On 6/5/2018 7:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On 4 June 2018 at 23:48, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
fundamental questions.
What fundamental question do you refer to? How to detect consciousness?
How to produce consciousness? How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
what might constitute an answer.
I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities
are:
OK, I'll take a stab at them.
- Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.
It's a necessary feature of intelligence. Intelligence requires "what-if"
modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences. Even a the lower
animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.
Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
experience of it?
Ah, there's your problem. Science doesn't answer "why" questions.
That's what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science
does. Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin
anymore.
- What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act
intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee events.
It is something that is instantiated by complex material systems that
include memory and information processing; but we don't know exactly what
kind.
You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
See above, i.e. because it is necessary. Science may well determine
when and where and what relations there are. But not why. That's the
"engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I
am often criticized.
- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported in
my experience. So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
The problem with that is you stuck in "just". Don't deprecated good models.
My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
the search for it is like the hunting of the snark. We seek theories with
more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
that something is most fundamental. Mystics like Bruno postulate something
and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
experience, PROVE their postulates. But as Feynman used to point out, this
is Greek mathematics. Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
observations.
I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
for example I know how it feels to be me.
It ain't so much what you don't know that gets you into trouble, as what you
know that ain't so.
--- Josh Billings
Indeed.
Even if my metaphysical
obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is valuable to know
where the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and be humble enough
to recognize them.
I think it is scientists who are most aware of the boundaries of scientific
knowledge. Non-scientists tend to look at technology and think, "Oh we can
make airplanes so we know all about flying." Scientists know that there's
no proof that the Navier-Stokes equations will converge to a solution for a
particular case. That doesn't however mean that the boundary is fixed and
can't be pushed back. So when scientists propose to study consciousness,
non-scientists think, "Oh they want to explain it like Newton explained
gravity and Maxwell explained radio waves. Put it in mathematical formulae.
That's impossible. I have consciousness and I know it's not mathematical (I
can't even do math)." Scientists are thinking, "We'll make an approximate
but limited model of consciousness, like Newton did of gravity, so we'll be
able to predict some phenomena of consciousness, like Maxwell did for EM."
Well but you know my objections, namely with the instrumentation issue.
I feel that a lot of resistance to this stuff comes from a fear that
one is trying to slide religion or the supernatural through the back
door, so to speak. I trust that you believe that I am not trying to
sell anything like that. I only proclaim my ignorance, and the
ignorance of everyone else.
Just like a lot of resistance to materialism comes from people who want an
immortal soul.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of that. These people lack
imagination. The immortal soul, especially under many-mind
assumptions, is a truly terrifying idea.
It's not very nice under many-worlds either.
Brent
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