On 6/5/2018 8:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On 4 June 2018 at 20:30, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that
consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking
about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this
conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked
certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is
not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think.
Would you like to share those questions?
One of the questions is: what is emergence? Is it an ontological step
or an epistemological device? If you consider the classical examples:
statistical physics, ecosystems, societies, markets, cities, etc. I
think you will come to the conclusion that it is epistemological. We
do not have enough cognitive capacity to understand the world in terms
of the individual behaviors of every single human being, but we are
able to perceive and reason about higher-order patterns of behavior. I
know what amount of traffic to expect when I ride my bike in a bit,
because I know the higher-order patterns of my city. But I also know
that a sufficiently powerful intelligence could keep track of the
behavior every single person in the city instead. The same goes for
molecules, individual financial transactions and so on. There is a
cognitive limit that is breached by what we call emergence, but in all
of these cases we can go all the way down to the building blocks.
Yes, this comports with my idea that consciousness is in part a
summarization of experience for memory which is then called on for
prediction. That's why we notice and remember unusual things. We don't
need anymore summaries about commonplace things.
This leads to my second question: if we assume emergence, then what is
the building block of consciousness? I think that it is easy to see
that either consciousness is qualitatively different or we haven't
found the building block yet. In either case, emergentism is a very
weak hypothesis, in the sense that it does not propose an explanatory
mechanism (unlike all other things above).
Functionalism would say the building block is a transformation of
information...something like a qubit gate. Here's an interesting
overview of the non-functionalist ideas of monism:
'Russellian monism' New paper by Groff and Sam Coleman, forthcoming in
Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel.
http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf
… #Panpsychism #Consciousness
http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf
The third question that I mention is aligned with Bruno's duplication
machines. If consciousness emerges from brain activity, which is
finite and made of fungible entities (atoms, molecules, particles,
whatever), then the same exact pattern that you are experiencing now
can, in principle be repeated many or infinite times, both across time
and space.
If time and space are infinite and everything (pattern) that can happen
does.
What happens then? Is there some magic property that still
makes you distinct across such instances? Or does it turn out that you
cannot really be said to be associated with any specific chunk of
matter?
I don't see why that's a problem. It seems to implicitly demand that
"you" be unique and somehow distinct from all possible realizations.
Why should it matter if momentarily in some far away galaxy there's
someone who is experiencing reading these words...but necessarily having
the same next thought of reading THESE worlds?
Brent
I'm a lot of fun at parties.
Telmo.
Brent
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