>> 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.
Science does not answer "why" questions of an existential nature, for example "why does the universe exist?", but I disagree with the generalization. Science answers plenty of certain types of "why" questions: Why are most plants green? Why are there so many different species? Why is the sun so bright? etc. I believe that I am asking a question of the same nature as the above. There are certainly metaphysical questions to ask about consciousness, but here I am simply asking how it fits our current body of scientific theory. All of our most powerful theories seem to fit each other. Darwinism fits higher-order psychological and sociological theory, and it also fits chemistry, which fits particle physics and so on. In my view, consciousness is the odd thing that doesn't fit any of this. >> 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. I criticize it because I find it circular: first one assumes that consciousness is correlated with human-like behavior, then one creates human-like behavior to show how consciousness originates... >> >>> - 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. I don't criticize these good models. I ask that we don't forget what is assumed at the start. Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
