> On 6 Jun 2018, at 14:48, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> 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?”,
Mechanism answers this, by 1) the universe do not exist (God is not among the beings, in Plotinus’s terms) 2) the universal machine’s existence needs to assume at least one universal machinery (I choose Numbers because people know them since primary school) 3) the physical universe is entirely explained from the theology that all universal machine can find all by itself through introspection (but to communicate requires works à-la Gödel & Al.). > 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. The only problem with consciousness is that it cannot be attached to any representation, be it in the arithmetical reality, or in the physical reality. But we can explain why machine invoke consciousness in the sense that they know something being immediately true and undoubtable, yet non definable, non provable, etc. And it has role: it makes a first person like a sort of hero, with infinitely many bodies/representations in infinitely many computations, some sharable, some not, etc. Even without Mechanism, it is a theorem of arithmetic that there is a sort of god who plays hide and seek with itself in arithmetic. The modal logics makes the link between arithmetic rather simple and quick, but of course, it is important to realise that the G box ([]p) is what Gödel defines completely in arithmetic in his 1931 paper. There is only a problem for those who want a physical universe, able to select the consciousness. With Mechanism, consciousness differentiate in the arithmetical reality, and also fuse, all the (relative) time, measured here in number of steps of computations, or any more general Blum measure (memory space, number of occurence of this or that symbols, etc.). > >>> 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… > Yes, that is indeed one of the many ways people put consciousness under the rug. >>> >>>> - 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. Good models (theories) are good, and physics will remain our best predicting tools, but it simply cannot be related to consciousness if we don’t justify physics from a measure on all relative computations. Luckily, they have the right mathematical shape (quantum logic + quantisation) for doing that. Bruno PS I might have missed some mails. Don’t hesitate to resend them. > > 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. -- 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.
