On 6/27/2018 1:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On 27 June 2018 at 03:24, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I don't think that's the case. C seems to me to be capable to explaining
anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix). The theories of M are
certainly
incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those
theories
it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that
is
impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that
it
could not be included?
I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.
I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
other phenomenon.
I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.
Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
following conversation:
T: Where does life come from?
B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
T: Fine, how does that work?
B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
were you expecting?
I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical basis
of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of the
exchange.
Well, he discovered the principle of selection with variability, and
how this leads to biological complexification. That is no small part
of the puzzle. I meant Darwinism in the neo-Darwinism sense, including
Mendel's postulation of genes, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
structure and many other things.
Notice the difference. We have all of these mechanisms to back the
"life emerges from chemistry" theory. Each one explains a piece of the
puzzle. For consciousness we have nada.
But we don't have nada. We have some understanding of how neurons work
and we've even made some AI based on neural nets that is surprisingly
intelligent in a narrow domain. We know a lot about how a brain
produces consciousness from the way that injury or external stimulus
affects consciousness.
I know you're thinking, "But that doesn't explain why the brain
processes produce consciousness". My point is that you don't ask
/*why*/ planets produce gravity. Once you have an equation that
precisely predicts /*"what"*/ you stop asking /*"why"*/. When we can
predict, manipulate, and create intelligent human-like behavior
questions about why that behavior is conscious will seem quaint, like
questions about why chemical reproduction constitutes life.
If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
happened before, it's not new.
Did Newton explain gravity? Did Einstein?
They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
all the time. You know more about that than me.
Are you satisfied with the
chemical explanation of life?
Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
plausible ideas.
I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science. There
is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.
Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
of the time, incrementally improving understanding within the current
paradigm. When the limits of the pardigm are reached, improvement
stalls around certain issues and eventually a reexamination of the
base assumptions is necessary. This leads to a crisis and parts of the
edifice comes tumbling down. The quintessential example is classical
physics and Einstein.
And the stall comes from asking the wrong question: like where does the
elan vitale reside or how does the force of gravity reach out from a
planet? or how can a physical process produce consciousness?
Brent
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