On Fri, Apr 19, 2019, at 09:09, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote: > 1) The qualia of black-and-white is not on the same level with the qualia of > colors. The qualia of colors include the qualia of black-and-white. You > cannot see a color if that color is not emergent upon black-and-white (or > more specifically shades-of-gray). You cannot experience music if music is > not emergent upon sounds. You cannot taste chocolate if chocolate is not > emergent upon sweet. You cannot understand Pythagoras Theorem if the > understanding of Pythagoras Theorem doesn't emerge upon the understandings of > triangles, angles, lengths, etc. And this is real emergence, because you > really get new existent entities that never existed before in the history of > existence. God himself never experienced these qualia.
Ok, I think I understand your presentation better now. You make an interesting point, I don't think I ever considered emergence purely on the side of qualia as you describe. There is something here that still does not convince me. For example, you say that the "chocolate taste" qualia emerges from simpler qualia, such as "sweet". Can you really justify this hierarchical relation without implicitly alluding to the quanti side? Consider the qualias of eating a piece of chocolate, a spoonful of sugar and french fries. You can feel that the first two have something in common that distinguishes them from the third, and you can give it the label "sweet". At the same time, you could say that the chocolate and french fries are pleasant to eat, while the spoonful of sugar not so much. You can also label this abstraction with some word. Without empirical grounding, nothing makes one distinction more meaningful than another. What makes the "sweat" abstraction so special? Well, it's that we know about sweet receptors in the tongue and we know it's one of the four(five?) basic flavors because of that. I'm afraid you smuggle this knowledge into the pure qualia world. Without it, there is no preferable hierarchical relation and emergence becomes nonsensical again. There's just a field of qualia. > > I don't understand your second part of the question regarding our "cognitive > processes". Are you referring to our specific form of human consciousness ? I > don't think this is only restricted to our human consciousness, for the > reason that it happens to all qualia that we have. All qualia domains are > structured in an emergent way. I was referring to your observation that things lose meaning by repetition, like staring at yourself in the mirror for a long time. I to find this interesting, but I can imagine prosaic explanations. For example, that our brain requires a certain amount of variety in its inputs, otherwise it tends to a simpler state were apprehension of meaning is no longer possible. In other words, I am proposing a plumber-style explanation, and asking you why/if you think it can be discarded? > > 2) The main ideas in my book are the emergent structure of consciousness and > the self-reference which gives birth to the emergent structure. The ideas > about self-reference that I have are rooted in phenomenology. First I observe > that consciousness is structured in an emergent way, and then I conclude that > the reason it is like this is because there is an entity called > "self-reference" that looks-back-at-itself and in this process includes the > previously existing self and brings a new transcendent self into existence, > like in the case of colors emerging on top of black-and-white. I have the problem above with the first part of what you say, but I like the second part. > > 3) The difference is that in an emergent system you have top-down influence > in levels. Electrons in simple systems like the ones in physical experiments > have little input from any top level, so they behaving according to their own > level and display certain laws. But when they are part of a greater holistic > system, like in the brain (which is just an appearance of internal workings > in consciousness) they receive top-down influence from the intentions in > consciousness, and so they behave according to the will of consciousness. Is > the same phenomenon when we speak, that I also gave in my presentation. When > we speak, we act from the level of intending to transmit certain ideas. And > this level exercises top-down influence in levels and the sentences, words > and letters are coming out in accordance with the intention from the higher > level. Here I think you are making the ontological/epistemological confusion. Another way to describe what you are alluding to above is this: the more complex a system, the higher the amount of branching in the trees of causation that extend into the past. To describe the movement of an election in the ideal conditions of some laboratory experiment, you might just require a couple of equations and variables. To describe the movement of an election in the incredible wet mess that is the human brain, you require trillions of equations with trillions of variables. The identification of patterns across scales allows us to vastly compress the information of the object we are looking at, making it somewhat tractable by our limited intellects. Some of these patters have names such as "speaking", "word", "presentation", "red", etc. These patterns are not arbitrarily grounded, they are grounded by some correspondence with qualia, as I argue above. Why? I don't have the answer, I think it's a mystery. I am not saying that the point of view you describe above is not valid or interesting, but I am saying that it is nothing more than epistemology. Telmo. > > On Thursday, 18 April 2019 16:22:18 UTC+3, telmo wrote: >> Hi Cosmin, >> >> 1) >> >> Ok, I saw your presentation. We agree on several things, but I don't quite >> get your qualia emergence idea. The things you describe make sense, for >> example the dissolution of meaning by repetition, but what makes you think >> that this is anything more than an observation in the domain of the >> cognitive sciences? Or, putting it another way, and observation / model on >> how our cognitive processes work? >> >>> >>> 2) Consciousness is not mysterious. And this is exactly what my book is >>> doing: demystifying consciousness. If you decide to read my book, you will >>> gain at the end of it a clarity of thinking through these issues that all >>> people should have such that they will stop making the confusions that >>> robots are alive. >> >> I don't mean to discourage or attack you in anyway, but one in a while >> someone with a book to promote shows up in this mailing list. No problem >> with me, I have promoted some of my work sometimes. My problem is with "if >> you read my book...". There are many books to read, please give the main >> ideas. Then I might read it. >> >>> >>> 3) No, they are not extraordinarily claims. They are quite trivial. And >>> they start from the trivial realization that the brain does not exist. The >>> "brain" is just an idea in consciousness. >> >> I have no problem with "the brain is just an idea in consciousess". I am not >> sure if this type of claim can be verified, or if it falls into the category >> of things we cannot assert, as Bruno would say. I do tend to think privately >> in those terms. >> >> So ok, the brain does not exist. It is just a bunch of qualia in >> consciousness. But this is then true of every single thing! Again, no >> problem with this, but also no reason to abandon science. The machine >> doesn't exist either, but its elections (that don't exist either) follow a >> certain pattern of behavior that we call the laws of physics. Why not the >> electrons in the brain? What's the difference? >> >> 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. 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