> On 19 Apr 2019, at 14:09, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > 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.
Do you really mean “without empirical grounding”, or “without experiential grounding”. The “empirical grounding” seems to me still too much “quanti”. > > 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. OK. > >> >> 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. Using the theory of machine self-reference (which is really the base of the whole of theoretical computer science or recursion theory), we have a try pique of “self”: G (third person self-reference which are rationally justifiable modulo the bet on the substitution level) It is close for Necessitation, and admit the Löb’s axiom (as a theorem) G* (third person self-reference, rationally justifiable or not. Incompleteness assures that G is properly included in G*). It NOT closed for necessitation, but admit the Löb axiom (again as a (meta-theorem) about the sound machines). S4Grz (first person self-reference, non definable by the machine, and typically on the qualia side: indubitable but no exprimable immediate knowledge (well: immediate only in its []p & <>t & p form, to be sure). Cosmic is unclear on the []p distinction with []p & p, with third person self, and the first person self, the doxastic belief and the epistemological (and non communicable) personal knowledge. > >> >> 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 think that mystery is solved by the machine when she understand that []p and ([]p & p) are equivalent for God (G* proves []p <-> []p & p), but inequivalent from the machine’s point of view. []p obeys a doxastic notion of rational belief, where S4Grz (the logic of []p & p) obeys to a logic of (temporal) knowledge of an unnameable subject. The first consider the second as mysterious, the second knows, but cannot justify it through words or any representation. Bruno > > 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] >> <mailto:[email protected]>. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>. >> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list >> <https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout >> <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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list > <https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <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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