On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 4:36:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/13/2019 6:11 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
>
> Physicalism fails to account for consciousness. This is the worst possible
> failure I can imagine, given that consciousness is the only thing I can be
> certain to exist.
>
>
> I think this misunderstands what science does. In the words of John von
> Neumann, "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to
> interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical
> construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations,
> describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical
> construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work." I see two
> approaches to this, one (of which I have been the main advocated on this
> list) might be called "the engineering approach" while the other is the
> philosophical approach. The philosophical approach either takes
> consciousness as fundamental and incorrigible (like Cosmin) or tries to
> equate it with something within a theory based on something else (like
> Bruno). One thing both approaches seem to rely on is that there can be no
> p-zombies, i.e. intelligent behavior is a sure sign of consciousness, as
> JKC is won't to point out. Given that the engineering approach gave us
> Turing, LISP, Deep Blue, Watson, and AlphaGo...while the philosophical
> approach "predicts" various things we've know for a century or more and
> various contradictory things about the future (as Bohr said, "Prediction is
> hard, especially about the future.") my money is on the engineering
> approach.
>
> Brent
>
>
I think this is right, without getting into defining the whole
physicalism/materialism thing.
The article
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
by Daniel Stoljar <http://philosophy.cass.anu.edu.au/people/daniel-stoljar>
(who
wrote a textbook on the subject) is as good as any, I guess.
I'lll just say one should soon become bored to death taking about the
*definition* of physicalism/materialism.
Now it is clear scientists come up with models (and theories, and
frameworks, and paradigms), and they take their "model" and likely
"implement" it in some programming language and use that program to match
to experimental or observational data, and they maybe use a statistical
program to say"that looks like a good match".
But the elephant in the room is s*emantics*: What is the interpretation of
the "entities" of the model.
Semantics is a big deal in programming language theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_(computer_science)
Is there a calculus of experience, and a semantics of experiences (qualia)?
That's the scientific question.
*There is a hidden code of nature—the code written into its fabric. Our
theories—our hypothetical code—are our evolving best-guess translations of
the code of nature, which remains hidden from our knowledge—within
nature-in-itself.*
@philipthrift
--
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 view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2cca5659-de7f-4131-944b-78d81b23ed72%40googlegroups.com.
