On 5/13/2019 4:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
3) Or maybe it's "what the brain does", as many physicalists like to say. My body as mass, because the atoms that make up my body amount to that mass. What amounts to my consciousness? What are the building blocks? There is no accounting, there is no description in yours or van Neumann's sense.
But there are models that work. That was my point in citing AI projects like Watson and AlphaGO. The building blocks are perception, information processing, values, and action. You say "there is no accounting" but that's because you're using "accounting" as a synonym for "explain". The accounting in scientific theory is in terms of a model that works. You're demanding of a theory of consciousness that will do for consciousness what general relativity/*does not do*/ for the metric or for the stress-energy tensor, what Darwin/*did not do*/ for reproduction with variation. Maybe someday Bruno's theory will yield some interesting prediction (of the future), but until then it's a theory doesn't do any work. So far it doesn't even account for the effect of holding your breathe too long or ingesting LSD. The physical model that says consciousness is the brain processing information by neuron's firing at synapses...a very successful model. But the mysterians of consciousness want to pooh-pooh that because it doesn't talk about how their consciousness "feels". But neither does Bruno's . He talks about "arithmetic, seen from the inside" as though that was more than a Platonic metaphor.
Brent -- 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/6d7eae1d-f2b7-3fe9-2643-cd0db62b915e%40verizon.net.
