On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 9:55 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 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 > Very well said, Brent. I will have to try and remember this. Thanks. Bruce -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLThQZAxGu3RdzrfJqDdB-H%3DAgxR77fGb1JybNz4zindfQ%40mail.gmail.com.
