On Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 7:34:27 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: > > > > On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 4:30 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be > <javascript:>> wrote: > > >> >> Nobody knows the answer to the "hard problem of consciousness" >>> because nobody knows exactly what the question is or what criteria is to be >>> used to determine if its been successfully answered. >> >> >> > *So you don’t understand it.* >> > > Correct, I don't know the question so I have no way of knowing if it's > been successfully answered or not and after communicating with you for > years I don't think even you what would satisfy you. If I could prove with > mathematical certitude that X caused consciousness would you say the issue > had been put to bed and its time to move on to other things? I doubt it, > I think you'd say (correctly) that X may cause consciousness but X is not > consciousness. And the tail chasing would continue because you don't know > what exactly you want to know. > > >> * >It is not so astonishing. That explains your lack of interest in greek >> philosophy.* >> > > The fact that you ARE interested in Greek philosophy is tacit admission on > your part that the field you're so interested in has not advanced one > nanometer in 2500 years; after all no modern astronomer would dream of > studying Greek astronomical theories with the hope of it helping him in has > work because astronomy has advanced light years in the last 2500 years; and > the same is also true for medicine and mathematics and physics, but not for > Greek philosophy.. > > > The worst theologian are those who claim to know the truth. >> > > I agree, and the second worst type of theologian are those that abandon > the idea of God but believe they have made a great philosophical discovery > by not abandoned the ASCII sequence G-O-D. > > John K Clark >
It is odd that the phenomenon of consciousness would be a "hard" problem, as if other "problems" of nature would be "easy". We don't know what dark matter and dark energy are. There are a hundred papers on arXiv with different definitions and theories on those two "problems". We don't know if those terms are well defined - we only observe phenomena we associate with them. Physicists - at least in the articles they write for both scientific and science-for-the-general-reader publications - don't agree on what space, time, spacetime, or gravity are (e.g. loop quantum gravity vs. scale relativity vs. string theory vs. ...). There are unsolved problems in chemistry*. The medley of "quantum gravity" theories - attempts to meld GR and QM - make gravity** a "hard" problem. In the scheme of things, consciousness may be a "hard" problems, but science is full of such things. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_chemistry ** e.g. *Entropic gravity, also known as emergent gravity, is a theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force—a force with macro-scale homogeneity but which is subject to quantum-level disorder—and not a fundamental interaction. * @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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b1641605-ff99-461c-b5cd-201e43a119a4%40googlegroups.com.
