On Mon, May 27, 2019, at 09:57, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > 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 <[email protected]> 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.
What makes the phenomenon of consciousness unlike all the others you list is this: dark matter, dark energy, time, space and gravity are all phenomena that we observe within our first-person view of reality, and that we can inter-subjectively agree on. Consciousness is the stage within which all these phenomena are observed. It is a qualitatively different thing, unlike any other thing I can think of. It's like asking the difference between "Citizen Kane", "Star Wars", "Clockwork Orange" and a cinema screen. Telmo. > > * 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 [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b1641605-ff99-461c-b5cd-201e43a119a4%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b1641605-ff99-461c-b5cd-201e43a119a4%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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/58ce38af-3d1e-482f-a2db-23a2d0e84361%40www.fastmail.com.
