On 5/27/2019 12:57 AM, 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]
<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 continuebecause 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.
I think the difference is that people can't imagine or articulate what a
solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" would even look like.
When I say that it will be desolved when we can engineer AI beings to
behave at a human level of intelligence and can specify attributies of
their personality, people say, "Oh, but that's not solving the hard
problem. How will you know how they feel inside?" I say you'll ask them.
Brent
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