> On 17 Jul 2019, at 20:32, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 7/17/2019 3:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> On 16 Jul 2019, at 19:37, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On 7/16/2019 3:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>>> The consciousness of the universal machine is timeless, and spaceless. It >>>> is somehow 100% unfocused, without any attention, and it might plausibly >>>> be related to the highly dissociative state that some people seemed to >>>> describe in experience with some drug. >>> And yet you have to ask me how it is that your definition of consciousness >>> does not comport with my experience of it?? >> You are right. I have to ask you exactly that. >> >> It would have helped if you could have been more specific. >> >> Which one of the quasi-axioms does not met your experience? >> >> 1) Do you think it is false to be conscious for a conscious entity? > > ?? That a tautology, not a quasi-axiom.
I agree partially. But “truth” is not definable, and so this is still a meta-axiom, even if a trivial one. Telling me that it is tautological means that you agree with it. You agree that consciousness is before all a truth. Not all people agree with this, some claim it is an illusion, and I think we have already agreed that this is … a contradiction (the negation of a tautology). Think about consistency. It is trivial that a consistent machine is consistent, but we have to invoke this “tautology” to better understand that if a machine is consistent it cannot prove that it is consistent. Similarly we have that consciousness is a truth that cannot be proved, nor defined, so it helps to make it clear that we accept it is true and thus meaningful. Some claims that consciousness does not exist and is an illusion, and the first axiom is used just to eliminate that conception in this theory. > >> >> Or >> >> 2) Do you think it is false that consciousness is (immediately, without >> asking an intellectual effort) knowable? > > I'm not sure that's true. I think consciousness is knowable on reflection: > "Yes, I was conscious of that." But I'm not sure what "immediately" means in > this context. It means that you don’t have to make a reasoning to conclude that you are conscious. A sort of reasoning might be done through the activity of your brain, but it will not be consciously made, so that from your first person perspective, it looks like, from the conscious first person perspective, consciousness is a given. OK? >> >> Or >> >> 3) Do you think it is false that consciousness is not definable (without >> mentioning truth or god, …) > > I don't know what that means. If I say "Consciousness is an inner > narrative." have I mentioned "truth" because I think that's a true statement? > And what god do you refer to? Bal, Yawheh, Zeus, Loki, Thor,... And what > do they have to do with it? Consciousness here is the brute consciousness, not the higher reflexive consciousness (that one is obtained with the Löbian machine, but not any arbitrary universal machine). When you are conscious of some pain, that does not need to be accompanied by a inner narrative. > >> >> Or >> >> 4) Do you think it is false that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify >> rationally that it is conscious? > > Yes, I think this is false. I think a conscious entity must be able to show > a certain level of intelligence. I don’t see the relation between your answer and “4)”. To say that it is false "that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify rationally that it is conscious” means that you believe that some entity can justify rationally that it she/him/it is conscious. > >> >> Or >> >> 5) Do you think that something important about consciousness is missing? > > Yes. It says nothing about being conscious OF something or acting > intelligently. Within that definition a rock could be conscious. You lost me here. It is a bit like saying “I don’t accept your definition of group” because it does not address the abelian groups. Once we agree on consciousness, we can tackle the question of "conscious of”, which is rather subtle in the mechanist framework, as the things referred too might be the root of the mind-body problem. But I told you the basic idea, which is that consciousness mirror consistency, and consciousness of p will mirror the consciousness of p. Bruno > > 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/15569007-e8c2-81c4-4bdb-fbf5461c19c0%40verizon.net. -- 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/5314D805-C5F2-406A-990D-5C1A89718478%40ulb.ac.be.
