> On 23 Jul 2019, at 13:50, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Brent, > > On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote: >> >> >> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and >>> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot >>> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is >>> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect >>> consciousness. >> >> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, >> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that >> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be >> understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no >> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron >> either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory >> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering >> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement >> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory. > > I understand your point that we can always make additional demands for > explanation, and that any scientific theory cannot be expected to do more > than what successful scientific theories do, which is to correctly predict > phenomena. > > My main point is this, and I think it goes to the core of our disagreement: > No scientific theory predicts consciousness!
Elementary arithmetic predicts consciousness, at least in the sense that it predicts that all universal machine looking inward discover his theology, and that includes the knowledge of something immediately true, not definable, nt provable, etc. If the machine learns to use natural language, she will use the term “consciousness” for this, I think. Or terms like souls, private knowledge, etc. > Putting it another way, every single successful scientific theory that we > know about as these two properties: > > - Consciousness is not required for anything "to work”; Are you not assuming the materialist hypothesis. With mechanism, the physical reality is only an appearance, so consciousness is required for a physical work to work. > - Consciousness is not predicted to exist in any way. Arithmetic “predicts” that all universal machine have knowledge, consciousness, and get confronted to the hesitation between security and liberty. Arithmetic explains both the equivalence of all modes of the self, and why that equivalence is impossible to grasp by the machine ‘in its “normal state of consciousness”, making the machines believing in difference between the believable, the knowable, the observable, etc. > > Now, I know you will argue that yes, neuroscience can predict and observe > conscious states, but the only thing it can do is find correlates between > observable behavior and brain activity. Which is great, but has nothing to do > with the hard problem. Firstly because consciousness itself cannot be > measured or observed. What you can do is observe behaviors that you *assume > to be correlated with consciousness*. I challenge you to find any other > theory or filed of science where such a speculative leap is accepted and the > results after such a leap taken seriously. > > - Are my cells individually conscious? I don't know. Yes, as they are Turing universal, they have the highly dissociative consciousness state. As it is the same for all universal machine, this is a bit of trivia. But that is important in the apparition of the physical appearances from arithmetic when see from inside. > - Are stars conscious? Is Google? Who knows. Emergentists might suspect they > are, because they are systems with highly complex behavior. Complexity is not enough, and even could endanger consciousness. All you need is Turing universality. Self)—consciousness needs the induction axioms. > - Are cats conscious? I assume they are, but am I not just noticing their > similarities to me? What about plants? Why or why not? > - Etc. We can bet that all animals and plants are conscious (when we bet on computationalism). I have not heard evidences that Star are Turing universal. A very simple boolean circuits can be Turing universal, but we can build highly complex boolean graph which are not. > > In the end, I find John Clark's position on this more palatable: he agrees > that consciousness cannot be measured, so he doesn't care about the problem. > He thinks it's a waste of time to think about it. Intelligence is the > interesting thing. Fair enough. But your position is a bit different: you > present your own metaphysical belief as scientifically justified, and I don't > think that is a tenable position. All you say here seems to me applicable for Matter (primary matter). No experimental evidences, and it brought only metaphysical faculties. No theories at all predict its existence, but arithmetic predicts its appearance, without eliminating the personal data of private subjective experience. “Matter” just seems to be an oversimplifying assumption waiting for a better explanation. The concept of “Matter” is never used in any paper in physics, only in materialist philosophy. With Mechanism, consciousness plays *the* key role in the emergence of the physical reality, but it plays an everyday role in speeding up the relative computation. Human consciousness provides a definite advantage (and disadvantages too) to the human, solving much quicker problem of adaptation, with the unfortunate price that it makes its environment also quicker to change. Bruno > > Telmo. > > >> 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/1ae59181-0197-8be6-a320-418771e9d823%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/0c22cb84-3ea8-4f56-b4ab-1521919f240f%40www.fastmail.com. -- 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]. 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