> On 24 Oct 2019, at 11:29, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/09/soul-dust-nicholas-humphrey-review
>
> Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body
> problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were
> right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very
> specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They
> thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles
> with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact
> mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum.
> If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to
> mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when
> the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material
> brain be the seat of consciousness?
Of course, this is in written in the Aristotelian era, or materialist era. But
the whole philosophy of Plato is an attempt to solve the mind-body problem. In
fact we can argue that the work of Plato contains the solution, notably in the
text Theaetetus. That is indeed a solution coherent with Mechanism, up to an
explanation of the existence of matter, or its appearance, from a theory of
consciousness.
The usual solution of the mind-body problem is what we call “a religion”. A
religion is only a conception of reality which does not put the soul, or
consciousness under the rug.
People who claim that they have no religion are usually people who take for
granted the solution proposed by Aristotle, where consciousness is naturalised
in some way. In fact it is the solution shared by atheists and Christians, for
example, except that atheist eliminates consciousness, usually invoking a
mechanist explanation, like “consciousness is a natural product of the activity
of a brain”. That solution can be shown incompatible with Descartes Mechanism.
>
> Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness,
> he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and
> movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure
> makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged,
> so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we
> inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one
> another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
>
> Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
> so we must have immaterial souls.
That’s a valid conclusion. Of course this was found already in India and China,
and in the antic Greece.
It comes from the understanding that the first person view is different from
the thread person view, which is something related to empathy: the ability to
put oneself in the shoes of someone else.
> Descartes went that way (albeit with secret doubts).
OK. Note that Descartes theory is exposed in the indo-greek text “the question
of King Milinda”.
> So did many others. The mind-body problem came into existence.
>
> Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness
> couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't
> make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy
> told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter
> is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even
> odder since.
That matter is something weird is of course an important point here. Mechanism
explains why it has to be like that.
In fact there are as many formulation of the mind-body problem than there are
type of metaphysics.
Basically,
1) for a dualist (which believe in Matter and Mind as distinct ontologically
real things) the problem consist in explaining the relation between both.
Dualism is usually abandoned, because if there is a relation between mind and
matter, making them belonging to different realm makes only the problem harder.
2) for a materialist monist, the problem consists in finding a materialist
phenomenology of mind.
3) for a immaterialist monist, the problem consists in finding an immaterialist
phenomenology of matter. That is what Mechanism, and the “theology of the
machine/number” provides.
>
> There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book
> after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust:
> The Magic of Consciousness.
Yes, some people keep saying that they don’t see the problem, but it is hard to
judge them, given the 1500 years of pseudo-scientific, or pseudo-religious,
imposed solution on this.
> We know exactly what consciousness is;
Yes, indeed. Good point.
> we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever,
> nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If
> someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two
> very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what
> jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is
> gentler: "You know what it is from your own case.”
This points correctly on the notion of first person knowledge. The problem of
knowledge is, fundamentally, the same as the problem of consciousness (up to
slight vocabulary nuance).
> You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of
> consciousness, just in being conscious at all.
That is valid data, but of course, it is not a theory, still less an
explanation. For some Catholics some time ago, without listening to Jesus, you
could not have a soul, so “Indian” (South American) were considered to not have
a soul, and so you could use them as slaves, etc. Eventually, they changes
their mind on this, and begun the christianisation of South-America (which was
a progress compared to treat them as zombies or animals).
>
> "Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how
> can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly
> physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.)
> This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical
> mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial
> assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature
> of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves
> consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume
> in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in
> the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
Saying that we don’t know what is matter means that, in particular, se have not
solve the mind/matter problem. We don’t know either what is the mind or
consciousness. To identify two mysteries does not solve any problems.
But the intuition here is good: the hard problem of consciousness might need to
sole an hard problem of matter, indeed.
>
> One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very
> common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc)
> together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get
> consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to
> you right now.)
That is correct, but belongs to the enunciation of the problem. It is not a
solution of the problem. Are those atoms necessary. Are atoms necessary at all,
etc.
> And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic
> nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations
> of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and
> consciousness is a form of matter.
That is sheer non-sense. If consciousness is a form of matter, what is its
mass, volume, temperature, etc. That makes non sense, intuitively, and indeed
with mechanism, we do get a “simple” theory of consciousness (machine’s
knowledge), and we can explain the illusion of matter from this, in a testable
way.
>
> This is still a difficult idea, in the present climate of thought. It takes
> hard thought to see it.
Here the guy has given an embryo of the enunciation of the problem, and
immediately after talk like if it was a solution, identifying consciousness
with some matter. Of course this is just unrigorous hand waving.
> The fact remains that we know what consciousness is; any mystery lies in the
> nature of matter in so far as it's not conscious. We can know for sure that
> we're quite hopelessly wrong about the nature of matter so long as our
> positive account of it creates any problem about how consciousness can be
> physical.
That is one step toward the elimination of consciousness.
> Some philosophers, including Humphrey's long-time collaborator, Daniel
> Dennett,
I guessed it!
> seem to think that the only way out of this problem is to deny the existence
> of consciousness, ie to make just about the craziest claim that has ever been
> made in the history of human thought. They do this by changing the meaning of
> the word "consciousness", so that their claim that it exists amounts to the
> claim that it doesn't. Dennett, for example, defines consciousness as "fame
> in the brain", where this means a certain kind of salience and connectedness
> that doesn't actually involve any subjective experience at all.
OK. That is akin to the Churchland eliminativism (of consciousness).
>
> In Soul Dust, Humphrey seems to agree with Dennett, at least in general
> terms, for he begins by introducing a fictional protagonist, a
> consciousness-lacking alien scientist from Andromeda who arrives on Earth and
> finds that she needs to postulate consciousness in us to explain our
> behaviour. The trouble is that she's impossible, even as a fiction, if
> Humphrey means real consciousness. This is because she won't be able to have
> any conception of what consciousness is, let alone postulate it, if she's
> never experienced it, any more than someone who's never had visual experience
> can have any idea what colour experience is like (Humphrey says she'll need
> luck, but luck won't be enough).
OK.
>
> Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" and
> this triggers a familiar response: "You say that there seems to be
> consciousness, but that there isn't really any. But what can this experience
> of seeming to be conscious be, if not a conscious experience? How can one
> have a genuine illusion of having red-experience without genuinely having
> red-experience in having the supposed illusion?”
That is correct. A genuine illusion needs to be conscious to be an illusion, so
to say that consciousness is an illusion is total nonsense.
But we are not far from the indo-greek path toward a solution. If consciousness
is not an illusion, and we we want to be monist, maybe it is “matter” which is
the illusion.
As I said often: it is easier to explain the illusion of a stone to a conscious
being than to explain the illusion of consciousness (already non-sensical) to a
stone ("inert matter").
>
> Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to
> the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is
> that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for
> "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome
> treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is
> tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier
> among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem
> with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select
> implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using
> consciousness at all.
That is false. In the mechanist theory, we can understand what consciousness
is, why it is necessary, and how it creates the illusion of matter, and how
matter makes it possible to stabilise consciousness in long (deep) histories.
But matter lost its primary ontology status. That runs against our 1500 years
of materialist brainwashing, of course, but it was the most intuitive
explanation for long, where reality is a sort of dream (of some God, or not).
>
> It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One
> doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that
> consciousness is really a kind of illusion.
Indeed.
> Whatever difficulties there are in explaining the survival value of
> consciousness, it doesn't lie in the fact that it makes self-entrancement
> possible. There is initially something disarming about the rapturous
> self-confidence of Soul Dust, but it comes in time to seem mere vanity.
It would be long to describe here, and now (it is done in my long text
“Consciousness and Mechanism” (in French: conscience et mécanisme), but
consciousness as an important role, first in the very fabric of the physical
reality, secondly, in the development of the living beings abilities to act on
their environment. It can be proved (it *has* been proved!) that machine’s
consciousness speed up their ability to compute with respect to either the
universal machine running them, or relatively to other universal machine (in
the material tensorial structure which allows parallel computations).
Let me explain a little bit. The consciousness of the machine is related to two
fundamental theorems in mathematical logic, both found by Gödel, plus some
others.
I assume a chatty machine which asserts sometime some “belief”. I limit myself
to arithmetically sound and rich machine.
1) the completeness theorem: it says that is a machine is consistent then there
is a reality which satisfies (make true) its belief. This means that the
syntactical concept of consistency (of some beliefs) is related to the
semantical concept of having a reality satisfying such beliefs.
2) the incompleteness theorem: if a machine is consistent (and thus if there is
a reality which satisfy the machine’s belief), the machine cannot prove its
consistency. That is: if there is a reality, the machine cannot prove that
there is a reality.
We can add
3) Tarski theorem, which explains that such a machine will not even be able to
define that reality.
Note that logician used the term “model” instead of reality, but as many people
comes from physics, and the fact that physicists use “model” in the logician’s
sense of theory, I use reality instead. It is a semantical notion. A
model/reality of a theory (set of beliefs) is a structure which
verifies/statisfies those beliefs/assertions/sentences.
Then, it is again a theorem by Gödel, inihis “length of proof” short paper
(page 82 in Davis’s “Undecidable" book) which explains why consciousness and
self-consciousness provides an evolutive advantage among the living beings,
with also rather dangerous bad side effect, like the development of fear.
Indeed, Gödel showed that when you add an undecidable sentence of a theory as a
new axiom of that theory, you can solve an infinity of more problem (may
undecidable sentences become decidable) but the length of the proofs of
infinitely many decidable sentences can shortened in a quasi arbitrary. In
principle the machine enlarges its accessibility spectrum imeans n its local
environment. That can be related (non trivially) to some other speed-up
phenomenon in theoretical computer science (like notably the Blum Speed-up
theorem: which says that you can by using the right software makes a Babbaage
like machine more quick than a 2100 quantum computer, on almost all arguments
(that is the snap: I don’t claim this has any use in practice, but it plays a
role, due to the lack of first person consciousness on the “delays” in the
universal dovetailing).
The universal dovetailer argument shows that the mind-body problem (the problem
of relating first person experiences to some third person sharable realities)
is reduced to the justification of the Turing machine’s observable (and its
mathematics) from a statistics of first person experience on all computation (a
mathematical concept with Church-Turing’s theses).
Eventually, we get the logic of those mathematics, at their propositional
level, by the modal logics of the “Theaetetus’ variants of Gödel’s arithmetical
“beweisbar predicate”. The logics of ([]p & p), []p & <>t, []p & p & <>t” (+
graded variants with <>t replaced by <><>t, or <><><>t).
Those are quantum logics, and the open problems here is how to extract the
tensor product, or the linear logic, from those logics of the observable.
Like in physics, we get an interesting labyrinth of quantum logics, and by
incompleteness, G*, they are divided into private and non justifiable part (the
qualia) and relatively sharable parts: the qualia.
Put in another way, with Mechanism, the elementary arithmetical reality (which
we know is not simple at all since Gödel) determine a consciousness flux,
initiated on all universal numbers, and which differentiate, and fuse, along
many histories. It converges (in some technical sense) to a sort of multiverse.
Mechanism is eliminativist, not of the observable, but of the idea that what we
observe is ontologically primary (Aristotle). What we observe is “only” a
local indexical projection of the whole (arithmetical) reality into itself
(assuming mechanism, and rather well tested thanks to Everett’s QM (without
collapse)).
Bruno
>
> Galen Strawson
>
> @philipthrift
>
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