On 10/25/2019 4:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:10, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just parts
that push and pull.
I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial
distinction.
Oops. I see I wrote "could" where I intended "couldn't".
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of
the mill in producing flour, which one wouldn't find by inspecting the
machine. But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the
relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts
wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to
environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel.
But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it
is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's
environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself.
If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find
them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Brent
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