> On 6 Nov 2019, at 11:30, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Philip Goff > Philip Pullman > moderator, Nigel Warburten > > transcript of podcast > > @ > https://lithub.com/philip-goff-and-philip-pullman-talk-materialism-panpsychism-and-philosophical-zombies/ > > .... > > PG: You only get rich, human experience after millions of years of evolution. > So the basis constituent is consciousness but it doesn’t mean every > combinations of particles is conscious; it doesn’t meant the table is > conscious, for example. > > NW: Well, it does mean it is conscious on some level, doesn’t it? > > PG: The things that make it up are conscious but maybe the table as a whole > does not necessarily have its own experience. So, are you maybe sympathetic > to the view that something distinctively human is kind of fundamental to the > universe? > > PP: Not to the universe; that couldn’t be possible if we believe the universe > jumped into being with the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, or whatever it was. > But yes, I do think there is something distinctive about human beings, which > is our ability to reflect on our own experience.
The recursion theorem of Kleene, as well as it first person interpretation by the machine, shows that the ability to reflect its own experience is common to all Gödel-Löbian-Solovay machines or entities. I recall that a Löbian machine is a Universal machine aware of its own universality (“aware” in the Theaetetus’ sense). > If I believe that glass of water is conscious maybe it is, but it’s not doing > much reflecting. As far as we know. Maybe it’s in conversation with your > glass. But ah, yes, in the stories I’ve written, clearly human > self-consciousness, human awareness, came into being 30, 40 thousand years > ago, something like that, and it’s based of course, on the coming of > artistic, the remains of art. Cave paintings, the carvings on stones, that > sort of thing. That seems to be a time when people were becoming interested > in other things than where the next meal was. So yeah, I do think the sort of > consciousness we could be able to display now and we display every day, did > kind of emerge from something that was less conscious. > > NW: That’s still a problem for a panscientist isn’t it? Yes, that is a bit of a problem for anyone attaching consciousness to 3p descriptible things. It is Searle's error, again and again. This requires a non mechanist theory of mind. > You have lots of little bits of conscious stuff and then you have this thing > that can reflect on what matter is and whether it’s conscious or not. > > PG: Look, all these views have problems and there is, it’s early days, in my > view, of the science of consciousness. I suppose it seems to me that the > challenges facing a panpsychist research program look to be more tractable > than the problems facing, say, [an eliminative] materialist. The core of > [eliminative] materialism as I’ve already labored, is you have this huge, > explanatory gap between the purely quantitative objective properties, Of course this does not exist. The physical reality is a first person plural construction, driven by the first person differentiation of the histories corresponding to the many computations (whose existence is purely arithmetical). Computer science explains how quanta and qualia appears, and the explanation is testable thanks to the quanta which can be compared with the (human) observation. Bruno > and the qualitative subjective, and I don’t think you’ve made any–– whereas > the explanatory gap for the panpsychic is how did you get from very simple > forms of consciousness to very complex forms of consciousness? > > PP: It just makes sense to me. > > PG: You think it’s true? > > PP: Yeah. > > —————————————— > > @philipthrift > > > > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d067fc13-4b61-42bb-b46a-c51479e39d3f%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d067fc13-4b61-42bb-b46a-c51479e39d3f%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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/FA3B1E32-B0EC-4530-935C-657481192D54%40ulb.ac.be.
