On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,
It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to
what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my
dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The
counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding
the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is
not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".
You meant responses in some different world, where the input and
the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to philosophical
questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean when the
antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who proposed an
analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals, giving them meaning
through the concept of "possible worlds". Philosophy has moved on past
this understanding of counterfactuals, but it seems that Bruno is
attached to the idea of multiple worlds, so he thinks that
consciousness depends on a "possible worlds" understanding of the
response to counterfactual inputs.
Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible worlds
modal logic. But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to
be rules of language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in
the language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality. I'm bothered
by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen "believes" and
"proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's referring to
perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, everything
provable. But this not a model of human reasoning. Factual doesn't
enter into it, so how can counterfactual.
Brent
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