On Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 10:31:05 AM UTC+2 telmo wrote:
> > > Am Mi, 28. Apr 2021, um 20:51, schrieb Brent Meeker: > > > > On 4/28/2021 9:54 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > > > > Am Di, 27. Apr 2021, um 04:07, schrieb 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List: > > It certainly seems likely that any brain or AI that can perceive sensory > events and form an inner narrative and memory of that is conscious in a > sense even if they are unable to act. This is commonly the situation > during a dream. One is aware of dreamt events but doesn't actually move in > response to them. > > And I think JKC is wrong when he says "few if any believe other people > are conscious all the time, only during those times that corresponds to the > times they behave intelligently." I generally assume people are conscious > if their eyes are open and they respond to stimuli, even if they are doing > something dumb. > > But I agree with his general point that consciousness is easy and > intelligence is hard. > > > JFK insists on this point a lot, but I really do not understand how it > matters. Maybe so, maybe if idealism or panspychism are correct, > consciousness is the easiest thing there is, from an engineering > perspective. But what does the tehcnical challenge have to do with > searching for truth and understanding reality? > > Reminds me of something I heard a meditation teacher say once. He said > that for eastern people he has to say that "meditation is very hard, it > takes a lifetime to master!". Generalizing a lot, eastern culture values > the idea of mastering something that is very hard, it is thus a worthy > goal. For westerns he says: "meditation is the easiest thing in the world". > And thus it satisfies the (generalizing a lot) westerner taste for a magic > pill that immediately solves all problems. > > I think you are falling for similar traps. > > > Which is what? > > > The trap of equating the perceived difficulty of a task with its merit. > Are we after the truth, or are we after bragging rights? > That ambiguity exists whenever people pair their genuine christian names to a post. Anonymity can at times be a form of politeness in the 'you can't take my posts seriously' sense. Everybody uses their real names to convince others on the net... as if anybody on the net or social media ever said: "ah, thank you for convincing me to depart from my flawed points of view with the truth! Now I am less dumb." > > I think you are falling into the trap of searching for the ding an sich. > Engineering is the measure of understanding. > That's JKC's point (JFK is dead), > > > My apologies to JKC for my dyslexia, it was not on purpose. > > if your theory doesn't lead to engineering it's just philosophizing and > that's easy. > > > Well, that is you philosophizing, isn't it? Saying that "engineering is > the measure of understanding" is a philosophical position that you are not > bothering to justify. > So is saying practically anything. > > If you propose a hypothesis, we can follow this hypothesis to its logical > conclusions. So let us say that brain activity generates consciousness. The > brain is a finite thing, so its state can be fully described by some finite > configuration. Furthermore, this configuration can be replicated in time > and space. So a consequence of claiming that the brain generates > consciousness is that a conscious state cannot be constrained by time or > space. If the exact configuration we are experiencing now is replicated 1 > million years from now or in another galaxy, then it leads to the same > exact first person experience and the instantiations cannot be > distinguished. If you want pure physicalism then you have to add something > more to your hypothesis. > How about precision and effectiveness of that way of thinking as opposed to mathematical approaches? Physicists imho allow themselves a more relaxed attitude where they may set aside concerns of existing mathematical objects or make the kinds of approximations that mathematicians would never allow themselves to guess. It took some decades for example up to around 1950 for physicists to work out renormalization in quantum field theory, with calculating the perturbative expansion where all terms of second order and above yield divergent integrals. With more precision in spectroscopy, discovering the fine structure of atomic emission spectra etc. those physicists sought for a way to pull a finite result from the divergent integrals. Restricting the domain of integration to energies of order mc2 and through unjustified subtractions they obtained a finite result very close to the experimental result. Then Tomonaga, Dyson, Feynman etc. improved the technique until the degree of precision became satisfying. Renormalization for calculation purposes by changing the mass of the electron and replacing it by a quantity, depending on the relevant magnitude of energies, and yet diverging when the order of magnitude tends towards infinity... Mathematicians wouldn't have pulled that off. They wouldn't take those liberties. Even if you extracted Feynman's integral out of self-reference precisely, instead of "something like it must be there, because it fits", the temptation of mathematicians to believe that physics can be reduced to a number of equations is understandable; but the physical style of reasoning is part of what makes it possible to understand those equations and frame them at all to begin with. To assume that mathematics absolutely encompasses everything that physicists have discovered can appear authoritarian. The old joke of the physicist going to a mathematician's shop with the word "Dry Cleaning" written on sign out front comes to mind. Physicist walks in with a dirty suit and wants to know when he can pick it back up. The mathematician owner replies "I'm afraid we don't do dry cleaning." "What? Why does the sign out front say 'Dry Cleaning' ?" asks the surprised physicist. The owner replies: "Oh, we actually don't ever clean anything in here. We just sell signs." PGC -- 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/f169ffbe-ce80-4c2d-86ac-79283ebb4b63n%40googlegroups.com.
