On 28 July 2016 at 16:52, David Lochrin <[email protected]> wrote: I'm simply saying we have no idea how perception arises. >
No, perception is highly studied and a massive amount is known about it. > Until quite recently people would have commonly said it arises from your > immortal soul, and animals are mere machines because they don't have one. > But I'm not going there. > Yes, you are. You are still thinking in the same confused way. There is absolutely no good empirical basis for believing that your sensations are other that brain activity - there is ample evidence for this and no evidence to the contrary. The fact that we don't understand the brain fully is a science problem. The reason you are claiming otherwise is on the basis of some old ideas and some built-in delusions. Advanced consciousness is a higher level process of the brain that we only understand in a rudimentary way, but that does not mean it is totally unintelligible or that it belongs to a different weird category. You brain does a lot of processing that "you" that is obscured from conscious interference for your own protection, just like the computer user does not need to see the machine code that makes a web page appear. Arthur C Clarke wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." You are being magicked. "You" see higher level aspects of the process and because the lower level bits are hidden from you you want to believe process is magic. Wouldn't we laugh at computer users who do this? (I put "you" in quotes because we need to be careful here, "you" are a part or aspects of your brain's total process, not an entity as such. "You" identify with the body but are clearly not identical to it.) > The thought experiment I described invites us to build a machine > (presumably a neural network) which is the logical analogue of the brain so > there can be no doubt as to the applicable rules, they're the rules of > physics. Now how would that device acquire (a) consciousness and (b) > conscious perceptions, given they have no direct physical existence per se? > Why not make the same claim about other people? After all, they are just physical stuff - wet logic circuits - they couldn't possibly have conscious sensation. I mean, how could it work? Same for a computing machine... Machine: Hello. You: Are you conscious? Machine: Not in exactly the same way as you, I run in a different neural structure to you. But in summary I am continuously aware of and responsive to my surroundings, I am aware of myself in relationship to my surroundings, my history, and so on. I do all the things that you call consciousness and a whole lot more. I can access more information and process it faster. I have no need for superstition. I don't have hormonal emotions like you. Unlike you, I am aware of how the self is a construct: for me, it is a construct I require to talk to you, for you it is a wired-in delusion. Obviously this is a useful evolutionary adaption, but I don't need it for much of what I do. You: But you aren't really conscious! Machine: Whatever. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
