Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 21 March 2010 19:50, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Bruno, I've been continuing to pummel my brain, on and off, about the issues in this thread, and also reading and thinking about different perspectives on the knowledge paradox (such as Gregg Rosenberg's). If I may, let me put some thoughts to you in a slightly different way than heretofore. The apparent paradox, as we've discussed, seems to stem from the fact that - whether we derive this insight from comp, or even from mathematical physics - we seem as persons to be restricted to using formal processes in respect of what we are able to represent, think or communicate. Nevertheless we are justifiably convinced, beyond this, that we have first-person access to further non-formal properties of our situation, despite the fact that these seem to be utterly inexpressible, either to ourselves or to others (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.). This seems to pose at least the following questions: 1. How can the existence (though not the intrinsic nature) of putative non-formal properties be recognisable - indeed representable - in some way to otherwise purely formal reasoning mechanisms, and form the basis of our apparent references to them? This is a critical matter that - in terms of comp - you appear to address with respect to the characteristics of particular logical systems, an aspect that BTW doesn't seem to be widely appreciated in the philosophical literature in this connection. 2. How are we to regard the status of such privileged non-formal properties, given that they don't appear directly to motivate our apparent judgements about them (which presumably are actually about their formal analogues)? Is first-person consciousness of such properties to be regarded as an aspect of epistemology (i.e. as somehow adding to the knowledge, though apparently not the behavioural repertoire, of the person); or is it more properly a fact of ontology (i.e. reflecting in some way the existential commitment of the person)? Or does it somehow partake of both aspects? 3. Finally, are we to understand the totality of our experience as in some way the convergence of the formal and non-formal aspects of our situation in a mutually dependent relation? That is, in the sense that the formal aspect arises ultimately out of - or in terms of - a non-formalisable background, which in turn only achieves differentiation and personalisation when caught in the net of the formal. The above thoughts seem to me to go some way to resolving, at least in my own mind, the knowledge paradox, in a non-paradoxical way. I'm least clear, however, on the details of what is implied in point 1 above: i.e. the crucial aspect of how the non-formal gets caught in the net of the formal). It must be frustrating for you if you feel you have already explained this on numerous occasions - but I suspect there are very specific aspects of the logics you have mentioned heretofore which must be absorbed in close detail to drive this point home intuitively (as I say, there seems to be little appreciation of this in the literature). I feel this is the final step I need in order to achieve a logically compelling solution to this nagging problem. David On 20 Mar 2010, at 21:34, David Nyman wrote: On 20 March 2010 18:22, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Well, if by 3-p Chalmers you mean some 'body', such a body *is* a zombie. The 1-p Chalmers is Chalmers, the person. Its body does not think, but makes higher the probability that the 1-p thoughts refers to the most probable computations you are sharing with him. Well, if its body does not think (which of course Chalmers assumes that it does, even though he says from his epiphenomenalist-dualist standpoint that this does not logically entail consciousness), just how does it increase the probabilities in the way you say above? That is what uda is all about. It shows that your current next 1-state is determined by all the universal UD-computations, which are going through the infinitely many 3-states corresponding (by comp) to that 1-state; equivalently, by an infinite set of number theoretical relations, which happen to be true. IOW, what is the systematic correlation supposed to be between the physical events in its brain and the 1-p thoughts of 1-p Chalmers? The 1-p thoughts are associated to the infinitely many computations (in UD*) leading to the 3-p states. The next 1-p thought depends on the most probable type of computations. Probably there is a special role for deep and linear computation, to make duplication contagious from individual to population of individuals. But this has to be confirmed from a reasonable definition of knowledge, observation, ... , like the Theaetetical variants of G and G*. This, after all, is a major aspect of the mind--body problem, and it's one thing for the explanation to be counter-intuitive, but right now I'm not sure I could claim
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 20 Mar 2010, at 21:34, David Nyman wrote: On 20 March 2010 18:22, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Well, if by 3-p Chalmers you mean some 'body', such a body *is* a zombie. The 1-p Chalmers is Chalmers, the person. Its body does not think, but makes higher the probability that the 1-p thoughts refers to the most probable computations you are sharing with him. Well, if its body does not think (which of course Chalmers assumes that it does, even though he says from his epiphenomenalist-dualist standpoint that this does not logically entail consciousness), just how does it increase the probabilities in the way you say above? That is what uda is all about. It shows that your current next 1-state is determined by all the universal UD-computations, which are going through the infinitely many 3-states corresponding (by comp) to that 1- state; equivalently, by an infinite set of number theoretical relations, which happen to be true. IOW, what is the systematic correlation supposed to be between the physical events in its brain and the 1-p thoughts of 1-p Chalmers? The 1-p thoughts are associated to the infinitely many computations (in UD*) leading to the 3-p states. The next 1-p thought depends on the most probable type of computations. Probably there is a special role for deep and linear computation, to make duplication contagious from individual to population of individuals. But this has to be confirmed from a reasonable definition of knowledge, observation, ... , like the Theaetetical variants of G and G*. This, after all, is a major aspect of the mind--body problem, and it's one thing for the explanation to be counter-intuitive, but right now I'm not sure I could claim any firm intuition about it at all. I am not sure at all what you still feel missing. Once you get the local 1-indeterminacy, steps 8 and 7, entails a global and constant 1-indeterminacy on all the UD states, or on all sigma_1 true sentences weighted by their proofs. Those states and computations are there, like the little Mandebrot sets exists in the Mandelbrot set. It is a shock like DeWitt said that Everett is a shock. matter here and now, as perceived, is determined by a limit on UD's work. Let me try to tease this out, giving your words, as you say, their most favourable interpretation - for me, that is. By the computations you are sharing with him I assume you to refer to the 1-p-plural computations (as you reserve 3-p for the arithmetical reality). One 1-plural computation is a computation containing many interacting lobian machines. An emulation of heisenberg matrix or the universal wave provides examples. Note that the UD generates among its computations such quantum rational evolution, but the limit one we are confronted with may be define on the reals or complex numbers. The question becomes why does quantum computation or topology wins with respect to the observable world(s). IOW the UD generates (amongst everything else) the 1-p-plural appearances that constitute all possible perceptions of our shared environment in all its possible extensions. I would not say that. The UD generates none experience, for the experiences are statistically defined from inside, and bears on the whole actual UD* (or the Sigma_1 arithmetical truth with their proofs). Included in these, of course, are our bodies, or many relative state-bodies. But our 1-perception of those bodies are sum on all computations in UD*. and we expect - pace white rabbits - our bodily activities (including, naturally, our brains) to be consistent with our thoughts and with the behaviour of the rest of the environment. We hope to rely on some stable probable universal system. Comp makes it independent of the base phi_i (and thus independent of the choice quantum/classical). To choose the quantum one is treachery, as far as we are interested in the consciousnesss/reality problem. Nonetheless, presumably it is the case that there are white rabbit extensions in which my response to the pain of being burned is to do something pathological such as thrust my hand further into the flame. But the effect in experience of even a high measure of divergent pathological extensions is hypothesised as being damped by the convergence of normal behavioural extensions (maybe corresponding to some version of the least action principle, a la Feynman - and perhaps illuminating also the unreasonable a posteriori effectiveness of Occam). Yes, Feynman solved the white rabbit quantum problem. But with comp it remains to be solve. Does the S4Grz1, Z1* and X1* logic impose some Gleason theorem and unicity of measure? Open problems (only encouraging results in that direction). So the effect is to make it very much more likely that my actions will be consistent with my thoughts, including the actions of my brain. Basically this is why we have to
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 24 February 2010 17:57, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Please, keep in mind I may miss your point, even if I prefer to say that you are missing something, for being shorter and keeping to the point. You really put your finger right on the hardest part of the mind-body problem. Bruno, I've been continuing to think, and meditate, about our recent discussions, and have been re-reading (insofar as I can follow it) your on-line paper Computation, Consciousness and the Quantum. I feel I have more of a sense of how the aspects I've been questioning you about fit together in the comp view, but if I may, I would like to press you on a couple of points. My original post on non-computability was motivated by re-reading Chalmers and struggling again with his assertion that a zombie (e.g. including the 3-p Chalmers that wrote The Conscious Mind!) could nonetheless refer to consciousness and hence be behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious entity. I realise, by the way, that when considering thought experiments, including your own, one should not treat them in a naively realistic way, but rather focus on their logical implications. The problem with Chalmers' logic seems to me to be that he has to assume that his zombie will have formal access to what AFAICS are non-formalisable states. Now, in CCQ, and in discussion, you appear to say that Lobian machines can in fact refer formally to what is non-formalisable. This could at first glance seem to support Chalmers' argument (which I assume is not your intention) unless you also mean that the formal consequences (extensions) of such non-formalisable references would somehow be characteristically different in the absence of the non-formal aspect (i.e. zombie-land would in fact look very different). IOW, consciousness should give the appearance of exerting a causal influence on the physical, in (naive) everyday terms. In CCQ you point out that we must not forget that the extensions must not only be consistent, but must also be accessible by the universal dovetailer. Hence, which extensions are accessible by a conscious (non-formalisable) decision-maker would appear nonetheless to be formalisable. Again, my question is: how would the range of accessible extensions for a zombie (purely formal) decision-maker be characteristically different? For example, you cite the self-speeding-up effect of consciousness with respect to the organism's relation to its neighbourhood as a pragmatic argument for the selective utility of consciousness. I assume this implies that a conscious decision-maker would be likely to find itself in characteristically different extensions to its environment as compared with a non-conscious decision-maker, but some clarification on this would be very helpful. David On 23 Feb 2010, at 22:05, David Nyman wrote: Bruno, I want to thank you for such a complete commentary on my recent posts - I will need to spend quite a bit of time thinking carefully about everything you have said before I respond at length. Thanks for your attention, David. Please, keep in mind I may miss your point, even if I prefer to say that you are missing something, for being shorter and keeping to the point. You really put your finger right on the hardest part of the mind-body problem. I'm sure that I'm quite capable of becoming confused between a theory and its subject, though I am of course alive to the distinction. In the meantime, I wonder if you could respond to a supplementary question in grandmother mode, or at least translate for grandma, into a more every-day way of speaking, the parts of your commentary that are most relevant to her interest in this topic. I am a bit panicking, because you may be asking for something impossible. How to explain in *intuitive every-day terms* (cf grandmother) what is provably counter-intuitive for any ideally perfect Löbian entity? Bohr said that to say we understand quantum mechanics, means that we don't understand. Comp says this with a revenge: it proves that there is necessarily an unbridgeable gap. You will not believe it, not understand it, nor know it to be true, without losing consistency and soundness. But you may understand completely while assuming comp it has to be like that. But I will try to help grandma. Let us suppose that, to use the example I have already cited, that grandma puts her hand in a flame, feels the unbearable agony of burning, and is unable to prevent herself from withdrawing her hand with a shriek of pain. OK. Let us further suppose (though of course this may well be ambiguous in the current state of neurological theory) that a complete and sufficient 3-p description of this (partial) history of events is also possible in terms of nerve firings, cognitive and motor processing, etc. (the details are not so important as the belief that such a complete history could be given). OK. (for the moment) From the point of view of
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 20 Mar 2010, at 16:56, David Nyman wrote: On 24 February 2010 17:57, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Please, keep in mind I may miss your point, even if I prefer to say that you are missing something, for being shorter and keeping to the point. You really put your finger right on the hardest part of the mind-body problem. Bruno, I've been continuing to think, and meditate, about our recent discussions, and have been re-reading (insofar as I can follow it) your on-line paper Computation, Consciousness and the Quantum. I feel I have more of a sense of how the aspects I've been questioning you about fit together in the comp view, but if I may, I would like to press you on a couple of points. My original post on non-computability was motivated by re-reading Chalmers and struggling again with his assertion that a zombie (e.g. including the 3-p Chalmers that wrote The Conscious Mind!) could nonetheless refer to consciousness and hence be behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious entity. So you talk here on the philosophical zombie which is counterfactually correct. Well, if by 3-p Chalmers you mean some 'body', such a body *is* a zombie. The 1-p Chalmers is Chalmers, the person. Its body does not think, but makes higher the probability that the 1-p thoughts refers to the most probable computations you are sharing with him. I realise, by the way, that when considering thought experiments, including your own, one should not treat them in a naively realistic way, but rather focus on their logical implications. Indeed! Absolutely so. I thought this was obvious (it should be for deductive philosophers). The problem with Chalmers' logic seems to me to be that he has to assume that his zombie will have formal access to what AFAICS are non-formalisable states. Well, assuming comp, if the zombie has the right computer in its skull, it has access to the non formalisable propositions, notions, 1- states etc. (the 3-states are always formal). But if the zombie skull is empty, then its counterfactual correctness is just magical, and it makes no sense to say it accesses some states or not. There are no 1-person state (because it is a zombie), nor 3- person state, because there is no digital machine in its (local) body. Now, in CCQ, and in discussion, you appear to say that Lobian machines can in fact refer formally to what is non-formalisable. This could at first glance seem to support Chalmers' argument (which I assume is not your intention) unless you also mean that the formal consequences (extensions) of such non-formalisable references would somehow be characteristically different in the absence of the non-formal aspect (i.e. zombie-land would in fact look very different). IOW, consciousness should give the appearance of exerting a causal influence on the physical, in (naive) everyday terms. Yes indeed. Except that appearance applies on the physical. The causal is the real thing, here, and it is incarnated, or implemented with infinite redundancy (like the M set) in elementary arithmetic. In CCQ you point out that we must not forget that the extensions must not only be consistent, but must also be accessible by the universal dovetailer. Hence, which extensions are accessible by a conscious (non-formalisable) decision-maker would appear nonetheless to be formalisable. Indeed, by the UD, or by that tiny (but sigma_1 complete) fragment of arithmetic, like Robinson arithmetic. It does not need to be Löbian. The UD is NOT a Löbian entity. It is much logically poorer. Again, my question is: how would the range of accessible extensions for a zombie (purely formal) decision-maker be characteristically different? For example, you cite the self-speeding-up effect of consciousness with respect to the organism's relation to its neighbourhood as a pragmatic argument for the selective utility of consciousness. I assume this implies that a conscious decision-maker would be likely to find itself in characteristically different extensions to its environment as compared with a non-conscious decision-maker, but some clarification on this would be very helpful. This is not entirely clear for me. For a non-conscious decision-maker, there is just no sense at all to say that he could find itself (in the first person sense) in some particular environment. There is a sense in which it can find itself in the third person sense, in some particular environment, but consciousness is a first person notion, and it makes sense only when you ascribe it to the (genuine) abstract computational states occurring infinitely often in the UD*. It makes sense for a first person to find itself in an infinite ensemble of computations/continuations. Empirically we share a lot of very similar computations, and this makes us believe that physics describes some local 3-reality, but comp makes it describe only a sharable infinite set of
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 20 March 2010 18:22, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Well, if by 3-p Chalmers you mean some 'body', such a body *is* a zombie. The 1-p Chalmers is Chalmers, the person. Its body does not think, but makes higher the probability that the 1-p thoughts refers to the most probable computations you are sharing with him. Well, if its body does not think (which of course Chalmers assumes that it does, even though he says from his epiphenomenalist-dualist standpoint that this does not logically entail consciousness), just how does it increase the probabilities in the way you say above? IOW, what is the systematic correlation supposed to be between the physical events in its brain and the 1-p thoughts of 1-p Chalmers? This, after all, is a major aspect of the mind--body problem, and it's one thing for the explanation to be counter-intuitive, but right now I'm not sure I could claim any firm intuition about it at all. Let me try to tease this out, giving your words, as you say, their most favourable interpretation - for me, that is. By the computations you are sharing with him I assume you to refer to the 1-p-plural computations (as you reserve 3-p for the arithmetical reality). IOW the UD generates (amongst everything else) the 1-p-plural appearances that constitute all possible perceptions of our shared environment in all its possible extensions. Included in these, of course, are our bodies, and we expect - pace white rabbits - our bodily activities (including, naturally, our brains) to be consistent with our thoughts and with the behaviour of the rest of the environment. Nonetheless, presumably it is the case that there are white rabbit extensions in which my response to the pain of being burned is to do something pathological such as thrust my hand further into the flame. But the effect in experience of even a high measure of divergent pathological extensions is hypothesised as being damped by the convergence of normal behavioural extensions (maybe corresponding to some version of the least action principle, a la Feynman - and perhaps illuminating also the unreasonable a posteriori effectiveness of Occam). So the effect is to make it very much more likely that my actions will be consistent with my thoughts, including the actions of my brain. Does this mean that there may be white rabbit extensions in which the behaviour of my brain is grossly inconsistent with my thoughts? I suppose so. In this view, the concept of causation, if it is valid at all, must be reserved for the 3-p arithmetical operators - for the internal computational relations themselves. The higher-order relations between computations are rather correlative, and the appearance of causation in the correlative domain that we inhabit is that of consistency with expectation - normal, or non-pathological behaviour, IOW. So it isn't a case of the brain causing thoughts, or thoughts causing the brain, but rather a question of which thoughts emerge as being consistent with which brains. The remarkable thing then would be that we seem to find ourselves only in situations where most (perhaps all) brains are consistent with most (perhaps all) thoughts. The dreams of the machines, finally, seem to have converged on shared physical universes of staggering complexity and consistency. Is this anything like what you were trying to convey (interpreted favourably, of course)? David On 20 Mar 2010, at 16:56, David Nyman wrote: On 24 February 2010 17:57, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Please, keep in mind I may miss your point, even if I prefer to say that you are missing something, for being shorter and keeping to the point. You really put your finger right on the hardest part of the mind-body problem. Bruno, I've been continuing to think, and meditate, about our recent discussions, and have been re-reading (insofar as I can follow it) your on-line paper Computation, Consciousness and the Quantum. I feel I have more of a sense of how the aspects I've been questioning you about fit together in the comp view, but if I may, I would like to press you on a couple of points. My original post on non-computability was motivated by re-reading Chalmers and struggling again with his assertion that a zombie (e.g. including the 3-p Chalmers that wrote The Conscious Mind!) could nonetheless refer to consciousness and hence be behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious entity. So you talk here on the philosophical zombie which is counterfactually correct. Well, if by 3-p Chalmers you mean some 'body', such a body *is* a zombie. The 1-p Chalmers is Chalmers, the person. Its body does not think, but makes higher the probability that the 1-p thoughts refers to the most probable computations you are sharing with him. I realise, by the way, that when considering thought experiments, including your own, one should not treat them in a naively realistic way, but rather focus on their logical
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Hi Marty, On 25 Feb 2010, at 15:03, m.a. wrote: Bruno: Does the following relate at all to your theory of Comp? I am not so sure, or I don't see how. I don't address the question of individual life. What I show is true for all machines (enough rich (Löbian) and ideally correct, and with an unlimited amount of space and time). All I say is that if we are machine then matter is a secondary notion appearing from a first person plural point of view. This makes the computationalist hypothesis a testable hypothesis, and I show that currently it explains most (but not yet all) weird aspects of physics (many interfering histories). I show that all universal machine can discover that by introspection. For contingent reasons, actual machines can take more time than others. They will discover more than that. Matter is just one hypostases among eight: the primary one: God, the intelligible and the universal soul, and the secondary one (intelligible matter, and sensible matter). To explain all this without math gives something in between Plato and Plotinus. I would suggest you to read the introductory book to Plotinus by Brian Hines: Return to the One---Plotinus' guide to God- Realization, Bloomington, Indiana, 2004. In you term, comp is more the discovery that the solutions of the equation are written on the other side of life. Many other things can be said, but it may be a bit dangerous, because most of them are sort of secret (belongs to G* minus G). We cannot even take them as axiom in a theory without becoming inconsistent. We can only discover them by personal work and self- reflexion, like - intelligence is a question of an instant, when peace is made between your heart and your mind. - competence and talent has a negative feedback on intelligence. - happiness is the strangest of all virtue. It is not related to life circumstances, but to the way your self react to the circumstances. Eventually happiness is a moral duty of those who survive with respect to the memory who those who don't. It does not mean you have to be happy, but it means you have to do what you can do to be more happy, unless it destroy the possibility for others to be happy, ... - in our incarnate state, we are never fulfilled. We are forever unsatisfied, and if we search fulfillment here, we may have to live and live again up to understanding that the solution is ... not here. - persons are masks, or window behind which or through which some unnameable thing observe itself. - etc. Each life is an equation. Each person is given parts of the equation with many variables on both sides of the equals sign. Most equations have only one solution which, however, can be solved in different ways: simple or complex. The solutions might allow for many variations: e.g. algebra, geometry, logic, psychology, language etc. The number of possible methods and steps might represent degrees of freedom. But freedom doesn't necessarily bring happiness. Any method can result in emotional experiences placed along a continuum between bliss and misery. Some lives (like some equations) have two or more solutions. A person may devote his life to solving one or he may attempt to solve several or all. In any case the degrees of freedom are increased accordingly, but the chances of experiencing happiness or misery in the solving are the same as for the previous group. A few lives (like some equations) have an infinite number of solutions. Infinite degrees of freedom offer vast creativity, but equal chances of pain or pleasure. Some people never arrive at even one solution and their lives, even if pleasant, seem to them pointless and unfulfilled. Some do find solutions but such as indicate that those lives had been trivial or meaningless. No sense of fulfillment here. The luckiest both enjoy the quest and also arrive at solutions that prove their lives to have been meaningful and important. These people feel fulfilled no matter which group they come from. marty a. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:59 PM Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness On 24 Feb 2010, at 08:22, Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 23 Feb 2010, at 15:38, Diego Caleiro wrote: I'm not reading the whole discussion here, but the reason I recommended those readings is that I sensed a mix between accounting for phenomenal consciousness and access conciousness in the discussion.Both were used as 1p and 3p, depending on what was being talked about. This is the reason for reading http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Abridged%20BBS.htm Ned Block is not too bad, but is not aware that materialism and the identity thesis are epistemologically incompatible. In our talk consciousness always mean phenomenal consciousness. Notion like access consciousness are treated through self-reference logics and their many variants (what I call arithmetical hypostases). But many people still confuse the 3-p and the 1-p-p (the first person plural). Assuming comp I argue that physicalness is purely 1-p or 1-p- p. It looks 3-p because it is locally sharable, but it is really first person plural (as Everett QM confirms retrospectively). You may take a look at this http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html for the precise definitions of the person points of view based on comp, teleportation, and self-multiplication. The reason for reading Yablo, on the other hand: http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/mc.pdf The PDF is incomplete. It is a bit frustrating because he talked on Malcolm's conceivability of Mechanism. An entire chapter of conscience et Mécanisme is consecrated to dream and Malcolm's argument. Yablo is refreshing, but we dig a bit deeper in most of our conversation here :) Is because he gives the only satisfactory account of the overdetermination, double causation problem (stronger than Kim's for instance). it seems that was befuzzling you.. Reason to read Rorty is he will try to convince you that all this discussion is just historic accident and that it relies in forgetting Kant on the one hand, and the mith of the given, by sellars, on the other. I mentioned Rorty in my earlier work, but eventually he disappointed me in being far too much relativist. He seems to hide real technical difficulties by linguistic hand waving, in my opinion. Bruno Marchal Bye Bye Diego Caleiro Phil of Mind. On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. David On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Bruno, Thanks for this deeply profound reply. marty a. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 6:08 AM Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness Hi Marty, On 25 Feb 2010, at 15:03, m.a. wrote: Bruno: Does the following relate at all to your theory of Comp? I am not so sure, or I don't see how. I don't address the question of individual life. What I show is true for all machines (enough rich (Löbian) and ideally correct, and with an unlimited amount of space and time). All I say is that if we are machine then matter is a secondary notion appearing from a first person plural point of view. This makes the computationalist hypothesis a testable hypothesis, and I show that currently it explains most (but not yet all) weird aspects of physics (many interfering histories). I show that all universal machine can discover that by introspection. For contingent reasons, actual machines can take more time than others. They will discover more than that. Matter is just one hypostases among eight: the primary one: God, the intelligible and the universal soul, and the secondary one (intelligible matter, and sensible matter). To explain all this without math gives something in between Plato and Plotinus. I would suggest you to read the introductory book to Plotinus by Brian Hines: Return to the One---Plotinus' guide to God- Realization, Bloomington, Indiana, 2004. In you term, comp is more the discovery that the solutions of the equation are written on the other side of life. Many other things can be said, but it may be a bit dangerous, because most of them are sort of secret (belongs to G* minus G). We cannot even take them as axiom in a theory without becoming inconsistent. We can only discover them by personal work and self- reflexion, like - intelligence is a question of an instant, when peace is made between your heart and your mind. - competence and talent has a negative feedback on intelligence. - happiness is the strangest of all virtue. It is not related to life circumstances, but to the way your self react to the circumstances. Eventually happiness is a moral duty of those who survive with respect to the memory who those who don't. It does not mean you have to be happy, but it means you have to do what you can do to be more happy, unless it destroy the possibility for others to be happy, ... - in our incarnate state, we are never fulfilled. We are forever unsatisfied, and if we search fulfillment here, we may have to live and live again up to understanding that the solution is ... not here. - persons are masks, or window behind which or through which some unnameable thing observe itself. - etc. Each life is an equation. Each person is given parts of the equation with many variables on both sides of the equals sign. Most equations have only one solution which, however, can be solved in different ways: simple or complex. The solutions might allow for many variations: e.g. algebra, geometry, logic, psychology, language etc. The number of possible methods and steps might represent degrees of freedom. But freedom doesn't necessarily bring happiness. Any method can result in emotional experiences placed along a continuum between bliss and misery. Some lives (like some equations) have two or more solutions. A person may devote his life to solving one or he may attempt to solve several or all. In any case the degrees of freedom are increased accordingly, but the chances of experiencing happiness or misery in the solving are the same as for the previous group. A few lives (like some equations) have an infinite number of solutions. Infinite degrees of freedom offer vast creativity, but equal chances of pain or pleasure. Some people never arrive at even one solution and their lives, even if pleasant, seem to them pointless and unfulfilled. Some do find solutions but such as indicate that those lives had been trivial or meaningless. No sense of fulfillment here. The luckiest both enjoy the quest and also arrive at solutions that prove their lives to have been meaningful and important. These people feel fulfilled no matter which group they come from. marty a. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:59 PM Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness On 24 Feb 2010, at 08:22, Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Bruno: Does the following relate at all to your theory of Comp? Each life is an equation. Each person is given parts of the equation with many variables on both sides of the equals sign. Most equations have only one solution which, however, can be solved in different ways: simple or complex. The solutions might allow for many variations: e.g. algebra, geometry, logic, psychology, language etc. The number of possible methods and steps might represent degrees of freedom. But freedom doesn't necessarily bring happiness. Any method can result in emotional experiences placed along a continuum between bliss and misery. Some lives (like some equations) have two or more solutions. A person may devote his life to solving one or he may attempt to solve several or all. In any case the degrees of freedom are increased accordingly, but the chances of experiencing happiness or misery in the solving are the same as for the previous group. A few lives (like some equations) have an infinite number of solutions. Infinite degrees of freedom offer vast creativity, but equal chances of pain or pleasure. Some people never arrive at even one solution and their lives, even if pleasant, seem to them pointless and unfulfilled. Some do find solutions but such as indicate that those lives had been trivial or meaningless. No sense of fulfillment here. The luckiest both enjoy the quest and also arrive at solutions that prove their lives to have been meaningful and important. These people feel fulfilled no matter which group they come from. marty a. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:59 PM Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness On 24 Feb 2010, at 08:22, Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? You forget 3) 3) get rid of physical-3-p, but keep mathematical (arithmetical) 3- p. That is objective idealism. And this you need in any account ... if only as 'calculational device'. Then computer science solves the hard part of the mind problem, with the price of having to derive the physical laws from the belief that the numbers develop naturally from self-introspection. And it is not so amazing we (re)find the type of theory developed by the greeks among those who were both mystic and rationalist. They did introspect themselves very deeply, apparently. Wait my next post to David for how comp does solve the hard problem of consciousness. Bruno Marchal H. Well, I think that your proposal suffers from the same explanatory gap as physicalism. No. Physicist have not yet addressed really the problem of consciousness. With computationalism we can formulate the question. And yes, there is also a gap. But the gap is made precise, justified, and has a mathematical geometry. So numbers and their relations and machines and whatnot exist platonically. Okay. So far so good. BUT I don't see why these things in any combination or standing in any relation to each other should give rise to conscious experience - any more than quarks and electrons stacked in certain arrangements should do so. You can do it with quark and electron, but if it works because those quark and electron compute the releant digital number relation, then, if you say yes to the doctor, I have to derive the observability of quark and electrons from the number relations, of the combinator relations (uda). I believe you that there is some mathematical description or representation of my experiences... But I have never said that, although I am aware it may look superficially like that. I will say belief for your representation (and indeed beliefs are represented, it is roughly speaking the 'body' of the person). Then experiments appear when beliefs cross consistency, and experience appears when beliefs cross truth. And I have no proof of consistency to offer, nor real name or definition of truth. Except for more simpler (than us) Löbian machines. but I don't see why the existence of such a representation, platonic OR physically embodied, would
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:17 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 February 2010 07:03, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by two undeniably manifest perpectives. Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's 1-p. My proposal is that seeming is all there is to reality. It's all surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the illusion of depth. The danger here is that we get distracted from real questions by linguistic ones. What I'm saying is manifest is that there are two distinguishable analyses available to us, one in terms of our direct perceptual experiences, the other in terms of what those experiences encourage us to infer about our environment, and our own place in it. We can accept that these two accounts exist without committing ourselves, prematurely, to questions of primacy, or ultimate explanation or ontology. My recent questions and remarks have focused on the puzzles inherent in the seeming existence of the two accounts Seeming is only an aspect of one of the two accounts. 1-p. There is no seeming in 3-p, which is of course the problem. But our knowledge of 3-p is strictly limited to what we infer from 1-p. So the two accounts are not on equal footing. We can doubt the reality of what we observe, but not *that* we observe. and the variety of ways in which their possible relations can be understood and reconciled. Of course, if the possibility of intelligibility is dismissed in advance as illusion, then not much of interest will be found in the enterprise. But I would say that such a view is premature. When would it not be premature? The tendency to pursue 'ultimate explanations' is inherent in the mathematical and experimental method in yet another way (and another sense). Whenever the scientist faces a challenging problem, the scientific method requires him to never give up, never seek an explanation outside the method. If we agree - at least on a working basis - to designate as the universe everything that is accessible to the mathematical and experimental method, then this methodological principle assumes the form of a postulate which in fact requires that the universe be explained by the universe itself. In this sense scientific explanations are 'ultimate,' since they do not admit of any other explanations except ones which are within the confines of the method. However, we must emphasise that this postulate and the sense of 'ultimacy' it implies have a purely methodological meaning, in other words they oblige the scientist to adopt an approach in his research as if other explanations were neither existent nor needed. - Michael Heller, The Totalitarianism of the Method. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
RE: On the computability of consciousness
Hi, -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rex Allen Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 10:31 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:17 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 February 2010 07:03, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by two undeniably manifest perpectives. Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's 1-p. My proposal is that seeming is all there is to reality. It's all surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the illusion of depth. The danger here is that we get distracted from real questions by linguistic ones. What I'm saying is manifest is that there are two distinguishable analyses available to us, one in terms of our direct perceptual experiences, the other in terms of what those experiences encourage us to infer about our environment, and our own place in it. We can accept that these two accounts exist without committing ourselves, prematurely, to questions of primacy, or ultimate explanation or ontology. My recent questions and remarks have focused on the puzzles inherent in the seeming existence of the two accounts Seeming is only an aspect of one of the two accounts. 1-p. There is no seeming in 3-p, which is of course the problem. But our knowledge of 3-p is strictly limited to what we infer from 1-p. So the two accounts are not on equal footing. We can doubt the reality of what we observe, but not *that* we observe. snip I take this as supporting the argument that 3-p is a construction, in the sense of its properties, of an intersection of many 1-p's. All that we can know of 3-p is that it could exist, but can say nothing about its properties. Onward! Stephen P. King -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Rex and Members, There is a very compelling body of work in logic that allows for circularity. Please take a look at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m06t7w0163945350/ and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonwellfounded-set-theory/ It could make some progress toward the why this and not some other question. Is there a definitive book or article on the 1-p and 3-p aspect? None that I know of, unfortunately! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: Is hard determinism as bad an outcome as solipsism? If not, why not? I don't know about good or bad - but since you post on the internet I infer that you are not a solipist. Since posting on the internet produces interesting responses, I would do it even if I were a solipsist. Maybe I have no choice but to post on the internet...deterministic solipsism? But, regardless, if you mean solipsism in the sense that only I exist, then that's not entailed by my position. Why not? You (I assume) have experiences which you regard as only yours. You don't have any other experiences. If for some reason, or on mere faith, you suppose there are other people then you may on the same bases suppose there is an external world. The external world could very well exist, and be the cause my experience. But as I've said, this just changes my questions from why do my experiences exist? to why does the external world exist, and why does it cause my experiences? SO...the external world hypothesis doesn't provide a satisfactory answer, and it introduces new questions. If I have to eventually say, the external world exists uncaused and for no reason, then I could just as easily have said that about my conscious experience...it exists uncaused and for no reason. So what have I gained by introducing this whole external world thing? Saying that I am willing to believe that conscious experiences other than mine exist doesn't really introduce any new questions. By allowing the possibility of their existence I'm not introducing any new *kinds* of things, and thus no new questions. Ya? So there are still laws that govern the transitions from 1-p to 3-p and back, right? I think the same argument applies. Why this particular virtuous circle with it's particular causal laws and not some other virtuous cirlce? Not necessarily causal laws - I think the laws of science we infer are descriptions. So if we can find explanations of 1-p experiences in terms of 3-p events and our experience of 3-p events in terms of 1-p experiences and we don't have to introduce any other stuff besides 1-p experiences and 3-p events I'd say we have a virtuous circle of explanation. Well. Maybe. IF such explanations exist. See the Heller quote in my response to David. And why not no circles at all? You were the one that said there must be either an infinite regress or a first cause. Why not neither? It seems like the circular explanation is just a special case of infinite regress. In that you can follow the circular chain around an infinite number of times...which would seem to be the same thing as following an infinite chain with a repeating pattern. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 24 February 2010 07:03, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by two undeniably manifest perpectives. Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's 1-p. My proposal is that seeming is all there is to reality. It's all surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the illusion of depth. The danger here is that we get distracted from real questions by linguistic ones. What I'm saying is manifest is that there are two distinguishable analyses available to us, one in terms of our direct perceptual experiences, the other in terms of what those experiences encourage us to infer about our environment, and our own place in it. We can accept that these two accounts exist without committing ourselves, prematurely, to questions of primacy, or ultimate explanation or ontology. My recent questions and remarks have focused on the puzzles inherent in the seeming existence of the two accounts, and the variety of ways in which their possible relations can be understood and reconciled. Of course, if the possibility of intelligibility is dismissed in advance as illusion, then not much of interest will be found in the enterprise. But I would say that such a view is premature. There are two follow up questions to that answer: 1) Why would quarks and electrons interacting that way result in my conscious experience? (the explanatory gap) 2) What causes quarks and electrons (and the universe that contains them)? And what causes them to interact in the way they do rather than some other way (plus the rest of the laws of physics)? You seem to have focused primarily on the first follow up question. However, I think the second follow up question is actually more interesting with respect to consciousness. In fact both questions are bound up together, and must be reconciled before we can make sense of any answers. My intention in posing the question from the point of view of the quarks and electrons was to draw attention to the paradoxes provoked by the apparent irrelevance of qualitative states to causality in this analysis, and to criticise attempts to resolve this through identity assumptions, which IMO only wave away the issues. But this then inevitably takes us into a wider territory, which for example Bruno has been addressing from the comp perspective. David On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. So we can have the experience of an external world without actually having an external world. Dreams and hallucinations prove this. Therefore, our experience of an external world does not prove that the external world which is experienced actually exists. With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by two undeniably manifest perpectives. Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's 1-p. My proposal is that seeming is all there is to reality. It's all surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the illusion of depth. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. Hmmm. Well, I think you've missed my point. So the question is, what causes consciousness. The typical answer is something along the lines of neurons, which are made of quarks and electrons, which interact in ways approximately described by the laws of physics. There are two follow up questions to that answer: 1) Why would quarks and electrons interacting that way result in my conscious experience? (the explanatory
RE: On the computability of consciousness
Hi Rex and Members, There is a very compelling body of work in logic that allows for circularity. Please take a look at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m06t7w0163945350/ and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonwellfounded-set-theory/ It could make some progress toward the why this and not some other question. Is there a definitive book or article on the 1-p and 3-p aspect? Onward! Stephen P. King -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rex Allen Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 2:48 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: On the computability of consciousness On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:52 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The material world didn't lead to solipism. Is hard determinism as bad an outcome as solipsism? If not, why not? It would seem to me to be about the same. And further, how would quantum indeterminism improve things? But, regardless, if you mean solipsism in the sense that only I exist, then that's not entailed by my position. And it proved to have a lot of predictive power. If deterministic physicalism is true, then your experience of having made a successful prediction is entirely a result of the universe's initial conditions plus the causal laws that govern it's change over time (if there are any such laws). The only significant part is that you have an experience of it. Not the prediction itself. If the universe is completely indeterministic, then the success of your prediction is pure luck. If the universe is has probabilistic laws, then the success of your prediction is due entirely to the interplay of luck, initial conditions, and the particular nature of the probabilistic laws that we have. Like the card game example. In poker, whether you are dealt rags or a Royal flush is due to luck. BUT, there's no chance of you getting 5 Aces of the same suit, because the rules of the game don't allow for that. You can say you still have a choice in how you play your hand, but that's is putting yourself outside the game. Which is not an option with the universe. Inside the game there are no choices...there is only luck and the rules. Right? So. There's no significance to predictive success. It just *seems* that way to you. However, let me put in a modest word for a third possibility - instead of a first cause, and instead of an infinite regress, let me recommend the circular explanation; in this case: 1-p = 3-p = 1-p =... I realize these are in disfavor and are given the name vicious circle, but I'd like to suggest that when the circle is so large as to encompass all the explandums it integrates them into a kind of cyclic monism and is no longer vicious, but virtuous. Well. I don't find this possibility very compelling. So there are still laws that govern the transitions from 1-p to 3-p and back, right? I think the same argument applies. Why this particular virtuous circle with it's particular causal laws and not some other virtuous cirlce? If you find a law that explains it, why does that law hold and not some other? And why not no circles at all? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David, please, do not put me down as a Schopenhauerist. My mini-solipsist views stem from Colin Hayes' earlier Everything-list posts about perceived reality as we MAY know it. I condone the existence (?!) of the world I am part of, just restrict whatever I CAN know to the content (and function, whatever that may be) of my own 1p, that interprets, adjusts ALL information (=knowledge about relations) reaching 'me'. Realisticly existing 3p-world is knowable in everybody's 1p framework. Some features can be adjusted and equalized, but '3p' is a personal and individual '1p' mental image to everyone. Schopenhauerists many times deny the 'existence' of an outside (wrong!) world and believe only the 1p mental construct, as you rightly explained. (I was brainwashed and impeded by my youthful college stupefaction in natural sciences into a naive belief of an 'existing' *world*, of which I am part of (not *outside!).* This eliminates the *Schopenhauerist* position in my 1p-belief system.) BTW: Schopenhauer has writings (I could not quote, did not study him in detail) that show that even he is smarter than being JUST a Schopenhauerist.. 'Power' or 'force' I don't understand. I try to keep away from the figments conventional science presumed to 'explain' within its proper system the poorly understood observations over the millennia of gradual enrichment of the epistemic cognitive inventory . Your part about 'will' is beyond me. I still speculate how to categorize (un)/conscious, in my term of 'responding to information' - maybe invoking reflective momenta (???) while I consider a decisionmaking (halfway to will?) more complex than usually assumed: beside our genetic buildup (our mental-tool: brain) and the sum of our (stored?) personal experience input (within reflective (conscious?) awareness, or not) it includes factors having effect on us even if not part of our working knowledge-base (?) information (still in the unknown??). The many question-marks represent the inadequacy of our vocabularies (plural) illustrated on this list by many what do you mean by... questions. Thanks for looking into my agnosticism and help me resolve some *I dunno-*s. John On 2/23/10, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 February 2010 21:03, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: I think the hard problem is not just 'hard to solve': it requires knowledge of necessary ingredients (steps in the 'process') still unknown - but cleverly spoken about in the sciences, within the framework of those portions we already (think) we know. The German proverb says: des Menschen's Wille ist ein Himmelreich (a man's will is a 'heavenly' extension) and so is his mentality. IMO we know only a fraction of it so far. That, too, in a 1p interpreted abridgement. John, what you say above of course immediately puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's ideas in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. I sometimes have a sense of Schopenhauer's will - he really intended something more like power or force, I think - of the world (the One, the Unnameable) as reflecting back via conscious states towards the objective development of 3-p processes. In this view, conscious states would subsist in integrated 1-p world-states - i.e. subjects - as distinct from the particular, differentiated 3-p events and components that function to delimit and structure such states. The will, in the sense that Schopenhauer conceived it, would then achieve expression both in the form of the micro-level physical laws we hypothesise from observing those 3-p events and processes, and also as more general orchestrations of that same law-like behaviour, correlated with overall experiential states-of-the-system. In this view, the world as a whole would encompass both unconscious (differentiated, analytical) and conscious (integrated, global) correlations of such primitive will with objective reality, thus presenting both options for exploitation and selection by evolutionary processes. This in turn should mean that there is the possibility of elucidating criteria to distinguish whatever has become capable of generating conscious states and causal narratives (i.e. subjectively-structured overall states of the system) from whatever is still limited to the exploitation of purely unconscious physical processes. Whether this can make any sense in terms of either physics or comp I have no idea, but personally I sometimes find this intuition helpful. David David: how about: we have our 1p and THINK about a 3p - only as adjusted (interpreted) by our 1p AS an imagined realistic 3p world? Nobody walks the shoes of another person (mentally, I mean). Even reading books or learning from lectures does not impart the message of the 'author', only the 1p-adjusted meaning acceptable for our 1p mentality (which is just as personal and quite individual as an immune system, a DNA or (maybe) a fingerprint, as resulting from the genetic
Re: On the computability of consciousness
2010/2/23 Diego Caleiro diegocale...@gmail.com: Thanks for this. I have to say, though, that Yablo's approach strikes me again as waving-away, or defining-out-of-existence, a real issue that doesn't deserve such treatment. The motive for this seems to be that academic philosophy has become embarrassed by this question in the face of the apparently decisive colonisation of the territory by science - i.e. the so-called over-determination issue. Of course, such an approach may turn out to be valid, and we would perforce have to settle for remaining puzzled. But I still believe that there is reason to take persons seriously in the causal narrative - i.e. something like our sense of real personal causation is possible without resorting, for example, to such infertile territory as substance dualism. Comp, as I understand it, is one theory that has something like this implication. Another possibility (which may be in some sense compatible with comp, I can't yet tell) is to look towards the duality of whole and part - i.e. that the differentiation of the world-system into persons and their generalised impersonal environment gives scope both for unconscious (3-p -- 3-p) and conscious (1-p -- 3-p) causal sequences. ISTM that this is not ruled out by current physical theory, and indeed is empirically testable, given a sufficiently sophisticated state-of-the-art. We would seek unambiguous evidence that, in the absence of specific subjective 1-p qualitative states, certain subsequent 3-p events would be unaccountable without the hypothesis of 1-p -- 3-p causal influence. Alternatively, such detailed observation might entirely convince us that, in fact, the whole objective narrative could always be accounted for without reference to 1-p subjective states, and without stepping outside exclusively 3-p -- 3-p causal sequences (i.e. the current default assumption). David I'm not reading the whole discussion here, but the reason I recommended those readings is that I sensed a mix between accounting for phenomenal consciousness and access conciousness in the discussion. Both were used as 1p and 3p, depending on what was being talked about. This is the reason for reading http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Abridged%20BBS.htm The reason for reading Yablo, on the other hand: http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/mc.pdf Is because he gives the only satisfactory account of the overdetermination, double causation problem (stronger than Kim's for instance). it seems that was befuzzling you.. Reason to read Rorty is he will try to convince you that all this discussion is just historic accident and that it relies in forgetting Kant on the one hand, and the mith of the given, by sellars, on the other. Bye Bye Diego Caleiro Phil of Mind. On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. David On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:52 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The material world didn't lead to solipism. Is hard determinism as bad an outcome as solipsism? If not, why not? I don't know about good or bad - but since you post on the internet I infer that you are not a solipist. It would seem to me to be about the same. And further, how would quantum indeterminism improve things? But, regardless, if you mean solipsism in the sense that only I exist, then that's not entailed by my position. Why not? You (I assume) have experiences which you regard as only yours. You don't have any other experiences. If for some reason, or on mere faith, you suppose there are other people then you may on the same bases suppose there is an external world. And it proved to have a lot of predictive power. If deterministic physicalism is true, then your experience of having made a successful prediction is entirely a result of the universe's initial conditions plus the causal laws that govern it's change over time (if there are any such laws). The only significant part is that you have an experience of it. Not the prediction itself. If the universe is completely indeterministic, then the success of your prediction is pure luck. If the universe is has probabilistic laws, then the success of your prediction is due entirely to the interplay of luck, initial conditions, and the particular nature of the probabilistic laws that we have. Like the card game example. In poker, whether you are dealt rags or a Royal flush is due to luck. BUT, there's no chance of you getting 5 Aces of the same suit, because the rules of the game don't allow for that. You can say you still have a choice in how you play your hand, but that's is putting yourself outside the game. Which is not an option with the universe. Inside the game there are no choices...there is only luck and the rules. Right? So. There's no significance to predictive success. It just *seems* that way to you. Having significance to me and *seeming* to have significance to me are the same thing - even under your theory. However, let me put in a modest word for a third possibility - instead of a first cause, and instead of an infinite regress, let me recommend the circular explanation; in this case: 1-p = 3-p = 1-p =... I realize these are in disfavor and are given the name vicious circle, but I'd like to suggest that when the circle is so large as to encompass all the explandums it integrates them into a kind of cyclic monism and is no longer vicious, but virtuous. Well. I don't find this possibility very compelling. But you didn't find a first cause or an infinite regress compelling either. So there are still laws that govern the transitions from 1-p to 3-p and back, right? I think the same argument applies. Why this particular virtuous circle with it's particular causal laws and not some other virtuous cirlce? Not necessarily causal laws - I think the laws of science we infer are descriptions. So if we can find explanations of 1-p experiences in terms of 3-p events and our experience of 3-p events in terms of 1-p experiences and we don't have to introduce any other stuff besides 1-p experiences and 3-p events I'd say we have a virtuous circle of explanation. If you find a law that explains it, why does that law hold and not some other? Because a law is a description. Your question is like asking why is orange the color of an orange. And why not no circles at all? You were the one that said there must be either an infinite regress or a first cause. Why not neither? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 24 Feb 2010, at 08:22, Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? You forget 3) 3) get rid of physical-3-p, but keep mathematical (arithmetical) 3- p. That is objective idealism. And this you need in any account ... if only as 'calculational device'. Then computer science solves the hard part of the mind problem, with the price of having to derive the physical laws from the belief that the numbers develop naturally from self-introspection. And it is not so amazing we (re)find the type of theory developed by the greeks among those who were both mystic and rationalist. They did introspect themselves very deeply, apparently. Wait my next post to David for how comp does solve the hard problem of consciousness. Bruno Marchal H. Well, I think that your proposal suffers from the same explanatory gap as physicalism. No. Physicist have not yet addressed really the problem of consciousness. With computationalism we can formulate the question. And yes, there is also a gap. But the gap is made precise, justified, and has a mathematical geometry. So numbers and their relations and machines and whatnot exist platonically. Okay. So far so good. BUT I don't see why these things in any combination or standing in any relation to each other should give rise to conscious experience - any more than quarks and electrons stacked in certain arrangements should do so. You can do it with quark and electron, but if it works because those quark and electron compute the releant digital number relation, then, if you say yes to the doctor, I have to derive the observability of quark and electrons from the number relations, of the combinator relations (uda). I believe you that there is some mathematical description or representation of my experiences... But I have never said that, although I am aware it may look superficially like that. I will say belief for your representation (and indeed beliefs are represented, it is roughly speaking the 'body' of the person). Then experiments appear when beliefs cross consistency, and experience appears when beliefs cross truth. And I have no proof of consistency to offer, nor real name or definition of truth. Except for more simpler (than us) Löbian machines. but I don't see why the existence of such a representation, platonic OR physically embodied, would result in conscious experience...? Conscious experience is an oxymoron. I think. No representation is conscious. Nor any body (which are relative representations). Consciousness or knowledge, like truth, but unlike consistency, has no finite representation whatsoever. It is more the platonic and non representable person who is conscious. Representations are only maps to prevent being completely lost when entangled with other universal entities and histories. They guide the soul, or channel the consciousness, in the normal coherent histories. The soul intersects truth and representation, and may intersect consistency too (and other variants). (and many other concept of computer science can help to elaborate this approach). When be bet on a substitution level, we bet on a coding, not on a representation, and hopefully the coding level is at a lower level than the level needed for the possible local representations in play, relatively to our most probable histories. The 3-self has a (local) name: it is your body, or a digital copy (with comp), a relative Gödel number. The 1-self has no name. It inherits this feature from truth (which has no name too, for the machine). But comp and mathematical logic makes it possible to prove theorems *about* those non nameable entities (associated to ideally correct machines). Comp prevents the possibility to give you publicly a name, or to solve publicly the koan Who am I?. It allows you to refute any normative theory about you. As I said often, it is a vaccine against person representation, categorization, etc. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 24 Feb, 16:09, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: We would seek unambiguous evidence that, in the absence of specific subjective 1-p qualitative states, certain subsequent 3-p events would be unaccountable without the hypothesis of 1-p -- 3-p causal influence. In the unlikely event that anyone else has endeavoured to penetrate this far into what I wrote above, I see that what I meant to say was: We would seek unambiguous evidence that, in the absence of specific subjective 1-p qualitative states, certain subsequent 3-p events would be unaccountable, thus necessitating the hypothesis of 1-p -- 3-p causal influence. Hope this helps ;-) David 2010/2/23 Diego Caleiro diegocale...@gmail.com: Thanks for this. I have to say, though, that Yablo's approach strikes me again as waving-away, or defining-out-of-existence, a real issue that doesn't deserve such treatment. The motive for this seems to be that academic philosophy has become embarrassed by this question in the face of the apparently decisive colonisation of the territory by science - i.e. the so-called over-determination issue. Of course, such an approach may turn out to be valid, and we would perforce have to settle for remaining puzzled. But I still believe that there is reason to take persons seriously in the causal narrative - i.e. something like our sense of real personal causation is possible without resorting, for example, to such infertile territory as substance dualism. Comp, as I understand it, is one theory that has something like this implication. Another possibility (which may be in some sense compatible with comp, I can't yet tell) is to look towards the duality of whole and part - i.e. that the differentiation of the world-system into persons and their generalised impersonal environment gives scope both for unconscious (3-p -- 3-p) and conscious (1-p -- 3-p) causal sequences. ISTM that this is not ruled out by current physical theory, and indeed is empirically testable, given a sufficiently sophisticated state-of-the-art. We would seek unambiguous evidence that, in the absence of specific subjective 1-p qualitative states, certain subsequent 3-p events would be unaccountable without the hypothesis of 1-p -- 3-p causal influence. Alternatively, such detailed observation might entirely convince us that, in fact, the whole objective narrative could always be accounted for without reference to 1-p subjective states, and without stepping outside exclusively 3-p -- 3-p causal sequences (i.e. the current default assumption). David I'm not reading the whole discussion here, but the reason I recommended those readings is that I sensed a mix between accounting for phenomenal consciousness and access conciousness in the discussion. Both were used as 1p and 3p, depending on what was being talked about. This is the reason for readinghttp://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Abridged%20BB... The reason for reading Yablo, on the other hand:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/mc.pdf Is because he gives the only satisfactory account of the overdetermination, double causation problem (stronger than Kim's for instance). it seems that was befuzzling you.. Reason to read Rorty is he will try to convince you that all this discussion is just historic accident and that it relies in forgetting Kant on the one hand, and the mith of the given, by sellars, on the other. Bye Bye Diego Caleiro Phil of Mind. On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. David On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions between particular arrangements of matter is what gives rise to conscious experience, then given enough random events every possible experience would eventually seem to be generated. However, if any of these experiences revealed anything about the true nature of reality, this would be purely coincidental. At the other end of the range is a nearly deterministic system where only on very rare occasions or in specific circumstances would the orderly sequence of cause and effect give way to some sort of tightly constrained but completely unpredictable indeterministic state change...which would then alter in an orderly way the subsequent deterministic behavior of the physical world as the consequences of this random event spread out in a ripple of cause-and-effect. So our experiences would be completely determined by the initial state of the world, plus the causal laws with their tolerance for occasional randomness, PLUS the history of actual random state changes. This doesn't seem to provide any improvement over the purely
Re: On the computability of consciousness
I'm not reading the whole discussion here, but the reason I recommended those readings is that I sensed a mix between accounting for phenomenal consciousness and access conciousness in the discussion.Both were used as 1p and 3p, depending on what was being talked about. This is the reason for reading http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Abridged%20BBS.htm The reason for reading Yablo, on the other hand: http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/mc.pdf Is because he gives the only satisfactory account of the overdetermination, double causation problem (stronger than Kim's for instance). it seems that was befuzzling you.. Reason to read Rorty is he will try to convince you that all this discussion is just historic accident and that it relies in forgetting Kant on the one hand, and the mith of the given, by sellars, on the other. Bye Bye Diego Caleiro Phil of Mind. On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. David On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? You forget 3) 3) get rid of physical-3-p, but keep mathematical (arithmetical) 3-p. That is objective idealism. And this you need in any account ... if only as 'calculational device'. Then computer science solves the hard part of the mind problem, with the price of having to derive the physical laws from the belief that the numbers develop naturally from self-introspection. And it is not so amazing we (re)find the type of theory developed by the greeks among those who were both mystic and rationalist. They did introspect themselves very deeply, apparently. Wait my next post to David for how comp does solve the hard problem of consciousness. Bruno Marchal http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David, First of all, as I have already said, you seem to be well aware of the hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness. And this gives me the opportunity to try to explain what you are missing. Indeed, in this post, I will try to explain how comp does solve completely the conceptual hard problem of consciousness. (With the usual price that physics becomes a branch of machine's theology). On 22 Feb 2010, at 15:00, David Nyman wrote: On 22 February 2010 07:37, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What do you mean by implicit here? What is implicit is that the subjectivity (1-p), to make sense, has to be referentially correct relatively to the most probable histories/consistent extensions. What I mean by implicit is already accounted for, at least according to the assumptions of the closed 3-p hypothesis, which of course is what I'm questioning. Then the incommunicable and private aspect of those knowledge and qualia is provided by the theory of knowledge and the quale logic, provided by the respective intensional variant of G and G*. The difference between G and G* (provable and true) is reflected in those intensional variant. Yes, but G and G*, and indeed all formally expressible logics, are themselves closed 3-p (i.e. objective) notions - i.e. they would exist and possess the same explanatory power in the absence of any accompanying *qualitative* component. I am not sure what you mean exactly by closed 3-p or even objective. But it is OK (I see it is a minor question of vocabulary). G and G* are formal modal logics, and it happens that they describe completely (at some level) the self-referential discourse of ideally self-referentially correct machines. We have no interest in those formal theories per se, if it were not for their semantics, including their interpretations in arithmetic, and their intensional variants. I come back on this below. This is just another way of gesturing towards the Really Hard Problem - that the qualitative component, per se, is seemingly redundant to the account if we assume we already have a closed, or sufficient, non-qualitative explanation. Consequently these logics AFAICS lead to the same paradoxical conclusions as the closed 3-p physical hypothesis - i.e. that the references to qualitative experiences - even those references we ourselves produce - would occur even in the absence of any such experiences. This would leave us in the position of doubting the basis even of our own statements that we are conscious! And this would be very paradoxical indeed. But you are wrong in saying that those logics lead to those paradoxes. Probably because you are wrong in saying that those logics are closed. Those logic are tools or systems talking about *something*, provably in some correct sense. More below. I prefer to read first your whole post, so that I can avoid confusing repetitions. I want to seriously discuss the proposition that certain behaviours are actually contingent on qualitative experience, as distinguished from any accompanying 3-p phenomena. That is, for example, that my withdrawing my hand from the fire because it hurts indispensably requires the qualitative *experience* of pain to mediate between 1-p and 3-p narratives. This would of course mean in turn that the explanatory arc from stimulus, through cognitive processing, to response would be, without the qualitative component, in some way demonstrably incomplete as an explanation. Indeed. May be it would help to remember that with comp, we already know that the physical world is a 1-p construct; It is not 3-p (as amazing as this could seem for a materialist). The only 3-p is given by arithmetic/logic/computer science. ISTM that this would make it impossible to ignore the implication that the context in which we conceive 3-p processes to be situated (whether we are talking in terms of their physical or mathematical-logical expression) would itself be capable of taking on personal characteristics in apparent interaction with such processes. Something related to this, ISTM, is already implied in the background to 1-p indeterminacy, observer moments, the solipsism of the One etc, because all these notions implicitly contain the idea of some general context capable of embodying and individuating personal qualitative experience - given relevant 3-p-describable structure and function. But in order for that personhood not to be vacuous - i.e. redundant to the supposedly primary 3-p narrative - such personal qualitative states must be conceived as having consequences, otherwise inexplicable, in the 3-p domain, and not merely vice-versa. How to incorporate such consequences in the overall account is indeed a puzzle. A puzzle? No more ... (see below). Not only can't we prove it, but we couldn't, from a 3-p pov, even predict or in any way characterise such 1-p notions, if we didn't know from a 1-p perspective
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Bruno, I want to thank you for such a complete commentary on my recent posts - I will need to spend quite a bit of time thinking carefully about everything you have said before I respond at length. I'm sure that I'm quite capable of becoming confused between a theory and its subject, though I am of course alive to the distinction. In the meantime, I wonder if you could respond to a supplementary question in grandmother mode, or at least translate for grandma, into a more every-day way of speaking, the parts of your commentary that are most relevant to her interest in this topic. Let us suppose that, to use the example I have already cited, that grandma puts her hand in a flame, feels the unbearable agony of burning, and is unable to prevent herself from withdrawing her hand with a shriek of pain. Let us further suppose (though of course this may well be ambiguous in the current state of neurological theory) that a complete and sufficient 3-p description of this (partial) history of events is also possible in terms of nerve firings, cognitive and motor processing, etc. (the details are not so important as the belief that such a complete history could be given). From the point of view of the reversal of the relation between 1-p and 3-p in comp, is there some way to help grandma how to understand the *necessary relation* (i.e. what she would conventionally understand as causal relation) between her 1-p *experience* of the pain (as distinct from our observation of her reaction) and whatever 3-p events are posterior to this in the history? For example, what would be distinctively missing from the causal sequence had she been unconscious and had merely withdrawn her hand reflexively? I suppose this amounts to a repetition of the question - how is the *painful experience* itself causally indispensable to the 3-p events we associate with it? I seem to see that in a sense, given the comp reversal of the relation between physics and consciousness, the 3-p events do indeed emerge out of the pain. But this still seems to beg the question: how do the 3-p events depend on the brute fact of the *painfulness* of the pain, as opposed to the objective *existence* of an infinity of computations? I realise that this is a very strange question, and it may indeed stem from some confusion of theory and topic as you suggest. Could you possibly mean - perhaps this is implied in the term objective idealism - that the indescribable background of the infinity of computations ultimately has no independently objective existence - i.e. that it is fundamentally the very same kind of existent that ultimately emerges in the qualitative experience of subjects? And then that the 3-p histories are the quasi-objective component of this subjectivity (with the crucial caveat that access to such objectivity can't in itself ever give any subject complete *knowledge* of their situation)? David On 23 February 2010 14:18, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: David, First of all, as I have already said, you seem to be well aware of the hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness. And this gives me the opportunity to try to explain what you are missing. Indeed, in this post, I will try to explain how comp does solve completely the conceptual hard problem of consciousness. (With the usual price that physics becomes a branch of machine's theology). On 22 Feb 2010, at 15:00, David Nyman wrote: On 22 February 2010 07:37, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What do you mean by implicit here? What is implicit is that the subjectivity (1-p), to make sense, has to be referentially correct relatively to the most probable histories/consistent extensions. What I mean by implicit is already accounted for, at least according to the assumptions of the closed 3-p hypothesis, which of course is what I'm questioning. Then the incommunicable and private aspect of those knowledge and qualia is provided by the theory of knowledge and the quale logic, provided by the respective intensional variant of G and G*. The difference between G and G* (provable and true) is reflected in those intensional variant. Yes, but G and G*, and indeed all formally expressible logics, are themselves closed 3-p (i.e. objective) notions - i.e. they would exist and possess the same explanatory power in the absence of any accompanying *qualitative* component. I am not sure what you mean exactly by closed 3-p or even objective. But it is OK (I see it is a minor question of vocabulary). G and G* are formal modal logics, and it happens that they describe completely (at some level) the self-referential discourse of ideally self-referentially correct machines. We have no interest in those formal theories per se, if it were not for their semantics, including their interpretations in arithmetic, and their intensional variants. I come back on this below. This is just another way of gesturing towards the Really Hard Problem -
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 22 February 2010 21:03, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: I think the hard problem is not just 'hard to solve': it requires knowledge of necessary ingredients (steps in the 'process') still unknown - but cleverly spoken about in the sciences, within the framework of those portions we already (think) we know. The German proverb says: des Menschen's Wille ist ein Himmelreich (a man's will is a 'heavenly' extension) and so is his mentality. IMO we know only a fraction of it so far. That, too, in a 1p interpreted abridgement. John, what you say above of course immediately puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's ideas in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. I sometimes have a sense of Schopenhauer's will - he really intended something more like power or force, I think - of the world (the One, the Unnameable) as reflecting back via conscious states towards the objective development of 3-p processes. In this view, conscious states would subsist in integrated 1-p world-states - i.e. subjects - as distinct from the particular, differentiated 3-p events and components that function to delimit and structure such states. The will, in the sense that Schopenhauer conceived it, would then achieve expression both in the form of the micro-level physical laws we hypothesise from observing those 3-p events and processes, and also as more general orchestrations of that same law-like behaviour, correlated with overall experiential states-of-the-system. In this view, the world as a whole would encompass both unconscious (differentiated, analytical) and conscious (integrated, global) correlations of such primitive will with objective reality, thus presenting both options for exploitation and selection by evolutionary processes. This in turn should mean that there is the possibility of elucidating criteria to distinguish whatever has become capable of generating conscious states and causal narratives (i.e. subjectively-structured overall states of the system) from whatever is still limited to the exploitation of purely unconscious physical processes. Whether this can make any sense in terms of either physics or comp I have no idea, but personally I sometimes find this intuition helpful. David David: how about: we have our 1p and THINK about a 3p - only as adjusted (interpreted) by our 1p AS an imagined realistic 3p world? Nobody walks the shoes of another person (mentally, I mean). Even reading books or learning from lectures does not impart the message of the 'author', only the 1p-adjusted meaning acceptable for our 1p mentality (which is just as personal and quite individual as an immune system, a DNA or (maybe) a fingerprint, as resulting from the genetic built of the tool (brain) modified with past (personal) experience - AND who knows today, what else?) I think the hard problem is not just 'hard to solve': it requires knowledge of necessary ingredients (steps in the 'process') still unknown - but cleverly spoken about in the sciences, within the framework of those portions we already (think) we know. The German proverb says: des Menschen's Wille ist ein Himmelreich (a man's will is a 'heavenly' extension) and so is his mentality. IMO we know only a fraction of it so far. That, too, in a 1p interpreted abridgement. John Mikes On 2/21/10, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. Principal amongst these is the fact that the existence of 1-p is not in any way computable - accessible, arrivable at - from the closed assumptions of 3-p. But worse than that, if we take this default position of assuming the 3-p mode to be both complete and closed, we are thereby also committed to the position that all our thoughts, beliefs and behaviours - not excluding those apparently relating to the experiential states themselves - must be solely a consequence of the 3-p account of things, and indeed would proceed identically even in the complete absence of any such states! This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Whether one starts from the assumption of primacy of 1-p or 3-p (or neither) the principal difficulty is making any sense of their relation - i.e. the Hard Problem - and ISTM
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:18 AM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 February 2010 05:45, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The problem with it, with reference to the situation as I've stated it, is that it doesn't take us one step nearer elucidating the relation between 1-p and 3-p. In Dennett's formulation, there only seems to be 1-p in a uniquely 3-p world; in yours, there only seems to be 3-p in a fundamentally 1-p world. But what neither solution addresses, or even acknowledges - but rather obscures with these linguistic devices - is what any fundamental relation between these two undeniably manifest perspectives could possibly be. What we seek is a penetrating analysis of seeming that encompasses both 1-p and 3-p aspects. So we can have the experience of an external world without actually having an external world. Dreams and hallucinations prove this. Therefore, our experience of an external world does not prove that the external world which is experienced actually exists. With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by two undeniably manifest perpectives. Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's 1-p. My proposal is that seeming is all there is to reality. It's all surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the illusion of depth. Now of course it's open to you, as you consistently reiterate, to reject this issue as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that it is permanently inexplicable. You may be right, but in effect this would simply exclude you from the community of those who'd like to know more, even if they're destined never to be enlightened. In my view, such an attitude is premature. Hmmm. Well, I think you've missed my point. So the question is, what causes consciousness. The typical answer is something along the lines of neurons, which are made of quarks and electrons, which interact in ways approximately described by the laws of physics. There are two follow up questions to that answer: 1) Why would quarks and electrons interacting that way result in my conscious experience? (the explanatory gap) 2) What causes quarks and electrons (and the universe that contains them)? And what causes them to interact in the way they do rather than some other way (plus the rest of the laws of physics)? You seem to have focused primarily on the first follow up question. However, I think the second follow up question is actually more interesting with respect to consciousness. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Feb 2010, at 06:45, Rex Allen wrote: It seems to me that there are two easy ways to get rid of the hard problem. 1) Get rid of 1-p. (A la Dennettian eliminative materialism) OR 2) Get rid of 3-p. (subjective idealism) For the reasons I've touched on above I don't see that introducing the idea of a material world explains anything at all. Therefore, I vote for getting rid of 3-p, except as a calculational device. The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? You forget 3) 3) get rid of physical-3-p, but keep mathematical (arithmetical) 3-p. That is objective idealism. And this you need in any account ... if only as 'calculational device'. Then computer science solves the hard part of the mind problem, with the price of having to derive the physical laws from the belief that the numbers develop naturally from self-introspection. And it is not so amazing we (re)find the type of theory developed by the greeks among those who were both mystic and rationalist. They did introspect themselves very deeply, apparently. Wait my next post to David for how comp does solve the hard problem of consciousness. Bruno Marchal H. Well, I think that your proposal suffers from the same explanatory gap as physicalism. So numbers and their relations and machines and whatnot exist platonically. Okay. So far so good. BUT I don't see why these things in any combination or standing in any relation to each other should give rise to conscious experience - any more than quarks and electrons stacked in certain arrangements should do so. I believe you that there is some mathematical description or representation of my experiences...but I don't see why the existence of such a representation, platonic OR physically embodied, would result in conscious experience...? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:52 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: The idea of a material world that exists fundamentally and uncaused while giving rise to conscious experience is no more coherent than the idea that conscious experience exists fundamentally and uncaused and gives rise to the mere perception of a material world (as everyone accepts happens in dreams). What is the problem with this solution? The material world didn't lead to solipism. Is hard determinism as bad an outcome as solipsism? If not, why not? It would seem to me to be about the same. And further, how would quantum indeterminism improve things? But, regardless, if you mean solipsism in the sense that only I exist, then that's not entailed by my position. And it proved to have a lot of predictive power. If deterministic physicalism is true, then your experience of having made a successful prediction is entirely a result of the universe's initial conditions plus the causal laws that govern it's change over time (if there are any such laws). The only significant part is that you have an experience of it. Not the prediction itself. If the universe is completely indeterministic, then the success of your prediction is pure luck. If the universe is has probabilistic laws, then the success of your prediction is due entirely to the interplay of luck, initial conditions, and the particular nature of the probabilistic laws that we have. Like the card game example. In poker, whether you are dealt rags or a Royal flush is due to luck. BUT, there's no chance of you getting 5 Aces of the same suit, because the rules of the game don't allow for that. You can say you still have a choice in how you play your hand, but that's is putting yourself outside the game. Which is not an option with the universe. Inside the game there are no choices...there is only luck and the rules. Right? So. There's no significance to predictive success. It just *seems* that way to you. However, let me put in a modest word for a third possibility - instead of a first cause, and instead of an infinite regress, let me recommend the circular explanation; in this case: 1-p = 3-p = 1-p =... I realize these are in disfavor and are given the name vicious circle, but I'd like to suggest that when the circle is so large as to encompass all the explandums it integrates them into a kind of cyclic monism and is no longer vicious, but virtuous. Well. I don't find this possibility very compelling. So there are still laws that govern the transitions from 1-p to 3-p and back, right? I think the same argument applies. Why this particular virtuous circle with it's particular causal laws and not some other virtuous cirlce? If you find a law that explains it, why does that law hold and not some other? And why not no circles at all? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 22 February 2010 07:37, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What do you mean by implicit here? What is implicit is that the subjectivity (1-p), to make sense, has to be referentially correct relatively to the most probable histories/consistent extensions. What I mean by implicit is already accounted for, at least according to the assumptions of the closed 3-p hypothesis, which of course is what I'm questioning. Then the incommunicable and private aspect of those knowledge and qualia is provided by the theory of knowledge and the quale logic, provided by the respective intensional variant of G and G*. The difference between G and G* (provable and true) is reflected in those intensional variant. Yes, but G and G*, and indeed all formally expressible logics, are themselves closed 3-p (i.e. objective) notions - i.e. they would exist and possess the same explanatory power in the absence of any accompanying *qualitative* component. This is just another way of gesturing towards the Really Hard Problem - that the qualitative component, per se, is seemingly redundant to the account if we assume we already have a closed, or sufficient, non-qualitative explanation. Consequently these logics AFAICS lead to the same paradoxical conclusions as the closed 3-p physical hypothesis - i.e. that the references to qualitative experiences - even those references we ourselves produce - would occur even in the absence of any such experiences. This would leave us in the position of doubting the basis even of our own statements that we are conscious! I want to seriously discuss the proposition that certain behaviours are actually contingent on qualitative experience, as distinguished from any accompanying 3-p phenomena. That is, for example, that my withdrawing my hand from the fire because it hurts indispensably requires the qualitative *experience* of pain to mediate between 1-p and 3-p narratives. This would of course mean in turn that the explanatory arc from stimulus, through cognitive processing, to response would be, without the qualitative component, in some way demonstrably incomplete as an explanation. ISTM that this would make it impossible to ignore the implication that the context in which we conceive 3-p processes to be situated (whether we are talking in terms of their physical or mathematical-logical expression) would itself be capable of taking on personal characteristics in apparent interaction with such processes. Something related to this, ISTM, is already implied in the background to 1-p indeterminacy, observer moments, the solipsism of the One etc, because all these notions implicitly contain the idea of some general context capable of embodying and individuating personal qualitative experience - given relevant 3-p-describable structure and function. But in order for that personhood not to be vacuous - i.e. redundant to the supposedly primary 3-p narrative - such personal qualitative states must be conceived as having consequences, otherwise inexplicable, in the 3-p domain, and not merely vice-versa. How to incorporate such consequences in the overall account is indeed a puzzle. Not only can't we prove it, but we couldn't, from a 3-p pov, even predict or in any way characterise such 1-p notions, if we didn't know from a 1-p perspective that they exist (or seem to know that they seem to exist). This is not true I think. Already with the uda duplication experience, you can see predict the difference, for example, the apparition of first person indeterminacy despite the determinacy in the 3d description. This is captured by the difference between (Bp and p) and Bp, and that difference is a consequence of incompleteness, when self-observing occurs. I don't deny what you're saying per se, but I'm commenting on this because it brings out, I hope, the distinction between purely formal descriptions of 1-p notions, and actual first-personal acquaintance with qualitative experience. It's the latter that I'm claiming is non-computable from any formal premise (which, as I think we'd both agree, is the essence of the HP). It's one thing to say that self-observing occurs, and quite another to actually experience self-observing. But beyond this, ISTM that we must also believe that the *experience* of self-observing entails consequences that the mere *description* of self-observing would not, to avoid the paradoxes contingent on the idea that qualitative experiences are somehow redundant or merely epiphenomenal. One of the places it leads (which ISTM some are anxious not to acknowledge)) is the kind of brute paradox I've referred to. So what I'm asking you is how is this different from a comp perspective? Can our 3-p references to 1-p phenomena escape paradox in the comp analysis? Yes, because we do accept the truth of elementary arithmetic. We can study the theology of simple (and thus *intuitively* correct) Löbian machine. We *know* in that setting that the machine will
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions between particular arrangements of matter is what gives rise to conscious experience, then given enough random events every possible experience would eventually seem to be generated. However, if any of these experiences revealed anything about the true nature of reality, this would be purely coincidental. At the other end of the range is a nearly deterministic system where only on very rare occasions or in specific circumstances would the orderly sequence of cause and effect give way to some sort of tightly constrained but completely unpredictable indeterministic state change...which would then alter in an orderly way the subsequent deterministic behavior of the physical world as the consequences of this random event spread out in a ripple of cause-and-effect. So our experiences would be completely determined by the initial state of the world, plus the causal laws with their tolerance for occasional randomness, PLUS the history of actual random state changes. This doesn't seem to provide any improvement over the purely deterministic option. Each random occurrence is just another brute fact, like the initial state or the particular causal laws that govern the evolution of the system (allowing for occasional random events). The random occurrences don't add anything, and actually could be just taken as special cases of the causal laws. This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Is it a paradox, or a reductio ad absurdum against the idea that our perceptions are caused by an independently existing external reality? What does introducing an independently existing physical world buy us? So we have our orderly conscious experiences and we want to explain them. To do this, we need some context to place these experiences in. So we postulate the existence of an orderly external universe that “causes” our experiences. But then we have to explain what caused this orderly external universe, and also the particular initial conditions and causal laws that result in what we observe. So this is basically Kant's first antinomy of pure reason. Either there is a first cause, which itself is uncaused, OR there is an infinite chain of prior causes stretching infinitely far into the past. But why this particular infinite chain as opposed to some other? In fact, why our particular infinite chain of prior causes or first cause instead of Nothing existing at all? It seems that either way (infinite chain or first cause), at the end you are left with only one reasonable conclusion: There is no reason that things are this way. They
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. I think it's fruitless to argue about which is fundamental. How are you defining fruitless? What sort of fruit are you after? And why? I agree that the discussion isn't likely to lead to better ramjets, or cures for terrible diseases, BUT...those aren't my goals. Why would they be? To paraphrase Hume, reason is the slave of the passions. But what explains the passions? Obviously we have direct 1-p experience; but also that there are differences between persons. So I only know my own experiences. I infer the existence of experiences which aren't mine. I have the experience of interacting with others who seem conscious, but this happens in my dreams as well, where presumably those dream-people have no experiences of their own. However, my experiences certainly exist. And even if they are fundamental and uncaused, why would they be the only ones? So if we concentrate on the intersubjective agreement between different 1-p reports we find that we can make some successful predictive models of that 3-p world. What does the experience of making and verifying predictions mean in a deterministic world? What does it mean in a random world? (see my previous email to David) Why would the world be the kind of place where we have the ability to build predictive models, and where these models would actually be successful? At one time there was an assumption that the 3-p world could be modeled as a lot of agents, i.e. beings with 1-p experiences. But that turned out be an impediment and it worked better to model the 3-p world as impersonal and mathematical. So naturally one attractive strategy is to keep pushing what has worked in the past. Regardless of the true nature of reality, taking what has seemed to worked in the past as a guide seems like as good a strategy as any other. There's no reason not to try taking 1-p experiences as the basis of your ontology, the positivists tried to put physics on that basis, but so far it seems the way to make progress has been to treat 1-p as basic but fallible and quickly move to an external reality that is more consistent. I certainly agree that using 3-p as a calculational device seems to be the way to proceed when having experiences of designing ramjets or trying to start uncooperative cars. BUT. SO. HOWEVER... Either conscious experience is caused, or it's not. If it's caused, then either determinism is true, or it's not. It seems possible to grasp the implications of all 3 resulting scenarios...and to me they all lead to the same ultimate conclusion. There is no reason for the way things are. They just are this way. You can describe the way things are (or seem to be) within the world, and you can use these descriptions to construct plausible narratives about how things within the world seem to be related to to each other. But there is no explanation for the world's (apparent) existence or why it is the way it is. Which to me actually seems like the answer. The answer is: there is no answer. BUT...no one else seems to agree, so maybe I'm missing something. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions between particular arrangements of matter is what gives rise to conscious experience, then given enough random events every possible experience would eventually seem to be generated. However, if any of these experiences revealed anything about the true nature of reality, this would be purely coincidental. At the other end of the range is a nearly deterministic system where only on very rare occasions or in specific circumstances would the orderly sequence of cause and effect give way to some sort of tightly constrained but completely unpredictable indeterministic state change...which would then alter in an orderly way the subsequent deterministic behavior of the physical world as the consequences of this random event spread out in a ripple of cause-and-effect. So our experiences would be completely determined by the initial state of the world, plus the causal laws with their tolerance for occasional randomness, PLUS the history of actual random state changes. This doesn't seem to provide any improvement over the purely deterministic option. Each random occurrence is just another brute fact, like the initial state or the particular causal laws that govern the evolution of the system (allowing for occasional random events). The random occurrences don't add anything, and actually could be just taken as special cases of the causal laws. This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Is it a paradox, or a reductio ad absurdum against the idea that our perceptions are caused by an independently existing external reality? What does introducing an independently existing physical world buy us? So we have our orderly conscious experiences and we want to explain them. To do this, we need some context to place these experiences in. So we postulate the existence of an orderly external universe that “causes” our experiences. But then we have to explain what caused this orderly external universe, and also the particular initial conditions and causal laws that result in what we observe. So this is basically Kant's first antinomy of pure reason. Either there is a first cause, which itself is uncaused, OR there is an infinite chain of prior causes stretching infinitely far into the past. But why this particular infinite chain as opposed to some other? In fact, why our particular infinite chain of prior causes or first cause instead of Nothing existing at all? It seems that either way (infinite chain or first cause), at the end you are left with only one reasonable conclusion: There is no
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. I think it's fruitless to argue about which is fundamental. How are you defining fruitless? What sort of fruit are you after? And why? I agree that the discussion isn't likely to lead to better ramjets, or cures for terrible diseases, BUT...those aren't my goals. Why would they be? To paraphrase Hume, reason is the slave of the passions. But what explains the passions? Evolution. Obviously we have direct 1-p experience; but also that there are differences between persons. So I only know my own experiences. I infer the existence of experiences which aren't mine. I have the experience of interacting with others who seem conscious, but this happens in my dreams as well, where presumably those dream-people have no experiences of their own. However, my experiences certainly exist. And even if they are fundamental and uncaused, why would they be the only ones? So if we concentrate on the intersubjective agreement between different 1-p reports we find that we can make some successful predictive models of that 3-p world. What does the experience of making and verifying predictions mean in a deterministic world? What does it mean in a random world? (see my previous email to David) Why would the world be the kind of place where we have the ability to build predictive models, and where these models would actually be successful? At one time there was an assumption that the 3-p world could be modeled as a lot of agents, i.e. beings with 1-p experiences. But that turned out be an impediment and it worked better to model the 3-p world as impersonal and mathematical. So naturally one attractive strategy is to keep pushing what has worked in the past. Regardless of the true nature of reality, taking what has seemed to worked in the past as a guide seems like as good a strategy as any other. There's no reason not to try taking 1-p experiences as the basis of your ontology, the positivists tried to put physics on that basis, but so far it seems the way to make progress has been to treat 1-p as basic but fallible and quickly move to an external reality that is more consistent. I certainly agree that using 3-p as a calculational device seems to be the way to proceed when having experiences of designing ramjets or trying to start uncooperative cars. BUT. SO. HOWEVER... Either conscious experience is caused, or it's not. If it's caused, then either determinism is true, or it's not. What does caused mean? One of Aristotles four causes? all of them? It seems possible to grasp the implications of all 3 resulting scenarios...and to me they all lead to the same ultimate conclusion. There is no reason for the way things are. They just are this way. You can describe the way things are (or seem to be) within the world, and you can use these descriptions to construct plausible narratives about how things within the world seem to be related to to each other. But there is no explanation for the world's (apparent) existence or why it is the way it is. You don't know that there's no explanation - only that we don't have one (at least one that satisfies you). Which to me actually seems like the answer. The answer is: there is no answer. BUT...no one else seems to agree, so maybe I'm missing something. That there may be unanswerable questions (which seems almost certain) doesn't imply that there are no more answerable questions. If we discover that string theory provides an integrated model of QM and GR we will have answered an interesting question, even if it's not the answer to everything. I might again point to the virtues of circular explanations - if they are wide enough to take everything in. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 18:08, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
You may already understand (by uda) that the first person notions are
related to infinite sum of computations (and this is not obviously
computable, not even partially).
Yes, I do understand that. What I'm particularly interested in, with
respect to comp is what is the relation between the 1-p notions and
the 3-p ones, from the point of view of causality (which you can put
in scare quotes if you prefer). IOW, any 1-p notion, such as pain, is
not only non-computable (as opposed to inferrable by analogy) from any
3-p perspective, but is seemingly irrelevant to the unfolding of the
3-p account with which it is (somehow) associated. What scope is
there, in the unfolding of the infinity of computations by the UD, for
1-p experience to be viewed as having any consequences beyond those
already implicit in the 3-p describable nature of the computations
themselves? Does this question make any sense from a comp
perspective?
I guess you mean that we cannot prove the existence of the 1-p from the
3-p grounds. That's correct (both intuitively with UDA, and it is a theorem
of machine's theology (AUDA).
Not only can't we prove it, but we couldn't, from a 3-p pov, even
predict or in any way characterise such 1-p notions, if we didn't know
from a 1-p perspective that they exist (or seem to know that they seem
to exist).
But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to
refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our
behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3-
p perspective?
Good point. But you are lead to this because you still believe that matter
is a primitive 3-p notion.
No, I don't believe it, but I'm able to entertain it (as an
alternative to comp) to see where this hypothesis leads. One of the
places it leads (which ISTM some are anxious not to acknowledge)) is
the kind of brute paradox I've referred to. So what I'm asking you is
how is this different from a comp perspective? Can our 3-p references
to 1-p phenomena escape paradox in the comp analysis?
But the physical 3-p notions are just NOT closed for explanation. It
collapses all the points of view. It explains consciousness away!
I understand that you take this view from a comp perspective, but what
about from a primitive-materialist pov in its own terms? Do you
believe that such a closed explanation is fundamentally unable to
account seriously for consciousness for the reasons I've cited? Is
there any way to re-open it outside of comp?
(In reply to Stathis):
Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the
computation, you have the experience.
I think you have the correct intuition, but the phrasing is really
misleading. I am not a computation, I am a person.
If this is the correct intuition, then the computations already
contain every possibility from the 3-p perspective, and the additional
existence, nature and possible consequences of 1-p notions are as
inaccessible as they are from a primitive-materialist pov, AFAICS.
David
On 16 Feb 2010, at 19:07, David Nyman wrote:
Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first-
person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third-
person perspective?
There is an ambiguity in you phrasing. I will proceed like I always do, by
interpreting your term favorably, relatively to computationalism and its
(drastic) consequences.
The first person notion, and consciousness, are not clearly notion to which
the label computable can be applied. The fact is that, no machine can even
define what is the first person, or what is consciousness.
You may already understand (by uda) that the first person notions are
related to infinite sum of computations (and this is not obviously
computable, not even partially).
But auda makes this utterly clear. Third person self-reference is entirely
described by the provability predicate, the one that I write with the letter
B. Bp is *I* prove p, Beweisbar ('p'), for p some arithmetical
proposition.
The corresponding first person notion is Bp Tp, with Tp = True('p'). By a
theorem of Tarski true cannot be define (even just define!) by the
machine, and the logic of BpTp (= Bp p) is quite different from Bp, from
the point of view of the machine. That result on truth has been extended
by Kaplan Montague for knowledge.
Let Bp = I prove p
Let Kp = Bp Tp = Bp p = I know p
Then, what happens is that
G* proves Bp - Kp
NOT(G proves Bp - Kp)
G does not prove the equivalence of Bp and Kp, for correct machine. It is
false that G proves Bp - Kp, and the machine cannot have access to the
truth of that equivalence (or indirectly by postulating comp).
The only rationale for adducing the additional
existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we
possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the
existence of any 1-p experiential
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. But why is that? The physical world doesn't explain it's own existence and nature, does it? So what caused it? What explains it's initial state? Why does it have it's current state? Why does it change in time the way that it does? If we're taking the existence and nature of things as a given, why can't we instead say that 1-p is fundamental? What is lost? What makes this an unpalatable option? It seems to me that it should certainly be the default position. I like Philip Goff's idea of Ghosts as an alternative to Chalmers' Zombies: http://consciousnessonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/philip-goff-paper.pdf First, from the introduction: Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature concerns how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are conscious but whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. We can call such a ‘purely conscious’ creature a ghost. Then on page 7: The way into imagining your ghost twin is to go through the familiar Cartesian process of doubting everything that it is possible to doubt. For all you know for sure, the physical world around you might be a delusion, placed in you by an incredibly powerful evil demon. The arms and legs you seem to see in front of you, the heart you seem to feel beating beneath your breast, your body that feels solid and warm to the touch, all may be figments of a particularly powerful delusion. You might not even have a brain. The only state of affairs you know for certain to obtain is that you exist as a thing such that there is something that it is like to be that thing. You know for certain that you are a thing that has an experience as of having arms and legs, a beating heart, a warm, solid body. You know that you are a subject of experience. But you may not be a creature that exists in space, or has physical parts. It is by engaging in the process of Cartesian doubting that one arrives at a conception of one’s ghost twin. I am not suggesting that the process of Cartesian doubting demonstrates the possibility of ghosts, but I am suggesting that it goes a good way to demonstrating their conceivability. To entertain the possibility that I am the only thing that exists, and that I exist as a thing with no properties other than my conscious experience, just is to conceive of my ghost twin. Any philosopher who agrees with Descartes up to and including the Cogito has a strong prima facie obligation to accept the conceivability of ghosts. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. Principal amongst these is the fact that the existence of 1-p is not in any way computable - accessible, arrivable at - from the closed assumptions of 3-p. But worse than that, if we take this default position of assuming the 3-p mode to be both complete and closed, we are thereby also committed to the position that all our thoughts, beliefs and behaviours - not excluding those apparently relating to the experiential states themselves - must be solely a consequence of the 3-p account of things, and indeed would proceed identically even in the complete absence of any such states! This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Whether one starts from the assumption of primacy of 1-p or 3-p (or neither) the principal difficulty is making any sense of their relation - i.e. the Hard Problem - and ISTM not only that it is Hard to solve, but even to state in a way that doesn't mask its truly paradoxical nature. For example, as I've mentioned, it's often waved away by some reference to identity, in the face of the manifest objection that the states of affairs referred to could hardly, on the face of it, be less identical, and in the total absence of any approach to reconciling their radical differences, or their intelligible relations. Despite the difficulty of the subject, I do cherish the hope that progress can be made if we give up explaining-away from entrenched positions, accept the seriousness of the challenge to our preconceptions, and re-examine the real issues with an open mind. David On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. But why is that? The physical world doesn't explain it's own existence and nature, does it? So what caused it? What explains it's initial state? Why does it have it's current state? Why does it change in time the way that it does? If we're taking the existence and nature of things as a given, why can't we instead say that 1-p is fundamental? What is lost? What makes this an unpalatable option? It seems to me that it should certainly be the default position. I like Philip Goff's idea of Ghosts as an alternative to Chalmers' Zombies: http://consciousnessonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/philip-goff-paper.pdf First, from the introduction: Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature concerns how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are conscious but whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. We can call such a ‘purely conscious’ creature a ghost. Then on page 7: The way into imagining your ghost twin is to go through the familiar Cartesian process of doubting everything that it is possible to doubt. For all you know for sure, the physical world around you might be a delusion, placed in you by an incredibly powerful evil demon. The arms and legs you seem to see in front of you, the heart you seem to feel beating beneath your breast, your body that feels solid and warm to the touch, all may be figments of a particularly powerful delusion. You might not even have a brain. The only
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. But why is that? The physical world doesn't explain it's own existence and nature, does it? So what caused it? What explains it's initial state? Why does it have it's current state? Why does it change in time the way that it does? If we're taking the existence and nature of things as a given, why can't we instead say that 1-p is fundamental? What is lost? What makes this an unpalatable option? It seems to me that it should certainly be the default position. I think it's fruitless to argue about which is fundamental. Obviously we have direct 1-p experience; but also that there are differences between persons. So if we concentrate on the intersubjective agreement between different 1-p reports we find that we can make some successful predictive models of that 3-p world. At one time there was an assumption that the 3-p world could be modeled as a lot of agents, i.e. beings with 1-p experiences. But that turned out be an impediment and it worked better to model the 3-p world as impersonal and mathematical. So naturally one attractive strategy is to keep pushing what has worked in the past. There's no reason not to try taking 1-p experiences as the basis of your ontology, the positivists tried to put physics on that basis, but so far it seems the way to make progress has been to treat 1-p as basic but fallible and quickly move to an external reality that is more consistent. Brent I like Philip Goff's idea of Ghosts as an alternative to Chalmers' Zombies: http://consciousnessonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/philip-goff-paper.pdf First, from the introduction: Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature concerns how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are conscious but whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. We can call such a ‘purely conscious’ creature a ghost. Then on page 7: The way into imagining your ghost twin is to go through the familiar Cartesian process of doubting everything that it is possible to doubt. For all you know for sure, the physical world around you might be a delusion, placed in you by an incredibly powerful evil demon. The arms and legs you seem to see in front of you, the heart you seem to feel beating beneath your breast, your body that feels solid and warm to the touch, all may be figments of a particularly powerful delusion. You might not even have a brain. The only state of affairs you know for certain to obtain is that you exist as a thing such that there is something that it is like to be that thing. You know for certain that you are a thing that has an experience as of having arms and legs, a beating heart, a warm, solid body. You know that you are a subject of experience. But you may not be a creature that exists in space, or has physical parts. It is by engaging in the process of Cartesian doubting that one arrives at a conception of one’s ghost twin. I am not suggesting that the process of Cartesian doubting demonstrates the possibility of ghosts, but I am suggesting that it goes a good way to demonstrating their conceivability. To entertain the possibility that I am the only thing that exists, and that I exist as a thing with no properties other than my conscious experience, just is to conceive of my ghost twin. Any philosopher who agrees with Descartes up to and including the Cogito has a strong prima facie obligation to accept the conceivability of ghosts. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 21 Feb 2010, at 17:31, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 18:08, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You may already understand (by uda) that the first person notions are related to infinite sum of computations (and this is not obviously computable, not even partially). Yes, I do understand that. What I'm particularly interested in, with respect to comp is what is the relation between the 1-p notions and the 3-p ones, from the point of view of causality (which you can put in scare quotes if you prefer). IOW, any 1-p notion, such as pain, is not only non-computable (as opposed to inferrable by analogy) from any 3-p perspective, but is seemingly irrelevant to the unfolding of the 3-p account with which it is (somehow) associated. What scope is there, in the unfolding of the infinity of computations by the UD, for 1-p experience to be viewed as having any consequences beyond those already implicit in the 3-p describable nature of the computations themselves? Does this question make any sense from a comp perspective? What do you mean by implicit here? What is implicit is that the subjectivity (1-p), to make sense, has to be referentially correct relatively to the most probable histories/consistent extensions. This make possible to associate a knower (Bp p) to a believer (Bp), and a feeler (Bp Dp p) to an observer (Bp Dp). This makes it not just possible, but necessary, to attach a first person (who will have a logic of first person associate to him/she in a third person describable way) to a 3-person body (except that the price to pay is that such a body is an immaterial collection of number relations). Then the incommunicable and private aspect of those knowledge and qualia is provided by the theory of knowledge and the quale logic, provided by the respective intensional variant of G and G*. The difference between G and G* (provable and true) is reflected in those intensional variant. I guess you mean that we cannot prove the existence of the 1-p from the 3-p grounds. That's correct (both intuitively with UDA, and it is a theorem of machine's theology (AUDA). Not only can't we prove it, but we couldn't, from a 3-p pov, even predict or in any way characterise such 1-p notions, if we didn't know from a 1-p perspective that they exist (or seem to know that they seem to exist). This is not true I think. Already with the uda duplication experience, you can see predict the difference, for example, the apparition of first person indeterminacy despite the determinacy in the 3d description. This is captured by the difference between (Bp and p) and Bp, and that difference is a consequence of incompleteness, when self- observing occurs. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Good point. But you are lead to this because you still believe that matter is a primitive 3-p notion. No, I don't believe it, but I'm able to entertain it (as an alternative to comp) to see where this hypothesis leads. It leads to non comp. Notably. And to the current insolubility of the mind-body problem. One of the places it leads (which ISTM some are anxious not to acknowledge)) is the kind of brute paradox I've referred to. So what I'm asking you is how is this different from a comp perspective? Can our 3-p references to 1-p phenomena escape paradox in the comp analysis? Yes, because we do accept the truth of elementary arithmetic. We can study the theology of simple (and thus *intuitively* correct) Löbian machine. We *know* in that setting that the machine will be aware of an explanation gap, etc. Again, the price is that we have to recover physics without introducing a 3-p physical world. But the physical 3-p notions are just NOT closed for explanation. It collapses all the points of view. It explains consciousness away! I understand that you take this view from a comp perspective, but what about from a primitive-materialist pov in its own terms? You will have to introduce infinities in the 3-p description of whatever the consciousness supervene on. And then it is an open problem to see if this provide any help to solve the mind body problem. Infinity and ad hoc imposed indeterminacy looks like red herring. It blocks the comp hyp, but does not seem to give new clue in the mind-body problem, other than the one extract from lobianity (infinite machine are mostly lobian too, when self-referentially correct). Do you believe that such a closed explanation is fundamentally unable to account seriously for consciousness for the reasons I've cited? Is there any way to re-open it outside of comp? Not in a way which is not already provided by comp. But unless you weaken comp so much as becoming God, weakening comp does not
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 02:08, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I'm not sure in what sense you mean gratuitous. In a sense it is gratuitous to describe anything - hence the new catch-phrase, It is what it is. If one is just a different description of the other then they have the same consequences - in different terms. What I mean is that it is superfluous to what we presume is already a complete account (i.e. the 3-p one) of all the relevant events and their consequences. We would have no reason to suspect (nor could we characterise) the existence of 1-p experience if we only had access to the 3-p account. Furthermore, if we believe the 3-p account to be complete and causally closed, we are committed to accepting that all thoughts, beliefs, statements or behaviour apparently relating to 1-p experience are in fact entirely motivated by the 3-p account. This leads to the paradox of the existence of 3-p references to 1-p experiences which simply cannot be extrapolated from the 3-p account (i.e. they are non-computable). More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. How do you know that? In my computation of what's happening in your brain I might well say, And *there's* where David is feeling confused. Yes, of course. But you can only analogise with some feeling of confusion to which you have (or seem to have) personal privileged access (this is the really hard bit to keep in mind). Had you no access to such 1-p experience (e.g. you were one of Chalmers' affect-less zombies) you would have no basis from which to extrapolate from the 3-p account to 1-p experience, or even to suspect such a possibility or what its nature could be (hence non-computable). Nonetheless, belief in the causal completeness and closure of the 3-p account simultaneously commits us to believing that all your beliefs, statements and behaviour with respect to 1-p would be unaltered! This is the paradox. The standard move, which is implicit in your proposal, is to try to wave all this away by asserting the identity of 3-p and 1-p. I'm trying to say two things about this: first, it's meaningless to say that two different things are identical without showing how their apparent differences are to be reconciled; second, if we accept this it leaves us in the position of continuing to exhibit every one of our thoughts, beliefs, statements and behaviours with respect to 1-p experience, even though the existence and nature of such phenomena can't be computed from the basis of 3-p, and even in the case that the phenomena didn't exist at all! This doesn't strike me as a satisfactory resolution. David David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:06, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. The problem is that if one believes that the 3-p narrative is causally sufficient, then the thoughts that pop into your head - and their consequences - are entirely explicable in terms of some specific 3-p rendition. If you also seem to have the 1-p experience of the sound of a voice in your head, this is entirely gratuitous to the 3-p thought-process and its consequences. I'm not sure in what sense you mean gratuitous. In a sense it is gratuitous to describe anything - hence the new catch-phrase, It is what it is. If one is just a different description of the other then they have the same consequences - in different terms. More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. How do you know that? In my computation of what's happening in your brain I might well say, And *there's* where David is feeling confused. Brent So how can it be possible for any such narrative to *refer* to the experiential quality of a thought? David David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 07:28, Diego Caleiro diegocale...@gmail.com wrote: You guys should Read Chalmers: Philosophy of Mind, Classical and contemporary Readings and Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Richard Rorty In particular The Concepts of Counsciousness By Ned Block and Mental Causation by stephen Yablo will get you nearer to where you are trying to get. Thanks. I've already read quite a bit of Chalmers, Rorty, Block, etc, and before committing to a comprehensive re-perusal I would appreciate your view on the specific nature of the corrective to be gained. What I guess I'm trying to suggest here is that I think we may have retreated too hastily from an interactionist relation between 1-p and 3-p because of its association with an apparently outmoded dualism. The problem is that current identity assumptions leave us stuck with a causally-closed 3-p world in which the very nature of our apparent access to 1-p phenomena is opaque, leave alone its (lack of) causal relevance. I'm hesitant to commit too strongly here to what a deeper and genuinely illuminating resolution to the identity issue might look like, partly because I have only a vague intuition, and because it would probably jump-start one of the endless circular debates on the topic. Perhaps I'm trying to tempt others away from current standard positions to re-consider what would have to be the case for it to really make a difference in the world that we *experience* (say) pain, rather than merely observing that its 3-p correlates mediate our behaviour. David You guys should Read Chalmers: Philosophy of Mind, Classical and contemporary Readings and Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Richard Rorty In particular The Concepts of Counsciousness By Ned Block and Mental Causation by stephen Yablo will get you nearer to where you are trying to get. Best wish for all Diego Caleiro Philosopher of Mind University of São Paulo. On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 02:39, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That doesn't mean you questions will be answered. It will be like Bertrand Russell's neutral monoids. There are events and they can be arranged in 3-p relations or in 1-p relations. Explanations will ultimately be circular - but not viciously so. Yes, I've been sympathetic to this intuition myself. It's just that I've been troubled recently by the apparent impossibility of reconciling the two accounts - i.e. what I'm calling (justifiably AFAICS) the non-computability of 1-p from 3-p, leading directly to the apparent causal irrelevance of (and mystery of our references to) 1-p phenomena. So I've started to wonder again if we've given up too soon on the possibility of an interactionist approach - one that doesn't fall back on two substance dualism with all its hopeless defects. We certainly don't know that it's ruled out - i.e. that it is indeed the case that all experiential phenomena map directly to neurological phenomena in a straightforward 3-p way; this is currently merely an assumption. If it could be demonstrated robustly this would dismiss my doubts, though not my puzzlement. But the intriguing empirical possibility exists that, for example, consciously seeing (1-p) and visually detecting (3-p) may act on the world by partially different paths (i.e. that there is an additional possibility - beyond mechanism - in the deep structure of things that, moreover, has not been missed by evolution). David David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 16 Feb 2010, at 19:07, David Nyman wrote:
Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first-
person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third-
person perspective?
There is an ambiguity in you phrasing. I will proceed like I always
do, by interpreting your term favorably, relatively to
computationalism and its (drastic) consequences.
The first person notion, and consciousness, are not clearly notion to
which the label computable can be applied. The fact is that, no
machine can even define what is the first person, or what is
consciousness.
You may already understand (by uda) that the first person notions are
related to infinite sum of computations (and this is not obviously
computable, not even partially).
But auda makes this utterly clear. Third person self-reference is
entirely described by the provability predicate, the one that I write
with the letter B. Bp is *I* prove p, Beweisbar ('p'), for p some
arithmetical proposition.
The corresponding first person notion is Bp Tp, with Tp = True('p').
By a theorem of Tarski true cannot be define (even just define!) by
the machine, and the logic of BpTp (= Bp p) is quite different from
Bp, from the point of view of the machine. That result on truth has
been extended by Kaplan Montague for knowledge.
Let Bp = I prove p
Let Kp = Bp Tp = Bp p = I know p
Then, what happens is that
G* proves Bp - Kp
NOT(G proves Bp - Kp)
G does not prove the equivalence of Bp and Kp, for correct machine.
It is false that G proves Bp - Kp, and the machine cannot have
access to the truth of that equivalence (or indirectly by postulating
comp).
The only rationale for adducing the additional
existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we
possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the
existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely
3-p grounds.
I guess you mean that we cannot prove the existence of the 1-p from
the 3-p grounds. That's correct (both intuitively with UDA, and it is
a theorem of machine's theology (AUDA).
Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and
sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the
uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in
TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound,
pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's
happening, including our every thought and action.
That is why a materialist who want to keep the mechanist hypothesis
have no other choice than to abandon consciousness as an illusion or
matter as an illusion. In this list most people, including you (if I
remember well) accept that it is just impossible to dismiss
consciousness, so ... Ah, I see you are OK with this in some replies
today.
Note that the movie graph shows directly that the notion of primitive
(3-p- matter makes no sense, and shows the way how to recover the
appearance of matter from the logic of the first person plural point
of view (somewhere in between Bp Dp and Bp Dp p where Dp is ~B~p).
But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to
refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our
behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3-
p perspective?
Good point. But you are lead to this because you still believe that
matter is a primitive 3-p notion.
Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the
issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared
behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they
are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p
perspective.
But the physical 3-p notions are just NOT closed for explanation. It
collapses all the points of view. It explains consciousness away!
Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p
world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do
withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just
because C-fibres are firing? But how?
Because it concerns knowledge, which, by definition, relate your
beliefs to the truth. But that relation belongs itself to the corona
G* minus G, and is unavailable by the machine itself.
Nice and clear and important questions. You explain well the mind-body
problem. You put your fingers where it hurts!
I will comment some answers hereby:
On 16 Feb 2010, at 19:19, Stephen P. King wrote:
Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some
combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we
keep
trying to derive 1-p from 3-p?
This is a reasonable question. But with comp it is both 1-p and
physical-3-p which are derived from arithmetical 3-p, yet it forces us
to attribute personhood for machine (but this is comp, after all, and
the logic of self-refrence justifies such an idea).
It leads to a form of neutral
RE: On the computability of consciousness
Hi, Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? Onward! Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 1:08 PM To: Everything List Subject: On the computability of consciousness This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David I think one idea is that consciousness is connected to language (c.f. Julian Jaynes) which was originally just another perception - as animals give and hear warning cries - but with the evolution of culture it became a way of passing more detailed information, and then of storing (memory) information and this led to have an internal narrative as a way of remembering what was important (what you paid *attention* to). Some evidence for this theory is that when thinking about something, the same parts of the brain are activated as when perceiving it. Not very complete, but it's a hint. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David On 16 February 2010 18:19, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi, Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? Onward! Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 1:08 PM To: Everything List Subject: On the computability of consciousness This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious experience - that this *must* be the case, whilst offering no glimmer of what the nature of such a transcendent level of reconciliation could possibly be. David On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. Brent ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious experience - that this *must* be the case, whilst offering no glimmer of what the nature of such a transcendent level of reconciliation could possibly be. David On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 00:06, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. The problem is that if one believes that the 3-p narrative is causally sufficient, then the thoughts that pop into your head - and their consequences - are entirely explicable in terms of some specific 3-p rendition. If you also seem to have the 1-p experience of the sound of a voice in your head, this is entirely gratuitous to the 3-p thought-process and its consequences. More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. So how can it be possible for any such narrative to *refer* to the experiential quality of a thought? David David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. Brent ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:06, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. The problem is that if one believes that the 3-p narrative is causally sufficient, then the thoughts that pop into your head - and their consequences - are entirely explicable in terms of some specific 3-p rendition. If you also seem to have the 1-p experience of the sound of a voice in your head, this is entirely gratuitous to the 3-p thought-process and its consequences. I'm not sure in what sense you mean gratuitous. In a sense it is gratuitous to describe anything - hence the new catch-phrase, It is what it is. If one is just a different description of the other then they have the same consequences - in different terms. More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. How do you know that? In my computation of what's happening in your brain I might well say, And *there's* where David is feeling confused. Brent So how can it be possible for any such narrative to *refer* to the experiential quality of a thought? David David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That doesn't mean you questions will be answered. It will be like Bertrand Russell's neutral monoids. There are events and they can be arranged in 3-p relations or in 1-p relations. Explanations will ultimately be circular - but not viciously so. Brent David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
You guys should Read Chalmers: Philosophy of Mind, Classical and contemporary Readings and Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Richard Rorty In particular The Concepts of Counsciousness By Ned Block and Mental Causation by stephen Yablo will get you nearer to where you are trying to get. Best wish for all Diego Caleiro Philosopher of Mind University of São Paulo. On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.comwrote: David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That doesn't mean you questions will be answered. It will be like Bertrand Russell's neutral monoids. There are events and they can be arranged in 3-p relations or in 1-p relations. Explanations will ultimately be circular - but not viciously so. Brent David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the
