Re: Against Mechanism
On 06 Dec 2010, at 00:02, Rex Allen wrote: Math causes experiences of math. H. I don't see how or why that would be. If you assume Mechanism, the idea that the brain is Turing emulable, then it is a theorem. And if you assume the classical theory of knowledge, then you can even understand how that happens. It happens because universal numbers, relatively to infinities of universal numbers, cannot see the relationship between they representable proofs and their private and non representable truth. You talk like if Gödel's and Tarski's theorems don't exist. You are confusing all the time the notion of mathematical truth, which is not representable in any way, with the notion of proofs, which are formalizable and can be represented. Anyway, your theory (which is really only a personal phenomenological report) needs to presuppose that we are not Turing emulable. This means that we cannot accept a digital brain or body substitution. I respect that opinion, but I am still waiting what is your non-mechanistic explanation of consciousness, matter and why a majority of humans believe in prime numbers. To say that consciousness just exists and nothing else is not better than to say that God created it all. That explains nothing. You did not reply to my objection, that if your accidental idealism theory is correct, I can only accept it accidentally, making even absurd your attempts to convince us. Your very attempt to reason with us seems to me to contradict your theory. Bruno 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: Against Mechanism
On Dec 5, 11:02 pm, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: So I would say that time exists within conscious experience, conscious experience doesn't exist within time. All experiences that exist, do so eternally and timelessly. So you say, but nothing is experienced *as* eternal The thoughts of those life forms is not likely to look like random snow, since that would not be useful for their survival. The contents of thoughts and the survival of the thinker are caused by the same thing...the initial conditions and causal laws of the universe. The contents of thoughts do not cause the survival of the thinker. They are a practical and high level description of the causes. The existence of the trees does not disprove the forest Like 1Z, you're assigning causal power to abstractions that only exist for you. There is a difference between a high level description and a pure abstraction If I start with thought as primitive, and try to explain that thought under accidental idealism I can go no further. While it explains the existence of thought (by definition) it seems like an intellectual dead end. It's an answer that doesn't generate any additional questions...so it's an end in that sense. But so is any explanation that stops dead somewhere. However, you object to that. You object to persuing an explanation back N places only to stop dead -- except where N=0. So there can only be one ultimate answer: there is no reason for the way things are. OK. So why is the N=0 version better than the N0 version? That's it. Supposed answers that introduce unexplained causal laws or entities are vulnerable to the same questions they were introduced to explain. What explains the order of our experiences? Orderly causal laws! But then what explains orderly causal laws? You just end up with infinite regress. Or an unexplained first cause. Your version of events is unexpected first cause where the cause is identical to the effect. -- 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: Against Mechanism
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 29 Nov 2010, at 05:15, Rex Allen wrote: On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Would you admit then, that a computer which interprets bits the same way as a brain could be conscious? Isn't this mechanism? Or is your view more like the Buddhist idea that there is no thinker, only thought? Right, my view is that there is no thinker, only thought. Ah! The key point where we differ the most. Person is the key concept for those who grasp mechanism and its consequences. At least you don't eliminate consciousness, but you do eliminate persons. Brr... Once one has abandoned libertarian free will, I don’t see that the concept of “persons” matters much anyway. Meillassoux’s solution uses Cantorian detotalization to counter proposed resolutions to Hume’s “problem of induction” that involve probabilistic logic depending upon a totality of cases. Meillassoux's main point with this digression into Cantorian set theory is that just as there can be no end to the process of set formation and thus no such thing as the totality of all sets, there is also no absolute totality of all possible cases. Down the rabbit hole of infinite regress. Doesn’t seem promising, and doesn’t seem necessary. Meissaloux seems to ignore that the set of partial computable is closed for the Cantorian diagonalization. That is the key technical point which makes Church thesis possible and *digital* mechanism so powerful (and computer science a science). If one doesn’t accept that conscious experience is the result of computable functions, then I don’t see that this is relevant. So the Church-Turing thesis is basically that everything computable is computable by a Turing machine. Further, since an algorithm is a finite string of characters from a finite alphabet, the number of computable functions is countable. You can’t use Cantorian diagonalization in this case because doing so would require you to write a computable function that could generate a list of the other computable functions, and then create it’s own output for input “n” by sampling the nth output of the nth computable function and adding 1 - with the problem being that because of the halting problem you can never generate a list of *only* the computable functions. Which means that Meillassoux’s idea won’t work *if* one assumes that conscious experience is computable...since in that case there is, in some sense, a set of possible conscious experiences. But if one doesn’t start from the assumption that conscious experience is computable, then your point has no bearing on Meillassoux’s argument. Right? And, as an accidentalist, I don’t assume that conscious experience is computable. While some sequences of experience may have aspects that lend themselves to being accurately described via computable functions, I see no reason to accept that *all* aspects of *all* experiences are thus describable. So...an interesting argument, but I think not applicable. Rex -- 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: Against Mechanism
On 12/6/2010 8:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 29 Nov 2010, at 05:15, Rex Allen wrote: On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Would you admit then, that a computer which interprets bits the same way as a brain could be conscious? Isn't this mechanism? Or is your view more like the Buddhist idea that there is no thinker, only thought? Right, my view is that there is no thinker, only thought. Ah! The key point where we differ the most. Person is the key concept for those who grasp mechanism and its consequences. At least you don't eliminate consciousness, but you do eliminate persons. Brr... http://www.smbc-comics.com/#comic 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.
