Hi David,
I think feisty/curmudgeon is more apt than fierce... but yeah ... :-)
RE: "In other words, what is the relation, in your theory,
between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena?"
Right to it eh? Call the two perspective 1-P and 3P
OK. First, there may be a bit of a misdirection in the words
"first-person and specific third-person phenomena?". Phenomena are 100%
encountered by a scientist's 1-P experience. It's 100% of our access to
anything. It's 'scientific observation'. There's no such thing as "3rd
person phenomena". 3rd person is a description of the 'contents of
consciousness as scientific observation'...These descriptions have no
more reality than that of an abstract set of rules
prescribing/proscribing regularity between agreed 1st-person percepts.
Their predictive success entails no claim to any capture of ontology or
necessity for causal relations.
The 1-P/3-P divide is, in my system, a duality of equivalent
descriptions pivoting on mutual consistency in the production of an
observer that acquires the 'what it is like, 1-P experience' as a result
of the fundamental properties of being within the system thus described.
This is not a duality of substance. It is a duality of knowledge
resulting from being in and made of a system's componentry and
describing it from within.
That's all you have to do.
The usual mistake that's made at this point is to fail to discriminate
between the 'why/how' of 1-P and the 'what'. It's extemely easy to
isolate the 'what': ELECTROMAGNETISM (EM). This is the beautiful 3-P
description of a brain. The list of possible 'what' is delivering 1-P is
of length 1. 'Being' electromagnetism results in 1-P.
The real WHY/HOW is in asking 'why is it that EM delivers it?'
Well there you go. You know that the description yuo have of EM and the
description that says WHY EM does 1-P (when configured like a brain) are
not the same descriptions. In other words you have to start describing
the universe in a manner prior to the observer.
How do you empirically justify this new set of descriptions?
Whatever this new descriptive realm is, it should predict an observer
that sees the world as we do AND that appears to be a brain when you
look at it 3-P.
Neither description set need be unique.
I hope that's enough!
cheers
colin
David Nyman wrote:
Gawd, I've missed you Colin, you fierce old thing! Is it wet where
you are or is the inundation confined to poor old Brisbane?
I suppose you know that Bruno and you agree (at least in my estimation
of your lines of argument) that observation is the key phenomenon to
be explained at the outset, instead - as you rightly say - of just
being taken for granted. If this cardinal error is committed at the
starting gate, the rest of the argument inevitably runs in a circle.
Of course you and Bruno start from different premisses vis-a-vis the
primitives, but on the positive side either theory is (I presume) open
to empirical falsification.
One thing I haven't been able to fathom so far about your own ideas is
where you stand on what Bruno calls first-person indeterminacy, which
has come up again in a recent thread. You know, the transporter
thought experiment, or just the question in general of why I find
myself to be in this particular observer position (as raised in the
target paper). In other words, what is the relation, in your theory,
between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena? In
Bruno's computational approach, the relation seems to emerge via a
kind of filtering process or sieve of consciousness considered as a
whole through the infinity of possible computations. In this way the
computational "everything" is conceived as converging on consistent
first-person narratives as a consequence of various kinds of "measure"
- a very rough analogy would be the emergence of all possible books in
Borges' "Library of Babel". What would be the analogous ideas in
your own approach?
David
On 12 January 2011 22:50, Colin Hales wrote:
I confess to the usual level of exasperation. Yet again the great culturally
maintained mental block subverts real progress. And, yet again, the
participant doesn;t even know they are doing it. Garrett says
"The key is that observers are just a particular type of information, as is
everything else. That is, we assume that the Physical Church Turing Thesis
(PCTT) ..blah blah blah"
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
The author has somehow remained completely uninformed by the real message in
the consciousness material cited in the article.
Observers are NOT just a particular type of information
The word information _was defined by an observer_, a human, USING
observation. Like every other word it's just a metaphoric description of as
thing, with meaning to a human. No matter what logical steps one proceeds
to enact from this juncture, you are not describing anything that can be
used to build or explain an observer. You are merely de
