Re: The Mind Outside My Head
On 4/10/2012 11:08 PM, John wrote: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/10/mind-outside-head-consciousness/ It is a more extreme version of a view I have long held that consciousness is relative to an external environment and without that environment the the brain would devolve into loops or unconscious state. But I don't see that Manzotti provides a very useful model of imagination or dreams or recall of images by electrostimulation of the brain. Those phenomena imply that the information is stored in the brain. To say it's shared with an external process that happened years before doesn't add anything; the sharing is via storage in the brain. 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-list@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: what is mechanism?
On 10 Apr 2012, at 21:21, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 09.04.2012 18:58 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 09 Apr 2012, at 16:35, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... I believe that now I understand what physicalism is. What would you recommend to read about mechanism? Something like this SEP paper about physicalism http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ Yes, it is a good description of physicalism. For mechanism such type of media are not aware of the UDA argument, so you have to understand it by yourself, by reading my papers, or this list. New idea or result take time to be accepted, especially when they cross different disciplinaries. I can give you many titles of books and papers---or you can find them in the references in my thesis, or papers. But mechanism is defended mostly by materialist and they use the mechanist assumption mainly to burry the mind-body problem. The subject is hot, and authoritative-argument are frequent. I understand that but right now I would like to understand what a mechanism is. Gandy has written good paper on this. The book of Odifreddi on recursion theory makes a good sum up. The idea of mechanism is mainly the idea of finiteness and some local causation process, or there arithmetical counterpart. A good book in computer science can help. Mechanism from a materialist viewpoint would also interesting. That exists because many subset of the physical laws are Turing universal. So we can implement computation in nature. But the notion of computation is mathematical, even arithmetical, so the elementary causation can be reframe in term of addition and multiplication. This is not obvious unless you have read some original paper in the field, like those in the dover book by Davis (the undecidable). After all, to make a conscious choice it is good to consider all alternatives. But mostly I am interested to learn what mechanism is (say theory independent). Somehow the best account is the original one made by Turing. You will find it in the dover Davis book. Probably on the net too. Hence if you know something in Internet or in the written form, I would appreciate your advice. The best about 20 pages, not too little, and not to much. OK I found the paper by Turing: http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/turing_oncomputablenumbers_1936.pdf Of course, the language is old, and we prefer to talk today in term of functions instead of real numbers. You can try to read it. I will search other information, but there are many, and of different type, and most still blinded by the aristotelian preconception. So it is hard to find a paper which would satisfy me. But you can get the intuition with Turing's paper I think. It would be nice you complement it with some good book, like the one by Nigel Cutland: http://www.amazon.com/Computability-Introduction-Recursive-Function-Theory/dp/0521294657/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3 Bruno ... This is why I like Gray's book where he distinguish between three different conscious processes. 1) Reconstruction of the external world. ... that he seems to assume. From what you said, I think Gray is still physicalist. But as I insist, this forces him to postulate some non comp hypothesis, which nobody has ever done, except for the theories based explicitly on fairy tales. To be fair, some people try to develop a notion of analogical machines, but they are all either Turing emulable, or Turing recoverable by using the first person indeterminacy. Gray is definitely physicalist. He recognizes though that consciousness cannot be explained by physicalism, but the book is written in the physicalism language. This makes it a nice antiphysicalism weapon: You like physicalism, please read Gray's book, it is for you. In order to convince someone you have to speak her language, otherwise it is hard. As for reconstruction of the external world, in my view this statement fits well the language of the 1st and 3rd person views. The 1st view is after all how the 3rd view reality is perceived by the 1st view. In the Gray's language the brain makes this dirty view and forms for example conscious visual experience. Gray says 1) this way The World is Inside the Head. p. 1. “For, just like those inner sensations, that world out there is constructed by our brains and exists within our consciousness. In a very real sense, the world as we consciously experience it is not out there at all: it is inside each and every of us.” Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this
Re: The Mind Outside My Head
On 11.04.2012 08:36 meekerdb said the following: On 4/10/2012 11:08 PM, John wrote: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/10/mind-outside-head-consciousness/ It is a more extreme version of a view I have long held that consciousness is relative to an external environment and without that environment the the brain would devolve into loops or unconscious state. But I don't see that Manzotti provides a very useful model of imagination or dreams or recall of images by electrostimulation of the brain. Those phenomena imply that the information is stored in the brain. To say it's shared with an external process that happened years before doesn't add anything; the sharing is via storage in the brain. Brent You may want to look at Max Velmans WHERE EXPERIENCES ARE: DUALIST, PHYSICALIST, ENACTIVE AND REFLEXIVE ACCOUNTS OF PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS http://cogprints.org/4891/ See there Figure 3. A reflexive model of perception I have not read the paper yet, I have found it just recently, but there is an interesting question there Is the brain in the world or the world in the brain? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@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: The Mind Outside My Head
On 11 Apr 2012, at 18:02, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 11.04.2012 08:36 meekerdb said the following: On 4/10/2012 11:08 PM, John wrote: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/10/mind-outside-head-consciousness/ It is a more extreme version of a view I have long held that consciousness is relative to an external environment and without that environment the the brain would devolve into loops or unconscious state. But I don't see that Manzotti provides a very useful model of imagination or dreams or recall of images by electrostimulation of the brain. Those phenomena imply that the information is stored in the brain. To say it's shared with an external process that happened years before doesn't add anything; the sharing is via storage in the brain. Brent You may want to look at Max Velmans WHERE EXPERIENCES ARE: DUALIST, PHYSICALIST, ENACTIVE AND REFLEXIVE ACCOUNTS OF PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS http://cogprints.org/4891/ See there Figure 3. A reflexive model of perception I have not read the paper yet, I have found it just recently, but there is an interesting question there Is the brain in the world or the world in the brain? Similarly, is the brain in your head, or is your head in your brain? If we are locally Turing emulable (comp) then worlds including brains and heads are relatively stable and persistent number's hallucination. They are extrapolations on such hallucinations. And physical realities (sharable stabilities) should emerge from infinities of universal numbers competing to sustain the relative hallucination(s). (cf UDA). It is a bit like the Indra Net, brains and local worlds are couple of universal numbers, and all universal numbers reflect dynamically all universal numbers. If you remember the definition of universal numbers that I have given. For all this the natural matrix already exists in a tiny part of elementary arithmetic. Bruno Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@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 . 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-list@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: Primitive Awareness and Symmetry
As this topic is touching on both philosophical zombies and deism, I recommend a reading of Bernardo Kastrup's essay, The parallels of Pandeism: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2010/03/consciousness-and-pandeism.html -- wherein Kastrup observes some intriguing parallels between the debate around the 'hard problem of consciousness' and the philosophy of Pandeism which he finds provides an intriguing, holistic view encompassing all sides of the debate. Kastrup defines Pandeism thusly: Pandeism is a school of thought that holds that the universe is identical to God, but also that God was initially an omni-conscious and omni-sentient force or entity. However, upon creating the universe, God became unconscious and non-sentient by the very act of becoming the universe itself. And so, Pandeism is (naturally) both a kind of Deism and a kind of Pantheism (and so we get from, Pantheist- Deism to Pan-Deism to PanDeism to Pandeism). On Apr 9, 9:42 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 1:18 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: A zombie brain component is a component that replicates the function of the tissue it replaces but does not replicate its contribution to consciousness, such as it may be. The visual cortex is necessary for visual perception since if we remove it we eliminate vision. A zombie visual cortex replicates the I/O behaviour at the cut interface of the removed tissue but does not contribute to consciousness. If whole zombies are possible then it should be possible to make such a component. If you say the brain as a whole would have normal consciousness even though the component didn't This is where I find your argument confusing. Consider an atom in the brain. Can you replace it with a zombie atom? It doesen't matter, so long as it acts like a normal atom it will contribute to consciousness. The brain as a whole will have normal consciousness even though the atom doesn't. But the consciousness never depended on the atom *having* consciousness - only on the atom *contributing* to consciousness (by having the same functional behavior). Yes, I agree with you; I don't believe it is possible to make a zombie. If it were possible then we would either need components that lack or don't contribute to intrinsic consciousness (if consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter or if consciousness is added via an immaterial soul) or components that lack or don't contribute to the functional organisation that gives rise to consciousness while possessing the functional organisation that gives rise to intelligent behaviour. It's an argument against zombies and against the substrate-dependence of consciousness. you could modify the thought experiment to replace all of the brain except for one neuron. In that case the replaced brain would be a full blown zombie, No. I can replace all the atoms with zombie atoms and the brain is still a normal conscious brain. but adding the single biological neuron would suddenly restore full consciousness. This is absurd, but it should be possible if zombies are possible. I agree with your conclusion, but your argument seems to imply that since zombies are impossible, zombie components are impossible and so quarks must have an element of consciousness. It invites the fallacy of slipping from 'contributes to consciousness' to 'has consciousness'. No, I don't think quarks are either conscious or zombies. I think consciousness arises necessarily from intelligent behaviour. -- 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-list@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.
