On 04 Feb 2014, at 00:08, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/3/2014 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2014 21:25, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 4 February 2014 02:26, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 3 February 2014 12:06, Stathis Papaioannou
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> If consciousness is epiphenomenal I don't see how that
diminishes its
>> importance in any way, let alone eliminates it. It is consistent
with
>> evolution since it is not an optional extra: if intelligence
evolved
>> then consciousness had to evolve as a necessary side-effect. It is
>> also consistent with the world being causally closed and
eliminates
>> the paradox that David Nyman sees.
>
>
> Does it? You still haven't explained why bodies emit utterances
that appear
> to refer to this putative epiphenomenon. Or are you saying that
they're not
> really emitting such utterances or making such references?
They're just
> physical systems going about their lawful physical business, but
somehow
> that evokes a physically-undetectable extra something-or-other.
And it's
> only in terms of this extra something-or-other that utterances
seem to exist
> that, in turn, only seem so to refer. Is that what it boils down
to?
It's because you're stuck on the idea that consciousness is something
extra and optional.
Those weren't rhetorical questions. I was asking you for your
views. I don't think I'm stuck on any idea in particular. I'm more
interested in trying to discern precisely what is entailed by
framing a problem in a particular way.
If you could see that it was logically entailed by
certain physical phenomena or computations you wouldn't have a
problem.
How right you are. Do you see this? If you do, perhaps you could
explain to me how it is so entailed.
It would be like agonising over why an object in which every
point on its perimeter is equidistant from the centre has the quality
of roundness rather than squareness or nothingness; and how it could
be that roundness has no separate causal efficacy over and above what
can be explained in terms of the physicality of the object possessing
this property.
Yes, that would certainly follow if all the relevant phenomena
could be exhaustively explained by the correct level of physical
emergence. Do you presently have a view as to what that might be,
or is this a case of "shut up and wait"?
> By the way, I'm not really sure what the term epiphenomenon is
supposed to
> convey in this context. Is it indeed supposed to be a sort of one-
way
> dualism in which, as I suggest above, a genuinely novel something-
or-other
> is evoked by physical behaviour but cannot reciprocally affect it
(and so
> cannot be detectable by it). Or is it really a form of cryptic
eliminativism
> in which, in the final analysis, there is no additional something-
or-other
> at all?
I don't think these terms make any substantive difference. Whether my
consciousness can be replicated by a computer, for example, is an
important question and it is not dependent on whether under some use
of the English language it is correct to say that consciousness can
be
eliminated.
Absolutely. If indeed my consciousness had been satisfactorily
replicated by a computational prosthetic it would be very foolish
of me to complain that it had been eliminated.
Anyway, it would appear, that like Brent, you were using the term
epiphenomenon to mean some emergent phenomenon that is fully
entailed by canonical physical causation, like temperature. If
that's the case, I agree with Brent that there would be no
remaining motive to differentiate it categorically from any other
such canonical phenomenon of emergence.
By the way, if you think that consciousness may be that kind of
phenomenon, does that imply that you reject any categorical 3p/1p
distinction? I ask because I tend to agree with Bruno (and Brent,
if I've understood his most recent comment) that the prize at the
end of this road is a completed theory of the physical correlates
of self-reported conscious phenomena. But many people take the view
that after this prize is attained, there is still a "remainder
problem" that doesn't seem so problematical with temperature or
other emergent phenomena of the canonical kind. On the other hand,
if one wishes to deny that anything remains to be accounted for
after the physical correlates are explained it would be reasonable
to describe one's position as eliminative with respect to any such
remainder.
Bruno thinks that even if we explain consciousness at this kind of
engineering level, there is a remainder - namely explaining the
origin of the physics we used to explain consciousness. And he
proposes that both can be explained as emergent phenomena within
arithmetic by some kind of interaction of all possible computations.
To be precise, I am not proposing that it can explained in that way,
but that if comp is true, it has to be explained in that way. It is a
key nuance. It might be that such explanation cannot exist, and if
that is shown, then comp is refuted.
I'm open to such a possibility, but I don't hold out much hope for
the program succeeding - at least not until physics gets a lot
simpler. I think that when we can "build a general AI to
specification" that will be the end of the "hard problem" of
consciousness.
"AI" already exists. PA is as clever as you and me, it is just totally
incompetent in the practical matter. And yes, it solves a big part of
the hard problem, notably in explaining already the origin of the
physical appearances and their quantum aspects.
Sometimes a problem hangs around a long time because people have a
prejudice that the answer must take a certain form. People thought
about gravity in terms of "What is it about things that makes some
of them want to go down and others go up?" They thought of heat as
being a fluid and tried to study it's properties. Later, when a
good theory has been developed, they often overlook the fact that
the new theory *did not* answer the old questions. It was *not* the
explanation the had sought. But it was better and it created new
questions.
Sure, and you can see AI like that. But the mind-body problem is a
very specific question, and you just seem to believe that we can
continue to put it under the rug. But when formulated in comp, we do
make progress and got new question, like how to derive the believes in
the physical laws without assuming a physical universe. And we do get
a complete explanation of why the psychological and the physical split
into communicable (intelligible) parts and the non communicable parts
(the sensible knowable part).
The only price (of comp) is the abandon of the Aristotelian view on
reality. The physical becomes but an aspect of something much bigger,
and much less known today (the arithmetical reality).
Bruno
Brent
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to
interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a
mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal
interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of
such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is
expected to work.
----John von Neumann
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