On 05 Feb 2014, at 07:54, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 5 February 2014 03:54, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
My view is that if consciousness is epiphenomenal it's
meaningless to
ask why bodies emit utterances referring to the epiphenomenon.
Why? You agree that there is still one way causal link. That is
consciousness is a necessary side, and real, effect of the brain
activity.
So why a body could not refer to it meaningfully?
It's not that which would be meaningless: it would be meaningless to
ask how a body could refer to an epiphenomenon, David's initial
question.
Not sure if a body can refer to anything (but we can say that, as
an abuse
of language to be short).
The question, it seems to me, remains: why a person (using her
body) could
not refer to an epiphenomenon?
Why would that be meaningless? Why asking those question would be
meaningless?
If I tell you "I feel myself conscious right now"? Is that
meaningless?
It is meaningless that I hope you find that plausible?
And is it meaningless to ask such question?
May be, that's possible, but I need some justification. Without it,
it looks
just like "don't try to understand, don't search, don't ask".
I do think that the modal logic will provide a *very* powerful tool
to see
many nuances and possibilities in this context.
To be clear, what I find problematic is the question of whether
consciousness can cause someone to refer to it.
That is a good question. (I will answer it positively).
It can't do this by
definition if it's epiphenomenal.
OK. That will be the reason why I want to discard "epiphenomenalism".
However, you can declare that you
are conscious and while the declaration is explainable in purely
physical terms, it may be associated with actual consciousness.
Perhaps this is nitpicking.
It is not nitpicking, as eventually this is the crux of the matter.
See below.
Ah, but then it looks like if there is a two way road, and
consciousness
is
only a phenomenon. A quite peculiar one, as it relates 3p and 1p,
but
still
a phenomenon, and it this leads to make physics also a 1p
phenomenon, why
not?
Why do you think we gain by making consciousness into an
epiphenomenon?
We don't have to explain why it apparently has no effect on matter
yet
we can still refer to it.
May be we cannot [explain why it apparently has no effect on matter
yet we
can still refer to it].
But if that is the case, the question remains: why? And here, comp,
and the
arithmetization of metarithmetic, can explain, for similar
questions, why we
cannot explain some truth.
I think we can't decide that something does not need to be
explained, above
the more elementary assumptions.
I think that is Craig's fuel, and no comp fuel, to take sense has
fundamental. Epiphenomenalism has also that air of "let us not try to
understand".
You confirm my feeling that "epiphenomenalism" is used by admitting
or
introducing a bet on an explanation gap. Some explanation gap is
there
indeed, but I think we can entirely explain it. This leads to a
sort of
miracle: consciousness has a role, even in the physical events.
Mind can
"act" on matter. (cf atomic bombs and computers), and this without
violating
the physical laws. But eventually it makes the physical laws
emerging on
something non physical (which comp allows to limit on arithmetical
truth or
combinators truth, ...).
I don't believe that mind can act on anything except in a manner of
speaking, but again maybe this is nitpicking. The important thing is
that if mind had separate causal efficacy we would observe miraculous
events in the brain, and we don't observe such events.
Even with comp in the absence of a basic physical reality, you could
say there is no *reason* why subjectivity should exist - it just does.
Let us imagine that you do tell us that "you are conscious".
Now, I look at myself, and I know what "I am conscious" means, in some
direct intuition, and so, I will suppose that you saying refer to that
fact, which I understand: you are indeed conscious.
But then you add that your consciousness has no role at all in your
utterance of "I am conscious". This seems to me like saying "I am
conscious", but my utterance of it is the one of my body-zombie, who
by some kind of mysterious chance happens to say a truth about me,
given that you don't causally associate your first person observation
of your consciousness with the utterance.
You could say "I have headache", which is a first person experience,
and, for that reason I will take an aspirin, yet the existence of that
first person headache is not used by my brain to make me taking the
aspirin. That seems close to non-sense to me. It prevents you to be a
zombie, but makes you deluded in all high level person behavior.
In fact, we don't even need to talk on consciousness. I think it makes
sense to say that a program can have a high level causal efficacy,
even when the behavior does not violate the laws of physics or
arithmetic which supports that high level efficacy.
For example, nobody will say that Deep Blue win the chess tournament,
because this NAND receives this inputs and then (followed by a lengthy
description of all the low level happenings).
We will explain deep blue behavior in terms of most of its high level
ability. We will say "he lost that game because he did not recognize
that his opponents has made a Nimzovitch entry", or "he win that game
because it tested more possibilities than the opponents".
That will be the real (or more genuine) explanation, both for the
computer scientists who programmed deep blue, and for the chess
players. Indeed the use of the NAND gates are somehow entirely
irrelevant, we could have programmed deep blue on another type of
machine.
As complex entities, we need to have higher level description and
explanation, and are necessarily ignorant of our lower levels, which
might only be the support of our explanation, and is different from
the more genuine high level explanation.
In that way, we can recover the sense of "I take an aspirin because I
have a persistent headache since the morning".
God might know that your body takes an aspirin because it obeys to SWE
equation, but the SWE is only a context in which a person with a first
person headache experience can take an aspirin. It is not the cause or
the explanation of your behavior. You need to be God, to say that your
consciousness has no role, and from God's view, I can make sense, but
everything get wrong, hereby, simply because we are not in that God
position.
OK?
I am not sure if I succeed to be as clear as I would like. I do think
that you make a confusion between G* and S4Grz.
G* knows that []p = []p & p (so it knows that the body-zombie has a
soul, or that the soul has a body-zombie),
But G, which represent the machine cannot know that. This prevents the
machine to identify its soul, with the body, and it is only by betting
on comp, and praying God, that the soul of the machine can bet on some
level of identification, which remains unknown by the machine.
I hope we will clarify this, with and without the modal logic.
Epiphenomenalism might be correct in some God' eyes, but may be
"really false" in the machine first person eye. Bringing back that
Heaven-epiphenomenalism on Earth would be like knowing our subst
level, or knowing the basic level, or like defending a murderer by
saying it has no free will and just obeyed the SWE. That might be only
"trivially" true at some level, and deeply false at the level where we
actually live.
Case not closed!
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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