On 05 Feb 2014, at 14:28, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 4:54:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 04 Feb 2014, at 18:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2014 11:54:26 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 04 Feb 2014, at 12:46, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> On 4 February 2014 22:32, 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.
>
>> 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 we must explain the elementary assumptions also,
Of course. But unless we want do philosophical obfuscation, there is
also a need of some good-willingness in accepting sharing some
elementary belief.
Why would I share an elementary belief that I understand to be false?
Nobody ask you this. On the contrary, the idea is to start from what
we can agree on.
Given the complexity of the problem we talk about, we might even ask
if we agree on the logical rules.
So my question is what does need to be explained in the axioms of
arithmetic that I have given? For most people a first order logic
axiom like
0 ≠ s(x) (for all x) is simpler to understand that any statement
involving terms like "sense" or "aesthetic".
It's not simpler for me, or someone who doesn't know the language of
mathematical notation.
It is conceptually simpler. I could have written instead:
"0 is not equal to the successor of any number".
Or write a longer sentence. It is intuitively trivial with the
intended standard intuitive notion of numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, ...
I have to figure out what is meant by s(x), which distracts me from
the question of whether s(x) is actually fictional and derived from
a whole history of philosophical formulation.
You confuse the intended notion with the relation between the humans
and that notion. We can always come back on this, but you should
appeal to such side notion only when you think that it invalidate the
reasoning. If not you do what we call in french "un procès
d'intention", that is, you attribute to your opponents statements that
he never did.
Once you know how to read the language, the sense making that it
took to get there, such as all of the childhood wiring of tactile
and visual metaphors crafted by patient teachers, are elided into
the sub-personal awareness.
We do that all the time. Again, if you are willing to argue, you must
invoke the elision only if it invalidates the argument.
With the bulk of the iceberg of sense making metaphor safely under
water, yes the tip seems much simpler than talking about something
for which a formal language has yet to exist.
I discovered formal language in biology. As far as Nature exists, it
exploits arguably the formal and the multiplicable all the times. A
formal system, fundamentally, is just a system defined by its form.
The axiom here says 0 is not a successor of any natural number. A
FAQ is "is not 0 the successor of -1 ?", and the anwer is that we
just accept "0 ≠ s(x)" to eliminate the negative numbers, in which
we are not interested because we want a very simple Turing universal
base. We could use all integers, as they are also Turing universal
with addition and multiplication, but we have chosen the natural
numbers.
Beyond that type of explanation, at this stage, asking for more is
obfuscation.
It would be obfuscation if we were asking about computation or math,
but I'm only interested in the relationship of consciousness to
physics and information.
Then *you* should stay mute about comp. You can't say that comp is
false and computer science irrelevant for sense and consciousness, and
make negative statement like my sun is law (who get an artficial
brain) is a zombie, without us asking to justify your point, without
appealing on "real", "true", "feel", "obvious", etc.
UDA can certainly inspires attempt in that direction, as it seems to
imply an inflation of continuations, much larger a priori than the
apparently well defined local continuation we observe.
But you insist that your first axiom is that comp is false.
And I agree with the *feeling*, if only because *that* feeling, I
think, is understandable. Indeed, the more you grasp comp, the less it
is believable. That is, modulo some definitions, a theorem in comp.
You can't ask us to start from such a strong negative statement. It
leads to p-zombie, and well, may daughter thinks differently, and I do
not see how you could contradict her.
and then we find that sense can only be self-explanatory. Nothing
else can be self explanatory because explanation itself can't be
anything other than a way of making sense.
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".
I think that if you aren't seeing that sense is fundamental, it is
because you have stopped questioning it when you get to a
comfortable level of objective-seeming simplicity.
Sense is without doubt fundamental, and is indeed the base of the
UDA (with sense/consciousness assumed to be invariant for the
digital transplant). Then the math of comp makes it possible to
pursue the interrogation, not avoid it.
If you are agreeing that sense is fundamental then are you agreeing
that arithmetic truth is derived from sense?
No. Sense is fundamental, if only because only it pull us toward
truth, justice, etc. But with comp, somehow, it participates also in
the building of space, time, energies, realities, etc.
But sense is not primitive, it arises itself from the existing
solutions of diophantine polynomials. (A tiny part of arithmetical
truth).
In comp terms, the reason that I disallow the digital transplant is
that I suspect that the capacity for sensory enrichment is nested-
logarithmic, and that there are thresholds in which that logarithm
diagonalizes, if that makes sense.
I have a large mind and I can make sense of this, but computability is
close for diagonalization, and anyway, if this is only something that
you *suspect*, you can't use it to invalidate a reasoning, especially
at step 0 (the stated assumptions).
A biological organism, lets say a frog, represents a particular
history of sensory experience. If we assume fundamental sense, then
the forgetting that we experience in our momentary consciousness,
and the loss of history in death, is not fundamental. It is retained
on the Absolute level, so that what is expressed to us by the frog's
living body (hopping, croaking, etc, not just anatomically
amphibian, but personality, character, metaphor) is not only a what
but also a who that recapitulates the entire history of the
individual frog, all frogs, amphibians, living organisms, etc. The
frog image that we are aesthetically acquainted with is the very tip
of a tall spire of history that our public facing senses render as
collapsed into an externalized presence. We can do this because both
we and the frog, at the bottom of our spires, share the same base of
common sense.
No problem, but then you should be happy with the idea that after
Gödel the mathematicians have to extend that same base of common sense
to all universal numbers.
The family is bigger than we thought.
The problem with digital substitution is that it just takes the
collapsed rendering and simulates it in our experience, so that the
spire of history which connects it to our experience and the
Totality of experience is missing entirely, replaced by an
impersonal set of modal strategies to navigate the un-inspired, flat
terrain which fills the space between spires.
That would be the case if a 3p machine could think, but no 3p things
can think. Only 1p person think. You beg the question by a sort of
decision of not attributing an 1p person to a machine, but the math
shows evidence for a person. We get it freely when we apply Theaetus'
definition on Gödel provability, which indeed capture a recursive
definition of the belief in arithmetic/computer-science and possible
effective (or not effective, actually) extensions.
You are reducing the machine to its form, but form have semantics, and
with billions of neurons, you can digitally encode a deep past
summary, a long complex history.
I'm seeing simplicity itself as a concept - a quality which is
revealed not by some mechanism, but by sanity itself - a sanity
shared by all phenomena without having to be taught or practiced
like arithmetic.
Yes, shared by all phenomena including the arithmetical one. Why not?
Because the arithmetical one is a synthetic summary of externalized
sense.
= "because comp is false".
Perhaps *The* external summary.
The reality we search. you cannot invoke that to make a negative
statement on a theory. That would be exactly like invoking God to
conclude that the Indians have no soul (and thus can be enslaved and
tortured).
Fuzzy philosophy can be ok. Some people non well trained in science
can have insight, and sometimes even see what the experts can no
more see, by having their nose to close the subject matter.
But using fuzzy philosophy to make peremptory negative statement,
notably on the presence/absence of consciousness for some type of
being, makes me feel uneasy, especially when you don't try to answer
the arguments presented. I can't help myself to not think you do
have prejudices on numbers and machines.
If I have prejudices against numbers and machines it is only because
I see that saying yes to the doctor is a catastrophe that few
understand how to avoid and why it should be avoided. By this I mean
it metaphorically that I see myself as part of a very threatened
civilization which is on the verge of turning into a computer
controlled prison.
I share a part of the fear, but that is a reason to awaken people, and
comp shows why universal numbers are awaken at the start, and then
indeed that they can easily fall sleepy, and get enslaved by another
universal numbers.
But the world of computer is not controllable, and attempt to control
it makes it quickly less controllable. In the long run, the liars are
defeated, but meanwhile a lot of suffering is possible. Nothing is
simple here. But *deciding* that some entities cannot think will not
help. We can debate, but for this you must realize that "comp is
false", despite the feeling, is not obvious.
I see us as in the depths of the Dark Ages as far as consciousness
is concerned, fiddling in the Neo-Scholastic echo-chambers of quanta
while the forest of qualia burns.
Your grass seems potent. I agree we are in the Dark Ages, but I
attribute this to the fact that theology, unlike all other science,
did not succeed in getting the non confessional academical seriousness
and rigor it deserves.
You seem on the opposite side: you want science to allow the lack of
rigor of theology, apparently.
You almost seems to refuse arguing, and vindicate a status of truth
for your negative opinion about machine's consciousness (machine
abilities to emulate a living person).
Had I been alive in Galileo's time, I would have seen just the
opposite, and advanced the idea of verificationism and measurement
to halt the tide of superstition and chaos.
I prefer a superstition which gives a chance to my sun in law, to a
superstition which does not.
Comp is more a right than a "truth". It implies the right to say "no",
also. Comp might be false (I don't really care), but as a logician I
will continue to debunk invalid refutation of comp, and continue to
try to study the consequence. Eventually you will understand, perhaps,
why machines can already do that.
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
Craig
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, ...).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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