On 06 Feb 2014, at 09:57, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 5 February 2014 23:32, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
On 05 Feb 2014, at 07:54, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
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.
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.
Well, I *could* be a zombie and still say that, unless you consider
the idea of zombies contradictory (which maybe it is).
I bet you are not a zombie. But you seem to illustrate my point, if
epiphenomenalism is true, despite you are not a zombie, you could be
one, and that is a step toward the elimination of the person.
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.
A zombie would take an aspirin as well, wouldn't it? Otherwise its
zombie deception would be obvious.
Sure, he would take aspirin, coffee, and many things. We do agree on
the definition of zombie.
They act like any acting human. By definition p-zombiness is not
behaviorally detectable.
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 don't really disagree with any of that, but I would still say that
chess program makes moves due to the activity of electrons in
semiconductors,
You remain locally correct, but that is less easy to do for oneself
(as you don't know the level), and if you make consciousness having no
role, because its role is subdue to some material causality, then with
comp matter will be doubly eliminated, as it will become the illusion
of an epiphenomenon.
not because it is exercising a particular strategy
except in a manner of speaking. But the substantive point I want to
make is that there is no downward causation,
I don't think there is any causation at all. Causation is a modal
notion, and as to be treated indexically to, and with comp, in a way
related to the many computations in arithmetic.
for if there were we
would observe magical events. If you accept that then I agree with
you, any apparent disagreement is really just semantics.
We must still discuss if this is very semantics. Some higher level
laws can be quite autonomous relatively to lower level laws, and some
downard causation, even if reductible in theory to particles or
numbers, remains meaningful at his own level.
I don't think
Craig accepts that: he agrees that there are no magical events in the
brain but, inconsistently, he also believes that the brain exhibits
behaviour not entirely explained by the physics.
I agree with you, even if I am quite agnostic on the physical reality,
which might be a mean on the arithmetical sharable video game.
With arithmetic we need really only the "p -> q" = "~p V q", something
common with any Block reality notion. Then we can explain the dreams,
and the dreams coherence (with the modus ponens, or even just "->").
In
NUMBERS -> UNIVERSAL DREAMS -> PHYSICAL REALITIES -> HUMAN MIND,
there is very plausibly no direct "human mind" downward causation to
the physical realities (others than the FPI selection), I am OK with
that, but we are still ignorant on many things to evaluate the role of
possible universal mind in the building of matter in general to
conclude.
Bruno
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!
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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