> On Jan 27, 2025, at 10:35, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > > Eric writes: > > "He is arguing against the computation framing of consciousness. Searle’s > device is to say that my brain is like my stomach, and that the computation > framing doesn’t do its complexity justice." > > Can say the same thing about quantum mechanics.
It’s an interesting response, because answering it requires deciding what role a law has in our understanding of the world. It happens (as these accidents do) that I was at a conference maybe 3 months ago with at least one philosopher who writes on this, so I know it is a field. (Actually, got a dosing from other sources over the weekend, so I know more than that….) Somehow, each thing we create as a formalism is bounded. I don’t want to say finite in its instantiations, because those could be infinite in various cardinalities. But finite in the premises that generate it as a formal system. QM as much as anything else. So we say that the best guess right now is that there is no type of matter (and should be no type of spacetime) that isn’t borne on by, or limited by the constraints of, the generating premises of QM. We would like laws to have universality of that kind, and if they don’t, we look for ways to improve them to others that will get closer. But if we think “the universe” refers to something about which there could be indefinitely much to be known or understood, and somehow a much bigger infinity than that of any formalisms that, once we create them, are just more “things in the world”, so just parts of that universe. It doesn’t seem like we want to say there is a containment relation whereby the one finite thing “contains” everything — in the sense of “everything there is that makes up an understanding”. All the ways I know to imagine this, since it refers to things I don’t know yet, are metaphors. I can think about “projections” in the sense of dimension reduction, and a universe-of-everything that can have infinitely many dimensions projected out of it, with the remainder being _exactly_ the premises of QM. Others seem to like to think of it in some kind of set-containment metaphor, where QM “handles” some “subset of phenomena” “in” the universe. (The latter doesn’t appeal to me as much.) Does the “projection” metaphor of how QM constrains all else that we will say about matter seem equally apt, for what one or another computational model says about what-all goes on in heads (and where relevant, bodies)? Seems mismatched. The set-containment metaphor seems better for computation-like events in heads. At the end, though, they are all metaphors, pretty clearly adopted out of desperation to have some mental image. If we let go of the mental image, then what we seem to be left with is just a list of cases. Here is QM; there is geometry; this is some algebra; here’s a formal declaration of computability; and here are various hooks and interfaces at which they seem to make some kind of contact with one another that we also write down explicitly. Maybe that’s all there is; or all that we have any justification to speak as if there is. Poor FRIAM: so far from DaveW, so close to Nick. Dunno. Eric .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
