I don’t think that’s the position I am taking. I am not saying that the head isn’t made of matter. And Descartes and David Chalmers don’t make any sense to me at all. I most certainly am not in the tribe of revelatory truth.
But if somebody told me he would shoot me if I didn’t announce some philosophical position for myself, I would say I am a fallibilist, as thoroughly as I can remember to be. Each of these constructs as we currently have it is some bounded thing. We try to expand them. The big MLs clearly are a large expansion into, if not “new” dimensions beyond the theory of algorithms, apparently the realm of “more is different”. All to the good. But to suppose they _already_ contain everything there is to be understood is not a position I would take w.r.t. anything else we have anywhere in science. They contain or represent whatever they do. I don’t know how much that is, and what more it leaves to be found. I would be amazed if it were “everything”, since nothing else in science ever has been before. > On Jan 27, 2025, at 14:56, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > > It's fine if people want to imagine other metaphysics for what goes on with > consciousness, but it is a pointless violation of Occam's razor until they > show that consciousness can do things that matter cannot. As LLMs begin to > surpass human intelligence, there's really no leg for them to stand on, other > than to appeal to faith and chauvinism. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Santafe > Sent: Monday, January 27, 2025 11:40 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "I hope I'm wrong. But that text reads like it was > generated by an LLM" > > >> 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. 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