There is no mind-body problem
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Philip Thrift
Oct 24, 2019, 5:29:51 AM10/24/19
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Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness?
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical, so we must have immaterial souls. Descartes went that way (albeit with secret doubts). So did many others. The mind-body problem came into existence.
Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since.
There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.
"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
This is still a difficult idea, in the present climate of thought. It takes hard thought to see it. The fact remains that we know what consciousness is; any mystery lies in the nature of matter in so far as it's not conscious. We can know for sure that we're quite hopelessly wrong about the nature of matter so long as our positive account of it creates any problem about how consciousness can be physical. Some philosophers, including Humphrey's long-time collaborator, Daniel Dennett, seem to think that the only way out of this problem is to deny the existence of consciousness, ie to make just about the craziest claim that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They do this by changing the meaning of the word "consciousness", so that their claim that it exists amounts to the claim that it doesn't. Dennett, for example, defines consciousness as "fame in the brain", where this means a certain kind of salience and connectedness that doesn't actually involve any subjective experience at all.
In Soul Dust, Humphrey seems to agree with Dennett, at least in general terms, for he begins by introducing a fictional protagonist, a consciousness-lacking alien scientist from Andromeda who arrives on Earth and finds that she needs to postulate consciousness in us to explain our behaviour. The trouble is that she's impossible, even as a fiction, if Humphrey means real consciousness. This is because she won't be able to have any conception of what consciousness is, let alone postulate it, if she's never experienced it, any more than someone who's never had visual experience can have any idea what colour experience is like (Humphrey says she'll need luck, but luck won't be enough).
Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" and this triggers a familiar response: "You say that there seems to be consciousness, but that there isn't really any. But what can this experience of seeming to be conscious be, if not a conscious experience? How can one have a genuine illusion of having red-experience without genuinely having red-experience in having the supposed illusion?"
Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using consciousness at all.
It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion. Whatever difficulties there are in explaining the survival value of consciousness, it doesn't lie in the fact that it makes self-entrancement possible. There is initially something disarming about the rapturous self-confidence of Soul Dust, but it comes in time to seem mere vanity.
Galen Strawson
@philipthrift
John Clark
Oct 24, 2019, 7:13:15 AM10/24/19
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On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 5:29 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion.
I agree it's idiotic to say "consciousness is an illusion" but for those who say consciousness is a problem at all must explain what sort of explanation of the "problem" would satisfy them, and they cannot. Even if I could prove that X caused consciousness they would say X may cause consciousness but X is not consciousness so you have not solved the problem. The hardest thing about the hard problem of consciousness is not finding the answer but explaining exactly what the question is.
> Whatever difficulties there are in explaining the survival value of consciousness [...]
John K Clark
Bruno Marchal
Oct 24, 2019, 9:46:48 AM10/24/19
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On 24 Oct 2019, at 11:29, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, "the corpuscularian philosophy", and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that "when the brains were out, the man would die". But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness?
Of course, this is in written in the Aristotelian era, or materialist era. But the whole philosophy of Plato is an attempt to solve the mind-body problem. In fact we can argue that the work of Plato contains the solution, notably in the text Theaetetus. That is indeed a solution coherent with Mechanism, up to an explanation of the existence of matter, or its appearance, from a theory of consciousness.
The usual solution of the mind-body problem is what we call “a religion”. A religion is only a conception of reality which does not put the soul, or consciousness under the rug.
People who claim that they have no religion are usually people who take for granted the solution proposed by Aristotle, where consciousness is naturalised in some way. In fact it is the solution shared by atheists and Christians, for example, except that atheist eliminates consciousness, usually invoking a mechanist explanation, like “consciousness is a natural product of the activity of a brain”. That solution can be shown incompatible with Descartes Mechanism.
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
so we must have immaterial souls.
That’s a valid conclusion. Of course this was found already in India and China, and in the antic Greece.
It comes from the understanding that the first person view is different from the thread person view, which is something related to empathy: the ability to put oneself in the shoes of someone else.
Descartes went that way (albeit with secret doubts).
OK. Note that Descartes theory is exposed in the indo-greek text “the question of King Milinda”.
So did many others. The mind-body problem came into existence.Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is "much odder than we thought", as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since.
That matter is something weird is of course an important point here. Mechanism explains why it has to be like that.
In fact there are as many formulation of the mind-body problem than there are type of metaphysics.
Basically,
1) for a dualist (which believe in Matter and Mind as distinct ontologically real things) the problem consist in explaining the relation between both. Dualism is usually abandoned, because if there is a relation between mind and matter, making them belonging to different realm makes only the problem harder.
2) for a materialist monist, the problem consists in finding a materialist phenomenology of mind.
3) for a immaterialist monist, the problem consists in finding an immaterialist phenomenology of matter. That is what Mechanism, and the “theology of the machine/number” provides.
There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness.
Yes, some people keep saying that they don’t see the problem, but it is hard to judge them, given the 1500 years of pseudo-scientific, or pseudo-religious, imposed solution on this.
We know exactly what consciousness is;
Yes, indeed. Good point.
we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case.”
This points correctly on the notion of first person knowledge. The problem of knowledge is, fundamentally, the same as the problem of consciousness (up to slight vocabulary nuance).
You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.
That is valid data, but of course, it is not a theory, still less an explanation. For some Catholics some time ago, without listening to Jesus, you could not have a soul, so “Indian” (South American) were considered to not have a soul, and so you could use them as slaves, etc. Eventually, they changes their mind on this, and begun the christianisation of South-America (which was a progress compared to treat them as zombies or animals).
"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
Saying that we don’t know what is matter means that, in particular, se have not solve the mind/matter problem. We don’t know either what is the mind or consciousness. To identify two mysteries does not solve any problems.
But the intuition here is good: the hard problem of consciousness might need to sole an hard problem of matter, indeed.
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.)
That is correct, but belongs to the enunciation of the problem. It is not a solution of the problem. Are those atoms necessary. Are atoms necessary at all, etc.
And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
That is sheer non-sense. If consciousness is a form of matter, what is its mass, volume, temperature, etc. That makes non sense, intuitively, and indeed with mechanism, we do get a “simple” theory of consciousness (machine’s knowledge), and we can explain the illusion of matter from this, in a testable way.
This is still a difficult idea, in the present climate of thought. It takes hard thought to see it.
Here the guy has given an embryo of the enunciation of the problem, and immediately after talk like if it was a solution, identifying consciousness with some matter. Of course this is just unrigorous hand waving.
The fact remains that we know what consciousness is; any mystery lies in the nature of matter in so far as it's not conscious. We can know for sure that we're quite hopelessly wrong about the nature of matter so long as our positive account of it creates any problem about how consciousness can be physical.
That is one step toward the elimination of consciousness.
Some philosophers, including Humphrey's long-time collaborator, Daniel Dennett,
I guessed it!
seem to think that the only way out of this problem is to deny the existence of consciousness, ie to make just about the craziest claim that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They do this by changing the meaning of the word "consciousness", so that their claim that it exists amounts to the claim that it doesn't. Dennett, for example, defines consciousness as "fame in the brain", where this means a certain kind of salience and connectedness that doesn't actually involve any subjective experience at all.
OK. That is akin to the Churchland eliminativism (of consciousness).
In Soul Dust, Humphrey seems to agree with Dennett, at least in general terms, for he begins by introducing a fictional protagonist, a consciousness-lacking alien scientist from Andromeda who arrives on Earth and finds that she needs to postulate consciousness in us to explain our behaviour. The trouble is that she's impossible, even as a fiction, if Humphrey means real consciousness. This is because she won't be able to have any conception of what consciousness is, let alone postulate it, if she's never experienced it, any more than someone who's never had visual experience can have any idea what colour experience is like (Humphrey says she'll need luck, but luck won't be enough).
OK.
Humphrey also talks in Dennettian style of "the consciousness illusion" and this triggers a familiar response: "You say that there seems to be consciousness, but that there isn't really any. But what can this experience of seeming to be conscious be, if not a conscious experience? How can one have a genuine illusion of having red-experience without genuinely having red-experience in having the supposed illusion?”
That is correct. A genuine illusion needs to be conscious to be an illusion, so to say that consciousness is an illusion is total nonsense.
But we are not far from the indo-greek path toward a solution. If consciousness is not an illusion, and we we want to be monist, maybe it is “matter” which is the illusion.
As I said often: it is easier to explain the illusion of a stone to a conscious being than to explain the illusion of consciousness (already non-sensical) to a stone ("inert matter").
Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using consciousness at all.
That is false. In the mechanist theory, we can understand what consciousness is, why it is necessary, and how it creates the illusion of matter, and how matter makes it possible to stabilise consciousness in long (deep) histories. But matter lost its primary ontology status. That runs against our 1500 years of materialist brainwashing, of course, but it was the most intuitive explanation for long, where reality is a sort of dream (of some God, or not).
It seems to me, then, that Humphrey's central contentions are hopeless. One doesn't solve the problem of consciousness (such as it is) by saying that consciousness is really a kind of illusion.
Indeed.
Whatever difficulties there are in explaining the survival value of consciousness, it doesn't lie in the fact that it makes self-entrancement possible. There is initially something disarming about the rapturous self-confidence of Soul Dust, but it comes in time to seem mere vanity.
It would be long to describe here, and now (it is done in my long text “Consciousness and Mechanism” (in French: conscience et mécanisme), but consciousness as an important role, first in the very fabric of the physical reality, secondly, in the development of the living beings abilities to act on their environment. It can be proved (it *has* been proved!) that machine’s consciousness speed up their ability to compute with respect to either the universal machine running them, or relatively to other universal machine (in the material tensorial structure which allows parallel computations).
Let me explain a little bit. The consciousness of the machine is related to two fundamental theorems in mathematical logic, both found by Gödel, plus some others.
I assume a chatty machine which asserts sometime some “belief”. I limit myself to arithmetically sound and rich machine.
1) the completeness theorem: it says that is a machine is consistent then there is a reality which satisfies (make true) its belief. This means that the syntactical concept of consistency (of some beliefs) is related to the semantical concept of having a reality satisfying such beliefs.
2) the incompleteness theorem: if a machine is consistent (and thus if there is a reality which satisfy the machine’s belief), the machine cannot prove its consistency. That is: if there is a reality, the machine cannot prove that there is a reality.
We can add
3) Tarski theorem, which explains that such a machine will not even be able to define that reality.
Note that logician used the term “model” instead of reality, but as many people comes from physics, and the fact that physicists use “model” in the logician’s sense of theory, I use reality instead. It is a semantical notion. A model/reality of a theory (set of beliefs) is a structure which verifies/statisfies those beliefs/assertions/sentences.
Then, it is again a theorem by Gödel, inihis “length of proof” short paper (page 82 in Davis’s “Undecidable" book) which explains why consciousness and self-consciousness provides an evolutive advantage among the living beings, with also rather dangerous bad side effect, like the development of fear. Indeed, Gödel showed that when you add an undecidable sentence of a theory as a new axiom of that theory, you can solve an infinity of more problem (may undecidable sentences become decidable) but the length of the proofs of infinitely many decidable sentences can shortened in a quasi arbitrary. In principle the machine enlarges its accessibility spectrum imeans n its local environment. That can be related (non trivially) to some other speed-up phenomenon in theoretical computer science (like notably the Blum Speed-up theorem: which says that you can by using the right software makes a Babbaage like machine more quick than a 2100 quantum computer, on almost all arguments (that is the snap: I don’t claim this has any use in practice, but it plays a role, due to the lack of first person consciousness on the “delays” in the universal dovetailing).
The universal dovetailer argument shows that the mind-body problem (the problem of relating first person experiences to some third person sharable realities) is reduced to the justification of the Turing machine’s observable (and its mathematics) from a statistics of first person experience on all computation (a mathematical concept with Church-Turing’s theses).
Eventually, we get the logic of those mathematics, at their propositional level, by the modal logics of the “Theaetetus’ variants of Gödel’s arithmetical “beweisbar predicate”. The logics of ([]p & p), []p & <>t, []p & p & <>t” (+ graded variants with <>t replaced by <><>t, or <><><>t).
Those are quantum logics, and the open problems here is how to extract the tensor product, or the linear logic, from those logics of the observable.
Like in physics, we get an interesting labyrinth of quantum logics, and by incompleteness, G*, they are divided into private and non justifiable part (the qualia) and relatively sharable parts: the qualia.
Put in another way, with Mechanism, the elementary arithmetical reality (which we know is not simple at all since Gödel) determine a consciousness flux, initiated on all universal numbers, and which differentiate, and fuse, along many histories. It converges (in some technical sense) to a sort of multiverse.
Mechanism is eliminativist, not of the observable, but of the idea that what we observe is ontologically primary (Aristotle). What we observe is “only” a local indexical projection of the whole (arithmetical) reality into itself (assuming mechanism, and rather well tested thanks to Everett’s QM (without collapse)).
Bruno
Galen Strawson@philipthrift--
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Brent Meeker
Oct 24, 2019, 2:10:48 PM10/24/19
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On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just
parts that push and pull.
Brent
Brent
Brent Meeker
Oct 24, 2019, 2:21:22 PM10/24/19
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On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
That is sheer non-sense. If consciousness is a form of matter, what is its mass, volume, temperature, etc. That makes non sense, intuitively, and indeed with mechanism, we do get a “simple” theory of consciousness (machine’s knowledge), and we can explain the illusion of matter from this, in a testable way.
It's a "form" in a metaphorical sense, as wetness is an attribute to
water and some other liquid compounds. It appears when the matter
is sufficiently complex in it's arrangement and interactions to
produce responses to its environment that are intelligent and
purposeful. That's exactly the operational criterion we use to
infer consciousness in other beings. And it implies degrees of
consciousness. Something Platonic concepts of consciousness cannot
do.
Brent
Brent
Philip Thrift
Oct 24, 2019, 2:50:03 PM10/24/19
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It still seems though that what hits one over the head with being indisputable is:
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.)
That's sort of have-matter-compiler, will-make-consciousness (like the Frankenstein movies showing this time of year).
Whatever Gödel-Löbs are going on are going on in that material form.
@philipthrft
Brent Meeker
Oct 24, 2019, 3:19:51 PM10/24/19
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On 10/24/2019 2:29 AM, Philip Thrift
wrote:
Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using consciousness at all.
But for an intelligent social species this "instinct" will have to
include the ability to model oneself in interactions with others and
to include the fact that they will model you. This kind of
self-awareness is the highest order to self-reference that
philosophers revere as "consciousness". There are certainly plenty
of other levels of consciousness in which ego doesn't appear and
you're not thinking about personal survival. Again it is a mistake
derived from Plato's mysticism and the desire for immortality that
makes consciousness a kind of separate soul substance, a single
thing that can survive the death of the mechanism that produced it.
Brent
Brent
Brent Meeker
Oct 24, 2019, 4:01:56 PM10/24/19
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On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> The universal dovetailer argument shows that the mind-body problem
> (the problem of relating first person experiences to some third person
> sharable realities) is reduced to the justification of the Turing
> machine’s observable (and its mathematics) from a statistics of first
> person experience on all computation (a mathematical concept with
> Church-Turing’s theses).
I don't understand that. What is "the Turing machine's observable"?
> (the problem of relating first person experiences to some third person
> sharable realities) is reduced to the justification of the Turing
> machine’s observable (and its mathematics) from a statistics of first
> person experience on all computation (a mathematical concept with
> Church-Turing’s theses).
And how is a first person experience found in the UDA in order to form
statistics of it?
Brent
Bruno Marchal
Oct 25, 2019, 7:52:15 AM10/25/19
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I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial distinction.
Bruno
Brent
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 25, 2019, 8:00:47 AM10/25/19
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On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:21, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
That is sheer non-sense. If consciousness is a form of matter, what is its mass, volume, temperature, etc. That makes non sense, intuitively, and indeed with mechanism, we do get a “simple” theory of consciousness (machine’s knowledge), and we can explain the illusion of matter from this, in a testable way.
It's a "form" in a metaphorical sense, as wetness is an attribute to water and some other liquid compounds.
Wetness is typically ambiguous, like color. It can be used to denote the felling by a person of being wet, and some amount of water in some material compound. In the first case it denotes a qualia, in the second case it denotes quanta.
It appears when the matter is sufficiently complex in it's arrangement and interactions to produce responses to its environment that are intelligent and purposeful.
That is what Chalmers could call the “easy problem of consciousness”. But the hard problem is that if the easy problem is all there is, then why should the feeling of pain exist at all, and what is it?
That's exactly the operational criterion we use to infer consciousness in other beings.
Which might be not to bad, FAPP, but that does not solve the problem of “what is matter, what is mind, and how are their related”. Mechanism do solves the problem is a complete way, making the solution testable, as it forces us to derive the laws of physics from the self-reference logics.
And it implies degrees of consciousness. Something Platonic concepts of consciousness cannot do.
On the contrary, Mechanism explains the huge variety of type of consciousness, with a complete mathematical structure attached to it, and the physical consciousnesss is testable, as the observable must be explained by the logic of certain prediction (which gives rise to the 3 usual variants of []p).
Read my last papers to have all the details, which of course needs some familiarity with Gödel’s work and followers.
Bruno
Brent
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 25, 2019, 8:08:48 AM10/25/19
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This is explained by the fact that the physical law are Turing complete (despite being necessarily more than that, given that the physical laws in general are not Turing emulable, as I have proved (in the frame of the Mechanist hypothesis).
That's sort of have-matter-compiler, will-make-consciousness (like the Frankenstein movies showing this time of year).Whatever Gödel-Löbs are going on are going on in that material form.
That does not follow. With mechanism, the laws of physics emerge from the statistics on the first person universal machine experience in arithmetic. Matter would need to have magical abilities to select some particular computations in arithmetic, a bit like a physicists should not obey to quantum mechanics if the collapse axioms was true. The collapse in QM is a bit like the selection implicit in the idea that there is a unique universe or history, when the theories which work enforce that we take all computations into account. Here, just the two slits experience already confirms the intuitive self-multiplication of the observer histories in arithmetic.
Bruno
@philipthrft
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 25, 2019, 8:12:41 AM10/25/19
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On 24 Oct 2019, at 21:19, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 2:29 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using consciousness at all.
But for an intelligent social species this "instinct" will have to include the ability to model oneself in interactions with others and to include the fact that they will model you. This kind of self-awareness is the highest order to self-reference that philosophers revere as "consciousness". There are certainly plenty of other levels of consciousness in which ego doesn't appear and you're not thinking about personal survival.
I agree.
Again it is a mistake derived from Plato's mysticism and the desire for immortality that makes consciousness a kind of separate soul substance, a single thing that can survive the death of the mechanism that produced it.
The genuine problem is that if consciousness is produce by a digital mechanism, then there is an infinity of mechanism which produces it, and the theory of matter has to become a statistics on personal (or first person plural personal) histories (computations involving Löbian machines).
The idea that the clinical locally 3p death entails the first person death is as much mystical and can be considered as a form of wishful thinking. Things are not that simple.
Bruno
Brent
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 25, 2019, 8:19:11 AM10/25/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> On 24 Oct 2019, at 22:01, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> The universal dovetailer argument shows that the mind-body problem (the problem of relating first person experiences to some third person sharable realities) is reduced to the justification of the Turing machine’s observable (and its mathematics) from a statistics of first person experience on all computation (a mathematical concept with Church-Turing’s theses).
>
> I don't understand that. What is "the Turing machine's observable”?
> And how is a first person experience found in the UDA in order to form statistics of it?
Bruno
>
> Brent
>
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Brent Meeker
Oct 25, 2019, 5:55:11 PM10/25/19
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On 10/25/2019 4:52 AM, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:10, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just parts that push and pull.
I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial distinction.
Oops. I see I wrote "could" where I intended "couldn't".
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of the mill in producing flour, which one wouldn't find by inspecting the machine. But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel. But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself. If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Brent
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of the mill in producing flour, which one wouldn't find by inspecting the machine. But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel. But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself. If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Brent
Brent Meeker
Oct 25, 2019, 5:58:28 PM10/25/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 10/25/2019 5:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> The genuine problem is that if consciousness is produce by a digital
> mechanism, then there is an infinity of mechanism which produces it,
> and the theory of matter has to become a statistics on personal (or
> first person plural personal) histories (computations involving Löbian
> machines).
>
Brent
Bruno Marchal
Oct 26, 2019, 4:41:43 AM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 25 Oct 2019, at 23:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/25/2019 4:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:10, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just parts that push and pull.
I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial distinction.
Oops. I see I wrote "could" where I intended "couldn't".
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of the mill in producing flour,
The production of flour by the mill is describable in pure 3p terms. I see not introspective machine there a priori.
which one wouldn't find by inspecting the machine.
Indeed. But that would be different if the mill contains some chips, and would be capable to describe itself, asserting things like “Yesterday there was no wind, and I was unable to make as much flour that I expected, I am sorry”.
But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel. But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself. If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Not know. But he can bet, but then he bets on Mechanism, and eventually he will understand that physics has to be founded on machine’s psychology/theology/computer-science/arithmetic. He was going in that direction, and was not so far of the discovery of the universal machine.
Bruno
Brent
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 26, 2019, 4:45:56 AM10/26/19
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It is the materialist which needs infinities and a lot of magic to associate my consciousness to one machine in arithmetic, and not to the potential infinitely many which are run in the arithmetical reality (which is not an ontological thing!).
With mechanism, what exist are 0, s’0), s(s(0)), ...etc. No infinite things there.
Bruno
>
> Brent
>
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Brent Meeker
Oct 26, 2019, 3:45:28 PM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 10/26/2019 1:41 AM, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 25 Oct 2019, at 23:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/25/2019 4:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:10, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just parts that push and pull.
I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial distinction.
Oops. I see I wrote "could" where I intended "couldn't".
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of the mill in producing flour,
The production of flour by the mill is describable in pure 3p terms. I see not introspective machine there a priori.
which one wouldn't find by inspecting the machine.
Indeed. But that would be different if the mill contains some chips, and would be capable to describe itself, asserting things like “Yesterday there was no wind, and I was unable to make as much flour that I expected, I am sorry”.
But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel. But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself. If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Not know. But he can bet,
Scientists only ever know things in that sense; it goes without
saying. It is only metaphysicians who pretend to "know" things in
some absolute sense.
Brent
Brent
but then he bets on Mechanism, and eventually he will understand that physics has to be founded on machine’s psychology/theology/computer-science/arithmetic. He was going in that direction, and was not so far of the discovery of the universal machine.
Bruno
Brent
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Brent Meeker
Oct 26, 2019, 3:50:16 PM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 10/26/2019 1:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 25 Oct 2019, at 23:58, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 10/25/2019 5:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> The genuine problem is that if consciousness is produce by a digital mechanism, then there is an infinity of mechanism which produces it, and the theory of matter has to become a statistics on personal (or first person plural personal) histories (computations involving Löbian machines).
>>>
>> In materialism there are no infinities. They are just Platonic pipe dreams.
>
> In mechanism there is no infinities.
> The infinities are phenomenological.
There are no infinities in phenomenon either.
> Analysis is as much part of the machine phenomenology than physics. No real numbers!
>
> It is the materialist which needs infinities and a lot of magic to associate my consciousness to one machine in arithmetic, and not to the potential infinitely
"real"; a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
Brent
Russell Standish
Oct 26, 2019, 8:05:39 PM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 12:50:10PM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real";
> a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
>
> Brent
I don't know about that. The everything is "all finite things" is a
>
> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real";
> a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
>
> Brent
perfectly rational starting point for an ensemble theory.
Even though Max's original "all mathematical objects" theory is
ambivalent on the point, I've always interpreted that as "all finite
axiomatic systems", even in my first paper on the subject: "Why Occams
Razor".
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brent Meeker
Oct 26, 2019, 8:25:55 PM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 10/26/2019 5:05 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 12:50:10PM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real";
>> a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
>>
>> Brent
> I don't know about that. The everything is "all finite things" is a
> perfectly rational starting point for an ensemble theory.
>
> Even though Max's original "all mathematical objects" theory is
> ambivalent on the point, I've always interpreted that as "all finite
> axiomatic systems", even in my first paper on the subject: "Why Occams
> Razor".
many axioms of the form (s...(s(s(s)))...).
So I'm not sure what your refer to. I doubt that "all finite things"
is well defined. Is the set of all finite things finite?
Brent
Russell Standish
Oct 26, 2019, 8:33:50 PM10/26/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
axiomatic systems", or "all turing machines".
Peano arithmetic is a finite axiomatic system. However, the integers
is not - as shown by Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
Bruno Marchal
Oct 27, 2019, 5:39:47 AM10/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 26 Oct 2019, at 21:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/26/2019 1:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Oct 2019, at 23:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/25/2019 4:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Oct 2019, at 20:10, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 10/24/2019 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Leibniz put it well in 1686, in his famous image of the mill: consciousness, he said, "cannot be explained on mechanical principles, ie by shapes and movements…. imagine that there is a machine [eg a brain] whose structure makes it think, sense and have perception. Then we can conceive it enlarged, so that we can go inside it, as into a mill. Suppose that we do: then if we inspect the interior we shall find there nothing but parts which push one another, and never anything which could explain a conscious experience."
Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical,
That’s a valid reasoning.
No it's not. Leibniz could find "producing flour" either, just parts that push and pull.
I don’t understand. I think you miss here the 1p and 3p crucial distinction.
Oops. I see I wrote "could" where I intended "couldn't".
But that's not your objection is it. The 1p would be the experience of the mill in producing flour,
The production of flour by the mill is describable in pure 3p terms. I see not introspective machine there a priori.
which one wouldn't find by inspecting the machine.
Indeed. But that would be different if the mill contains some chips, and would be capable to describe itself, asserting things like “Yesterday there was no wind, and I was unable to make as much flour that I expected, I am sorry”.
But that's because a mill doesn't have experience in the relevant sense. It may well have "mill experience", i.e. it's parts wear and that constitutes a kind of memory and it responds to environments as more or less power is available from it's water wheel. But it can't have experience in the human (or even dog sense) because it is not sufficiently complex nor programmed to interact with it's environment based on internal modeling which includes modeling itself. If it had those things, then with sufficient study Leibniz could find them and know about the 1p experience of the mill.
Not know. But he can bet,
Scientists only ever know things in that sense; it goes without saying.
OK. Fair enough.
It is only metaphysicians who pretend to "know" things in some absolute sense.
Only fraudulent metaphysicists do that, like when a science is stolen by a political power, like in USSR, or like non Occident in general in the fundamental domain.
That is the whole point of making theology come back at the faculty of science: allows doubt and skepticism, and stop the claim of truth, or certainties, which are always symptoms of dishonesty.
Bruno
Brent
but then he bets on Mechanism, and eventually he will understand that physics has to be founded on machine’s psychology/theology/computer-science/arithmetic. He was going in that direction, and was not so far of the discovery of the universal machine.
Bruno
Brent
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 27, 2019, 5:48:28 AM10/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> On 26 Oct 2019, at 21:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/26/2019 1:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 25 Oct 2019, at 23:58, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 10/25/2019 5:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> The genuine problem is that if consciousness is produce by a digital mechanism, then there is an infinity of mechanism which produces it, and the theory of matter has to become a statistics on personal (or first person plural personal) histories (computations involving Löbian machines).
>>>>
>>> In materialism there are no infinities. They are just Platonic pipe dreams.
>>
>> In mechanism there is no infinities.
>
> Then stop referring to "an infinity of mechanism which produces it”.
>> The infinities are phenomenological.
>
> There are no infinities in phenomenon either.
>
>
>
>> Analysis is as much part of the machine phenomenology than physics. No real numbers!
>>
>> It is the materialist which needs infinities and a lot of magic to associate my consciousness to one machine in arithmetic, and not to the potential infinitely
>
> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real"; a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
Bruno
>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 27, 2019, 5:55:36 AM10/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> On 27 Oct 2019, at 02:25, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/26/2019 5:05 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 12:50:10PM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real";
>>> a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
>>>
>>> Brent
>> I don't know about that. The everything is "all finite things" is a
>> perfectly rational starting point for an ensemble theory.
>>
>> Even though Max's original "all mathematical objects" theory is
>> ambivalent on the point, I've always interpreted that as "all finite
>> axiomatic systems", even in my first paper on the subject: "Why Occams
>> Razor".
>
That is used to denote the natural numbers. Peano arithmetic is not finitely many axiomatisable due to the necessary presence of the scheme of inductions axioms.
But that is why the ontology is ,to given by Peano arithmetic, but by Robinson arithmetic, which is indeed a finitely axiomatisble theory. It has seven axioms (sides the axioms of classical logic).
> So I'm not sure what your refer to. I doubt that "all finite things" is well defined. Is the set of all finite things finite?
That is the oldest problem in theology: is god a possible object of the reality. Neoplatonists, but also Vimalarty and many Indian schools, got the opinion that it cannot. That is why the ONE is neither a part, nor an element of the set of beings. The whole is not even definable from inside. Quine New foundations allows a universal set, though. So it might makes sense that God can be in the universe, but it cannot make sense once we assume mechanism, where the numbers of numbers is not a number, as Plotonius foresaw.
Bruno
>
> Brent
>
>
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Bruno Marchal
Oct 27, 2019, 5:59:18 AM10/27/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> On 27 Oct 2019, at 02:33, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 05:25:39PM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 10/26/2019 5:05 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 12:50:10PM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>>> I'm glad you recognize there's a difference between "potential" and "real";
>>>> a distinction this list is founded to obfuscate.
>>>>
>>>> Brent
>>> I don't know about that. The everything is "all finite things" is a
>>> perfectly rational starting point for an ensemble theory.
>>>
>>> Even though Max's original "all mathematical objects" theory is
>>> ambivalent on the point, I've always interpreted that as "all finite
>>> axiomatic systems", even in my first paper on the subject: "Why Occams
>>> Razor".
>>
>> Peano arithmetic is not a finite axiomatic system. It has infinitely many
>> axioms of the form (s...(s(s(s)))...).
>> So I'm not sure what your refer to. I doubt that "all finite things" is
>> well defined. Is the set of all finite things finite?
>>
>
> It was a way of characterising a type of theory, such as "all finite
> axiomatic systems", or "all turing machines".
>
> Peano arithmetic is a finite axiomatic system.
> However, the integers
> is not - as shown by Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
Bruno
>
>
> Cheers
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
> Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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