On 25 Sep 2012, at 05:45, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able
>> to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
>
> The behaviour - talking about the pain - could be explained entirely
> as a sequence of physical events, without any hint of underlying
> qualia.
With comp a physical events is explained in term of measure and
machine/number relative consciousness selection (à la WM-duplication
way).
Physics is phenomenal. It is an internal consciousness selection made
on coherent computations (arithmetical relations).
We can't explain physics without a theory of quanta, which, in comp,
is a sub-theory of a theory of consciousness/qualia.
Consciousness is not epiphenomenal: it is the "extractor" of the
physical realities in arithmetic. We could say that consciousness is
the universal self-accelerating property of the universal number which
makes possible the differentiation of the experience, and then the
physical reality is a projection. I could consider consciousness as
the main "force" in the universe, even if it is also a phenomenal
reality (the ontology being only arithmetic, or finite combinatorial
relations).
I can easily see why experience would need semiotic compressions to organize itself, but I can see no reason that arithmetic or physical realities would possibly need to be 'extracted', or even what that would mean.
Why execute a program if all possible outcomes are already computable?
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I can easily see why experience would need semiotic compressions to organize itself, but I can see no reason that arithmetic or physical realities would possibly need to be 'extracted', or even what that would mean.This is what the Universal Dovetailer Argument explains.
Why execute a program if all possible outcomes are already computable?To be computable is not enough, if the computations are not done, relatively to the situation you are in.Your question is like "why should I pay this beer if I can show that I can pay it?".
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
We can't observe the
experience itself.
If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
is the definition of a zombie.
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
It sounds like you are saying either epiphenomenalism is true or interactionism is true ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Dualist_views_of_mental_causation ). Both of these are forms of dualism, and I think both are false.
Violations of physics are not required for consciousness to have effects. After all, no violations of physics are required for human psychology to have effects on stock prices.
The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
is the definition of a zombie.
Dualist theories, including epiphenominalism, lead to the notion that zombies are logically consistent. I don't think zombies make any sense. Do you?
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
I disagree with this.
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
Jason
-- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
Because they assume a substantive and thus separable substrate, the y are false.On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
It sounds like you are saying either epiphenomenalism is true or interactionism is true ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Dualist_views_of_mental_causation ). Both of these are forms of dualism, and I think both are false.Demonstrating that minds are not epiphenomena!
Violations of physics are not required for consciousness to have effects. After all, no violations of physics are required for human psychology to have effects on stock prices.
These dualisms consider mind and body to be separable, this is where they fail. If Mind and body are merely distinct aspect of the same basic primitive then we get a prediction that zombies are not possible.The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
is the definition of a zombie.
Dualist theories, including epiphenominalism, lead to the notion that zombies are logically consistent. I don't think zombies make any sense. Do you?
Every mind must have an embodiment and every body must have (some kind of) a mind.How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.
Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.
No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.
Right, and it is this that zombies lack.
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.
I agree with your disagreement!
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
I disagree with this.Nice debate!
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
Jason
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? �Is it all coincidental?
There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? �There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. �Saying the consciousness is�irrelevant�in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is�irrelevant�in the price moves of the stock market. �Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.�
We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. �While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. �By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:
�
If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
Hi!��� Because they assume a substantive and thus separable substrate, the y are false.It sounds like you are saying either epiphenomenalism is true or interactionism is true (�http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Dualist_views_of_mental_causation�). �Both of these are forms of dualism, and I think both are false.
��� Demonstrating that minds are not epiphenomena!
���
Violations of physics are not required for consciousness to have effects. �After all, no violations of physics are required for human psychology to have effects on stock prices.
Well, it at least shows emergent things can have effects. �A truck is an emergent�phenomenon, but it can still run you over. �So though consciousness might be emergent we can't�plainly�rule out that it can have no effects.
���
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. �If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. �So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? �It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. �It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
is the definition of a zombie.
��� These dualisms consider mind and body to be separable, this is where they fail. If Mind and body are merely distinct aspect of the same basic primitive then we get a prediction that zombies are not possible.
Dualist theories, including epiphenominalism, lead to the notion that zombies are logically consistent. �I don't think zombies make any sense. �Do you?
Right, and I think the converse is also true. �If zombies are not possible, then dualism must be wrong.
�
Every mind must have an embodiment and every body must have (some kind of) a mind.
�
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.
��� How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
Zombies can reason.
�They can do absolutely everything you can do, except they are not conscious.
�They are also completely identical and indistinguishable, from you.
�The only one who could (in principle) know they are a zombie is the zombie itself, but they don't know anything the non-zombie doesn't, for both the zombie and non-zombie brains have identical information content.
�If you ask it if it is conscious, it will still say yes, and believe it.
�It will not consider itself to be lying, it will in fact, believe itself to be telling the the truth.
�There would be no lie detector test to that could detect this lie, the lie is so good, the zombie itself believes it. �The zombie is in fact, as certain of its own consciousness as the non-zombie.
���� Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I�define�as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. �Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.
Right, I don't see that the difference makes a difference to anyone or anything, so the truth that there is still some difference must be questioned.
�If there is no difference then the whole notion of zombies becomes inconsistent.
���� No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
�They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. � It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. �Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.
But ask the zombie what it can see, and it can describe everything it sees, inspect its brain and you can see the information flow from the retinas to be processed by the visual cortex, and eventually make it to utterances of what it is looking at.
�It knows what it is seeing, it's brain contains that knowledge in the same way any other brain does.
�You can even watch its hippocampus store memories of what it saw, and when you ask it what it saw a few minutes ago, you can watch this knowledge come out of its brain just as it does in a non-zombie brain.
�So in what sense could its knowledge be any less valid than the knowledge in a non-zombie brain?
�Remember, zombies are 100% physically identical to their non-zombie counterparts, in every third-person observable way.
�
�
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. �Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. �The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. �If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
��� Right, and it is this that zombies lack.
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." �Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". �So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Zombies can think, understand, solve problems, answer questions, remember, talk about their beliefs, and so on.
�They just are not conscious of anything when they do these things.
�So when a zombie thinks/says/understands/believes he is conscious�you might say it thinks is wrong or lying. �But in what sense is it lying or in what sense is it wrong? �Its brain does the same calculations as the other brain that is telling the truth. �Its brain contains the same neural patterns as the other brain that has true beliefs.
Daniel Dennett says it well: "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".[9][10]�He coined the term�zimboes�(p-zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent;[11]�"Zimboes thinkZ�they are conscious, thinkZ�they have qualia, thinkZ�they suffer pains � they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"
�
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
��� Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.��� Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
This isn't�startling. �Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. �If we had no principles for determining if�something�is conscious or not, would we still do this? �Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? �We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. �So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not�conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS�conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. �Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. �We can never really prove anything.
We might be 99.99999% certain of some belief, but I don't know that we can ever be certain. �Some non zero amount of doubt regarding the correctness any proof depends on our own�consistency/sanity.
This is not to say that seeking out explanations, or evidence, or proof is fruitless. �So I don't see this leading to an enemy of the good.
�
�
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
I disagree with this.
��� I agree with your disagreement!
�
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. �Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" �If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?�
or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
Jason
��� Nice debate!
Thanks,
Jason
If the latter, then it sounds like you are saying that some arithmetic functions can only be expressed as pain or blue...
in which case, how are they really arithmetic.
Besides, we have never seen a computation turn blue or create blueness.
I can easily see why experience would need semiotic compressions to organize itself, but I can see no reason that arithmetic or physical realities would possibly need to be 'extracted', or even what that would mean.This is what the Universal Dovetailer Argument explains.
If it does, then I don't understand it. If you can explain it with a common sense example as a metaphor, then I might be able to get more of it.
Why execute a program if all possible outcomes are already computable?To be computable is not enough, if the computations are not done, relatively to the situation you are in.Your question is like "why should I pay this beer if I can show that I can pay it?".
Yes, why should I pay for the beer if it's arithmetically inevitable that I have paid for the beer in the future?
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.
We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:
If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
It sounds like you are saying either epiphenomenalism is true or interactionism is true ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Dualist_views_of_mental_causation ). Both of these are forms of dualism, and I think both are false.
Because they assume a substantive and thus separable substrate, the y are false.Demonstrating that minds are not epiphenomena!
Violations of physics are not required for consciousness to have effects. After all, no violations of physics are required for human psychology to have effects on stock prices.
Well, it at least shows emergent things can have effects. A truck is an emergent phenomenon, but it can still run you over. So though consciousness might be emergent we can't plainly rule out that it can have no effects.These dualisms consider mind and body to be separable, this is where they fail. If Mind and body are merely distinct aspect of the same basic primitive then we get a prediction that zombies are not possible.The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
is the definition of a zombie.
Dualist theories, including epiphenominalism, lead to the notion that zombies are logically consistent. I don't think zombies make any sense. Do you?Right, and I think the converse is also true. If zombies are not possible, then dualism must be wrong.Every mind must have an embodiment and every body must have (some kind of) a mind.
How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.Zombies can reason. They can do absolutely everything you can do, except they are not conscious.
They are also completely identical and indistinguishable, from you. The only one who could (in principle) know they are a zombie is the zombie itself, but they don't know anything the non-zombie doesn't, for both the zombie and non-zombie brains have identical information content. If you ask it if it is conscious, it will still say yes, and believe it. It will not consider itself to be lying, it will in fact, believe itself to be telling the the truth. There would be no lie detector test to that could detect this lie, the lie is so good, the zombie itself believes it. The zombie is in fact, as certain of its own consciousness as the non-zombie.
Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.Right, I don't see that the difference makes a difference to anyone or anything, so the truth that there is still some difference must be questioned. If there is no difference then the whole notion of zombies becomes inconsistent.
No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.But ask the zombie what it can see, and it can describe everything it sees, inspect its brain and you can see the information flow from the retinas to be processed by the visual cortex, and eventually make it to utterances of what it is looking at. It knows what it is seeing, it's brain contains that knowledge in the same way any other brain does. You can even watch its hippocampus store memories of what it saw, and when you ask it what it saw a few minutes ago, you can watch this knowledge come out of its brain just as it does in a non-zombie brain. So in what sense could its knowledge be any less valid than the knowledge in a non-zombie brain? Remember, zombies are 100% physically identical to their non-zombie counterparts, in every third-person observable way.
Right, and it is this that zombies lack.
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Zombies can think, understand,
solve problems, answer questions,
remember, talk about their beliefs, and so on.
They just are not conscious of anything when they do these things.
So when a zombie thinks/says/understands/believes he is conscious you might say it thinks is wrong or lying.
But in what sense is it lying or in what sense is it wrong? Its brain does the same calculations as the other brain that is telling the truth. Its brain contains the same neural patterns as the other brain that has true beliefs.
Daniel Dennett says it well: "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".[9][10] He coined the term zimboes (p-zombies that havesecond-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent;[11] "Zimboes thinkZ they are conscious, thinkZ they have qualia, thinkZ they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"
Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.We might be 99.99999% certain of some belief, but I don't know that we can ever be certain. Some non zero amount of doubt regarding the correctness any proof depends on our own consistency/sanity.This is not to say that seeking out explanations, or evidence, or proof is fruitless. So I don't see this leading to an enemy of the good.
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
I agree with your disagreement!
I disagree with this.
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> You can approximate consciousness by "belief in self-consistency". This has
> already a "causal efficacy", notably a relative self-speeding ability (by
> Gödel "length of proof" theorem). But "belief in self-consistency" is pure
> 3p, and is not consciousness, you get consciousness because the machine will
> confuse the belief in self-consistency with the truth of its
> self-consistency, and this will introduce a quale. The machine can be aware
> of it, and (with enough cognitive ability) the machine will be aware of its
> non communicability, making it into a personal quale.
>
> I think you are doing a confusion level, like if matter was real, and
> consciousness only emerging on it. I thought that some times ago you did
> understand the movie graph argument, so that it is the illusion of brain and
> matter which emerges from consciousness, and this gives another role for
> consciousness: the bringing of physical realities through number relations
> being selected (non causally, here). Consciousness is what makes notions of
> causal efficacy meaningful to start with.
I object to the idea that consciousness will cause a brain or other
machine to behave in a way not predictable by purely physical laws.
Some people, like Craig Weinberg, seem to believe that this is
possible but it is contrary to all science. This applies even if the
whole universe is really just a simulation, because what we observe is
at the level of the simulation.
On 9/27/2012 1:01 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.
We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:
If the experience had separate causal powers we
would be able to observe its effects: we would see that neurons were
miraculously firing contrary to physical law, and explain this as the
immaterial soul affecting the physical world.
It sounds like you are saying either epiphenomenalism is true or interactionism is true ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Dualist_views_of_mental_causation ). Both of these are forms of dualism, and I think both are false.
Because they assume a substantive and thus separable substrate, the y are false.
Violations of physics are not required for consciousness to have effects. After all, no violations of physics are required for human psychology to have effects on stock prices.
Demonstrating that minds are not epiphenomena!
Hi!
Well, it at least shows emergent things can have effects. A truck is an emergent phenomenon, but it can still run you over. So though consciousness might be emergent we can't plainly rule out that it can have no effects.
Surely! The truck and my body emerge from the same underlying process and thus are similarly efficacious. If we are both being simulated by the same underlying process, the truck and I will not be any different when it come to the rules, unless a bias or distinction is built into the simulating program.
> I find the entire concept of epiphenominalism to be self-defeating: if it
> were true, there is no reason to expect anyone to ever have proposed it. If
> consciousness were truly an epiphenomenon then the experience of it and the
> resulting wonder about it would necessarily be private and non-shareable.
> In other words, whoever is experiencing the consciousness with all its
> intrigue can in no way effect changes in the physical world. So then who is
> it that proposes the theory of epiphenominalism to explain the mystery of
> conscious experience? It can't be the causally inefficacious experiencer.
> The only consistent answer epiphenominalism can offer is that the theory of
> epiphenominalism comes from a causally efficacious entity which in no way is
> effected by experiences. It might as well be a considered a
> non-experiencer, for it would behave the same regardless of whether it
> experienced something or if it were a zombie.
The experiencer would behave the same if he were a zombie, since that
is the definition of a zombie.
Dualist theories, including epiphenominalism, lead to the notion that zombies are logically consistent. I don't think zombies make any sense. Do you?
These dualisms consider mind and body to be separable, this is where they fail. If Mind and body are merely distinct aspect of the same basic primitive then we get a prediction that zombies are not possible.
Right, and I think the converse is also true. If zombies are not possible, then dualism must be wrong.
Only for a substance dualism would this be true. It is not true for a dual aspect monism.
Every mind must have an embodiment and every body must have (some kind of) a mind.
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.
How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
Zombies can reason.
This is to equate reasoning to automatically following an algorithm. This implies perfect predictability at some level and thus the absence of any 1p only aspects. Additionally, the recipe is some thng that needs explanation. How was it found...?
This kind of zombie reasoning is an oxymoron as it assumes the possibility of evaluations and yet disallows the very possibility. Zombies have no qualia and thus cannot represent anything to itself. It has no "self" and thus lacks the capacity to impress anything upon that non-existent self.
They can do absolutely everything you can do, except they are not conscious.
If they are not conscious then they are not conscious of their consciousness. Thus they do not have knowledge.
They are also completely identical and indistinguishable, from you.
from the point of view of an observer, sure. But this is just a retelling of the Turing test. It merely considers 3p behavior.
The only one who could (in principle) know they are a zombie is the zombie itself, but they don't know anything the non-zombie doesn't, for both the zombie and non-zombie brains have identical information content.
This is where the zombie falls apart. The zombie cannot act on that difference as it cannot , by definition, act upon the representation of that information.
If you ask it if it is conscious, it will still say yes, and believe it.
No, they have no qualia, thus no beliefs.
It will not consider itself to be lying, it will in fact, believe itself to be telling the the truth.
NO!Contradiction!
There would be no lie detector test to that could detect this lie, the lie is so good, the zombie itself believes it. The zombie is in fact, as certain of its own consciousness as the non-zombie.
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.
Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
Right, I don't see that the difference makes a difference to anyone or anything, so the truth that there is still some difference must be questioned.
Stick to the definition. If a zombie has no qualia then it does not have anything that supervenes on qualia. Does it "know" anything? NO!
If there is no difference then the whole notion of zombies becomes inconsistent.
It is inconsistent! As I see it, the concept of an entity that behaves identically to a conscious being and yet has no consciousness - no quale - then it is, at most, an automaton.
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.
No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
But ask the zombie what it can see, and it can describe everything it sees, inspect its brain and you can see the information flow from the retinas to be processed by the visual cortex, and eventually make it to utterances of what it is looking at.
This claim assumes the possibility of the capacity to report the content of its senses. This is dangerously close to contradicting the definition of a zombie.
It knows what it is seeing, it's brain contains that knowledge in the same way any other brain does.
Knowledge implies the capacity of distinguishing a difference between the state of having knowledge and not having it. This seems to require an internal self-modeling capacity. How is this not a contradiction of the definition of a Zombie?
You can even watch its hippocampus store memories of what it saw, and when you ask it what it saw a few minutes ago, you can watch this knowledge come out of its brain just as it does in a non-zombie brain.
Where does the "it's" come from? There is nothing to "posses" an opinion or representation of the data (that is not, strictly speaking, the data). It can only come from the implicit third party of the narrative here. The zombie has no sense of self as different from the world and thus no capacity to know that "it" is the subject of the brain scan.
So in what sense could its knowledge be any less valid than the knowledge in a non-zombie brain?
Zombies cannot have "knowledge", as has just been shown.
Remember, zombies are 100% physically identical to their non-zombie counterparts, in every third-person observable way.
Exactly, and thus any reference to internal capacities are suspect when attributed to zombies.
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Right, and it is this that zombies lack.
Zombies can think, understand, solve problems, answer questions, remember, talk about their beliefs, and so on.
How is this determined? First we must show that such capacities obtain, otherwise we abandon logic and hold the law of non-contradiction in contempt.
They just are not conscious of anything when they do these things.
There is no "they"... There is no "agency" for a zombie, unless the narrative here of the observer (who is making the determination) is merely projecting their own capacities...
So when a zombie thinks/says/understands/believes he is conscious you might say it thinks is wrong or lying. But in what sense is it lying or in what sense is it wrong? Its brain does the same calculations as the other brain that is telling the truth. Its brain contains the same neural patterns as the other brain that has true beliefs.
"Same" ? If we are considering an equivalence then that equivalence, unless restricted, is complete. The same holds for difference. If we are going to allow for a spectrum between these then we must simultaneously allow for both , at least in a possible world sense.
Daniel Dennett says it well: "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".[9][10] He coined the term zimboes (p-zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent;[11] "Zimboes thinkZ they are conscious, thinkZ they have qualia, thinkZ they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"
Dennett is right here! He is pointing out the contradiction of the definition of Zombie in the idea or belief that zombies can have beliefs. An entity either has qualia/consciousness or it does not. If it has consciousness or anything that follows from consciousness - such as knowledge - then it is not a zombie.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.
Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
We might be 99.99999% certain of some belief, but I don't know that we can ever be certain. Some non zero amount of doubt regarding the correctness any proof depends on our own consistency/sanity.
There is truth and there is the ability to find a proof of that truth.
This is not to say that seeking out explanations, or evidence, or proof is fruitless. So I don't see this leading to an enemy of the good.
First, let us banish the ambiguity and inconsistency.
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
I disagree with this.
I agree with your disagreement!
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?
or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
Jason
Nice debate!
Thanks,
Jason
-- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
--
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:The higher level description is not an entity with *separate* causal
> But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events
> or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the
> forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the
> consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying
> human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of
> course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions,
> but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real
> and do make a difference.
power. Was the stock market movement caused by physics, chemistry,
biochemistry or psychology? In a manner of speaking, it's correct to
say any of them; but we know that all the chemical, biochemical and
psychological properties are ultimately traceable to the physics, even
if it isn't practically useful to attempt stock market prediction by
analysing brain physics. What I object to is the idea of strong
emergence, that higher level properties are not merely surprising but
fundamentally unable to be deduced from lower level properties.
We still can't observe the experience. Advanced aliens may be able to
>> We can't observe the
>> experience itself.
>
>
> I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining
> the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and
> consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements
> the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By
> tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is
> and isn't aware of.
>
> Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain
> scans what people are seeing:
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16267-mindreading-software-could-record-your-dreams.html
read our thoughts very accurately in this way but still have no idea
what we actually experience or whether we are conscious at all.
>> The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing inThe "merely" makes it an epiphenomenon. I think this is Daniel
>> any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
>> conscious,
>
>
> Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations,
> thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So
> we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts,
> surroundings, etc.
Dennett's potion. Dennett argues that zombies are logically impossible
as consciousness is nothing but the sort of information processing
that goes on in brains.
On 26 Sep 2012, at 19:37, Craig Weinberg wrote:in which case, how are they really arithmetic.
They are not. Arithmetical truth is already not arithmetical.Arithmetic seen from inside is *vastly* bigger than arithmetic. This needs a bit of "model theory" to be explained formally.
" LST has bite because we believe that there are uncountably many real numbers (more than 0). Indeed, let's insist that we know it; Cantor proved it in 1873, and we don't want to open the question again. What is remarkable about LST is the assertion that even if the intended interpretation of S is a system of arithmetic about the real numbers, and even if the system is consistent and has a model that makes its theorems true, its theorems (under a different interpretation) will be true for a domain too small to contain all the real numbers. Systems about uncountable infinities can be given a model whose domain is only countable. Systems about the reals can be interpreted as if they were about some set of objects no more numerous than the natural numbers. It is as if a syntactical version of "One-Thousand and One Arabian Nights" could be interpreted as "One Night in Centerville".
This strange situation is not hypothetical. There are systems of set theory (or number theory or predicate logic) that contain a theorem which asserts in the intended interpretation that the cardinality of the real numbers exceeds the cardinality of the naturals. That's good, because it's true. Such systems therefore say that the cardinality of the reals is uncountable. So the cardinality of the reals must really be uncountable in all the models of the system, for a model is an interpretation in which the theorems come out true (for that interpretation). Now one would think that if theorems about uncountable cardinalities are true for a model, then the domain of the model must have uncountably many members. But LST says this is not so. Even these systems, if they have models at all, have at least one countable model.
Insofar as this is a paradox it is called Skolem's paradox. It is at least a paradox in the ancient sense: an astonishing and implausible result. Is it a paradox in the modern sense, making contradiction apparently unavoidable? We know from history all too many cases of shocking results initially misperceived as contradictions. Think about the existence of pairs of numbers with no common divisor, no matter how small, or the property of every infinite set that it can be put into one-to-one correspondence with some of its proper subsets."
What broke the Skolem prison for me was a remark by Louis Kauffman that self-referencing systems allows for finite models of infinities as they can capture the mereology of infinite sets ( the property that there is a one-to-one correspondence between whole and proper subsets). We get stuck on what is "proper"....But LST proves a kind of ambiguity much more important than the permanent plurality of interpretations. There can be plural models, that is, plural interpetations in which the theorems come out true.
As we become familiar with formalism and its susceptibility to various interpretations, we might think that plural interpretations are not that surprising; perhaps they are inevitable. Plural models are more surprising. We might think that we must go out of our way to get them. But on the contrary, LST says they are inevitable for systems of a certain kind.
But the ambiguity is stronger still. The plural permissible models are not always isomorphic with one another. The isomorphism of models is a technical concept that we don't have to explain fully here. Essentially two models are isomorphic if their domains map one another; their elements have the same relations under the functions and predicates defined in the interpretations containing those domains.
If all the models of a system are isomorphic with one another, we call the system categorical. LST proves that systems with uncountable models also have countable models; this means that the domains of the two models have different cardinalities, which is enough to prevent isomorphism. Hence, consistent first-order systems, including systems of arithmetic, are non-categorical.
We
might have thought that, even if a vast system of uninterpreted
marks on paper were susceptible of two or more coherent
interpretations, or even two or more models, at least they would
all be "equivalent" or "isomorphic" to each other, in effect
using different terms for the same things. But non-categoricity
upsets this expectation. Consistent systems will always have
non-isomorphic or qualitatively
different models."
This non-isomorphism is the point I have
been trying to make, we cannot extract a true plurality of
minds from a single Sigma_1 COMP model unless we allow for an
inconsistency in the ontologically primitive level. Continuing
the quote:
" We don't even approach univocal reference "at the limit" or asymptotically, by increasing the number of axioms or theorems describing the real numbers until they are infinite in number. We might have thought that, even if a certain vast system of bits sustained non-isomorphic models, we could approach unambiguity (even if we could not reach it) by increasing the size of the system. After all, "10" could symbolize everything from day and night to male and female, and from two to ten; but a string of 1's and 0's a light-year in length must at least narrow down the range of possible referents. But this is not so, for LST applies even to infinitely large systems. LST proves in a very particular way that no first-order formal system of any size can specify the reals uniquely. It proves that no description of the real numbers (in a first-order theory) is categorical."
This
reasoning is parallel to my own argument that there must be a
means to "book keep" the differences and that this cannot be
done "in the arithmetic" itself. This is the fundamental
argument that I am making for he necessity of physical worlds,
which we can represent faithfully as topological spaces and we
get this if we accept the Stone duality as a ontological
principle. But that is an argument against your thesis of
immaterial monism. :_(
Continuing the quote:
"Very Very Serious Incurable Ambiguity: Upward and Downward
LST
If the intended model of a first-order theory has a cardinality
of 1, then we have to put up with its "shadow" model with a
cardinality of 0. But it could be worse. These are only two
cardinalities. The range of the ambiguity from this point of
view is narrow. Let us say that degree of non-categoricity is 2,
since there are only 2 different cardinalities involved."
Why not allow for arbitrary extensions via forcing?
Why not the unnameable towers of cardinalities of Cantor, so long
as it is possible to have pair-wise consistent constructions from
the infinities?
"But it is worse. A variation of LST called the "downward" LST
proves that if a first-order theory has a model of any
transfinite cardinality, x, then it also has a model of every
transfinite cardinal y, when y > x. Since there are
infinitely many infinite cardinalities, this means there are
first-order theories with arbitrarily many LST shadow models.
The degree of non-categoricity can be any countable number."
Implying the existence of sets of countable numbers
within each model, subject to some constraint?
"There is one more blow. A variation of LST called the "upward"
LST proves that if a first-order theory has a model of any
infinite cardinality, then it has models of any arbitrary
infinite cardinality, hence every infinite cardinality. The
degree of non-categoricity can be any infinite number."
Thus an argument for the Tower!
"A variation of upward LST has been
proved for first-order theories with identity: if such a theory
has a "normal" model of any infinite cardinality, then it has
normal models of any, hence every, infinite cardinality.
Coping
Most mathematicians agree that the Skolem paradox creates no
contradiction. But that does not mean they agree on how to
resolve it.
First we should note that the ambiguity proved by LST is curable
in the sense that LST holds only in first-order theories.
Higher-order logics are not afflicted with it, although they are
afflicted with many weaknesses absent in first-order logic. The
ambiguity is also curable as soon as we add ordering to our
collection of domain objects supposed to be real numbers. Once
ordering is added, systems intended to capture the reals can
become categorical.
But the ambiguity remains baffling and frustrating for
first-order theories prior to the introduction of ordering.
Can such a system really assert the uncountability of the reals
if the assertion is "just as much" about some merely countable
infinite? Or can it really assert that the cardinality of the
continuum is 1 (assuming the continuum hypothesis) if the
assertion is "just as much" about every other infinite
cardinality? LST may not force us to retract our belief that the
reals are uncountable; but on one terrifying reading it does,
and to avoid that reading we may well have to alter the modality
of our belief that the reals are uncountable.
What of models that do not assume CH? We get a plenum
of continua... (At least between Aleph_0 and Aleph_1) No? Do we
necessarily lose countability so long as ordering can be imposed
by some rule?
"In metalogic the term "model" is used in (at least) two senses.
We have used the term in the more technical sense, as an
interpretation of a system in which its theorems come out true
for that interpretation. But the term "model" may also be used
more casually to refer to the domain of things on which we want
to focus, such as the real numbers, especially if we assume that
such things have an existence independent of formal systems and
human logicians. In this less strict second sense of "model",
Platonists in mathematics who believe that the real numbers
exist independently of human minds and formal systems can say
that there is an uncountable model of the real numbers: namely,
the real numbers themselves. However, they must (by LST) admit
that first-order formal systems that seem to capture the real
numbers can always be satisfied by a merely countable domain.
For this reasons, Platonists will remain Platonic and will not
pin their hopes on formalization."
Bad news for Bruno! :_(
"One reading of LST holds that it proves that the cardinality of
the real numbers is the same as the cardinality of the
rationals, namely, countable. (The two kinds of number could
still differ in other ways, just as the naturals and rationals
do despite their equal cardinality.) On this reading, the Skolem
paradox would create a serious contradiction, for we have
Cantor's proof, whose premises and reasoning are at least as
strong as those for LST, that the set of reals has a greater
cardinality than the set of rationals.
The good news is that this strongly paradoxical reading is
optional. The bad news is that the obvious alternatives are very
ugly. The most common way to avoid the strongly paradoxical
reading is to insist that the real numbers have some elusive,
essential property not captured by system S. This view is
usually associated with a Platonism that permits its proponents
to say that the real numbers have certain properties
independently of what we are able to say or prove about them.
The problem with this view is that LST proves that if some new
and improved S' had a model, then it too would have a countable
model. Hence, no matter what improvements we introduce, either
S' has no model or it does not escape the air of paradox created
by LST. (S' would at least have its own typographical expression
as a model, which is countable.) As Morris Kline put it, while
Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that certain strong
formal systems always prove less than we'd like, LST shows that
they also prove more than we'd like."
Please note the discussion of Platonism!
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 1:01:12 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.
Exactly Jason. The moment we conflate "physical events" with "painful stimulus" we have lost the war. If we assume that physical events can possibly be defined as full of 'pain', or that they stimulate (i.e. are received and responded to as a signifying experience - which is causally efficacious in changing observed behavior), then we are already begging the question of the explanatory gap. To assume that there can be a such thing as a purely physical event which nonetheless is full of pain and power to influence behavior takes the entirety of sense and awareness for granted but then fails to acknowledge that it was necessary in the first place. Once you have the affect of pain and the effect of behavioral stimulation, you don't need a brain as far as explaining consciousness - you already have consciousness on the sub-personal level.
We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:
This may not be what we are seeing at all, but rather what we are looking at. There was a recent study on the visual cortex which showed the same activity whether the subject actually saw something or not.
Simulation isn't an objectively real function, it's a matter of fooling some of the people some of the time.
The term mind is similar to soul in that it assumes a public extension of a private intention which isn't actually real. It makes it a lot easier to talk about to reify our cognitive level experiences as a 'mind', but it's really is just the mental frequency range of your Self. The body of your Self is your entire body, brain, cells, and even more - your house, your friends, your world. The self is *not* defined in space or bodies, it is reflected in those things.
How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.Zombies can reason. They can do absolutely everything you can do, except they are not conscious.
No, that's just a bad theoretical assumption. Understandable, but bad. In reality puppets can appear to reason to the extent that something thinks they know what behaviors should constitute reason and makes the leap from thinking that their observation of those behaviors implies awareness. Zombies can't do anything.
They cannot be themselves. They have no first person experience at all. There is no 'they' there.
They are also completely identical and indistinguishable, from you. The only one who could (in principle) know they are a zombie is the zombie itself, but they don't know anything the non-zombie doesn't, for both the zombie and non-zombie brains have identical information content. If you ask it if it is conscious, it will still say yes, and believe it. It will not consider itself to be lying, it will in fact, believe itself to be telling the the truth. There would be no lie detector test to that could detect this lie, the lie is so good, the zombie itself believes it. The zombie is in fact, as certain of its own consciousness as the non-zombie.
Confusion of exterior 3p and interior 1p. Assumption of 'identical'. Mistakes.
Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.Right, I don't see that the difference makes a difference to anyone or anything, so the truth that there is still some difference must be questioned. If there is no difference then the whole notion of zombies becomes inconsistent.
Yup.
No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.But ask the zombie what it can see, and it can describe everything it sees, inspect its brain and you can see the information flow from the retinas to be processed by the visual cortex, and eventually make it to utterances of what it is looking at. It knows what it is seeing, it's brain contains that knowledge in the same way any other brain does. You can even watch its hippocampus store memories of what it saw, and when you ask it what it saw a few minutes ago, you can watch this knowledge come out of its brain just as it does in a non-zombie brain. So in what sense could its knowledge be any less valid than the knowledge in a non-zombie brain? Remember, zombies are 100% physically identical to their non-zombie counterparts, in every third-person observable way.
Just a hypothetical. In theory, fire shouldn't feel hot. Theory based on exterior mechanics can never apply to interior experience completely, because if it could then it would be logically impossible for there to have any reason for experience to exist at all. The reason why zombies don't make sense is the same reason that we have the hard problem. If function is all there is, why is anyone watching the show?
Right, and it is this that zombies lack.
The people talking about them could be zombies. There is nothing in
> Epiphenominalism is forced to defend the absurd notion that epiphenominalism
> (and all other theories of consciousness) are proposed by things that have
> never experienced consciousness. Perhaps instead, its core assumption is
> wrong. The reason for all these books and discussion threads about
> consciousness is that experiences and consciousness are causally
> efficacious. If they weren't then why is anyone talking about them?
any observation of peoples' behaviour that *proves* they are
conscious,
Consciousness is defined on dictionary.com as "awareness of sensations, thoughts, surrounds, etc." Awareness is defined as "having knowledge". So we can say consciousness is merely having knowledge of sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.
Zombies can think, understand,
No.
solve problems, answer questions,
Yes. Like a Magic Eightball can so that too.
remember, talk about their beliefs, and so on.
No. No beliefs, no memory. We can hear them talk, but 'they' aren't talking. No more than any other puppet.
They just are not conscious of anything when they do these things.
But since they *never* were conscious of anything, there never was a 'they' to begin with. You are assuming something that never was.
So when a zombie thinks/says/understands/believes he is conscious you might say it thinks is wrong or lying.
There is no belief, thought, or understanding. We can hear something being said, but it is only a clever set of automated recordings. What a zombie-puppet says is a fancy voicemail tree.
But in what sense is it lying or in what sense is it wrong? Its brain does the same calculations as the other brain that is telling the truth. Its brain contains the same neural patterns as the other brain that has true beliefs.
Daniel Dennett says it well: "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".[9][10] He coined the term zimboes (p-zombies that havesecond-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent;[11] "Zimboes thinkZ they are conscious, thinkZ they have qualia, thinkZ they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!"
Dennett is just incredibly wrong about everything related to consciousness and perception, but he is very convincing as he expresses the logic of the mistakenly exteriorized interiority very well. The problem isn't that it is illogical, it is that logic isn't the ground of being after all, and supervenes on first person awareness in the first place - which transcends logic and reason.
Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
Information cannot become significant on it's own. Not possible.
Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.We might be 99.99999% certain of some belief, but I don't know that we can ever be certain. Some non zero amount of doubt regarding the correctness any proof depends on our own consistency/sanity.This is not to say that seeking out explanations, or evidence, or proof is fruitless. So I don't see this leading to an enemy of the good.
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
Hahahaha "I am not having this conversation" also means "I have no way of knowing that I am not having this conversation."
I agree with your disagreement!
I disagree with this.
I third this disagreement, and escalate it to the level of truth more fundamental and elemental than all of physics and arithmetic.
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
You got it. Zombies were a very early and natural mistake, which I don't blame on Chalmers. Our naive realism is to conflate personal with impersonal, sub-personal with micro-impersonal, etc. He made a misstep, but anyone would have done the same. That's what pioneering a field is all about.
This is to equate reasoning to automatically following an algorithm. This implies perfect predictability at some level and thus the absence of any 1p only aspects. Additionally, the recipe is some thng that needs explanation. How was it found...?
��� This kind of zombie reasoning is an oxymoron as it assumes the possibility of evaluations and yet disallows the very possibility. Zombies have no qualia and thus cannot represent anything to itself. It has no "self" and thus lacks the capacity to impress anything upon that non-existent self.
Here, I disagree. �If a you ask a zombie to solve a riddle, and it ponders it for several minutes and then gives you the correct answer, how can you say it was not reasoning? �It is like saying a computer is not multiplying when you ask it what 4*4 is and it gives you 16.
Note that I think we agree (some forms of reasoning probably require consciousness), which only provides another reason to doubt the consistency of the definition of zombies. �I don't think reasoning is normally assumed to require consciousness, which is why someone who defines zombies as non-conscious�may still hold that they have a reasoning ability.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain > scans what people are seeing: > http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16267-mindreading-software-could-record-your-dreams.htmlWe still can't observe the experience. Advanced aliens may be able to read our thoughts very accurately in this way but still have no idea what we actually experience or whether we are conscious at all.
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, September 27, 2012 1:01:12 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:On 9/26/2012 11:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:There is a sequence of physical events from the application of the
> If it has no causal efficacy, what causes someone to talk about the pain
> they are experiencing? Is it all coincidental?
painful stimulus to the subject saying "that hurts", and this
completely explains the observable behaviour.
But can you separate the consciousness from that sequence of physical events or not? There are multiple levels involved here and you may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing only on the atoms. Saying the consciousness is irrelevant in the processes of the brain may be like saying human psychology is irrelevant in the price moves of the stock market. Of course, you might explain the price moves in terms of atomic interactions, but you are missing the effects of higher-level phenomenon, which are real and do make a difference.
Exactly Jason. The moment we conflate "physical events" with "painful stimulus" we have lost the war. If we assume that physical events can possibly be defined as full of 'pain', or that they stimulate (i.e. are received and responded to as a signifying experience - which is causally efficacious in changing observed behavior), then we are already begging the question of the explanatory gap. To assume that there can be a such thing as a purely physical event which nonetheless is full of pain and power to influence behavior takes the entirety of sense and awareness for granted but then fails to acknowledge that it was necessary in the first place. Once you have the affect of pain and the effect of behavioral stimulation, you don't need a brain as far as explaining consciousness - you already have consciousness on the sub-personal level.
Well you need something to explain consciousness (besides consciousness itself), otherwise you haven't explained anything.
We can't observe the
experience itself.
I'm not convinced of this. While today, we have difficulty in even defining the term, in the future, with better tools and understanding of minds and consciousness, we may indeed be able to tell if a certain process implements the right combination of processes to have what we would call a mind. By tracing the flows of information in its mind, we might even know what it is and isn't aware of.
Albeit at a low resolution, scientists have already extracted from brain scans what people are seeing:
This may not be what we are seeing at all, but rather what we are looking at. There was a recent study on the visual cortex which showed the same activity whether the subject actually saw something or not.You're right, it depends on what level we are doing the scanning. That information might not propagate to the effect that it becomes known throughout the brain.
Simulation isn't an objectively real function, it's a matter of fooling some of the people some of the time.
The term mind is similar to soul in that it assumes a public extension of a private intention which isn't actually real. It makes it a lot easier to talk about to reify our cognitive level experiences as a 'mind', but it's really is just the mental frequency range of your Self. The body of your Self is your entire body, brain, cells, and even more - your house, your friends, your world. The self is *not* defined in space or bodies, it is reflected in those things.
How does this follow the definition of a zombie? They have no qualia thus no ability to reason about qualia!
I know I'm not a zombie and I believe
that other people aren't zombies either, but I can't be sure.
If you were a zombie, you would still know that you were not a zombie, and still believe other people are not zombies either, but you could not be sure.Zombies can reason. They can do absolutely everything you can do, except they are not conscious.
No, that's just a bad theoretical assumption. Understandable, but bad. In reality puppets can appear to reason to the extent that something thinks they know what behaviors should constitute reason and makes the leap from thinking that their observation of those behaviors implies awareness. Zombies can't do anything.They are defined to be able to do anything. I agree it seems to lead to contradictions.
They cannot be themselves. They have no first person experience at all. There is no 'they' there.
They are also completely identical and indistinguishable, from you. The only one who could (in principle) know they are a zombie is the zombie itself, but they don't know anything the non-zombie doesn't, for both the zombie and non-zombie brains have identical information content. If you ask it if it is conscious, it will still say yes, and believe it. It will not consider itself to be lying, it will in fact, believe itself to be telling the the truth. There would be no lie detector test to that could detect this lie, the lie is so good, the zombie itself believes it. The zombie is in fact, as certain of its own consciousness as the non-zombie.
Confusion of exterior 3p and interior 1p. Assumption of 'identical'. Mistakes.
Then what makes a zombie a zombie???
This follows because the notion of knowing, which I define as possessing information, applies equally to zombie and non-zombie brains. Both brains have identical information content, so they both know exactly the same things.Right, I don't see that the difference makes a difference to anyone or anything, so the truth that there is still some difference must be questioned. If there is no difference then the whole notion of zombies becomes inconsistent.
Yup.
No, the reports that are uttered by a zombie, if we are consistent are not reports of knowledge any more than the output of my calculator is knowledge!
They both know what red is like, they both know what pain is like. It's just there is some magical notion of there being a difference between them which is completely illogical. Zombies don't make sense, and therefore neither do dualist theories such as epihenominalism.But ask the zombie what it can see, and it can describe everything it sees, inspect its brain and you can see the information flow from the retinas to be processed by the visual cortex, and eventually make it to utterances of what it is looking at. It knows what it is seeing, it's brain contains that knowledge in the same way any other brain does. You can even watch its hippocampus store memories of what it saw, and when you ask it what it saw a few minutes ago, you can watch this knowledge come out of its brain just as it does in a non-zombie brain. So in what sense could its knowledge be any less valid than the knowledge in a non-zombie brain? Remember, zombies are 100% physically identical to their non-zombie counterparts, in every third-person observable way.
Just a hypothetical. In theory, fire shouldn't feel hot. Theory based on exterior mechanics can never apply to interior experience completely, because if it could then it would be logically impossible for there to have any reason for experience to exist at all. The reason why zombies don't make sense is the same reason that we have the hard problem. If function is all there is, why is anyone watching the show?
The machine in the state of executing the function is conscious. It has to be, otherwise it would be a zombie but one that knows, thinks, understands, contemplates, feels, etc.
I think we can build machines that do these things, and so they will be conscious. You think man-made machines cannot be conscious, so they will be unable to do these things.
It is logically consistent, but will be increasingly hard to justify as the repertoire of man-made machines advances.
Knowledge, at least tacitly, implies the ability to act upon the data, not just be guided by it.
It then becomes a straightforward problem of information theory and computer science to know if a certain system possesses knowledge of those things or not.
Information cannot become significant on it's own. Not possible.
Rubbish! You are making perfection the enemy of the possible. We are fallible and thus can only reason within boundaries and error bars, so. Does this knock proofs down? NO!
This isn't startling. Doctors today declare people brain dead and take them off life support using the same assumptions. If we had no principles for determining if something is conscious or not, would we still do this? Do you worry about stepping on rocks because it might hurt them? We have good reasons not to worry about those things because we assume there are certain necessary levels of complexity and information processing ability needed to be conscious. So perhaps if we can tell with reasonable certainty something is not conscious, we might also be reasonably certain that a certain other thing IS conscious.
Proof, is another matter, and likely one we will never get. Your entire life could be a big delusion and everything you might think you know could be wrong. We can never really prove anything.We might be 99.99999% certain of some belief, but I don't know that we can ever be certain. Some non zero amount of doubt regarding the correctness any proof depends on our own consistency/sanity.This is not to say that seeking out explanations, or evidence, or proof is fruitless. So I don't see this leading to an enemy of the good.
because consciousness is not causally efficacious.
Hahahaha "I am not having this conversation" also means "I have no way of knowing that I am not having this conversation."
I agree with your disagreement!
I disagree with this.
I third this disagreement, and escalate it to the level of truth more fundamental and elemental than all of physics and arithmetic.
It is
emergent, at a higher level of description, supervenient
Right, it could be emergent / supervenient, but that does not mean it is causally inefficacious.
You need to look at the counterfactual to say whether or not it is casually important. Ask "If this thing were not conscious would it still behave in the same way?" If not, then how can we say that consciousness is casually inefficacious?or
epiphenomenal - but not separately causally efficacious, or the
problem of other minds and zombies would not exist.
There is no problem of zombies if you can show the idea to be inconsistent.
You got it. Zombies were a very early and natural mistake, which I don't blame on Chalmers. Our naive realism is to conflate personal with impersonal, sub-personal with micro-impersonal, etc. He made a misstep, but anyone would have done the same. That's what pioneering a field is all about.
Well we can learn something about what consciousness is not from errors too.
Jason
On 9/27/2012 4:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi Bruno,On 26 Sep 2012, at 19:37, Craig Weinberg wrote:in which case, how are they really arithmetic.
They are not. Arithmetical truth is already not arithmetical.Arithmetic seen from inside is *vastly* bigger than arithmetic. This needs a bit of "model theory" to be explained formally.
Is this not just the direct implication of the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems? What is missing? The discussion here is wonderful! http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/low-skol.htm#review It seems to run parallel to what I have been trying to discuss with you regarding the possibility that non-standard models allow for a "true" plurality of 1p in extensions of modal logic.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/low-skol.htm#skolem
Skolem's Paradox
" LST has bite because we believe that there are uncountably many real numbers (more than <aleph.gif>0). Indeed, let's insist that we know it; Cantor proved it in 1873, and we don't want to open the question again. What is remarkable about LST is the assertion that even if the intended interpretation of S is a system of arithmetic about the real numbers, and even if the system is consistent and has a model that makes its theorems true, its theorems (under a different interpretation) will be true for a domain too small to contain all the real numbers. Systems about uncountable infinities can be given a model whose domain is only countable. Systems about the reals can be interpreted as if they were about some set of objects no more numerous than the natural numbers. It is as if a syntactical version of "One-Thousand and One Arabian Nights" could be interpreted as "One Night in Centerville".
This strange situation is not hypothetical. There are systems of set theory (or number theory or predicate logic) that contain a theorem which asserts in the intended interpretation that the cardinality of the real numbers exceeds the cardinality of the naturals. That's good, because it's true. Such systems therefore say that the cardinality of the reals is uncountable. So the cardinality of the reals must really be uncountable in all the models of the system, for a model is an interpretation in which the theorems come out true (for that interpretation). Now one would think that if theorems about uncountable cardinalities are true for a model, then the domain of the model must have uncountably many members. But LST says this is not so. Even these systems, if they have models at all, have at least one countable model.
Insofar as this is a paradox it is called Skolem's paradox. It is at least a paradox in the ancient sense: an astonishing and implausible result. Is it a paradox in the modern sense, making contradiction apparently unavoidable? We know from history all too many cases of shocking results initially misperceived as contradictions. Think about the existence of pairs of numbers with no common divisor, no matter how small, or the property of every infinite set that it can be put into one-to-one correspondence with some of its proper subsets."
What broke the Skolem prison for me was a remark by Louis Kauffman that self-referencing systems allows for finite models of infinities as they can capture the mereology of infinite sets ( the property that there is a one-to-one correspondence between whole and proper subsets). We get stuck on what is "proper"....
From: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/low-skol.htm#amb1
"To talk about incurable ambiguity suggests calamity, and this is how it seems to some logicians. LST shows that the real numbers cannot be specified uniquely by any first order theory. If that is so, then one of the most important domains in mathematics cannot be reached with the precision and finality we thought formal systems permitted us to attain.
But this is not a calamity from another point of view. If formal languages were not ambiguous or capable of many interpretations, they would not be formal. From this standpoint, LST is less about deficiences in our ability to express meanings univocally, or about deficiencies in our ability to understand the real numbers, than it is about the gap between form and content (syntax and semantics).
Other metatheorems prove this ambiguity for statements and systems in general. LST proves this ambiguity for any system attempting to describe uncountable infinities: even if they succeed on one interpretation, there will always be other interpretations of the same underlying syntax by which they describe only countably many objects.
LST has this similarity to Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. While Gödel's theorem only applies to "sufficiently strong" systems of arithmetic, LST only applies to first-order theories of a certain adequacy, namely, those with models, hence those that are consistent. Gödel's theorem finds a surprising weakness in strength; sufficiently powerful systems of arithmetic are incomplete. LST also finds a surprising weakness in strength; first-order theories with models are importantly ambiguous in a way that especially hurts set theory, arithmetic, and other theories concerned to capture truths about uncountable cardinalities.
Serious Incurable Ambiguity: Plural ModelsBut LST proves a kind of ambiguity much more important than the permanent plurality of interpretations. There can be plural models, that is, plural interpetations in which the theorems come out true.
As we become familiar with formalism and its susceptibility to various interpretations, we might think that plural interpretations are not that surprising; perhaps they are inevitable. Plural models are more surprising. We might think that we must go out of our way to get them. But on the contrary, LST says they are inevitable for systems of a certain kind.
Very Serious Incurable Ambiguity: Non-Categoricity But the ambiguity is stronger still. The plural permissible models are not always isomorphic with one another. The isomorphism of models is a technical concept that we don't have to explain fully here. Essentially two models are isomorphic if their domains map one another; their elements have the same relations under the functions and predicates defined in the interpretations containing those domains.
If all the models of a system are isomorphic with one another, we call the system categorical. LST proves that systems with uncountable models also have countable models; this means that the domains of the two models have different cardinalities, which is enough to prevent isomorphism. Hence, consistent first-order systems, including systems of arithmetic, are non-categorical.
We might have thought that, even if a vast system of uninterpreted marks on paper were susceptible of two or more coherent interpretations, or even two or more models, at least they would all be "equivalent" or "isomorphic" to each other, in effect using different terms for the same things. But non-categoricity upsets this expectation. Consistent systems will always have non-isomorphic or qualitatively different models."
This non-isomorphism is the point I have been trying to make, we cannot extract a true plurality of minds from a single Sigma_1 COMP model unless we allow for an inconsistency in the ontologically primitive level. Continuing the quote:
" We don't even approach univocal reference "at the limit" or asymptotically, by increasing the number of axioms or theorems describing the real numbers until they are infinite in number. We might have thought that, even if a certain vast system of bits sustained non-isomorphic models, we could approach unambiguity (even if we could not reach it) by increasing the size of the system. After all, "10" could symbolize everything from day and night to male and female, and from two to ten; but a string of 1's and 0's a light-year in length must at least narrow down the range of possible referents. But this is not so, for LST applies even to infinitely large systems. LST proves in a very particular way that no first-order formal system of any size can specify the reals uniquely. It proves that no description of the real numbers (in a first-order theory) is categorical."
This reasoning is parallel to my own argument that there must be a means to "book keep" the differences and that this cannot be done "in the arithmetic" itself. This is the fundamental argument that I am making for he necessity of physical worlds, which we can represent faithfully as topological spaces and we get this if we accept the Stone duality as a ontological principle. But that is an argument against your thesis of immaterial monism. :_(
Continuing the quote:
"Very Very Serious Incurable Ambiguity: Upward and Downward LST
If the intended model of a first-order theory has a cardinality of 1, then we have to put up with its "shadow" model with a cardinality of 0. But it could be worse. These are only two cardinalities. The range of the ambiguity from this point of view is narrow. Let us say that degree of non-categoricity is 2, since there are only 2 different cardinalities involved."
Why not allow for arbitrary extensions via forcing? Why not the unnameable towers of cardinalities of Cantor, so long as it is possible to have pair-wise consistent constructions from the infinities?
"But it is worse. A variation of LST called the "downward" LST proves that if a first-order theory has a model of any transfinite cardinality, x, then it also has a model of every transfinite cardinal y, when y > x. Since there are infinitely many infinite cardinalities, this means there are first-order theories with arbitrarily many LST shadow models. The degree of non-categoricity can be any countable number."Implying the existence of sets of countable numbers within each model, subject to some constraint?
"There is one more blow. A variation of LST called the "upward" LST proves that if a first-order theory has a model of any infinite cardinality, then it has models of any arbitrary infinite cardinality, hence every infinite cardinality. The degree of non-categoricity can be any infinite number."Thus an argument for the Tower!
"A variation of upward LST has been proved for first-order theories with identity: if such a theory has a "normal" model of any infinite cardinality, then it has normal models of any, hence every, infinite cardinality.
Coping
Most mathematicians agree that the Skolem paradox creates no contradiction. But that does not mean they agree on how to resolve it.
First we should note that the ambiguity proved by LST is curable in the sense that LST holds only in first-order theories. Higher-order logics are not afflicted with it, although they are afflicted with many weaknesses absent in first-order logic. The ambiguity is also curable as soon as we add ordering to our collection of domain objects supposed to be real numbers. Once ordering is added, systems intended to capture the reals can become categorical.
But the ambiguity remains baffling and frustrating for first-order theories prior to the introduction of ordering.
Can such a system really assert the uncountability of the reals if the assertion is "just as much" about some merely countable infinite? Or can it really assert that the cardinality of the continuum is 1 (assuming the continuum hypothesis) if the assertion is "just as much" about every other infinite cardinality? LST may not force us to retract our belief that the reals are uncountable; but on one terrifying reading it does, and to avoid that reading we may well have to alter the modality of our belief that the reals are uncountable.
What of models that do not assume CH? We get a plenum of continua... (At least between Aleph_0 and Aleph_1) No? Do we necessarily lose countability so long as ordering can be imposed by some rule?
"In metalogic the term "model" is used in (at least) two senses. We have used the term in the more technical sense, as an interpretation of a system in which its theorems come out true for that interpretation. But the term "model" may also be used more casually to refer to the domain of things on which we want to focus, such as the real numbers, especially if we assume that such things have an existence independent of formal systems and human logicians. In this less strict second sense of "model", Platonists in mathematics who believe that the real numbers exist independently of human minds and formal systems can say that there is an uncountable model of the real numbers: namely, the real numbers themselves. However, they must (by LST) admit that first-order formal systems that seem to capture the real numbers can always be satisfied by a merely countable domain. For this reasons, Platonists will remain Platonic and will not pin their hopes on formalization."Bad news for Bruno! :_(
"One reading of LST holds that it proves that the cardinality of the real numbers is the same as the cardinality of the rationals, namely, countable. (The two kinds of number could still differ in other ways, just as the naturals and rationals do despite their equal cardinality.) On this reading, the Skolem paradox would create a serious contradiction, for we have Cantor's proof, whose premises and reasoning are at least as strong as those for LST, that the set of reals has a greater cardinality than the set of rationals.
The good news is that this strongly paradoxical reading is optional. The bad news is that the obvious alternatives are very ugly. The most common way to avoid the strongly paradoxical reading is to insist that the real numbers have some elusive, essential property not captured by system S. This view is usually associated with a Platonism that permits its proponents to say that the real numbers have certain properties independently of what we are able to say or prove about them.
The problem with this view is that LST proves that if some new and improved S' had a model, then it too would have a countable model. Hence, no matter what improvements we introduce, either S' has no model or it does not escape the air of paradox created by LST. (S' would at least have its own typographical expression as a model, which is countable.) As Morris Kline put it, while Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that certain strong formal systems always prove less than we'd like, LST shows that they also prove more than we'd like."
Please note the discussion of Platonism!
Note that I think we agree (some forms of reasoning probably require consciousness), which only provides another reason to doubt the consistency of the definition of zombies. I don't think reasoning is normally assumed to require consciousness, which is why someone who defines zombies as non-conscious may still hold that they have a reasoning ability.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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From: Craig WeinbergReceiver: everything-listTime: 2012-09-27, 09:26:01
Subject: Re: Epiphenomenalism (was: Re: Bruno's Restaurant)
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I *can* know the exact position of an electron in my brain, even if this will make me totally ignorant on its impulsions. I can know its exact impulsion too, even if this will make me totally ignorant of its position.
But that doesn't imply that the electron does not have a definite position and momentum; only that you cannot prepare an ensemble in which both values are sharp.
OK. This Fourier relation between complementary observable is quite mysterious in the comp theory.
In both case, the electron participate two different coherent computation leading to my computational state.
Of course this is just "in principle", as in continuous classical QM, we need to use distributions, and reasonable Fourier transforms.
But at the fundamental level of the UD 'the electron' has some definite representation in each of infinitely many computations. The uncertainty comes from the many different computations. Right?
Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
The state is well defined, as your state belongs to a computation. It is not well defined below your substitution level, but this is only due to your ignorance on which computations you belong.
Right. What I would generally refer to as 'my state' is a classical state (since I don't experience Everett's many worlds).
But I still don't understand, "Consciousness will make your brain, at the level below the substitution level, having some well defined state, with an electron, for example, described with some precise position. Without consciousness there is no "material" brain at all. "
How does consciousness "make a brain" or "make matter"? I thought your theory was that both at made by computations. My intuition is that, within your theory of comp, consciousness implies consciousness of matter and matter is a construct of consciousness;
That's what I was saying.
so you can't have one without the other.
Exactly. Not sure if we disagree on something here.
Bruno
Brent
You can "observe" yourself below the substitution result, but the detail of such observation are just not relevant for getting your computational state.
Bruno
Brent
Of course, you will argue that this is what physics already describes, with QM. In that sense I am OK, but consciousness is still playing a role, even if it is not necessarily the seemingly magical role invoked by Craig.
HEY!
It's nice to see other people noticing the same thing that I have been complaining about. Thank you, Brent!
On 9/29/2012 3:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I *can* know the exact position of an electron in my brain, even if this will make me totally ignorant on its impulsions. I can know its exact impulsion too, even if this will make me totally ignorant of its position.
But that doesn't imply that the electron does not have a definite position and momentum; only that you cannot prepare an ensemble in which both values are sharp.
OK. This Fourier relation between complementary observable is quite mysterious in the comp theory.
How about that! Bruno, you might wish to read up a little on Pontryagin duality, of which the Fourier relation is an example. It is a relation between spaces. How do you get spaces in your non-theory, Bruno?
In both case, the electron participate two different coherent computation leading to my computational state.
Of course this is just "in principle", as in continuous classical QM, we need to use distributions, and reasonable Fourier transforms.
But at the fundamental level of the UD 'the electron' has some definite representation in each of infinitely many computations. The uncertainty comes from the many different computations. Right?
Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
This is defined as "centering" by Quine's Propositional Objects as discussed in Chalmers book, pg. 60-61...
The state is well defined, as your state belongs to a computation. It is not well defined below your substitution level, but this is only due to your ignorance on which computations you belong.
Right. What I would generally refer to as 'my state' is a classical state (since I don't experience Everett's many worlds).
But I still don't understand, "Consciousness will make your brain, at the level below the substitution level, having some well defined state, with an electron, for example, described with some precise position. Without consciousness there is no "material" brain at all. "
How does consciousness "make a brain" or "make matter"? I thought your theory was that both at made by computations. My intuition is that, within your theory of comp, consciousness implies consciousness of matter and matter is a construct of consciousness;
That's what I was saying.
Really!?
so you can't have one without the other.
Exactly. Not sure if we disagree on something here.
What exactly are you agreeing about, Bruno? No consciousness without matter? Ah, you think that numbers have intrinsic properties... OK.
Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
Perhaps, but you need to define what you mean by physical world without assuming a *primitive* physical world.
On 29 Sep 2012, at 12:21, Stephen P. King wrote:
HEY!
It's nice to see other people noticing the same thing that I have been complaining about. Thank you, Brent!
On 9/29/2012 3:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I *can* know the exact position of an electron in my brain, even if this will make me totally ignorant on its impulsions. I can know its exact impulsion too, even if this will make me totally ignorant of its position.
But that doesn't imply that the electron does not have a definite position and momentum; only that you cannot prepare an ensemble in which both values are sharp.
OK. This Fourier relation between complementary observable is quite mysterious in the comp theory.
How about that! Bruno, you might wish to read up a little on Pontryagin duality, of which the Fourier relation is an example. It is a relation between spaces. How do you get spaces in your non-theory, Bruno?
?
The result is that we have to explain geometry, analysis and physics from numbers. It is constructive as it shows the unique method which keeps distinct and relate the different views, and the quanta/qualia differences. But the result is a problem, indeed: a problem in intensional arithmetic.
In both case, the electron participate two different coherent computation leading to my computational state.
Of course this is just "in principle", as in continuous classical QM, we need to use distributions, and reasonable Fourier transforms.
But at the fundamental level of the UD 'the electron' has some definite representation in each of infinitely many computations. The uncertainty comes from the many different computations. Right?
Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
Perhaps, but you need to define what you mean by physical world without assuming a *primitive* physical world.
This is defined as "centering" by Quine's Propositional Objects as discussed in Chalmers book, pg. 60-61...
The state is well defined, as your state belongs to a computation. It is not well defined below your substitution level, but this is only due to your ignorance on which computations you belong.
Right. What I would generally refer to as 'my state' is a classical state (since I don't experience Everett's many worlds).
But I still don't understand, "Consciousness will make your brain, at the level below the substitution level, having some well defined state, with an electron, for example, described with some precise position. Without consciousness there is no "material" brain at all. "
How does consciousness "make a brain" or "make matter"? I thought your theory was that both at made by computations. My intuition is that, within your theory of comp, consciousness implies consciousness of matter and matter is a construct of consciousness;
That's what I was saying.
Really!?
?
so you can't have one without the other.
Exactly. Not sure if we disagree on something here.
What exactly are you agreeing about, Bruno? No consciousness without matter? Ah, you think that numbers have intrinsic properties... OK.
Indeed. I think 17 is intrinsically a prime number in all possible realities.
This is needed to define in an intrinsic way the non intrinsic, intensional properties of the relative number (machines). Being universal, or simply being a code, or an address is not intrinsic, but can be once we choose an initial Turing universal base.
Bruno
--
Stathis Papaioannou
On 9/29/2012 10:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi Bruno,
On 29 Sep 2012, at 12:21, Stephen P. King wrote:
HEY!
It's nice to see other people noticing the same thing that I have been complaining about. Thank you, Brent!
On 9/29/2012 3:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I *can* know the exact position of an electron in my brain, even if this will make me totally ignorant on its impulsions. I can know its exact impulsion too, even if this will make me totally ignorant of its position.
But that doesn't imply that the electron does not have a definite position and momentum; only that you cannot prepare an ensemble in which both values are sharp.
OK. This Fourier relation between complementary observable is quite mysterious in the comp theory.
How about that! Bruno, you might wish to read up a little on Pontryagin duality, of which the Fourier relation is an example. It is a relation between spaces. How do you get spaces in your non-theory, Bruno?
?
The result is that we have to explain geometry, analysis and physics from numbers. It is constructive as it shows the unique method which keeps distinct and relate the different views, and the quanta/qualia differences. But the result is a problem, indeed: a problem in intensional arithmetic.
What ever means they are constructed, it is still a space that is the end result. A space is simply "a space is a set with some added structure."
In both case, the electron participate two different coherent computation leading to my computational state.
Of course this is just "in principle", as in continuous classical QM, we need to use distributions, and reasonable Fourier transforms.
But at the fundamental level of the UD 'the electron' has some definite representation in each of infinitely many computations. The uncertainty comes from the many different computations. Right?
Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
Perhaps, but you need to define what you mean by physical world without assuming a *primitive* physical world.
I am OK with the idea that a physical world is that which can be described by a Boolean Algebra in a "sharable way". The trick is the "sharing". It order to share something there must be multiple entities that can each participate in some way and that those entities are in some way distinguishable from each other.
This is defined as "centering" by Quine's Propositional Objects as discussed in Chalmers book, pg. 60-61...
The state is well defined, as your state belongs to a computation. It is not well defined below your substitution level, but this is only due to your ignorance on which computations you belong.
Right. What I would generally refer to as 'my state' is a classical state (since I don't experience Everett's many worlds).
But I still don't understand, "Consciousness will make your brain, at the level below the substitution level, having some well defined state, with an electron, for example, described with some precise position. Without consciousness there is no "material" brain at all. "
How does consciousness "make a brain" or "make matter"? I thought your theory was that both at made by computations. My intuition is that, within your theory of comp, consciousness implies consciousness of matter and matter is a construct of consciousness;
That's what I was saying.
Really!?
?
I believe that it was Brent that wrote: "My intuition is that, within your theory of comp, consciousness implies consciousness of matter and matter is a construct of consciousness; " and you wrote that you agreed.
so you can't have one without the other.
Exactly. Not sure if we disagree on something here.
What exactly are you agreeing about, Bruno? No consciousness without matter? Ah, you think that numbers have intrinsic properties... OK.
Indeed. I think 17 is intrinsically a prime number in all possible realities.
It is not a reality in a world that only has 16 objects in it.
I can come up with several other counter-examples in terms of finite field, but that is overly belaboring a point.
This is needed to define in an intrinsic way the non intrinsic, intensional properties of the relative number (machines). Being universal, or simply being a code, or an address is not intrinsic, but can be once we choose an initial Turing universal base.
How do you distinguish one version of the code X from another Y such that X interviews Y has a meaning?
On 29 Sep 2012, at 21:33, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/29/2012 7:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
Perhaps, but you need to define what you mean by physical world without assuming a *primitive* physical world.
Physical objects are exactly the kind of thing that are defined ostensively.
They are referred too ostensively. They are not "defined" in that way, at least not in the theory.
Only in practice, they referred too ostensively. In our context, we search a theory, not a practice.
On 9/30/2012 12:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Sep 2012, at 21:33, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/29/2012 7:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:Yes, and the fact that we cannot know which one bears us "here and now". The QM indeterminacy is made into a particular first person comp indeterminacy.
Where is the "here and now" if not a localization in a physical world.
Perhaps, but you need to define what you mean by physical world without assuming a *primitive* physical world.
Physical objects are exactly the kind of thing that are defined ostensively.
They are referred too ostensively. They are not "defined" in that way, at least not in the theory.
Well of course, nothing can be referred to ostensively *in a theory*. But that's how theoretical definitions are given meaning via reference to what we perceive.
Only in practice, they referred too ostensively. In our context, we search a theory, not a practice.
A theory that can't be connected to practice is just abstract mathematics, a kind of language game.
In fact you do connect your theory to practice by reference to diaries and perceptions.
-- Onward! Stephen
-- Onward! Stephen