Ben Goertzel wrote:
Sorry to be negative, but no, my proposal is not in any way a
modernization of Peirce's metaphysical analysis of awareness.
Could you elaborate the difference? It seems very similar to me.
You're saying that consciousness has to do with the bottoming-out of
mental hierarchies in raw percepts that are unanalyzable by the mind ...
and Peirce's Firsts are precisely raw percepts that are unanalyzable by
the mind...
It is partly the stance (I arrive at my position from a cognitivist
point of view, with specific mechanisms that must be causing the
problem), where Peirce appears to suggest the Firsts idea as a purely
metaphysical proposal.
So, what I am saying is that this superficial resemblance between his
position and mine is so superficial that it makes no sense to describe
on the latter as a modernization of the former.
A good analogy would be Galilean Relativity and Einsten's Relativity.
Although there is a superficial resemblance, nobody would really say
that Einstein was "just" a modernization of Galileo.
***
The standard meaning of Hard Problem issues was described very well by
Chalmers, and I am addressing the hard problem of concsciousness, not
the other problems.
***
Hmmm.... I don't really understand why you think your argument is a
solution to the hard problem.... It seems like you explicitly
acknowledge in your paper that it's *not*, actually.... It's more like
a philosophical argument as to why the hard problem is unsolvable, IMO.
No, that is only part one of the paper, and as you pointed out before,
the first part of the proposal ends with a question, not a statement
that this was a failure to explain the problem. That question was
important.
The important part is the analysis of "explanation" and "meaning". This
can also be taken to be about your use of the word "unsolvable" in the
above sentence.
What I am claiming (and I will make this explicit in a revision of the
paper) is that these notions of "explanation", "meaning", "solution to
the problem", etc., are pushed to their breaking point by the problem of
consciousness. So it is not that there is a problem with understanding
consciousness itself, so much as there is a problem with what it means
to *explain* things.
Other things are "easy" to explain, but when we ask for an explanation
of something like consciousness, the actual notion of "explanation"
breaks down in a drastic way. This is very closely related to the idea
of an objective observer in physics .... in the quantum realm that
notion breaks down.
What I gave in my paper was (a) a detailed description of how the
confusion about consciousness arises [peculiar behavior of the analysis
mechanism], but then (b) I went on to point out this peculiar behavior
infects much more than just our ability to explain consciousness,
because it casts doubt on the fundamental meaning of explanation and
semantics and ontology.
The conclusion that I then tried to draw was that it would be wrong to
say that consciousness was just an artifact or (ordinarily) inexplicable
thing, because this would be to tacitly assume that the sense of
"explain" that we are using in these statements is the same one we have
always used. Anyone who continued to use "explain" and "mean" (etc.) in
their old context would be stuck in what I have called "Level 0", and in
that level the old meanings [sic] of those terms are just not able to
address the issue of consciousness.
Go back to the quantum mechanics analogy again: it is not right to
cling to old ideas of position and momentum, etc., and say that we
simply do not "know" the position of an electron. The real truth - the
new truth about how we should understand "position" and "momentum" - is
that the position of the electron is fundamentally not even determined
(without observation).
This analogy is not just an analogy, as I think you might begin to
guess: there is a deep relationship between these two domains, and I am
still working on a way to link them.
Richard Loosemore.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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