On Aug 21, 12:35 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > On 21 Aug 2011, at 14:43, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> > That's why the mechanist position is critically flawed as a > > cosmological-ontological TOE. It amputates the 1p definition of life - > > which only marginally has to do with reproduction (I don't have kids, > > so I'm disqualified from being 3-p 'alive'.) Life is about feeling > > like you want to avoid dying, and that feeling is SIGNIFICANT. > > This means only that you put consciousness or 1-p in life. No, it means that I put 1-p in experience, and life as specific category of experience. Consciousness is a general term that isn't all that helpful. I like awareness or feeling. And yes, I put feeling in life, because it really has no place in an inorganic world. If all of your actions are pre-programmed, feeling is really superfluous. Our intuition is that killing an ant is less significant than burning down a house full of people. I think that intuition has validity. An ant may or may not be any more 'conscious', but whatever it is less of than a human being is the same thing that a computer program is less of, to us at least. > That is just a matter of definition. > I would not have consecrated my life to the study or consciousness if > it was to amputate the notion of first person, which, on the contrary, > I extend to number relations and program executions. So you extend 1-p to numbers but not to life. I used to extend 1-p to numbers, so I can understand that. I am ok with Platonic primitives, but of course, I see other kinds of sense as primitive as well; privacy, detection, participation, etc. > > It's > > also about flourishing in whatever way you can - to feel like you are > > thriving. I would go so far as to say that all organisms experience > > this and that no inorganic materials experience this. > > No materials at all experience things. Only persons, in a large sense > (not just humans, but animals, and angels, perhaps the plants, on some > scale). > > > > > That's not to say that inorganic materials experience nothing, > > Which makes everything alive/conscious. > I know you do that. It is your panpsychism. I don't buy it. No, it doesn't. It just gives perception a plausible ancestor in detection. They don't experience something like we experience something, all that is necessary is that everything experience just a little bit more than nothing. Otherwise, if you exterminate all of the living beings on the few billion planets that might have them, then you are left with a vast cosmos of countless astrophysical wonders yet has no experience. No wonders. An undetectable abyss. How do you get from that void of utter intangible absence of experience to even a single flicker of awareness is an insurmountable gap. Sense cannot come from non-sense. It is not invented, as you might say, it is discovered. > > I would > > hazard to guess that there is a bit of a blurred line with things like > > crystal growth and virus transmission where the degree of > > sensorimotive articulation approaches that of organic life - but my > > sense is that it is likely more sterile and mathematical. More of a > > monotonous drive in the sense of playing Solitaire or a turn based > > computer game or weaving an endless patterned rug. > > What you say informs me on Craig's first person, not on what is > matter, and what is consciousness. Sure, it's pure speculation on my part, but I'm not making it up. If I had to guess which was more rowdy and emotional, I would choose the dog and not the geode. Wouldn't you? Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
