On 03 Apr 2012, at 22:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Apr 3, 3:56 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
On 03.04.2012 02:06 Stathis Papaioannou said the following:
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Craig
Weinberg<whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
From blindsight, synesthesia, and anosognosia we know that
particular
qualia are not inevitably associated with the conditions they
usually
represent for us, so it seems impossible to justify qualia on a
functionalist basis. Just as a computer needs no speakers and video
screen inside itself, there is no purpose for such a presentation
layer within our own mechanism. Of course, even if there were a
purpose, there is no hint of such a possibility from mechanism
alone.
If there was some reason that a bucket of rocks could benefit by
some
kind of collective 'experience' occurring amongst them, that's a
million miles from suspecting that experience could be a
conceivable
possibility.
Rather than 'consciousness', human beings would benefit
evolutionarily
much more by just being able to do something mechanically
conceivable
things like teleport, time travel, or breathe fire. Awareness
doesn't
even make sense as a possibility. Were we not experiencing it
ourselves we could never anticipate any such possibility in any
universe.
Since there is no evolutionary advantage to consciousness it must
be a
side-effect of the sort of behaviour that conscious organisms
display.
Otherwise, why did we not evolve as zombies?
The evolutionary advantage of consciousness, according to Jeffrey
Gray,
is late-error detection.
Why would a device need to be conscious in order to have late-error
detection?
I agree. People confuse consciousness-the-qualia, and consciousness-
the-integrating function. Stathis was talking about the qualia.
Evolution can press only on the function, a priori.
As far as ballcocks and electronic sensors, the difference is that
they don't assemble themselves. We use their native capacities for
purposes that plastic and metal has no way of accessing. The ballcock
is only a thing in our world, it doesn't have any world of its own. I
think that the molecules that make up the materials have their own
world, but it's not likely to be anything like what we could imagine.
Maybe all molecules have a collective experience on that microcosmic
level, where snapshots of momentary awareness corresponding to change
string together centuries of relative inactivity.
It is not the fact that matter detects and responds to itself that is
in question, it is the presentation of an interior realism which
cannot be explained in a mechanistic context.
This is begging the question. And I would say that mechanism explains
well the interior realism, up to the qualia itself which can be
explained only in the negative. It is that thing that the machine
"feels correctly" to be non functional and makes the machine thinks at
first "non correctly" that she is not a machine. It is not correct
from the 3-view, but still correct from the machine first person view.
If 3-I is a machine, the 1-I cannot feels to be a machine.
As Minski pointed out, machines will be as befuddled as us about the
mind-body problem. But comp can explains this "befuddling" at the meta-
level, completely. The machines too. In a sense, the first person and
consciousness is not a machine, with the mechanist hypothesis.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
