On 09 Apr 2012, at 16:35, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 08.04.2012 21:32 Bruno Marchal said the following:
...
This is well illustrated in this (one hour) BBC broadcast, featuring
Marcus de Sautoy (who wrote a nice book on the "music of the
primes").
(thanks to the salvianaut linking to this in a salvia forum)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Biv_8xjj8E
Despite being mathematicians, de Sautoy still believes he is flesh
and
bones, and that consciousness is neuronal activity. His reasoning are
valid, but uses implicitly both mechanism and the aristotelian
conception of reality. That can't work (cf UDA).
Bruno,
I believe that now I understand what physicalism is. What would you
recommend to read about mechanism? Something like this SEP paper
about physicalism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
Yes, it is a good description of physicalism. For mechanism such type
of media are not aware of the UDA argument, so you have to understand
it by yourself, by reading my papers, or this list. New idea or result
take time to be accepted, especially when they cross different
disciplinaries. I can give you many titles of books and papers---or
you can find them in the references in my thesis, or papers. But
mechanism is defended mostly by materialist and they use the mechanist
assumption mainly to burry the mind-body problem. The subject is hot,
and authoritative-argument are frequent.
On the contrary, I use computationalism only to *formulate* the mind-
body problem, and the UD Argument shows that mechanism (digital
mechanism, aka computationalism) is incompatible with physicalism. In
fact mechanism provides the conceptual explanation of how the laws of
physics have to be generated, if comp is true, but not as applying to
some "reality", but as connecting in some way the many minds of
numbers (aka digital "machine" in the mathematical sense of Church
Turing Post).
I have just sent UDA step 0 to the FOAR list, so you can still climb
on the wagon. Except that it is not easy to link to it (how can Google-
group be so hard to use?). UDA step 0 is the definition of (digital)
mechanism. If you google directly on UDA step 0, you will find the
introduction to mechanism I did for an entheogen forum.
Gosh, the new Google group presentation is even worst.
And if I click for Google+, everything is in Dutch ... <sigh> ... I
miss so much the old Escribe, where each individual posts get a link.
That was simple and efficacious.
I hate to advertize my work, but then, if it is flawless, it is in
advance of what you can find in the dictionaries and media. I reduce
the mind-body problem to an problem of justifying the number's belief
in a physical reality, without postulating it. I guess you have the
link to the sane paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
If you search motivation for mechanism and computationalism, you can
find tuns of paper on that issues, in library and on the net.
Mechanism is already discussed by the Chinese and the Indians since
many thousand of years, and Diderot's definition of rationalism is
just mechanism. It is often opposed to superstition or belief in
actual divine intervention. Anderson's selected paper on "Minds and
Machines" was not bad. It contains the paper by Putnam on
functionalism, which is often another name for computationalism. I
make a distinction, though, by making explicit that computationalism
is defined by the existence of a substitution level, and I explain
that the choice of the level does not change the conceptual "reversal"
consequence.
Usually, neuro-philosophers assume some high, neuronal, levels, but
the consequences I explain can be derived from any levels (even sub-
quantum level). Yet, the choice of the level can influence the shape
of the physical laws, so that we can indirectly measure our
substitution level by comparing the physics "observed" with the
indirect consequences of comp on the physical laws, or simply with the
physics derived from comp (but this asks for progress in that
direction).
Perhaps the book closer to comp, as I understand it, is the book
"Mind's I" edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. They missed the reversal,
but present good introductory thought experience going in the correct
direction with many valid points.
As for movie, they mix everything up, for they presume that
consciousness starts at the self level.
I agree. It is my main critics.
This is why I like Gray's book where he distinguish between three
different conscious processes.
1) Reconstruction of the external world.
... that he seems to assume.
From what you said, I think Gray is still physicalist. But as I
insist, this forces him to postulate some non comp hypothesis, which
nobody has ever done, except for the theories based explicitly on
fairy tales.
To be fair, some people try to develop a notion of analogical
machines, but they are all either Turing emulable, or Turing
recoverable by using the first person indeterminacy.
2) Feelings.
3) Cognitive conscious experiences.
The third points adds nothing to the first two, hence he ignores it
in his book.
OK.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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