Hi Jason Resch It isn't levels that's the problem, it's the dualism between (concrete) privately lived experience and describing
the experience in words (abstractions) in public afterwards. The former is alive, the latter is dead. A description is not the thing itself. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/17/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-15, 01:40:44 Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:13 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: On Saturday, August 11, 2012 3:01:41 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: Roger, You say computers are?uantitative?nstruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level? ?or example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter. ?he matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room. Does that mean that if I carefully scooped some salt or iron filings into a cymatic pattern, that we should have an expectation of a sound being produced automatically? No, but it means if I replaced part of your auditory cortex with mechanical parts that provided the same?lectrochemical?ignals to the neurons that interfaced with your old auditory?ortex, you would be able to hear. ?t what point could I stop replacing neighboring neurons with mechanical parts? ?ould I replace all but one neuron? ?hat happens if I replace that last one? ? ? Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition? The simulated human won't even have an 'it'-ness. The simulation only exists for us because it is designed specifically to exploit our expectations. There is no simulation, just millions of little salt scoopers. So a computer that is adding is not really adding? ?ou suggest that a computer is only adding if it outputs the numbers in a way humans can look at it and interpret it as addition? ? ? ?fter all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings. That's like saying that a photograph is made up of pixels which lack image. Since the nature of consciousness is privacy, we are not the best judge of non-human consciousness. There is no reason to trust our naive realism in assuming that non-humans lack proto-feelings. Do electrons?osses?roto-feelings for every possible human emotion? ?f not, when or where do these more complex feelings come in? Jason ? "Complex behavior is not confined to metazoans. Both amoebae and ciliates show purposive coordinated behaviour, as do individual human cells, such as macrophages. The multi-nucleate slime mould Physarum polycephalum can solve shortest path mazes and demonstrate a memory of a rhythmic series of stimuli, apparently using a biological clock to predict the next pulse (Nakagaki et. al. 2000, Ball 2008)." - http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos2.html ? ?here do you believe these feelings originate? Feelings may not originate, but like the colors of the spectrum are accessed privately but have no public origination. As long as we assume that experience is something which occurs as the product of a mechanism, then we are limited to making sense of the universe as a meaningless mechanism of objects. If we think of time and space as the experiential cancellations, I think we have a better chance of understanding how it all fits together. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/rfpVcQ4KDaEJ. 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. -- 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. -- 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.
