On 10/16/2012 10:03 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 6:48:51 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote:
On 10/16/2012 4:31 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 4:19:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 10/16/2012 12:41 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/16/2012 2:42 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/16/2012 7:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi Alberto,
OK, I am officially confused by your statements. You
previously wrote: "Magic emergence from magic enough
complexity has been advocated for almost anything." and
now you suggest that consciousness is contingent on a
level of evolution, ala: "... in this stage of evolution a
form of consciousness becomes a necessity".
How is this not an argument for emergence from
complexity? What is evolution other than a mechanism in
Nature to generate increasing stable complex structures in
the physical universe? Either consciousness is an
irreducible primitive or it is not?
I agree that complexity *is* involved when we consider
issues such as "reportablity" of consciousness, but the
property of "having a subjective experience of being in
the world" itself can be strongly argued to flow at the
most basic level that allows differences.
If there are no inputs from the world to perceive, e.g. a
person in a sensory deprivation tank, or the 'perceptions'
are very simple interactions, e.g. an orbital electron
scattering a photon what will be the content of this
subjective experience?
Brent
--
Hi Brent,
How so? Do we humans have "orbital electron scattering"
of photons as actual experiential content?
No, but Craig thinks electrons do.
Only if electrons actually exist. I think there is a good chance
that they are only the shared experience of atoms.
Hi Craig,
Well, we differ on that point! If we accept atoms, we also
have to accept electrons! Best not go there!
Unfortunately if I doubt photons really the whole Standard Model is
potentially up for grabs. The wide variation in the modeling of atoms
tells me that it is not a given that electrons are not just an
accounting of atomic charge states. It may be that electrons are
objective in some senses but subjective in others (photons being
subjective in more ways). That seems the most likely.
Hi Craig,
Interesting challenge! What if we jettison as a confabulation all
of physical theory... What is left? Shall we cast aside the nice
predictive values that we have gotten? What then? I am willing to go
there for the sake of discussion, but to where?
Let's try something. Consider the Bp&p idea. Belief in a
proposition and it is true. Can we reconstruct explanations from this?
We would have to have a plurality of entities that would have the
beliefs, no? Where do we get that plurality? Let's stipulate that we
have a plurality somehow. There should be something that distinguishes
them, something other than positions in space and time... or is there
anything that would generate distinctions?
Maybe the beliefs are frames in different languages that require
some transformation to translate the propositions of one into something
equivalent for all others. My assumption is that we have to have a
common reality to recover something like physical theories and we can
get that either by imbedding our entities into a single space or by
simply having a common set of propositions that form a non-contradictory
set, something isomorphic to a Boolean algebra if and only if the
propositions are satisfiable
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem> such that
the total logical formulation is TRUE. I favor the latter idea, but it
requires that the physical universe that we observe to be representable
as a true Boolean algebra and a repudiation of the idea that "substance"
is ontologically priomitive.
How is it determined to be satisfiable becomes an interesting
question! Most thinkers seem to assume that its global logical
consistency is completely determined ab initio by the combination of
"physical laws" and initial conditions. But exactly how did the physical
laws come to exist such that they never generate a logical inconsistency
(violating satisfiability) and thus "white rabbits"? I think that the
physical laws are the result of an underlying process that is, in the
ontological sense, eternal and that what we observe as a physical
universe is just an intersection of logically true beliefs for some
finite collection of entities.
Do we have a way of isolating electrons which are independent of ions?
When I look up the research online, it is always (naturally) a
foregone conclusion that they do exist in isolation but I haven't
found anything which explains how specifically we know that (or how we
could know that).
Are electrons entities that we can capture in a jar? Yes!
http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29675
I'm not anxious to try to advocate for electron agnosticism on top of
photon agnosticism, but if there is nothing convince me otherwise,
then there is no reason not to go there as well (other than fear of
ridicule, which I only care about if I'm actually wrong).
Craig
Umm, I think that you are wrong on this one, but I am OK with the
possibility of being wrong. ;-) One thing that I should add en passant.
In my current thinking an entity has sense or 1p if and only if it can
be represented by a separable QM system. When we consider such "monads"
as interacting QM systems (and assume decoherence theory) they are no
longer separable (as they are entangled) their 'common" observables form
a commutative (Abelian) sheaf that maps (somehow) to a Boolean algebra.
The "classical world" is just the topological dual of the Boolean Algebra.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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