On 04 Aug 2013, at 21:03, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Thanks Freqflyer,
It's interesting for me because in some respects, Roger seems like a
shadow version of myself in that we are both driven by a similar
cranksessive motivation to focus on the particulars of the Hard
Problem. Having had no exposure to speak of in philosophy generally
or Leibniz in particular, I have found, through Stephen P. King
first, and then continuing with Roger, that what I have come up with
bears some strong similarities to Leibniz' Monadology. There are
several other philosophers, scientists, and artists whose work I
have discovered in the past few years who I am also glad to have
found after I had already developed my thoughts, or I would have
thought that I had plagiarized from them. This has been an
unexpected bonus of this hobby - learning about a lot of big ideas
as they come up, without having to digest a lot of other writing
that I'm not prepared to understand.
Anyhow, my beef with Roger is primarily the spamorrhea tactics that
he has adopted, number one. I'm sure that I have bothered more than
one person on this list with my posts, but I have never tried fill
up the list with my topics intentionally. I may have interminable
arguments, but hopefully they are combined to one or two threads at
a time. The second complaint I have is his belligerent
politicization. I'd be lying if I said I would feel the same about
an equally political poster who was not proselytizing regressive
bigotry, but even it he was someone who I can identify with
politically, I would still think 'dude, this isn't a good place for
this...you're embarrassing the cause.'
The Leibniz posting is actually the least offensive part of the
Roger show, IMO - although it was probably enough sometime six
months ago (which I'm sure people feel about my posts as well).
Where my hypothesis differs from Leibniz and Bruno is as follows:
Leibniz (or Leibniz a la Clough) -
"Why ? Consciousness is bipolar, consisting of a nonphysical-subject/
physical-
object pair, a true living subject looking at a spactime physical
object."
There are some important considerations here.
1. If someone drinks a physical coffee object, their nonpysical-
subject experiences stimulation. If they take physical aspirin,
their non-physical headache pain goes away. While we can find
examples such as psychosomatic illness and placebo effect where the
result may imply that the object is influenced directly by the
subject. This should tell us right away that simplistic models of
the relation between human consciousness, the brain, awareness and
matter are probably not an adequate place to start. We all agree
that magnetic stimulation of the brain can have direct and specific
effect on subjectivity, and that meditation can change neurological
behavior.
2. What would it mean for something non-physical to be directly
interacting with something physical? This seems to be the overlooked
elephant in the room since Descartes substance dualism. If Substance
A can interact with Substance B, then the two substances must either
be aware of each other, or they must share a third Substance C which
is aware of both...of course, Substance C has the same problem, it
needs a Substance C-A and a Substance C-B, and the infinite regress
of homunculus transduction protocols begins.
3. In a dream, we can not easily tell that we are dreaming. Even in
the face of directly irrational circumstances, the feeling of
realism can persist without any notice. We can see and interact with
things which are, from our perspective within the dream, objects.
What's the point of saying you have separate fundamental substances
if they interaction is indistinguishable in many circumstances?
Often our motives are compromised by sub-conscious influence, but we
can also do things like take drugs to change our brain, or kill
ourselves, which require a rather tortured explanation to be
portrayed as evolved behaviors.
All of these suggest to me that the boundary between "physical" and
"non-physical" is scientifically meaningless. I don't think that we
can even say that there is anything non-physical, especially in
light of phenomena like synchronicity and quantum entanglement. To
label something metaphysical, non-physical, emergent, I think is to
castigate the phenomena and refuse to examine it intelligently. To
me, this means understanding that the nature of physics, while
aesthetically divided on many levels into public-facing and private-
facing phenomena, and divided in an absolutely perpendicular way
(public bodies are nested additively from space , private
experiences are nested subtractively from eternity), physics, as a
pansensitive interaction, is an unbroken whole. Consciousness is not
only bipolar, it is divisible in multiple senses, although polarity
is a significant part of that theme and should not be overlooked.
Object and subject are more meaningful linguistically than
scientifically. What is real is public bodies and private
experience. The dream basketball is like a 'real' basketball except
in the sense that the dream basketball cannot be located in public.
It is public vs private, or unity vs multiplicity which united
physics, mathematics, and subjective philosophy.
As far as Bruno goes, I admire all of the work that I have seen of
his, and had this been another time in my life and were I more
mathematically literate, I would very likely think that his solution
is the right one. As it stands instead, my understanding has taken a
different path in which I can clearly see that any assumption of
quantifiable phenomena as primary cannot be correct. I have tried
many times to explain here that this is not because I want it to be
that way, or because I fear technology or love humanity, but rather
that I understand the difference between aesthetic experiences in
which there is perception and participation, and mechanical
functions in a low level phenomena is used as a device to simulate
parts of experiences.
The machine itself get the difference between any third person self-
description (a Bp), and the correct one, like Bp & p, (or any other
such that Bp -> p (so B is a knower in the classical sense)).
What you argue for is that no Bp can ever defined a (Bp & p), but the
machine already understand this.
It's hard to show some people why this difference is real and why it
is important (others get it right away).
The ideally correct machine is born with it.
Ironically, Roger's obsession with monads are part of the solution.
Leibniz is not the only thinker to conceive of the universe as
emerging within a singularity rather than exploding out of it. Terms
like Totality, the Abolute, Ein Sof, Tao, Brahman, Aion, etc, all
suggest the same kind of 180 degree pivot of the assumption of
universe as assembled objects.
Yes. That's what the ideally correct machine can eventually realise.
Once we try this cosmological flip, we wind up with experiences that
can be counted, rather than countings which can simulate experience.
Nobody can simulate a machine first person experience. An experience
is a personal event lived by some person, that you can associated,
assuming comp, with infinities of machines and computations.
Associated but not identified.
The totality of arithmetic truth fits in as a single two dimensional
slice across eternity, a vanishingly thin layer, but universal in a
horizontal sense.
I think you confuse arithmetical truth (which is something big) with
the apprehensible part of arithmetical truth by some machine.
The rest of the universe can only be experienced directly.
This is ambiguous.
Arithmetic truth is the shadow of the monad - the imposter, the
anesthetic servant whose job it is to minimize consciousness,
With comp, it is more like the condition to make consciousness
happening and differentiating along the many dreams, some true, some
only consistent.
and to make it disappear.
You are the one making disappear the consciousness of machines,
relative numbers, and my sun in law (the one with the brain
prosthesis), I recall.
Bruno
Craig
On Saturday, August 3, 2013 10:59:40 AM UTC-4, freqflyer07281972
wrote:
Roger,
Just because you perceive that people are 'wasting their time' by
providing their own unique points of view on questions dear to their
heart (and not, by the way, on rehashing simplistic strawmen
positions of philosophers that lived during the Age of
Enlightenment) does not give you licence to therefore go ahead and
'waste their time.' See, it's sloppy thinking like this that makes
you unwelcome on this list, not the profundity of anything you say.
What you have done is shown that you've mastered a grade school
syllogism:
I am a subject.
These things in front of me are my objects.
Where is my subject? It can't be an object!
Conclusion:
The world is at heart dualistic! And our subject is radically
different than our objects!
So we need some 'non-physical principle' to explain this mysterious
subject
(etc.)
Therefore God...(etc)
I'm not sure if you've been keeping up with the writing in the
Western tradition of philosophy, or science (it was invented after
Leibniz died), or if you just got bogged down in the 1700s with
Leibniz et al., but this stuff is kind of old potatoes these days.
What is far more fruitful (and fascinating, in my opinion) is how
the brain arrives at a notion of subjectivity in the first place and
how the brain works-- knowledge inferred from things like brain
lesion studies and studies into perceptual self-deception.
When Craig talks about multisense realism, that is an original
theory he has formulated to try to unify the two realms of external,
perceived objects (sensates) and the subjective feeling of what it
is to be alive (sensation). On one level, sure, he's wasting time,
just like all philosophically enjoyable work is a waste of time. As
Bertrand Russell said: If you enjoyed the time you were wasting,
then you weren't wasting it after all. But on another level, he is
trying to do something original, to think something through deeply.
He uses other thinkers as tools in a toolkit. And while lots of
people don't agree with him, they enjoy his efforts, because he
takes the time to work through challenging concepts.
When Bruno talks about the UDA, he is also trying to do something
similar. He is trying to unify the subjective and objective
components of reality at the deeper level of arithmetic. He has an
argument. He has something new to say.
You are not an original thinker, Roger! You have become enamored by
a stupid artifact of language having to do with subjects and
objects, and something that has been far more poetically described
by Zen masters than you could ever hope to do, and you hit us over
the head with it like a dead fish.
You have not stumbled upon some Lovecraftian truth about being by
reading Leibniz. Your readings of Leibniz do not do him justice.
Leibniz was a penetrating and original thinker who arrived at the
idea of monads because it was forced on him by circumstances of
knowledge AT THAT TIME. God was virtually an axiom due to the
overwhelming power of the church, minds and brains were thought
distinct because neurology hadn't been invented, and science was
struggling to break free from its mold in the form of natural
philosophy and Aristotelian thinking. Leibniz's thoughts were a
reflection of the state of knowledge that existed at his time. For
you to go own using your own watered down version of Leibniz as some
kind of epistemological panacea is a waste of time in a totally
different sense. In the realm of new ideas about the question of
mind and consciousness, it contributes nothing. As Leibniz
scholarship, it is atrocious and betrays a fundamental lack of
understanding of the role of history in constructing ideas.
Finally, your apology says nothing about your constant political
bear baiting in a forum that has no use for it.
It's not even that you talk about Leibniz so much that makes you a
crackpot. It's that you have so little to say of any real value.
Even here, though, you might get some sympathy, if it weren't for
the fact that you have betrayed your bigotry and intolerance
countless times on this list. You strike me as a particularly odious
fellow, one whose sole joy in life is ruining things for everyone
else.
There are plenty of places on the world wide web for people like
you. Try 4chan, for a start. But here...
TROLL!!! BE GONE!!!
On Saturday, August 3, 2013 8:44:04 AM UTC-4, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi tintner michael and Albert Cororna,
I am accused of wasting peoples' time by constantly posting
here and elsewhere on the subject of Leibniz.
I do that because people are already wasting their time
by posting totally impossible views on what mind is or what
consciousness is,
supposedly the chief topics on these sites.
Why ? The current model of the mind or brain
has no subject, only a description of a subject such as "subject".
which is not subjective but objective because it can be located in
spacetime
and described in words.
You need a living, nonphysical, subjective subject. In fact life
also needs a living subject.
The same as is reading this paragraph.
Why ? Consciousness is bipolar, consisting of a nonphysical-subject/
physical-object
pair, a true living subject looking at a spactime physical object.
Only Kant and Leibniz take this criticism seriously, and of them,
only Leibniz
does it specifically.
Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000]
See my Leibniz site at
http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: tintner michael
Receiver: MindBrain
Time: 2013-08-02, 07:17:50
Subject: [Mind and Brain] Re: Why life is impossible to understand
in thematerialistic model of e
>I suspect this is a matter of perspective.
>
>You're assuming that the current materialistic model is the only
possible
>such model, rather than merely an "early evolution" model of
materialism.
>
>Science is still looking at the world as materialistic pieces/
parts. It
>does not yet have a true holistic, integrated materialistic model
of the
>world, which understands how the parts fit together to form wholes.
It
>doesn't understand "self" - how the living machine that is a human
being
>can continuously configure and reconfigure its body as very
>different wholes - how a Peter Sellers can assume a myriad
>roles/personalities/bodies. It doesn't understand the mechanics of
>evolution - how bodies can be "reconfigured"/transformed into
radically
>different forms other bodies.
>
>This is not surprising. So far we have only created machines that are
>"production lines" of parts - basically Rube Goldberg lines of
parts moving
>each other like lines of dominoes. We haven't created - have barely
>conceived of - machines that are truly integrated wholes like living
>creatures.
>
>When we start acquiring holistic materialistic models, I suspect your
>problems/objections will disappear.
>
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