On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 3:56:34 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 28 January 2014 18:25, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > > That's because the theory prevents the truth about it from being accessed. >> The theory of comp is blind to its blindness, and demands to be refuted >> only by those wearing blindfolds. To test fairly, you would have to take >> off the blindfold, but then the fact of your seeing would make the test >> redundant. > > > Hi Craig > > Your use of the word "blindness" above prompts me to ask you a question > that has long puzzled me about your ideas. What I don't understand is why > the sense you posit as fundamental in your theory would not, in effect, be > "blind" to itself. >
Because blindness is an invention of sense. Sense can't be blind to itself because there isn't anything to obstruct it at the fundamental level. > If I've understood you (which isn't necessarily the case, of course) sense > is the "inner dual" of outer activity (or vice versa) - so that the > complete picture is a sort of intrinsic/extrinsic duality. If that is the > case, your ideas seem to bear a strong relation to panpsychist or > panexperientialist theories. > Very close. Sense is both the inner, the outer, and the duality that separates them. All of those discernments are sensible and relate to sensory aesthetics. Of the three, the outer or extrinsic is more like the opposite of the fundamental sense, and the intrinsic is more like a limited version of the fundamental sense, the former being spread across a sense of space as bodies and the latter being confined by a sense of past and future as non-experiences. It is related to panexperientialism, yes. I use the term pansensitivity or Primordial Identity Pansensitivity to make it clear that I am not saying "everything has experience" or "rocks have experiences like people do", but rather "all matter and energy is a representation of an underlying experience which may be out of range/frequency of direct perception". The perceiver is not a thing, but an experience. We are a human lifetime, constrained into conscious episodes, which includes many experiences and is part of many experiences. The body, brain, and mechanisms thereof are a kind of back-door representation of all of those experiences on different scales. By saying that sense is the Primordial Identity, I am suggesting that it is ontologically impossible for anything to exist in any way outside of sense, and that everything that can ever exist does so because it is a feature developed through sense. > These latter theories do not, in general, dispute that extrinsic activity > per se is fully explainable in its own terms (is reducible, for example, to > the entities and processes described by physics) Rather, they additionally > posit a basic sensory component accompanying these activities (i.e. an > inner duality) that in some way summates, at the appropriate level, all the > way up to conscious experience. > I am putting the sensory component as primary, so that extrinsic activities and intrinsic activities can both be explained almost completely in their own terms, as everything makes sense in many different ways (although every way of making sense has the same sense-centered sense in common also). For a human being, we are an example of a massively elaborated experience which is 'folded in on itself' several times, so that we cannot be explained completely in either intrinsic or extrinsic terms. Our experience is likely much more of a hybrid of intrinsic and extrinsic experiences than something with a simpler body. > The problem that concerns me about this way of looking at things is that > any and all behaviour associated with consciousness - including, crucially, > the articulation of our very thoughts and beliefs about conscious phenomena > - can at least in principle be exhausted by an extrinsic account. But if > this be so, it is very difficult indeed to understand how such extrinsic > behaviours could possibly make reference to any "intrinsic" remainder, even > were its existence granted. It isn't merely that any postulated remainder > would be redundant in the explanation of such behaviour, but that it is > hardly possible to see how an inner dual could even be accessible in > principle to a complete (i.e. causally closed) extrinsic system of > reference in the first place. > Right, because the extrinsic perspective is blind to the limits of causal closure. With sense connecting all phenomena and masking that connection on other levels, the idea of closure is an expectation which does not apply intrinsically. The duality, and the outer aesthetic are all inner to sense at the fundamental level, even though locally the appearance is exactly the contrary (by necessity). > > It might seem at first that comp (which also exploits an outer/inner > distinction) is vulnerable to a similar line of criticism, but I believe it > can escape it - unlike primitive-physical or (subject to your comments) > primitive-sensory explanations - by building on the fundamental elements of > reference from the ground up (so to speak). Comp (which derives from the > study of computation, not computers, as you seem to assume rather often in > your critique) is built on recursive webs of reference (notably > self-reference) which bootstrap beyond proof or ostensive demonstration to > incontrovertible truth (at least the arithmetical variety). This puts us in > the position (assuming the comp hypothesis) of accepting our own > incommunicable ability to access such incorrigible indexical truths - in > common with the arithmetical machines we study - or concluding (per > impossibile) that we too are truthless "zombies". > Where does comp get its "reference" from, if not from sense? Once you have reference, self-reference is no great trick, but consciousness becomes redundant. There is no function that consciousness can accomplish which would not be served just as well by unconscious "reference". What we observe in computation is that reference can be accomplished mechanically, however we know that there are different levels of quality of interpretation. We know that we can memorize a password based on keystrokes without knowing the letters on the keys. We know that we can pronounce a language phonetically without understanding what we are saying. This suggests that there is some kind of hierarchy of quality which separates the merely robotic kinds of reference, and more profound levels of participation. Looking at the examples I just gave, there is no amount of complexity in a password or length of a reading in another language which would necessitate a more profound level of aesthetic coherence. What I am saying is that information *about* experience cannot ever become an experience by itself, and that there is no information which is anything more than an experience about an experience. To me, this puts comp on the defensive. We can see clearly through these symbol grounding examples that there is a difference in kind between computation which refers to experience and experience itself which is unrelated to complexity. We can see clearly that we ourselves possess the capacity to participate in both experience and doing computation about experience. What we can see that something which is very rich aesthetically can be compressed destructively by counting, sampling, digitizing, etc. What we cannot see is a reason to assume that once a high level experience is reduced to a granular level, that it can be restored meaningfully without an audience to complete the restoration perceptually. We can't see an example of a machine which seems to care about anything, or can understand what it means to try rather than to simply do. Craig > David > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
