On Saturday, February 1, 2014 2:53:30 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 1 February 2014 16:55, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > > I get around that with perceptual relativity. When flying over a city, it >> doesn't look like there are millions of conscious entities - not because >> their behavior is limited to a set of rules, but because your vantage point >> amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame. By modulating >> frequency and scale, perceptual histories diverge and alienate each other's >> presence. The more extreme the alienation, the more the quality of what is >> perceived appears mechanical. > > > I don't see that you make your point here. How does "your vantage point > amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame" get around anything? >
Because it is not that consciousness follows rules, it is that rules are the result of one conscious experience modeling others. What we can know about the universe outside of our body is limited by our body. The mind has different limitations, but it is much more directly sensitive to physics than our body, and its view of other bodies. > ISTM rather that "the quality of what is perceived appears mechanical" > because when placed under examination at any scale it can be observed to > adhere to an unvarying and causally-closed set of rules (the ones we group > under the heading of "physical"). > That's because the variation is closed to our vantage point. If an alien astronomer looked at any individual or group of people, they would conclude a causally-closed set of rules as well, but that's only because they are looking at the behavior of our bodies. The behavior of bodies is not that interesting compared to the aesthetic content of experiences. You could have a life changing epiphany and the alien astronomer would see nothing very interesting. > In effect, it appears to be a "mechanism" at all scales. > Appears. What about feels? Why would mechanisms have an experience that feels like something? > The inexorable progress of this analysis of physical appearances has so > far trumped every historical attempt to interpolate novel "top-down" rules > operating at other levels (spiritualism, vitalism, holism, dualism etc.). > Because it is looking for the head (temporary experiences) at the tail end (bodies in space). They are aesthetically orthogonal views. If you measure something with an instrument, you can only measure the outside of the instrument interacting with the outside of another body. The result is an inside out view of the universe. > Comp, as I've said, at the least confronts the problem and offers the > possible shape of a solution (but that alone, of course, doesn't guarantee > its correctness). > Yes, Comp is almost correct, but at the absolute level, when it comes to putting the horse of sense before the cart of information, it gets it exactly wrong. > The value of any genuinely new insight (Relativity Theory, for example) is > not in ignoring the previous theory (Newtonian mechanics in this case) but > rather in providing a better explanation for the predictions of the old > theory whilst simultaneously making new and surprising ones that turn out > to match observation better. > This is not about making predictions, although someone could take it in that directions. This is about understanding the nature of consciousness and physics. > Consequently, if your theory is to prevail, it must be able to explain why > appearance - and especially the appearance of "conscious" behaviour, not > excluding your own - conforms to "physical" causation as precisely as we > observe. > Because observation is a narrow constraint on sense which is invariably reflected in the result of the observation. Why do the Blind Men each conclude that the elephant is a different thing? You are underestimating the depth of the pansensitivity that I'm proposing - which is what I have come to expect. Turning your model of the universe inside out takes some practice. When I say that sense is Absolutely Primordial, I mean that nothing - not appearances, not realism, not sanity or logic - nothing whatsoever is anything except a local feature within it. > This physical conformity of appearance is the reason that the theory > cannot avoid the POPJ - in essence that we don't need, or seem even be able > to apply, the notion of consciousness or sense to explain why the creatures > that appear to us - including ourselves - make the claims to those > phenomena that they do. What you say above doesn't suffice to address this > formidable issue at all. > It's not formidable if you bite the bullet and actually consider the sense primitive without equivocating. Once you see that logic is a kind of sense but sense is not a kind of logic, then everything falls into place nicely. As long as you try to force the concrete presence of sensation and sense-making into an abstract theory, the hard problem will always be formidable. 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.
