On Sunday, February 2, 2014 10:09:10 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > Thanks for quoting the Chalmers piece because I didn't have it to hand and > was relying on memory. But on rereading it I still believe that my way of > formulating the paradox has teeth. Although Chalmers admits in this passage > that consciousness looks explanatorily irrelevant to phenomenal judgement > on a functional basis, but not necessarily causally irrelevant, one must > appreciate that he is hedging his bets, or better reserving his arguments, > for a later appeal to psycho-physical causation. And remember too that I > agree with him that the relation of acquaintance entails that we cannot > coherently accede to any such irrelevance, whether or not we deem it > explanatory or causal. If this were not the case there would be no paradox, > since there would be nothing to explain but function. > > But of course he must still elucidate the psycho-physical principles he > seeks, in order to build a bridge from the relation of acquaintance to that > of function and I don't think even he would claim to have achieved that > beyond some speculative ideas on the role of information. So building such > a bridge is a necessity for any theory before we can concede that it has > eluded the jaws of the POPJ. > > I would certainly be interested to hear how your theory tackles this > problem, if in fact we've now succeeded in establishing just what it is. >
I think that Chalmers gets most of the way there in general, but in a few areas stops short of committing to what I call primordial pansensitivity, but could be called Absolute panpsychism. I've been influenced directly from Chalmers and his formulation of the Hard Problem, and I see myself in many ways as picking up where he leaves off. For all of his boldness in approaching the possibility of panpsychism, he is still operating from a framework which assumes structure and mechanism, at least as parallel to consciousness. What I am looking at is a universe which is fundamentally aesthetic, i.e., a self-nesting dream about dreaming. The more nested the dream, the more realism can be leveraged, because the scale of time and space can be expanded, making sub-dreams seem physical and super-dreams seem intuitive from any given dream. It's all being carved out of the Totality like a Jack O Lantern (metaphorically, obviously, I'm not talking about a carving of a literal container). The totality need not be a deity or a Mind as far as I can figure, but human experience might be part of a larger kind of experience which may as well be deity-like or Mind like in part. What I propose then is that coherence itself is relativistic and changes dynamically as any individual experience becomes more transparent to the Totality or more reflective of the insensitivity which masks the totality (the bodies-in-spacetime view). I'm not claiming to have an exhaustive reinterpretation of physics, only that I might have put together all four corners of the frame of such a reinterpretation. It could take centuries to fill in the rest of the puzzle, and I have no delusions that it is my account that has to be the one which leads us there. If anything at all comes of my efforts, I'd be pretty surprised, but I do suspect that any correct reinterpretation of physics will be more or less consistent with the basic ideas I'm proposing. Einstein too, like Chalmers, was on the right track but didn't go far enough. He was right not to accept QM also, but he did not take the final leap of seeing order itself as a relativistic feature, and that physics itself was a protocol of shared perception rather than just dynamic ratios of measure. Measure, like computation and information, ultimately can only make sense if it is part of a larger and deeper sense of intention and appreciation. The current idea of information overlooks the "in" and treats all phenomena as formation. This is, in my understanding, only the public range of physics. Private physics, or the physics of privacy is the source and destination of all forms and functions. Forms are a side view of experience which can be appreciated. Functions are a side view of experience which represent participation. Craig David > > > On Sunday, February 2, 2014 7:43:33 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: >> >> On 2 February 2014 19:48, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> What do you mean by "laying claim to conscious phenomena"? In what way >>> does a brain or body lay claim to conscious phenomena? >> >> >> Let me restate it then. Bodies, insofar as they are the manifestations >> with which we interact (own brains and bodies included) *appear* to be the >> source of any utterance (or thought, in our own case) whatsoever. >> > > I don't see bodies as manifestations with which we interact. I see them as > the back end view of all interactions. They aren't the source of anything > except reverberating consequences. > > >> This includes, therefore, *utterances and thoughts that lay claim to >> conscious phenomena*, >> > > It just means that you are ruling out immaterial perspectives from the > start. Given the reality of experience and the reality of the appearance of > bodies in that experience, you choose the reality of the appearances - the > contents of the experience, over existential primacy of experience itself. > To understand my hypothesis you would have to pivot 180 degrees on that and > see bodies as a product of nested perception (not just human or biological > perception, but perception beneath the alpha and beyond the omega of all > functions and forms). > > >> as for example I am exemplifying in this very statement. Even if we take >> the view that it is we who are putting this construction on those >> manifestations, >> > > That is not my view. You're talking about human experience, but I'm > talking about primodial pansensitivity. In my view, all human beings could > be erased from the universe and it would not change anything. Experience > would continue as usual. > > >> we can't ignore the fact that the causally-closed rules they appear to >> follow, at whatever scale, do not entail any aspect of consciousness to >> explain these utterances. >> > > This is the most common mistake that I run into: The conflating of human > consciousness with the principle of sense makes a solipsistic straw man of > idealism. I talk about it here if you are interested: > http://multisenserealism.com/about/the-matter-of-objects-and-the-idea-of-subjects/ > > The bottom line is Berkeley's point: How would you know what entails > consciousness and what doesn't? Since nothing can be experienced without > consciousness, it is an absolutely unscientific act of faith to presume > substances independent of all aesthetic receptivity. The idea of a material > body which is not associated with any experience of detection whatsoever > makes the detection of bodies completely superfluous, and makes any > description of them indiscernible from nothingness. > > >> Therefore, a fortiori, it must seem inexplicable how these utterances >> could make reference to phenomena which are completely absent from, and >> redundant in, their causal schema. >> > > Sure, if you start from an erroneous premise, then it is not surprising > that the result is ultimately absurd. If you start with bodies that don't > need consciousness, and the sole value of functionalism, then consciousness > cannot make sense. What is ignored of course is that 'function' is an > expectation of consciousness, so that unconscious bodies have no capacity > to discern the difference between function and non-function (or any other > difference for that matter). > > >> >> Chalmers lays all this out quite explicitly in TCM and I think he may >> even have coined the rubric POPJ. >> > > Yes, but Chalmers coined it as an attack on modal accounts of > consciousness. He says: > > "Chapter 5: *The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment*. On my position, even if >> consciousness cannot be physically explained, behavior and functioning can >> be. So it seems that consciousness is explanatorily (although perhaps not >> causally) irrelevant to behavior. In particular it is explanatorily >> irrelevant to claims such as "I am conscious" and related phenomenal >> judgments (where judgments are defined in functional terms). I call this >> the "paradox of phenomenal judgment". I argue that this paradox is >> counterintuitive but poses no fatal flaws. I address the objections that it >> implies that we are unable to know about, refer to, or remember our >> phenomenal states. I argue that these objections rest on causal theories of >> knowledge and of reference that we have independent reason to reject in the >> phenomenal case. Knowledge of and reference to phenomenal states is based >> on something tighter than a causal relation; it is based on a relation of >> acquaintance. I discuss the content of phenomenal beliefs and the >> constitutive relation between experience and phenomenal belief." > > > What he is saying, in my view, is clearly that acquaintance > (sensory-motive participation, aesthetic realism, direct perception) is > more fundamental than causality from algorithmic causes (logical > representations, programs, abstract processing, etc). > > >> He doesn't deviate, at least until his discussion of "information", from >> a canonical account of physical phenomena but it is important to see that >> it makes no essential difference to his argument whatever ultimate >> ontological basis we choose to assume. Hence in terms of a sensory-motive >> theory we are still confronted by the manifestation of a closed physical >> necessitation schema on which the stabilisation of our experience utterly >> relies. >> > > *OUR* sensory context relies on a lower level context which appears to us > (from our perceptual niche) as bodies, cells, molecules, etc. but that in > no way means that those appearances do not in fact rely on an even lower > (and higher) level context of felt rhythms, attractions and repulsions, > proto-semantic tropes, etc. These are all good questions, and I'm glad you > are asking them, but you are assuming that I have not been thinking about > these issues already. If you are interested, I would tell you that I've > been thinking of almost nothing but these issues for up to ten years now, > and issues like these for probably 25 years before that. > > >> This schema makes no appeal whatsoever to any category of sense >> > > That's because you assume that there can be categories outside of sense. > Again, if there could be, then sense would be redundant and there would be > no communication at all. > > >> but nonetheless suffices completely to account for all bodily utterances >> laying claim to sensory appreciation. But of course we cannot believe this >> and hence we have the paradox. >> >> As Brent has remarked, it is still possible to hold on to the hope that >> the physical appearances, however much they appear to be exhaustive and >> causally closed, still conceal some truly unexpected nomological >> necessitation that will suffice to account for conscious phenomena, >> although the analogies he gives generally tend to elimination of the entire >> category. Chalmers spends a good deal of effort in TCM to show why he >> thinks that hope must be indefinitely deferred, unless completely novel >> "psycho-physical laws" can be discovered. There is little consensus on >> this, to say the least, but many people can't see how psycho-physical laws >> would constitute an adequate account of consciousness any more obviously >> than physical ones. >> > > The psycho-physical laws that Chalmers rightly anticipates are to be found > in what I call sense. They aren't laws though, because laws require sense > to operate. Laws have to make sense, don't they? There has to be some way > to detect their influence through sensation or they are indistinguishable > from nothing, right? > > >> >> I hope it is now clear what I mean by bodies laying claim to conscious >> phenomena. It is essentially the same argument deployed by Chalmers in TCM. >> > > It is clear that you don't completely understand Chalmers position or > mine. > > 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-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- 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. 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