On 7 February 2014 07:47, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: >> Well, I *could* be a zombie and still say that, unless you consider >> the idea of zombies contradictory (which maybe it is). > > > I bet you are not a zombie. But you seem to illustrate my point, if > epiphenomenalism is true, despite you are not a zombie, you could be one, > and that is a step toward the elimination of the person.
I know I'm not a zombie, but you don't know that. I don't know how you would bet on it either, since you could not prove it in order to get your payout! The most you can know is that if a certain substitution is made in by brain then *if* I am conscious I will continue to be conscious. >>> You could say "I have headache", which is a first person experience, and, >>> for that reason I will take an aspirin, yet the existence of that first >>> person headache is not used by my brain to make me taking the aspirin. >>> That >>> seems close to non-sense to me. It prevents you to be a zombie, but makes >>> you deluded in all high level person behavior. >> >> >> A zombie would take an aspirin as well, wouldn't it? Otherwise its >> zombie deception would be obvious. > > > Sure, he would take aspirin, coffee, and many things. We do agree on the > definition of zombie. > They act like any acting human. By definition p-zombiness is not > behaviorally detectable. > > > > >> >>> In fact, we don't even need to talk on consciousness. I think it makes >>> sense >>> to say that a program can have a high level causal efficacy, even when >>> the >>> behavior does not violate the laws of physics or arithmetic which >>> supports >>> that high level efficacy. >>> >>> For example, nobody will say that Deep Blue win the chess tournament, >>> because this NAND receives this inputs and then (followed by a lengthy >>> description of all the low level happenings). >>> >>> We will explain deep blue behavior in terms of most of its high level >>> ability. We will say "he lost that game because he did not recognize that >>> his opponents has made a Nimzovitch entry", or "he win that game because >>> it >>> tested more possibilities than the opponents". >>> >>> That will be the real (or more genuine) explanation, both for the >>> computer >>> scientists who programmed deep blue, and for the chess players. Indeed >>> the >>> use of the NAND gates are somehow entirely irrelevant, we could have >>> programmed deep blue on another type of machine. >>> >>> As complex entities, we need to have higher level description and >>> explanation, and are necessarily ignorant of our lower levels, which >>> might >>> only be the support of our explanation, and is different from the more >>> genuine high level explanation. >>> >>> In that way, we can recover the sense of "I take an aspirin because I >>> have a >>> persistent headache since the morning". >>> >>> God might know that your body takes an aspirin because it obeys to SWE >>> equation, but the SWE is only a context in which a person with a first >>> person headache experience can take an aspirin. It is not the cause or >>> the >>> explanation of your behavior. You need to be God, to say that your >>> consciousness has no role, and from God's view, I can make sense, but >>> everything get wrong, hereby, simply because we are not in that God >>> position. >>> >>> OK? >> >> >> I don't really disagree with any of that, but I would still say that >> chess program makes moves due to the activity of electrons in >> semiconductors, > > > You remain locally correct, but that is less easy to do for oneself (as you > don't know the level), and if you make consciousness having no role, because > its role is subdue to some material causality, then with comp matter will be > doubly eliminated, as it will become the illusion of an epiphenomenon. > > > > > >> not because it is exercising a particular strategy >> except in a manner of speaking. But the substantive point I want to >> make is that there is no downward causation, > > > I don't think there is any causation at all. Causation is a modal notion, > and as to be treated indexically to, and with comp, in a way related to the > many computations in arithmetic. > > > > > > >> for if there were we >> would observe magical events. If you accept that then I agree with >> you, any apparent disagreement is really just semantics. > > > We must still discuss if this is very semantics. Some higher level laws can > be quite autonomous relatively to lower level laws, and some downard > causation, even if reductible in theory to particles or numbers, remains > meaningful at his own level. Downward causation would involve, for example, a neuron spontaneously firing when all the biochemical parameters show that it should not. That would be something miraculous. It has never been observed, or we would know there is something very wrong with science. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
