On 24 February 2014 02:43, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you turn your desire to move your hand into the neurological changes > which move them? The neurological change is the expression of what you > actually are. These primitive levels of sense are beyond the question of > 'how', they are more in the neighborhood of 'how else?' But we cannot be content to let "how else?" stand as mere rhetoric, can we? The question of how the desire moves the hand is essentially the same question I have been asking you all along to try to justify in terms of a theory of primitive sensory-motive relations. How specifically might experience translate to function? Certainly it is the expression of what you actually are, but how can this be cashed out in detail, or even in principle? You may feel that it is unfair of me to make this demand at such an early stage because it is precisely the unsolved conundrum of any theory that doesn't fundamentally sweep consciousness under the rug. But I have been under the strong impression that you see the sensory-motive approach as the key precisely fitted to unlocking this puzzle; hence my enquiry as to the specifics. To be honest it was the realisation of (or at least the possibility of) a novel resolution of these issues in the comp formulation of the world-problem in general that eventually made me waver from my prior attachment to a sensory-motive approach. In the end, as I tried to frame counter-arguments in the debate and turned the thing over and over in my mind, I found that this possibility of resolution carried more immediate persuasive heft for me than my worries about the precise metaphysical relation of the various elements of the schema. After all, we cannot expect to be able to explain everything at once. And also it seemed to me that we were not that far away from being able to test at least some of this conjecture in "yes doctor" mode, by direct interface with digital prostheses and the like (hence my posting of that link). That would be rather persuasive wouldn't it? We shouldn't have to wait interminably for some unfortunate AI "doll" to become capable of protesting its heartfelt feelings to our unsympathetic ear; we could directly experience the computational simulation of real consciousness for ourselves and let that be the criterion. No? 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.
