On 24 February 2014 16:31, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Monday, February 24, 2014 9:13:26 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > >> On 24 February 2014 02:43, Craig Weinberg <whats...@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? >> > > Yes, in this case, we absolutely can. Otherwise you enter into a regress > of having to ask 'how does asking how' work? We don't have to ask how it > works, nor must there be an answer which could satisfy such an expectation. > The whole idea of 'how' is a cognitive framing of sensible comparisons. > Sure, it seems very important to the intellect, just as air seems very > important to the lungs, but that doesn't mean that 'how' can refer to > anything primordial. It's like asking an actor in a movie asking how they > got into a projection on a screen. > Er, no I don't agree that it's like that at all, if I've managed to puzzle out your drift. I wasn't asking "why primitive sense" because that's a posit of your theory. I was asking how the desire to move your hand turns into the neurological changes which move them in terms of that posit. How. This is a question whose answer must lie *within* the theory, hence be derivable from it. I'm asking how your theory can frame these questions in such a way that they are capable of being answered. Or are you implying that the only right way to frame the problem is in such a way that no questions of this kind can ever be answered? > >> 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? >> > > It doesn't. It's a matter of the frame of reference. My experience looks > like a function from your distance. > Yes, but how or why does it look like that.? That's what my question means. I think this is what Bruno is getting at when he says that genuine problems should be invariant to the terms in which they are described. I find that you have an unfortunate tendency to assume that you have avoided the need to address a question just because you change the words you use to describe it. I don't think that helps either your understanding or your ability to convey it to me. >From a greater, absolute distance, both of our functions looks like > mathematics. > > >> 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. >> > > No, no, it's not unfair at all. I'm not ducking the question and saying > 'we can't know the answer to this mystery because blah blah sacred > ineffable', I am saying that the question cannot be asked because it can > only be asked within sense to begin with. If you can ask what sense is, > your asking is already a first hand demonstration of what it is. It can > have no better description, nor could it ever require one. All that is > required is for us to stop doubting what we already experience directly. > We cannot doubt it. Uniquely so, in fact. > We can doubt whether what we experience is this kind of an experience or > that kind, whether it is more 'real' or more like a dream, but we cannot > doubt that there is an experience in which there is a feeling of direct > participation - a sense which includes the possibility of a sense of motive. > I agree. As indeed did Descartes. > > >> 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. >> > > Yes, I think it is the frame of the puzzle. If we start from sense, then > every piece falls into place eventually. If we start from non-sense, then > we can never find the piece of the puzzle which is the puzzle itself. > I understand that feeling and share it. It's very common (though curiously, not universal) and perhaps it is not eliminable as long as we insist on understanding the puzzle exclusively from within the frame of sense. I know it seems as if once we step outside that frame, even conceptually, we can never step back in. It seems impossible, like lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps. But understanding the world in its fullness inevitably seems to involve believing six impossible things before breakfast. This step is not by any stretch the most impossible, especially if we can find ways of accurately modelling the reference to sense, as Bruno tries to teach us, if not quite bridging the gap to the thing itself. When something starts to look indistinguishable from the thing itself - even to the extent of displaying every sign of feeling like the thing itself - the distinction between original and copy begins to fade just a little, at least for me. I know that despite this the Iron Man must follow his weird and warn of the dreadful apocalypse to come (although hopeful not bring it about). > >> >> 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. >> > > I don't think that you had a sensory-motive approach, I think you probably > had an idealist-theoretic approach...the idea of experience as a > pseudo-substance rather than ordinary sense/sense-making. > I don't think so, although frankly I still don't have any clue what you mean by "ordinary" sense-making. I used to call it sense-action, based on the twin relational primitives of perception and acting-upon. I suppose you might call it a theory of fundamental relations. I spent a good deal of time on this list debating with Bruno and other like-minded folk (whom he sometimes called first-person fundamentalists). It would probably be embarrassing to re-read, but I put a lot of thought and discussion into it over the years. I just couldn't take it very far beyond the basic notions and a lot of suggestive analogising, which is pretty typical of "theorising" at this level. I suspect that the time to start worrying about any theory is when it seems that it should be capable of explaining everything but in practice it doesn't actually explain very much. > >> 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. >> > > We can if the explanation is felt directly rather than symbolized and > communicated. > I disagree. It only feels that way. > > >> 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? >> > > Nothing is persuasive until someone is transplanted into a synthetic brain > and returns to tell the tale. > That's demanding too much. I think digital prostheses will actually turn the tide of the debate on this. But of course, as the charming YouTube illustrates, there's no definitively knock-down way to win this argument. We can only place our bets and hope. > >> 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? >> > > As long as there is enough of us left to live and participate as a person, > we can compensate to some extent for the shortfall of a prosthetic limb. We > triangulate the gap and our perception can fill-in to a surprising degree. > Only if our entire brain is amputated and replaced successfully will we > know what it is like to be a computer rather than a human being. > Meh, I suspect most people would concede the point a lot earlier. But then you're not most people. 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