On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 5:30 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 9/21/2014 6:58 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > > > On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 3:22 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > >> >> On 9/21/2014 5:07 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> Is an insect swarm conscious? Is your computer? Are galaxies? The >> problem is that we might be confusing empathy for consciousness. It is >> clear that the more an organism is similar to us the more empathy we feel >> (human > monkey > cat > insect > bacteria, ...). >> >> >> That's true on Bruno's definition of consciousness. >> > > I don't understand what you're driving at. Telmo seems to be asserting > ignorance of types of statements concerning consciousness. > > If you negate this, don't you have to show your hand more than resorting > to discourse examples? > > > I'm saying that things like insect swarms or galaxies are likely to be > conscious by Bruno's definition. All they must have is the potential for > Turing computing. > But most seems to agree on this here. The kinds/hierarchies of self-reference having been post subjects for the last weeks. > > > >> But that's not the consciousness that we are told is indubitable and >> which we all intuititively know we have. >> > > This would be true concerning sufficiently rich machines as well...which > is why I don't see if/how your distinction leads anywhere. > > > It's saying that any explanation of consciousness needs to explain the > conscious inner narrative I experience. > Tall order given current state of affairs, but sure. > It's cheap to redefine consciousness as the potential for universal > computation, because the potential for universal computation is common. If > the potential for universal computation is going to explain > consciousness-as-I-experience-it, the explanation can't just rely on the > assumption that brains do computation. It needs to say how the computation > a brain does is different from the computation a galaxy does. > Isn't the appropriate machine relating to some axioms and models the input, from instruments of observation say, of a galactic structure in some plane or stream of its accessible neighborhood; isn't that machine just more or less correctly dreaming the thing from its intuitive 1p perspective and its histories? That machine has ultimately no way of knowing whether galaxies are conscious and has to have some finally unjustifiable and incomplete (given Theatetus' negation knowledge definition) theory of this. It will find relative to its histories, that milkshakes of nebulae, nurseries mixing in lactose tolerant orbits, superbly noval black holes and all this fun drama is plausible or false or correct given its standards of evidence, plausibility, theology etc. It might need more coffee and ask: What would galaxy ice cream taste like? Vanilla definitely as stracciatella would already be bringing process and simulation of orbits into play which ice cream is physically constrained to do in these parts, if you're not doing funky 3d modelling or something. Good stracciatella has to be fine grained, so only asteroids could be taken literally. Rocky road would be faithful to stars and solid bodies given dark background so nothing is really appropriate and we retreat to reducing things to vanilla super nova starlight. Just the light. The science theologies of ice cream deserve more attention, yes. -- 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/d/optout.
