On 22 Sep 2014, at 02:07, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 1:34 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
Good point Brent and one on which I am also equivocal, which is why
I have been keen to tease out whether people are talking about
consciousness or the contents of consciousness, and to try to work
out whether there is, in fact, any difference. If there isn't,
consciousness becomes something like elan vital, a supposed magic
extra that isn't in fact necessary in explanatory terms - all that
exists are "bundles of sensations" (or however Hume phrased it).
But in materialism we still have a magic extra: matter itself. In
the MUH math is the magic extra. I don't know of any theory that
gets rid of all "magic" assumptions.
And with comp, assumed by most materialist to be *the* theory of mind,
the MUH is a theorem, forcing matter to be explained by the FPI
statistics, enlarging Everett's embedding of the physicist in the
physical reality to an embedding of the dreamers in the arithmetical
reality.
In a sense comp offers a conceptual revolution akin to Darwin, as it
offers the space and the logic explaining where the laws of physics
come from (in a testable way).
In reply to John's comment, we don't know that sure that certain
types of brain activity cause consciousness, that's a (very
reasonable) hypothesis based on the fact the two appear to be always
correlated.
We don't even know if they are strongly correlated, because we don't
know what else is conscious. 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, ...).
Today a female jumping spider jumped on me. It is hard for me to not
attribute consciousness to her. Even self-consciousness. I like very
much planaria and amoebas, but I have never got the feeling they are
self-conscious, but I am happy to attribute them at least the raw
consciousness + simple "bad'/"good" local content and also the "urge"
feeling, when hungry. Never got the feeling from a fly or a worm that
they have reciprocal empathy with me, but jumping spider, octopus, and
other invertebrates might, imo.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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