On 22 Sep 2014, at 03:22, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/21/2014 5:07 PM, 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.
True. But matter explains lots of other stuff. Consciousness as a
pure potentiality, distinct from any content, doesn't explain
anything.
Right. Those things have to be explained in simpler theory, like comp
forces us to use arithmetic or anything Turing equivalent to arithmetic.
But I thought no one (except Craig and some others) suggest that
consciousness is a potentiality, although it might be related to it,
(through <>p, indeed), and no more is suggesting this explains
everything.
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.
And we don't know that other people are conscious. But as JKC
pointed out we do know that things that affect our brain affect our
consciousness. Quite aside from anesthesia and concussions that
make it go away (modulo your theory that we merely forget), it's
affected by whiskey and pot and salvia and LSD, and the effects are
even amenable to some explanation at the molecular level.
But that explanation is partially correct, and unprecise, as it use
the 1-1 identity, and not the many-1 identity needed in Everett and/or
in computationalism.
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. But that's not
the consciousness that we are told is indubitable and which we all
intuititively know we have.
? I don't see why you say that. I have no definition of consciousness,
except that I explain a bit of it when explaining why comp solves the
hard part of the problem, by explaining why machine get the hard
question and realize it cannot be explained at their level (they need
proposition in their own G*).
We attribute consciousness to other things as we perceive their
behavior to be intelligent and goal directed; because that's how we
recognize it in people: "How many fingers do you see?" "What day is
it?" "Do you know where you are?".
OK.
Bruno
Brent
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