On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:11 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 3/15/2015 7:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > > > > On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:00 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > >> On 3/13/2015 10:26 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> or under anesthesia I'm not conscious >>> >> >> You can't prove that. That's an assumption. >> >> >> That's logic chopping. There's a big gap between proven and assumed. In >> fact all of science works in that gap. It's called "knowledge" and it is >> provided by evidence, not logic and not assumption. >> > > I agree, "prove" was a horrible choice of words. > > What I meant to say is that you can't test for consciousness. You can > test for things that you assume to be sufficient and necessary conditions > for consciousness, but you can't test this assumption itself. > > Carl Sagan talks about the "dragon in the garage". I feel that > consciousness is unlike any other phenomena, because it is the "dragon in > the garage" that we *know* is there. > > > Is that really so different from all the other things we know? I could be > a brain-in-a-vat, my impression I'm typing on a keyboard could be a > hallucination, are there *really* other people, perhaps this is a dream, am > I really just imagining the world and other people? > I think it is different, because all the scenarios you describe are irrelevant to most scientific theories. Classical physics is an excellent model to predict observations in the meso world where we live. I can use it to predict the path of of projectile, because it describes regularities in the mechanics of our reality. It was conceived before any modern knowledge of subatomic particles, relativity and so on. The substrate doesn't matter, until you go to extreme cases. It's still good science, I think we can agree. The same holds for all the scientific knowledge that then allows us to predict how our world will behave, that allows us to build stuff that we desire and so on. It doesn't matter if I'm a brain-in-a-vat or an inhabitant of the Matrix. We used empiricism to discover regularities in whatever this environment is. But consciousness is different. Consider Watson. Is it conscious? We have absolutely no way of knowing, and our intuitions about neural activity, hormone levels, blood pressure and so on do not help us there. > For one reason or another we easily dismiss all these defeaters of > knowledge, but when it comes to consciousness it's suddenly different and > we get radical agnosticism - even though consciousness is by definition > knowledge (of something). > With all other knowledge we know who the knower is. With consciousness, the model becomes self-referential. Telmo. > > Brent > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
