David Nyman wrote:
On 27 April 2015 at 07:43, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
Mose people get on living in the world by means of heuristics, or
useful rules-of-thumb, that are good enough for most purposes. That
means, of course, that we make mistakes, we are misled by imprecise
interpretations of perceptions, and of other peoples' intentions and
motives. But as long as we get it right often enough, we can
function perfectly adequately. As Brent might say, consciousness is
an engineering solution to living -- not a logician's solution.
So a Turing emulation of consciousness is perfectly possible, and
that consciousness would be not essentially different from yours or
mine.
I think the conclusion you draw here obfuscates the distinction between
behaviour (normally) attributed to a conscious being and the putative
additional fact (truth) of consciousness itself.
That is the Platonists move, and also leads to problems, as Kant found.
When you use a phrase like "consciousness itself", one inevitably thinks
of Kant's 'ding an sich', and the conclusion that this is essentially
unknowable. Postulating a distinction between consciousness as found in
conscious beings and "consciousness itself" is to postulate that
conscious beings are explained by the inexplicable -- not a great advance!
Of course it is
possible - implicitly or explicitly - to reject any such distinction, or
what Bruno likes to call 'sweeping consciousness under the rug'. A
fairly typical example of this (complete with the tell-tale terminology
of 'illusion') can be found in the Graziano theory under discussion in
another thread.
There is no "sweeping under the rug" here. Consciousness is that which
is to be found in conscious beings. It supervenes on the physical, and
came about by evolution -- a process of trial and error. That is why
conscious living is by corrigible heuristics, not arithmetic or modal
logics.
Alternatively one can look for an explicit nomological entailment for
consciousness in, say, physical activity or computation. The problems
with establishing any explicable nomological bridging principles from
physical activity alone are well known and tend to lead to a
more-or-less unintelligible brute identity thesis.
Can you indicate to me why relating consciousness is computations is
Platonia is any less an unintelligible brute identity thesis?
Arithmetical relations are static, not dynamic, so they do not
instantiate the computations of a physical computer (or brain).
Bruce
Consequently physical
activity is postulated as an adequate approximation of computation, at
some level, and it is the latter that is assumed to provide the
nomological bridge to consciousness. What is striking, then, about
Bruno's UD argument is that it uses precisely this starting assumption
to draw the opposite conclusion: i.e. that computation and not physical
activity must be playing the primary role in this relation.
This is perhaps less of a shock to the imagination than it may at first
appear. Idealists such as Berkeley and of course the Platonists that
preceded him had already pointed out that deriving the appearance of
matter from the 'mental' might present conceptual problems less
insuperable than the reverse. What they lacked was any explicit
conceptual apparatus to put flesh on the bare bones of such an
intuition. What is interesting about Bruno's work, at least to me, is
that it suggests (until proved in error) that the default assumption
about the nomological basis of consciousness in fact leads to a kind of
a quasi-idealism, albeit one founded on the neutral ontological basis of
primary arithmetical relations. That then presents the
empirically-testable task of validating, or ruling out, the entailment
that physics itself (or more generally 'what is observable or
shareable') relies on nothing more or less than such relations.
David
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