On 02 Nov 2015, at 08:23, Pierz wrote:
On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 8:39:12 PM UTC+11, Russell Standish
wrote:
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 08:55:09PM -0700, Pierz wrote:
>
> Anyway it seems that if we're committed to computationalism plus
Church
> thesis, then we have to consider the possibility that evolution
may be a
> conscious process - indeed the onus should be on us to say why it
*wouldn't* be
> conscious.
I don't think we know enough about consciousness to really say one way
or the other, so no the onus is not on anyone.
"Onus" or not, computationalists should at least attempt to be
consistent. If genetic algorithms are considered potentially
conscious, then it is legitimate to ask why evolution itself would
not be. One should examine all the ramifications of a theory and not
simply wave the uncomfortable ones away by saying "we can't know."
It's often in the pursuit of the implications of a theory to the
last possible limit that things get interesting - think Einstein
pursuing the constancy of the speed of light to its logical
conclusion. It's also where the theory's flaws are likely to be
exposed. It seems to me though that computationalists are generally
mainly interested in explaining away the apparent mystery of the
Hard Problem of consciousness in the brain,
That is right. mechanism is usually used by materialist to stop
thinking to the question, and when they think about the question they
are often lead to eliminativisme.
But the UDA shows that this does not work: on the contrary the hard
problem of consciousness becomes twice harder, as it leads to an hard
problem of matter to: explaining the appearance of matter, without
assuming anything physical. But then the math shows that it is the
case, with the Solovay split surprise that we get the explanation of
why they are qualia and quanta, and why qualia *seems* so hard to
explain.
rather than overturning the conception of nature as an unconscious
machine. But that is what it leads to ISTM - at least the
Putnamesque, functional type version of CTM.
Putnam's functionalism is a particular case of computationalism. It is
computationalism with the idea that the substitution level is
implicitly rather high (but still left unprecise).
Bruno
Nevertheless, I highly suspect that our human consciousnesses are in
fact evolutionary processes, which I know is an answer to a very
different question.
--
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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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