On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 07:26:02AM +0100, David Nyman wrote: > On 7 May 2017 5:02 a.m., "Russell Standish" <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > Anyway, back to our sheep (as they say in French). Bruno has been > reluctant to really address the question of physical supervenience in > his work. It has to be such consciousness must be about something, > which we may call the environment, or physics, and further that the > mental state must be reflected into that environment to set up a fixed > point that anchors the consciousness into a meaningful > environment. This will manifest as physica supervenience. Otherwise, > the observed environment will collapse into meaningless noise, an > effect I dubbed the Occam catastrophe. > > I know Bruno has sometimes talked about fixed points, and what he > calls the "Dxx" trick, but I don't see any real derivation of physical > supervenience in his theories. > > > Could you remind me how you deal with this issue in TON? >
In ToN, I argue on the basis of the Occams razor and the Everything hypothesis that we're most likely to find ourselves in the simplest possible universe, namely one that is pretty noisy and devoid of meaning. This I called the Occam catastrophe - a catstrophe for the theory as it contradicts empirical evidence of us living in a complex and meaningful universe. My solution to the Occam catastrophe was to note that the anthropic principle required that the universe be compatible with our existence as an observer, ie to paraphrase Einstein, the universe must be as simple as possible, but no simpler. In order for this compatibility to exist, our conscious selves must be reflected into the observed universe some how. In order for this reflected self to influence our consciousness, we need to be self-aware. Hence my prediction, from which I've never wavered, is that any substantive theory of consciousness must require consciousness to be self-aware. The epilogue to this, not appearing in ToN (and the flipside of the argument, as it were) is that self-awareness requires supervenience on physics (physics being defined as "what is observed", or phenomena). If we didn't supervene on our observed world, then how in hell can be be aware of ourselves. This might seem like a virtuous circle of logic, but I think that is only because the real reason why self-awareness is needed hasn't been elucidated yet. Conversely, if it can be shown that consciousness is possible without self-awareness, then the whole Occam catastrophe argument comes to bite again, implying that we don't, in fact, live in an everything ensemble, moreover that computationalism is false. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
