On 6/6/2018 5:48 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
experience of it?
Ah, there's your problem. Science doesn't answer "why" questions. That's
what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science does.
Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin anymore.
Science does not answer "why" questions of an existential nature, for
example "why does the universe exist?", but I disagree with the
generalization. Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"
questions:
Why are most plants green?
Why are there so many different species?
Why is the sun so bright?
etc.
I believe that I am asking a question of the same nature as the above.
There are certainly metaphysical questions to ask about consciousness,
but here I am simply asking how it fits our current body of scientific
theory. All of our most powerful theories seem to fit each other.
Darwinism fits higher-order psychological and sociological theory, and
it also fits chemistry, which fits particle physics and so on. In my
view, consciousness is the odd thing that doesn't fit any of this.
OK. But does it "fit" anything? Does it fit arithmetic? or
computation? We know it's correlated with brain functions because if we
mess with the brain it messes with consciousness. That's more that
Newton knew when he invented gravity. People thought it didn't "fit"
either because they thought in terms of contact forces. How could a
"field" act on anything? Newton didn't even know how to see if messing
with the field would mess with orbits.
You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
See above, i.e. because it is necessary. Science may well determine when
and where and what relations there are. But not why. That's the
"engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am
often criticized.
I criticize it because I find it circular: first one assumes that
consciousness is correlated with human-like behavior,
But that's not an assumption; it's an observation.
then one creates
human-like behavior to show how consciousness originates...
"What I cannot create, I do not understand"
--- Richard Feynman
Brent
- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported
in
my experience. So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
The problem with that is you stuck in "just". Don't deprecated good models.
I don't criticize these good models. I ask that we don't forget what
is assumed at the start.
Telmo.
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