1) What does "third-person" self-reference mean ? To me, this would be 
equivalent to "third-person color red", which clearly is not the case for 
red to be third-person, since red only exists in an ontological subjective 
manner.

2) What "machine" ? What "self of the machine" ? "Machine" is just a 
concept in human consciousness. It doesn't exist beyond merely a concept.

3) Phenomenological is the only type of existence. Everything else is 
merely an extrapolation starting from phenomenological existence. i.e. I 
see an unicorn in my subjective first person existence, and then I 
extrapolate and say that that unicorn somehow has an independent existence 
from it being just a quale in my consciousness, which clearly is false.

4) You can set yourself all kinds of goals as you want. But this doesn't 
mean that reality is the way you want it to be. You can wish for red to be 
agreed upon by everyone, but a blind person will not agree.

5) There is only 1 notion of the Self: "I Am". But I would be interested to 
find out the 8 types of Self that you mention.

6) You can look at the emergent phenomenology. For example, in the visual 
domain you have: black-and-white -> shades-of-gray -> colors -> shapes -> 
objects -> full visual scene. All these levels have the properties that 
each level inherits the qualities of the previous levels, while also 
bringing into existence its own quality. For example, the reason why a 
color can variate from lighter to darker is because it inherits in itself 
the quality of shades-of-gray. And if you think carefully about this, this 
is possible because of the properties of self-reference that I just 
mentioned, x=x (color is itself), x<x (shades-of-gray are included in 
color), x>x (color is more than the shades-of-gray). And all these happen 
at the same time, because the same consciousness is the one that experience 
the evolution in levels. When you learn something new, that new knowledge 
emerges on top of previously held knowledge, but this doesn't create a new 
consciousness to experience the new knowledge, but the same consciousness 
is maintained. And this is possible because the same consciousness (x=x) 
includes the previous consciousness that it was (x<x) and becomes more than 
what it previously was (x>x).

On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 15:17:36 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> 1) With mechanism, third-person self-reference is formalisable
>
> 2) That is good insight, well recovered by the machine about its first 
> person self. 
>
 
>
3)
>
 
>
In other words, the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the 
>> looking-back-at-itself of self-reference. 
>>
>  
>
That type of existence is phenomenological. 
>
> 4)
>
> So, existence can only be subjective, so all that can exists is 
> consciousness.
>
>
> I see this as a critics of your theory. It is almost self-defeating. My 
> goal was to understand matter and consciousness from proposition on which 
> (almost) everybody agree, and with mechanism, elementary arithmetic is 
> enough.
>
> 5)
> OK. (Except the tiny formula which does not make much sense to me, and 
> seem to assume a lot of things). But with mechanism we get 8 notion of 
> self, and transcendance is indeed derived from them.
>
> 6)
>
> And all these apparently contradictory properties are happening all at the 
> same time. So, x=x, x<x, x>x all at the same time.
>
>
> Without giving a theory or at least a realm, it is hard to figure out what 
> you mean.
>
> But there is no actual contradiction here, because self-reference is 
> unformalizable. The reason why I get to such weird conclusions is explored 
> throughout the book where a phenomenological analysis of consciousness is 
> done and it is shown how it is structured on an emergent holarchy of 
> levels, a holarchy meaning that a higher level includes the lower levels, 
> and I conclude that this can only happen if there is an entity called 
> "self-reference" which has the above mentioned properties. So as you can 
> see, there pretty much cannot be a mathematics of self-reference.
>
>
> But such theories exist. Even the fact that the first person 
> self-reference is not formalisable is provable in a meta-theory. 
>
> Self-reference is where mathematical logic has got many surprising 
> results, and with mechanism, they are somehow directly usable. To not use 
> them needs some non-mechanist hypothesis, for which there are no evidences, 
> and it looks like bringing complexity to not solve a (scientific) problem.
>
>

-- 
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.

Reply via email to