On 4/19/2019 5:09 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2019, at 09:09, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
1) The qualia of black-and-white is not on the same level with the
qualia of colors. The qualia of colors include the qualia of
black-and-white. You cannot see a color if that color is not emergent
upon black-and-white (or more specifically shades-of-gray). You
cannot experience music if music is not emergent upon sounds. You
cannot taste chocolate if chocolate is not emergent upon sweet. You
cannot understand Pythagoras Theorem if the understanding of
Pythagoras Theorem doesn't emerge upon the understandings of
triangles, angles, lengths, etc. And this is real emergence, because
you really get new existent entities that never existed before in the
history of existence. God himself never experienced these qualia.
Ok, I think I understand your presentation better now. You make an
interesting point, I don't think I ever considered emergence purely on
the side of qualia as you describe.
There is something here that still does not convince me. For example,
you say that the "chocolate taste" qualia emerges from simpler qualia,
such as "sweet". Can you really justify this hierarchical relation
without implicitly alluding to the quanti side? Consider the qualias
of eating a piece of chocolate, a spoonful of sugar and french fries.
You can feel that the first two have something in common that
distinguishes them from the third, and you can give it the label
"sweet". At the same time, you could say that the chocolate and french
fries are pleasant to eat, while the spoonful of sugar not so much.
You can also label this abstraction with some word. Without empirical
grounding, nothing makes one distinction more meaningful than another.
What makes the "sweat" abstraction so special? Well, it's that we know
about sweet receptors in the tongue and we know it's one of the
four(five?) basic flavors because of that. I'm afraid you smuggle this
knowledge into the pure qualia world. Without it, there is no
preferable hierarchical relation and emergence becomes nonsensical
again. There's just a field of qualia.
I don't understand your second part of the question regarding our
"cognitive processes". Are you referring to our specific form of
human consciousness ? I don't think this is only restricted to our
human consciousness, for the reason that it happens to all qualia
that we have. All qualia domains are structured in an emergent way.
I was referring to your observation that things lose meaning by
repetition, like staring at yourself in the mirror for a long time. I
to find this interesting, but I can imagine prosaic explanations. For
example, that our brain requires a certain amount of variety in its
inputs, otherwise it tends to a simpler state were apprehension of
meaning is no longer possible. In other words, I am proposing a
plumber-style explanation, and asking you why/if you think it can be
discarded?
2) The main ideas in my book are the emergent structure of
consciousness and the self-reference which gives birth to the
emergent structure. The ideas about self-reference that I have are
rooted in phenomenology. First I observe that consciousness is
structured in an emergent way, and then I conclude that the reason it
is like this is because there is an entity called "self-reference"
that looks-back-at-itself and in this process includes the previously
existing self and brings a new transcendent self into existence, like
in the case of colors emerging on top of black-and-white.
I have the problem above with the first part of what you say, but I
like the second part.
3) The difference is that in an emergent system you have top-down
influence in levels. Electrons in simple systems like the ones in
physical experiments have little input from any top level, so they
behaving according to their own level and display certain laws. But
when they are part of a greater holistic system, like in the brain
(which is just an appearance of internal workings in consciousness)
they receive top-down influence from the intentions in consciousness,
and so they behave according to the will of consciousness. Is the
same phenomenon when we speak, that I also gave in my presentation.
When we speak, we act from the level of intending to transmit certain
ideas. And this level exercises top-down influence in levels and the
sentences, words and letters are coming out in accordance with the
intention from the higher level.
Here I think you are making the ontological/epistemological confusion.
Another way to describe what you are alluding to above is this: the
more complex a system, the higher the amount of branching in the trees
of causation that extend into the past. To describe the movement of an
election in the ideal conditions of some laboratory experiment, you
might just require a couple of equations and variables. To describe
the movement of an election in the incredible wet mess that is the
human brain, you require trillions of equations with trillions of
variables.
The identification of patterns across scales allows us to vastly
compress the information of the object we are looking at, making it
somewhat tractable by our limited intellects. Some of these patters
have names such as "speaking", "word", "presentation", "red", etc.
These patterns are not arbitrarily grounded, they are grounded by some
correspondence with qualia, as I argue above. Why? I don't have the
answer, I think it's a mystery.
I am not saying that the point of view you describe above is not valid
or interesting, but I am saying that it is nothing more than epistemology.
If your fundamental ontology is qualia, a kind of incorrigble knowledge,
then isn't everything going to epistemology? The very idea of a mind
independent reality is a construct to explain the existence of patterns
in the qualia. That's where the self-reference comes in: among the
qualia are some that are experience or recognition of patterns in prior
qualia.
Brent
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