On 7/20/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises
thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as
Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not
scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.
That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that consciousness is
a mystery is part hubris
Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time,
where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no
souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism
makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and
self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.
(we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for
understanding.
With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction
between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of.
That's where I disagree. These two propositions cannot both be true:
1) Consciousness is what I directly experience without mediating inference.
2) Consciousness is the Loebian inference implicit in theories of
computation (as defined by Bruno).
The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and
sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided
if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant
computations).
What "person"? Where did "person" come from?
There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an
electron either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about
consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and
prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
Assuming a physical reality,
It's not an "assumption" when it's supported empirically. You have
logicians attitude that everything must start from axioms...which are
assumptions.
but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.
No. You have argued it. But your argument also implies that physics is
necessary. So if it shows physics is unreal, that's a contradiction.
So it's a reductio. A reductio indicates something is wrong with the
argument; but it doesn't tell you what.
Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily
from incompleteness + Theaetetus.
You have /assumed/ that you can define it to be something simple and
then you argue that because this simple thing has one or two
similarities to the very complex thing we experience as consciousness it
is therefore the same thing. Even though in addition to similarities it
also has some glaring differences, such as being timeless, such as
knowing all logical inferences, such as existing independent of a matter.
It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not
aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.
You have made it the hard problem of your theory by simplifying away all
the observable complexities of consciousness and assuming it is mere
Platonic arithmetic.
Brent
Bruno
Brent
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