On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 08:53:39AM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 3:22 AM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Friday, August 9, 2019, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 8:59 PM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > What role do you see decoherence playing in consciousness? In > other words, could you explain why shedding IR photons into an > external environment necessary for the mind to be conscious? > > > Consciousness is a classical phenomenon since the brain is a classical > object (not in a state of quantum coherence). So decoherence, and the > emergence of the classical from the quantum, is essential for > consciousness. Just as to be conscious is to be conscious of > something, > such as the external world. > > > > You appear to be extrapolating a causation from the appearance of a > correlation: > "The brain is classical, and the brain is conscious, therefore all > consciousness must be classical." > > The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. > > > Show me consciousness that does not involve decohered classical matter, such > as > in a brain. > > > Also, is a brain really conscious of the external world, or is it > conscious > of it's internal states? The redness of a red apple does not exist > physically. Redness is an invention of the brain, which cannot be found in > the external world of colorless particles. > > > But the physical world does contain photons of various wavelengths -- which > correspond to different colours. Correlation does not necessarily indicate > causation, but scientific study does reveal the underlying relations between > things. > > Bruce >
Riffing further on this theme, conscious must be intimately tied up with a process for deriving meaning from data. Given a continuous ontology (eg ontic-ψ), this must involve a discretisation process - decoherence pretty much fits the bill here, and so Brent's often posed-insight that consciousness must involve an interaction between an observer system, and an environment that is traced over makes a lot of sense. Going the other way, computationalism entails via the UDA that the physical world has this continuous character. So computationalism must ultimately address Brent's insight. This comes to the fore with the MGA - the argument breaks down when an environment is included that adds essential stocasticity to subsequent runs of the machine (ie only the original run of Klara is conscious, the recording reruns of Olympia are not, nor might any accidental recordings either). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20190810012533.GB2223%40zen.
