On 7/8/2024 11:23 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sun, Jul 7, 2024 at 3:14 PM John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 7, 2024 at 1:58 PM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
/>>> // I think such foresight is a necessary
component of intelligence, not a "byproduct"./
>>I agree, I can detect the existence of foresight in others
and so can natural selection, and that's why we have it.
It aids in getting our genes transferred into the next
generation. But I was talking about consciousness not
foresight, and regardless of how important we personally
think consciousness is, from evolution's point of view
it's utterly useless, and yet we have it, or at least I
have it.
/> you don't seem to think zombies are logically possible,/
Zombies are possible, it's philosophical zombies, a.k.a. smart
zombies, that are impossible because it's a brute fact that
consciousness is the way data behaves when it is being processed
intelligently, or at least that's what I think. Unless you believe
that all iterated sequences of "why" or "how" questions go on
forever then you must believe that brute facts exist; and I can't
think of a better candidate for one than consciousness.
/> so then epiphenomenalism is false/
According to the InternetEncyclopedia of Philosophy
"/Epiphenomenalism is a position in the philosophy of mind
according to which mental states or events are caused by physical
states or events in the brain but do not themselves cause
anything/".If that is the definition then I believe in
Epiphenomenalism.
If you believe mental states do not cause anything, then you believe
philosophical zombies are logically possible (since we could remove
consciousness without altering behavior).
I view mental states as high-level states operating in their own
regime of causality (much like a Java computer program). The java
computer program can run on any platform, regardless of the particular
physical nature of it. It has in a sense isolated itself from the
causality of the electrons and semiconductors, and operates in its own
realm of the causality of if statements, and for loops. Consider this
program, for example:
twin-prime-program2.png
What causes the program to terminate? Is it the inputs, and the
logical relation of primality, or is it the electrons flowing through
the CPU? I would argue that the higher-level causality, regarding the
logical relations of the inputs to the program logic is just as
important. It determines the physics of things like when the program
terminates. At this level, the microcircuitry is relevant only to its
support of the higher level causal structures, but the program doesn't
need to be aware of nor consider those low-level things. It operates
the same regardless.
I view consciousness as like that high-level control structure. It
operates within a causal realm where ideas and thoughts have causal
influence and power, and can reach down to the lower level to do
things like trigger nerve impulses.
Here is a quote from Roger Sperry, who eloquently describes what I am
speaking of:
"I am going to align myself in a counterstand, along with that
approximately 0.1 per cent mentalist minority, in support of a
hypothetical brain model in which consciousness and mental forces
generally are given their due representation as important features
in the chain of control. These appear as active operational forces
and dynamic properties that interact with and upon the
physiological machinery. Any model or description that leaves out
conscious forces, according to this view, is bound to be pretty
sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory. The conscious mind in this
scheme, far from being put aside and dispensed with as an
"inconsequential byproduct," "epiphenomenon," or "inner aspect,"
as is the customary treatment these days, gets located, instead,
front and center, directly in the midst of the causal interplay of
cerebral mechanisms.
Mental forces in this particular scheme are put in the driver's
seat, as it were. They give the orders and they push and haul
around the physiology and physicochemical processes as much as or
more than the latter control them. This is a scheme that puts mind
back in its old post, over matter, in a sense-not under, outside,
or beside it. It's a scheme that idealizes ideas and ideals over
physico-chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic-or DNA. It's
a brain model in which conscious, mental, psychic forces are
recognized to be the crowning achievement of some five hundred
million years or more of evolution.
[...] The basic reasoning is simple: First, we contend that
conscious or mental phenomena are dynamic, emergent, pattern (or
configurational) properties of the living brain in action -- a
point accepted by many, including some of the more tough-minded
brain researchers. Second, the argument goes a critical step
further, and insists that these emergent pattern properties in the
brain have causal control potency -- just as they do elsewhere in
the universe. And there we have the answer to the age-old enigma
of consciousness.
To put it very simply, it becomes a question largely of who pushes
whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the
cranium. There exists within the human cranium a whole world of
diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within
forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe
that we know.
[...] Along with their internal atomic and subnuclear parts, the
brain molecules are obliged to submit to a course of activity in
time and space that is determined very largely by the overall
dynamic and spatial properties of the whole brain cell as an
entity. Even the brain cells, however, with their long fibers and
impulse conducting elements, do not have very much to say either
about when or in what time pattern, for example, they are going to
fire their messages. The firing orders come from a higher command.
[...]
In short, if one climbs upward through the chain of command within
the brain, one finds at the very top those overall organizational
forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral
excitation that constitute the mental or psychic phenomena. [...]
Near the apex of this compound command system in the brain we find
ideas. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an
idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a
cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new
ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces
in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and in distant, foreign
brains. And they also interact with real consequence upon the
external surroundings to produce in toto an explosive advance in
evolution on this globe far beyond anything known before,
including the emergence of the living cell."
-- Roger Sperry
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Wolcott_Sperry> in "Mind,
Brain, and Humanist Values
<https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/sperry/Mind_Brain_and_Humanist_Values.html>"
(1966)
I disagree with the metafors of "force", "submission", "obliged" and
"higher command" (which is located where?). The mental life has casual
potency, but it is because the brain evolved specifically to provide an
ecology of ideas and action. I would regard it as just a matter of
level of description.
Brent
Jason
/> As you said previously, if consciousness had no effects,
there would be no reason for it to evolve in the first place./
What I said in my last postwas "It must be because consciousness
is the byproduct of something else that is not useless, there are
no other possibilities".
/> There is another possibility: consciousness is not useless./
If consciousness is not useless from Evolution's point of view
then it must produce "something" that natural selection can see,
and if natural selection can see that certain "something" then so
can you or me. So the Turing Test is not just a good test for
intelligence it's also a good test for consciousness. The only
trouble is, what is that "something"? Presumably whatever it is
that "something" must be related to mind in some way, but If it is
not intelligent activity then what the hell is it"?
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
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