Hi Stephen,
At 20:00 30/04/04 -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>Dear Bruno,
>
> I missed something that you wrote earlier! Do you truly think that the
>solution to the mind/body problem involves "explaining how a private mind
>can be attached to anything third-person describable"?
>
> I don't see how this makes any kind of sense! The mere fact that you
>cannot have a 1st person experience of "what it is like to be Stephen Paul
>King" unless you are, actually, Stephen Paul King tells me that it is
>impossible for a 3rd person description to exist.
Ah Ah Ah ... OK. I agree, but it is not among the axioms, it is among the
theorems. What is not yet clear to me is what you accept without proving
and what you try to prove.
>What I see is that we have
>agreements and/or coincedances in the 1st person views of many SASs.
Nobody knows. (Well we should say no-soul knows that).
>These
>give rise to the idea of 3rd person views, but such do not actually exist.
We can postulate some 3rd person axioms. As you know the
enterprise I advocate relies on accepting the notion of number, and
accepting usual partial axiomatisation as third person correct. I do
hope you accept that the proposition "17 is prime" is either true or false.
It makes it 3-person well definite.
> At best we can associate an inferability of a private mind, ala Turing
>Test, or someother kind of justification of the belief in private minds, to
>some aspect of our individual experience. For example, I assume that you
>(and your private mind) are not merely a computational simulation generated
>by the same computation that generates my own experienciable actuality
Too much ambiguity here. The expression "same computation" could have
more than 1 interpretation.
>because if I did so I should be able to induce a transformation of my 1st
>person experience directly and smothly into yours. After all, the
>simulations would all be within the same repetuoir of possible simulations.
>This is classic problem of solipsism! Don't you agree?
I am not sure. Arithmetic is the repertoir of all possible simulations, and
this does not lead necessarily to solipsism.
Best Regards,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon May 03 2004 - 09:53:39 PDT