Le 21-mai-05, à 15:48, Bruno Marchal a écrit :
>
> Le 21-mai-05, à 08:31, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
>
>> Stathis:
>>
>>> People certainly seem to take their consciousness seriously
>>> on this list!
>>> I've now managed to alienate both the "consciousness doesn't
>>> really exist"
>>> and the "it exists and we can explain it" factions. I did not
>>> mean that there is no explanation possible for consciousness.
>>> It is likely that in the course of time the neuronal
>>> mechanisms behind the phenomenon will be worked out and it
>>> will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines.
>>> Imagine that advanced aliens have already achieved this
>>> through surreptitious study of humans over a number of
>>> decades. Their models of human brain function are so good
>>> that by running an emulation of one or more humans and their
>>> environment they can predict their behaviour better than the
>>> humans can themselves. Now, I think you will agree (although
>>> Jonathan Colvin may not) that despite this excellent
>>> understanding of the processes giving rise to human conscious
>>> experience, the aliens may still have absolutely no idea what
>>> the experience is actually like.
>>
>> No, I'd agree that they have no idea what the experience is like. But
>> this
>> is no more remarkable than the fact that allthough we may have an
>> excellent
>> understanding of photons, we can not travel at the speed of light, or
>> that
>> although we may have an excellent understanding of trees, yet we can
>> not
>> photosynthesize. Neither of these "problems" seem particularly hard.
>
>
> But we can photosynthesize. And we can understand why we cannot travel
> at the speed of light. All this by using purely 3-person description
> of those phenomena in some theory.
> With consciousness, the range of the debate goes from non-existence to
> only-existing. The problem is that it seems that an entirely 3-person
> explanation of the brain-muscles relations evacuates any purpose for
> consciousness and the 1-person. That's not the case with
> photosynthesis.
... and from this don't infer that I am saying that consciousness is
not explainable. Just that consciousness cannot have the same *type* of
explanation as photosynthesis.
(With comp I would argue that an explanation of consciousness is of a
type similar as an explanation of why there is something instead of
just logic + arithmetic).
Bruno
>
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Jonathan Colvin
>>
>>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat May 21 2005 - 11:44:12 PDT