Hi Lee ,
> It was just a figure of speech. You are free, of course, to use
> the word "reality" any way you want. I'm not comfortable for using
> it to describes one's subjective impressions, feelings, etc.
But I am not using the word "reality" to *describe* one's subjective
impression, it seems to me I am just acknowledging the existence of
those subjective impression in many persons.
To acknowledge something is to admit that something has some kind of
"reality", it seems to me.
And it seems you did acknowledge those experiences too). To describe
them, in the limit, I can only point you to great poets and artists,
and they will hardly mention the word "reality".
You just seems to want those experiences are just an unnecessary
epiphenomenon, and you would like that science never adresses what they
really are and where they came from.
For you it looks like "consciousness" is just a sort of subjective
mirror partially reflecting an objective third person describable
reality in which we are embedded. And science should never leave the
third person discourse. All right?
Now, please understand that I agree (100%) with the last sentences:
science should never leave the third person discourse.
But this does not prohibit science of looking to herself, and to try
theories (hypotheses) about third person discourses, and even to
*discover* sort of first person discourse canonically associated to
some mathematical object.
By taking the comp hyp enough seriously it just happens that
"consciousness", or just the "ability to guess the existence of one (at
least) world" is not a little detail. Or it is a little detail but then
remember that the devil is hidden in the little details. Why? Because
if I am correct in my derivation it makes the physical law emerging
from number theory.
> So you say. And I confess I haven't the energy (and probably not
> the preparation) to study your thesis. So I'll wait for the experts
> to acclaim you. No one will cheer louder: "I knew him *before*
> the world saw the truth to COMP! He even knows who I am!".
My heart appreciates very much. My poor brain, or some reasoner who
appears to succeed to manifest himself through it, relatively to you,
is a little bit astonished: you are amazingly honest and confess you
could give a weight to authoritative argument. Ah la la.
I think it would be better to get the understanding by yourself, then
you could say " I thought it", but perhaps you do get some
understanding, I think :-)
Actually my work is "the work" which people should understand by
themselves, if only to understand the second part where they must
understand that machine can understand it by themselves, in some
precise sense.
You could also be disappointed. Although the conclusion is startling,
technically my contribution is modest and leads quickly to soluble but
intractable questions.
A paper entitled "Theoretical Computer Science and the Natural
Sciences" should appear soon, though.
> My friends and I (and probably Daniel Dennett and so on) believe
> that people who demand a 1st person "account of the world" (e.g.
> Chalmers) will never get anywhere.
Actually, this is one of the main point where I differ from George Levy
(OK George?), although I could make sense of it. The point is, and
Dennett agrees on this, that, in cognitive *science*, we need to
develop some third person discourse on the first person discourses.
OK, strictly speaking the quantum and physical discourses appears at
some first person (plural) level.
Chalmers is not getting anywhere(*), ok. Perhaps we agree on this.
(*) Using Everett to defend dualism! See the quite good explanation how
Everett is deeply monist in the book:
PRIMAS H., 1981, Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics and Reductionism,
Springer-Verlag, Berlin (second, corrected edition : 1983)
> That the "hard problem" or
> whatever is just a horrible consequence of the way sense impressions
> traveling on neurons give rise to people thinking that their
> own perceptions are a sort of reality independent of the physical
> reality. We think that this is a sort of delusion, although the
> very #?!&$-AT_SYMBOL-! structure of our language hideously leads from that
> to "who or what is being deluded?".
Mmhh....
> This might be a good time to ask what is meant by that word you
> just used. Hal explained "computationalist hypothesis" as used
> by philosophers, e.g., that a robot (that was just CPU driven)
> could be conscious.
Actually this is the strong AI thesis. Logically comp is stronger,
because comp is the thesis that "I" am a machine (I, You, ...). Comp is
stronger because the fact that machine could think does not entails
that only machine could think! (despite Occam!).
Now comp is weaker than most functionalism in the philosophy of mind,
because comp asserts only the existence of a level of substitution at
which we are Turing-emulable. Functionalist reason like if the level
was known, but that's impossible.
> have believed that since 1966 when I used
> to argue about it with people in high school. *Lots* of people
> believe that. I have taken "COMP" to be Bruno's Thesis, in which
> practically everything can be derived fundamentally from the
> integers alone, using Gödel's results, and other rather recently
> discovered truths.
No no. That's the theorem. Comp is precisely the conjonction of Church
Thesis, of some amount of belief in arithmetic, + the act of faith
saying "yes" to *some* digitalist surgeon.
All what I say, I derive it (hopefully correctly) from comp.
It is also different from Schmidhuber (and many others) who makes the
thesis that there is a "physical universe" and that it is computable
(programmable). I think that comp is quasi-incompatible with this.
> So I dismiss the 1st person, remarking that it's "existence" is
> but only to be expected. If an ape or a parrot could talk, it
> could yak on about it's impressions. And they'd be of little
> but therapeutic value.
Thanks for acknowledging the therapy! With comp, this would mean the
appearance of the physical world originates in some intrinsic universal
machine self-therapy. It makes sense when you realize that Lob formula
(B(Bp->p)->Bp), the main axiom of the modal logic of self-reference (G)
can be interpreted as showing that some form of honest placebo effect
works! But this is something I am still taking with some grain of salt.
See the book "Forever Undecided" to see Smullyan exploiting the working
of some self-fulfilling beliefs.
> As anything scientific, yes. I agreed with John's statement:
> "Interpreted used as subjectivised. There is a fine line separating
> solipsism from craziness..." at least insofar as I may read that
> to mean that our subjective impressions actually turn out to be
> less reliable than our efforts to understand things objectively
> (3rd person).
But I agree too! This does not prevent us the study of first person
discourse, by use of all the possible scientific way to tackle
problems.
I must go now. Apology for not having respected the order of your
paragraphs, but my computer take some initiative apparently!
Best regards,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Wed Aug 10 2005 - 13:01:24 PDT