RE: subjective reality

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:55:51 -0700

Bruno writes

> You just seems to want those [1st person] experiences to be just an unnecessary
> epiphenomenon, and you would like that science never address 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?

Yes, you've phrased it quite well. True, the various experiences
of a human being (as a function of brain chemistry or lesions or
working "fine") or animal, etc., are all worthy of study. But
it's just that I am extremely skeptical that anything will *ever*
come from the 1st person account.

I also agree with many of the following paragraphs....

Then comes:

> > 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.

Okay, but two questions:

1. by "comp" do you mean the "computationalist hypothesis" as apparently
   used by philosophers? Is "comp" just an abbreviation for that?

2. By "Turing-emulable" do you mean that we can be imitated by a
   physical Turing machine (or, what amounts to the same thing),
   by a computer? Or, instead, are you going to the Pure Platonism,
   with no separate existence of a physical reality required?

> Comp is precisely the conjunction of Church
> Thesis, of some amount of belief in arithmetic, + the act of faith
> saying "yes" to *some* digitalist surgeon.

And this is the same as saying yes to being uploaded, say, into
a computer? (I will, for the sake of other readers, even extend
this by stipulating a computer that provides a fully Earth like virtual
reality and which allows multiple mobile sensors on the Earth's
surface so that folks can both feel at home, and also not lose
contact with the actual world.)

Best regards,
Lee
Received on Wed Aug 10 2005 - 18:56:05 PDT