From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 02:09:08 MDT
Lee wrote:
> Emlyn writes
>
> > Personally, I've been finding continuing thinking on the nature of
> > consciousness quite unsettling. The problem is as follows:
> >
> > Axiom: I am.
> > Tenuous hypothesis 1: I have sensory input implying
> > other stuff, and so it is too. [Too what, tenuous?]
> > Tenuous hypothesis 2: I am part of the set of other stuff.
>
> You better jolly well believe that you are part of the
> other stuff. The materialistic hypothesis is everything
> that we could ask for: for four hundred years it has had
> an unbroken track record of success, it's simple, and
> it's almost free of contradictions (and they're tiny).
Absolutely, I agree.
>
> > (much deduction, investigation, leading to negation of
> concept of conscious
> > self; self is an illusion, "I" am just a pattern of information)
>
> Well, it depends (of course) on what we ought to
> properly believe the "self" to be. I think that
> there exists a proper notion of self completely
> compatible with materialism.
Care to elucidate? I don't think I know what it is. It certainly isn't "the
will to survive"; that's just a partial specification for a decision making
algorithm. It's also not an algorithm modelling the universe including
itself, including the information that the self model represents it; that's
just data and process again. How can experience arise from that??
>
> > I find that if I take Tenuous Hypotheses 1 & 2 as axioms, I
> produce the
> > result:
> >
> > Result: I am not.
>
> It looks probable to me that your notion of self is such
> that you do not have one.
That's the crux. And yet I do have one, it's the only thing I really know.
>
> > By my original axiom, I now have A and ~A. I've just
> flushed reality down
> > the toilet. What is existence?
>
> The self-awareness of certain machines whose ability
> to map their environment extends warily into mapping
> themselves as a point in their environment?
Why are they aware? What function does it serve? Algorithms and qualia don't
seem to mix well (if qualia correctly represents what I am trying to
describe, which I suspect it doesn't).
>
> > I can't fault the materialist viewpoint, because I can't support the
> > alternative; the closer I look, the more it appears that there is no
> > possible role at all for any proposed non-physical piece of
> consciousness.
>
> Yay.
>
> > So intelligent thought is a purely physical phenomenon,
> about information
> > processing. Which means that "I" am not; "I" am an illusion
> (fooling who?
> > what?).
>
> It seems to me (or if you prefer, to this instance of Lee Corbin)
> that there probably exists a satisfactory meaning to be associated
> with "I" also. I am finding that emphasizing the difference between
> Tegmark's "frog perspective" and "bird perspective" helps clarity
> an old dichotomy.
I don't know this example.
>
> > I can only find paradox at the base of any search for an
> explanation of the
> > only phenomenon in the universe that I can definitely call
> axiomatic (that I
> > am). To me, it is more clearly evident than the existence
> of anything else.
>
> Yes, I totally agree.
>
> > But apparently it cannot be true.
> > Help.
>
> Well, our course of action is clear! We need only reform our
> notions of "I", "me", and "self" so that the inconsistencies
> disappear. Now it has appeared to many thoughtful people that
> this cannot be done without doing excess violence to what those
> tokens conventionally mean. The same fate has befallen "free
> will".
Yes. The tokens are not the issue, it is what I am struggling to use them to
represent.
>
> But I, and also a number of thoughtful people, think that (unlike
> "phlogiston" and "soul") all of the above can be used to usefully
> communicate, and that all of the above can refer to objectively
> evident pieces of reality.
>
> Lee
?
Emlyn
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