Philosophy of Mind - arguments against naturalism

Visbek · Nov 30, 2017

ashurbanipal said:
Well, I don't know that AI is impossible in the sense that we might one day build a machine that becomes associated with consciousness--that is, that a conscious mind comes to attune itself with the bit of matter that constitutes the machine. However, if that ever does happen, it'll be because that machine makes some connection to a non-physical domain, not because it makes a mind out of material stuff.

But how is that possible?!?

Where is the connection?

How do we make the silicon connect to something that has no location, no mass, no energy, nothing at all?

Do you really not see why that's a major issue?

Of course it'll work. A tax program (and by parity of reasoning, any program) receives input and produces output according to an interpretation.

The tax program, like the Quake engine, also needs input it can understand. If I try to tell TurboTax that my income for 2017 is <<<IMPRESSIVE>>> because I fragged 3 enemies, the application will reject the data. Similarly, if I tell Quake that I paid $15,000 in mortgage interest in 2017, the game will reject the data.

My point is that the interpretation need not remain static. I could understand that when, say, a door opens in the game, that's my cue to input my gross income, which I could do by taking certain actions within the game, all mapped to a different set of actions for different possible values.

But you have no way to tell the Quake game engine what your income was! It has no way for you to input that data, and certainly not in any way that it can manipulate that data to calculate your tax liabilities.

None of that is evidence for different persons or consciousnesses. I'm aware of what I'm doing (even if I'm not fully aware of why I'm doing it) under the influence of either system.

I think you'd be better off learning a bit about Kahneman's dual system theory before making further comments. It's quite fascinating, by the way.

Funny you should mention calostomy patients....

Let me know when it's replicated.

Even if it turns out to be wrong, there are countless other ways that our consciousness is not what it seems.

1) I'm not sure how any of that is evidence of the brain fooling itself.

And yet, clearly that's what seems to be happening. Our experiences of time, of pain, of attention, of consciousness itself don't actually tell us how any of that operates.

By the way, the "agent" theory is from Minsky.

2) I think at least some of that evidence supports idealism better than it does materialism. Take change blindness, for instance. We know that the physical processes, so far as we can describe, work to register the change. The light impacting the retina changes, obviously, as must the axial potentials travelling down the optic nerve, and so on. And yet, the conscious mind does not register the change. Why should that be the case? A materialist can come up with reasons, of course, but they're ad hoc reasons--nothing I can think of in materialist theories predict this sort of thing.

So your takeaway from change blindness is to... ditch the entire concept of a material world? Seriously?

You do realize it really isn't that difficult to explain in physical terms, right?

And you do understand that your own proposal actually predict nothing at all? How does dualism or idealism predict that damage to the visual cortex will prevent the individual from having visual experiences? How does it predict that there are multiple regions of the brain which receive visual input, resulting in an individual with a damaged visual cortex still being able to process some visual information, albeit unconsciously? Does dualism predict that giving Prozac to a patient with bipolar disorder will help relieve their symptoms? Will it tell you which anti-depressants will work best?

ashurbanipal · Nov 30, 2017

devildavid said:
And this points out the weakness of dualism. It doesn't have to explain anything and it makes up things it calls mental objects. There are no mental objects that exist independent of the physical brain. Dead people do not have mental objects because their brain no longer functions. So dualists take the easy way out by defining things as fundamental, rather than explaining how they come to be. They simply misunderstand how the brain creates the illusion of dualism.

Well, you get one thing kinda right: one criticism of dualism is that it has to posit one more class of fundamental than either materialism or dualism--the idea being that this is a cost. The reason it's counted a cost is somewhat complex, but it can only be supported in a certain system of valuation. It's worth noting, however, that every ontology has to posit that something is fundamental, and ultimately, no explanation can be given of its existence.

Anyway, the rest of what you say is just assertion with no reason given to believe it.

devildavid · Dec 1, 2017

ashurbanipal said:
Well, you get one thing kinda right: one criticism of dualism is that it has to posit one more class of fundamental than either materialism or dualism--the idea being that this is a cost. The reason it's counted a cost is somewhat complex, but it can only be supported in a certain system of valuation. It's worth noting, however, that every ontology has to posit that something is fundamental, and ultimately, no explanation can be given of its existence.

Anyway, the rest of what you say is just assertion with no reason given to believe it.

Ontology is make believe. Reality is where we all live. We exist because we exist, not because we think. Brain dead people exist, dead bodies exist. It's that simple. Ontology is just a bunch of talk. We can't describe the nature of reality because we are too far in it. Talking about reality has no impact on actual reality. Philosophy is the tail that tries to wag the dog and creates nothing but uncertainty at best and confusion at worst.

Visbek · Dec 1, 2017

devildavid said:
Ontology is make believe. Reality is where we all live.

I just have to point out that "reality is where we all live" is, in fact, an ontological position.

Technically, it is known as "realism."

It isn't just talk, because we still have issues about the nature of reality, why the laws of physics are universal and purportedly timeless, what is the nature of number and mathematics, what is causality, can regularity justify causal inferences, what is a priori knowledge and how is it justified, what is identity, what happens at the borders where identity breaks down, and so on.

It's your choice to refuse to care about philosophy, but a refusal to be reflective -- which is basically you demanding that everyone agree with you on a whole series of issues that are not in fact settled -- is not exactly impressive.

ashurbanipal · Dec 2, 2017

devildavid said:
Ontology is make believe. Reality is where we all live.

So what you're saying is that we cannot know that your second claim is correct. Ontology is the study of reality. If the study of reality is make-believe, then it seems pretty clear we cannot know anything about reality, including that it's where we all live.

devildavid said:
We exist because we exist, not because we think.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but if you're taking a dig at Descartes, it seems pretty clear you don't understand what he had to say.

devildavid said:
Brain dead people exist, dead bodies exist.

Um...sure.

devildavid said:
It's that simple. Ontology is just a bunch of talk. We can't describe the nature of reality because we are too far in it. Talking about reality has no impact on actual reality. Philosophy is the tail that tries to wag the dog and creates nothing but uncertainty at best and confusion at worst.

I have no idea what to make of any of that.

devildavid · Dec 4, 2017

Visbek said:
I just have to point out that "reality is where we all live" is, in fact, an ontological position. Technically, it is known as "realism."

It isn't just talk, because we still have issues about the nature of reality, why the laws of physics are universal and purportedly timeless, what is the nature of number and mathematics, what is causality, can regularity justify causal inferences, what is a priori knowledge and how is it justified, what is identity, what happens at the borders where identity breaks down, and so on.

It's your choice to refuse to care about philosophy, but a refusal to be reflective -- which is basically you demanding that everyone agree with you on a whole series of issues that are not in fact settled -- is not exactly impressive.

Ontology is just a word. Living in reality is not the same as taking a philosophical position about reality. I take no philosophical position on reality, I just live in it and experience it. I don't sturdy reality and take positions on it. Philosophy is just opinions dressed up as profundity.

Visbek · Dec 4, 2017

devildavid said:
Ontology is just a word.

Yes, so is "morality" and "God" and "atheism" and "physics" and....

Pointing out that a word is a word doesn't prove anything.

Living in reality is not the same as taking a philosophical position about reality.

Yes, it is. Your choice, inability and/or refusal to acknowledge it as such does not make your assumptions go away. You're also committed to a series of beliefs, you just haven't articulated them well.

Let's say that Joe distrusts all government. He believes the only valid role for any government is to provide basic law enforcement, courts, and a military. It doesn't matter that Joe has never studied political science, and has no idea what the term "libertarian" means. Joe can deny that he's a libertarian or holds a specific political ideology. None of that changes the fact that Joe is accurately described as a libertarian.

We should also note that today's common-sense view is yesterday's incredible perspective. For centuries, it was common sense for millions of people that the world as we experienced it was an illusion (e.g. Buddhism) or that the world was filled with supernatural forces. To a Brit in the 11th century, the phrase "I live in reality" meant an acceptance of witches, angels, devils and other supernatural forces. To someone in Heian-era Japan, it meant believing in directional taboos, demonic possession, and social superiority based on proximity to the Emperor. To a devout Jew living in Kiryas Joel today, it means a belief in an active deity that punishes and rewards people.

I.e. The phrase "I live in reality" means different things to different people at different times, and philosophy is a good way to interpret the various meanings of that phrase. It is primarily based on other posts here that I can make an educated guess that you hold a philosophical viewpoint called "realism." If you read up on it, you'll probably find that it describes your views well -- as well as some problems with this view that you haven't considered.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/

Philosophy is just opinions dressed up as profundity.

Or, it's a profound exploration of critical issues about the human experience, and a useful tool for examining, articulating and revealing our own assumptions about the world.

ashurbanipal · Dec 5, 2017

Visbek,

After reading through your reply, I continue to have the impression that there's some more basic points that need to be clarified. You seem to have a view that the conservation laws you've named make interaction impossible. As I've said, if you accept that proposition, then you'd also have to believe dualism, or at least any dualism that permits mental<->physical causation, is impossible.

However, as I have argued, the claim that conservation laws make interaction impossible, is false. I would put it to you that you haven't really argued that this is the case, and have more or less avoided the arguments I've made in favor of my claim--or so it seems to me; perhaps I've misunderstood your point somewhere. But that's not what I want to dwell on at this time, because I think there's some more basic issue at, er, issue: namely, the nature of possibility. What does it mean to say that something is possible? Before I answer your posts in detail (which I will do), I propose to analyze the nature of possibility, and you tell me whether there's anything therein with which you disagree. I'll be giving a fairly mainstream and obvious account:

The basic idea is logical possibility: a proposition is possibly true so long as it entails no contradiction. Claims of the form (A & ~A) entail a contradiction, and hence are not possibly true, for example. Claims of the form (A v ~A) do not entail a contradiction, and hence are possibly true. This latter example serves to make an important point, which is part of the nature of possibility: in a system of binary logic, (A v ~A) is provably true in every case--that is, it's a tautology. That fact does not affect the fact that it's possibly true; it remains possibly true, and actually true.

Now this is the basic idea, but by itself it hardly tells us which propositions are logically possible. To know that, we need to understand what our logics themselves entail--that is, the axioms of any logic are themselves propositions, and even though a statement may not contradict itself, it may contradict some axiom of logic. In that case, it's still not logically possible. Any proposition that does not contradict itself or the axioms of logic, and does not entail such a contradiction, is logically possible. Obviously, logics provide us a means of symbolizing propositions and testing whether they're inconsistent or not, and this is generally what I have in mind when I use terms like "contradiction"--I mean formally demonstrable contradiction.

There are, of course, other kinds of possibility to consider. Physical possibility is one example (in which I imagine you'll be interested). We've already got a roadmap for how to account for physical possibility, or really any other kind of possibility. We just add to the list of propositions that cannot be contradicted. In this case, I suspect you'll insist on accepted conservation laws, to which I'm happy to agree. But otherwise the same rules apply: a state of affairs is physically impossible just in case a proposition that accurately describes it is logically inconsistent (in a formally demonstrable manner) with the accepted axioms or logic, or the other propositions added under the subject of physics. Otherwise, it is physically possible.

Now I don't know whether any of this is at issue...I just kinda get that impression. Is there anything in the above analysis with which you disagree? Alternately, is there anything important and relevant about the nature of possibility in the context of the present discussion that you think the above leaves out?

ashurbanipal · Dec 8, 2017

devildavid said:
If everything behaved randomly, that is what science would observe as a fact.

I think not. That's what human beings would observe as fact in everyday life. Science would never get off the ground, because beyond the random behavior of everything, what else would there be to know within the domain of science?

devildavid said:
Science does not need certain results because science is not a philosophy, but a method of studying that which actually exists and how it actually functions.

Sounds like that's a needed result.

devildavid said:
Philosophy, by its nature tries to make things fit into a particular philosophical viewpoint.

Why do you think that? Seems to me about the opposite is true.

devildavid said:
Just because you can ask any question does not make the any question worth asking.

I agree with respect to unfair questions (as in the fallacy "unfair question"). Otherwise, I see no reason to think this is right.

devildavid said:
And if all it leads to are word games and arguments then you have nothing. Being able to put together words to make a point is not the same as using evidence which is independent of your words.

And yet here you are using words and making arguments. I wonder why that is...

devildavid said:
Science doe not rely on words, but evidence made up of facts that are impervious to philosophical argument.

Science is composed almost entirely of words. When you take a science class, the professor speaks to you in words. Papers in all areas of science are written in words. Evidence is interpretted; without the interpretation, it lacks meaning. I get the impression that you almost have this view that scientists stand around in their labs, scientific evidence somehow magically floating around between their brains, each of them smiling vaguely as the evidence melds with their minds, leading them to eternal wordless agreement about what the evidence means (in as literal a sense as that statement could possibly be meant).

Scientists argue about the meaning of evidence all the time, and there's never any guarantee that one interpretation is the right one, nor any guarantee that there is a single right interpretation.

devildavid said:
The only absolutely true philosophy is nihilism.

How is that, exactly?

devildavid said:
But none of us really go there because there is something built into us makes us keep living as a whole as a species which is beyond our control.

Plenty of folks are nihilists. However, non-nihilists would not buy this claim--that is, that the only reason we're not nihilists is because we're programmed, in some non-telistic way, not to be.

devildavid · Dec 8, 2017

ashurbanipal said:
I think not. That's what human beings would observe as fact in everyday life. Science would never get off the ground, because beyond the random behavior of everything, what else would there be to know within the domain of science?

Sounds like that's a needed result.

Why do you think that? Seems to me about the opposite is true.

I agree with respect to unfair questions (as in the fallacy "unfair question"). Otherwise, I see no reason to think this is right.

And yet here you are using words and making arguments. I wonder why that is...

Science is composed almost entirely of words. When you take a science class, the professor speaks to you in words. Papers in all areas of science are written in words. Evidence is interpretted; without the interpretation, it lacks meaning. I get the impression that you almost have this view that scientists stand around in their labs, scientific evidence somehow magically floating around between their brains, each of them smiling vaguely as the evidence melds with their minds, leading them to eternal wordless agreement about what the evidence means (in as literal a sense as that statement could possibly be meant).

Scientists argue about the meaning of evidence all the time, and there's never any guarantee that one interpretation is the right one, nor any guarantee that there is a single right interpretation.

How is that, exactly?

Plenty of folks are nihilists. However, non-nihilists would not buy this claim--that is, that the only reason we're not nihilists is because we're programmed, in some non-telistic way, not to be.

All science starts with observation. If something is random, science observes it and describes it, tests it and analyzes it. There are things that occur that science calls random, such as the motion of gases. It all depends on what you mean by random and what you are observing. For example, my keyboard is not randomly moving around the room , nor am I, as I type this. I am not appearing randomly in different parts of the universe. But that doesn't mean that some physical things can't be described as having the property of being random.

Science without actual lab work is not really science. A science lecture is not science. Science is a method which has to be practiced.

What does non-telistic mean?

ashurbanipal · Dec 14, 2017

Visbek,

I'm not sure if you saw my post about the nature of possibility, but since it's been quite a while, I'm going to go ahead and respond to your most recent round of posts. I would still appreciate you taking a look at that post--it's number 208. I think if you'll do so, it'll save us both a lot of effort in the end.

Visbek said:
I can create a digital image of an elephant, a representation out of binary states. While you may say it doesn't make sense to weigh those binary states, that doesn't change the fact that those binary states are physical things.

I don't think so. As states, they have no location, weight, etc. That's why two numerically disparate transistors can be in an identical state. The physical things are the transistors in question, not their states.

Moreover, those transistors can be arranged any which way and form a representation of an elephant. Indeed, we could measure out a 1 meter-square patch of grass somewhere, and carefully measure whether each blade bends north or west, or east or south (counting as zeros and ones, respectively), and call the result a representation of an elephant, and under that piece of code, every such 1 meter-square piece of grass with the same configuration represents an elephant. And so on. The arbitrariness of the representation is conspicuous, and such is the case with literally every physical representation, at least of the kind under discussion here.

Visbek said:
The problem here is that you don't understand that all of these concepts can be physically instantiated. The concept of "37" and "elephants" are merely the arrangement of neural networks.

Nope. Once again, it's provable that any arrangement of a neural network can represent anything at all. Your position requires that there be some kind of language of thought, presumably instantiated as some kind of natural law, and LOT theories fail for some pretty fundamental reasons. (As an aside, the only positive argument ever offered for believing there is an LOT is because it's the only way for materialism to be true, given what we know about the brain and the world--ergo, despite the gaping logical holes, there must be an LOT. Seriously!). To circle back 'round to where this all started: meaning cannot be naturalized, at least apparently.

Visbek said:
If that was not the case, then we are right back at the interactivity problem. How do you know what an elephant looks like? You know its physical geometry based on sensory input, which is purely physical data input to the brain. So how does this magically turn into non-physical information?

One consequence of the dancing pixies argument is that physical instantiation of a concept (as you call it) is just as "magical." Physicalism fares no better on this question, and starts to look like enveiglement besides.

Visbek said:
It doesn't matter that these claims are causal, or even that causality is a concept. You're relying on causality to make your claims. Do you, or do you not, accept that's the case? Or are you now saying that the laws of physics and causality are, what, purely optional? Ignorable at will?

Far be it from me to give up physics, although I do suspect there are some very fundamental issues wrong with physics as it currently exists, and I am skeptical that any totalizing system of reality can be the thorouhgoing truth, and I suspect quite a few people expect physics will be such a system when it is "finished." I doubt physics ever will be, or even could possibly be, finished in the requisite sense.

With those caveats, causality seems to be more basic than physics, in that it's a concept physics deploys from top to bottom (so to speak). There is no physical explanation of causality tout court, so I'm not sure what the relevance of physics is, just here.

Visbek said:
You're trying to tell me that these non-physical things influence physical events. That's a straight-up violation of conservation laws.

No it isn't. You haven't shown that.

Visbek said:
What you have is a subjective impression that "my consciousness is not physical."

Come to that, all anyone has is a subjective impression.

ashurbanipal · Dec 14, 2017

Visbek said:
However, that doesn't actually prove anything, except that "this is how we experience consciousness." That subjective experience does not tell us anything about its actual ontological structure.

Why not?

Visbek said:
Consider phantom limb pain. The individual has a subjective experience of pain in a limb that is removed from the body; that person has a subjective experience that the limb is still there. That subjective experience does not explain how or why the individual experiences phantom pain, and does not provide valid information about the person's physical condition.

Um...so what?

Visbek said:
It's not justified, because pretty much everything we know about the physical world rules out the possibility of any interactions between any bthings which violate conservation laws.

You seem to just be repeating your earlier assertions, without any argument in favor thereof.

Visbek said:
There is no way for this non-physical thing to influence a wave function collapse (which, we should note, happens because the particle interacts with another subatomic particle) without doing something physical.

This seems false, or probably false, to me. Plenty of quantum systems involve multiple particles (sometimes a great many), and those stay in superposition indefinitely. So interaction with another particle may be necessary, but is clearly not sufficient, for wavefunction collapse. On the other hand, what is both necessary and sufficient, for every observation of wavefunction collapse in all of human history, is a conscious mind making an observation.

Visbek said:
"Location" is not a property that is conserved. "Location" is purely relative, where X is in relation to a specific frame of reference, and there is no absolute frame of reference. What is conserved is momentum.

Sure, location is relative (in this case, relative to other minutes structures in a brain). I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, though. A particle in superposition can change location (relative to some other object) without any change in momentum. That's all I really need to be the case.

Visbek said:
And yet, you yourself have repeatedly claimed that tunneling and wave form collapse don't generate experiences. They can't even convey the content of an experience to the brain. We can't even say that wave form collapses have any role whatsoever in cognition, or decisions, or experiences. As such, I really have no idea what you're hoping to prove by even discussing this.

The first two sentences do not entail the third, which I take to be a conclusion based on the first two as premises. The role played by tunneling and waveform collapse (I suggest) is simply the conveying of information from the brain, and back to the brain. Nothing more. But that information should not be confused with consciousness, experience, or any other mental phenomenon. Think of it like radio waves, if that helps at all: the radio waves transmit information, but they are not themselves the music that issues forth from the speaker.

Visbek said:
....no, it means it's not possible. If that claim is correct, then you cannot have any hidden variables of any sort.

Locality entails physicality, since, by definition, only physical things have a locale. Bell's inequality does not rule out non-local hidden variables, which means it does not rule out non-physical hidden variables.

ashurbanipal · Dec 14, 2017

Visbek said:
"Physicalism" specifically refers to a monist philosophy, in which consciousness is ultimately physical. As SEP puts it:

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

"Materialism" is just a slightly outdated term for the same concept.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

This isn't a deep issue.

Oh, it's quite deep. There's a pretty good literature on the subject (for example, you might start with Physicalism by Jeffrey Poland, or Russell's Analysis of Matter, or any of several papers written by Barbara Montero). Philosophers who haven't read that literature are likely to think the two terms nearly interchangeable. But they aren't.

Visbek said:
Of course it is!

How did it develop? How did it get here? Why do humans have experiences at all? Is it necessary in order for a human to function? How do these two fundamentally different ontological classes work together? These types of questions don't disappear just by waving your hand.

They must eventually for something, for any ontology. Materialism (or physicalism, if you prefer, in this case) will eventually just have to say "well, the material (physical) stuff is just there." Dualists can help themselves to the same move. Ditto questions of the ultimate explanation of causation--which I will be happy to show if you would answer the question I've asked you multiple times now: explain causation at the smallest physical scales we know.

Visbek said:
The physicalist does not shy from these questions. They are not answerable today, but that does not mean they can never be answered. Again, we didn't know what gravity was or how it operated for hundreds of years; that did not mean the question could never be answered.

To develop the point a little more finely: theories (of whatever) must contain ontological posits that explain whatever entities the theory is supposed to explain. Thus, cells are supposed to explain organisms, molecules explain cells, atoms explain molecules, and so on. For each layer that some new theory adds on, we can just ask again "well, where did the ontological posits in that layer come from?" Eventually, we'll get to where we just cannot answer, and the process of explanation will perforce stop.

Visbek said:
What I mean is: How does the brain actually have an experience?!?

Brains, I repeat, do not have experiences. This would be like me asking you repeatedly why God created matter (presumably, you don't think God created matter). I cannot tell whether you're trying to be unfair or simply find it impossible to think any way other than the way to which you are accustomed.

Visbek said:
Yet again, we know that if certain regions of the brain receive electrical stimulation, we will have an experience; and if a region is damaged, we won't have the experience. Absolutely nothing about wave form collapse or tunneling explains how this happens or does not happen.

Sure it does, and I've explained it already. When a part of a brain is ablated--say, the part that enables a subject to perceive the color red--the input to the mind that would produce in that mind the experience of red is no longer passed to the mind. This is no more mysterious than if a person were placed in a black and white room, and they didn't perceive red while therein. The reason such a person would not experience red is simply because the circuitry that registers red would not activate. Similarly, in the ablation case, that circuitry would not activate either--only because it's been removed from the person's head, rather than because of a lack of the right kind of sensory input.

Visbek said:
Clearly they do, since you only have an experience when specific neurons fire.

Seems obviously false, as far as I can tell. What makes you think this? There's certainly no 1:1 correspondence between brain events and mental events--at least not that our current best evidence supports--if that's what you're thinking.

ashurbanipal · Dec 14, 2017

Visbek said:
Plus, the last I checked? My consciousness follows my brain around. You are flat-out unable to explain how that happens. That's a serious problem.

I've offered an explanation for why your consciousness is associated with your body. It need not, however, be present in any particular location to do so, and a dualist would say it is not in any particular location. To continue the radio wave analogy: someone unaware of how radios and radio waves work might think that the music coming out of the car speakers is "following the car around." But that's not the case--the waves just happen to be everywhere the car goes, and the radio is a device that can tune in to one specific modulation of those waves.

Also, how did you check that your consciousness followed your brain around?

Visbek said:
And how does that happen?!? How does the visual cortex pass data to the non-physical mind?

On the model I've suggested, by producing a certain pattern in waveform collapses that the mind can read as "red."

Visbek said:
The "Hamlet Rock" isn't treating all random input as a trigger to print the next letter. It has to convert a sequence of physically detectable characteristics into that word. E.g. molecule of SiO2 next to molecule of Na2O = the letter "E". You'd have to custom program the reader to match the sequence in Granite Rock #1, and work backwards to construct sequences that produce the text of Hamlet. But when you run that same program against a different granite rock, it won't generate the text of Romeo and Juliet, it will just produce gibberish.

Sure. But that's not the only way to program such a computer. We could instead take the method I suggested in my previous posts. Why in the world would we be forced to program the computer your way?

Visbek said:
We posit that computers are purely physical things. Can they be conscious? If not, then why not?

As physical things, no--because physical properties and mental properties have nothing in common in the right way so as to make the latter from the former. If a computer ever becomes associated with consciousness, it'll be because it somehow formulates a link with a mind. I don't know whether that's possible or not, but I see no reason to rule it out.

ashurbanipal · Dec 15, 2017

First, I apologize for the late post. I missed the notification, somehow. Anyway:

devildavid said:
All science starts with observation. If something is random, science observes it and describes it, tests it and analyzes it. There are things that occur that science calls random, such as the motion of gases.

Alright now wait a minute--I didn't say that science wouldn't get off the ground if there were only a lack of apparent consistency. I said that science depends on the universe being (actually) consistent. An actually inconsistent universe would be one in which science could not exist. An inconsistent universe is one in which it could be true, for example, that the sun exists, and also simultaneously true that the sun does not exist. Or, that you could be in location x, and simultaneously not in location x. And so on.

Randomness is another matter, although one closely related, and again, in a truly random universe (i.e. one without any underlying patterns), science would, again, never get off the ground.

devildavid said:
It all depends on what you mean by random and what you are observing. For example, my keyboard is not randomly moving around the room , nor am I, as I type this. I am not appearing randomly in different parts of the universe. But that doesn't mean that some physical things can't be described as having the property of being random.

Yes but if everything behaved randomly (that is, if there were no patterns to anything--and by that I mean not merely a lack of apparent patterns, but a genuine lack of all patterns), there would be no science, as there would be nothing for science to discover.

devildavid said:
Science without actual lab work is not really science. A science lecture is not science. Science is a method which has to be practiced.

All true, but not sufficient to make your point, because lab work by itself is insufficient to constitute science. Scientists have to think about their evidence, talk about it with other scientists, consider possible counter-hypotheses to what their intuitions tell them, and so on. That is, evidence must be interpretted.

devildavid said:
What does non-telistic mean?

Non-purposeful. Telos=purpose, end, meaning.

Philosophy of Mind - arguments against naturalism

Visbek

Stuck In The Circle

ashurbanipal

devildavid

Phlegmatic

Visbek

Stuck In The Circle

ashurbanipal

devildavid

Phlegmatic

Visbek

Stuck In The Circle

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

devildavid

Phlegmatic

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal