[Wittrs] Re: The Vexing Question
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:28:57 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
> Okay. My point is what does it mean to say "person X is
> conscious"? What does it mean to be conscious?
I don't think that is answerable.
> When we look at the uses we see that we mean person X is aware
> (of the world around him, of us, of himself, of the date, etc.).
I can imagine a conversation where somebody says "John is asleep right
now, but he is aware of that event." Presuming that being asleep
implies not being conscious, such usage would seem to question an
equivalence of "conscious" and "aware."
>>> Isn't it just physics in a very important sense?
>> I wasn't disagreeing with that.
> But the changing is just physics, too.
I'm wondering what part of "I wasn't disagreeing with that" you failed
to understand.
>> But that is where we must start, if we are to give an account of
>> awareness. Otherwise we are just chasing word usages around in big
>> enough circles that we don't notice the circularity.
> But it really only gets at the physics while, with life forms,
> there is also the systemic behaviors to address.
Then I guess you really do just want to do circular reasoning about
concepts, without being concerned with how those concepts connect to
reality. But how can we adequately study awareness intentionality if
we avoid the most basic point, the connecting of our concepts to the
world?
> What makes you think that the order we find in the world is entirely
> imposed by our brains or some such?
You are reading too much into what I said. I have not suggested that
the order is entirely imposed by our brains. If there were no world,
then we would not have anywhere to apply any ordering, so of course the
world participates.
> The world has to be very much like what we see in some fairly
> significant ways or we and our species could not have made it
> this far.
But I have not said that we invent the world. I thought we had been
talking of ordering the world.
In the way we normally think of order in the world, I would say that
New Delhi is closer to the top of Mt Everest than it is to London. But
if somebody used a different order, and said that London is closer
because you can fly there in a few hours, whereas it would take days or
longer to reach the top of Mt Everest - why would that be a problem?
>> As far as I can tell, we don't actually find any order in the world.
>> Where we find order, is in representations of the world. And, as far
>> as I can tell, what we consider to be representations would not exist
>> in the world unless we were there to form those representations.
> This strikes me as a variant of idealism.
No, it is not at all like idealism.
According to idealism, you start with representations, and invent a
world out of those representations. And, incidently, Hawkins and
standard AI assumptions both seem to agree with that. Berkeley's
idealism just takes it one step further. Berkeley says that since all
we actually use is the representations, then we don't actually need
reality. If you think about it, Berkeley is just applying Ockham's
principle to the standard representationalist assumptions of Hawkins,
AI and much of philosophy.
I am very explicitly disagreeing with that. I say that we start with
an unrepresented world, and invent ways to form representations. And
only then can we try to see what the world is like. But, unlike the
idealist, we are not trying to decide what the world is like based only
on representations. Rather, we are trying to decide what the world is
like, armed with both (a) representations that we have ourselves made
and (b) our knowledge of the procedures that we have followed to form
those representations. This actually makes us more intimately
connected to our world, better acquainted with our world, and better
able to determine what the world is like.
> But whatever it is, please consider the argument I make above about
> crossing the street.
Sorry, but it was a silly argument, based on your misinterpreting what
I wrote.
In an earlier post, I used the camera as an analogy. I clearly
distinguished between using a camera to take picture (form a
representation), and inventing a camera. It's in the inventing of the
camera where human input is most important.
Suppose I take a picture with each of three cameras. The first uses a
normal lens, the second uses a telephoto lens, and the third uses a
wide angle lens. I will get three different representations from those
three cameras, but they are all representations of the same world. If
I look for order in those representations, then the order will be
different for the different pictures. The relative sizes of objects
will be different for example. But all of the pictures would still show
the traffic on the street.
>> Ptolemaic astronomers found that the motion of the planets was
>> orderly, and that they moved in cycles and epicycles. Modern
>> astronomers find that they move in ellipses. If the ordering already
>> exists, and we just discover an existing ordering, how can we get
>> that so badly wrong?
> We make mistakes. Not everything we theorize is going to be
> true. That's why we test empirically and adjust our ideas
> accordingly.
There is no empirical test that could distinguish between Ptolemaic
astronomy and Copernican astronomy. The distinction between them is
pragmatic, not factual. We can easily transform between them. That's a
transformation between a geocentric coordinate system and a
heliocentric coordinate system. The mathematics is simple enough.
Pragmatically speaking, however, there is a great difference. The
Copernican model is simpler, and more easily lends itself to expanding
scientific knowledge.
> I think you are confusing organizing data according to cultural
> cues, etc., with organizing data according to the physics of that
> data and how our systems are equipped for handling the latter.
There is no "physics of the data". Mathematics deals with data,
physics deals with the physical world.
> Hawkins' point is that we are equipped for the physics in roughly
> the same way, being of the same species in the same general world
> environment, etc., and that if we couldn't make sense out of that,
> we couldn't have survived as a species and, thus, individually.
I can agree with that much.
> Thus, he notes, we order the world pretty much in accord with how
> the world is ordered.
But I find no basis for that.
Regards,
Neil
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