You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Gnomon

Comments

Maybe a slight edge. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." I don't know if he was being sar...
December 01, 2019 at 23:22
I agree. But I'm not talking about an "intelligent person" whose intentions and methods are presumably similar to my own. Just as the Atheists argue, ...
December 01, 2019 at 19:51
Ouch!! The entropy between sender and receiver is astronomically high. There must be a short somewhere producing stupid static. :groan:
December 01, 2019 at 18:39
Obviously, we are not talking "in the same way" about our conscious perception of Reality. Philosophers often distinguish between Phenomenal Reality (...
December 01, 2019 at 18:29
I guess I'm not normal, and have no shame, or perhaps I'm just unconventional. But, I have good company. Most of the leading philosophers have been no...
December 01, 2019 at 03:19
I agree. But I was including the current theoretical (immaterial) "foundation" of perceived reality, Quantum Fields, in the sub-atomic domain. I also ...
November 30, 2019 at 19:00
No. I'm using a broader definition of "Information" as both noun and verb. That's the whole point of the Enformationism Thesis. Information is not jus...
November 30, 2019 at 18:05
You may have misunderstood my usage of abstract "ideality" in contrast to concrete "reality". Plato's realm of perfect Ideas or Forms was never meant ...
November 30, 2019 at 17:49
I get the belated impression that your original post was talking about Computer Consciousness, while most of the discussion here has been about Human ...
November 29, 2019 at 18:29
That depends on how many alternative interpretations are possible. As a computer algorithm, the Gaussian uncertainty is small. Which is appropriate fo...
November 28, 2019 at 23:28
Meaning. It takes two informed parties to communicate in code. Both sender and receiver must understand the intended meaning of the symbols (signals) ...
November 28, 2019 at 18:51
That's why I resolve the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of Dualism vs Monism with the BothAnd Principle. The "correct" term depends on your per...
November 28, 2019 at 00:55
Apparently, for many scientists, that cause/effect inference from Program to Programmer is quite resistible --- if it is taken to imply a supernatural...
November 28, 2019 at 00:38
Before you go : "This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill --- the story ends, you wake up in your bed an...
November 27, 2019 at 18:38
Ha! I am acutely aware of how big an undertaking it is to flip my own understanding of reality upside down. Enformationism began as a flash of insight...
November 27, 2019 at 18:18
Other than my arcane vocabulary, is the "reason" you're dubious because Enformationism combines Physics and Metaphysics? Most scientists are careful t...
November 27, 2019 at 02:30
Perhaps. If the final outcome was the most important goal of the designer. But multiplayer video games are intended to provide an ongoing experience f...
November 26, 2019 at 19:51
I'm sorry you feel that way. Since I'm breaking new ground in the Enformationism Thesis, rather than just recycling old ideas, I am forced, like many ...
November 26, 2019 at 18:58
That's OK. My thesis is also quite esoteric, and is not amenable to mainstream reductionist materialist Physics. But there are plenty of Physicists an...
November 26, 2019 at 04:00
Knowledge is just one form of Generic Information. In my thesis, Consciousness is a highly evolved form of Generic Information. Generic Information is...
November 26, 2019 at 03:45
You are probably most familiar with Claude Shannon's definition of Information. But, my general definition of Information above is a distillation of m...
November 26, 2019 at 00:06
According to the Wiki definition below, mathematics is not a physical thing, but simply "knowledge", "number", "structure", "geometry". All of these a...
November 25, 2019 at 18:05
Off topic. I just happened upon this post on Quora Forum, which claims to show a structural geometrical proof of God. It's an interesting concept, but...
November 25, 2019 at 17:44
Are you aware of any mathematical models of entanglement that would yield geometric structures? It seems to me that the key characteristic of entangle...
November 25, 2019 at 01:57
Jesus didn't have be too smart to predict the Roman suppression of sedition; just a basic knowledge of Jewish history. He had a series of predecessors...
November 25, 2019 at 01:20
Yes, but that assumes the Designer intended to create a perfect Garden of Eden. If so, then we have to invent an evil god who is powerful enough to fo...
November 25, 2019 at 00:57
My Creation hypothesis is similar, except that G*D is Chaos : defined as Eternity/Infinity. Hence, with no space-time limits, all things are possible,...
November 25, 2019 at 00:16
Yes. Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jewish reformer. Because he preached to the "dispossessed", and understood how the Romans would react to his rab...
November 24, 2019 at 19:33
How do you know this? I can only infer that other humans are conscious because they behave the same way as I do in similar situations. Do particles be...
November 24, 2019 at 04:03
Emergence is in the mind of the beholder. So no Mind, no illusion of sudden change. A magician could try to make his assistant disappear without using...
November 24, 2019 at 03:06
I suspect that the article's title was intentionally provocative. All they did was to come to the same conclusion that Schrodinger did in his Cat-in-t...
November 24, 2019 at 02:46
So, you think evolution "intended" to create intelligent agents all along, but it took 14 billion years to create a working prototype? I'm kidding, bu...
November 23, 2019 at 19:35
I agree with your intuition that the Qualia of Subjective Consciousness may be somehow related to the mystery of Quantum Entanglement. Unfortunately, ...
November 23, 2019 at 19:18
Panpsychism, which assumes that every particle in the cosmos is Conscious, does make it sound like there is some "magical ingredient" in addition to t...
November 23, 2019 at 18:46
Maybe TMF is talking about Cultural Evolution in general, rather than Eugenics or Transhumanism in particular. Cultural Evolution occurs much more rap...
November 22, 2019 at 19:12
Ha! That's why martial arts and competitive sports emphasize "practice, practice, practice". When you practice a move, your conscious mind analyzes th...
November 22, 2019 at 18:55
The statements you refer to are empty (meaningless) to you, because you don't understand the unconventional worldview that the assertions are derived ...
November 22, 2019 at 18:35
The BothAnd Principle emerged from my development of the Enformationism worldview. And that unconventional understanding of how the world as-a-whole w...
November 22, 2019 at 18:03
Unfortunately, some people interpret Emergence Theory as a technical-sounding term for Magic. But it's not a perceptual gap, obscured by smoke & mirro...
November 22, 2019 at 01:20
No. My thesis takes a stand, and like math, reasons answers from axioms. The Multiverse theory is likewise a non-answer, but it allows physicists to c...
November 21, 2019 at 18:58
Yes. I use metaphors as a short-cut for extremely complex "mechanisms". And I agree that the sub-conscious mind can be "programmed" by conscious conce...
November 21, 2019 at 18:42
It's just a metaphor. You can substitute whatever "programming" results in the body's ability to run itself, like a robot, without the mind consciousl...
November 21, 2019 at 18:30
My personal worldview, and my understanding of Consciousness, is based on the assumption that Information is indeed the foundation of the universe. Bu...
November 21, 2019 at 18:12
Yes. That's why I have concluded that human Free Will is limited to a conscious Veto over the options presented by automatic sub-conscious calculation...
November 21, 2019 at 01:06
I'm familiar with Laszlo , but not with that abstruse theory. However, the term sounds like Cartesian Dualism to me. His solution was "neat", in that ...
November 21, 2019 at 00:33
Do you prefer the Magic Bang answer? Is that satisfying to you? Apparently, it's not for many astronomers, who postulate a hypothetical Multiverse as ...
November 21, 2019 at 00:15
The problem here is that Quantum "mechanics" is not mechanical. Quantum Leaps, Entanglement, & Superposition are not mechanical. So applying objective...
November 20, 2019 at 18:40
The problem of Consciousness is "hard" only for those who think in materialistic terms of "motion, mechanics, or dynamics". If instead, we think of Ca...
November 20, 2019 at 18:29
As I noted in my reply to Enrique, I didn't intend to get this thread off-track by introducing my personal cosmology into the discussion. All of my co...
November 20, 2019 at 04:24
I have constructed an unconventional personal worldview that is intended to explain the "causality of the observer" among many other issues making Qua...
November 20, 2019 at 04:00