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Marchesk

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Ah, the leaky abstraction, which is itself a leaky metaphor. I understand it to mean that abstractions sometimes fail to perfectly hide the complexity...
July 05, 2019 at 16:56
I would never say that. I'm sympathetic to Searle's argument. Syntax is not meaning. Google and Siri don't converse. So computers move information abo...
July 05, 2019 at 16:50
That's a good point that Data does not eat, so he lacks anything functional related to hunger or digestion. But note that Odo from Deep Space 9 also d...
July 05, 2019 at 15:40
I don't think we're doing exactly the same thing as a calculator/computer when we add two, because two has an import conceptual component for us. It's...
July 05, 2019 at 15:29
it's not behavior. I can pretend to be in pain or feel sad. i can also hide my pain (within reason) or sadness. When you dream at night, usually your ...
July 05, 2019 at 15:19
Searle just says we know in the case of humans we know that we're conscious, so it must be tied to our biology, since we don't have any other explanat...
July 05, 2019 at 15:09
You resurrected a really old thread. But I enjoyed re-reading it after all this time, for the first few pages. But then it fell apart. I take issue wi...
July 05, 2019 at 09:13
So ... knowledge is when words are used to put information to work?
July 01, 2019 at 05:40
Well, that brings up the question of whether information exists independent of minds, and minds are just acting on the information already there in th...
June 30, 2019 at 20:20
Yeah, if the multiverse lies along the 11th dimension, them our universe would have a location in that dimension. Also, if there is an upside down Str...
June 30, 2019 at 08:06
Radio and microwaves travel through the air transmitting a boatload of information from satellites, radios and cell towers.
June 30, 2019 at 04:58
Does information have a spatiotemporal location? We often say a file is moved from one computer to another. It might be uploaded, downloaded, synched ...
June 30, 2019 at 04:52
But sometimes doing things with words results in moving information from one head to another. Why else would the talking heads on Fox News be on 24 ho...
June 30, 2019 at 03:29
The argument I'm opposing in the OP is that since consciousness experiences such as pain don't fit into a scientific understanding of the universe, at...
June 30, 2019 at 03:08
By folks, do you mean Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish? They're the ones advancing the view that consciousness is an illusion — a magic show or simul...
June 30, 2019 at 02:54
If we perceive the world as colored in, and science explains it without the coloring in, then the appearance of color needs to be explained. It doesn'...
June 27, 2019 at 03:34
Strong emergentism means something truly novel that couldn't have been predicted beforehand with perfect knowledge comes into existence when the right...
June 26, 2019 at 15:26
Or not so reliably, since this is accompanied with an illusion of color resulting in much ink spilled over the hard problem and also, the problem of p...
June 26, 2019 at 09:43
Science is an objective, third person enterprise that abstracts away from individual perception to formulate equations, models and laws. This is funda...
June 26, 2019 at 09:20
This sounds like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I'm unclear as to where that is a property dualism, strong emergentism or some fo...
June 25, 2019 at 15:03
It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. The room doesn't feel like anything o...
June 25, 2019 at 02:49
So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions? Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, ...
June 25, 2019 at 01:07
To restratre my main point in the OP: If colors, pains, etc. are an illusion, what makes us think the world we perceive is any better off? I was think...
June 24, 2019 at 18:51
Yes, but I'm skeptical of p-zombie argument because I don't think it makes sense for them to make the same arguments about consciousness. Still, the t...
June 24, 2019 at 17:42
This has it backwards. Our color concepts come from experience prior to any scientific understanding of optics, and then they were mapped onto the sci...
June 24, 2019 at 17:28
Only a narrow band of it. The rest of it has no color for us.
June 24, 2019 at 16:30
Here's an outright denial that credits Dennett and P. Churchland: That sounds exactly like the argument that consciousness is an illusion, and at leas...
June 24, 2019 at 15:42
Here is a podcast interview of Dennett from 2018. https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/danieldennett2 At around 29:25, Dennett is asked about Galen S...
June 24, 2019 at 10:21
A p-zombie is missing the experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels. Thus it has no subjectivity. The zombie is identical in every other way. Th...
June 23, 2019 at 16:21
That's correct, but it'd kind of a big deal to deny the phenomenal aspect, yes? I understand the argument to be a denial of experiencing pain, pleasur...
June 23, 2019 at 16:03
Exactly this! Notice that it doesn't require any sort of interpretation as to the nature of the phenomenological, it just is our experience. And whate...
June 20, 2019 at 18:03
A solipsist walks into a bar and says, "We're all in this together!". A solipsist walks into a coffee shop and asks, "Is it solipsistic in here, or is...
June 19, 2019 at 19:29
Yes, but Dennett has other arguments where it becomes clear he is arguing that consciousness is an illusion. We don't really experience pain in a subj...
June 19, 2019 at 16:12
Nick Bostrom uses this kind of reasoning to argue that there is a Great Filter lying ahead of us, and that we live inside a computer simulation. The f...
June 19, 2019 at 09:41
My guess would be those structures that handle sensory data and integrate them into a perception in addition to the ones for memory, imagination, drea...
June 18, 2019 at 13:10
You're a time traveller? So philosophy should just be science? But philosophy asks broader questions and questions that science doesn't know how to ad...
June 18, 2019 at 13:08
If science can solve such questions, sure. Until then, they remain philosophical. I try to avoid qualia because it has controversial properties, and w...
June 18, 2019 at 12:45
Sure, but how long ago did we split off form a common ancestor with bats? If bats aren't exotic enough, what about squid perception when it comes to t...
June 18, 2019 at 12:35
That's the point. I don't know whether any of that is true. The point Nagel was making is there is a gap in our understanding, because it would requir...
June 18, 2019 at 12:34
Because we don't brain structures for sonar perception. That's why Nagel chose bats. He could have also gone with whales and dolphins, which would hav...
June 18, 2019 at 12:27
Useful? Purpose? This is a philosophical discussion about the nature of conscious experience. It's not about whether being able to know sonar experien...
June 18, 2019 at 12:26
Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of mind uploading, but we might get general purpose AI, which then can join this debate. Will be interesting, if that happen...
June 18, 2019 at 00:44
Agreed. This is my problem with the p-zombie argument. But I listened to a recent podcast with Chalmers as the guest, and he doubled down on this. Yes...
June 18, 2019 at 00:33
Yes, that's what saying consciousness is an illusion amounts to.
June 18, 2019 at 00:29
We can avoid talk of qualia and consciousness and still arrive at the same problem. Which is how to account for our experience of colors, sounds, tast...
June 17, 2019 at 23:52
Qualia is first person, but I prefer to talk in terms of color, sound, etc. We don’t have a description for sonar experiences, nor do we have a way of...
June 17, 2019 at 23:37
Of course not, but that's what I think the logical conclusion is if you say colors, sounds, etc. are illusions, since that's how we know about apples ...
June 17, 2019 at 17:18
No, not unless panpsychism is true. The things we can't perceive that we learn about through science are described in objective terms.
June 17, 2019 at 16:44
But they might perform the same functions that brain structures do one day. So then it's a question of whether functionalism or information processing...
June 17, 2019 at 16:35
He's asking what the experience of using sonar is. Is it accompanied with something like color or sound? The reason for choosing a bat is because it h...
June 17, 2019 at 15:36