Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?

On Sep 28, 3:29 am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:
...

We as brains, can really only understand and sense neural
signals.

I don't see the highest level, the brain, as a suitable
level to talk about things like "understanding" if we
want to understand what is happening when something like
ourselves "understand", any more than a lower level, the
neuron, (or your atoms) as being suitable to talk about
"understanding" behavior.

Also the brain does not "sense" neural signals but rather
some higher level pattern made up from these signals. When
I look at an image I don't sense the pixels I sense the
subject matter of the image.

...

If people actually believed in materialism like they say
they do, they wouldn't be so confused about consciousness.

Whereas I would state the opposite. It is their description
of the physical world that makes it hard to describe their
own internal observations.

The brain infers a physical world from its experiences
(internal events) constructed from its sensory inputs but
those experiences are not themselves contained in the
sensory input and thus not part of the inferred model of
the physical world.

Of course there is the naive view that an object is red
in color because that is what its color is, whereas the
red is in fact an internal event and simply the way the
brain codes or processes sensory differences we call
colors.

Science has moved us beyond the naive world view so now
we can understand the physical world is a construction,
which may be differently viewed by different brains,
although we assume a single real physical Universe is
the source of the data used by brains, which are also
part of that Universe, to build a model of the Universe.

Your brain has no direct knowledge of the physical world
only the patterns of its inputs. How do you know if
something exists "out there"? How do you know if you are
dreaming or not? What kind of physical world would you
infer if your only input was a binary switch? How could
it change as the number and value states of those inputs
were increased?

--
JC

.

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