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


"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20070927132906.149$sp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
forbisgaryg@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 27, 12:30 am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

What I reject as being so unlikely it's not even work talking about
(except for the fact that a huge percentage of the world doesn't reject
it so I keep having to talk about it), is the belief that consciousness
is anything other than just more of the same - the behavior of atoms.

If that were only true. You also reject the notion that consciousness
is the behavior of the atoms. I say this because you hold that
computers are or can be conscious even though they are composes of
completely different atoms and structures of atoms. You claim that
consciousness rest upon the behviors of sturctures at such a high level
that they are atom type independent (similar to a ball, whose behaviors
don't depend upon rubber for its bounciness.)

Your logic is flawed.

Your mental cloud of unknowing is expanding faster than the inflationary
Universe!


We don't use words to label precise behaviors.

Yes, we do. When I go to the take a *** I say that I am going to take a
***.

We use words to label
classes of behaviors.

Nope; their are classes and instantiations of each class that can be
concrete processes/entities in Universe.

Everything is an abstraction.

Wrong.

It's a class of
patterns which we assign the meaning to.

Wrong again; people assign meaning both to classes and to specific
instantiations of a class.

When we say a person is running,
we can create millions of different videos to show people running, but no
two videos will be the exact same set of molecules doing the exact same
set
of motions.

And I can use words to describe or talk about *one* of the instances of a
person running, just as I can use words to describe multiple instances *as*
multiple instances, and to descibe multiple instances *as* a class.

No two people use the same definition for a word for most of
these words. The edge cases will be different for each of us. If you
show
a 100 different people 1000 videos of people doing something running-like
(a running edge case), and ask them to identify which video shows running
and which is not running, you will get 1000 different answers. We define
words by the approximate location of the center of the set. We give
examples of what running is which are clearly located near the center of
the set of all behaviors we think should be called running. We can apply
it to the actions of people, and dogs, and even computers - it's a very
abstract words. But no matter how specific a word is, it's still only an
abstraction of class of sensory signals.

You are going off the deep end again.


I claim that consciousness is just yet another word which describes
another
class of behaviors of atoms. Which behaviors are part of the class is
hard
to say because even though lots of people think the word has meaning (that
is they think they are talking about something real when they use it),
they
can't for the life of them define it.

What people? You mean like Igor Aleksander, who describes consciousness in
terms of several specific axioms that have both modelling and predictive
value? You have no education in these matters; your lack of breadth and
depth are astounding!

So, since I know they are talking
about some class of behaviors of atoms, I have fun trying to figure what
the class is based on how they use it. But since they can't define it,
it's mostly impossible for me to know what class they want to apply it to.

That is because your class/non-class dichotomy is faulty.


It's clear where people place the center of the set of all atom behaviors
which they want to label as consciousness. They place the center at the
set of behaviors their own brain is able to detect in itself. That is,
whatever the brain is able to report about it's own behaviors is what they
call consciousness. But what they can't do, because they don't understand
they are simply creating another words to describe a class of behaviors of
atoms, is help me figure out where the edge cases lie. Do they want to
define the word as one which only applies to the human brain? That's a
perfectly fine way to define the word. But then, when we build a machine
using electronic components which produces human-like conscious behaviors,
including the ability to talk about and debate the nature of it's own
consciousness, are they then going to choose to extend the boundaries of
the concept of consciousness to include those non-biological machines? I
find it hard to believe they wouldn't if we ended up creating such a
machine because this machine, who learned English and philosophy the same
way humans learn it, will strongly argue that he is just as conscious as
any hunk of meat because everything they have, he has, in the sense of his
brain being able to sense it's own actions.

None the less, the bottom line, is just because society can't agree on
what
class of behaviors they are talking about when they use the word
conscious,
doesn't mean the word is not just a reference to some class of motions of
atoms.

Where in the motion of atoms is the concept and predispotions and actions we
call "eukaryotes emerged from complex interactions of prokaryotes"?


We as brains,

We are not brains, as Bennett and Hacker have it, but persons! Becareful,
as to argue against B&H is to argue agaisnt the supposition of the
mereological fallacy .

can really only understand and sense neural signals. All our
words are actually just first hand references to classes of motions of the
atoms which create our neural signals. Only second hand, do they also
reference the motion of atoms out in the real world. So when we say we
see
a cat, we are really saying we (a brain) is currently sensing cat-like
neural patterns. But those cat like neural patterns have a strong
correlation to the cat-like collection of atoms which also happen to exist
out in the real world so, because of that correlation, we can talk about
cats and refer to all of it, the stuff that exists outside the head as
well
as the stuff that represents it inside our head.

If people actually believed in materialism like they say they do, they
wouldn't be so confused about consciousness. If you believe in
materialism, you would understand that everything we talk about is a
reference to the behavior of atoms.

Why not fields? Or molecules? Or cells? Or organisms? Your silly
reductionistic claptrap loses information at each stage of reduction to
"atoms", which are not really "atoms" now are they!


That's what materialism is all about -
the belief that the physical stuff of nature is the foundation of
everything there is in nature.

As Feynman put it, Physics has found no stuff yet!!!!!


But most people who like to debate issues of consciousness don't believe
this to be true. They believe consciousness is something else - that the
stuff it's made from is another elementary part of nature which the tools
of science can't detect.

You are bringing in your infamoud strawman again; souls and magic etc.,
which no one is claiming to be the case.

They claim it's impossible to build a machine to
measure it, or detect it (subjective experience can not be made objective
they claim). They know it's there, because their brain is able to detect
it, and report on it's status, but they think it's impossible to build a
machine do detect it and report on it's status (a tool of science). Don't
they see how completely contradictory those ideas are? If they claim to
be
materialists, and believe that the brain is just a collection of atoms
arranged in the right way, which "creates" consciousness, then what do
they
think they are saying consciousness is if not the behavior of the atoms of
their brain?

Because it isn;t *just* the behavior of atoms! There are emergences of
information and process all throughout the hierarchy of being .


How, can it make sense to argue that this collection of atoms has the
power
to sense the existence of consciousness, but at the same time try to argue
that no tool of science can sense it and report on it? How can people be
this stupid and then turn around and call this a hard problem?

Your depth of understanding of the hard problem is about 1 billionth of a
millimeter.


It's only hard if you choose to believe in your heart that the universe is
dualistic,

Yup - there it is- the strawman!

but then try to rationally argue for the monastic belief of
materialism. You can't have it both ways and not create a hard problem.
Either you believe a universe full of atoms is all there is here, or you
believe that there exists something besides atoms which physics hasn't
been
able to detect with any of their tools other than this tool called the
brain that all physicists are born with.

You can look at a billiards game as "just" a carenium or if a player, you
can see order and intent in the motions of the balls due to players'
actions. The order and intent come from emergences that are not part of the
attributes/properties/processes of atoms exclusively!


If you look at the facts in front of us, there is no hard problem, there
are only stupid thinkers who choose to allow their heads to be a jumbled
mess of inconsistent beliefs who then turn around and call the mess they
created for themselves a hard problem.

You have created the mess inside your head by wearing blinders that only
allow you to see and believe what you have been conditioned to believe - not
what is actually there!


It's not hard at all. Just clean it up and make it consistent. There are
only two options possible with consciousness. Either I'm right, and the
universe is made up of atoms and there is nothing else here when it comes
to the brain which means when people talk about consciousness, they are
simply talking about the normal operation of a normal human brain.

So, War and Peace is *nothing but* atoms of ink and cellulose!
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!


Or, there's something more complex going on here and the universe is more
complex than we understand.

Of course it is.

<FSM-like mushy mental meanderings snipped>


I don't however, see any need to waste time considering the options that
consciousness is another force of nature, when all the evidence we have
tells us the brain is nothing more more than a large reinforcement trained
adaptive body controller made out of biological parts which all work
according to the forces of nature we already understand.

If *all* it is is a body controller, what about thoughts that do not result
in any body control!?? Your continued use of exclusionary words limits your
ability todiscourse wisely and is a function of your intellectual blinders.



Consciousness (the think people get so confused about), as I have
explained, is nothing more than an outgrowth of the very strong and
compelling illusion of a mind/body split created by the normal operation
of
the brain in its role of classifying sensory signal patterns. This
illusion tricks people into seeing double. The illusion makes them see
the
mind as being separate from the body,

Rather, the mind is an emergent property of brain/CNS/body/environmental
interactions and properties that is*not* identical with the movement of
atoms *qua* atoms; there are no psycological attributes of atoms moving
*qua* atoms moving; but there is of emergent patterns of CNS processes.



and then in order to justify what
they sensing, they make up all this crap about consciousness to explain
the
double image. But them it becomes a hard problem when they realize that
logically, there shouldn't be a double image.

But instead of understanding that this double image is an illusion created
by the normal operation of a physical signal processing device,

Prove that it is an illusion!

all these
people are hung up thinking the split is some odd and special fundamental
aspect of nature which physics (and the rest of science) can't figure out.

Our consciousness looks like it's something separate from the physical
brain because our physical brain made it look that way for us. That's the
answer to the hard problem. It's a simple answer which resolves all the
mysteries of conscious without having to bring in any new undiscovered
properties of the universe to explain it.

We already have glimpses into the processes of Unvierse (emergence itself)
that enable C or are preconditions of emergence. Reid goes into this in
detail in Biological Emergences : Evolution by Natural Experiment.

These are not "new" properties as a class; yet many of the specific
instances of emergence are yet to be discovered.






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