Re: Challenge to Curt


"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20080330113628.249$6q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Alpha" <OmegaZero2003@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20080327005702.901$WM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The only evidence I have that such a distinction is valid is
your word. I don't consider your word to be worthy of being used as
scientific evidence. I need more than that.

You don't trust your common sense either?

Of course I don't. No one should trust their common sense. We use it to
guide us, and give us hints about what to do and what to trust. But the
number one thing you learn by doing real science, is _never_ trust your
common sense. It's especially true for this topic. People who trust
their
common sense over the logic, over the math, are the ones that get it
wrong.

Do you know how Einstein figured out relativity? By looking at the math
of
electromagnetism, trusting what it said, and ignoring his common sense.

Historians agree that Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Hawkings *all* relied on
their intuition!

Now *that* is a telling statement, as intuition is a combination of
heuristics,, experince, thoughtfulness and gut feel, all things eliminative
materialists would dismiss or eliminate!

He
didn't do any research. He didn't collect any new data. He used the data
and math that others had already created and just trusted what it meant
instead of trusting what his, and everyone else's common sense told him.
You can't solve hard problems by trusting your common sense. The reason
they are hard in the first place is because our common sense is misleading
us for those problems.

Common sense can indeed mislead us. Illusions that trick oour common sense
into believing one state of affairs when it can be shown that another state
of affairs is the actuality. And so forth. But in general, common sense is
borne of intuitive notions about Unioverse which is turn are borne of
observation and inculcating the behaviuors of Universe's constituents as
patterns that repeat. From such we and induce or deduce, sometimes
unconsciously, facts about the world, or intuitions that some such must be a
fact about the world. I do not think that "experience" falls outside of
that set of things we believe are ontological real and disntinct processes
in Universe. Out intuiton and common sense about experince is that we do
have such.


You don't experience red? Do
you think a thermostat has a "feeling of what it is like" to be warm or
82 degrees warm? You are dismissing the most obvious datum of all; your
own experience! Scientists trust their observations all the time,
including when a few thousand report that they experience red when
looking at a red rose; the relationship we call red exists in their minds
(or is interpreted by their brain/minds) as red. That is thousands of
data points. And while their experience of red may be (probably is)
correlated with or caused by APs, When A cuase B, A does not have to be
identical with B.

That's right. We get it. A can cause B without B being identical to A.
I
can cause a Usenet post to be be create but yet I'm not identical with the
Usenet post. Do you honestly think we are so stupid we don't understand
that?

But where's the evidence to support your claim that B is not identical to
A
when all known laws of physics tells us it is?

The poit is that physics per se tells us next to nothing about complex,
dynamical, non-linear adaptive systems demonstrating self-organization and
order. Nor does it fare well (not at all in fact) in telling us what the
comment "foobar" means to a programmer immersed in thoughts about how to
correct a latent error in a Microsoft OS.



In order to support your
claim, you have to show us data suggesting that some law of physics has
failed to explain why your lips are moving.

Please invoke some law of physics that tells us why I decided to use
"foobar" above rather than "granguldescrunk".


Therefore, with B being a distinct ontological reality
(because it has more information to the entity experienceing B than just
the neurons firing properties), it is not identical with the reduced
aspect, namely A.

All I see when you write all this nonsense is a stupid digital camera
trying to convince me that when it sees red, something more is happening
inside it than a light sensor generating a signal in response to red
light.
No matter what the camera says, I just shake my head in disbelief that the
camera is so full of itself that it thinks it's more than just a machine
which is able to sense and react to red light. The camera may think its
got some type of soul inside of it that makes it more than just a camera,
but I know better.

You know better because you are conscious and have more intelligence than
the stupid camera, which is not conscious at all and is hardly an exemplar
of intelligence.


I don't deny I have an experience of seeing red. I never have. Unlike
you
however, I understand that what I call "the experience of seeing red", is
just my eye generating signals in response to stimulation by red light and
my brain responding to the signals sent to it from the eye and my fingers
moving in response to the signals sent to them by the brain as I type, "Of
course I can see red!".

I can whip up a camera with an audio output capability and some code that
would respond "mechanically" to various pixels being active. There is no a
shred of evidence, theory or even a good guess as to how such a contration
automagically becomes conscious of those mechanicanical machinations. I
would not be so naive as to believe that it is already even a little bit
conscious.

--
Curt Welch
http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx
http://NewsReader.Com/



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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