[ExI] consciousness and perception

[John K Clark]

brent.allsop at comcast.net

> There are some great minds already explicitly in this camp.  Namely Steve
> Lehar, John Smythies, Steve Harison

I can’t comment on these people because I haven’t seen them write stupid
stuff or present obvious things as if they were profound as I have on this
list and on your “canonizer”. Perhaps they are indeed brilliant, however if
they maintain (and I’m not saying that they do) that it is particular atoms
that give us our individuality even though science can find no individuality
in atoms themselves, or if they say that we will soon understand the
mechanics of something that does not work by cause and effect then they are
not great minds.

> Many of these ideas, in various forms, go back to Descartes and before.

Yes and that is exactly the problem, these ideas have not changed one bit in
many hundreds of years despite massive progress by science in understanding
the nature of reality. It’s a dead end.

> This theory predicts that once you reproduce whatever it is that has this
> phenomenal property, in another mind, the other mind will absolutely,
> scientifically, always experience the same phenomenal experience.

So this “theory” predicts that someday (no telling when) it will discover
something (no telling what) that CAUSES the conscious state of intelligent
beings, even though that “something” that CAUSES it is not involved with
CAUSE and effect. Golly gee what a wonderful theory.

> The theory predicts that we will come up with a type of elemental table
> map of all the things in our brains that have phenomenal properties

And does the “theory” also predict how we will ever know if its predictions
are correct, other than by observing what the test subject says writes or
does?

> If none of this is possible, after we fully understand the brain, this
> theory will obviously be falsified.

Bullshit! No progress has been made in advancing this line of thought in the
last thousand years and when no progress has been made in the next thousand
people like you will be saying we need more time and we still don’t
understand the brain quite well enough even though Jupiter Brains will have
become ubiquitous.

 John K Clark