[ExI] digital simulations, descriptions and copies.

John Clark jonkc at bellsouth.net
Thu Jan 21 18:35:42 UTC 2010


By 8:30 am on Jan 21, 2010 Gordon Swobe had written 4 posts, I shall write one.

> Some people seem to deny the existence of consciousness

Nobody on this side of a looney bin does.

> The brain does much more than merely process information.

It also does something that the Scientific Method cannot detect, the name of that "something" has slipped my mind but I think it starts with the letter "S".

> Your pocket calculator processes information but I think you'll agree it does not have conscious experience. 

Why would I agree with that, in fact why would you agree that a rock does not have conscious experience? True, rocks don't act like they are aware, but according to you behavior tells us nothing about inner awareness.

> I reject that idea as written because consciousness does not seem to me merely a "side-effect" of information processing.

Yes I know you reject that because it just doesn't seem right to you, you can't explain why it doesn't, it just doesn't. You're not alone, lots of people reject things even though there is a mountain of data in support of it and accept things when there is no data at all to support it. I however prefer Science.

> I think mental phenomena (conscious thoughts, beliefs, desires, and so on) exist as high level processes of the physical brain. 

But you can give no explanation of how Evolution produced these things. Well OK that's not entirely true, you did give a stab at explaining it, something like that on Monday Wednesday and Friday consciousness effects behavior enough for Evolution to produce it, but on Tuesday Thursday and Saturday consciousness effects behavior too little for the Turing Test to work, and on Sunday you're just a bit confused. 

> If philosophical zombies can exist [...]

Then Darwin's Theory of Evolution is wrong.

> this is where the computationalist theory of mind falls on its face: it can try to explain information processing, but it cannot explain our conscious awareness of information processing, i.e., it cannot explain semantics.

But you can't even explain what the terms mean. Earlier you said that even humans can't get semantics from syntax. Do you care to explain that little gem? Probably not, in the past when anybody pointed out a contradiction in your ideas you just ignore the difficulty. Doublethink in action.

> Perhaps you hold consciously or unconsciously to the doctrine of mind/matter duality, such that you think mental phenomena must in some way exist separate from the matter of the brain.

They are separate only in the way that verbs and adjectives are separate from nouns. Not very mystical.
> 
> In my view every conscious thought or emotion has a physical correlate in the brain.

In the brain? Why not in the neuron? You have said that signals between neurons are not involved in consciousness, so they can't cooperate to generate it, so one neuron will have to do even though you can't explain why there aren't 100 billion conscious beings inside your head.

 John K Clark







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