Greetings Gerhard, Platt, John, Squonk and Disputers.
I am familiar with most of the writers and scientists referred to in
this thread, maybe I missed Francis Crick and Danah Zohar, but
that doesn't matter, there are plenty enough of those who look for
(the site of) consciousness.
"Consciousness" Phew!. I was in the process of writing something
on this topic just as Platt's piece arrived, but by throwing in
something from my aborted piece I will hopefully address the
various contributors. What triggered my input was an article in the
July issue of Scientific American ("A Mind for Consciousness")
about one Christof Koch who had investigated into the matter. The
article started by giving the reason for his interest.
> "Koch started thinking about consciousness seriously in the summer of
> 1989 - thanks to a throbbing toothache. He wondered, why do a bunch of
> neurons flashing around result i pain? And why don't electrons moving
> in a transistor cause the computer to to have subjective states?"
See, the usual "awakening to consciousness" approach to artificial
intelligence.But later in the article Koch utters these strange
words.
> "To test such notions, Koch is focusing on the cagey mind of the rodent.
> his team aspires, among other things, to create zombie rodents
> .....thereby dissociating the animals' behavior and awareness. In this
> way neurons critical for awareness may become apparent."
This is significant, once the consciousness question is scrutinized
the traditional border between humans and non-humans
disappears; it becomes a property of the brain: Enough of the grey
mass and the organism should "have consciousness". OK, I won't
go further into Koch's approach, he despairs and ends by the same
note as the one that John Beasly reports.
> "Meanwhile a chorus of philosophers led by David Chalmers of the
> University of Arizona believes that a scientific theory of
> consciousness will emerge but that it won't be just a
> neurophysiological theory. ....'It's very much an open question what
> form a theory of consciousness will take'. Chalmers remarks. Before a
> theory can take hold, he and Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford
> propose that new physical laws or principles will need to be
> discovered. That's because consciousness, they say, is an irreducible
> phenomen, much like space, time and gravity.
No, it's useless, maybe Hammeroff 's "microtubulae" are involved
when the brain works, maybe Zohar's "Einstein-Bose condensate"
comes into play when we awaken in the morning, but it will forever
be matter different from mind. This effort is based upon the fallacy
that searching deep enough we will reach the point where mind and
matter - the subjective and the objective - fuzes, but that's
impossible ............inside the subject-object premises.
Platt started by saying:
>Not that we can presume to do any better. But we certainly can do
>just as well by using the MOQ as the starting point, beginning with
>the basic premise that the world is not split between mind and
>matter (consciousness/substance), but between Dynamic Quality and stable
>patterns of value.
Well, if we really accept the MoQ premise, it means that the
"mind/matter" split is invalid and that there is no such thing as
awareness in contrast to un-awareness (can't well say
conscious/unconscious here). All organisms above a certain level
sleep so even a fish must wake up to a state different from
unconsciousness. But no, it isn't this fishy kind we mean, it's
something special akin to the biblical "knowledge"; Access to
reality AS IT IS!
I recommend Gerhard's rendering of Tor Nörretrander's "The User
Illusion" which is a blow to any simple subject/object parallelism.
But Nörretranders seems to be the kind who believe that intricacies
are given - not created by a wrong model. In its time I exchanged a
few letters with him and he told me that he was reading Pirsig, but
that did obviously not tell him anything. And what should he write
about if things were straightened out? It's like the Medieval
scholastics with their disputes; the Enlightenment pulled the rug
from under their feet and they hated it. This is what the MoQ does
to SOM, but who wants that?
To do justice to your impressive piece Gerhard I will have to return
to it in a separate post. Till then.
Bo
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