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It seems clear that you either ignore what is posted by your opponents or don't understand them or just dismiss them . . . because you completely misunderstood what Gaylen wrote . . . especially in the bold! Dennett's "eliminative materialism" is the "fringy" philosophical view. He also schooled you on the difference between "eliminative materialism" and functionalism . . . which you clearly did not comprehend.
The only ones who are "doomed to miss out" are those who don't comprehend the intellectual issues in philosophy.
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
Looks like someone realized the article they pointed me to correctly identified that their pet beliefs are way outside the mainstream of science. Ooops. Let's try and distract from that uncomfortable fact by changing the subject to what some totally unrelated person happens to think and hope no one notices.
Yeah, scientists have really been held back over the past few centuries by ignoring philosophy. All of that relying on the evidence and so on has gotten them nowhere. If only they'd listen to a bunch of amateurs debating the logical implications of made up facts instead. Think of all they could have accomplished.
We need to add to that old adage . . . "there are none so blind." We need to add . . . "there are none who will misunderstand more than those who want to misunderstand.
Take your own advice - you are the only one that needs it. The "getting real" will show you that you simply are not answering the challenges put to you. Your contention is that Consciousness in a Robot is not possible. You have not defended that claim in any way except to throw out buzz words you hope will do it for you.
Hint: They don't.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
You can be forgiven for not knowing the most obvious things
Oh good. Then as soon as you - for once - show me something related to the thread topic that I do not know - and you feel are obvious - then I will accept your forgiveness. But since this has not happened thus far - I am unclear why you bring it up.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
but not for incessant harassment without substance.
Disagreement is not harrassment. That is just the persecution card you play when someone fails to simply swallow whole the assertions you make. The lack of substance comes from you - not me. Such as the lack of substance behind your claim that consciousness in a robot is not possible.
To push you back on topic and off rant - I can only repeat the question. What basis have we for assuming consciousness is not possible in robots? You have thrown out the words "alive" and "being" without adding any substance to your use of these words. So perhaps you can unravel what you think you mean by their use in the context of the topic of the thread.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
If you don't know the difference between a machine that merely exists and a living creature that experiences "Being" there is little that can be said to correct such abject ignorance.
It is not my failure to know the difference - so much as your failure to discuss the implications of the difference. You simply fall back on calling people names whenever you can not do it.
As I keep asking - if we build a non-biological machine that performs all the same processes as the biological machine in our skull - then why would it's experience of being be any less valid than our own?
The question is simple - but clearly the answer is not given the rant it has tormented you into. Calling people ignorant - especially people who are not - does not answer the question. It dodges it.
We need to add to that old adage . . . "there are none so blind." We need to add . . . "there are none who will misunderstand more than those who want to misunderstand.
Feel free to explain how citing the beliefs of some random philosopher changes the fact that the authority you pointed us to says that your particular faith is a fringe belief among people knowledgeable in the field. Yeah, that's a major goof on your part, but trying to take out your frustration on others just shows a lack of character.
Yep, like I said he, as a professional in the field, admits that his interpretation is part of a small minority among other professionals in the field, and also not shared by all the philosophers writing about it.
Since truth is not determined by popularity or authority, I'm not much interested in arguing over who is or is not in agreement with the most professionals. But, I've read a lot of books and articles by cognitive science professionals and, for what it's worth, what I've found is this: The vast majority of cognitive scientists who are not philosophers could be fairly described as property dualists, whether they realize it or not.
They loosely think of themselves as materialists, but they don't explicitly address the distinction between reductive physicalism and non-reductive physicalism because they see it as a philosophical problem - not a scientific one. Nevertheless, most of their writing and research implies a rejection of substance dualism and a tacit acceptance of some version of property dualism (I will list some version of property dualism below). They either don't realize that they are property dualists because they have not read enough of the philosophical literature to understand what it is, or they understand the distinction but simply don't care about it because they see it as a philosophical issue, not a scientific one. I am not aware of any non-philosopher cognitive scientist who wades into the mind/body debate and explicitly adopts a label like behaviorist or eliminative materialist. I've never seen this happen, but I have not read everything in cog-sci literature, so I could have missed some examples of this.
Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary field (neuroscience, computer science, etc.) that includes philosophers of mind and, of course, philosophers of mind are well-read on the mind/body literature. Most of them feel obliged to explicate their metaphysical views, and when they do, a majority of them avoid labeling themselves as behaviorists or eliminativists. ("Behaviorism" is widely considered to be a "dead end" and "cognitive science" is what has replaced it.) Unlike behaviorism, cognitive science generally takes subjective/qualitative mental phenomena seriously - i.e., in need of explanation. Most cognitive scientists are focused on finding the "neural correlates" of conscious experience. The concept of a "correlation" implies that two or more types of things (let's say "P-type" and "Q-type")need to be correlated. The "P-types" are physical processes (neural), but what are the "Q-types? (qualitative/subjective). Scientists (virtually all of them) stop here. They know, intuitively, what they are correlating the P-types to, but they don't bother getting into the philosophical nitty-gritty of trying to explain just exactly what the Q-types are. Scientists accept methodological behaviorism because behavior is all that we can measure scientifically. You zap a brain then record the resulting behavior - which, in the case of humans, generally includes a verbal report like "I felt X" where "X" is some qualitative experience. But methodological behaviorism is not the same as philosophical behaviorism, and it certainly does not imply eliminativism, or any other form of reductivism.
Most scientists don't wade very deep into the philosophical mind/body literature (or, if they do, they refrain from saying much about it in their published writings), but in the relatively rare cases where they do address the issues (e.g., Antonio Damasio, John Eccles, Karl Pribram, Vilayanur Ramachandran, etc.), it is clear that they are not behaviorists or eliminative materialists. You might still try to say that some of them are reductive materialists, but not eliminativists, but this gets into some deep philosophical territory - but my point is that this is philosophical territory - generally not explicitly addressed in scientific research papers. Some scientists assume that reductive materialism is true, but none of them (so far as I know) attempt to offer any extensive philosophical defense of reductive materialism. Instead, what you will find is that, despite the loose assumption of reductive materialism, their actual writing imply one of the following forms of property dualism:
Emergentism: the idea that increasingly complex physical processes give rise to the "emergence" of new properties that are something over and above (i.e. cannot be reduced to) their more basic constituents.
Non-reductive physicalism: the idea that mental properties are mapped to neurobiological properties, but are not reducible to them.
Epiphenomenalism: mental properties are real constituents of the world, but they are causally impotent. Physical causes give rise to mental properties, but mental phenomena, as such, cause nothing further - they are causal dead ends.
Anomalous monism: Unlike epiphenomenalism, which renders mental properties causally redundant, anomalous monists believe that mental properties make a causal difference to the world.
Panexperientialism: the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.
And, finally, here is a quote from Wikipedia that is worth considering:
Notice that not many people are listed, and those that are listed are philosophers - not scientists. Obviously this is not a comprehensive list - these folks all have followers - but my point is that if you are looking for "big names" in support of eliminativism, you won't find many.
What matters, of course, is not "who" or "how many" but since you've made a point of claiming that my position is held by "a small minority" I felt a desire to set the record straight.
What matters, of course, is not "who" or "how many" but since you've made a point of claiming that my position is held by "a small minority" I felt a desire to set the record straight.
The only thing I mentioned was that a believer in panpsychism admitted that his view was a fringe belief among people who know what they're talking about. If that hits too close to home, you'd have to take it up with him. In the mean time, nothing you've posted above says anything about the number of people faithful to that particular belief, so I'm not sure what you think you're setting straight.
The ability to communicate comes from us sharing an external third person reality as a reference point. Without that objective reference point, there's nothing to communicate.
I agree.
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If a feeling which can't be communicated counts as knowledge to you, then I know that dualism is incorrect because of my subjective feeling and experience. Now what?
Science is concerned with constructing theories to explain empirical (third-person accessible) data. Philosophy is concerned with identifying good/bad arguments and theories based on the logical relations implied by the concepts that are being expressed. Let's consider our two positions:
Gaylen: "Subjective qualitative feelings cannot be fully communicated via purely objective terms." (Specifically, what's missing in quantitative model of subjective experience is the qualitative nature of the feeling itself as it is experienced in its first-person/indexical terms.)
KC: "I know that dualism is incorrect because of my subjective feeling and experience."
The frustrating weakness in my position is that I seem unable to use third-person terminology to prove to you that I "know" anything subjectively that is not reducible to objectively measurable neural activity. I can try to evoke certain feelings within you, but I can't do the subjective feeling for you - it is something that you must do for yourself because that's just what it means for something to be subjective. If I am unable to provoke you to feel something for yourself, them I'm stuck. Thanks to the nature of subjectivity, I cannot do your thinking for you, so I can't prove anything to you unless I can somehow provoke you into experiencing the proof for yourself.
The weakness in your position is that you are contradicting yourself. You reference your own subjective feelings in your attack on my claim to subjective knowledge. What are these subjective feelings that you are referring to? How can you know anything based on these subjective feelings if your subjective feelings don't count as knowledge? If, in fact, you truly have subjective feelings that somehow prove dualism to be wrong, then your subjective feelings are the basis of information, despite your claim that subjective feelings are not the basis of any information.
But, of course, your statement about having subjective feelings that could disprove dualism is meant to be facetious. I think your point is that, since subjective feelings are not a form of knowledge, you cannot have subjective feelings that, in themselves, prove anything - for or against dualism. But the problem remains: What are you referring to when you claim that subjective feelings are not sources of knowledge? If you want to claim that subjective feelings are not knowledge, you need to define 'subjective feelings' and 'knowledge' in such a way that you can show that they are not knowledge.
I think that reductive materialism makes things unnecessarily complicated and counterintuitive. My suggestion is to simply admit that a full understanding of pain requires that a person subjectively experience the qualitative nature of pain. This does not contradict the idea that pain IS a physical process, it just implies that some physical processes (e.g., certain sorts of neural activity) are fundamentally qualitative in nature, whereas others (e.g., nuclear fusion), presumably, are not.
I propose that, mathematically, a model of human experience will need to incorporate dimensions (mathematically, "dimensions" are expressible as coordinates used to locate and/or identify an entity) that are defined in terms of qualitative statements made by conscious people (e.g., "I feel X" when certain neurons are stimulated). Logically, there is just no way to eradicate the qualitative dimensions from any useful model of conscious experience - which is to say, there is no way to reduce the qualitative dimensions to purely quantitative dimensions. The mathematical coordinates can "map to" qualitative feelings, but they cannot convey the qualitative nature of feelings as "information" to anyone who does not know the qualitative nature of the feelings base on their own subjective experiences. Math can presumably simulate feelings, but it cannot directly convey a qualitative understanding of them.
I agree.
Science is concerned with constructing theories to explain empirical (third-person accessible) data.
Including reports of subjective experiences. I've pointed out lots of scientific fields which use these reports to great benefit before, so I'm not sure what it is you're not happy with. Sure, you can't trust that people's reports of their mental states is an accurate depiction of brain chemistry or function, but those reports need to be accounted for in models of brain function.
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Philosophy is concerned with identifying good/bad arguments and theories based on the logical relations implied by the concepts that are being expressed. Let's consider our two positions:
Gaylen: "Subjective qualitative feelings cannot be fully communicated via purely objective terms." (Specifically, what's missing in quantitative model of subjective experience is the qualitative nature of the feeling itself as it is experienced in its first-person/indexical terms.)
KC: "I know that dualism is incorrect because of my subjective feeling and experience."
The frustrating weakness in my position is that I seem unable to use third-person terminology to prove to you that I "know" anything subjectively that is not reducible to objectively measurable neural activity.
There's a bigger issue here - they're knowledge but they can't be communicated or justified or tested. That's the bigger problem than the one you're making up, since I've never asked you to be hooked up to an EEG to prove anything.
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I can try to evoke certain feelings within you, but I can't do the subjective feeling for you - it is something that you must do for yourself
Feelings aren't under my conscious control.
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The weakness in your position is that you are contradicting yourself. You reference your own subjective feelings in your attack on my claim to subjective knowledge.
I assumed your hypothetical definition of knowledge to give an example of how it fails in practice.
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What are these subjective feelings that you are referring to?
The ones which let me "know" that you are wrong, obviously. If you felt them, you'd "know" what I mean. You can't expect me to explain them using third person terminology - they need to be experienced in their first-person/indexical form to be understood correctly. Keeping with the hypothetical, of course.
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How can you know anything based on these subjective feelings if your subjective feelings don't count as knowledge?
Yes, exactly. You can see how useless these sorts of claims are when we're actually trying to communicate.
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If, in fact, you truly have subjective feelings that somehow prove dualism to be wrong, then your subjective feelings are the basis of information, despite your claim that subjective feelings are not the basis of any information.
Remember I'm using your assumptions to show how they fail in practice.
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What are you referring to when you claim that subjective feelings are not sources of knowledge? If you want to claim that subjective feelings are not knowledge, you need to define 'subjective feelings' and 'knowledge' in such a way that you can show that they are not knowledge.
Not my burden of proof, unless you want to take on the burden of disproving any random source of knowledge I make up. Start with defining underwear gnomes and then showing how the knowledge I get from them really isn't knowledge.
This isn't just snark. You seem to be running with some vague intuition of what subjective is and then want me to prove what it isn't. It isn't my job to do that work for you.
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I think that reductive materialism makes things unnecessarily complicated and counterintuitive. My suggestion is to simply admit that a full understanding of pain requires that a person subjectively experience the qualitative nature of pain.
No need to make this jump. It is an open question.
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I propose that, mathematically, a model of human experience will need to incorporate dimensions (mathematically, "dimensions" are expressible as coordinates used to locate and/or identify an entity) that are defined in terms of qualitative statements made by conscious people (e.g., "I feel X" when certain neurons are stimulated).
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. It isn't as if materialists ignore the fact that people talk about their mental states, so again I'm not sure what exactly you think is missing from even the most reductive materialist ideas.
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Logically, there is just no way to eradicate the qualitative dimensions from any useful model of conscious experience - which is to say, there is no way to reduce the qualitative dimensions to purely quantitative dimensions.
For a claim of "absolutely can not", I require a bit more proof than putting the word "Logically" at the start of the claim.
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The mathematical coordinates can "map to" qualitative feelings, but they cannot convey the qualitative nature of feelings as "information" to anyone who does not know the qualitative nature of the feelings base on their own subjective experiences. Math can presumably simulate feelings, but it cannot directly convey a qualitative understanding of them.
There's all sorts of fuzziness in there. Understanding is a complicated process that brains perform. There's no "directly convey"ing going on that I know of in any form of learning. What is it you're actually saying can't or won't happen?
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The mathematical coordinates can "map to" qualitative feelings, but they cannot convey the qualitative nature of feelings as "information" to anyone who does not know the qualitative nature of the feelings base on their own subjective experiences. Math can presumably simulate feelings, but it cannot directly convey a qualitative understanding of them.
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
There's all sorts of fuzziness in there. Understanding is a complicated process that brains perform. There's no "directly convey"ing going on that I know of in any form of learning. What is it you're actually saying can't or won't happen?
I'm saying that some physical systems subjectively experience qualitative states, e.g., pain when you drop a heavy rock on your foot - in contrast to, say, a computer when you drop a rock on its keyboard. The rock falling on the keyboard might cause #%FFT$@! to appear on the screen, but this is not cursing - it is not "pain behavior" because there is no pain. In principle (I think) a machine could someday be designed to process environmental inputs and pass a Turing test. A robot could, presumably, cuss at you if you drop a heavy object on its foot. I think it makes a difference whether the response: "Ouch! You F-king idiot!" is a reaction to qualitative sensations of pain, or is, instead, just "life-like" behavior generated by the machine because it was designed to mimic human-like responses in order to pass the Turing test. I think it is an intelligible - and important - question to ask: What types of physical systems can actually feel pain? As distinguished from types of systems that hop up and down cursing when you drop a rock on its foot, but (possibly) do not feel pain.
What I'm saying can't happen is this: We can never be 100% certain that a machine (or, for that matter, another person) feels pain in a given situation. Some level of doubt is introduced by the subjective nature of qualitative experience. (A rough definition of 'subjectivity' might be: "An indexical perspective-based aspect of physical systems that introduces a source of potential error when attempting to determine whether or not the system has qualitative experiences.") What is impossible, due to the subjective nature of qualitative experience, is for an external observer to distinguish, with 100% certainty, between pain-behavior caused by qualitative feelings of pain, and behavior mimicking the types of behavior that are typically caused - in humans - by qualitative sensations of pain.
More generally: We can't know anything about external objects of perception with 100% certainty because knowledge of external objects is always acquired via subjective (indexical, perspective-based) processes that occur within the observing/knowledge-seeking system. The only thing that an observer can know with 100% certainty is the indexical "this feeling here and now" and this certainty is actually limited to just the fact of "some" experience - not the categorization or labeling of the experience. Assigning a label to the experience introduces a small but unavoidable source of potential categorization/labeling error. (And, of course, this potential for error is introduced precisely because labeling necessarily requires input from the external world - i.e., knowledge of common language, cultural concepts, etc. and knowledge of the external world is always less than 100% certain.) As you've pointed out, this realm of absolute certainty is so outrageously miniscule that it is, for all practical purposes, completely useless and incommunicable and might not even count as "knowledge" at all (I say yes, you say no, let's call the whole thing off...).
But I would say (and virtually all philosophers agree), that "knowledge" is not limited to 100% certainty. Things get excruciatingly vague and confusing here (which is why there is an entire branch of philosophy called "epistemology"), but most people agree that I can know that you feel pain when you drop a rock on your foot, even though I cannot be 100% certain of it. Exactly how I know this, and exactly what degree of confidence or justification is required to count as "knowledge" is controversial, but roughly I know you feel pain because I am justified in believing that you are like me, and I know that I feel pain when I drop a rock on my foot. The trouble with robots that pass the Turing test is that they might not be "like me" in hardly any respect beyond the overt behaviors (such as hoping around and cussing when rocks fall on their toes).
So the question becomes: Do we simply accept this overt behavior as good enough to count as knowing that robots feel pain? or do we need to dig deeper? I think we need to dig deeper. We need a theory that gets at the functional relations and/or material factors that constitute pain. For all we really know, maybe only carbon-based organisms can experience qualia. Without a good theory of consciousness, we just don't know if the stuff of which a creature is made makes a difference (e.g., John Searle) or if functional relations alone are good enough (e.g., Dan Dennett).
Depending on your definition of 'knowledge' we probably can, in principle, someday figure out how to build conscious robots and know that we have, in fact, built a sentient (qualia-experiencing) creature, but, due to the subjective nature of qualitative experience, no conscious creature can know all about the qualitative nature of experience unless it - the knowing system - is, itself, a qualia-experiencing system. If we succeed in building an intelligent machine that does not experience pain, this machine will not understand everything about pain, even if, perchance, we can show it the best possible mathematical model of pain. The non-pain-feeling machine could use this model of pain to predict pain-behaviors just as well as we can predict the pain-behaviors of other people, but so long as the non-pain-feeling machine does not feel pain, there is something that it doesn't comprehend about the nature of pain, despite it's knowledge of a good mathematical model of pain. Namely: what it's like to feel pain.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 11-13-2014 at 09:24 AM..
The mathematical coordinates can "map to" qualitative feelings, but they cannot convey the qualitative nature of feelings as "information" to anyone who does not know the qualitative nature of the feelings base on their own subjective experiences. Math can presumably simulate feelings, but it cannot directly convey a qualitative understanding of them.
Neither can anything else, since there's nothing external to use as a common point of reference for communication. Let us know how you plan to fix that.
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I'm saying that some physical systems subjectively experience qualitative states, e.g., pain when you drop a heavy rock on your foot - in contrast to, say, a computer when you drop a rock on its keyboard. The rock falling on the keyboard might cause #%FFT$@! to appear on the screen, but this is not cursing - it is not "pain behavior" because there is no pain. In principle (I think) a machine could someday be designed to process environmental inputs and pass a Turing test. A robot could, presumably, cuss at you if you drop a heavy object on its foot. I think it makes a difference whether the response: "Ouch! You F-king idiot!" is a reaction to qualitative sensations of pain, or is, instead, just "life-like" behavior generated by the machine because it was designed to mimic human-like responses in order to pass the Turing test.
Which group do you fall in, and what novel non-monist method are you proposing for me to use to find out?
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I think it is an intelligible - and important - question to ask: What types of physical systems can actually feel pain? As distinguished from types of systems that hop up and down cursing when you drop a rock on its foot, but (possibly) do not feel pain.
What I'm saying can't happen is this: We can never be 100% certain that a machine (or, for that matter, another person) feels pain in a given situation. Some level of doubt is introduced by the subjective nature of qualitative experience. (A rough definition of 'subjectivity' might be: "An indexical perspective-based aspect of physical systems that introduces a source of potential error when attempting to determine whether or not the system has qualitative experiences.") What is impossible, due to the subjective nature of qualitative experience, is for an external observer to distinguish, with 100% certainty, between pain-behavior caused by qualitative feelings of pain, and behavior mimicking the types of behavior that are typically caused - in humans - by qualitative sensations of pain.
More generally: We can't know anything about external objects of perception with 100% certainty because knowledge of external objects is always acquired via subjective (indexical, perspective-based) processes that occur within the observing/knowledge-seeking system. The only thing that an observer can know with 100% certainty is the indexical "this feeling here and now" and this certainty is actually limited to just the fact of "some" experience - not the categorization or labeling of the experience. Assigning a label to the experience introduces a small but unavoidable source of potential categorization/labeling error. (And, of course, this potential for error is introduced precisely because labeling necessarily requires input from the external world - i.e., knowledge of common language, cultural concepts, etc. and knowledge of the external world is always less than 100% certain.) As you've pointed out, this realm of absolute certainty is so outrageously miniscule that it is, for all practical purposes, completely useless and incommunicable and might not even count as "knowledge" at all (I say yes, you say no, let's call the whole thing off...).
But I would say (and virtually all philosophers agree), that "knowledge" is not limited to 100% certainty. Things get excruciatingly vague and confusing here (which is why there is an entire branch of philosophy called "epistemology"), but most people agree that I can know that you feel pain when you drop a rock on your foot, even though I cannot be 100% certain of it. Exactly how I know this, and exactly what degree of confidence or justification is required to count as "knowledge" is controversial, but roughly I know you feel pain because I am justified in believing that you are like me, and I know that I feel pain when I drop a rock on my foot. The trouble with robots that pass the Turing test is that they might not be "like me" in hardly any respect beyond the overt behaviors (such as hoping around and cussing when rocks fall on their toes).
So the question becomes: Do we simply accept this overt behavior as good enough to count as knowing that robots feel pain? or do we need to dig deeper? I think we need to dig deeper. We need a theory that gets at the functional relations and/or material factors that constitute pain. For all we really know, maybe only carbon-based organisms can experience qualia. Without a good theory of consciousness, we just don't know if the stuff of which a creature is made makes a difference (e.g., John Searle) or if functional relations alone are good enough (e.g., Dan Dennett).
Depending on your definition of 'knowledge' we probably can, in principle, someday figure out how to build conscious robots and know that we have, in fact, built a sentient (qualia-experiencing) creature, but, due to the subjective nature of qualitative experience, no conscious creature can know all about the qualitative nature of experience unless it - the knowing system - is, itself, a qualia-experiencing system. If we succeed in building an intelligent machine that does not experience pain, this machine will not understand everything about pain, even if, perchance, we can show it the best possible mathematical model of pain. The non-pain-feeling machine could use this model of pain to predict pain-behaviors just as well as we can predict the pain-behaviors of other people, but so long as the non-pain-feeling machine does not feel pain, there is something that it doesn't comprehend about the nature of pain, despite it's knowledge of a good mathematical model of pain. Namely: what it's like to feel pain.
I thought we've been over this - since you were saying subjective experience is defined by being unique, it isn't like anything, kind of by of unique.
I still have no idea what it is you think is lacking in current scientific approaches to understanding the brain. Sure, they'll be mathematical models and descriptions since that's the best way we've found to explain the workings of physical systems. For some reason, though, you're convinced that there has to be something else hiding under the surface. How do you know that the processes working as described by these mathematical models aren't actually the subjective experience you think they can't describe?
Seems like you're attaching whatever you can to subjective so that no matter what scientists explain about the process, you can always point and say that you were talking about something else. That would at least explain why the conversation jumps from knowledge to qualia to testing consciousness in others to math or science being incapable of directly causing feelings to questions about omnipotence or not when we hit upon questions you can't answer - for example, a consistent reason why you reject my 1st person feeling that this approach is misguided.
ETA - this whole line of discussion seems to be assuming that a complete explanation of having a feeling will also induce that feeling. But there's no reason to expect that. For example, we don't find it a problem that the math behind a successful model of flight doesn't induce flight in the reader. Same thing here.
Exclamations or a sudden cry or remark of a dramatic event would in of themselves be an appeal , hard to argue I think. Including the screech of a critter, an appeal to the world which had it to be.
So these subjective feelings or realities are indiscriminate communications of information to the setting or world which the entity 'requires' to exist. Iow an animal alone in the middle of the night or an astronaut on Mars who has lost communication will still make an exclamation of joy when the fix for the radio is uncovered and no one is anywhere in sight. So to be honest we need to itemize the nature of these subjective happenings and define what they are in order to talk about the mechanics and compelling cause, unless it can be proven exclamations have nothing to do with existing, biological entities are entirely detached from the setting which gave in to the species or individual ant or person to become, and have no purpose relative to what caused them to be, and the exclamations are empty programmed voids of detail as if programmed into a machine.
So its impossible to make a robot unless the ingredients of the machine are consistent with the flow of nature- within the material itself. Why, because none of the material would be in harmony with each other and snatched from their setting in order to do things which will work as a function but cannot harmonize collectively for a unity alongside the world, a fake . ( no common ground with the universe=no communication=no exclamation. ..equation for today. ( exclamations are intercepted by others in the species and so on, representing the world in harmony understood, and compassion out of the rep is possible, therefore it wouldn't be irrational to understand compassion as part of creation otherwise it would not be reflected in the interception of exclamation( the subjective information) Rationally consciousness unveils a compassionate potential in the nature of the universe itself.
The comment , I forget the source, if something is copied exactly, the brain for instance, there will be an exact replica and the attributes consciousness will make a showing. I agree but the problem is they will need to copy exactly, with exact vessels and tissue and peculiar dna contribution from two different genders. Trying to make a point with that idea seems as school children asking if I draw a big enough picture of a bike and cut it out on a carboard filled 3d copy machine maybe I can ride it home. Easy response from the teacher, very good idea , go ahead and try .
The other thing I was thinking was if a tooth becomes sore and throbbing, the feeling and information becomes known in the brain and chemical repair mode begins best it can. How does science know for a fact the nueron area for throbbing tooth is not stimulated causing the whole operation of repair to begin with? If this is the case, the neuron is only a mediator and has nothing to do directly with the attribute of aware. The neuron could only be something found which is closer to headquaters . The study has to do with somatic subjective notions which have to do with need and survival, instances, I smell coffee for example, have they done any on people who have never had coffee....if not it would seem the nuero science experts are allowing the study to invite mystery with regards to this subject and further controversial interest to bring unwarranted att to the tinkering with these areas of the brain. on't know enough about it to exactly say , but it seems sencible the nueron areas are only bringing home the information and getting the ball rolling. So if the neuron acts in the same way under actual events...then we 'know' it is a very very powerful suggestion procured, and would be in fact no different then studying the oral areas relative to this topic, and nothing to do with defining what is the topic.
Last edited by Sophronius; 11-13-2014 at 12:23 PM..
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