Re: [-empyre-] metaphor

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

The Voices in my Head tell me that on 11/23/03 7:12 PM, Alan Sondheim at
sondheim@panix.com wrote:

> 
> 
> On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Henry Warwick wrote:
> 
>>> There are numerous logics and mathematics, but
>>> they're all fundamnetally
>>> related.
>> 
>> Agreed, but they are all flawed (Goedel) and it has
>> not been determined whether or not our brain is even
>> capable of understanding anything of what it purports
>> to understand about everything, anyway.
>> 
> "Flawed" is an anthropomorphic word of course; you can have mathematics
> without consistency that works in the small. Large numbers, Goedel
> mappings, etc. aren't physical objects that bang into one another! The
> fact that inconsistent or contradictory results can be produced - isn't
> for me (and wasn't for Goedel for that matter) a problem.

Perhaps, but my point still stands.

>> it has
>> not been determined whether or not our brain is even
>> capable of understanding anything of what it purports
>> to understand about everything, anyway.




>> I guess I'm a bit of an agnostic that way. I agree
>> with Dehaene: higher math is a product of our brain's
>> lanugage function based on quantities we find in the
>> universe. One could say that countable quantities are
>> real, but something like tensor equations are not.
>> 
> This of course means that somewhere you have ontology-switching from one
> domain to another - where?

No switch, just a studied disbelief combined with a willingness to accept
disproof.

> Re: Higher dimensions - of course they're back in string theory.

Exactly!
 

> In this way, oddly enough, strong AI (which I strongly disagree with)
> comes to the foreground - if one might argue for the mathesis of the real,
> then one might extend this to neural algorithms.
> 
> Instead I think whatever neural processes exist, they're not algorithmic
> or neural, although, on a much smaller level, they're locally structured
> (Heisenberg etc.).

I think that it is possible and very likely that mind/consciousness/blah is
neural, and in fact it is a creation of the neural.

Secondly to others:

Discussions of "rocks being conscious" is prima facie laughable as there is
no test for it, much less one that's falsifiable. You can wish they were,
but it doesn't mean they are, and you can't prove it, AFAIK. Secondly claims
to the contrary are irrelevant, as it is not extra-ordinary to posit that
something without a central nervous system has no mind. Therefore, to make
such an extra-ordinary claim requires equally extra-ordinary evidence, and I
see none forthcoming.

Therefore, positing consciousness as a universal quantal property (per
Penrose) leads to unwarranted conclusions. This doesn't mean that
consciousness is not a property in the universe (it obviously is) but HOW it
actually happens is up for grabs, and IMHO, the only people who are making
any real sense on the subject are neuroscientists like Ramachandran et al.

 

> 
> What I do wish is that others were participating in this, or that we can
> change the subject - I feel the obscurity of this, even though for me it's
> a bit central -

No prob, consider it dropped.

best to all,

HW