From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Sun Oct 17 2004 - 03:20:42 BST
Hi Scott, Jim, Platt, and anyone else along for the ride,
Scott, I now understand what you mean about Intellect, Consciousness,
Quality, etc, being different aspects of the same (non)-thing, sort
of like Desire and Jealousy could be aspects of Love. And thanks for
the Avery recommendation.
I do have a comment re your rejection of the materialistic theory of
consciousness (see below). Personally, I'm on the fence about this
because I think that, so far, science has not managed to to come up
with a configuration of matter that produces anything close to self-
awareness. However, if AI scientists do, in time, produce computers
(or more likely thousand or millions of computers running in
parallel) that are able to demonstrate truly heuristic decision-
making, not just super-sophisticated logic-tree or algorithmic type
processing, this would probably convince me that consciousness can
emerge from matter, especially if such a machine passed a rigorous
Turing test with colors flying.
My questions to you, and anyone else who wants to answer are: Would
this scientific development convince you that awareness is
fundamentally materialistic? If not, is there any scientific or
rational development that would? If not, would you then agree that
your continued belief in the non-material nature of consciousness is
irrational?
Now, my one comment on Scott's reasoning for rejecting the
materialistic theory of awareness...
On 15 Oct 2004 at 17:06, Scott Roberts wrote:
My reasoning on rejecting a materialist theory of consciousness is,
briefly, that we are aware of big things, but materialism supposes
that awareness comes about by the brain putting together a lot of
little things (like photons or molecules). This is, in my view,
impossible, since each little thing is separated in space and/or time
from each other little thing. Since the brain is also composed of
little things, there could be no awareness of anything bigger than
the little things.
msh comments:
I think a nuerobiologist would say that a human brain and nervous
system is considerably more than a mass of "little things" out of
spatial and temporal contact with one another, or with the outside
world. Jim might want to correct me on this, but my impression is
that science regards the brain as an incredibly complex system of
billions of nuerons and synapses that have evolved over billions of
years to work together to provide, so far, unmatched parallel
processing power.
Best to all,
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
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