The problem is that if there is no computation that can run on a register machine that will feel nauseous, just as I feel nauseous, then the feeling of nausea, itself, is not a computation.
That's a very big if. Let's take a computation... such as a perfect (down to the subatomic particles) simulation of your brain experiencing the sensation of nausea.
Now you have a computation that will feel nauseous just as you feel nauseous.
You are taken huge swaths of philosophical debate as given. You are making the assumption that the feeling one gets when being late will cease to exist when there are no more conscious beings. Just because you are not experiencing a feeling at a specific time, does that mean that that feeling ceases to exist?
Yes. That you know pain doesn't mean you know how it works.
You are saying that if a doctor asks "do you have any pain" you would have no idea what he was talking about unless you completely understood the brain and central nervous system.
Because the sensation is the result of the whole reaction. If you alter one, you alter the other necessarily.
Is there some law of chemistry, or law of physics which says that a particular process will not complete unless there is an associated sensation. What is that law?
No, you're confused. The default position is that there is nothing else. Always. If you want to posit another layer of reality it's up to you to demonstrate it. I'm telling you that it's not required. My hypothesis is that sensation is what the reaction feels like. There is no need to propose qualia or anything like it because it works fine without it.
Now it appears that you are saying that this world is just what a material world would be like because this is a material world and this is what it is like.
And it still appears like you don't understand the argument.
If you claim to know what a material world ought to be like then you can't base that on observation, without assuming your conclusion that this is, in fact, a material world.
A material (physical) world would look like a world in which all things interact via well-defined physics. Like this one. A world of mind would not. Our does, ergo it is physical.
But I do know how the parts of the register machine are arranged and how they work, that is what I have just been saying.
Now one event occurs on this system and then it is done. It does not hang around in some Platonic realm in order to participate in some phenomenon that is about to happen.
It just doesn't exist any more.
Then the next step occurs. And then it does not exist any more.
Understanding the logic of the program will not tell me by what mysterious agency all of these events are going to participate, somehow, in a sensation of nausea. The logic will only tell me what those numbers on the storage mean.
I have no reason to believe that any more is happening on this system than a set of separate events, one after the other and numbers on storage that mean something to someone who understands the program.
There is no reason at all to believe that this system will generate, somehow, a sensation of nausea?
I suspect that part of the problem here is that you're pondering an inappropriate level of abstraction. If you want to know how a flock of birds or a shoal of fish produces the coordinated moving patterns that they do, you won't find it by examining lots of individual birds or fish. If you want to understand turbulent flow, you won't do it by looking at individual water molecules. Those phenomena are higher level abstractions, emergent from the interactions of their elements.
The clearest example of I know of is Conway's Game of Life (GOL). This is a grid of binary cells that can be either black ('alive') or white ('dead'). They change state depending on their immediate neighbors' state. The system operates by repeatedly iterating over the grid, setting the state of each cell.
At the level equivalent to that which you are considering, nothing very interesting happens - with each step a cell may switch from black to white or from white to black, or may remain unchanged. As you said, "Now one event occurs on this system and then it is done. It does not hang around in some Platonic realm in order to participate in some phenomenon that is about to happen.
It just doesn't exist any more.
Then the next step occurs. And then it does not exist any more.". However, if you examine the system behaviour at a higher-level of abstraction, you'll see that the emergent behaviour of the system consists of consistent and predictable patterns of activity that occupy the grid. These patterns of activity can, unlike the static cells that compost them, move across the grid, and interact. These moving patterns can carry information and their interactions can behave like switches - they can compute. Arranged in an appropriate pattern, a GOL grid of cells can behave like a Universal Turing Machine - it can compute anything computable. Or it can generate a pattern that reproduces itself, or it can emulate Game Of Life itself.
The analogy with the brain is that just as you won't understand a GOL Glider Gun by examining individual grid cells switching from black to white or vice-versa, you won't ever understand sensation by examining individual chemical reactions, nor individual neurons firing. You need - at least - to look at higher levels of abstraction, such as the patterns of activation of neurons en-masse as they interact across the brain. This is where the interesting stuff is happening.
I'm not guaranteeing that you'll find an explanation at this level, but I'm guaranteeing you won't find it at a lower level.
getting to 'What is matter', and parts and abstractions . . . is it important that matter has a 'primal state', that there is a state of matter which can not be further reduced? Or, is materialism safe even if matter can be infinitely reduced?
If matter can be infinitely reduced, then 'What is matter' is up for grabs and it would be difficult to base a metaphysics on matter . . as with What is consciousness?
getting to 'What is matter', and parts and abstractions . . . is it important that matter has a 'primal state', that there is a state of matter which can not be further reduced? Or, is materialism safe even if matter can be infinitely reduced?
If matter can be infinitely reduced, then 'What is matter' is up for grabs and it would be difficult to base a metaphysics on matter . . as with What is consciousness?
Yes, in spite of all the gassing about a 'real reality' or a 'transcendent universe of being' all of us including prophets and philosophers go about their daily life taking what we perceive thru the senses as real and concrete.
getting to 'What is matter', and parts and abstractions . . . is it important that matter has a 'primal state', that there is a state of matter which can not be further reduced? Or, is materialism safe even if matter can be infinitely reduced?
If matter can be infinitely reduced, then 'What is matter' is up for grabs and it would be difficult to base a metaphysics on matter . . as with What is consciousness?
I don't think so, that is to say that the important thing about matter is that it has properties. Diamonds, soot and Buckyballs are all just carbon but in different configurations and thus have different properties. Similarly, as delorde notes, that's where the interesting stuff happens not at some 'primal state' but en masse.
What is being studiously ignored is the question I am asking
Your claim is that this is what we would expect a material world to be like. I am asking you to support that. I am asking what kind of physical process predicts that it will result in a sensation like nausea.
So, simply saying that this is what we happen to observe to be the case does not answer that at all.
All you are saying is "This is what we would expect a material universe to be like because this is a material universe and this is what it is like".
No, address the question or else drop the claim that this world is what we would expect a material universe to be like. Show that we would expect sensations to result from neural processes, not that we happen to observe this to be the case.
It is not that we expect a material universe to have sensations necessarily, only that a material universe would have things too complex for us to readily understand. This is contrary to idealism where there is no such attribute.
If I am a complex being - which I assume is required to be conscious - then I expect a material universe (from which I arise) to be similarly complex. Since I am both complex and limited (under a materialism scheme), it is expected that I will be unable to capture all the multitude of interactions in my head: the "calculation" is too big to fit the calculator. So, I expect to be surprised at some results and some of the things that emerge. I expect limitations.
A materialist view, under which I am a limited, circumscribed thinker, composed of a subset of all that can be, leads to this result. An idealist view doesn't necessarily lead to this result, since "all that is" is already contained in the thing thinking it.
The fact that I cannot explain all the connections reflects my expected limitations and doesn't challenge materialist dogma.
As a side issue, complexity also tells us that some calculations cannot be modeled in any simpler form than running the universe as it is. The feeling of nausea may very well be the result of a calculation that must be performed exactly as it is and cannot be reduced to a simpler recipe. The hardware would be a biological system capable of feeling nauseous, and the software would be the laws of physics and chemistry.
The brain is a computer. Any computation it does can in principal be computed by another computer. That I can agree with. I know my brain is a computer because I can implement the logic of a Turing Machine. That does not tell me that a sensation of nausea is one of the computations that I do.
Again, with any computation, why would any step complete differently if there were no feeling of nausea involved?
There is no contradiction involved in any sort of computation occurring without there being a feeling of nausea accompanying it.
I guess I'm just not as comfortable at jumping in at the state of matter (this particular anthropomorphic en masse) as you are . . . yes matter in this particular en masse has predictable properties but for me it feels too much like looking for my keys under the street light.
I guess I'm just not as comfortable at jumping in at the state of matter (this particular anthropomorphic en masse) as you are . . . yes matter in this particular en masse has predictable properties but for me it feels too much like looking for my keys under the street light.
I guess I'm just not as comfortable at jumping in at the state of matter (this particular anthropomorphic en masse) as you are . . . yes matter in this particular en masse has predictable properties but for me it feels too much like looking for my keys under the street light.
Understandable, as that is probably not where you should jump in. Try organic chemistry first, some basic biology, physiology and then perhaps some neuroscience before you go all anthropomorphic en masse on yourself. If you drop your keys because you walked into the post of a street light then that is the best place to look for them, whether the light is on or not.
Very clever - however if collectives such as rocks, molecules, atoms and particles and etc. are abstractions of mind, then to suggest mind emerges from these abstractions is circular.
I realize you hold these collectives exist independent of mind, but I'm not sure how we can know that. BTW, I'm not an Idealist in any shape or form. I'm a materialist by day because it works big time but in my few quiet moments I'm thinking this whole thang is impossible, there's no way that I and this stuff can be here - but it is.
If your definition cannot help distinguish whether or not a robot is conscious without explicit provision within the definition, then it is not a very useful one.
You can also eat a peach and experience the taste. You can listen to music and hear what it sounds like. You can have somebody tickle your tummy and see what that feels like.
But when you do any of those things, I experience nothing from it. Should I then conclude that you are not conscious?
No, wait, we don't want to go so far as solipsism, so I should conclude that you are conscious too... but on what basis? If it's "because you are also a human in a generally awake state" then that's sneaking "human" into the definition of consciousness. If it's "because you are a large-brained mammal" or "because you have an earth-evolved nervous system" then likewise that's sneaking those elements into the definition of consciousness. If it's "because you respond externally in a way similar to how I do," then surely I must conclude that a robot that also responds in a similar way is also conscious.
Depending on how I'm supposed to interpret it, your definition is either no definition at all, inherently solipsistic, or inherently specified to apply only to certain entities in a way that begs the question of how consciousness arises.
My definition of consciousness is rather different. I've mentioned it before. Few seem to like it, but fewer still have made any effort to refute it. Consciousness is the presence of the self as an agent in a narrative constructed from sensory input and associative memories, during said construction.
Nothing magic or un-programmable, though programming such a capability would be a monumental task.
Very clever - however if collectives such as rocks, molecules, atoms and particles and etc. are abstractions of mind, then to suggest mind emerges from these abstractions is circular.
I realize you hold these collectives exist independent of mind, but I'm not sure how we can know that. BTW, I'm not an Idealist in any shape or form. I'm a materialist by day because it works big time but in my few quiet moments I'm thinking this whole thang is impossible, there's no way that I and this stuff can be here - but it is.
No, generally when I hold them it is in my hands (with perhaps some PPE). So much like you all I know is holding such collections that way evidently works. The rest I don't give a flying handshake about until it has some practical application.
Consciousness is the presence of the self as an agent in a narrative constructed from sensory input and associative memories, during said construction.
Nothing magic or un-programmable, though programming such a capability would be a monumental task.
Re your definition - is the phrase 'presence of the self' important or can we define c-ness as an agent in a narrative constructed from sensory input and associative memories, during said construction? What does the 'presence of the self' add?
Very clever - however if collectives such as rocks, molecules, atoms and particles and etc. are abstractions of mind, then to suggest mind emerges from these abstractions is circular.
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