I appreciate that you may find their use of "irrevocable" as not being consistent with your own take on how that word should be used. However, it's not something that I feel concerned enough about to debate to the nth degree. The line about the bald man was something that I used mainly because it was "fresh" in my memory after hearing it for the first time very recently, I think in the video I linked to earlier (or perhaps the "Phantoms in the Brain" documentaries on youtube that I watched before that after someone else provided a link to those - very interesting and thought provoking also).Reflecting more soberly (), that's equivocating 'bald'. It's the negation in 'irrevocable' that makes it absolute; the analogous question would be "does a man with three hairs on his head have a hairless head?", to which the answer is obviously 'No'.
Bottom line for me is that I found Ramachandran and Hewitt's "Three Laws of Qualia" paper pretty coherent - but I'm sure that even they would be happy to concede it's not meant to be the final word, but rather an honest attempt to provide a possible explanation (and still incomplete) of what could be going on, whilst also being consistent with observations from people with various brain disorders and lesions, etc.
If you wanted to be consistent about attacking vague use of language (and it's pretty hard not to be vague because there really aren't many words in our language that don't have "shades of meaning") then I really think "Self Referential Information Processing" is so vague as to be almost meaningless. Of course, it may not seem that way inside Pixy's mind, but I note that 18 months ago Rocketdodger happily accepted that fragment of C++ code posted earlier as a working implementation of SRIP, while more recently Pixy said it didn't do anything and only had self reference, but then didn't answer my question about where the self reference was unambiguously evident once it was "compiled" into one possible "machine language".
What is "information"? How should it "reference itself"? How does the brain encode information? Etc., Etc.
I recall (vaguely, from an earlier thread where I think I asked you specifically) that you personally do not necessarily subscribe to the "SRIP hypothesis", at least not to the extent that Pixy appears willing to defend it, so I'm not try to suggest that you do. But an even handed approach might suggest you should dig further into what "SRIP" is really meant to represent if indeed you also want to argue about the particular use of "irrevocable" in that paper.
Mostly it does not seem to me that Pixy is truly interested in some kind of inclusive discussion about exactly what "SRIP" is meant to mean (in detail) but in fact is more interested in being provocative, and perhaps just winning points for debating style or whatever words best describe that aspect of some "discussions" on these forums.
Of course it's easy to get sucked into a rigid stance (me too) where we want to defend one position or another "to the death" rather than really try to be open to understanding other views, but when it boils down to it the aspect of "consciousness" that I am really puzzled by is the subjective, conscious awareness, feelings that I KNOW I personally experience, and why those kinds of experiences should happen for only some parts of what goes on in my head but not for all. "SRIP" hasn't helped me at all in that respect. Of course all the rest of what is going on is also very interesting (and probably also a key part of the puzzle) but that doesn't leave me scratching my head as much. I've written quite a lot of code in my life and also have some formal education in computing theory, and so don't have a problem with the basic idea that the brain has some (or even "many") processes that are essentially doing the same kind of thing as a conventional man made computing system can do. But none of that seems to provide any kind of real explanation (that I personally can "grok") for my own first person subjective experiences.
Perhaps it really is just some kind of "emergent property" but I find that explanation very unsatisfying - in fact not really an "explanation" at all, but more like a placeholder for "we'll figure this out later". I'd like to be able to understand it at a level where we could say (with precision and certainty) exactly what was needed to reproduce it in another system.
After watching the "Phantoms in the Brain" clips on youtube I did find myself idly speculating about the possibility that we all have a variety of less obvious brain damage/lesions or even just "differences" such that for some the idea of "qualia" simply makes no sense (or little sense) perhaps because they truly do not have the same kind of "experience" that I do. In other words, perhaps there really are degrees of zombieness. If true, we'll be arguing about this until hell freezes over and still not agreeing with each other!
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