Bubb, I'm going to pretty much ignore the trivially true, tautological statement from your Bolivian friend since it doesn't actually bear on this discussion in any way. X or not X describes the state of everything in reality and isn't an original observation given that it is one of the fundamental laws of binary logic.
The statement is evidence of ternary logic, and my bolivian friend is a world expert in ternary logic. he agrees with me, that bivalent logic is a subset of ternary logic, which means, ternary logic can account for all bivalent operations, while bivalent operations cannot account for ternary operations.
Notice the 'two schools of thought' here. The trivalent school contains the logic of the bivalent school, yet the bivalent school does not contain the logic of the other.
This is going to come up again at the end of this exchange.
I must genuinely thank you for linking to that video of Stephen Wright and Daniel Dennet, very interesting stuff.
Right? Now that's what I call rational dialectic. I'm sure you have checked out the rest of Robert's site. Glad you enjoy, and at least finally feel I have brought something worthwhile to this discussion;-)
However, predictably, I completely disagree with you on your conclusions
Yes, quite predictable..
, and can reasonably deduce that you viewed it (like everything else) through your everything-supports-OS012-and-if-anyone-refutes-it-they-are-in-fact-proving-it goggles.
or, the converse is true, and you view it with your bivalent goggles on, etc etc..
or, maybe both of us are simply flat wrong!
Taking some of your points in turn:
Wright concludes that Dennet is basically saying concsciouness does not exist, and he is correct in concluding that about Dennet.
I believe he does, and I am waiting to hear back from Robert now on the matter. I can't find the link to where he said that right now. But regardless, I can argue that anyway.
If you could point to what they were, that might have been a more convincing statement, but he really doesn't. The only real contradiction that is pointed out is identified by Dennett with regard to the epiphenomenal view of consciousness, which is that consciousness is produced by the brain but does not, in turn, affect or cause anything.
Wright is suggesting that 'experience' is closer to consciousness, or must be included when defining consciousness. 'experience' is the 'shine' that dennett negates.
Dennet correctly notes that, if your argument for epiphenomenal consciousness is your report of your own consciousness, then that report is, in turn, an the result of you detecting your consciousness. Since epiphenomenal consciousness cannot have any effects (remember if consciousness is an epiphenomenon it cannot cause anything) it cannot not be detected (and therefore cannot be an epiphenomenon) and therefore your report of it is proof that it is not epiphenomenal.
Wright and Dennett don't agree on usage of 'epiphenomenal'. I'm not saying my argument is supportive of either, i dont have clarity on 'epiphenomenal' yet.
Where Wright and Dennett differ is that Dennett does not postulate an extra stage or "shine" beyond the brain activity to account for consciousness.
that 'shine' is experience. I can directly experience what Dennet describes in the brain concluding in consciousness, and have. Dennet actually describes the 'conflict of idea', with 'consciouness' being the 'king' or 'winning' idea. If there is nothing extra to that, how is it then that I or anyone can experience the 'whole' show or conflict? I can experience idea. dennet, to me, is arguing that 'idea' is consciousness. There is a metastage of awareness above that.
As a fellow "mysterian" perhaps you can explain what explanatory power this extra step gives us since there is no apparent idea of what it is.
That's the point, this is why consciousness is very mysterious. We can experience it, so it's truth value is direct, but we cannot define it or isolate it, it may be comprised of something highly objective (brain hardware) and highly subjective (experience).
materialism is stopped at the point of pure subjectivity. 'experience' is composed of 'light' (seeing/percieving) and 'sound' (feeling).
Your school of thought assumes that because something is currently 'unknown', then it means us 'mysterions' as you call us suggest that we will never know, and that is simply not true, we seek scientific understanding of the direct subjectivity of consciouness.
Consciousness, like all mysteries, is composed of something both objective and subjective, at once. It's nature is recursive. This is why I dont engage (yet) in the epiphenomenal argument, because that to me seems (and I find Robert making this error a bit here too) it's either one or the other. Rather, consciousness may be both created by the brain, but also influencing the brain to create it. they may both be creating each other. Animate and in animate matter may be eternal. It's relationship may be highly synergistic.
FYI, I am still refining my argument on the matter, but dont mind speculating a bit here critically to get further clarity.
The name consciousness is what we have given to this perceived (and only perceived) extra step. Since the step itself is unecessary and unproven, the tag of "consciousness" is superfluous, this does not imply that consciousness does not exist.
You are implying that it doesnt exist, that 'experience' does not really exist, it's simply a result of conflict in the brain. Yet if true, then how is it I can model that conflict in direct experience? Can a computer make a comprehensive, dynamic and identical perfect model of itself? I dont think so, and I think there is a mathematical proof somewhere that explains that, I think it was Neils Bohr, or maybe Godel.....(dont have time to research right now, sorry, perhaps someone else is familiar)
Could you point to that within the video? I don't believe that Wright ever asks Dennett to identify "experience" or even uses the word "hard-ware". Nor does Wright identify experience or actually explain how it arises.
This is me phrasing, deconstructing, their argument in 0, 1, and 2 dialectic. I emailed Robert to assist me in finding his quote, but I can still make my argument here without that.
Feeble attempt at twisting what Dennett actually says to suit your argument. You have no basis for asserting that Dennett would agree with that statement. What he actually says is that our brain is basically in a state of turmoil awith many contentful events (I would say "representations") vying for control. By default one always wins (I would add "given enough time") and this is what you are conscious of.
Yes, that is what I said, that the turmoil of the brain, the conflict of 'ideas', dependent upon our circuitry, produces a 'winning idea' and that is what dennet is saying is CONSCIOUSNESS. If, as you put it "By default one always wins (I would add "given enough time") and this is what you are conscious of." then you are having an experience of something objective happening. There is a dichotomy there, a distinction. Dennett does not account for that distinction. Consciousness is comprised of both distinctions, one purely subjective, one purely objective.
This is not the process that produces consciousness it is consciousness. He calls this the "Cerebral Celebrity" theory. There are parallels in neuroscience such as binocular rivalry and the model of selective attention advance by Desimone and Duncan (1995).
Yes, I get that quite clearly, and I think it's BS, because I can experience that directly, indeed, it was having that experience directly which produced 'OS 012' as an idea in pure form. So what can account for my distinction?
At this point, consciousness gets highly recursive, and analytical language cannot account for it's flexibility, so therefore, we have 'mystical' arts, which we CAN ANALYZE SCIENTIFICALLY.
Dennet also does an amazing job of clarifying that 'ethics' are an eternaly true princaple, and we can come to develop a perfect objective criteria for 'morals', which is in complete harmony with OS 012.
Again not particularly supportive of your argument. They collectively describe ethics as a Good Trick i.e., a strategy that is effective, perhaps even essential, in producing stable, intelligent societies. Therefore any intelligent developed society that we encounter will necessarily share our ethics.
again, you try to contradict me by agreeing with me. Indeed, those 'ethics' become 'mutually viewable' and thus function as 'objective truths'. Dennet, towards the end of the interview, uses the language 'eternal' to describe them.
I agree with him, and can argue for that without the assistance of invoking Dennett.
Not because there is an external eternal principle for ethics but because they are a strategy that is "discovered again and again."
indeed, they are discovered only because they exist. apply that concept to 'infinity' and 'self replicating intelligence in a continuum' and you see my point.
At the moment of big bang, according to our 'views', the idea 'i-pod' existed in theory, 'i-pod' is a conclusion, in one of a series of conclusions, or 'novelties' that the laws of space time can account for. It's 'metaphysics' is a 'pattern integrity' of the laws of nature.
This actually argues that we don't need OS012 because as a race, we have an overall intelligent, stable society.
we do? Then how is it that we may face our destruction with our very advances?
Dennnet avoids the '2' value.
He does not avoid addressing it critically; he's never asked about it. Again just a lie.
Well of course he is not asked about the '2' value, I wasnt doing the interview, Wright was! However, wright was addressing the '2' value, and Dennet wasnt.
I can address easily the metalogical argument behind thier discussion.
The term "real illusion" is simply paradoxical except in the very trivial sense that the activity that creates it in your brain is real.
see how you are denying the 2 value? It is an experience. An experience of something is distinguished by the cause of something. an experience may be an 'illusion', superfluous, irrelevant, but it's still a distinction, but it's REAL experience. It exists. This is nothing more than the logical law of identity, A=A, which dennet fails to apply at the deeper levels of awareness.
That you perceive something does not give it existence in the real world (dreams are a trivial example).
Dreams are not trivial examples, they are perfect examples. Dreams =dreams. Real dreams are real dreams. They are purely subjective, yet we all have them, thus they are mysterious 'mutually viewable' subjective phantasms which are real relative to their space, subjectivity, conceptual, internal, consiousness.
In fact that is pretty much the definition of "illusion": the perception of something as it is not, or the perception of something that does not exist.
clearly illusions are real illusions, we have a distinction for 'illusion' and that is distinguishable by what is 'physical'.
Well, I'd say that Wright is several orders of magnitude more intelligent than you, but it's true that you do apparently share a tendency to claim victory on either trivial or completely insubstantial grounds.
I agree that he is several orders of a magnitude more intelligent than I, and learn much from him.
hehe, and you're no Daniel Dennett either!
As for drawing parallels between Wright vs. Dennett and you vs. us, I don't think that you have any grounds for doing so and are simply trying to bolster your non-existent argument by association with a more competent thinker.
It's a perfect comparison. Wright argues beautifully and rationally inside of the third value, and Dennett negates the third value because he doesnt understand the 2 value, experience.
No. Just plain wrong. From where I'm sitting, although it was a very informed and interesting debate, Dennett came out ahead.
Well, that's opinion, and I dont think it would withstand the test of logic.
http://nonzero.org/dennbackground.htm
but again, this is simply two different schools of thought, Robert and myself's school, and the other school of thought that *thinks* itself seperate from ours;-)
Again, this has no real relevance to our discussion, but that's pretty much what I've come to expect from you.
Of course not, it was ancedotal, and figured some would find it interesting, such as you did. If it wasnt so relevant, then why did you respond? and if it wasnt so relevant, how is it that this exchange here perfectly highlights the distinictions of our entire discussion?
I should offer an apology to everyone for my contribution to sustaining this thread. Yesterday I did a bit of reading over past threads involving Bubb and his OS012 page (I would recommend this to anyone before bothering to engage with Bubb), and it became blindingly clear that Bubb is a troll.
oh here we go again......I'm a troll when I have a contradicting point of view.
He may also be a deluded, self-important, ignoramus who actually believes what he writes, but in the context of an internet forum his trolling is the more pertinent point.
right, I'm a troll when I have philosophical arguments on the net and attempt to argue my points rationally.
Bubb's breathtaking lack of integrity was laid painfully bare by pragmatist, zep and other almost 2 years ago in the original OS012 thread. Jonny did a superb job of dismantling Bubb's selective, non-standard and flip-flopping use of language around page 5 of this thread. Bubb didn't refute Jonny's points then (I'm not even sure he understood them) and I'm not sure why I expected him to actually address or understand my similar recent rebuttals.
I dont back away from the tit for tat. My arguments with Jonny's were able to advance inside of the tit for tat, and jonny's were not. Therefore, jonny's arguments didnt hold further logical strutiny because he could provide no further logical scrutiny.
Prof-Yaffle did a good job of trashing Bubb's logic around page 10 with a resulting similar lack of comprehension or answer. Back on badscience, ST posted in big red letters "Show us how it [OS012] works!" and every post since then in which he has failed to do so is pretty much another nail in the coffin of OS012 and Bubb's integrity. Although it should be noted that this wasn't really necessary, for evidence that OS012 is just vacuous twaddle you don't need to look any further than the OS012 homepage.
I think people can think for themselves, and questions of your interpretations aside, I predict that you will very soon simply be unable to rationally advance your ideas in exchange with me. I predict that at that stage, you will either agree with me, or you will find some manipulation to justify you leaving the exchange. I assume you are simply afraid, intellectually afraid, of the synthesis.
Please prove me wrong in rational debate.
BF
