X-Message-Number: 5439 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Consciousness and all that. Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 13:51:53 +1100 (EST) John Clark writes, >There are not judges, there is only a judge, and the judge is you. >The Turing test is not needed for you to know that the judge (you) are >conscious, introspection will do that, but you do need the test if you want >to know if I may be conscious. How do I know I'm conscious? I don't even know what you mean by "conscious". Anyway, one judge would still represent the irony I referred to. >Peter, do you think your fellow human beings are conscious? If so why? >Is everybody conscious? Are they conscious all the time? >What about people who are asleep, or in a coma, or dead? >What about people of a different sex than you, or a different race than you, >or a different shoe size than you? Unless you can tell me what you mean by "conscious", how can I answer you? So far all you've said is that consciousness is that thing that the TT evaluates, and that the TT is that thing that evaluates consciousness. >Can you PROVE that ANYTHING in the universe is conscious but you? >Can you PROVE to me that you are conscious? >Can I PROVE to you that I am conscious? Here it seems you're talking about the social significance of "conscious". A lot of people have taboos about cannibalism - is that the significance of "conscious" - that you shouldn't eat something that is "conscious"? >Certainly not! If that was true we wouldn't need a brain, and I've found mine >to come in handy from time to time. Okay, then I think we're in agreement to some extent. > >Purpose, intention, aim, goal - > >I smell an infinite regress. >To answer the question "what is the meaning of meaning?" you must first know >the answer to " what is the meaning of "what is the meaning of meaning"" Oh, foo. By that argument, you couldn't know the meaning of anything. You could say, to answer the question, "what is the meaning of X?" you must first know the answer to "what is the meaning of "what is the meaning of X"". And yet we are perfectly capable of gleaning a meaning from some statements. The reason we can glean what they mean is that we can make social assumptions about them. We can share a context with the originator of the statment. Lacking that context, we can't assign meaning. For example, if a Martian landed outside your home and painted a zebra crossing on the street, you would not assume that that meant "it is safe to cross here". You wouldn't know what it meant. It might mean, "cross this line and die". That's why I've picked words above that pertain to personal motivation. By itself, a piece of information may be taken to mean practically anything. It is only when that information appears within a personal context that we can infer meaning from it. I don't ask, "what does this mean?" - I ask "what do you mean by this?". This is why "what is the meaning of life" seems so silly to me. If a farmer grows a plant, then I may understand what he means by it qua expression. But is life, all life, someone's expression? If it is, then we might ask what He means by it. But, unless you can describe Him, you won't be able to answer the question. And if, as most of us here do, you don't hold that life is someone's expression, then the question itself is a nonsense. >It's my practice to keep quoted material to a minimum, I don't >like to read gobs of it in other peoples posts. I routinely >omit irrelevancies, or gratuitous insults, or remarks that say >I'm all wrong but declines to say why, or pointing to foolish >theories that neither I nor any intelligent person would believe >in and then saying it's somehow related to the theory I do >believe in, without giving any specifics. Okay, I'll explain a little further. You understand my reticence - the CoS are not the most tolerant people in the world. What the Fishman stuff alleges is a scheme where people externalise their ideas, relationships and memories as creatures called "thetans", which I think share many of the characteristics of "memes". The use the CoS allegedly makes of this externalisation is to distance people from their lives so that they are bound to the church; the church is the only way adherents can be "cleared" of these thetans. Needless to say, the church charges quite a lot of money for this clearing therapy. I'm not suggesting that memetics is a cult in the sense of CoS, though I imagine it could be used as such; I'm only noting that the beliefs of the adherents of the two notions seem to me to be similar. I'm not trying to tar you with a CoS brush either, but I am curious about whether those similarities are also apparent to you. [with regard to humans superceding DNA:] >Then I would say that the big brain, long life strategy was a huge success, >that is, that it was a universal maximum. Succcessful at what and a maxiumum of what? Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5439