X-Message-Number: 14760 From: "John Clark" <> Subject: Clark's questions Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 02:53:46 -0400 In #14745 Wrote: >It offers, as I have explained, a possible new notion of how subjective >experiences arise. You propose a black box, you call it a self circuit, and say feeling comes from there. I don't see how this idea makes us any wiser. >>Me: >>Explain why a standing wave creates subjectivity. Maybe I'm a little thick >>but it's not obvious what one has to do with the other. >The physical basis of feeling has to be something which is not just a symbol >or a representation of something else; it has to be the thing-in-itself Premise: Consciousness must be causes by some thing. Conclusion: Consciousness is caused by standing waves. If standing waves were the only thing that existed then your reasoning would be valid but as it is I think you need a few steps in-between. >Experiment will decide whether my idea is correct, if we find the standing >waves (or something similar) and correlate them with reported feelings. We already know of certain chemicals that correlate with reported feelings, sulfuric acid and pain for example, but that fact doesn't immediately cause a theory of consciousness to spring to mind. >>Me: >> a standing wave of what? >electrical or/and magnetic or/and chemical waves. I don't see how it could be electric or magnetic, a brain subjected to even very intense fields has little effect on its operation. >Study of consciousness is not restricted to (a) external observation of >gross behavior or (b) introspection. Studies of internal brain functions, >and their correlation with reported subjective states, is proceeding apace. You said the word yourself, REPORTED! Reported means you're observing the sounds somebody else made with their mouth, their actual subjective experience is entirely a matter of speculation. >The radio receiver converts radio signals back into sound. The radio doesn't >know or care whether the sound is Beethoven's music or somebody's fart. Exactly, it can do lots of things and that's why it would be foolish to call it a Beethoven circuit. >The self circuit, on the other hand (and it must exist, whether a standing >wave or something else) Is there a speed circuit in a racing car or a beauty circuit in a work of art? >besides interacting with other aspects of the brain, CONSTITUTES feeling. If it interact with other aspects of the brain then the Turing Test works. If it doesn't then evolution would not have made it. >Elegant solutions are not necessarily the first developed, either by >nature or by people. Evolution found a way to make the parts of the brain that deal with feeling hundreds of millions of years ago, it's the parts that deal with calculation that are new, only about one million. Also you seem to be saying that approximate solutions are harder to obtain than exact ones and that doesn't seem right. John K Clark Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14760