From: SMTP%"jqb@netcom.com" 15-OCT-1996 12:54:42.35 To: STAPP CC: Subj: Re: Wrapping up QM and C From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter) Message-Id: <199610151954.MAA29785@netcom23.netcom.com> Subject: Re: Wrapping up QM and C To: STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 12:54:25 -0700 (PDT) Cc: phayes@picayune.coginst.uwf.edu In-Reply-To: <961015103826.346003b2@theorm.lbl.gov> from "STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov" at Oct 15, 96 10:38:26 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3543 The way you use your mailer or edit the header to eliminate makes it very difficult to carry on a conversation. I don't want to have to manually keep adding Pat back to the cc list after, apparently, you mail your responses to us separately, so this is my last comment. STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov wrote: > > Dear Pat, > You say: > "By insisting that the brain phenomena 'correspond to' his experiences, you > assume precisely the substance duality which I reject. Why can we not > simply say that these events in his head *are* his experiences? His > perspective on them is of course different from ours, since his, not ours, > is the head in which they occur. But the location of these events in his > head is not a private matter." > > I do not at all insist that brain activities merely `correspond' to experiences. > Just the opposite: I *do* allow that the conscious events might *be* brain > events. In fact, that is pretty close to what QM is already saying, and I > think that further advances in physics will make the identity of experiential > events and physical events ever more understandable, and more likely to be > the fact of the matter. You write hundreds and hundreds, nay thousands and thousands, of words that all miss or misunderstand the point. Physics has *nothing to do with it*. The question is how it is that a particular machine (that's us) organization can come to have a state such that it fits the facts as we have them, facts that we feebly refer as "experience" and "raw feel" and "phenomenal consciousness" etc. This "experience" model is not a model from physics, it is a vague *psychological* model. And the psychology is of the very machine that we don't understand in the first place, so any confidence that it can't be explained classically is misplaced. It is the position of people like me, Dennett, and Minsky that this particular machine is *just the sort* that will come to produce reports of having a self, primitive qualia, and all the rest. The fuzzy heads like you and Chalmers and most of the rest will insist that these aren't just reports, this *is* experience, but this is to no avail because you have no *model* of what "experience" is, you the machine are just busy "having" it, as a full functionalist model would imply. Such a model would predict that there would be Henry Stapps that would insist that they have something called experience, that they are selves; that there would be David Chalmers who insist that they are different from zombies in that zombies are "dark inside", that "there is nothing it is like" to be a zombie, without being able to articulate what these metaphors are metaphors *of*, without being able to articulate a *model* in which "there is nothing it is like" has any semantic content. It has none, despite the "intuitions" of these machines. OTOH, Dennett has a model (incomplete at this point, of course), of zimboes, Minsky has a model (incomplete at this point, of course), of a society of minds opaque to each other, Thomas Metzinger has a model (incomplete at this point, of course), of a self-modeling machine that has conflated the machine itself as an entity in the model with the model itself. Each of these models predict, to some degree, the results we actually observe. These are the kinds of models that we need; they are out of your field. These models are enough. If indeed we are such machines, then our protests that we aren't ("I'm not a zombie!") are irrelevant because they are expected. So protest away. --