(2023-06-05, 11:13 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]I disagree. If I am in Paris and experience all the sights and sounds there, it will make neural patterns in my brain. When I am at someplace similar later on, the patterns will be similar to the patterns that I saved from Paris, and that will resonate with the saved patterns in Paris. Neurons in my brain can combine those patterns and cause my mouth to say that this reminds me of this experience in Paris. All of that could be done by AI also.
So a GPS program in your phone that says the street names of Paris as you walk around the city...does that phone have thoughts about Paris?
Or is it just non-conscious information processing, the kind Sam Harris notes logically cannot produce consciousness unless one accepts a religious Something from Nothing miracle for the sake of the Materialist faith?
Quote:No need to smuggle in consciousness. The brain matches the patterns, and suggestions to talk about Paris come to mind. And as the thought of talking of Paris comes to mind, the brain puts together the story that it is consciously comparing the scene in front of it to Paris. The consciousness is not doing the computations. The consciousness is simply a state that the brain creates that says it is consciously aware of this.
Sorry but this seems like an incredibly ad hoc explanation... What is the
mind that suggestions to talk about Paris come to?.
Consciousness is a state the brain creates that says
it (the brain?) is
consciously aware of this? What is "
this"? The computations Consciousness is not doing?
In any case the problem is not talking about Paris, the issue is that people can have a thought that is
about the capital city in France. Maybe it's because they read/hear the word "Paris", maybe it's a scene from a movie, maybe it's a picture of the Eiffel Tower, etc...Regardless, their mind has at least one thought that is directly about Paris. You are almost certainly having at least one thought of Paris now as well.
Alex Rosenberg - who
is a Materialist, to be clear - notes that the "physical", as defined by Materialists/Physicalist believers as that which lacks any mental character, cannot explain how a thought is
about something because it would lead to an infinite regression of neurons for which there is obviously not enough space in the brain.
To quote from his The Atheist's Guide to Reality yet again ->
Quote:The first clump of matter, the bit of wet stuff in my brain, the Paris neurons, is [purportedly] about the second chunk of matter, the much greater quantity of diverse kinds of stuff that make up Paris. How can the first clump -- the Paris neurons in my brain -- be about, denote, refer to, name, represent, or otherwise point to the second clump -- the agglomeration of Paris…? A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe -- right next to it or 100 million light-years away?
…Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion. If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain.Let’s see exactly why. Call that part of the brain the neural interpreter. It’s supposed to interpret the Paris neurons as being about Paris the way we interpret the red octagons as being about stopping. How can the neural interpreter interpret the Paris neurons as being about Paris? The interpreter neurons would have to have different parts that are about two different things, about Paris and about the Paris neurons. Already we can see trouble coming. We started out trying to explain one case of neurons being about something—Paris. Now we have two cases of neurons being about things—about Paris and about the Paris neurons...
What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.
Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort…
…What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.
It’s this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can’t happen at all…When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong.”
I'd say Rosenberg is correct all the way up to the end, insofar as that is how Materialists/Physicalists think of physics, but then he makes the wrong turn of saying we cannot think about things. While this is the correct conclusion under the Materialist belief system, it's a leap of faith too far.
Better to be on the side of logic, continue to hold to Cogito Ergo Sum, and accept Materialism is false.