From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Thu Feb 20 15:20:07 EST 1992
Article 3662 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism (was Re: Virtual Person?)
Message-ID: <407@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 11 Feb 92 21:18:01 GMT
References: <1992Feb1.212751.5911@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb2.082603.6355@ccu.umanitoba.ca> <1992Feb3.145332.21683@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com> <6554@pkmab.se>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 49

In article <6554@pkmab.se> ske@pkmab.se (Kristoffer Eriksson) writes:
|In article <1992Feb3.145332.21683@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com> petersow@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Wayne Peterson) writes:
|>If the world is determistic then no part of it can know it.
|
|To analyze this, I think one would need more information about exactly
|what you mean by "to know". You seem to view truth and determinedness
|as some kind of opposites? Suppose you have a part of the world, a
|subsystem, where they coincide, that is, a part that deterministically
|distinguishes between true and false? Isn't it actually "true" and "false"
|that are the opposites, that need to be distinguished among, rather than
|"true" and "determined"?


Let's see if I cannot clarify what Wayne meant.

If the world is entirely deterministic then every brain state and transition
in my brain is already predetermined by the physical conformation of the
universe as a whole.

Everything that I know, believe, see, feel etc. was fully determined at the
moment the Universe came into existance.

Now, given that my 'knowledge' is thus predetermined, why should it have
any meaningful relationship to truth or falsity?  Why whould I believe that
my predetermined 'knowledge' has any meaning at all?

Thus, in a fully deterministic Universe the term knowledge is meaningless.
There are only physical brain states that have the illusion of knowledge.

Thus 'true' and 'determined' are not opposites, it is just that 'determined'
makes confidence impossible, and thus 'truth' is inaccessible - it *hides*
the truth.



By the way, this is the core of C.S. Lewis' argument for transcendent minds,
and thus for dualism.


Now, the fact is I am not sure I buy this reasoning, but it is difficult
to refute logically.

I suspect that either the teleonomic aspect of evolved organisms guarentees
a relationship between internal mental states and the external world, or
the universe is not indeed fully deterministic.  I am not sure which.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



