Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
I agree that syntax alone is insufficient for semantics. But I also believe that semantics can be implemented computationally.
You're clearly quite confused...
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
I'm not, now, trying to address that issue. I'm saying that the CRA also does not address that issue
Really? The whole point of the illustration (the room, paper, etc.) is to help explain/bolster the assertion that syntax is insufficient for semantics. You're confusing the example for the claim. Hence, you fall under #2 above.
I do view the mind as fundamentally computational, but not because Searle's argument is confused.
You have that backwards. Searle's argument isn't confused, you're confused about Searle's argument.
As a motorcyclist that has to contend with car drivers paying insufficient attention to the road on a daily basis, I have to state that the driver should have been penalised much more severely for his actions.
As a cager that has to contend with motorcyclists paying insufficient attention to the road on a daily basis, I have to state the the driver did us all a service by removing two dangerous hazards from the road.
I pay a great deal of attention to motorcycles when I drive -- though for my own protection. Motorcyclists seem to do incredibly stupid and dangerous things every time they're around me.
Just a few days ago, for example, some moron on a motorcycle decided to pass me on the right (the shoulder, not a different lane) while I was making a right turn on to a busy highway. Had I not expected him to do something incredibly stupid when I saw him behind me, I'd have run right in to him. (What's worse, he shouted some obscenity at me as he drove past, as though it was my fault he was putting his life and my fender unnecessarily at risk.)
I've generally heard (and used) the word accident to describe pretty much any collision other than one where the driver was deliberately aiming to hit someone.
I've seen "deliberately caused an accident" a few times, as absurd as it sounds.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
While not directly addressing the Chinese Room, it is an empirical example of robots understanding a language. They are not programmed with knowledge of the language
You've got to be kidding me? I don't think you understand what empirical means, nor what the CRA is actually aimed at!
Anyhow, you're right -- I didn't even read the article! Still, I knew I was perfectly safe in denying that it adequately addressed Searle -- We'd all have heard about it if it did!
Anyhow, what your robots don't do is anything like understanding at all. While it's fun to attribute intentional states to them, they're still doing nothing more than mindless symbol shuffling. Any semantic content you attribute to their "words" is purely extrinsic.
I contend that you can not draw the conclusion you do from the earlier split-brain study (or others like it). That is, the evidence is insufficient to justify such a strong claim -- especially in light of the other behavioral evidence that stands in direct contradiction. Similarly, Libet-style studies, while useful, can't justify the strong conclusions drawn on either empirical or rational grounds (the empirical claim is obvious, but the rational claim is pretty broad. I don't know that I can defend it on an internet forum in my spare time.)
Anyhow, what matters here is that, baring over-reaching conclusions, it doesn't actually offer us anything terribly new save a neuroscience perspective. (I'll direct you to work by and with Jacoby / opposition procedures / in contrast to other work in automaticity by folks like Bargh.) Lavazza and De Caro called the state of things "Intellectually interesting but methodologically confused" (probably not an exact quote, I'd need to dig the paper out.)
Really, what i'm objecting to is the bold, sweeping, claims from AI and Neuroscience camps that are not supported by the evidence, and often stand in opposition to strong evidence to the contrary! (Often from related fields. Despite being highly interdisciplinary areas, there isn't very good communication between them. Unfortunately, the only person I know of that has surveyed researchers is Imants Baruss, and not recently. Though he does offer us some explanation for the divide, I really rather someone else repeated his '94 study with a larger group.)
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
Ah, but it is a magical explanation. Saying "it just happens" offers you nothing over saying "god does it".
It also doesn't address the claim at issue: that syntax is insufficient for semantics.
Believe in your magical computation fairy, I'll stick with Searle: whatever the brain does that causes consciousness, it can not be computation alone.
. I cited it as evidence of the conclusion, and implied that, given the new evidence, you can look at the earlier study with split-brain studies under a new light
I'm not seeing the connection between the two? What are you trying to say?
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
Doug Hofstadter refutes it by pointing out that no human could ever perform the actions attributed to the human in the Chinese Room.
That would be #2 "Ignore the premise that the CR supports and pick on the illustration"
The point of the Turing test is that whether or not the machine is "really" intelligent does not matter
The Turning test is the "best you can do" with behavioralism. We had a fairly recent "cognitive revolution" in psychology due to the failures of behavioralism.
Turing set out to answer the question "Can Machines Think?" and this was his solution, from the best approach of his day, in dealing with the problem of other minds.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
I do not believe that it is possible to put together these rules without relating the characters to real-world concepts, i. e. without making the person understand them.
Well, then you don't buy-in to computationalism, or I've misunderstoond your position.
The point is that syntax alone is insufficient for semantics.
The bits of paper, the room, the rule-book, and tortured subject in the room are completely irrelevant to the CRA.
I have that paper on my desk now (I pulled it out a few weeks ago). It's a mess.
One thing that was particularly telling is that lot's of very basic information, like the number of participants, is completely absent.
This is to say nothing of the massive problems in their methodology. (It's been criticized VERY heavily by other researchers.) It made a splash in the popular press, but hasn't held up well at all under scrutiny.
Some fun facts about this pile of garbage: their "predictions" are accurate <60% of the time and their timings rely very heavily on untrained subject's introspective reporting.
Of course, the biggest point to be made is That paper has absolutely nothing to do with split-brain subjects.
Look, if you didn't want every stranger you encounter telling you how best to raise your child / how your approach is sure to turn your kids into psychopaths then why did you have them?
It's every childless asshat's responsibility to give you unsolicited parenting advice. How else would you know if your baby was too hot, too cold, has a developmental problem, or going to turn out gay / murder you in your sleep if you don't take away a particular toy.
After all, new parents *need* free advice, don't they?
I suppose my question is simply "Are consciousness and the self simply emergent phenomena?". It seems that they must be, as they seem to be the result of "simple" neurons and synapses.
That's the dominant thinking (emergentism & epiphenominalism) having replaced computationalist and reductionist approaches. It's still not very satisfactory, as you still end up with a bit of magic for the "and, poof, consciousness" part. That is, you get a "that" for free, but can't even begin to speak about the "how does". It doesn't seem to add much, it just gets of over a hurdle we could already see beyond. Further, those approaches don't do anything for the problem of downward causation save to ignore it completely. While tempting, without anything substantial for the "how does" it's ultimately just a bit of hand-waving.
I admit that my knowledge of philosophy is very limited, I have only dabbled in it by reading a few books. I'm a computational neuroscientist by day (vision), and this is what led me to Metzinger, since he claims that he is trying to reconcile philosophy with neuroscience.
Philosophy is an extraordinarily interdisciplinary activity. You'll find that its scope encompasses nearly every other field. That said, I don't see why there would ever need to be a reconciliation -- philosophy must always operate within the current understanding of applicable fields. (Of course, that knife can cut both ways, for example, computationalist approaches to strong AI were all but destroyed overnight after Searle's (in)famous 1980 paper.) The ultimate goal of philosophy is, after all, to stop being philosophy. That is, to provide a new and useful "frameworks" to promote the continued advancement of other disciplines, and occasionally spawn new ones.
When I was in grad school (oddly enough, not studying philosophy) I got a great piece of advice:"If you want to get a solid grounding in any unfamiliar discipline, work through the undergraduate textbooks." While I can't make any specific recommendations that aren't out-of-date, you may want to narrow things a bit to philosophy of mind after a quick walk-through of the cheapest general intro to philosophy text you can find to pickup some of the terminology (an Essentials guide or something like that) considering how broad the field is and its strong interdisciplinary nature.
Oh, and what do YOU think consciousness is? You've made many statements about what it is not, but haven't made any claims as to what it is.
In the introduction to The Astonishing Hypothesis (which turns out to be neither astonishing nor an hypothesis) Francis Crick flat-out refused to define consciousness -- even though the book deals exclusively with that topic! If a giant like Crick can't manage it, I'm in real trouble with your question.:)
Now, I may be an arrogant jerk, but I'm not so arrogant as to claim any serious answer to the question "what is consciousness". I can, however, offer you this much: when I talk about consciousness, I'm talking about, for the most part, subjective experience. The important question then, as far as I see it, is "how does subjective experience arise from brain processes".
I don't know what the answer will be, but I expect that any sufficient answer will come from the physicists -- and the emergence (or whatever) of consciousness will be a necessary consequence of some as-yet undiscovered bit of reality.
This may require a new metaphysics under which we can interpret the findings of the new physics, which have pushed us (nearly?) beyond our conceptual limits.
I don't agree that there is a guarantee that consciousness equates to existence. Descartes makes the assumption that he has a self, that it is conscious, and therefore he exists. One could argue that consciousness (whatever that constitutes) does not require, or imply, a self, but instead is a by-product of mechanical processes, such as the firing of neurons in the brain.
I actually didn't go that far. I stopped short of "ergo sum" as I didn't think it was relevant. Anyhow, I'm not sure I understand the nature of your objection. I also have no idea how you're using the word "existence". You suggest that emergentism as a possibility that would deny existence? If the mind is purely the result of physical processes, how does that in any way diminish the self? I don't need ghost to call "I" after all! I really don't follow your reasoning here.
Take, for instance, the "invisible hand" of economics. One could argue that it is consciously making decisions about how to efficiently allocate resources
That would be a particularly stupid thing to argue. We need not posit consciousness nor attribute free will to explain markets -- aside from a few useful analogies, such a position causes tons of problems without solving a single one.
Perhaps it is so with human consciousness. There is no global ego, determining what decisions a person will make. Rather, the global decisions are merely a result of the many individual neurons acting independently, or in local cooperation. Perhaps then, one can deconstruct conscious thought into the series of electric and chemical state of billions of neurons and synapses.
Okay, we're back to emergentism. Why not just say that?
I'll focus on Metzinger here as I'm assuming you're trying to pass along his ideas, yes?
Anyhow, what Metzinger ultimately does is, through reduction, deny the higher-level ontology. That's not very clear. He claims phenomenal experience of self is representational and, consequently, the self must be in "appearance only" (his words). The problem, of course, is that he inexplicably uses that to deny the subject of experience. That is, he denies the self by dismissing the phenomenal experience of the self as being, well, phenomenal. It's a bit of slight-of-hand. Pointing this out, you can see the "loop".
So how does he get away with it? Even granting his sense of self as distinct, it is clearly epistemic yet he makes it out to be ontological. He does the same with all perception and inexplicably conflates the sum of perception as consciousness. He's confused epistemology with ontology.
So, why does he bother? What was his goal? Metzinger does what I suspected you of doing earlier -- assuming that the self must necessarily be a transcendent entity, a soul. Which is silly, it isn't necessary at all to posit such an entity. (Oddly enough, Metzinger's self-model has quite a few problems avoiding dualism, which is hilarious as that is precisely what he seems out to destroy!) He would have done well to take a cue from Churchland rather than cling to a long-outdated classical concept of self.
That's the problem, isn't it? He equates "self" with "soul" and then declares (through a shockingly incoherent 700 pages) proclaims that the "self" doesn't exist. He's tilting at windmills... and getting knocked off his horse.
Of course, had he written a book titled "There is no soul" it wouldn't have sold nearly as well. As Metzinger is a populist hack, and selling books is his primary goal, he needs to keep his "work" as provocative as possible.
(If I've made any mistakes here, please point them out. It's been a while since I picked up that steaming pile and only skimmed over a few bits for a refresher.)
t. Anyway, I never said you were being fooled about being conscious, that was your statement. I said consciousness is an illusion.
Which is nonsense. That's why I pointed it out. Clearly, you're using the term consciousness in a way that... well, no one else does. As I said before, perception is not consciousness.
To say that consciousness is an illusion is to say that I'm being fooled into believing that I'm conscious. How could it be an illusion otherwise? To be fooled into thinking that I'm conscious necessitates that I believe that I'm conscious. To believe that I'm conscious necessitates that I be conscious. Do you see the problem? It's pretty clear that I can't be mistaken about my own consciousness -- that goes back to Descartes, which is why I brought him up in the first place!
Why are you wasting your time writing these posts if all you're going to do is insult me and tell me I'm wrong? You could at least tell me WHY you believe I'm wrong.
I tired -- I have no idea how to break down something so simple in such a way that I can get you to understand it.
Anyhow, the problem seems to be the language we're using -- and you seem to be confusing perception with consciousness. I honestly don't know how you manged it, but it's pretty clear that you've conflated the two.
Well, at least I'm not the only one you look down on.
I do look down on clowns like Dennett and Metzinger -- they're crooks who, because they can't contribute anything of value, cash in on the worst kind of populist nonsense. I don't look down on you. Despite my confrontational tone, I really do want you to understand. If I thought you were incapable, I wouldn't bother. I could be less of a jerk about it, sure, but then how would you know you were on the internet?:)
Why don't you take another stab at it? Define conscious as you're using it and explain why you think that that is an illusion.
else this is the first 3D javascript game ever that runs acceptably!
According to other posters (I haven't checked) it doesn't use canvas. It runs pretty good if you consider that.
There are zillions of other 3d games that use canvas with significantly better performance. If you count games that use webgl canvas, you'll find quite a few very impressive 3d games written in javascript.
It's not the language, it's the developers. Last year, just for fun, I wrote a Wolfenstein 3d style raycaster (with sprite support, and all the extras, even used the graphics from Wolf3d) in javascript. It ran smooth as silk even on the browser in my old BB OS6 phone. Not that I did anything special to optimize it or anything, just a simple by-the-book implementation.
I figure the developers had to go out of their way screw this up. Their version runs like shit.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that syntax alone is insufficient for semantics. But I also believe that semantics can be implemented computationally.
You're clearly quite confused...
I'm not, now, trying to address that issue. I'm saying that the CRA also does not address that issue
Really? The whole point of the illustration (the room, paper, etc.) is to help explain/bolster the assertion that syntax is insufficient for semantics. You're confusing the example for the claim. Hence, you fall under #2 above.
I do view the mind as fundamentally computational, but not because Searle's argument is confused.
You have that backwards. Searle's argument isn't confused, you're confused about Searle's argument.
therefore you appear to be tarring all motorcyclists with the same brush due to past encounters with moronic bikers.
Indeed, I am.
Someday, if I encounter an attentive and responsible motorcyclist, I'll surely regret making that post.
As a motorcyclist that has to contend with car drivers paying insufficient attention to the road on a daily basis, I have to state that the driver should have been penalised much more severely for his actions.
As a cager that has to contend with motorcyclists paying insufficient attention to the road on a daily basis, I have to state the the driver did us all a service by removing two dangerous hazards from the road.
I pay a great deal of attention to motorcycles when I drive -- though for my own protection. Motorcyclists seem to do incredibly stupid and dangerous things every time they're around me.
Just a few days ago, for example, some moron on a motorcycle decided to pass me on the right (the shoulder, not a different lane) while I was making a right turn on to a busy highway. Had I not expected him to do something incredibly stupid when I saw him behind me, I'd have run right in to him. (What's worse, he shouted some obscenity at me as he drove past, as though it was my fault he was putting his life and my fender unnecessarily at risk.)
I've generally heard (and used) the word accident to describe pretty much any collision other than one where the driver was deliberately aiming to hit someone.
I've seen "deliberately caused an accident" a few times, as absurd as it sounds.
While not directly addressing the Chinese Room, it is an empirical example of robots understanding a language. They are not programmed with knowledge of the language
You've got to be kidding me? I don't think you understand what empirical means, nor what the CRA is actually aimed at!
Anyhow, you're right -- I didn't even read the article! Still, I knew I was perfectly safe in denying that it adequately addressed Searle -- We'd all have heard about it if it did!
Anyhow, what your robots don't do is anything like understanding at all. While it's fun to attribute intentional states to them, they're still doing nothing more than mindless symbol shuffling. Any semantic content you attribute to their "words" is purely extrinsic.
Ah
I contend that you can not draw the conclusion you do from the earlier split-brain study (or others like it). That is, the evidence is insufficient to justify such a strong claim -- especially in light of the other behavioral evidence that stands in direct contradiction. Similarly, Libet-style studies, while useful, can't justify the strong conclusions drawn on either empirical or rational grounds (the empirical claim is obvious, but the rational claim is pretty broad. I don't know that I can defend it on an internet forum in my spare time.)
Anyhow, what matters here is that, baring over-reaching conclusions, it doesn't actually offer us anything terribly new save a neuroscience perspective. (I'll direct you to work by and with Jacoby / opposition procedures / in contrast to other work in automaticity by folks like Bargh.) Lavazza and De Caro called the state of things "Intellectually interesting but methodologically confused" (probably not an exact quote, I'd need to dig the paper out.)
Really, what i'm objecting to is the bold, sweeping, claims from AI and Neuroscience camps that are not supported by the evidence, and often stand in opposition to strong evidence to the contrary! (Often from related fields. Despite being highly interdisciplinary areas, there isn't very good communication between them. Unfortunately, the only person I know of that has surveyed researchers is Imants Baruss, and not recently. Though he does offer us some explanation for the divide, I really rather someone else repeated his '94 study with a larger group.)
Ah, but it is a magical explanation. Saying "it just happens" offers you nothing over saying "god does it".
It also doesn't address the claim at issue: that syntax is insufficient for semantics.
Believe in your magical computation fairy, I'll stick with Searle: whatever the brain does that causes consciousness, it can not be computation alone.
. I cited it as evidence of the conclusion, and implied that, given the new evidence, you can look at the earlier study with split-brain studies under a new light
I'm not seeing the connection between the two? What are you trying to say?
Doug Hofstadter refutes it by pointing out that no human could ever perform the actions attributed to the human in the Chinese Room.
That would be #2 "Ignore the premise that the CR supports and pick on the illustration"
The point of the Turing test is that whether or not the machine is "really" intelligent does not matter
The Turning test is the "best you can do" with behavioralism. We had a fairly recent "cognitive revolution" in psychology due to the failures of behavioralism.
Turing set out to answer the question "Can Machines Think?" and this was his solution, from the best approach of his day, in dealing with the problem of other minds.
I do not believe that it is possible to put together these rules without relating the characters to real-world concepts, i. e. without making the person understand them.
Well, then you don't buy-in to computationalism, or I've misunderstoond your position.
The point is that syntax alone is insufficient for semantics.
The bits of paper, the room, the rule-book, and tortured subject in the room are completely irrelevant to the CRA.
HaHa!
I have that paper on my desk now (I pulled it out a few weeks ago). It's a mess.
One thing that was particularly telling is that lot's of very basic information, like the number of participants, is completely absent.
This is to say nothing of the massive problems in their methodology. (It's been criticized VERY heavily by other researchers.)
It made a splash in the popular press, but hasn't held up well at all under scrutiny.
Some fun facts about this pile of garbage: their "predictions" are accurate <60% of the time and their timings rely very heavily on untrained subject's introspective reporting.
Of course, the biggest point to be made is That paper has absolutely nothing to do with split-brain subjects.
I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence."
Not familiar with the field at all, are you?
Yeah, split-brain != split mind
Put down the pop-sci books and go check out the actual research. That particular conclusion isn't supported by the evidence at all.
Counter fail!
Most "refutations" of the CRA fall in to four camps:
1) Deny it outright and posit a magical explanation (Systems reply)
2) Ignore the premise that the CR supports and pick on the illustration (most of the others)
3) Slip semantic content in and hope no one notices (robot reply)
4) Pretend that a particular system is not equivalent to other computational systems (ANNs are somehow different from TMs)
As it stands now, no one has shown that syntactic content is sufficient for semantic content.
As a Hulu Plus user myself, I'd love to know how you skip the ads. I've never noticed the option.
This is a false dichotomy...
It's not a dichotomy, false or otherwise.
Commodore owned MOS by that point. I don't know when they officially changed things to CSG, but the chips were stamped MOS for as long as I remember.
Look, if you didn't want every stranger you encounter telling you how best to raise your child / how your approach is sure to turn your kids into psychopaths then why did you have them?
It's every childless asshat's responsibility to give you unsolicited parenting advice. How else would you know if your baby was too hot, too cold, has a developmental problem, or going to turn out gay / murder you in your sleep if you don't take away a particular toy.
After all, new parents *need* free advice, don't they?
but even he kind of surprised everyone out of the gate by greatly expanding Medicare.
If by "greatly expanding Medicare" you mean "gave the pharmaceutical industry an infinite supply of blank-checks" then yes.
I suppose my question is simply "Are consciousness and the self simply emergent phenomena?". It seems that they must be, as they seem to be the result of "simple" neurons and synapses.
That's the dominant thinking (emergentism & epiphenominalism) having replaced computationalist and reductionist approaches. It's still not very satisfactory, as you still end up with a bit of magic for the "and, poof, consciousness" part. That is, you get a "that" for free, but can't even begin to speak about the "how does". It doesn't seem to add much, it just gets of over a hurdle we could already see beyond. Further, those approaches don't do anything for the problem of downward causation save to ignore it completely. While tempting, without anything substantial for the "how does" it's ultimately just a bit of hand-waving.
I admit that my knowledge of philosophy is very limited, I have only dabbled in it by reading a few books. I'm a computational neuroscientist by day (vision), and this is what led me to Metzinger, since he claims that he is trying to reconcile philosophy with neuroscience.
Philosophy is an extraordinarily interdisciplinary activity. You'll find that its scope encompasses nearly every other field. That said, I don't see why there would ever need to be a reconciliation -- philosophy must always operate within the current understanding of applicable fields. (Of course, that knife can cut both ways, for example, computationalist approaches to strong AI were all but destroyed overnight after Searle's (in)famous 1980 paper.) The ultimate goal of philosophy is, after all, to stop being philosophy. That is, to provide a new and useful "frameworks" to promote the continued advancement of other disciplines, and occasionally spawn new ones.
When I was in grad school (oddly enough, not studying philosophy) I got a great piece of advice :"If you want to get a solid grounding in any unfamiliar discipline, work through the undergraduate textbooks." While I can't make any specific recommendations that aren't out-of-date, you may want to narrow things a bit to philosophy of mind after a quick walk-through of the cheapest general intro to philosophy text you can find to pickup some of the terminology (an Essentials guide or something like that) considering how broad the field is and its strong interdisciplinary nature.
Oh, and what do YOU think consciousness is? You've made many statements about what it is not, but haven't made any claims as to what it is.
In the introduction to The Astonishing Hypothesis (which turns out to be neither astonishing nor an hypothesis) Francis Crick flat-out refused to define consciousness -- even though the book deals exclusively with that topic! If a giant like Crick can't manage it, I'm in real trouble with your question. :)
Now, I may be an arrogant jerk, but I'm not so arrogant as to claim any serious answer to the question "what is consciousness". I can, however, offer you this much: when I talk about consciousness, I'm talking about, for the most part, subjective experience. The important question then, as far as I see it, is "how does subjective experience arise from brain processes".
I don't know what the answer will be, but I expect that any sufficient answer will come from the physicists -- and the emergence (or whatever) of consciousness will be a necessary consequence of some as-yet undiscovered bit of reality.
This may require a new metaphysics under which we can interpret the findings of the new physics, which have pushed us (nearly?) beyond our conceptual limits.
I don't agree that there is a guarantee that consciousness equates to existence. Descartes makes the assumption that he has a self, that it is conscious, and therefore he exists. One could argue that consciousness (whatever that constitutes) does not require, or imply, a self, but instead is a by-product of mechanical processes, such as the firing of neurons in the brain.
I actually didn't go that far. I stopped short of "ergo sum" as I didn't think it was relevant. Anyhow, I'm not sure I understand the nature of your objection. I also have no idea how you're using the word "existence". You suggest that emergentism as a possibility that would deny existence? If the mind is purely the result of physical processes, how does that in any way diminish the self? I don't need ghost to call "I" after all! I really don't follow your reasoning here.
Take, for instance, the "invisible hand" of economics. One could argue that it is consciously making decisions about how to efficiently allocate resources
That would be a particularly stupid thing to argue. We need not posit consciousness nor attribute free will to explain markets -- aside from a few useful analogies, such a position causes tons of problems without solving a single one.
Perhaps it is so with human consciousness. There is no global ego, determining what decisions a person will make. Rather, the global decisions are merely a result of the many individual neurons acting independently, or in local cooperation. Perhaps then, one can deconstruct conscious thought into the series of electric and chemical state of billions of neurons and synapses.
Okay, we're back to emergentism. Why not just say that?
I'll focus on Metzinger here as I'm assuming you're trying to pass along his ideas, yes?
Anyhow, what Metzinger ultimately does is, through reduction, deny the higher-level ontology. That's not very clear. He claims phenomenal experience of self is representational and, consequently, the self must be in "appearance only" (his words). The problem, of course, is that he inexplicably uses that to deny the subject of experience. That is, he denies the self by dismissing the phenomenal experience of the self as being, well, phenomenal. It's a bit of slight-of-hand. Pointing this out, you can see the "loop".
So how does he get away with it? Even granting his sense of self as distinct, it is clearly epistemic yet he makes it out to be ontological. He does the same with all perception and inexplicably conflates the sum of perception as consciousness. He's confused epistemology with ontology.
So, why does he bother? What was his goal? Metzinger does what I suspected you of doing earlier -- assuming that the self must necessarily be a transcendent entity, a soul. Which is silly, it isn't necessary at all to posit such an entity. (Oddly enough, Metzinger's self-model has quite a few problems avoiding dualism, which is hilarious as that is precisely what he seems out to destroy!) He would have done well to take a cue from Churchland rather than cling to a long-outdated classical concept of self.
That's the problem, isn't it? He equates "self" with "soul" and then declares (through a shockingly incoherent 700 pages) proclaims that the "self" doesn't exist. He's tilting at windmills ... and getting knocked off his horse.
Of course, had he written a book titled "There is no soul" it wouldn't have sold nearly as well. As Metzinger is a populist hack, and selling books is his primary goal, he needs to keep his "work" as provocative as possible.
(If I've made any mistakes here, please point them out. It's been a while since I picked up that steaming pile and only skimmed over a few bits for a refresher.)
t. Anyway, I never said you were being fooled about being conscious, that was your statement. I said consciousness is an illusion.
Which is nonsense. That's why I pointed it out. Clearly, you're using the term consciousness in a way that ... well, no one else does. As I said before, perception is not consciousness.
To say that consciousness is an illusion is to say that I'm being fooled into believing that I'm conscious. How could it be an illusion otherwise? To be fooled into thinking that I'm conscious necessitates that I believe that I'm conscious. To believe that I'm conscious necessitates that I be conscious. Do you see the problem? It's pretty clear that I can't be mistaken about my own consciousness -- that goes back to Descartes, which is why I brought him up in the first place!
Why are you wasting your time writing these posts if all you're going to do is insult me and tell me I'm wrong? You could at least tell me WHY you believe I'm wrong.
I tired -- I have no idea how to break down something so simple in such a way that I can get you to understand it.
Anyhow, the problem seems to be the language we're using -- and you seem to be confusing perception with consciousness. I honestly don't know how you manged it, but it's pretty clear that you've conflated the two.
Well, at least I'm not the only one you look down on.
I do look down on clowns like Dennett and Metzinger -- they're crooks who, because they can't contribute anything of value, cash in on the worst kind of populist nonsense. I don't look down on you. Despite my confrontational tone, I really do want you to understand. If I thought you were incapable, I wouldn't bother. I could be less of a jerk about it, sure, but then how would you know you were on the internet? :)
Why don't you take another stab at it? Define conscious as you're using it and explain why you think that that is an illusion.
else this is the first 3D javascript game ever that runs acceptably!
According to other posters (I haven't checked) it doesn't use canvas. It runs pretty good if you consider that.
There are zillions of other 3d games that use canvas with significantly better performance. If you count games that use webgl canvas, you'll find quite a few very impressive 3d games written in javascript.
It's not the language, it's the developers. Last year, just for fun, I wrote a Wolfenstein 3d style raycaster (with sprite support, and all the extras, even used the graphics from Wolf3d) in javascript. It ran smooth as silk even on the browser in my old BB OS6 phone. Not that I did anything special to optimize it or anything, just a simple by-the-book implementation.
I figure the developers had to go out of their way screw this up. Their version runs like shit.