[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about any other thing.

E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.

I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic" precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define and use.

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.
> 
> If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
> 
> We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to understand consciousness.


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