Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Post 112.December 1, 2020
Is Consciousness An Illusion?
Is Reality an Interface?
Ironically, Dennett could not resist using the term “Design”, which is usually omitted from evolutionary theories. As Nagel interprets it : “Our user-illusions were not, like the little icons on the desktop screen, created by an intelligent interface designer. Nearly all of them—such as our images of people, their faces, voices, and actions, the perception of some things as delicious or comfortable and others as disgusting or dangerous—are the products of ‘bottom-up’ design”. The step-by-step evolutionary process “creates” its novelties from pre-existing entities, in-stead of from Nothing, as in the biblical creation story. Except, of course, for the original Singularity, postulated by science as the seed from which all things emerged. Hoffman also avoids speculating on the “intelligent interface designer”. But, even bottom-up evolution, like a computer program, must have a Programmer of some kind to specify the criteria for “Natural Selection” from an array of random variations. Materialists typically assign that creative role to unpredictable irrational chaotic Chance. Which is the modern version of ancient “Fate”: “Deterministic Chaos”7.
Nagel says that Dennett then goes on to show us “how to resist the intuitive tendency always to explain competence and design by intelligence”. But, even mindless statistical Fate has order at its heart. So, who determines the directional teleology of Natural Determinism? Who establishes the Initial Conditions? And who organized the progressive mechanism of Evolution? Happen-stance? Dennett uses Turing’s “thinking machine” as an analogy, because it “could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing what it was doing”. Yet, he forgets that the builders & programmers of computers, a> know what they are doing, b> have the intention to produce meaningful outputs, and c> have the comprehension to understand the product. So, even though the emergence of human awareness came only after millions of years of calculations, it must have been somehow pre-set in the initial conditions of the Big Bang, which emerged from the Singularity, like the execution of a program.
Again, ironically, the “mindless”, goal-less, blindly-groping, evolutionary algorithm has generated, on an insignificant planet, of an ordinary solar system, in a minor galaxy, the most complex and unnatural entity in the known universe : Human Culture — millions of “deluded” humans inter-connecting into something resembling a Global Mind. But, Nagel notes that, “an essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution, much of which, Dennett believes, is as uncomprehending as biological evolution” He then observes that Culture “is the territoryof what Richard Dawkins memorably christened ‘memes’’’. And Memes8 are a cultural analog to biological Genes, except that they seem to exist only in individual minds, until they are transmitted via symbols & words into other immaterial minds — not by insemination, but by imitation. Memes have no apparent function apart from Comprehension. Yet, no-one has tracked the evolutionary steps from a material Gene to an immaterial Meme. So, what do genes and memes have in common; what is the connection? In my thesis, the common denominator is EnFormAction : the power to Enform9. That’s why I say that the link, the “interface”, between material reality and immaterial ideality, is mundane Information.
Post 112 continued . . . click Next
Virtual Reality
Bottom - Up Design
The Enformationism thesis assumes that physical Evolution is an example of “bottom-up design”. By that I mean, it’s like a computer program, which was designed by an intentional programmer to “compute” the answer to an open question. For instance, the question “why create a world from scratch?” does not answer itself. Instead, the meaning-defining solution to “X=?” is the ultimate goal of the program. So, it must be computed from initial conditions. In other words, the unknown X of the equation is the reason for asking “why?”. If the Programmer already knew the answer, there would be no need to run the program. The question might be something like : “what would happen if . . . . “ Since it’s an open-ended (creative) question, the solution can only come at the teleological End of the creative process. Unlike top-down design, where the goal is known in advance, bottom-up design is a heuristic search for one of many possible outcomes.
7. Deterministic Chaos : “though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior follows a unique evolution and is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, . . .” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
8. Memes : Genes are enformed matter that can be copied from one physical body to another. But Memes are a form of Information that can be copied metaphysically (mentally) from one mind to another mind.
10. Interface : The connection and interaction between hardware, software and the user.
Is Consciousness an Illusion? Dennett’s paradoxical position on Consciousness Thomas Nagel Philosopher of Law, Politics and Ethics
“Materialism remains a
widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory.”
“To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism : it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything” ___Thomas Nagel
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