arpruss / norms-and-forms

Norms and Forms book in progress
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Re: Consciousness & Function #4

Open paz-etc opened 1 year ago

paz-etc commented 1 year ago

Regarding chapter 6. I suspect it is not implausible to say that anything that experiences something "very much like" what we experience as consciousness requires something "very much like" a brain. Jettisoning the strict bivalence evades the absurda, and also better captures the seemingly obvious fact that none of our experience of consciousness is the same as one another's (and the differences in conscious experience across animal species, from intelligent to simple).

This qualitative freedom to put function on spectra would then seem to be a descriptive advantage and suit the mess of conscious experience rather nicely. So I was surprised at line 234, "There is thus reason to prefer the highest levels of specification." Why that preference? When it comes to things that are qualitatively fuzzy shouldn't we prefer fuzzy categorizations?

Bonus thing to ponder/utilize (not a critique): Reliability can be stratified, where a random wanderer on a toroid grid will surely find the goal cell in a finite time (depends on the grid size of course, but it can be surprisingly fast). Unreliable in one way, reliable in another. Sometimes "reliable" becomes inadvertently polysemous in this way.