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Cosmological proof of God's existence

There is another attitude to Godelian statements than declaring them undecidable and the system therefore incomplete. You can say instead that the statements are paraconsistent ie. both true and false and that the system is complete but inconsistent.

What does it mean for a human to "see the truth of a Godel statement" when the human could just as well decide that the statement is paraconsistent? Mathematical truth is somewhat conventional, somewhat social. Wittgenstein's notion of form of life was explicitly in reference to the way mathematicians generally do not argue about mathematical statements ie. they share a form of life. There is a social, conventional aspect of mathematics that is obscured by the hyper-rigorous, hyper-formal systematisations that became prevalent in the 20th century.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
All possible content of consciousness is a result of neural states in one form or another, not a result of anything 'outside'. We literally model the universe, building up layer after layer of meanings, such as colours, shapes, notes, size, movement, everything. We decide which of these to include in our consciousness according to various factors, primarily of course that which is picked up by our senses, but we're perfectly capable of running a full model with no external input at all.

Ultimately this is all we have access to, and for a long time it was the only thing we made theories about. It's only fairly recently that we've even started to consider things that we cannot model in consciousness and to think about them and conceptualise, for instance, waves we cannot see or spacetime we cannot unify in our consciousnesses. In the end we can only understand higher dimensions in the language of mathematics. Our brains are not capable of modelling them – we have evolved to be able to move around in the three dimensions of space that are appropriate to our scale, after all, and with time and space as separate categories, which is appropriate to the speeds at which we travel.

It is to the huge credit of humans, I think, that we've been able to start to glimpse what lies beyond our immediate perception, but we can only do this through abstraction. Thus we have moved from examination of what we perceive to consideration of what we cannot and to an abstract conceptualisation of it. But we're left in the same essential position. We can only consider our abstractions about, for instance, the electron. We cannot consider electrons directly. We can test how well our abstractions fit through collecting data, but that data is only ever more than noise once we have applied our meanings to it, whether through neural processing to produce conscious images, or through the processing of our abstractions. It is the results of that processing, and only those results, that we can look at.
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When you talk about having a model of the universe that either is or is not affected by something from 'outside', you are already invoking a model of the mind that needs justifying. The mind is not an object, or a space in which things happen, and you need a very good argument to suggest that we are somehow cut off from 'reality'. I think you are still operating under the Platonic spell of wanting proper knowledge to be based on some kind of direct access to capital-R-Reality.

You also slip in an implied distinction between me and my mind, between me and my perceptions, as if I were a little man inside my own head, looking at the images my mind has created. But that's entirely false - I AM my perceptions, I AM my mind (even this construction is misleading - I am not an object called a mind). Having - or rather, being - a model of the universe constructed from sense-data is what counts as perceiving and knowing.
 
'I am my mind'. Yes.

'I am my perceptions'. Not quite.

What are your perceptions? When do you perceive them?

The contents of consciousness are all after the fact – we act and make our decisions pre-consciously. If you think of consciousness as the first layer of memory, as an after-the-fact report of what is happening, the story of ourselves that we will tell ourselves, the idea that we 'look at ourselves' becomes less strange.

I think it is useful to think here of other animals and how different their conscious representation will be. Even in the visual field, they will attach very different meanings to their sensory input, with different ideas about where objects begin and end. Even such a thing as face recognition. Your cat will look at your face and recognise it as a face – many animals are primed to respond to two eyes and a nose as a face – but he won't recognise your face. Even some humans, with prosopagnosia, cannot do that.

Think then of a pigeon trapped in a room that crashes again and again into a closed window when there is an open one just along the way. That pigeon literally does not see the glass. To its mind, within its meanings, there is no such thing as see-through solid. And it is incapable of learning that new category – we all have our cognitive limitations, and this is one of the pigeon's. So it flies again and again at the hole in the wall, only to hit an invisible force field – except that the poor old pigeon cannot conceptualise an invisible force field; it is left dazed and confused and none the wiser by each failed attempt to fly through the hole.

The only sensible way to look at this situation, I think, is to consider that we are navigating our way through the world by examining the meanings we produce in response to sensory input. We don't examine the sensory input itself. The meanings are attached before we perceive them. Our perceptions would be no use to us otherwise. To labour the point slightly, when you meet someone you know, as they first see you, they see you already as Santino, you present yourself in their consciousness already as you – that meaning has already been attached to the image, but it is an internally generated meaning, and it is quite possible to create such meanings that have no correspondence to anything external – this is what we do when we are deluded, when we dream, when we k-hole!
 
littlebabyjesus said:
'I am my mind'. Yes.

'I am my perceptions'. Not quite.

What are your perceptions? When do you perceive them?

The contents of consciousness are all after the fact – we act and make our decisions pre-consciously. If you think of consciousness as the first layer of memory, as an after-the-fact report of what is happening, the story of ourselves that we will tell ourselves, the idea that we 'look at ourselves' becomes less strange.

I think it is useful to think here of other animals and how different their conscious representation will be. Even in the visual field, they will attach very different meanings to their sensory input, with different ideas about where objects begin and end. Even such a thing as face recognition. Your cat will look at your face and recognise it as a face – many animals are primed to respond to two eyes and a nose as a face – but he won't recognise your face. Even some humans, with prosopagnosia, cannot do that.

Think then of a pigeon trapped in a room that crashes again and again into a closed window when there is an open one just along the way. That pigeon literally does not see the glass. To its mind, within its meanings, there is no such thing as see-through solid. And it is incapable of learning that new category – we all have our cognitive limitations, and this is one of the pigeon's. So it flies again and again at the hole in the wall, only to hit an invisible force field – except that the poor old pigeon cannot conceptualise an invisible force field; it is left dazed and confused and none the wiser by each failed attempt to fly through the hole.

The only sensible way to look at this situation, I think, is to consider that we are navigating our way through the world by examining the meanings we produce in response to sensory input. We don't examine the sensory input itself. The meanings are attached before we perceive them. Our perceptions would be no use to us otherwise. To labour the point slightly, when you meet someone you know, as they first see you, they see you already as Santino, you present yourself in their consciousness already as you – that meaning has already been attached to the image, but it is an internally generated meaning, and it is quite possible to create such meanings that have no correspondence to anything external – this is what we do when we are deluded, when we dream, when we k-hole!
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I'm not quite sure what a lot of this has to do with whether we are trapped in our minds unaware of reality, but you are making the same mistake again. I don't perceive my perceptions, I perceive the world. It doesn't matter how long it takes, I perceive entities in such a way that I can navigate and manipulate them, which is really all that I require perception to do for me.

As for epiphenomenalism, I don't credit any of the recent arguments for it. Of course I make decisions before I am 'conscious' of them - that's what making a decision is. They don't spring from nowhere - that wouldn't be making a decision at all, it would be being a random number generator. (I think the phenemenology is misleading here too. Our language has this term 'decision', but it needn't. I think I'm right in saying that Homeric Greek doesn't have it.)
 
This is absolutely not epiphenomenalism. Conscious representation plays a crucial role in allowing us to act. In humans that is characterised by an ability to deliberate over what we represent to ourselves. In other animals, mammals such as cats, for instance, such representation is simply presented directly to the networks that coordinate movement. They are connected directly to this in us too, but we have an extended consciousness, a consciousness +. And it is the same neural networks involved in both cases. There isn't a separate 'consciousness neural network' – any relevant neuron can fire in the brain waves that produce consciousness.

I'm fine with not using the term decision. I actually think our conception that we 'decide' with something we call 'free will' is a misconception based on the way we represent our actions to ourselves – we actually place the 'decision' in the action where it ought to come before it.

Your first paragraph is misguided. It is ignoring the nature of that 'mind' that we can be aware of. In doing so, it is missing out a whole layer of processing that is needed for us to make sense of anything. You are left in the odd situation where identical experiences – a full delusion where nothing in consciousness is a reflection of anything external; and the same experience but where the contents of consciousness are a reflection of data coming in from outside – have to be characterised separately: one as direct perception of the outside, the other not.

As for Homeric Greek not having a word for decide, well, I would suggest the Jaynesian explanation of that: that is because Homeric Greeks represented their 'decisions' to themselves as the external voices of gods.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
This is absolutely not epiphenomenalism. Conscious representation plays a crucial role in allowing us to act. In humans that is characterised by an ability to deliberate over what we represent to ourselves. In other animals, mammals such as cats, for instance, such representation is simply presented directly to the networks that coordinate movement. They are connected directly to this in us too, but we have an extended consciousness, a consciousness +. And it is the same neural networks involved in both cases. There isn't a separate 'consciousness neural network' – any relevant neuron can fire in the brain waves that produce consciousness.

I'm fine with not using the term decision. I actually think our conception that we 'decide' with something we call 'free will' is a misconception based on the way we represent our actions to ourselves – we actually place the 'decision' in the action where it ought to come before it.

Your first paragraph is misguided. It is ignoring the nature of that 'mind' that we can be aware of. In doing so, it is missing out a whole layer of processing that is needed for us to make sense of anything. You are left in the odd situation where identical experiences – a full delusion where nothing in consciousness is a reflection of anything external; and the same experience but where the contents of consciousness are a reflection of data coming in from outside – have to be characterised separately: one as direct perception of the outside, the other not.
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It seems pretty obvious to me that they are separate things. One of them is a perception and the other isn't. Just like a painting can be a painting of something - a particular house, but an identical painting might just be made up, not a painting 'of' any actual thing in the world.
 
In that case, I think your objection is probably trivial in nature. We can't actually be sure whether or not our perceptions reflect something 'out there' or not. What they do do is present a story of what is happening, one to which we add a hell of a lot at all times in order to fill in the gaps of the incomplete information coming in, and one in which sense is made of that information in such a way that certain data may well be overridden. The information may come in to the senses, but we in fact perceive something different based on other information and what we expect to see, based on the heuristics and rules that we use in our computation in order to be able to compute fast enough.

EG: Is there really a triangle in the foreground obscuring parts of the background. It's pretty hard to stop yourself seeing it like this even when you know how it should be.

20+Awesome+Optical+Illusions+12.jpg


These two trees are actually the same size. But we have the rules of perspective in us – almost certainly evolved, not learnt – so in the presence of a vanishing point, the tree higher in the visual field is perceived as larger. It is given the meaning 'larger'. The information hitting the retina is merely a 2D image: we turn it into 3D in a creative, active process.

optical-illusion2.jpg



Here's quite a remarkable one that shows how we represent shadows. Squares A and B are the same colour.

500x_optical_illusion.jpg
 
Right. So how do we decide whether or not what we are perceiving is a reflection of something external to us?

By its utility, clearly, by the way that it enables us to go about our business.

That is very strong evidence, but it is indirect evidence. And we can be fooled.
 
Not at all. I'm talking about the nature of conscious representation, and the fact that it is representation. I think it is a mistake not to see it in this way.

As I said right at the start of this, it is best to think of it as the first layer of memory, as the story that we tell ourselves about what is happening. That it is a story that tries to reflect an external reality does not make it any less a story.
 
But it's a massive leap to go from pointing out that our perception is not just a pure record of the world that we uninvolvedly get (although in fact the whole thing about being able to perceive is being involved in the world), to suggesting that therefore it is just a story.
 
There's no 'just' about it. It's an astonishing feat of evolution.

I think you're still missing the crucial point – that we present to ourselves conscious representation with the meanings already attached.

We don't perceive light waves of different frequencies. We perceive colours. But it's not just obvious qualia such as colours that are a meaning we ourselves generate – it is literally everything: sticking to the visual field, it is shapes, curves, separate objects, 3D depth, movement, foreground/background, solidity... When we are aware of our perceptions, that of which we are aware is the internally generated picture, not something external to us.
 
Having an internally generated picture of the world IS BEING AWARE of something external. That's what perception is. What else could it be?
 
Santino said:
Having an internally generated picture of the world IS BEING AWARE of something external.
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Except when it isn't.

We're going in circles here now.

I've had more or less this same argument before with bhamgeezer. It seems that this is a point that philosophers get hung up on, and I don't quite understand why. In fact, it seems to me that it is a barrier that is stopping you from seeing what kind of thing our consciousness is.
 
Are you bothered by the fact that perception doesn't come with an internal guarantee of its relationship to something external?
 
I'm toe-dipping here, but I'm more inclined toward Santinos POV, if only because ultimately mathematics is a constructed language used to abstract the Real, and because of that it offers no sensory involvement.

I suspect that the actual tools for answering a statement like the Godel theorum (and indeed many similar questions) don't exist - and may never exist for humans in our current physiology because the way our brains are wired prevents it from happening. Look at this thread, for example - despite using modern tools, lbj's position can be reduced to another form of platonism. Despite 3000 years of thinking, we're still there with the first concious humans.

Of course there is always the exciting possibility of the New, and that there isn't a biological limitation to our ability to understand - either through 'natural' or man-made change - and that at some point a genuinely comprehensive language that manages to straddle both the internal and external world can offer these kinds of explanation.
 
Personally I find appealing the idea that those things that are given to us in perception are, in instances of veridical perception, those objects in the world. This perception is limited, in that it only reveals an aspect of the object, however I believe it is possible to claim the reason for a perception being veridical to be that we are presented with the object in itself, rather than some form of sense-datum. The traditional arguments from illusion and hallucination, simply fail in my opinion. The relationship between perception and propositional knowledge is such that it inclines me towards a view similar to a Kantian divide of the mind (sensibility / understanding) however those intuitions given by means of sensibility are infact objects, rather than a manifold of the synthesised elements of empirical intuition. My problem is, that it doesn't seem that I percieve facts, but rather have to perform a conceptual act to know any fact about the world. Perception then must be of some other type than the ordinary mental language of intentional states, if you're like me you can say thats because it presents the world. Otherwise you must ascribe this to some faculty of the mind.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Not at all. I'm talking about the nature of conscious representation, and the fact that it is representation. I think it is a mistake not to see it in this way.

As I said right at the start of this, it is best to think of it as the first layer of memory, as the story that we tell ourselves about what is happening. That it is a story that tries to reflect an external reality does not make it any less a story.
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littlebabyjesus said:
When we are aware of our perceptions, that of which we are aware is the internally generated picture, not something external to us.
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Sounds like Descartes.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

In epistemological contexts, Descartes underwrites the mind-better-known-than-body doctrine with methodic doubt. For example, while reflecting on his epistemic position in regards both to himself, and to the wax, the Second Meditation meditator says:

Surely my awareness of my own self is not merely much truer and more certain than my awareness of the wax, but also much more distinct and evident. For if I judge that the wax exists from the fact that I see it, clearly this same fact entails much more evidently that I myself also exist. It is possible that what I see is not really the wax; it is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything. But when I see, or think I see (I am not here distinguishing the two), it is simply not possible that I who am now thinking am not something. (Med. 2, AT 7:33)
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Other reasons motivate Descartes as well. The doctrine is closely allied with his commitment to a representational theory of sense perception. On his view of sense perception, our sense organs and nerves serve as literal mediating links in the perceptual chain: they stand between (both spatially and causally) external things themselves, and the brain events that occasion our perceptual awareness (cf. Prin. 4:196). In veridical sensation, the immediate objects of sensory awareness are not external bodies themselves, nor are we immediately aware of states of our sense organs or nerves. Rather, the immediate objects of awareness — whether in veridical sensation, or dreams — are the mind's ideas.
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Do you agree with that littlebabyjesus?
 
yield said:
Sounds like Descartes.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/
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Descartes would the first ever statement of two things. An internalist epistemology whereby there are facts about my experience I cannot be mistaken about, and the immediacy of our access to our perceptions (the possible reason for embracing the former). It is the latter that has lead generations of the philosophers to embrace the representational route. I think its fair to say, LBJ wouldn't consider a theory of mind that wasn't in some sense representational.
 
I don't agree with Descartes' dualism, no. Conscious representation doesn't require you to postulate dualism. You're doing the representing and you're the one being aware of that which you are representing. Simple feedback loops ought to be able to allow for that, not that such a formulation completely does away with the hard problem of consciousness.

It's very easy to slip into dualism and I try not to. Even apparently hard-headed AI people and neuroscientists fall into it. The idea that consciousness is somehow epiphenomenal, not central to the working of the brain at all, is itself dualist, but one in which one side of the dualism is entirely passive, unable to affect the other.
 
Thanks bhamgeezer.

littlebabyjesus said:
I don't agree with Descartes' dualism, no. Conscious representation doesn't require you to postulate dualism. You're doing the representing and you're the one being aware of that which you are representing. Simple feedback loops ought to be able to allow for that, not that such a formulation completely does away with the hard problem of consciousness.
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I think I get that. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps?

What are the "simple feedback loops" though and how do they break down subject-object dualism?
 
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