(January 25, 2023 at 12:25 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There's this fun line of argumentation in attention schema theory that speaks to both our armchair views and the possibility of inaccuracy in reports of phenomenal content. It leans in. We may not be aware of all The Science, but neither are we personally aware of the full details of the structure the model represents despite constant (alleged/reported) first hand experience as users or possessors of the thing. The zombies reports and our reports are both bound to be inaccurate, insomuch as a model of attention is relatively impoverished with respect to detail compared to the object of attention. The arm model contains information that is useful for arm control, but not all information about the arm. The arm is far richer in physical detail than the arm model..and so, this arm model like an attention model - they contend, is always an inaccurate representation of the mechanism of the arm or the mechanism of phenomenal content. It's purpose..it's function...it's behavior..it's structure...it's very nature... is, very simply, utility - which, if so, is a handy refutation of any argument that evolutionary biology simply can't account for the production or possession of said whatsit.
That we'd need to invoke gods or the supernatural. That, if it's true that either exists and were involved in producing phenomenal content or phenomenal reports, they're only incidentally true, and tertiarily involved. Ala, yeah, sure, lets propose that gods made this machine that works this way -well..okay, i'm saying I think it works this way - and we're not disagreeing about operation, we disagree about the point of manufacture. Let's say it's true that gods made it, and so evolutionary biology actually wasn't responsible for it. It still seems like the kind of utilitarian thing evolution could have effected if gods hadn't beaten it to the punch.
Here's the question I have. Would a god created phenomenal mechanism know more about the arm, be more accurate, than a physically or naturally created phenomenal mechanism?
Just to say, I've just read the wiki on that and it looks a very interesting theory... and from a different angle than usual it seems, seeminging top-down I guess; ie how can we account for what we do report about consciousness, what sort of information does the system have to model for that to be the case? And the case even for a hypothetical pz like you say. So yeah, just saying I think it looks very interesting for further reading
