On naturalism and consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

And why-- what about such a mechanical system that tells you there's a "belief" there? Blow up this mechanical system to proportions bigger than us, so that you can physically walk into this system and see the "gears cranking". Could you point to the "belief"?

-And why, what? You told me that there was a "belief" there when you defined what a belief -was-. Yes, I can make a system large enough for you to see the gears working, and point to such a thing. The belief in question can be generated with a Nand gate (in multiple ways).

Yes, p has that meaning because *I* - the conscious agent - gave it that meaning. The project here is for particles to inherently posses beliefs on their own.

I think the request is a bit outlandish, mostly due to the general sense of your usage of the term particle. I'm showing you that a belief can be -reduced- to particles. Whether or not a particular particle "possessed" a belief- as you defined it, would be specific to the composition of the particle (it's not impossible, so long as the particle can express two distinct states in any way it could be a gate). Tell me the composition of the particle you want to discuss and I'll see if I can think of a way it would be capable of doing useful work (wewt, an engineering challenge).

But again, computers are given something by us and then after thousands - possibly millions - of basic calculations, they causally spit out an output, of which *we* give meaning to. So again, can you point to the belief within the mechanical system? The only times I can point to it are before and after causal relations, within the mind of the conscious agent.

Sure, we manipulate the input - but it doesn't -have- to be "us" manipulating the inputs of that system (which was the point my black box pv/scale NAND was trying to explain). We could accept both (explanations) as true. You do it without the particles - somehow-....but it can be done with the particles, -this is how-.

I think that the reason we're having a disconnect here is that you have some undeclared ideas about what a belief is. As you put it, a belief is what I would call either an input or an output. A declaration of a particular state.

Some fun stuff:

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The particular statement in question could go like so -using only two Nands-, you'd have to add a Nand for every spoon you ever saw, but adding a Nand parellel to a Nand is simply extending the gate. It can be handled as a single gate, but you won't have the same function or depth of data, so I prefer to separate the gates)

Nand-1-\
-----------Nand-2-
Nand-1-/

(I'd drop an inverter after Nand-2-, personally, for reasons explained below)

In which:
"Nand-1-" is a gate with at least 3 inputs and one output.
Input 1 "Object"
Input 2 "Attribute-spoon-"
Input 3 "Attribute-curved-"

"Nand-2-" is a gate with (lets say 2) inputs and one output
Input 1 "output of Nand-1-A"
Input 2 "output of Nand-1-B"

The first series of Nand both describe and handle statements regarding wither or not an object is present, whether or not that object is a spoon, and whether or not that object is curved. Only when all three statements yield the output state described as "true" can we generate a statement by which to evaluate the contents of series 2.

Series 2 will not yield the output (which, in our example, means "spoons are curved - implying, for example, that "all" known spoons are curved) unless all parallel constructions of series 1 yield the proper output (which, in our example, means "this is a spoon and it is curved"

If any gate in series 1 does not yield the proper output, the output of series two would be the statement that "not all spoons are curved" - a negation of our original statement". We could add a Nor for the nuance "some spoons are curved", we could add another Nand for machine awareness- whether or not all of the gates are yielding the proper output when not in use (this gives us an idea of when a gate might not be functioning. An if in series can shut down non-functioning gates (implying that they don;t contain trustworthy information). And all of this machine architecture is very rudimentary memory. Only marginally more complicated we could add, an adder for "most spoons are curved" (this would be easier with an Or, but we can see how limited Or is in the wishy washy information..."most or some"- we require more specificity, eh?) or "this many spoons are curved" depending on what kind of power we want the overall output of the system to have. What kind of work it's capable of, and how we might use that work.

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It seems like my enthusiasm to discuss isn't what it used to be :| so I'm getting through things a lot slower since I came back. But it will be answered for sure

That's okay, I have a tendency to use ten words where one would suffice. You'll get to it when you get to it. I'll still be around. I might take awhile myself, end of season...bout to get busy.