Posts

coherent objections to fine-tuning arguments

Here I will present an objection to the fine-tuning argument by putting it on a direct collision course with the Fermi Paradox. Objections to the fine-tuning argument: It is unclear how many different forms of life are possible given the known and unknown constants of Nature. The fine-tuning argument implicates that terrestrial life is the only one possible in the entire universe. We can't know how many different forms of life exists / existed in the universe. We don't know whether our own terrestrial form of life also exists / existed on a different planet. For the fine-tuning argument to be valid we have to prove the non-existence of life in the entire history of the universe other than on our planet. This turns a solution to the Fermi Paradox into a prerequisite to any fine-tuning argument. Sources: Definition of the fine-tuning argument: If the known constants of Nature were too different from what they are, "life as we know it" could not exist. Definition of the ...

The missing knowledge in Mary's room

Single source of computation fallacy  There is computation in the body on which the conscious mind doesn't have insight into and plays only an observer role.  E.g.: sympathetic nervous system, sensory signals triggering reflexes, nervous system triggering goosebumps, ...  The fallacy lies in the assumption that all processing is done by the conscious mind, which is caused by the mixture of our mind processing the actual signal plus the feedback signal of computation done in other systems in the body. This leads to mistaking both signals as the conscious processing of the mind. We are therefore being tricked and are unable to locate the computation of the parts we interpret as feelings or experience, which isn't the actual signal but the result of other systems' computations in the body. We simply have no conscious insight into other systems' processing. This leads to the conclusion that something other than computation is happening by seeing color...

Strongly emergent televisions

The Antenna Argument (Could the brain be an antenna for a yet-to-be-discovered spectrum?) Question : Doesn't a television with an antenna, a microphone, or an infrared telescope show strongly emergent properties?  None of the parts have access to the spectrums they can now observe and yet when put together they gain access to information coming from a completely different plane of reality previously not accessible to their parts.  A television without an antenna is just going to show noise, but with the antenna, it has access to previously inaccessible information, just like a computer with a Wifi antenna.  How do we know that the brain is not accessing a different spectrum than no other machine in the universe can? We don't have to stray away from the existing laws of physics to postulate that the brain is doing something undiscovered when it becomes conscious.  We have difficulty even understanding the most basic life forms, there is still a lot to be understood ab...

The missing knowledge in Marry's room

Here I will first compare Marry to a computer and the color of red to a program source code, then apply the idea of computational irreducibility to make an argument.   computational irreducibility :  Computations that cannot be sped up by means of any shortcut are called computationally irreducible. The principle of computational irreducibility says that the only way to determine the answer to a computationally irreducible question is to perform, or simulate, the  computation . Main question : What is the missing knowledge of Marry if she has complete knowledge of the color red and also herself? Short answer : The missing knowledge is the computationally irreducible execution of the program red on the system of Marry. Any execution of the program on the original Marry or any simulated Marry inevitably causes an experience of the color for the real or simulated model Marry. Without any version of Marry  necessarily  experiencing it, the knowledge is inaccessible,...