MYSTERIANIE W FILOZOFII

 MYSTERIANIE W FILOZOFII

Spośród tego, co napisał Martin Gardner na temat Douglasa Hofstadtera, zgadzam się może z 50%, ale to ważne 50%. A gdzie się nie zgadzam. Uważam, że zjawisko wolnej woli da się wyjaśnić. To po pierwsze. Na zasadzie miękkiego determinizmu, może z pewnymi modyfikacjami na przykład w stylu Hofstadtera. No i druga sprawa, wbrew na przykład Chomsky'emu, nie widzę wyraźnej granicy między zwierzętami a człowiekiem pod względem światomości. Nie wiem, czy mam prawo nazywać się kartezjaninem.

Natomiast mój kartezjanizm ujawnia się w podejściu do mind-body problem. Taki sam dylemat psychofizyczny dotyczy też wielu zwierząt i to nie tylko wyższych ssaków, ale i ośmiornicy, o której książkę napisał Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Co do Hofstadtera, to jego książką się kiedyś zaczytywałem. Teraz myślę, że jego książka jest najpierw bardzo podgrzana, bo proponuje ciekawą eksplikację świadomości jako 'dziwnej pętli", koniec końców dochodzi do wniosku, że świadomość jest iluzją, jeśli ją widzieć, gdzieś poza światem materialnym.

Te notatki piszę trochę na swój użytek. Wiem, że są niezrozumiałe.

Natomiast następujący cytat jest ciekawy. Nie ginie "duch w filozofii analitycznej

Let me spread my cards on the table. I belong to a small group of thinkers called the “mysterians”. It includes such philosophers as Searle (he is the scoundrel of Hofstadter’s book), Thomas Nagel,

Colin McGinn, Jerry Fodor, also Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, and a few others.

We share a conviction that no philosopher or scientist living today has the foggiest notion of how consciousness, and its inseparable companion free will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material

brain. It is impossible to imagine being aware we exist without having some free will, if only the ability to blink or to decide what to think about next.

It is equally impossible to imagine having free will without being at least partly conscious.

In dreams one is dimly conscious but usually without free will. Vivid out-of-body dreams are exceptions. Many decades ago, when I was for a short time taking tranquilizers, I was fully aware in out-of-body dreams that I was dreaming, but could make genuine decisions. In one dream, when I was in a strange house, I wondered if I could produce a loud noise. I picked up a heavy object and flung it against a mirror. The glass shattered with a crash

that woke me. In another OOB dream I lifted a burning cigar from an ashtray, and held it to my nose to see if I could smell it. I could.

We mysterians are persuaded that no computer of the sort we know how to build—that is, one made with wires and switches—will ever cross a threshold to become aware of what it is doing. No

chess program, however advanced, will know it is playing chess anymore than a washing machine knows it is washing clothes. Today’s most powerful computers differ from an abacus only in their power to obey more complicated algorithms, to

twiddle ones and zeroes at incredible speeds.

A few mysterians believe that science, some glorious day, will discover the secret of consciousness. Penrose, for example, thinks the mystery may yield to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. I belong to a more radical wing. We believe it is the height of hubris to suppose that evolution has stopped improving brains. Although our DNA is almost identical to a chimpanzee’s, there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even to make

it understand the square root of 2. Surely there are truths as far beyond our grasp as our grasp is beyond that of a cow.

Why is our universe mathematically structured? Why does it, as Hawking recently put it, bother to exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do the butterflies in our brain—or should I say bats in our belfry—manage to produce the strange

loops of consciousness? There may be advanced life forms in Andromeda who know the answers. I sure don’t. Nor do

Hofstadter and Dennet. And neither do you.

https://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700852p.pdf