[Part 2] Philosopher reacts to "Keith Frankish: What is Descartes' Prison?"

[@hiyoowihamainza949]

As a non-physicalist, you are my favourite physicalist. Agreed with most, if not all, you said here

[@onemorebrown]

Thanks, I appreciate that!

[@truthseeker2275]

37:25 - Reasons for why we need to jettison is it( phenomenal Consciousness in the way that it seems) is not because it leads to non- physicalism, rather it leads us down an explanatory dead end that says “yeah that'd be great but if we can't ...that doesn't mean we jettison the way that it seems / why to bother further?” - it blinds us to the pragmatic possibilities… If we do discover a pragmatic mechanism it may lead to great technological advances.

[@truthseeker2275]

Here’s a revised version of my text with improved grammar and clarity: --- From the idea that "you cannot get semantic information from syntactic information" (as proposed by Chomsky and Searle), it seems that semantic information-especially in Searle's view-closely relates to the so-called “mysterious mental qualities,” or the “what it is like” properties - semantic information is itself a so-called “mysterious mental quality”. Higher-order theories still represent syntactic structures out of which these “mysterious mental qualities” emerge, but the representations are themselves not the mechanism explaining how this happens. Considering that I wrote this in my second language with poor grammar and word order, then used GPT-4 to improve grammar and clarity, I would take this as prima facie evidence that you can indeed extract semantic information from syntactic information. Even though these neural networks are implemented on classical machines, like those Searle envisions in the Chinese Room, it is clear that a computational model emerges from the network that is not easily comprehensible. I believe that studying how semantic information emerges from syntactic information in neural networks could serve as a guide for how these “mysterious mental qualities” arise... although I’m not entirely convinced that it is fully comprehensible to us. --- This version maintains the original meaning while improving readability and grammar.