Barendregt on Consciousness: belief and hypothesis

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:YqgDdhS5lTQJ:ftp://ftp.cs.kun.nl/pub/CompMath.Found/belief_and_hypothesis.pdf&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

by brooksbp • 17 years ago

3 3 17 years ago

74.125.155.132

bkovitz• 17 years ago

"This is what I believe: to have consciousness, or rather to be conscious, and in spite of being sure of this, it should be considered as a proper belief, since one cannot formulate exactly what is meant by this, leave alone prove that it is so."

WTF!?

Eric Berne, founder of the bizarre 1960s psychotherapy called Transactional Analysis, had a name for that kind of writing: the Berkeley Subjunctive. "In the extreme case, the title reads, 'Some Introductory Remarks Concerning Factors Involved in Gathering Data Toward a Theory of...'—a very modest title indeed, since it is plain that it will take about two hundred years before the theory itself is ready for publication."

Is there any content on that page, beyond "Uhh, maybe consciousness exists and maybe it doesn't"?

yan• 17 years ago

That whole text is beautifully information-free.

brooksbp• 17 years ago

I believe you mean that it's fact-free. Information is the knowledge acquired through experience.

Disclaimer: If you don't see any value for a hypothesis deduced from something other than facts, don't click. I found it as yet another interesting read to keep me from falling asleep at my cube.

EDIT: Perhaps something of more interest (and facts): ftp://ftp.cs.kun.nl/pub/CompMath.Found/harvard.pdf

Barendregt on Consciousness: belief and hypothesis

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