Do you know those 10-15 mentioned hard items? I agree with your following thoughts on the matter.
We have to seperate the mystical or spiritual from the physical, or determine for some reason that the physical is truly missing something, that there is something more than that is required for life/autonomy/feelings, but I dont think anyone is capable of showing that yet. So the question is, Is it good enough to act and think and reason as if you have experienced the feeling. James Ratcliff Eric Baum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Jiri> James, Frank Jackson (in "Epiphenomenal Qualia") defined qualia Jiri> as "...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but Jiri> also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of Jiri> purely physical information includes.. :-) One of the biggest problems with the philosophical literature, IMO, is that philosophers often fail to recognize that one can define various concepts in English in such a way that they make apparent syntactic and superficial semantic sense, which are nonetheless actually not meaningful. My usual favorite example is, the second before the big bang, a phrase which seems to make perfect intuitive sense, but according to most standard GR/cosmological models simply doesn't correspond to anything. This problem crops up in the mathematical literature sometimes too, but mathematicians are more effective about dealing with it. There is an old anecdote, I'm not sure of its veracity, of someone at Princeton defending his PhD in math, in which he had stated various definitions and proved various things about his class of objects, and someone attending (if memory serves it was said to be Milnor) proved on the spot the class was the null set. Jackson however makes an excellent foil. In What is Thought? I took a quote of his in which he says that 10 or 15 different specific sensations can not possibly be explained in a physicalist manner, and argue that each of them arises from exactly the programming one would expect evolution to generate. Jiri> Mark, >> VNA..can simulate *any* substrate. Jiri> I don't see any good reason for assuming that it would be Jiri> anything more than a zombie. Jiri> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ Zombie is another concept which seems to make perfect intuitive sense, but IMO is not actually well defined. If sensations correspond to the execution of certain code in a decision making program (the nature of the sensation depending on the coding) then I claim that everything about sensation and consciousness can be parsimoniously and naturally explained in a way consistent with everything we know about CS and physics and cognitive science and various other fields. But in this case, a zombie that makes the same decisions as a human would be evaluating similar code and would thus essentially have the same pain. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; _______________________________________ James Ratcliff - http://falazar.com Looking for something... --------------------------------- Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search that gives answers, not web links. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
