2009/8/27 Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com>: > Perhaps not, but it's just words. Materialists use "dualism" as a term > of abuse, and some materialists will call anyone who thinks a lot > about consciousness a dualist, while some of those who think a lot > about consciousness will do anything to avoid being called that.
Well, I don't think that it is just words, but it can be difficult to see this because of the heavy freight of association carried by the standard vocabulary. At root, if one doesn't intuit the 'personal' (in the most general sense - e.g. Bruno's sense of the 0-personal) as a) ontological and b) uniquely so, one is still unconsciously categorising in terms of Descartes' two substances, however the vocabulary masks this. But perhaps this is what you mean by "just words"? David > > 2009/8/27 David Nyman <david.ny...@gmail.com>: > >> There's something trickier here, too. When you say "unless you are >> the system", this masks an implicit - and dualistic - assumption in >> addition to PM monism. It is axiomatic that any properly monistic >> materialist account must hold all properties of a system to be >> extrinsic, and hence capable of *exhaustive* extrinsic formulation. >> IOW if it's not extrinsically describable, it doesn't exist in terms >> of PM. So what possible difference could it make, under this >> restriction, to 'be' the system? If the reply is that it makes just >> the somewhat epoch-making difference of conjuring up an otherwise >> unknowable world of qualitative experience, can we still lay claim to >> a monistic ontology, in any sense that doesn't beggar the term? > > Perhaps not, but it's just words. Materialists use "dualism" as a term > of abuse, and some materialists will call anyone who thinks a lot > about consciousness a dualist, while some of those who think a lot > about consciousness will do anything to avoid being called that. > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
