On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > You seem to be reading a lot into my post.
Ha! Ya, once I got going I figured I'd just throw everything in there and see if any of it elicited any interesting feedback. > I never said that > consciousness is an illusion. In fact I didn't say anything about > consciousness at all. My post was about what makes an explanation a good > one and that being "ultimate" is historically not one of them. So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, nothing means anything. Things only have the "appearance" of meaning. In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations "good" and others "bad", that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. In such a reality if you predict an event that comes to pass, both your prediction AND the event were inevitable from the first instant of the universe, implicit in it's initial state plus the laws of physics. Looked at in a block-universe format: the first instant, you making the prediction, and the predicted event all coexist simultaneously. In this view, while your prediction was accurate, there's no reason for that...it's just the way things are in that block of reality. Scientific theories only describe this fact, they don't explain it. So what science deals in is descriptions. Not explanations. The feeling that something has been explained is an aspect of consciousness, not an aspect of reality (at least not reality as posited by physicalism). I don't think that this is usually made clear. And it seems like a subtle but important distinction, philosophically. So I take your point about the schoolmen. There aren't many practical applications for the idea that "things just are the way they are". But still it's an interesting piece of information, if true. But if physicalism is correct, then how useful are your "explanations" really? You *feel* as though it's useful to know about inflation and the CMB, but underneath your feelings, your constituent quarks and electrons are playing out the parts that were set for them by the initial state of the universe plus the laws that govern it's evolution. Maybe that initial state and the particular governing laws were set according to the rules of some larger multiverse...or maybe they just are what they are, for no reason. How about this: "Science is about observations. Philosophy is about clarity." I just want to be clear about the implications of the various narratives that are consistent with what we observe. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
