Stathis, Jason, and Brent, How about we set aside the idea of consciousness for a moment and look at what makes something a weapon. The materialist perspective would hold that it must be the capabilities of an object that makes it a weapon. If a pistol is a weapon, then anything that 'behaves like a pistol' is 'a weapon', therefore all weaponness must be predictable by the physical components of the pistol an it's interaction with it's ammunition. The firing pin hits the back of the cartridge and bang, the bullet fires out of the gun, therefore it is the interrelation between bullet-like objects and their acceleration out of barrel-like receptacles which makes it is a weapon, QED.
My perspective is that the distinction of being a weapon is not a literal, physical characteristic of a pistol, knife, recklessly driven automobile, or hospital pillow. There is no specific physical mechanism which causes 'weaponness'. Neither is the quality of being a weapon a magical dweomer conferred metaphysically on some objects and not others - that is the substance dualism category error. What I propose is that the idea of a weapon is neither a fixed Platonic principle, nor a relativistic 'illusion' or 'emergent property', but it is in fact an irreducibly semantic sensibility. Not just a passive label applied by the context, but an active, participatory sense- making. A weapon is that which can be used to easily amplify one's subjective motives to endanger someone or some thing into a literal threat. That does not mean that all objects are equally suited to be a weapon. You can hardly fight a war using only feathers in the same way that you can with artillery. Even though in the right hands, a feather pillow can be used to smother someone, it's not the hands themselves, or the pillow that are causing danger. It's the motive behind the hand, behind the brain. In the case of silicon vs human brains, you are talking swords and nuclear warheads. I know that your objection would be that there cannot be a motive separate from the brain, and I agree, on the physical level they are one and the same. If that were the case that there is no separation on any level however, I think that there would be no intermediate level of psychological experience at all, it would just be neurons computing the function of a pistol without any need to consider it anything other than what it is. Such a brain would have no use for categorical labels like 'weapon', or any labels for that matter. A pistol is a metal machine, a pillow is a feather machine, etc. This is where it gets into inertial frames. Perception and relativity rely upon persistent phenomenology which relates within one context but not as much in others. It's both bottom up and top down so the pistol lets you shoot intentionally, but the pistol also can result in someone being shot unintentionally. In this example, we are talking about the world as it appears from our perspective, so that how we appear from the world's perspective (neurology) is a different frame of reference (really the opposite side of the same frame of reference) and therefore an obstacle to understanding the relation of subject to object, and mind to matter. From the perspective of our subjective experience, neurology is a distant and poorly understood phenomena. >From the neurological perspective, our qualia are equally distant, connected through correlation rather than causality. Craig -- 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.
