On 27 April 2012 21:16, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > And the EV is supposed to be analgous to qualia? But that paralell > doens;t work. The EV is dismissable > because there was never prima facie evidence for it. > > > Then why was it widely believed to exist?...because somethings were alive > and other seemingly identical things weren't.
Peter and I are of course making the same point. I agree that, at the outset, "life" and "consciousness" display an appealing explanatory symmetry, in that we can seek an reductive account of both in terms of constituent processes. But that apparent symmetry fractures on closer analysis. The more that putatively "conscious processes" can be shown to be so reducible, the more this highlights the explanatory redundancy of the entire class of first-person phenomena. In the case of "life", it is surely obvious that we need anticipate no conceptual residue after explanatory reduction. But the troublesome resistance of first-personal phenomena to such reductive elimination is equally manifest to all who can suppress the urge to bolt for the denialist exit. Precisely because this point is indeed so obvious, and because I've never felt that you are personally of the eliminativist persuasion, I fail to understand why you persist in presenting the putative equivalence of these two concepts as though it were unproblematic. I'm puzzled as to exactly what is your point. Is it your hope that a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the physical correlates of conscious behaviour will somehow dissolve the presently intractable distinction between third and first-personal accounts of consciousness in some conceptually utterly novel way? Or do you anticipate that we might just settle for a sufficiently rich articulation of "conscious behaviours" as a closing of the conceptual account? David > On 4/27/2012 12:00 PM, 1Z wrote: > > On Apr 27, 7:13 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > We never explained where the elan vital was or where it came > > from. We just came up with a different kind of 'explanation'. > > And the EV is supposed to be analgous to qualia? But that paralell > doens;t work. The EV is dismissable > because there was never prima facie evidence for it. > > > Then why was it widely believed to exist?...because somethings were alive > and other seemingly identical things weren't. > > > However, qualia > are prima facie evidence for everything > else. I can;t just pretend that my pains don't hurt, etc. > > > We don't pretend things aren't alive either. > > Brent > > -- > 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. -- 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.
