On 28 Apr 2012, at 03:05, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/27/2012 5:41 PM, John Mikes wrote:
David, IZ, Brent:
do you have some fairly acceptable (for whom?) ID
"Intelligent Design"??
about that darn 'vita'?
That would ease the problem to accept or reject EV. Some people
'ride' the Terrestrial Biosphere churning of C-based molecules
(some add: M&R = metabolism and repair) but there may be more to
it. And if there IS more to it, there may be special circumstances
(even qualia?) to get into it (EV?)
Maybe, but why suppose there's more to it before exhausting the
model that has worked so well for so long?
Because by construction it eliminates consciousness.
When biologists eliminate the elan vital, by using chemistry instead,
there is a real progress because they eliminate a spurious linguistic
gap-type explanation by an explanation from conceptually more simple
notions.
But consciousness has never been proposed as an explanation of
something. On the contrary, it is more the fact that we search an
explanation for.
Biologist have not make life disappearing, they have truly explained
the phenomenon, from other well accepted phenomena.
But saying that AI or brain research can dispose of the notion of
consciousness is just eliminitivism of a fact.
And this non-explanation relies on another sort of spurious "elan
vital"-like notion: primitive matter/physicalism.
Now comp explain both facts: the appearance of conscious
(incommunicable but knowable first person) truth and the appearance of
the beliefs in primitive matter, and this without need to postulate
more than what we already believe in (addition and multiplication) of
numbers.
So, if we apply your logic, it seems clear that the spurious idea is
more the idea of physicalism and materialism we should eliminate,
instead of consciousness, which no conscious being can eliminated
without lying to him/herself.
Brent
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with
danger. This is the disease of curiosity…. It is this which draws
us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which
are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which
man should not wish to learn.” -- St. Augustine
In other words: don't ask. St. Augustine did not read Plotinus enough.
His thought here is a bit like what many popes said: science is the
devil.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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