On 31 Jan 2014, at 01:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 31 January 2014 04:19, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't think there is a problem if consciousness is an
epiphenomenon.
Is it not that very idea which leads to the notion of zombie?
If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, eliminating it would change
nothing in
the 3p.
There can be no zombies if consciousness is epiphenomenal.
Why?
Equivalently, if consciousness is epiphenomenal we could say it does
not really exist and we are all zombies; but I think that's just
semantics, and misleading.
I think that is eliminativism.
I think epiphenomenalism is one step toward eliminativism.
If you start looking for consciousness being an extra thing with
(perhaps) its own separate causal efficacy, that's where problems
arise.
Dualism is a problem. Making consciousness epiphenomenal is not
satisfying,
and basically contradicted in the everyday life. It is because pain
is
unpleasant that we take anesthetic medicine.
The brain is obliged to "lie" at some (uncknown, crypted) level,
not for
consciousness (that it filters), but for pain and joy. That's
normal. If you
run toward the lion mouth, you lower the probability of surviving.
Epiphenomenalism does not eliminate consciousness, but it still
eliminate
conscience and persons.
I don't think it diminishes the significance of consciousness, but
maybe I just look at it differently.
There are altered state of consciousness where "you-hereby" is only a
window through which "you-there-above" contemplate and don't
participate. That might add meaning to "epiphenomenal", but to believe
that consciousness, conscience, free will have no role is just plainly
wrong at the level where we see the jaws of the predators.
With comp it seems to me that we don't have a problem here.
Consciousness is just phenomenal, a first person view from an
arithmetical phenomenon. It cannot be "epi" (meaning "on") something
which does not exist.
The "causally-explanatively close ontological reality" is the
arithmetical/computer-science truth. It is the relative consciousness/
dream which could be "epi" on arithmetic, except that here
phenomenology is enough. No need for epithings which actualize a
bizarre dualism at the bottom when an emergent dualism is not that
hard to explain (from numbers and computer science).
Arithmetical truth gives the truth about machines and their dreams,
and also the core physical appearance necessary to share deep dreams.
We can look if there are quantum computers there.
Bruno
With comp I think we avoid it, even if the solution will appear to
be very
Platonist, as truth, beauty, and universal values (mostly unknown)
will be
more "real" than their local terrestrial approximations through
primitively
physical brains and other interacting molecules like galaxies foam.
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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