On 1 February 2014 16:55, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
I get around that with perceptual relativity. When flying over a city, it > doesn't look like there are millions of conscious entities - not because > their behavior is limited to a set of rules, but because your vantage point > amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame. By modulating > frequency and scale, perceptual histories diverge and alienate each other's > presence. The more extreme the alienation, the more the quality of what is > perceived appears mechanical. I don't see that you make your point here. How does "your vantage point amplifies the insensitivity of your perceptual frame" get around anything? ISTM rather that "the quality of what is perceived appears mechanical" because when placed under examination at any scale it can be observed to adhere to an unvarying and causally-closed set of rules (the ones we group under the heading of "physical"). In effect, it appears to be a "mechanism" at all scales. The inexorable progress of this analysis of physical appearances has so far trumped every historical attempt to interpolate novel "top-down" rules operating at other levels (spiritualism, vitalism, holism, dualism etc.). Comp, as I've said, at the least confronts the problem and offers the possible shape of a solution (but that alone, of course, doesn't guarantee its correctness). The value of any genuinely new insight (Relativity Theory, for example) is not in ignoring the previous theory (Newtonian mechanics in this case) but rather in providing a better explanation for the predictions of the old theory whilst simultaneously making new and surprising ones that turn out to match observation better. Consequently, if your theory is to prevail, it must be able to explain why appearance - and especially the appearance of "conscious" behaviour, not excluding your own - conforms to "physical" causation as precisely as we observe. This physical conformity of appearance is the reason that the theory cannot avoid the POPJ - in essence that we don't need, or seem even be able to apply, the notion of consciousness or sense to explain why the creatures that appear to us - including ourselves - make the claims to those phenomena that they do. What you say above doesn't suffice to address this formidable issue at all. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
