On 2/2/2014 5:37 AM, David Nyman wrote:
Craig, nothing you have said so far diminishes by a single iota the significance of the paradox to your theory. It's not so easy to disarm it as insouciantly interpolating armfuls of non-sequiturs couched in an impenetrable private jargon. You quote Chalmers, but you consistently dodge (or perhaps don't really get) the point he is making. His analysis isn't merely that physics seems to make consciousness causally irrelevant, though that in itself would be daunting enough. The paradoxical entailment comes from confronting the stark realisation that, despite this, physically-instantiated bodies and brains (i.e. the appearances in terms of which we interact both with "ourselves" and with each other) continue to behave *as if* they were laying claim to such conscious phenomena. Furthermore, they apparently do so by means of a causally-closed mechanism that entails that they neither possess these phenomena nor could plausibly have any access to them.
But the "apparently" in the above is not apparent at all. One could just as well conclude that consciousness is a nomologically necessary aspect of the causally-close physics; that it's no more separable than is temperature from molecular motion.
Brent -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
