On 2 February 2014 19:48, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
What do you mean by "laying claim to conscious phenomena"? In what way does > a brain or body lay claim to conscious phenomena? Let me restate it then. Bodies, insofar as they are the manifestations with which we interact (own brains and bodies included) *appear* to be the source of any utterance (or thought, in our own case) whatsoever. This includes, therefore, *utterances and thoughts that lay claim to conscious phenomena*, as for example I am exemplifying in this very statement. Even if we take the view that it is we who are putting this construction on those manifestations, we can't ignore the fact that the causally-closed rules they appear to follow, at whatever scale, do not entail any aspect of consciousness to explain these utterances. Therefore, a fortiori, it must seem inexplicable how these utterances could make reference to phenomena which are completely absent from, and redundant in, their causal schema. Chalmers lays all this out quite explicitly in TCM and I think he may even have coined the rubric POPJ. He doesn't deviate, at least until his discussion of "information", from a canonical account of physical phenomena but it is important to see that it makes no essential difference to his argument whatever ultimate ontological basis we choose to assume. Hence in terms of a sensory-motive theory we are still confronted by the manifestation of a closed physical necessitation schema on which the stabilisation of our experience utterly relies. This schema makes no appeal whatsoever to any category of sense but nonetheless suffices completely to account for all bodily utterances laying claim to sensory appreciation. But of course we cannot believe this and hence we have the paradox. As Brent has remarked, it is still possible to hold on to the hope that the physical appearances, however much they appear to be exhaustive and causally closed, still conceal some truly unexpected nomological necessitation that will suffice to account for conscious phenomena, although the analogies he gives generally tend to elimination of the entire category. Chalmers spends a good deal of effort in TCM to show why he thinks that hope must be indefinitely deferred, unless completely novel "psycho-physical laws" can be discovered. There is little consensus on this, to say the least, but many people can't see how psycho-physical laws would constitute an adequate account of consciousness any more obviously than physical ones. I hope it is now clear what I mean by bodies laying claim to conscious phenomena. It is essentially the same argument deployed by Chalmers in TCM. 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 [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.
