On 2/3/2014 12:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 02 Feb 2014, at 20:31, meekerdb wrote:
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.
That analogy is limited. You can explain temperature from molecules cinetics by
remaining entirely in the 3p account. The mind-body problem is that if you can explain
the whole 3p of the 1p, then the mind seems having no role at all.
Which is analogous. You could explain the cooling of your coffee entirely in terms of
molecular motion without mentioning temperature. But you would not have eliminated
temperature.
Now with comp we take the mind seriously and can explain its necessity and role (like
with the hypostases), but we lost any ontic place for matter, so we lost primitive
physics, and we have to recover it by a statistics on the 1p brought by all computations.
It is not a problem (except for Aristotelian fundamentalists) because nobody has ever
provided evidences for primitive matter or physicalism. It is only a big assumption in
metaphysics.
I'd say it is a very small assumption. Matter is assumed, but nothing about it is assumed
except that it is independent of us and we can agree on it. It's like your idea of god:
it's just a place holder name for whatever physicist will use as fundamental in their
explanation. We could call it goar.
Brent
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