On 02 Feb 2014, at 23:26, LizR wrote:
On 3 February 2014 02:37, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
Chalmers knows he has put his finger on a stark contradiction - a
paradox in fact - and he is intellectually honest enough to
acknowledge its force. He shows that it should lead us to the
conclusion - per impossibile - that we ourselves are in effect
merely zombies or physical puppets.
Which is exactly Daniel Dennett's viewpoint. He thinks we are indeed
"zombies" who merely think we have some extra magical property
called "consciousness" - but that this is just an "elan vital" and
will go the same way eventually.
If we are zombie, there is nothing wrong in enslaving and torturing
people.
Dennett eliminates consciousness, which should be the most undoubtable
truth we have access to, to save primitive matter and physicalism,
which relies only on a metaphysical assumption for which there has
been no evidence ever given (beyond assessing our local animal
intuition).
I find that grave. It is of the kind of denying crucial facts to keep
a pseudo-religion alive. It is not that much different from creationism.
Bruno
On days with an R in them, I suspect he's right...
To sum up: Your insight that sensory and physical categories of
representation appear to be "orthogonal" to each other is hardly
original; indeed it is the common point of departure for any theory
that seeks to make sense of the subject area. The peculiar virtue of
Bruno's approach (even considered simply as a bracing intellectual
tune-up) is that there are concepts naturally to hand in
computational theory that offer some hope of elucidating that
orthogonality in principle. They at least point in the direction of
how two apparently orthogonal categories can nonetheless be
synthesised in a third category that may plausibly be coterminous
with the phenomena of consciousness (in all their first-personal
indubitability). Furthermore they don't vitiate or do irreparable
violence to the lawful appearances of physics; rather they hold out
some hope of filtering these phenomena and those laws from some
plausible codification of "everything".
Yes, exactly. One day I hope to follow the entire argument and see
how far (or how little) of the way he has got to achieving that.
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