On 2/3/2014 7:26 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 February 2014 12:06, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
If consciousness is epiphenomenal I don't see how that diminishes its
importance in any way, let alone eliminates it. It is consistent with
evolution since it is not an optional extra: if intelligence evolved
then consciousness had to evolve as a necessary side-effect. It is
also consistent with the world being causally closed and eliminates
the paradox that David Nyman sees.
Does it? You still haven't explained why bodies emit utterances that appear to refer to
this putative epiphenomenon. Or are you saying that they're not really emitting such
utterances or making such references? They're just physical systems going about their
lawful physical business, but somehow that evokes a physically-undetectable extra
something-or-other. And it's only in terms of this extra something-or-other that
utterances seem to exist that, in turn, only seem so to refer. Is that what it boils
down to?
My view is that it is not physically undetectable. We just don't know how to detect it
yet. In Bruno's theory a computer whose program is Lobian is conscious. How would we
detect that? By querying the computer. By studying it's program. Will we experience its
consciousness...No. But we don't measure the chaotic molecular motions we call
temperature either, we infer it from other measurements using a theoretical model to
relate the two.
Brent
By the way, I'm not really sure what the term epiphenomenon is supposed to convey in
this context. Is it indeed supposed to be a sort of one-way dualism in which, as I
suggest above, a genuinely novel something-or-other is evoked by physical behaviour but
cannot reciprocally affect it (and so cannot be detectable by it). Or is it really a
form of cryptic eliminativism in which, in the final analysis, there is no additional
something-or-other at all?
David
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