On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 02:19:20PM +1300, LizR wrote: > On 6 February 2014 14:16, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I don't know. I suspect Liz was being a little overeager in > > > attributing 1p phenomena to the explanatory reach of the block > > universe, but it could be she's a closet eliminative materialist, in > > which case, yes, we have a fundamental disagreement on the ontology of > > consciousness. > > > > My position is that (since today has an R in it) I accept there is a > problem with consciousness supervening on matter, and hence no materialist > (physicalist?) theory can explain consciousness (except by claiming there > is no such thing). >
Actually, that is a considerably more antimaterialist stance than mine! I have no problem with supervenience, and indeed I would be surprised if supervenience were ever found to be false. But I do think that consciousness is unlikely to be explained through purely physical processes, hence I use the word emergent to describe it. > However, the *contents *of consciousness (sense impressions, memories) > *can*be attributed to a material structure interacting with a physical > environment, and those are due to processes that are embedded in space-time. > > > > > Nevertheless, within the framework of the block universe, there is no > > movement, as such, of any entity within spacetime. Of that, there is > > no disagreement. > > > > Agreed! All movement is in space; space-time is (according to special and > general relativity) a fixed 4D arena. > Yeah! 'nuff said. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
