On 17 February 2014 08:39, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 2/16/2014 5:14 PM, David Nyman wrote: > > On 17 February 2014 00:12, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > >> I don't think so. We know where the values of the Mars Rover are encoded >> and how they affect its behavior and we know how we could change them. >> That's about as good as reductionism gets. > > > But now aren't you just substituting value as an epiphenomenon of physics in > place of consciousness? Stathis could just as easily say that this was > merely a manner of speaking and whatever occurs is simply a consequence of > physical causation. > > > I and I would agree with Stathis - except for the "merely". I think Bruno > was right when he observed that "epi" doesn't mean anything in this context. > Stathis doesn't think that consciousness is separable from the physics; it's > just talking about the same thing at a different level. We don't call life > an epiphenomena of biochemistry. And I regard "meaning" in the same way, or > as Dennett calls it "the intentional stance".
I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biochemistry I should also say that life is. We don't say that, because while life is mysterious, it is not quite as mysterious as consciousness, and it seems to me that much of the philosophical discussion about consciousness occurs mainly because it seems mysterious. As a person somewhat familiar with biology I can see how life emerges from biochemistry, but I can't see how consciousness does in quite the same way. To put it differently, I can't imagine all the biochemistry being there but life absent, but I can imagine all the biochemistry being there but consciousness absent (though further reasoning may show that that to be impossible). But maybe that is just a failure of imagination. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
