On Tuesday, March 11, 2014 10:38:23 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > OK. Me too. But modern physics has a strong mathematical flavor, and > consciousness seems more to be an immaterial belief or knowledge than > something made of particles, so, if interested in the mind body problem, > the platonic perspective has some merit, especially taking into account the > failure of Aristotelian dualism. >
That's an interesting topic, to be sure. Does comp actually help at all to solve the hard problem? When I think about it qualia, I have five main questions that I'd want a philosophy of mind to propose answers for. 1. What are qualia made of? 2. Why do patterns of ions and neurotransmitters crossing bilipid membranes in certain regions of the brain correlate perfectly to qualia? 3. How is a quale related to what it is about, under normal circumstances? What about when a quale is caused by artificially stimulated neurons, dreams, hallucinations, sensory illusions, mistakes in thought or memory, etc? 4. How can qualia affect the brain's processes, such that we can act on their information and talk and write about them? 5. How could we know that belief in qualia is justified? How could our instinctive belief in qualia be developed by correct and reliable brain processes? Chalmers' ideas, for example, involve answers to 1-3 that sound reasonable, but they stumble badly on 4-5. Comp and other mathematical Platonist ideas seem to me to give interesting answers to 2-4 but flub 1 and 5. -Gabe -- 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/d/optout.
