On 10 June 2014 04:09, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: They're "along for the ride" like temperature is alftr on the kinetic > energy of molecules. Before stat mech, heat was regarded as an immaterial > substance. It was explained by the motion of molecules; something that is > 3p observable but the explanation didn't make it vanish or make it illusory.
I would argue that, at the ontological level, the explanation *does indeed* make heat, or temperature, "illusory". The whole point of the reduction is to show that there could not, in principle, be any supernumerary something left unaccounted for by an explanation couched exclusively at the "primordial" level, whatever one takes that to be. Given that this is the specific goal of explanatory reduction, what we have here is a precise dis-analogy, in that there *is indeed* a disturbingly irreducible something left behind, or unaccounted for, in the case of consciousness: i.e. the 1p experience itself. By contrast, there is no need to grant the phenomena of temperature or heat any such supernumerary reality. One could indeed argue with some force that all such phenomena are themselves, in fine, specific artefacts, or useful fictions, of consciousness. That is, they are epistemologically or explanatorily, as distinct from ontologically, relevant. Primordial matter, as it were, in its doings, need take no account of such intermediate levels, which, by assumption, reduce without loss to some exhaustive set of primordial entities and relations. This was the entire point of the argument (focused on steps 7 and 8 of the UDA) that Liz excerpted: that there is a reduction/elimination impasse that needs somehow to be bridged by any theory seeking to reconcile consciousness and any primordial substratum (or, pace Bruno, hypostase) with which it is supposed to be correlated. And hence we have an unavoidable problem, up to this point, with theories based on "primordially-explanatory" material entities and processes. The problem is that, in the final analysis - and it is precisely the *final* analysis that we are considering here - such theories need take no account of any intermediate level of explanation in order to qualify as "theories of everything", since any phenomenon whatsoever, on this species of fundamental accounting, can always be reduced without loss to the basic physical activity of the system in question. David -- 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.
