On 6/10/2014 1:07 AM, LizR wrote:
On 10 June 2014 16:52, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Yeah that's pretty close, although I'd say consciousness just occurs at a
different
level of description and is equally "real" at that level. The second law of
thermodynamics is "real" at the level of thermodynamics, even though it can
be seen
as implied by statistical mechanics. It is more general than any specific
statistical mechanics. I don't think p-zombies are possible, so
consciousness is a
necessary aspect of some kinds of physical processes.
So I guess that you think that consciousness is as real as the second law, which is (as
far as I know) an emergent property of the universe having been arranged in a special
way in the past (plus the laws of physics, although I imagine most varieties of physics
would give a version of the 2nd law, given a special arrangement of the constituents of
a universe).
So it isn't really, really, really real .... but it /is/ a good high level
approximation for -- er -- something.
I put "real" in scare quotes because ontologies are relative to theories, stories we tell
to describe the world. Since we don't even have a TOE, and if we did we couldn't know it
was right, we don't know what's "real". Further more, I'm not even sure that the
reductionist program of looking for what's most fundamental (in a TOE) and reifying it is
the right way to look at things. It leads to making strings or numbers, which we never
experience, "real" and everything we experience (on which we base or theories) "illusory".
I think this called the error of the misplaced concrete.
Brent
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