On 6/25/2014 11:27 AM, David Nyman wrote:
It exasperates me when people adduce phenomena such as temperature or life as analogous to consciousness, without noticing that the analogy is, at best, a half-truth. It is true - or at least plausible - that there might be some discoverable set of physical processes that could, in principle, be shown to be correlated with the conscious states of any physical system we deem to be conscious. But we are also forced to assume - ex hypothesi physicalism - that all such processes are "fully instantiated" entirely at the most basic level posited by the physical theory in question. This poses no problem whatsoever, in principle, for temperature, or life, or any other of the exhaustively 3p-describable levels "stacked" in a virtual hierarchy on the foundation of physics. It is of no import that any higher level is "eliminated" in such a reduction, because it is not, in the end, required to "do any work"; in fact the very success of the reduction is that such levels are revealed, in essence, as convenient fictions. It is uniquely in the case of consciousness that this approach becomes self-defeating, unless we are willing to allow the "convenient fiction" of consciousness itself to be eliminated with all the rest. But then, if we do so allow, the very phenomena on which we have been relying instantly vanish, like the Cheshire Cat, leaving not so much as a smile behind.
Note that I have not argued that the ability to 3p engineer consciousness will do anything to explain or diminish 1p conscious experience. I just predict it will become a peripheral fact that consciousness of kind x goes with physical processes or computations of type y.
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