On 26 June 2014 09:01, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >
Indeed it's already a fact, as any drug (or brain scan operator) user can tell you. But as you say this makes no inroads into explaining how consciousness arises or what it is. -- 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.
