On 25 June 2014 22:01, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: 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.
As a matter of sociology, you may well be right. But that apart, why wouldn't such putative 3p "conscious processes" be as vulnerable to elimination (i.e. reducible without loss to some putative ur-physical basis) as temperature, computation, or any other physically-composite phenomenon? And, should they indeed be eliminable in this way, what does that bode for any 1p accompaniments? Note, please, that I am not staking any personal belief on the reductive assumptions as stated; I'm merely attempting to articulate them somewhat explicitly in order to discern what might, and what might not, be legitimately derivable from them. The principal assumption then is that all phenomena whatsoever can be reduced without loss to some "primitive" (i.e. assumptively irreducible) basis, in which process the higher levels are effectively eliminated. Equivalently, one might say it's bottom-up all the way down. As an analogy, in the human sphere, this would be the contention that all political or sociological phenomena whatsoever can be reduced without loss to the behaviour and relations of individual human beings (i.e. what Margaret Thatcher presumably intended by "there's no such thing as society"). 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.
