On 6/25/2014 3:07 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 June 2014 22:01, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[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?
You mean reducible in explanation, but not eliminable in fact. Temperature is explained by
kinetic energy of molecules, but you can't eliminate temperature and keep kinetic energy
of molecules. There's a difference between eliminating in an explanation or description
and eliminating in fact.
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.
Or that all 3p describable phenomena can be reduced. Which is what I suppose. There may
remain 1p phenomena (qualia?) which are not explicitly part of the reductive description,
but which we suppose are still there because of the similarity of the 3p part to our 3p
part which is consistently correlated with our 1p part (i.e. the reason we don't believe
in p-zombies).
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
I think "without loss" is ambiguous. It could mean that in a simulation of the phenomena
we would not have to consider it (because it would arise from the lower level, e.g.
markets) or it could mean that it wouldn't occur.
Brent
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]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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.
