On 6/25/2014 4:08 PM, LizR wrote:
On 26 June 2014 10:58, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 6/25/2014 3:07 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 June 2014 22:01, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> 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.
I must admit I can't see that personally. If temperature is, in fact, molecular kinetic
energy, then it doesn't actually exist at any level, it's just a convenient fiction, surely?
Why not say it's a convenient quantity. It's the average of some microscopic variables.
If the microscopic variables are reified, why not their average?
Brent
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