On 6/25/2014 4:08 PM, LizR wrote:
On 26 June 2014 10:58, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: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.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?
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