Some recent discussions have centred on the (putative) features of hierarchical-reductionist ontologies, and whether comp (whatever its intrinsic merits or deficiencies) should be considered as just another candidate theory in that category, This prompts me to consider what fundamental question a particular theory is designed to answer. Making this explicit may help us to see what other questions are, by the same token (and perhaps only implicitly), treated as subsidiary or, as it were, merely awaiting resolution in due course in terms of the central explanatory thrust.
I think it's fair to say that theories centred on an exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology seek to answer the question of "What are the fundamental entities and relations that underlie and constitute everything that exists and how did things get to be this way?". Even if this is a rather crude formulation, if questions such as these are deemed central and definitive, the issue of "How and why does it *appear* to us that things are this way?" becomes subsidiary and presumably awaits ultimate elucidation in the same terms. IOW, both "we" and "what appears to us" will in the end be explained, exhaustively, as composite phenomena in a physical hierarchy that can be reduced without loss to the basic entities and relations. ISTM however that comp asks different questions from the outset: "How and why does it APPEAR that certain entities and relations constitute everything that exists, and what the hell is "appearance" anyway?" To be sure, in order to deal with such questions comp has to begin with "How does everything get to be this way?", but the crucial distinction is that "basic physical entities and relations" are, in this mode of question-and-answer, a complex by-product of the logic of appearance, and the subjects of said appearance. A further consequence is that it is no longer obvious that subjects, or what appears to them, are reducible in any straightforward way, either to physical entities and relations, or to the original first-order combinatorial ontology. It is true that we can pose questions in the first way and still say that we are non-eliminative about consciousness. The problem though is that because we have already committed ourselves to an exhaustively reductive mode of explanation, we can't help consigning such first-person phenomena to a subsidiary status, as an impenetrable mystery, an essentially irrelevant epiphenomenon, or some sort of weirdly-anomalous side-effect of basic physical activity. ISTM that this mode of question-and-answer, from the outset, essentially can't escape trivialising, ignoring, or rendering unanswerable in principle, the role of the first person. Consequently, I can't avoid the suspicion that, despite its phenomenal success (pun intended) it can't, in the end, be the most helpful way of asking the most fundamental questions. Whatever its independent merits or demerits, and its inherent complexity, ISTM that comp gets closer to a way of posing questions that might in the end yield more satisfying and complete answers. As it happens, in so doing it rehabilitates earlier attempts in the tradition stemming from the Greeks and Indians, and from later exemplars such as Berkeley and Kant. And perhaps most interestingly, its central motivation originates in, and simultaneously strikes at the heart of, the tacit assumption of its rivals that perception and cognition are (somehow) second-order relational phenomena attached to some putative "virtual level" of an exhaustively "material" reduction. 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.
