https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uhRhtFFhNzQ
This is a TED video of David Chalmers on the Hard Problem. His basic ideas will be pretty well known to most of us on this list although interestingly, he now seems less equivocal about panpsychism than in The Conscious Mind. He talks about the need for "crazy ideas" to tackle the Hard Problem. In this regard, he mentions Daniel Dennett's functionalism-is-everything and his his own formulation of information + panpsychism as examples of such crazy theories. However, IMHO these ideas simply aren't crazy enough to confront the Hardest part of the problem. Both seem blind to the crucial need to *reconcile* the 1p and 3p accounts, albeit they ignore it in opposite ways. Dennett's position is essentially to eliminate the 1p part, whereas panpsychism (with or without "information") just seems incoherent on the reconciliation. Chalmers seems to consider the outstanding problem in the latter case to be "structural mismatch" (i.e. physical things don't appear to be structured like mental things). He proposes that this might be solved by invoking "informational structure" as encoded in physical systems. However, ISTM that the really Hard problem (at least a priori) is not structural, but referential. IOW, how can phenomena that are (putatively) the mutual *referents* of the mind and the brain be shown, in some rigorous sense, to be equivalent, always assuming that one or the other isn't tacitly eliminated from the explanation? Indeed, if one accepts physics as a self-sufficient level of explanation, what purely 3p justification, or need, is there for claiming that a physical system "refers" at all, as distinct from what is already explained in terms of physical interaction? This is well captured by the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgement (POPJ). The POPJ asks: With reference to what theory (specifically and in detail) is it possible to reconcile the claim that utterances "about" mental phenomena are exhaustively reducible to purely physical processes, with the parallel claim that such utterances refer to 1p phenomena that are not so reducible? Comp, of course, purports to have the theoretical resources to justify such a reconciliation. Any other contenders? 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.