On 20 Jul 2014, at 15:58, David Nyman wrote:
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.
Good point.
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.
I think so, once we understand that comp eliminates Aristotle primary
matter.
Few does, but then most still ignore the FPI.
Bruno
Any other contenders?
David
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