On Sunday, July 20, 2014 9:58:46 AM UTC-4, 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. 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? >
There is never going to be a viable theory to solve the hard problem which doesn't meet qualia halfway. As long as experiences are assumed to be effects rather than causes there will always be a gap between what we are defining theoretically and what actually exists experientially. In my own hypothesis, I try to explain how participatory aesthetic phenomena makes sense as the universal fundamental, from which other notions like physical structure and mechanical function are derived using symmetry and perspective. Craig > 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.
