On 23 July 2014 18:25, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: You miss, and perhaps David's too (?), the fact that above a threshold of > relative complexity, the lower level is not relevant for the description of > the higher level. It would be like asking "why Obama has been elected?", > and getting back the answer: everything followed the SWE.
Hmm...Well, I originally suggested that the knower *couldn't* simply be reduced to computation or numbers, unlike the case of physical reducibility. In my view, the presence of a 1p knower is what "retrospectively" justifies realism about higher-level 3p structures with which the knower is to be associated. To see what I mean, let's assume that there is some putative ontology that can't in principle be used to justify the presence of such a knower. Any higher-level scenario conceived in terms of such an ontology is then vulnerable to a particularly pernicious species of "zombie reductionism". It isn't merely that the radical absence of first person-hood leaves in its wake nothing but zombies with 3p functional bodies but no "consciousness". It's much more radical than that. The zombie body is now radically lacking in "existence-for-itself". Consequently, the distinction between any such putative "body" and its ontological reduction is a differentiation without a difference. To put it another way, there is nobody present for whom it could represent a difference. I realise this may be difficult to accept, for example in the case of Deep Blue that you posed to me. However, imagine re-posing this case with respect to an ontology with which (let us assume) a knower could not *in principle* be associated. In that case there could be no effective distinction between "Deep Blue" and its physical reduction, since we have ruled out, by assumption, the possibility of persons to whom this could represent a difference. What might prevent us from seeing this is that we can't help imagining the proposed scenario from a God's-eye perspective. God then takes the role of the knower and "sees" that Deep Blue is still there. Thus we have unwittingly justified our ascription of "Deep Blue" to some aspect of the generalised ontology by "divine retrospection". 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.
