On 30 July 2014 09:03, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: I think (maybe pace David) that materialism explains well consciousness, by > using comp. The problem is that such explanation makes *matter* > incomprehensible.
Well I must confess I'm not entirely pacified yet. Surely the whole point is that if the second sentence is true it contradicts the first! If the assumption that materialism can use comp to explain consciousness in fact leads to the absurd conclusion you describe, then materialism *cannot* use comp to explain consciousness, well or otherwise. The trouble is, there are a lot of nuances that tend to obscure the logical steps of the argument, particularly in assumptions about the scope of "reasonable" explanation. Brent and others point to parallel accounts of neural activity and conscious self-reporting and ask "what more could be required in the way of explanation?". AUDA may indeed give a clue to the direction in which explanation could be extended, beyond ostensive parallelism of this kind, particularly with respect to the central logical puzzles of mutual reference between 1p and 3p regimes. But this would require us to relinquish any prior commitment to primitive materialist assumptions. My recent forays into thought experiment have been an attempt to articulate my own (still persisting) intuitions about the intrinsic limitations of reductionist explanation under strictly materialist assumptions (i.e. without either tacit or explicit reliance on supernumerary posits). ISTM that one of the problems in reaching any kind of stable agreement (or even disagreement) on these issues is equivocation over the terms of reference. Consequently I've tried to make my own view of the reductionist assumption clear: i.e. that explanation of phenomena at any level whatsoever can in principle be reduced without loss to accounts of the action of a finite class of "primitive" physical entities and relations. Of course, this tends to lead to disputation over the sense of "without loss", but I'll come to that in due course. Stated thus baldy and strictly eschewing equivocation, reductionism entails that it is misleading to consider any derivative phenomenon, above the level of the chosen explanatory basement, as having "independent existence". Strictly speaking (and strictness is essential for the succes of the argument) such phenomena are both explanatorily and ontologically dispensable. It's just that in extenso the proofs are a little longer! I've offered analogies in terms of such things as societies and football teams (you can easily supplement these with your own) in terms of which this consequence of reductionism is rather obvious. But for some reason it stops being "obvious" in the matter of matter itself. On reflection, the reason is not so elusive: i.e. we "directly experience" such higher-level phenomena in an unreduced form. Hence none of us (and that includes Professor Dennett) can avoid the fact of encountering, and discoursing in terms of, a "reality" in unreduced high-level terms, even though our "best" explanations actually rule out the other-than-metaphorically-independent significance of any such levels. If you doubt the degree of cognitive dissonance this engenders, consider the general tenor of disputes over "free will". This is the point at which the parallel with any other reductionist analogy breaks down. Nobody would seriously claim, beyond a manner of speaking, that football teams amount to anything other than the aggregate action of the persons that constitute them. But on the other hand almost everyone (pace Daniel Dennett) would claim direct access to a reality that is something (even if we can't agree exactly what) that is, at least, categorically distinct from any description of the aggregate action of the material processes of the brain. The same distinction, however, can't be claimed for "computation", on the assumption of material reduction. Just as in the case of the football team no instance of computation can escape reduction to material tokens that have been contrived, under suitable interpretation, to embody the necessary physical action. There isn't even the saving grace that we directly perceive computation in unreduced form. What we actually perceive are macroscopic physical devices that, by assumption, produce all their effects entirely in terms of basic material processes that are fully subject to reductive explanation. Every explanation we give in terms of computation can in principle be replaced without loss by a description of a physical process. This is the underlying reason that Alice's net behaviour can persist unaltered even after disruption of any putatively "computational" organisation of her brain. Under physicalist assumptions, Alice is first, last and always a physical device. Indeed, were that not the case, it would be difficult to see how any "physical computer" could ever be manufactured! On this analysis then, it can hardly be coherent to claim that any association between consciousness and matter obtains "qua computatio". If any such association were to obtain under these assumptions, it would perforce be "qua materia". The worrying thing (and it worried me even more in the light of your recent objections) is not that this analysis lacks power, but rather that the "flesh-eating microbe" of reductionism might devour even the computational structures putatively derivable from simpler number relations and hence nullify comp. My own intuition (still under review I admit) is that in an important sense realism about these structures depends ultimately on their generalised epistemic consequences. Is 17 prime independent of anyone's knowing it? My response to this oft-posed question is that if such putatively significant truths do not actually entail somebody's knowing them, their possible consequence may be moot. Certainly any mathematics devoid of such epistemic consequence could play no role in comp. Arithmetic is postulated in the first instance as an ontology whose truth is entirely "independent of us" but then the (truly surprising) discovery is elucidated that such truths turn out directly to entail our knowing them! If this is indeed the case it would surely settle the matter of the "platonic" existence of mathematics in the most astonishing (but satisfactory) manner. It's not lost on me, by the way, that my "strict" account of physicalism could still lay claim, prima facie, to an analogous a posteriori epistemic justification in terms of a conscious knower. It's just that - on the assumption of *strict* material reductionism - the further supervention of computation on physical tokens could play no role in the explanation. 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.
