On 5 August 2014 14:44, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8/4/2014 5:14 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 5 August 2014 11:59, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 12:40 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On 8/4/2014 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>> Not is a David Lynch movie useful to reduce obesity. What's your point >>> exactly? >>> >> That a good theory of consciousness should be useful for treating >>> people with mental problems. >>> >> Only if you already assume emergentism. Otherwise a good theory of >> brain could be enough. >> >> This looks like a good example of Kuhnian paradigms. Obviously a good > theory of consciousness is only good for treating mental problems if > consciousness is something that is (in some sense) secreted or created by > the brain. Otherwise you aren't addressing consciousness itself, only the > contents of consciousness, which I imagine we all agree are brain-dependant. > > > If the contents of consciousness are brain dependent, then what about > consciousness is not brain dependent. What is consciousness apart from > it's content? > > Yes, that is the question, and the point of disagreement.
So until you know what consciousness actually is, you are like the bad neighbours arguing from different premises. My theory, admittedly based on inference from a small sample, is that > almost everybody is directly acquainted with consciousness. On the > question of helping people we need to know how we can influence it. We try > to do this via language, but also drugs and surgery can be effective in > some cases. I'm not sure in what sense we must know what consciousness > "is" to do this. Vaccination was invented without knowing what a smallpox > virus was. > This was already explained rather well by Telmo. You aren't addressing the question of what consciousness is, you're simply assuming it -- so yes, this is indeed like finding a cure without knowing what a virus is. You don't need to know what a virus is to find a cure; the same may apply to conciousness (depending on what it is). However, even if consciousness is, say, something like an abstract universal machine manifesting itself differently in different people, it would still be useful to know that fact for other reasons, just as it's useful to know what a virus is, even if you can cure it without knowing. > > Of course if consciousness is, as Kim speculates, completely independent > of the body and brain and our interactions with them there's not much we > can do to help consciousness - but maybe we can help the body remember > where the bathroom is. > I'm not sure where "completely independent" came from. ISTM that Comp, for example, appears to posit some interdependency, yet it also doesn't posit that consciousness "arises from" the brain. -- 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.
