On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 11:34 PM, Pierz <[email protected]> wrote: > In "The Conscious Mind", Chalmers bases his claim that materialism has > failed to provide an explanation for consciousness >
It's not just materialism, a philosopher like Chambers would not be satisfied with any explanation of the form "X causes consciousness", not if X is atoms or information, and not even if X is God or the soul; in fact nobody seems to know what Chalmers means by "explanation". And Chambers doesn't know either. > on a distinction between 'logical' and 'natural' supervenience, where > logical supervenience simply means that if A supervenes on B, then B > logically and necessarily entails A > The spring equinox always comes before the tax filing deadline of April 15 in the USA, but that does not necessarily mean that the equinox causes the tax. > we can logically conceive of a (philosophical) zombie > And I have no reason to think that you are not a intelligent zombie, except that Evolution had no way to produce such a being. Chambers believes that if philosophers can conceive of something then it must be logically possible, and Chambers can conceive of a smart zombie, but young children can conceive that 2+2 = 5. > then it seems that consciousness cannot *logically* supervene on the > physical. > There is nothing logically inconsistent about a fire breathing dragon powered by a nuclear reactor in its belly, but that doesn't prove that such an animal actually exists. However intelligence and consciousness would need to be unrelated for a smart zombie to exist, but if that were the case then Evolution could never have produced a conscious being and yet I know for a fact that it did as least once. Therefore unlike fire breathing dragons philosophical zombies are not only nonexistent but are also logically contradictory. > There is simply nothing in the physical description that entails or even > *suggests* the arising of subjective experiences in any system, > biological or otherwise. > You know for a fact that when the biological activity of your brain changes with drugs or surgery or electrical stimulation your subjective experience changes. You know for a fact that when your subjective experience changes the purely materialistic chemistry of your brain also changes. And you believe these 2 facts don't even suggest that materialism just might have something to do with consciousness? This is the sort of thing that gives philosophy a bad name. > Gödel's theorem might show that mathematics is more than mere formalism, > but it does not allow us to make the leap to mathematics being more than > abstract relationships between numbers. > Well.... if you don't like materialism and you don't like abstractions either then what do you like? What's left? John K Clark -- 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.
