On 20 Aug 2014, at 18:55, John Clark wrote:
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.
I doubt this. What happens is that they might just not conceive that
2+2 = 4.
> 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.
Proof?
> 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?
With comp, both *matter appearances* (an aspect of consciousness)
becomes a mathematical phenomenon, an invariant of universal machine
self-transformation.
I still wait your solution to the exercise in my last post to you. Do
you agree with the answer given (by Liz and others)?
Bruno
John K Clark
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