On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 1:34 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > Good point Brent and one on which I am also equivocal, which is why I have > been keen to tease out whether people are talking about consciousness or > the contents of consciousness, and to try to work out whether there is, in > fact, any difference. If there isn't, consciousness becomes something like > *elan > vital*, a supposed magic extra that isn't in fact necessary in > explanatory terms - all that exists are "bundles of sensations" (or however > Hume phrased it). >
But in materialism we still have a magic extra: matter itself. In the MUH math is the magic extra. I don't know of any theory that gets rid of all "magic" assumptions. > > In reply to John's comment, we *don't* know that sure that certain types > of brain activity cause consciousness, that's a (very reasonable) > hypothesis based on the fact the two appear to be always correlated. > We don't even know if they are strongly correlated, because we don't know what else is conscious. Is an insect swarm conscious? Is your computer? Are galaxies? The problem is that we might be confusing empathy for consciousness. It is clear that the more an organism is similar to us the more empathy we feel (human > monkey > cat > insect > bacteria, ...). > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
