On 22 September 2014 12:07, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > My point was that on this theory, which is basically eliminativism, consciousness doesn't actually exist, in the same way as there was no "special ingredient" needed to animate living matter, to distinguish it from dead matter, it turned out to be "merely" a question of how the constituents were organised. Similarly there *may* be no special ingredient needed to turn bundles of sensations into consciousness. I agree that materialism has magic matter, however that isn't in itself an argument against an eliminativist explanation of consciousness. Otherwise it could be used as an argument for elan vital, or souls, or anything else. It just means the chain of explanation doesn't appear to end with matter. However, I don't agree that the MUH *necessarily* has magic maths, it's at least possible that maths is a logical necessity. Since it's the only thing we know of that couldn't be otherwise (except in very abstruse ways, at least) it is at least a candidate for being fundamental, i.e. the last link in the chain of explanation. > > 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, ...). > Right. Hence my use of "appear to be" above. It's very reasonable to assume that consciousness requires a fairly complex central nervous system, which somehow generates it - this theory isn't contradicted by any evidence I know of, except perhaps for NDEs, and has quite a lot of (apparent) explanatory power. That doesn't make it true, of course. -- 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.
