On 10 November 2014 05:34, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9 November 2014 12:04, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On my reading, Graziano agrees with what you said above about weak >> emergence, and claims that therefore consciousness does not exist. But >> that's just a manner of speaking. > > > That may be so, but my whole point is that it would be an incoherent manner > of speaking. If he believes that weak emergence is no kind of emergence at > all and that the same (a fortiori) is true for any stronger form, then what > is left, over and above the bare ontological assumptions? He makes no claim > to any theory of knowledge (i.e. an explicit epistemology) other than some > vague references to computation and information, either of which I would > guess he would regard as fully reducible to physics. In that case he would > again be left with no explanatory apparatus over and above the fully-reduced > ontology of physical theory. Nevertheless, he goes on blithely referring to > the baby he has just chucked out with the bathwater. > > Of course, he doesn't see this (hardly anybody does, or so it would seem). > But nevertheless what he is doing amounts to explanatory grand larceny. It's > as if somebody claims he is building houses exclusively of bricks while > completely failing to notice how much cement keeps going missing from the > construction site. One can't claim to "explain" something by helping oneself > liberally to stuff that appears nowhere on the explanatory bill of > materials.
One could say that if the bill of materials includes the ingredients and laws governing the interactions between the ingredients, that's everything there is. If seemingly magical things, fairies and unicorns and conscious beings, come out of the mix that doesn't necessarily mean that the ontological assumptions are deficient, but it may mean (by elimination) that the beholder's cognitive capacity is limited. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
