On 18 January 2015 at 14:42, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
What's wrong with "merely adventitious parallelism, on the lines of > epiphenomenalism"? If it seems to leave the mystery untouched, that is > because there is no logically possible solution to the hard problem of > consciousness. > Before we get into that, do you agree that formulations such as Smolin's are just missing the reference problem? I'm not at all sure that he means to say that the 'internal' properties amount to an epiphenomenon (although I find it a little difficult to be sure exactly what he means to say). That is, I don't understand him to mean that all *references* to sensations are the consequence of externally-observable properties of matter, but additional, 'internal' properties fortuitously happen to correspond to those references, despite there being no lawful interaction involving both sets of properties. After all, he wants to say that more complex aspects of mind (i.e. than 'pure' qualia) may be due to a 'combination' of the two types of property (perhaps something about the problem of reference has struck him here). But how can there plausibly be any such combining if the two sets of properties never interact? And how can we suppose them to interact when the external relations on their own give every evidence, both in theory and in practice, of being causally closed? David -- 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.
