On 4 February 2015 at 12:49, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com> wrote: > On 3 February 2015 at 23:11, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> An epiphenomenon is a necessary side-effect of the primary phenomenon. >> The epiphenomenon has no separate causal efficacy of its own; if it >> did, then we could devise a test for consciousness. This, by the way, >> does not imply that consciousness does not exist or is unimportant. >> >> The parallel examples I would give are emergent phenomena such as the >> economy. You might say this is not the same thing because it is >> somehow obvious that the economy is "just" the behaviour of its >> component parts while this is not obvious for the brain and mind. This >> may be a valid point, but what is its significance, in the end? > > > Well, you still haven't addressed the reference issue (you didn't the last > time I asked you either). On the face of it, your position would appear to > be that there is no such reference; i.e. that everything is indeed 'just' > the behaviour of its component parts, whatever we suppose those to be. But > if so, what are we talking about? Indeed, in what sense are we even talking > at all?
What if it could be shown that consciousness necessarily supervenes on certain types of functional organisations, realised in any substrate, in any universe, under any physics? Would you still consider there was a reference problem? > In this regard, your analogy to the economy is indeed inapt, because it begs > the very question at issue. Notions such as the economy are, after all, > 'emergent' only under some interpretation. Absent such interpretation (which > is the very point in question) there would be (as you acknowledge) no need > to invoke such notions in any reductive account. Perhaps we could say that consciousness "emerges" as such under its own interpretation, creating as it were its own observer. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
