On 13 February 2015 at 15:04, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
The problem of terms like "epiphenomenalism" (and some other ...ism) is
> that they are defined implicitly only in the Aristotelian picture. They
> *can* acquire different meanings in the platonician picture.
Yes, I agree. In a previous discussion with Brent, I remarked that a
difference between consciousness on 'Aristotelean' and computationalist
assumptions is that the former seems to lack the explanatory resources to
elucidate an explicit theory of the first-person, other than brute
association with the physical action of some material substrate. His view,
which seems rather common, is that this is as far as we can or should
expect explanation to go. That seems to me to be a little obscurantist, or
at least unhelpful.
None of this means that comp is correct, of course, but it does at least
have the value of suggesting possible lines of thought in which the role of
the first-person may appear somewhat less exceptional and paradoxical.
'Truth', in the sense of a first-person, or immediate and incorrigible,
actuality, is perhaps not something that we would expect to find in the
Aristotelian ('seek no further') formulation of physics. But it's hard to
escape the intuition that truthfulness, at least as a first approximation,
is an intrinsic feature of consciousness. This of course was Descartes'
basic intuition and time hasn't eroded its essential point.
David
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