Forwarded on behalf of Brent. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Nyman <david.ny...@gmail.com> Date: 2 June 2017 at 20:01 Subject: Re: A thought on MWI and its alternative(s) To: meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>
On 2 Jun 2017 19:18, "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: On 6/2/2017 6:21 AM, David Nyman wrote: I don't see how such experimental evidence can be claimed to exist, given that there is no way to measure consciousness. I think this is confused by an ambiguity about supervenience that I recently posted about. In the sense that one's own consciousness can be demonstrated to covary systematically with neurological function, there is surely no lack of experimental evidence. In the larger sense, of any finally unambiguous explanatory relation between the two phenomena in general, the question of evidence then depends rather upon what one is willing to count as explanation. The latter consideration is to say the least both less obvious and more controversial. Right. And a point I've tried to make (apparently unsuccessfully) several times. Not so. I have always accepted your view as one of the essential components of any explanation (i. e. the covariance part). In the case of physical phenomena, like gravity, we arrive at a mathematical model and we're all happy - we've explained gravity. When we do the same thing, providing a useful model of the brain that predicts conscious thoughts (cf. electrostimulation during brain surgery) we should be happy that we've explained consciousness. But NO, there are all the philosophers dedicated to "the hard problem" who demand to know "what really makes consciousness?". The analogy in physics is John Archibald Wheeler asking, "But what makes the equations *fly*?" In the virtuous circle of explanation, if you're not willing to count anything as an explanation, then there is no explanation. Again not so. An explanation of consciousness in terms of neurocognition is both ineliminable and indispensable from a practical perspective. But left at that, any explanatory relation with first person subjectivity can never be more than an a posteriori attribution. After all, an explicit account in terms of neurocognition is already causally sufficient in its own right. IMO the so-called hard problem is an unfortunate artifact of a faulty formulation of the problem area. Consequently comp doesn't try to 'solve' it. Instead, it recasts the problem in essentially epistemological terms, relying on the simplest assumptive ontology adequate to the task. To succeed, it must also show that this manner of framing the problem is fully compatible with an observable physics (and its theoretical ontology) such that all aspects of the physical covariance remarked on above remain consistent. All that said, what bears most heavily on its role in explanation is to offer, a priori, an otherwise absent first-personal account of the characteristic phenomena of subjectivity. David Brent -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
