Interesting, yes, but I think it misses the point. The first comment on that post does a good job explaining the real point, but Feser's response to it completely misses it again!
The commenter quotes Chalmers at length, concluding with this: "How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? ...Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does." To put it another way, the question isn't why things-- including mental experience--seem to us the way they do, but *why should there be such a thing as "seeming"* in the first place? So much philosophical discussion of consciousness takes "seeming" for granted, when it's the very thing that requires explanation. --- In [email protected], "PaliGap" <compost1uk@...> wrote: > > This is an interesting blog post IMO: > http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/nagel-and-his-critics-part-viii.html > > Or http://goo.gl/QulfS > > How much of our existential anguish can be laid at the feet > of Monsieur R. Descartes? > > "From the concrete material objects of everyday life, Descartes > and the moderns who have followed him derived two abstractions > (as I discussed in an earlier post). First, they abstracted out > those features that could be captured in exclusively quantitative > terms, reified this abstraction, and called that reified abstraction > "matter," or "the physical," or that which is "objective." Second, > they abstracted those qualitative features that would not fit the > first, quantitative picture, reified that abstraction, and called > it "the mental," or that which is "subjective." Once this move > was made, there was never in principle going to be a way to get > mind and matter together again, since they were in effect defined > by contrast with one another." >
