Dave thinks dmb conveniently avoid this:
[Dave before] You left the impression that James concludes that "consciousness"
does not exist. When in fact that is the furthest thing from the truth. As a
powerful lecturer he is using this statement as a rhetorical devise to wake up
his audience, to get their attention. Once he has their attention he goes on to
make his main point that yes, "consciousness" does exist but as a psychological
function. Which Chalmer's confirms on page 13 of his introduction to "The
Conscious Mind".
dmb says:
Didn't mean to leave that impression and I have said many times that James
takes consciousness to be a process rather than a thing or an entity. It's on
the Oxford DVD, in fact.
Dave said to dmb:
Brush up on your "supervenience." what the hell ever that is, it is a big deal
to Chalmers. ...A clue, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship.
dmb says:
Yea, I know. This is one of the terms used by those who don't want to go all
the way in saying that the brain and the mind are identical. One such position,
barely distinguishable from the brain-mind identity theory, is know as
"eliminative materialism". Richard Rorty is one of these, as you can see from
Wikipedia's overview:
"Eliminativism maintains that the common-sense understanding of the mind is
mistaken, and that the neurosciences will one day reveal that the mental states
that are talked about in every day discourse, using words such as "intend",
"believe", "desire", and "love", do not refer to anything real. Because of the
inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly think that they have such
beliefs and desires. Some eliminativists, such as Frank Jackson, claim that
consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function;
others, such as Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be
eliminated as neuroscience progresses. Consciousness and folk psychology are
separate issues and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not
the other. The roots of eliminativism go back to the writings of Wilfred
Sellars, W.V. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty. The term "eliminative
materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while descri
bing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein
was also an important inspiration for eliminativism, particularly with his
attack on "private objects" as "grammatical fictions".Early eliminativists such
as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two different notions of the sort of
elimination that the term "eliminative materialism" entailed. On the one hand,
they claimed, the cognitive sciences that will ultimately give people a correct
account of the workings of the mind will not employ terms that refer to
common-sense mental states like beliefs and desires; these states will not be
part of the ontology of a mature cognitive science. But critics immediately
countered that this view was indistinguishable from the identity theory of
mind. Quine himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about eliminative
materialism after all:"Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after
all, or a theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of
pain or anger in favor of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the
mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state of the
physical organism with the mental state)?"
I'd also point out that this is a pretty classic example of reductionism.
"Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a
reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of
relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena.
Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on
the fundamental phenomena that explain it.Reductionism does not preclude
emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand the emergent in
terms of the phenomena and process(es) it emerges from."
I think the MOQ is at odds with this view in a pretty big way.
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