Hi dmb, I'm afraid I don't see the category error. Birch says "But how mentality can be derived from something which totally lacks it cannot be so explained. It is to believe in miracles .... The doctrine that mind emerges from no mind implies that there was a stage in biological evolution when mind appeared for the first time."
The error here is the same as the intelligent design argument for the eye being an argument against evolution. There is no one point in time when "the eye" appears any more than there is for mind or consciousness. Any lines being drawn are purely definitional. In fact I suspect the category error here is the basic SOMist one of objectifying the emergent features ... scales, feathers, eyes, minds or consciousness .... object is the wrong category for all of them. However, he's just making rhetorical assertions in this quoted extract. Could you point me back at the whole article, so I can take a look at any arguments. Ian Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
