Hi dmb, Obviously I can find Birch, and I have dozens of links to my readings of Chalmers (and the rest of the Arizona science of consciousness school) on my own blog ... I meant the specific article in question. I'll look for a Platt posting on MD.
I still disagree about there being a category error with emergence per se. Clearly, it would be selecting the wrong categories of "objects" to suggest the church of reason "emerged" from the current recent physical buildings,or any form of explanation in their terms, but it would not be wrong to suggest that its social and intellectual patterns emerged on top of physical and biologically evolved layers. But if that's all you meant by the category error, then there is really no disagreement. Without reading the specific Birch article I still smell that IDC vs natural emergence scent in the Birch words you quoted .... before Krim pointed out the Templeton connection. Krim is not in the right frame of mind for your arguments - or style of argument more like - but as you subsequently explained, all you were really doing was holding up panpsychism as valid, whatever Birch's other defects. I think somewhere at root here you are trying to make a point about some kind of physical reductionism - and you see "emergence" as a word signalling that error - greedy reductionism as Dennett would say. The kind of reductionism that points out the physical explanations of material processes as the source of emergence, as if that explains all the bio-socio-intellectual patterns and processes too. (I take it as a given the MoQ tells us to look at patterns of value in all levels up to the situation in question.) Ian On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 8:55 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Ian said: > Hi dmb, I'm afraid I don't see the category error. ... Could you point me > back at the whole article, so I can take a look at any arguments. > > dmb says: > Actually, it was Platt who posted the link to that article. And I'm sure you > know how to use google. Chalmers has a website with thousands of articles on > the topic, including his own. > http://consc.net/online > > As for the category error, it would be like trying to explain the church of > reason by describing the workings of the physical buildings on a university > campus. The category error would be a matter of talking about doors and > windows where you should be talking about truth and reason. > > > > > >> 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 > > 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 > 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
