Hi Craig and Evgenii, Thanks for the suggestion to look at Strawson.
IMHO Unfortunately he starts off with the wacky assumption that the self is physical. Garbage in, garbage out. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/17/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-16, 13:03:09 Subject: Re: Alice and Wittgenstein: Materialism, Functionalism, and Comp On Sunday, September 16, 2012 12:34:47 PM UTC-4, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Craig, You may want to look at Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics He proves that selves exist. Interestingly enough he does it based on the materialist framework. p. 11 For the moment, though, the brief is to show that selves exist, and that they re things or objects or substances of some sort, and hence, given materialism, physical objects. One possibility is that there are in fact no better candidates for the title of physical object than selves even if there are others that are as good. p. 11 This last suggestion is likely to strike many as obviously false, but this reaction may stem in part from a failure to think through what it is for something to be physical, on a genuine or realistic materialist view, and, equally, from a failure to think through what it is for something to be a thing or object. Evgenii -- http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/09/selves-an-essay-in-revisionary-metaphysics.html Thanks Evgenii. I have been meaning to check out Strawson for a while actually. I agree that the self is physically and concretely real, but I don't think it is an object. The self is the subject. I see and agree with what Strawson is saying about the necessity of expanding our sense of what is physical, and I understand why he thinks it makes sense to think of the self as more of a 'thing' than anything - and I would agree, except that 'thing' is a term of objectification. I can only see myself as a thing in theory. In fact, who I am has no thingness at all from my own perspective. There is no object here, nothing which can be defined in terms of size, weight, temperature, etc. A subject is made of qualities that have only figurative dimensions, not literal body qualities. Craig On 08.09.2012 15:10 Craig Weinberg said the following: > Here I present another metaphor to encapsulate by view of the > relation between consciousness, information, and physicality by > demonstrating the inadequacy of functionalist, computationalist, and > materialist models and how they paint over the hard problem of > consciousness with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem. > > I came up with this thought exercise in response to this lecture: > http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/05/zoe-drayson-the-autonomy-of-the-mental-and-the-personalsubpersonal-distinction/ > > > Consider "Alice in Wonderland" > > Let's say that Alice is trying to decide whether she can describe > herself in terms of being composed of the syntax of the letters, > words, and sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether > she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that > are considered page parts of the whole book. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/VDrJ9z7gn7kJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
