Jiri> James, Frank Jackson (in "Epiphenomenal Qualia") defined qualia Jiri> as "...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but Jiri> also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of Jiri> purely physical information includes.. :-)
One of the biggest problems with the philosophical literature, IMO, is that philosophers often fail to recognize that one can define various concepts in English in such a way that they make apparent syntactic and superficial semantic sense, which are nonetheless actually not meaningful. My usual favorite example is, the second before the big bang, a phrase which seems to make perfect intuitive sense, but according to most standard GR/cosmological models simply doesn't correspond to anything. This problem crops up in the mathematical literature sometimes too, but mathematicians are more effective about dealing with it. There is an old anecdote, I'm not sure of its veracity, of someone at Princeton defending his PhD in math, in which he had stated various definitions and proved various things about his class of objects, and someone attending (if memory serves it was said to be Milnor) proved on the spot the class was the null set. Jackson however makes an excellent foil. In What is Thought? I took a quote of his in which he says that 10 or 15 different specific sensations can not possibly be explained in a physicalist manner, and argue that each of them arises from exactly the programming one would expect evolution to generate. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
