On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 10:17:57PM +0100, David Nyman wrote: > > Here's what's still not completely clear to me - perhaps you can assist me > with this. We don't know *which* set of physical events is in effect > selected by the functionalist account, even though it may be reasonable to > believe that there is one. Given this, it appears that should we be finally > convinced that only a functional account of 1-person phenomena uniquely > survives all attempted refutation, we can never in that case provide any > 'distinguished' bottom up physical account of the same phenomena. IOW we > would be faced with an irreducibly top-down mode of explanation for > consciousness, even though there is still an ineliminable implication to > specific fundamental aspects of the physics in 'instantiating' the bottom-up > causality. Does this indeed follow, or am I still garbling something? > > David >
This sounds to me like you're paraphrasing Bruno's programme. The only snag is how you can eliminate the possibility of a non-functionalist model also explaining the same set of physical laws. In fact the "God did it" model probably indicates this can't be done. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
