On 07 Sep 2010, at 23:13, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 9/7/2010 1:48 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
on 07.09.2010 05:11 Rex Allen said the following:
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Brent Meeker
<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
On 9/6/2010 6:45 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
...
Put a different way:
According to physicalism conscious experience supervenes on quarks
and electrons. Quarks and electrons do not supervene on conscious
experience.
I have just read Vital Dust, The Origin and Evolution of Life on
Earth by Christian de Duve. One citation from the chapter The
Future of Life (p. 271).
"We have reached a crucial state in the history of life. The face
of the Earth has changed dramatically in the last few thousand
years, a mere instant in evolution time, and it is changing ever
faster. What would have taken one thousands generations in the past
may now happen in a single generation. Biological evolution is on a
runaway course toward severe instability.
In a way, our time recalls one of those major breaks in evolution
signaled by massive extinctions. But there is a difference. The
cause of instability is not the impact of a large asteroid or some
other uncontrollable event. The perturbation is from life itself
acting through a species of its own creation, an immensely
successful species filling every corner of the planet with
continually growing throngs, increasingly subjugating and
exploiting the world. For the first time, also, in the history of
life, natural selection has been replaced, be it only partly, by
willful intervention on the part of a member of the bioshperic
community. The facts are before us clear and unmistakable.
Everybody can read the message and draw the obvious conclusions."
This means that conscious experience at least changes the movements
of quarks and electrons.
I don't think that follows. Maybe as Rex said, conscious experience
supervenes on the interaction of particles.
In which case the interaction of particles is not Turing emulable. If
*we* are Turing emulable (in the "yes doctor sense"), then physicalism
is wrong, and consciousness, including bodies observations, relies or
supervenes on infinities of computations or number relations (or
combinators relations, etc.).
Having said this your point does not follow, in the sense that even if
consciousness supervenes on interactions of particles (non mechanism)
this would not prevents consciousness to retroact on the particles,
like when a painter moves ink and papers to express his artistic
feelings. Another example: we may argue that guns and atomic bombs are
produced in part by human fears.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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