1. We cannot doubt that we are aware. 2. Our awareness may represent realities which are independent from our own existence.
3. Our awareness may represent ideas and fantasies which have no existence independent from our experience of it (and whatever neurological processes are behind it) 4. Representation can only be accomplished through presentation. 5. A word or a picture has to look like something to us in order to remind of us of something else. 6. Saying that awareness or qualia only represents another process does not explain why there should be any presentation of that process in the first place, let alone posit a mechanism by which a physical process can be represented by something that does not physically exist. 7. The problem with the mechanistic view is that it relies on the real existence of awareness and choice to make a case for distrusting awareness and choice. A consequence of this logical contradiction is that when we begin from the assumption of mechanism and work backwards it almost invariably blinds us to the presentation of the work that we ourselves are doing in determining this deterministic opinion. We fool ourselves into thinking that there is no man even behind our own curtain, and mistake all authentic, concrete presentations for abstract, symbolic representations. That does not work for awareness because awareness itself can only be represented to something which is already aware. Thus the symbol grounding problem arises when we make the mistake of assuming first that awareness must follow the rules of the world which is represented within awareness. Since the experience does not show up on the radar of materialism, we are forced to accept the absurdities of ungrounded feeling which emerges somehow without mechanism or explanation from generic physical changes or computations. We have to conflate symbol and reality - either by making reality not primitively real (comp) or by making symbols not really real (physics). To me, the clear solution to this is not to begin from either the assumption of idealism or materialism but to examine the relationship between them. Once we notice that there is really nothing about these two positions which is not symmetrical, we can move on to the next step of examining symmetry itself. What I find is that symmetry is a bootstrap metaphor for metaphor. Symmetry is what makes sense - literally. How it does this is understandable. It presents and then re-presents itself. It demonstrates how significance and order can be expressed through reflection. It is both mathematical and aesthetic but serves no purpose in either a comp or physical universe. It is so fundamental that we miss it entirely - which makes sense since we are part of the universe rather than objective observers of it. -- 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.
