On Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:06:03 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 29 January 2014 22:15, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > >> The problem that concerns me about this way of looking at things is that >>> any and all behaviour associated with consciousness - including, crucially, >>> the articulation of our very thoughts and beliefs about conscious phenomena >>> - can at least in principle be exhausted by an extrinsic account. But if >>> this be so, it is very difficult indeed to understand how such extrinsic >>> behaviours could possibly make reference to any "intrinsic" remainder, even >>> were its existence granted. It isn't merely that any postulated remainder >>> would be redundant in the explanation of such behaviour, but that it is >>> hardly possible to see how an inner dual could even be accessible in >>> principle to a complete (i.e. causally closed) extrinsic system of >>> reference in the first place. >>> >> >> Right, because the extrinsic perspective is blind to the limits of causal >> closure. >> > > But I'm afraid the problem is precisely that it behaves as if it is NOT in > fact blind to such limits. >
Yes, it's blind in the sense of the blind spot that we have in our visual field. It appears that there is no blind spot. We can only infer a blind spot by appealing to another sense, an intellectual sense, to understand the limitation of the optical sense. With comp, we have to appeal to other senses which are grounded in aesthetic realism rather than logical positivism or functionalism. > As Bruno points out in a recent response to John Clark, if we rely on the > causal closure of the extrinsic account (and which of us does not?) > I don't think that I do. I operate primarily on intuition. Causality tends to be irrelevant and self-revising in my experience. > then we commit ourselves to the view that there must be such an account, > at some level, of any behaviour to which we might otherwise wish to impute > a conscious origin. However, my point above is that the problem is in fact > even worse than this. In fact, it amounts to a paradox. > > The existence of a causally closed extrinsic account forces us to the view > that the very thoughts and utterances - even our own - that purport to > refer to irreducibly conscious phenomena must also be fully explicable > extrinsically. > That follows naturally though if the extrinsic is a representation of the intrinsic, which is itself part of a single pansensitivity. The extrinsic 'fills in', just like perception, even retrocausally from our perspective (because every moment is on some level part of the same now). > But how then could any such sequence of extrinsic events possibly be > linked to anything outside its causally-closed circle of explanation? To > put this baldly, even whilst asserting with absolute certainty "the fact > that I am conscious" I am forced nonetheless to accept that this very > assertion need have nothing to do (and, more strongly, cannot have anything > to do) with the fact that I am conscious! > Sure, but the fact that you would expect that your assertion could or should have anything to do with your being conscious would not make sense in a universe in which consciousness did not exist in a fundamentally real way. > > I take no credit for being the originator of this insight, although it > isn't IMO acknowledged as often as it should be, perhaps because of its > very intractability. It's sometimes referred to as the Paradox of > Phenomenal Judgement. David Chalmers, for example, acknowledges it in > passing in The Conscious Mind, fails to offer any solution and then > proceeds to ignore it. Gregg Rosenberg - who if you haven't read perhaps > you should - deals with it a little more explicitly in A Place for > Consciousness, but IMO ultimately also fails to square this particular > circle. In fact I know of no mind-body theory, other than comp, that > confronts it head-on and suggests at least the shape of a possible > solution. That said, do you see what the paradox is and if you do, how > specifically does your theory deal with it? > I think that the paradox arises directly from the assumption of fundamental isolation rather than fundamental identity. Once you place sense first, then the paranoid scenario in which an inanimate universe conspires to invent a puppet which invents itself as a non-puppet falls apart. Without putting sense first, we will chase our tails, over and over and over again, looking for the curtain behind the man behind the curtain. A man can make a curtain, but a curtain can't make a man, let alone a man who is really a curtain but thinks that he is not. Craig > David > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
