On Thursday, January 30, 2014 10:48:55 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 30 January 2014 02:19, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > >> 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'm sorry, Craig, but nothing that you have said encourages me to believe > that you have understood the paradox as posed or the particular problem it > raises. What we must account for is that there is a causally closed > extrinsic account, >
There is a closed extrinsic account, but all accounts are subjective. There seems to be a closed extrinsic account, but that seems to evaporate under some states of consciousness. The degree to which it seems closed is not an absolute, and seems to be contingent instead upon awareness to some extent. > on which we rely utterly for every other purpose, that appears to refer to > something with which it has no systematic connection. This would seem to > imply that what truly exists is merely a "mechanism" that merely gives the > appearance of making such references, but that this is in fact some sort of > conceptual mistake (i.e. in truth there are no such references). Of course, > were we to accept such a conclusion, we would be forced to eliminate > consciousness, which is untenable to all but "objectivist" hard-liners who > resolutely avert their eyes from the paradoxes that ensue. > What is a specific example of what you are talking about? The continuity of sense does not mean that it is objective in an absolute sense, only that our awareness is nested within an ongoing condition rather than contributing to it directly. The fact that my dream disappears when I wake up in the morning but the Earth persists for billions of my years doesn't mean that they are fundamentally different kinds of things. To the universe, duration may not be an appropriate measure of realism as it is for us. > > But postulating sense as fundamental doesn't save you from the paradox, > unless you are willing to believe that the extrinsic account somehow just > mimics the sensory one by some sort of "pre-established harmony" and that > there is in fact no on-going systematic link between them. > The extrinsic account is part of the sensory account. The sense fundamental means that there can be no "account" which is not sensory. Certainly there are many sensory accounts which are not available to us personally, but which are available to us indirectly through the extrinsic-facing senses of the body, but there is no problem with the congruency of all of the various views. Everything makes sense in the appropriate ways to reflect their relation to the whole. > That's why, as I've argued in a post to Brent, we need a theory that is, > at least, conceptually equipped to elucidate the systematic logical-causal > links between *all* the domains that appear to be in play. Nothing that you > have said persuades me that merely giving consciousness "fundamental" > priority over everything else even addresses this issue. It merely reverses > the paradox at the price of making the extrinsic account an isolated > epiphenomenon and provides no explanation for how that epiphenomenon might > be linked systematically to the "sense" it purports (per impossibile) to > refer to. > It's not an isolated epiphenomenon, it is a function of perceptual relativity. It's not necessarily possible to draw a direct relation between the extrinsic and the intrinsic, because the intrinsic contains the entire history of the universe, and requires it, whereas the extrinsic account is just a paper thin slice which by definition has only a collapsed signature of history. It gets us closer to understanding how to engineer reality only in the sense of helping us to realize that we are nowhere near as close as we think. From my perspective, everyone is talking about the passage to the Orient, and I'm saying 'actually it looks like there is a whole other side of the world over there'. > > From my reading of you, I think you have fallen into confusing the notions > of fundamental and irreducible. But in the appropriate schema, it is > possible for entities (conscious phenomena, for example) to be irreducible > to simpler explanatory elements, whilst still being, in an effective sense, > derivable from them by systematic "upwards" or "inner" reference. Of > course, demonstrating this in detail requires argumentative and technical > rigour, rather than mere intuitive poetry, and I leave that to those better > equipped than myself. > You're talking about individual instances of consciousness, but I'm talking about the global capacity for sense of any kind. 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.
