Stathis,
I rereply a statement you made.
On 31 Jan 2014, at 01:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 31 January 2014 04:19, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
I don't think there is a problem if consciousness is an
epiphenomenon.
Is it not that very idea which leads to the notion of zombie?
If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, eliminating it would change
nothing in
the 3p.
There can be no zombies if consciousness is epiphenomenal.
Just to be sure, I agree with that.
I asked "why?" because I was thinking at the meta-level.
The problem, is that if we can conceive that consciousness is
epiphenomenal, we can conceive that consciousness does not exist.
That is why I am afraid that epiphenomenalism makes a step toward the
elimination of the person.
With comp we can eliminate or own person or ego, but that's the kind
of thing which needs our own personal consent.
Equivalently, if consciousness is epiphenomenal we could say it does
not really exist and we are all zombies; but I think that's just
semantics, and misleading.
As I said, that's eliminativism.
Now tell me, is it a crime to torture a p-zombie?
I know a three years kids who broke a doll purposefully. Should we
send the kid in jail? In an asylum?
Consciousness is not epiphenomenal, even if the brain might have
arbitrary choices in some of the way to sum up big chunks of
informations available for the person in act.
Consciousness might better be seen as phenomenal, 1p. It depends on
truth, self, and relative consistency.
Bruno
If you start looking for consciousness being an extra thing with
(perhaps) its own separate causal efficacy, that's where problems
arise.
Dualism is a problem. Making consciousness epiphenomenal is not
satisfying,
and basically contradicted in the everyday life. It is because pain
is
unpleasant that we take anesthetic medicine.
The brain is obliged to "lie" at some (uncknown, crypted) level,
not for
consciousness (that it filters), but for pain and joy. That's
normal. If you
run toward the lion mouth, you lower the probability of surviving.
Epiphenomenalism does not eliminate consciousness, but it still
eliminate
conscience and persons.
I don't think it diminishes the significance of consciousness, but
maybe I just look at it differently.
With comp I think we avoid it, even if the solution will appear to
be very
Platonist, as truth, beauty, and universal values (mostly unknown)
will be
more "real" than their local terrestrial approximations through
primitively
physical brains and other interacting molecules like galaxies foam.
Bruno
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