On 04 Feb 2014, at 01:19, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, February 3, 2014 4:25:14 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On 4 February 2014 02:26, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com> wrote:
> On 3 February 2014 12:06, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>> If consciousness is epiphenomenal I don't see how that diminishes
its
>> importance in any way, let alone eliminates it. It is consistent
with
>> evolution since it is not an optional extra: if intelligence
evolved
>> then consciousness had to evolve as a necessary side-effect. It is
>> also consistent with the world being causally closed and eliminates
>> the paradox that David Nyman sees.
>
>
> Does it? You still haven't explained why bodies emit utterances
that appear
> to refer to this putative epiphenomenon. Or are you saying that
they're not
> really emitting such utterances or making such references? They're
just
> physical systems going about their lawful physical business, but
somehow
> that evokes a physically-undetectable extra something-or-other.
And it's
> only in terms of this extra something-or-other that utterances
seem to exist
> that, in turn, only seem so to refer. Is that what it boils down to?
It's because you're stuck on the idea that consciousness is something
extra and optional. If you could see that it was logically entailed by
certain physical phenomena or computations you wouldn't have a
problem. It would be like agonising over why an object in which every
point on its perimeter is equidistant from the centre has the quality
of roundness rather than squareness or nothingness; and how it could
be that roundness has no separate causal efficacy over and above what
can be explained in terms of the physicality of the object possessing
this property.
What computation or physical phenomena could logically entail
anything other than computation or physical phenomena though? Why
does a computation logically begin to itch or turn orange, if the
potential to itch or turn orange did not already exist?
Why would the potential to itch or turn orange not exist in
arithmetic, when you do not start assuming sense, and non comp?
Bruno
Craig
> By the way, I'm not really sure what the term epiphenomenon is
supposed to
> convey in this context. Is it indeed supposed to be a sort of one-
way
> dualism in which, as I suggest above, a genuinely novel something-
or-other
> is evoked by physical behaviour but cannot reciprocally affect it
(and so
> cannot be detectable by it). Or is it really a form of cryptic
eliminativism
> in which, in the final analysis, there is no additional something-
or-other
> at all?
I don't think these terms make any substantive difference. Whether my
consciousness can be replicated by a computer, for example, is an
important question and it is not dependent on whether under some use
of the English language it is correct to say that consciousness can be
eliminated.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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