On 19 February 2014 14:17, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
You're talking about the special case of human experience, human bodies, > etc. I'm talking about the ontology of the nature of any possible awareness > in any possible universe. > I'm not really sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The dictionary tells us that ontology is the study of the categories of being and existence. We must assume that since there is awareness it must inhere, in some sense, in whatever exists, but that alone doesn't take us very far. Since not everything that exists makes any claim to be aware the interesting part is trying to elucidate the specific conditions that differentiate the presence of such claims from their absence. A computational theory is a variety of idealism whose natural ontological homeland is Platonia. One can say that its specific ontological category is arithmetical, but this means only that the platonic existence of arithmetic suffices for a model of computation. That said, the specific conditions that differentiate claims of awareness from their absence will be epistemological rather than ontological, which is to say that they will require a theory of knowledge. Computational theory leads to a repertoire of logics which (so far) seem capable of supporting the necessary epistemological distinctions with all their accompanying modal complexities. If CTM is true, then all the foregoing is also true in the necessary sense (i.e. platonically). Consequently, rejecting it on the basis that numbers aren't real, or that computation can't differentiate awareness from its absence, amounts to a rejection of Platonism. Such rejection implies the Aristotelian view that awareness and its artefacts (such as numbers) supervene, in some unspecified and rather more problematical way, on primordial stuff that cannot be further explained. But your theory requires that this primordial stuff be sensory and so, as I argue above, amounts to the claim that sense or awareness properly inhere in whatever exists. So we can grant this and the difficult part still remains: what conditions differentiate specific claims of sensory awareness from the absence of such claims? Given that challenge, I frankly still don't see why you would reject computational theory as an attractive candidate for that role. 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.
