On 18 January 2015 at 23:28, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Monday, January 19, 2015, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com> wrote: > >> On 18 January 2015 at 14:42, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >> What's wrong with "merely adventitious parallelism, on the lines of >>> epiphenomenalism"? If it seems to leave the mystery untouched, that is >>> because there is no logically possible solution to the hard problem of >>> consciousness. >>> >> >> Before we get into that, do you agree that formulations such as Smolin's >> are just missing the reference problem? I'm not at all sure that he means >> to say that the 'internal' properties amount to an epiphenomenon (although >> I find it a little difficult to be sure exactly what he means to say). That >> is, I don't understand him to mean that all *references* to sensations are >> the consequence of externally-observable properties of matter, but >> additional, 'internal' properties fortuitously happen to correspond to >> those references, despite there being no lawful interaction involving both >> sets of properties. >> > > If the internal properties supervene on the observable properties, isn't > this a kind of lawful interaction? > Well, it would hardly be *inter* action because, given external causal closure, internal properties could have no possible role in the observable causal account. That makes the hypothesis of such properties both ad hoc (i.e. merely tacked-on in the face of troublesome a posteriori facts) and gratuitously lacking in parsimony (since the hypothesised properties can have no other explanatory role). > >> After all, he wants to say that more complex aspects of mind (i.e. than >> 'pure' qualia) may be due to a 'combination' of the two types of property >> (perhaps something about the problem of reference has struck him here). But >> how can there plausibly be any such combining if the two sets of properties >> never interact? And how can we suppose them to interact when the external >> relations on their own give every evidence, both in theory and in practice, >> of being causally closed? >> > > I guess he means that when we do things there is both the observable > behaviour and the experience. The experience can still be unobservable > (except to the experiencer) but intimately associated with the observable > in a supervenient relationship. > > What if zombies could be shown to be logically impossible? That would then > mean that experiences were necessarily associated with certain processes. > One could complain that this was unsatisfactory, but that would be like > complaining that it was unsatisfactory that sqrt(2) was not rational. > That's a poor example, given that it is obviously and analytically true as soon as you comprehend the meaning of "sqrt(2)" and "not rational". In other words, in such cases the right understanding of the terms warrants the conclusion as self-evident. The association of particular physical processes with conscious experiences isn't analytically obvious or necessary in any equivalent sense. Rather, if true, it would merely be a contingent a posteriori fact. In point of contrast, a key virtue of the comp hypothesis is that it associates mechanism (albeit digital mechanism) with consciousness (modelled as truth) in just this analytic or constitutive way. Further, the mode of association of digital mechanism with both consciousness and matter, far from being ad hoc, is given a priori in the base assumptions. I cite this not as a warrant for the specific correctness of the hypothesis, but rather as an example of a mode of explanation that might tend towards a *resolution* of the problem I posed, as opposed to a dismissal or trivialisation of it. 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/d/optout. > -- 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/d/optout.
