On 3 February 2015 at 23:11, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
An epiphenomenon is a necessary side-effect of the primary phenomenon. > The epiphenomenon has no separate causal efficacy of its own; if it > did, then we could devise a test for consciousness. This, by the way, > does not imply that consciousness does not exist or is unimportant. > > The parallel examples I would give are emergent phenomena such as the > economy. You might say this is not the same thing because it is > somehow obvious that the economy is "just" the behaviour of its > component parts while this is not obvious for the brain and mind. This > may be a valid point, but what is its significance, in the end? > Well, you still haven't addressed the reference issue (you didn't the last time I asked you either). On the face of it, your position would appear to be that there is no such reference; i.e. that everything is indeed 'just' the behaviour of its component parts, whatever we suppose those to be. But if so, what are we talking about? Indeed, in what sense are we even talking at all? In this regard, your analogy to the economy is indeed inapt, because it begs the very question at issue. Notions such as the economy are, after all, 'emergent' only under some interpretation. Absent such interpretation (which is the very point in question) there would be (as you acknowledge) no need to invoke such notions in any reductive account. As to your rhetorical enquiry, it seems to me to be a way of trivialising further questioning by insinuating that it is, in some unspecified sense, 'insignificant'. IMO, such a proposal is not even wrong. It just tells us not to ask. As far as I understand Bruno's thesis, it might at first glance appear to share a superficial resemblance to what you seem to mean by epiphenomenalism. Consciousness is not a 'thing' but a species of analytic or constitutive truth associated with a reductive computational ontology as a consequence of the simultaneous emulation, or 'entanglement', of specific third and first-person epistemological logics. Consciousness, as truth, is to that degree an epistemological emergent 'supervening' on computation. But the difference is in the much greater explanatory potential implicit in these assumptions. The paradox of reference becomes resolvable through an explicit epistemology: i.e. the triangulation of parallel sets of referents in the cross-hairs of computation, belief and truth. Similarly, questions of' 'causal ordering', at least in principle, become addressable in terms characteristic of each of these regimes (e.g. the relation between computational redundancy and FPI). ISTM that alternative schemas, of whatever character, must likewise possess explanatory resources that hold some potential for resolving fundamental relations of epistemology and ontology, rather than ignoring, distorting, or trivialising what doesn't fit. 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.
