To Seth, Marco, Dave, Platt, all,
Hi Seth - welcome to our world.
Seth wrote:
> Either the elementary component is as aware as we are, or there is something
> external at work, magically endowinging the collection of unaware constituents
> with awareness.
ELEPHANT:
I can't see how awareness could ever be anything other than what you call
"magical". What that word means in this context is "unexplained" or
"without cause". Well, obviously consciousness is without cause, it is the
*arena* of cause.
Barrage over.
Marco, Dave,
That's quite right. "Where does our awareness come from?" is an underlying
question. Also "Is it a 'where'?"
(not simply word play)
Also, I think the "practical difference" that alot of us are arguing about
in this awareness thread is high-quality V. low quality usages of words.
That's not an unimportant matter in my view - not at all. For instance the
distinction between "refute" and "reject" is one which helps us monitor our
progress in intellectual disputes. It makes a real practical difference.
Similarly, calling atoms "aware" makes a real practical difference to
whether we think human beings have a special status as the proper objects of
compassion, as moral agents, as morally important and so on.
After all, facism, as Pirsig pointed out, comes from taking "the great
beast" (the polis, the people, the race) as a unit of consciousness. I fear
that this is the sort of danger which any confusion about the fact that it
is individual human beings who are aware runs. I am well aware that Platt
is no facist, and am not suggesting anything against him personally in any
way. Never the less I do think that talk of aware atoms is confusing and
dangerous, as well as being completely unecessary and unjustified.
Dangerous confusing unecessary and unjustified ideas fall into the "low
quality" category of philosophical thought, and they do so because they make
a real practical difference for the worse.
If atoms can be called aware, why not cities, races? Because cities are not
quantum objects? But it isn't the quantumness of atoms that is the crucial
argument in Platt's account, but rather the fact that atoms appear to
"prefer" (in a quantum context as it happens, but that context is
incedental). Well, cities and nations can appear to "prefer" certain
outcomes just the same - and this is the stuff that dangerous conceptions of
national "consciousness" and "identity" and "destiny" are made of - at least
they become dangerous the moment that we forget or remove the "as if".
So, don't remove the "as if" unless you have a good reason for doing so.
This neither Platt nor anyone else in this discussion has yet provided.
Instead they have sought to claim (wrongly) that it is the Pirsigian thing
to do to remove the "as if".
I talk more of that in another post.
Elephant.
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