David Nyman wrote:
> 1Z wrote:
>
> Not only is it not necessary to
> > treat such a 1st person as ontologically primative, it is
> > hardly even coherent , since such a 1st person is clearly complex.
>
> I think I see where the confusion lies. My definitions rely on there
> being a unique ontologogical 'substance' because of my frustration that
> there is a pervasive use (not necessarily yours) of 1st-person and
> 3rd-person to denote, respectively, the 'inside' and 'outside' views of
> persons.
Why shouldn't they denote that ? And what has that to do with
substances ?
The inside/outside distinction can be asserted is a single-substance
universe. The inside/outside distinction is enough to found the 1st/3rd
person divide, what
do you need a multiplicity of substances for.
> This then leads to the idea that these derive from different
> ontological substances (e.g. Chalmers in effect, dualism in general).
> So my single substance is in that sense 'primitive'. Bruno would I
> think say that this substance is Number.
Hmmm. I don't think Bruno believes in any kind of substance.
> I just say it's whatever it is
> and it's the same for everything. Of course, it's the intersection of
> this substance with structure that produces persons (and all other
> phenomena), which are, as you rightly say, complex.
If persons are complex they are not already present in a simple
primordial substance.
> The problem
> > is, that while a)-c) is not all that can be said
> > about first personhood, it is pretty much all that *is* said
> > in your various definitions [*].
>
> I quite agree, with the above proviso. I was merely trying to point out
> different uses of the term that I thought important, but you may well
> have found this superflous. The obvious is sometimes elusive.
There is a still a mystery about what the role of primordial
first-personness is.
> > OK: now we seem to be getting to the nub of the problem. Consciousness
> > and qualia. IOW, 1st-personhood divides into two problems: an
> > Easy Problem of a)-c); and a Hard problem of d) qualia and e)
> > incommunicable
> > experiences.
>
> I would say that qualia are the fact of *being* structured substance
> *behaving* in a certain kind of 'perceiver+perceptual model' way.
It is not clear why they should be that fact. For one thing,
qualia seem not be structures in themselves. For another
the perceiver-perceptual-model is 3rd-personal comprehensible
and therefore part of the Easy problem. So you are simply
declaring that the HP rides on the back of the EP, for
reasons that canoot be undeerstood within the EP -- just as
Chalmers does.
> As
> such they are themselves incommunicable, although existing in
> non-random mutual relations (e.g. that of red to blue, or middle C to
> bottom A). The information they encode relationally is what is
> communicable both to the 'self' and to others - epistemology from
> ontology. Empirically my assumption is that they must also map in some
> systematic way to material structure, which is not to say that
> qualitative and material structural levels map one-to-one. However I
> don't believe that qualia are 'substrate independent' (you may recall
> that this is where we began in the dear, dim days of the FOR group).
AFAIC that amounts to saying they supervene on the physical --
on the 0-personal.
> > Now: if qualia are the only aspect of 1st-personhood whose emergence
> > form structured matter is "fishy", why not make qualia ontologically
> > fundamental, and keep the Easy aspects of 1p-hood as high-level
> > emergent features ? (It's not just that we don't *need* to
> > treat the a)-c) as primitive, it is also that we can't! A structure
> > that contains representations of other structures is inherently
> > complex!)
>
> I think I agree, as I say above. I know I lost you with my previous
> remarks about a primitive substance with primitive differentiation, but
> the fundamental nature of 'qualia' was what I was trying to convey. The
> substance on its own won't do, because it has no content, and
> semantically to have differentiation one needs to start with a
> substance. Hence qualia are to be found at the intersection,
intersection of what and what ?
>and
> different types of structure yield different types of qualia.
How and why ?
> > ( I am taking it that qualia are basically non-structural [**] )
>
> 'Fraid not.
You mean qualia are not non-structural. Can you argue for that ?
> But now I can agree with you that 1p-hood in its Easy
> aspect is indeed a high level emergent feature of this structured
> ontology. Then the fact of *being* the structured substance is the
> 'qualia', and the relational aspects (information) constitute our
> knowledge of the structural entities so formed (i.e. 'the world').
> I take the 'active principle' of information to be the relational aspects
> expressed as behaviour. IOW, one structure treats another as
> information when its behaviour is systematically changed by
> incorporating it.
> > Is that idea even coherent ? How can a universal Person contain
> > representations
> > of what is outside itself ?
>
> It can't of course. Only of what is inside itself. My intuition about
> the 'Big Person' was simply to express the idea that the 'substance' is
> universally available to be structured into persons.
That would be equally true of a 0-personal substance, ie matter.
> Persons are just
> zones so structured. We needn't mention the BP ever again.
>
>
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Received on Fri Aug 11 2006 - 13:26:05 PDT