On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 10:17:57PM +0100, David Nyman wrote:
>
> Here's what's still not completely clear to me - perhaps you can assist me
> with this. We don't know *which* set of physical events is in effect
> selected by the functionalist account, even though it may be reasonable to
> believe that there is one. Given this, it appears that should we be finally
> convinced that only a functional account of 1-person phenomena uniquely
> survives all attempted refutation, we can never in that case provide any
> 'distinguished' bottom up physical account of the same phenomena. IOW we
> would be faced with an irreducibly top-down mode of explanation for
> consciousness, even though there is still an ineliminable implication to
> specific fundamental aspects of the physics in 'instantiating' the bottom-up
> causality. Does this indeed follow, or am I still garbling something?
>
> David
>
This sounds to me like you're paraphrasing Bruno's programme.
The only snag is how you can eliminate the possibility of a
non-functionalist model also explaining the same set of physical
laws. In fact the "God did it" model probably indicates this can't be done.
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A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia
http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 20:30:06 PDT