On 27/08/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> I think you're setting up an impossible standard of "explaining". You're asking that it produce a certain feeling in you, and then you're speculating that after being given all the physics of conscious processes and even the ability to create a conscious person that you still won't get that feeling. But in fact, a little cocaine may very well give you that feeling, the feeling that everything is clear and understood by you.
I don't know why you've reached this conclusion based on what I
actually said. On the assumption that I would accept some sort of
identity theory of physics and consciousness, I'm prepared (for the
sake of argument) to accept that the same physics will produce the
same consciousness. I merely pointed out that, given the irremediably
third person nature of all explanation, this still must beg the
question of why *any* third person process whatsoever should evoke
first person experience, the qualitative nature of which has no
analogy in physics or any other third person discourse.
This is, as you rightly point out an impossible standard of explaining
- it simply can't be met, by me or by anyone. This was my point in
offering it in refutation of Stathis's proposal of the standard
analogy equating the 'emergence' of subjective experience with some
third person process like 'circulation'. Whereas a third person model
of 'mind' may (for all I know) indeed be capable of being mapped to
physics (pace Bruno), the subjective experience of such a mind, by its
very nature, must perforce elude any direct third person
categorisation.
David
>
> David Nyman wrote:
> > On 27/08/07, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >
> >> What if someone simply claimed that they couldn't see how circulation
> >> was the same as cardiovascular activity: they could understand that
> >> the heart was a pump, the blood a fluid, the blood vessels conduits,
> >> but the circulatory system as a whole was something emergent and not
> >> at all obvious, in the same way that mind was emergent. Alternatively,
> >> a superintelligent being could claim that the mind was as obviously
> >> the result of brain activity as circulation was the result of
> >> cardiovascular activity.
> >
> > Isn't the obvious (and AFAICS unanswerable) argument against this that
> > 'circulation' is merely a convenient shorthand for the specific set of
> > underlying structures and processes, once these have been identified,
> > even when this is not obvious a priori. One adds nothing
> > *explanatorily* by applying the term to these processes, which stand
> > by themselves for what is to be explained from the third-person
> > perspective which fully suffices in this case. But I don't see how
> > even a superintelligent being could convince us that first person
> > subjective experience is by any direct analogy *explained* merely by
> > being equated to certain third person activities of the brain, with
> > nothing further remaining to be accounted for. IOW, even if we are
> > inclined to accept on other grounds some sort of functional identity
> > theory, we have made no further progress towards *explaining* the
> > categorical uniqueness of the first person.
> >
> > David
>
> I think you're setting up an impossible standard of "explaining". You're asking that it produce a certain feeling in you, and then you're speculating that after being given all the physics of conscious processes and even the ability to create a conscious person that you still won't get that feeling. But in fact, a little cocaine may very well give you that feeling, the feeling that everything is clear and understood by you.
>
> Brent Meeker
>
> >
>
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Received on Mon Aug 27 2007 - 14:16:03 PDT