David Nyman wrote:
> On 27/08/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>> But my point is that you're insisting that explanation is something that you find satisfying. It's not that explanation fails in general, it fails subjectively for you. Every explanation can fail in that way on any subject.
>
> Well, it certainly fails for me at this point, but the question of
> whether it succeeds generally is moot. In this case in particular, are
> you - or some notionally normative generality - ready to accept pure
> third person discourse as an exhaustive basis for conscious
> experience? Don't you feel - in contrast to any other topic - that
> there is a categorical first person distinction (that is: the
> intrinsic nature of qualitative experience itself) that transcends the
> possible scope of extrinsic third person explanation? Can we
> confidently dismiss this from further speculation as mere intuitive
> prejudice?
I'm prepared to remain agnostic. There is no 3rd person explanation of consciouness that is anywhere near as complete as the explanation of gravity or life. Maybe when I see one I'll consider it as complete as I do the biochemical basis of life (which is not to say that *everything* is explained).
What I'm not ready to do is to conclude that a 3rd person explanation is in principle impossible. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that the problem is my intuition rather than the form of explanation.
Brent Meeker
"One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before
having solved it."
--- Carl Ludwig Siegel
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Received on Mon Aug 27 2007 - 17:48:22 PDT