On 27 Aug, 01:35, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 2009/8/27 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
> > The idea of 'being' somebody (or thing) else already assumes dualism.
> > It assumes some 'I' that could move to be Stathis or a bat and yet
> > retain some identity. But on a functionalist view 'I' already am
> > Stathis and a bat - in other words there is no 'I', it's the creation
> > of viewpoint by each functional entity. In that case being someone
> > else in incommunicable in principle because the concept in incoherent.
>
> Well, I completely agree with all of that, but what made you think
> that what I was saying was anything to do with being somebody else? I
> think I did a bad job of articulating my line of argument. As I've
> said, I can't make any sense of a functionalist view on the basis of
> PM. To be coherent, functionalism must treat physical entities as
> mere relational placeholders,
I can't see why. Note that funcitonalism is only a claim about
minds. not a claim that everyhting si a function
>and hence the supplementary assumption
> of PM or any other primitively non-functional ontology is either
> simply redundant or weirdly dualistic AFAICS.
PM is not redundant if it introduces contingencty
and thereby solves the WR problem.
>I thought this before
> ever encountering Bruno's ideas, but his articulation of comp has
> given me another angle of attack on this key intuition. To be clear:
> I'm not per se arguing against functionalist accounts, but like Bruno
> I believe that their task is to explain the *appearance* of the
> material, not their own spooky emergence from it.
>
> But beyond even that, what I was articulating was my own version of
> strict eliminativism. IOW if we sincerely want to be monists we must
> be ready in principle to reduce *all* our various conceptual accounts
> to one in terms of the differentiables of a single ontic context.
Yes--NB "reduce"
> And
> unless we're eliminativists about personal existence, that had better
> be the one we already occupy.
Why.? Since reduction does not *remove* what is reduced, but
only identifies it with a reduction base. Physical reductionists just
have
to say their minds are their brains, not that their minds are non-
existent.
>There's a tendency to argue this
> context away as merely epistemic and not ontic,
I stil don't know what you mean by that
>but this distinction
> can be shown to collapse with very little logical effort. I know not
> everyone accepts this view, especially in the 'hard' sciences, but
> there are very notable exceptions, some of them amongst its most
> distinguished practitioners. Obviously, for this to have any chance
> of success as a programme, all the other accounts must be in principle
> paraphraseable as aspects or modalities of this single contextual
> account, but again IMO the standard arguments against this seem to
> miss the point.
>
> David
>
>
>
> > David Nyman wrote:
> >> 2009/8/26 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> >>> I don't see that. I conjectured that with sufficient knowledge of the
> >>> environment in which the alien functioned and input-outputs at the
> >>> corresponding level, one could provide and account of the alien's
> >>> experience. I was my point that simply looking at the alien's brain,
> >>> without the context of its function, would not suffice.
>
> >> I can't tell what you mean by "provide an account". Do you mean that
> >> one could provide some account of all this in functional terms that
> >> *we could interpret* in ways that made contextual sense *for us* -
> >> standing in, as it were, for the alien? If so, this is what I meant
> >> when I said to Stathis that it really becomes equivalent to the
> >> problem of other minds, in that if we can coax the data into making
> >> sense for us, we can extrapolate this by implication to the alien.
> >> But that would tend to make it a rather human alien, wouldn't it?
>
> >>> The question is whether PM is sufficient to describe the system.
> >>> Language is almost certainly inadequate to describing what it is like
> >>> to 'be' the system - you cannot even fully describe what it is like to
> >>> be you.
>
> >> I'm questioning something more subtle here, I think. First, one could
> >> simply decide to be eliminativist about experience, and hold that the
> >> extrinsic PM account is both exhaustive and singular. In this case,
> >> 'being' anything is simply an extrinsic notion. But if we're not in
> >> this sort of denial, then the idea of 'being' the system subtly
> >> encourages the intuition that there's some way to be that
> >> simultaneously satisfies two criteria:
>
> >> 1) Point-for-point isomorphism - in some suitable sense - with the
> >> extrinsic description.
> >> 2) An intrinsic nature that is incommunicable in terms of the
> >> extrinsic description alone.
>
> > Even if there PM and functionalism is true, (1) and (2) are dubious.
> > Extrinsic descriptions are necessarily in terms of shared experiences
> > and so may not be complete. "Incommunicable" is ambiguous. It could
> > mean impossible in principle or it could mean we haven't developed the
> > words or pictures for it. Assuming there's something incommunicable
> > in the later sense doesn't imply that PM or functionalism are false.
>
> > The idea of 'being' somebody (or thing) else already assumes dualism.
> > It assumes some 'I' that could move to be Stathis or a bat and yet
> > retain some identity. But on a functionalist view 'I' already am
> > Stathis and a bat - in other words there is no 'I', it's the creation
> > of viewpoint by each functional entity. In that case being someone
> > else in incommunicable in principle because the concept in incoherent.
>
> > Brent
>
> >> This intuition has a lot of work to do to stay monistic - i.e. to
> >> claim to refer to a unique existent. First it has to justify why
> >> there's still a gap between the 'extrinsic' system-as-described and
> >> the 'intrinsic' system-as-instantiated - i.e. the description can no
> >> longer be considered exhaustive. Then it has to explain the existence
> >> of the former as some mode of the latter. Finally, it has to
> >> dispense with any implied referent of the former, except in the guise
> >> of the latter - i.e. it has to dispense with any fundamental notion of
> >> the extrinsic except as a metaphor or mode of the intrinsic.
>
> >> Dispensing with the extrinsic in this way leaves us with 'being' as a
> >> fundamentally intrinsic notion. Not doing so is an implicit appeal to
> >> dualism.
>
> >> David
>
> >>> David Nyman wrote:
> >>>> 2009/8/26 Stathis Papaioannou <stath....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> >>>>> With the example of the light, you alter the photoreceptors in the
> >>>>> retina so that they respond the same way when to a blue light that
> >>>>> they would have when exposed to a red light.
> >>>> Ah, so the alien has photoreceptors and retinas? That's an assumption
> >>>> worth knowing! This is why I said "a successful theory wouldn't be
> >>>> very distant from the belief that the alien was, in effect, human, or
> >>>> alternatively that you were, in effect, alien".
>
> >>>>> I think what I have proposed is consistent with functionalism, which
> >>>>> may or may not be true. A functionally identical system produces the
> >>>>> same outputs for the same inputs, and functionalism
>
> ...
>
> read more »
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Received on Thu Aug 27 2009 - 10:40:38 PDT