On 15 February 2014 02:45, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
If that is so (and I agree that it is, since I am not a physical > eliminativist) it is still consistent with the physical processes still > being *sufficient* to produce consciousness. It would only not be > sufficient if some further ingredient were necessary beyond the matter in > the right configuration. I've been reflecting on our exchange on the subject of reference. The assumption that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of physics would entail, I suppose, that we shouldn't think of physics itself as "referring" to anything at all. The idea is that we can always give a fully sufficient and closed account of any sequence of events in fully-reduced physical-causal terms. One could make an analogy, for example, with watching a movie on an LCD screen, in terms of which the "dramatic events" must always be fully reducible to some sequence of illumination of the screen pixels (so that the drama is an epiphenomenon of the pixel-physics). For this analogy to be transferable to the mind body problem, we must further assume that the "dramatic interpretation" which, in the case of the the movie must be provided externally, is somehow internal to the epiphenomenal causal logic and the physics on which it supervenes. If this is granted, the epiphenomenal "dramatis personae" then have access to a logic of reference that somehow "travels on" the underlying ontology, but is ineffective in it. As in the movie analogy, there is a dramatic logic that supervenes on the physical level, but is no more effective in physical terms than we would expect the characters in a movie to be in changing the underlying pixel-physics. If the foregoing is to make any sense, we are forced to the view that all references to such dramatis personae are, in the end, merely a manner of speaking, and that consequently *all* such gross or macroscopic references are, strictly speaking, epistemological (i.e. they are all internal references to epiphenomena of some fully-reduced physical ontology). Funnily enough, I recently heard Jaron Lanier expressing just such a view (at least as a possibility). Do you agree that your views imply that "reality" is in some sense like this? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
