On 15 February 2014 18:41, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
To extend your metaphor, in my view, since the characters in a drama can > build an LCD screen as part of the show, but an LCD screen can't build a > show as part of its function, it makes more sense that the drama is > fundamental and that from an absolute perspective, it is the pixels which > are the epiphenomenal show. The reason why it is reversed for us locally is > that our show is nested several times within other shows which are both > larger and smaller in scope and slower and faster in frequency. The most > 'other' of these shows is the one which appears most mechanical, as it > includes the fastest, slowest, largest, and smallest experiences relative > to our own - the polar opposite of our own native scope, which is by > definition middle-range from our perspective. > Well, I was just using the metaphor to illustrate what I see as the consequence of Stathis's views (it remains to be seen whether he concurs). However, even if we grant this view, it seems to me that we can be too easily befuddled by words like fundamental or epiphenomenal. By his own admission, Stathis is not an eliminativist about consciousness, so in labelling it as epiphenomenal ISTM, in the first instance, that he is hardly saying more than that whatever is picked out by the term isn't merely some more coarse-grained structuring of a fully-reduced physical ontology (as, for example, in the case of chemistry). If it were, it would simply be no more than physics. The contention that consciousness *supervenes* on physics is then no more than a gesture towards yet-to-be-elucidated psycho-physical principles, in terms of which we would expect each level, in the final analysis, to be mutually co-variant. But consciousness has a logic of its own, evidently quite distinct in kind from that of the physical causal level, and frankly I don't what would motivate one to consider it any less fundamental (in Stathis's model, that is) since a complete account of things *must include both*. Indeed, just as the LCD pixels comprise just that infrastructure that is required to underpin all possible dramas at the level of the movie, the fully-reduced physical ontology comprises just that infrastructure that is required to underpin all possible dramas at the epistemological level (precisely how and why this is the case being other questions). So, to paraphrase Einstein, consciousness without physics would be lame, physics without consciousness would be blind. 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.
