On 15 Feb 2014, at 14:14, David Nyman wrote:
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.
It might be slightly out-of-topic, but I would distinguish the
statement "consciousness is an epiphenomenon on physics, and
consciousness + physics is an epiphenomenon of arithmetic. Only the
last case can lake sense to me.
I might be able to give some sense to "epiphenomena" (I am not sure),
but if consciousness is an epiphenomena, eventually the physical
reality has to be also an epiphenomenon.
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.
Yes, in that view, consciousness has no responsibilities, and the
person is eliminated. But then with comp, I don't see why matter, not
just primitive matter, must be eliminated too.
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).
You might be on the track of some contradiction here. It looks like
all "references" becomes meaningless, including the reference on the
physics on which consciousness would be an epiphenomenon on.
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?
I am curious also.
Bruno
David
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