[Serious Phil] In Virtue of the Vacuous

[Joseph Polanik]

Peter D wrote:

 >Joseph Polanik wrote:

 >>SWM wrote (#1872):

 >>>Peter D wrote:

 >>>>SWM wrote:

 >>>>>Peter D wrote:

 >>>>>>SWM wrote:

 >>>>>>>PDJ writes below: "You could build a humanoid AI, and Chalmers
 >>>>>>>could look at it and say: 'Yep, I would say that AI has qualia.
 >>>>>>>Of course, it has them because n non physical Extra Ingredient
 >>>>>>>supervenes on its information processing...' You won't have
 >>>>>>>proved a damn thing to him about the falsehood of dualism.
 >>>>>>>How-and-why explanation just isn';t the same as recipe following.
 >>>>>>>You can bake bread without understanding microbiology."

 >>>>>>>This is incredible! How many times have I pointed out that I am
 >>>>>>>not tyring to prove the "falsehood of dualism," only that we
 >>>>>>>don't need to opt for dualism to account for consciousness in the
 >>>>>>>universe!!!

 >>>>>>How many times do I have to say...same bloody difference! There is
 >>>>>>no purported motivation for dualism whatsoever beyond accounting
 >>>>>>for consciousness.

 >>from a traditional perspective, that would be quite true; but, until
 >>the von Neumann Interpretation is falsified, there is another
 >>motivation: accounting for physics.

 >[no comment from PDJ]

 >>>Except my dear dualism defender, I am not asserting that dualism IS
 >>>false, only that we have no reason to speculate that it's true if we
 >>>can adequately explain consciousness without it which, I have
 >>>claimed, we can.

 >>Stuart's position revolves around a highly questionable conditional
 >>claim:

 >>if we can adequately explain consciousness without asserting dualism;
 >>then, we have no reason to assert dualism.

 >That isn';t questionable at all,

are you saying that one may not question the antecedent of that
conditional!?

curiously enough, both you and Stuart are refusing to engage the same
argument: the antecedent of the conditional is false, making the
conditional itself vacuously true.

 >>as previously discussed, one must assert phenomenological dualism to
 >>make explanation possible.

 >>someone, such as Dennett, who ontologically reduces experience qua
 >>qualia to brain activity, forfeits the ability to explain experience
 >>in terms of brain activity because that would be explaining something
 >>in terms of itself.


 >since there is no known reason to posit mind-matter dualism other than
 >to explain consc.

just repeating your claim is not enough


 >># curiously enough, this claim suffers from the same flaw that PDJ
 >>overlooked above: it presupposes that the von Neumann Interpretation
 >>is false.

 >Every unsupported claim should be presumed false.

you are free to adopt such a position; but, that is beside the point.

at issue is whether you admit or deny that your position presupposes
that a certain interpretation of QM is false.

 >I have no more reason to believe in Abstract Egos that I have in Magic
 >Pixie Dust.

this isn't about whether there are reasons to believe in an abstract I.
it's about whether there are facts that falsify a certain interpretation
of QM.

 >>until vNI is falsified, there may be another reason to assert
 >>dualism: to explain physics.

 >There may be a reason to presume dualism to expalin what it is ususally
 >presumed to explain.

possibly true; but, your claim is that there is no other reason to
postulate dualism.

your claim is false.

Joe


-- 

Nothing Unreal is Self-Aware

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