🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep25.194311.138446@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

>What I am asserting is that you are looking for (insisting on) the wrong
>kind of explanation of consciousness, and that the reason you are looking
>for this kind of explanation is that you refuse to take seriously the idea
>that you are a physical system.  If you really accept this, then an
>explanation in the form "these aspects of the system are your
>consciousness; when it gets these kinds of inputs, it reacts in this kind
>of way, which is your qualia" *is* a full explanation of consciousness. I
>don't think it is necessary to *agree* that "you are a physical system" to
>understand this; although for me personally, when I understood this point,
>my last objections to physicalism disappeared.

Well, this seems to be the net.physicalist.position.of.choice.  Qualia
just *are* physical events; don't ask why.  Unfortunately, it's
entirely unsatisfactory.  For this position to be any good, you have to
provide some reason why God couldn't have created a world with isomorphic
physical events, but no qualia.  And that's what you can't do.  Note
that "qualia are physical, therefore She couldn't" is utterly circular,
as the physicality of qualia is precisely what's at issue.  (Though
the passage above suggests that you want to be able to take it as an
unquestioned axiom.)

This position seems to flirt between some kind of property dualism
(qualia are a new kind of thing in the catalog of the universe; *but*
they're physical, no doubt about it) and some kind of brute physicalism
(everything's physical and don't ask why).  Either way, the call for
an entailment relation (or alternatively, the call for an explanation
of why qualia exist at all) is being evaded entirely.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."