🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep28.150204.4237@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:

> -- so your parenthetical
>>explanation here won't do.  There is also the secondary question
>>of why it feels like *that* rather than like *this*
>
>Everything is itself; you can't get further than that.
>
> -- it seems
>>perfectly coherent that our blue experiences and red experiences
>>could be systematically inverted, for instance.  Even when all
>>the physical facts are in, it seems arbitrary why one kind of process
>>is accompanied by this experience, and another kind by that one.
>
>It is arbitrary.

Well well well.  It's arbitrary.  That's quite enough, as far as
I'm concerned, to establish dualism.  Given the physical facts,
the correspondence between physical facts and qualitative feels
*could have* been that way, but *in fact* it's this way.  So
this correspondence is a further fact.

Seriously, yours is turning out to be about most dualist of
non-dualist theories that I've ever come across, all but
acknowledging the distinctness of the properties in question
and the lack of a conceptual entailment relation between them
(although a bizarre, radically extensionalist epistemology
stops you from putting it quite that way), but dealing with
this by asserting a brute identity between these properties
without any conceptual connection to back it up.  Qualia *just
are* physical; don't ask why.

>>As I said in another post, evolution won't do as an explanation,
>>as it will only get you as far as the current physical details.
>>Evolution is irrelevant to the question of why *this* physical
>>sructure gives rise to *this* experiential feel.
>
>Each physical structure is itself and not anything else...

And there we go again...

-- 
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."