🚀 go-pugleaf

David Chalmers writes:
>An evolutionary story will be able to tell you why a
>particular brain structure evolved, but about the further
>("philosophical") question, it has nothing to say.  This alone of
>course doesn't refute physicalism -- it simply means that the
>physicalist has more work to do (i.e., give an account of how this
>sort of brain structure and function could entail the existence of
>qualia).

I would like to hear your opinion on how qualia, etc. came into being. I,
and others here I think) find it satisfying to hold that our mental states
have evolved to enhance our fitness in an exactly parallel way to our
obviously physical parts. In other words, my introspection, my
model of your mental states, my feeling of embarassment when you point
out my error of logic, all make me function in a superior way to a being
physically similar to myself, but having, perhaps, just a sort of
"robotic" approach to survival, food gathering, etc. Further, my kind of
consciousness is the best possible for my kind of species (it it were not,
better fitted rival models would have chased it out of the competition
hundreds of generations ago).

If you can't go along with this position, then how would you speculate
that human consciousness did arise? Unless you take the extreme view
that every collection of atoms has some level of consciousness,
presumably it must spring forth at some level of system complexity. Do
we allow that slugs are conscious? Rats? Dogs? Apes?

The evolutionary view has answers for these questions -- it seems to me
that any other position is the weaker unless it can provide answers of at
least similar plausibilty.

Obviously we cannot (yet?) explain how the physical leads to the mental,
but I claim that is analogous to asking someone who is using a computer
with a multi-tasking real-time system with multiple I/O channels to
explain the cause of a particular glitch in terms of the quantum mechanics
of its silicon transistors.  It is, in a practical sense, impossible --
despite the fact that at each level of the machine's construction we do
have a complete physical/logical understanding of the processes involved.
I find it quite plausible to suppose that computers in a few years time
will be effectively non-deterministic as far as the user is concerned.
To find out why it did certain things, we will have to ask it!  Running a
diagnostic will then be very much like asking "How are you FEELING
today?".

Dick Jackson