Timeline for Is there a causal influence of the mental on the physical?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
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| Nov 5 at 16:43 | comment | added | Mr. Tea | I guess I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It sounds to me like you're trying to support parallelism, which is a solution to the problem with epiphenomenalism that I bring up here (i.e. the physical neural nets encoding the idea of consciousness evolved in parallel with, but with no input from, the consciousness that we experience). That's where there's an inexplicable coincidence. How did talking about consciousness help our ancestors survive or choose a mate or hunt? | |
| Nov 5 at 16:24 | comment | added | mudskipper | In other words, "how did the information get there" -- that's an easy problem (though difficult enough in details). The hard question, I think, is how to express sentience in a physicalist theory. What would it take to accept that a certain adaptive robot we might built would be sentient? Are flies sentient? (I think so) Microbes? (I don't know) Large communities of fungi? A wood? (I don't know). | |
| Nov 5 at 16:07 | comment | added | mudskipper | Information requires an interpreter (or stack of interpreters). What is informative to one creature may just be unobserved or irrelevant noise for another creature. The iranian spider-tailed viper has a tail that looks like a spider. That's misleading information for some "gullible" birds. How did that "information" end up in the tail? A few lucky mutations, plus evolution, plus relatively stable environment conditions (stupid birds) do the trick. There is no spider there, but the total illusion of a juicy spider being there does have effects (by being interpreted as non-illusionary real). | |
| Nov 5 at 15:43 | history | edited | Mr. Tea | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 40 characters in body
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| Nov 5 at 15:40 | comment | added | Mr. Tea | I think you're missing my point -- though I admit I am using terms rather loosely. I am not talking about identity, I am talking about physical information storage. Information about consciousness physically exists in our brains, encoded in neural networks, in such a way that we may communicate information about consciousness in physical ways in the physical world. The problem from the epiphenomenalist perspective, then, is: how did that information end up in our brains if consciousness has no physical effect on the world? I'll edit to be more clear. | |
| Nov 5 at 15:01 | comment | added | mudskipper | "how is it that our brains are in some way aware of the existence of consciousness" -- well, epiphenomenalists could say: It's not our brains that are aware -- that's a misuse of language and concepts -- I am aware. And "I" in any kind of interpretation am not identical to "my brain" (how could I be? my brain is "part of my body") A tv screen shows images to us (or to our cats) but in one kind of description it is merely thousands of leds flashing. The images are perfectly "real" but as such have no causal effects - likewise "thoughts" (or the "I" as thought) might not have any. | |
| Nov 5 at 14:01 | review | Late answers | |||
| Nov 5 at 14:38 | |||||
| Nov 5 at 13:37 | history | answered | Mr. Tea | CC BY-SA 4.0 |