Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind

[bennyboy]

But it isn't, the "green-ness" comes from the mechanism to begin with (a different mech would give us purple). The fact that we use green (instead of purple) comes from a standard scheme. There's nothing transcendent about this green-ness at all..........

It's transcendent in the sense that its existence isn't ultimately dependent on the SPECIFIC mechanism involved, but rather on the intentions of the people who formed that mechanism. That green-ness was going to happen, with or without that particular arrangement of LED lights.

I should think you'd find this idea highly compatible with your gate-logic model: mind is going to happen wherever there's a possibility of the evolution of systems which compare data in consistent ways: but the specific mechanism (brain vs. electronic computer vs. quantum computer etc.) isn't really that important.

Let's say we have a brain and a computer which function identically, i.e. that the computer perfectly simulates all the functions of the brain, and that we choose to accept as true that the computer is actually "sentient." What does this mean, when two very different mechanisms are capable of producing sentience?

-That both mechanisms function identically.......as you just said. Nothing more, nothing less.

We isolate the most immediate causal context as though it is isolated from the universe.

In the same way that we don't factor in the guys who grow the coffee beans that the factory workers grind into coffee which facilitates their building a computer mouse........sure. Doesn't mean that it isn't actually a rabbit hole, just that we don't find it useful to go -all the way down the rabbit hole- when discussing one particular thing.

You imply this is a fact of convenience, but I don't think that's quite right. The fact is that we CAN'T go all the way down the rabbit hole. We can't determine, ultimately, why things exist rather than not, or why mind exists rather than not.

So here is the rule I'd like to discuss: "A supervenient property, once supervened, should be considered transcendent-- independent of the mechanical structure/function upon which it supervenes."

So, vanilla is transcendent, yes?

In the sense that on might consider the qualia of vanilla, "vanilla-ness" a supervenient property, maybe.

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My position is not "brains -with- minds"...but that "brains -are- minds". As such, "any other data processing structure" doesn't fit the bill, as a brain is not just "any" data processing structure.

The objects -themselves- are also expressions of the underlying principles. Reductionism. That said, the principle may -allow- for mind, but it (mind) certainly doesn't seem to express itself in a vacuum on principle alone. The principle gives potential, the object actualizes the potential. Aluminum, for example, has the potential to fly, but we don't see flying chunks of aluminum until they get hammered into aircraft (or thrown across my lawn).

Okay, if you are defining brain as any structure which has a mind, and you are defining mind as the ability to perform logical comparisons on data, then I'd say that mind is the expression of the principle of logical comparison, rather than of the specific mechanism of the brain (be it biological or electronic). And I'd definitely say that "plane-ness" isn't a property of a hunk of aluminum, but rather the aluminum is the medium through which the idea of planeness was manifested.