RE: Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis
February 16, 2017 at 9:43 pm
(This post was last modified: February 16, 2017 at 9:50 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 16, 2017 at 9:05 pm)bennyboy Wrote:IOW there is nothing known to exist that you would consider a distal cause. There is no point at which you would consider this particular question answered. An army of distal causes between the proximate cause and the big bang, but none satisfy -even as candidates-. You aren't, point of fact, asking for a distal cause at all.
(February 16, 2017 at 6:36 pm)Khemikal Wrote: It shouldn't be difficult, I'm not asking you to agree that anything -is- a distal cause of qualia, only asking you to identify candidates -as- a distal cause in a material monist framework. Your view is irrelevant to the question you asked me to answer.
What's the distal cause of the existence of matter? The Big Bang? Whatever quantity/principle/process allowed for it?
Quote:Whatever that is, then that is my view of the distal cause of the capacity for material systems to experience: it has been intrinsic to the fabric of the Universe from the very start.I disagree, what is the distal cause of whatever unknown thing you would call a distal cause, so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Do you see the problem with the way you've approached the question -and- determined your own answer?
You're searching for something like an ultimate cause - to everything, not qualia in particular. I don't know what that ultimate cause is, neither do you..but we're not actually questioning qualia, specifically at that point. You have insisted, in this, that you will accept nothing less than an explanation of the entire universe as an explanation of qualia. That's not exactly a rational request, nor is it even remotely a rational objection to any specific explanation of qualia...which is a bit more specific and limited and further up the chain..as it were, than "the universe".
Quote:The process you describe led to the capacity for a particular organism to experience things in a particular way. As I said, we don't "get" what it's like to do echolocation because we're not built like that. But we get what it's like to be able to know what something is like, and so do bats, worms (I think), and I suspect there's no magical critical mass at all-- that it runs right down the scale spectrum to QM.Do you think that rocks are able to know what something is like?
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