RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 23, 2019 at 9:52 am
(This post was last modified: January 23, 2019 at 10:09 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(January 23, 2019 at 3:43 am)bennyboy Wrote:(January 23, 2019 at 12:20 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: Why do you think this is a problem? Why -should- consciousness be required, is everything that exists a required or needful thing?If you are making a model of reality, and the leftover piece of the puzzle is the central feature of our existence, and also the means by which we investigate and formulate that model, then yes. Everything is needed.
Leftover piece of a puzzle? I asked you why you thought that consciousness would have to be necessary. Necessity is not at all how we understand evolution to operate, is why I ask.
More broadly....unless you think that you live in a world where there is no thing that exists that didn't -have- to exist, this whole "necessity" bit is just you tying yourself into knots. Pet rocks would need to be equally necessary, or there could be no explanation for the existence of pet rocks..under this conjecture.
Are pet rocks necessary? Do they exist? Is their existence explicable? Are they, instead..some "leftover piece"?
I'm going to point out here that in some scenario where you happened to be right with a conjecture that the physical does not explain consciousness (which is a shady conjecture all by it's one-sies with reference to what we do know regardless of what we don't, lol)..the above would still have been an exceedingly poor reason to think so. Maybe consciousness isn't necessary, it would just be one more unnecessary thing in a world full of such things. Isn't that the contention of the p-zombie thought experiment in the first place? If we're going to contend that it's possible for a p-zombie to act like us..then we don't get to quibble about the lack of necessity that we have, ourselves, asserted. We live in such a world, or so we've maintained.
This actually wouldn't be a problem for consciousness or the world at large, just another mundane case of there being thirty ways to skin a cat. Honestly, we already see that without any reference to hypothetical p-zombies. Plants accomplish much of what we do without the possession or even means of possession of a conscious experience -at least like we envision it-.
The fuckers might even be better at it than we are. Who really works for who, here, anyway?
(further things to think about, consider the implications of this necessity trap. If consciousness would have to be necessary, well..necessarry to and for what? Would the necessity of consciousness insist that all things possess it? Pet rocks..conscious agents by necessity?)
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