Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind

[The Grand Nudger]

Ask an addict about that "control", and how quickly the illusion can fade MLA. Don't watch Blade Runner, btw, read the book. PKD FTW!
(read all of his books - do eeeet....there's one about control and addicts as well...hehehehehe, they made a decent rotoscope out of it, Scanner Darkly)


Just a few points for you Benny, you know my line on alot of this so there's no need rehashing those parts- here we go.

Let's say I'm looking at lights at an intersection. I observe the red one, wait until it turns off and the green one turns on, and then proceed to drive. How important is the specific mechanism which produced lights of those colors?

In context? Not all that important. We had streetlights before we were capable of constructing them the way that we do now.

Surely, you need some kind of mechanism capable of producing light. But ultimately, what is the source of that green light? It is in the intentionality of the designers. If the LED lights at the intersection had not been invented, the designers would have used light bulbs, or colored lamps with oil fires inside them, or whatever. The green-ness was inevitable, but the mechanism on which it supervenes is arbitrary.

The green-ness wasn't any more inevitable that the mechanism that produces it. The colors are a standardized scheme so that we all know wtf to do when we approach an intersection with a dangling red light. Was a time when we didn't use colors, btw, lever action arrows - sucked....lots of crashes (and we still have the odd traffic cop waving his begloved dickbeaters at oncoming traffic). Before that, nothing. The color scheme we use has it's roots in the railroad industry, iirc, btw. Pretty sure the green, particularly, is a recent innovation. Railroads used to use white for go - caused accidents.

I would term this "transcendence"-- the greenness is independent of the mechanism underlying it, because it doesn't matter HOW the greenness occurs, only that it does.

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..........

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.

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?