From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sun Apr 04 2004 - 13:57:00 MDT
> > I was referring to something different, the "paradox" that
> people can
> > encounter during meta-thinking about thinking. They wonder
> > how it can
> > be that the experience of self, what it actually *feels* like
> > to smell a
> > rose, in all its undeniable immediacy, can arise from matter
> > that is not
> > itself conscious.
> >
> > My point was that this paradox is explained simply (as
> > described in my
> > earlier post), not that human experience with all its rich
> meaning is
> > explained simply.
>
> Well, I'm not so sure it makes sense to say that experience
> "arise[s] from matter". I think that our current conceptual
> vocabulary is not really adequate to understanding or
> expressing the relationship between mind and matter.
>
> -- Ben
So, following up my previous comment: the so-called 'paradox' is not
really a puzzling aspect of the universe, rather it's an indication that
two useful vocabularies we've developed for talking about the world
* physics
* introspective folk psychology
are apparently "incommensurable" (in the sense of philosophy of science
-- meaning there is no reasonably straightforward way to translate
between their vocabularies)
Ben
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