From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2008 - 08:16:43 MDT
> Yes, but I know right now that I'm not a zombie, regardless of whether
> anyone else believes me. What you're suggesting is that this special
> personal knowledge might be unreliable: I may yet be a zombie, or a
> partial zombie, despite feeling what I feel. But surely *at bottom*
> consciousness must be this feeling that I have. If you come up with a
> scientific theory that predicts what chemicals I will find salty, but
> I taste one of these chemicals and find it sweet, then it is your
> theory that is wrong and needs to be adjusted, not my taste
> perception.
Precisely. In fact, even the materialism of consciousness can't be
taken as given for the moment. We can to some extent predict what
people will do in certain circumstances; we can link certain parts of
the brain with certain feats of the mind. But until we can give
accurate predictions of what someone will do in the next hour, based
on data about their body (also acceptable: probabilistic predictions
or chaotic attractor-like predictions), then we cannot claim
materialism of consciousness as a scientific fact - just as a most
likely interpretation.
Stuart
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT