From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Aug 18 2004 - 04:17:34 BST
Paul,
[Paul said] I have a feeling this dialogue will end up with you telling me
that
> consciousness is too mysterious to be explained, and I kind of agree,
> but it's fun anyway.
Actually, my position is that, from an empirical perspective, consciousness
doesn't need to be explained. Everything else needs to be explained in
terms of consciousness (and value, which is also indubitable). It is
materialism whose dogma has twisted things so as to make consciousness a
something needing to be explained. That doesn't deny that there is a
mystery (polarity) but that arises from our being fallen beings, so to
speak.
>
> Scott said:
> Of course, the Plotinian has the opposite challenge of explaining how
> the intellect can materialize...
>
> Paul:
> As, in its system, intellect is no more the fundamental source of
> reality than matter, the MOQ avoids this challenge.
The MOQ has the challenge of explaining how the interaction of DQ and SQ
produces things. When I say "how" I am referring to explanations on the
order of quantum electrodynamics explaining why things stick together, the
periodic table, etc. Of course I do not expect any of these philosophies to
actually come up with such explanations. From our fallen state the best we
can do is wave our arms.
In my other post to you I discuss why the way the MOQ avoids this issue is
inadequate.
>
> Scott said:
> ...but I don't see any logical impossibility involved, whereas I do with
> the problem of conscious emergence. (Our perceptions are extended --
> have spatio-temporality, but if they are perceptions *of* the extended,
> passed to us by tiny signals (photons, etc.) then there is nothing
> spatio-temporal that can grasp the extended whole as a whole, since
> every event (e.g. an electron absorbing a photon, a nerve cell firing)
> is separated from every other event.
>
> Paul:
> Just because the inorganic and biological levels are presumed to behave
> according to intellectually constructed rules of space and time, there
> is nothing in the MOQ which forces other levels to follow those rules.
> Social patterns overcame the restrictions of physical biological
> patterns, hence, intellectual consciousness does not need to follow
> these rules. Also, intellectual patterns are created by perception of
> Quality, not photons.
I am referring to sense perceptions, not intellectual patterns, as that
which are supposed to be created by the collation of photons, a view I am
trying to refute.
Sense perceptions must (while we are awake) follow spatio-temporal rules. I
am pointing out that if we assume that our sense perceptions are caused by
spatio-temporal things and events, and those spatio-temporal events are all
that is real, then there couldn't be sense perceptions, since sense
perceptions require continuity.
- Scott
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