Hi Les. Thought-provoking post. I think it's very hard to model diversity while preserving a true single-category ontology, but it is instructive to try.
In this case the question is: So how does your "abolutely homogeneous" esse generate diversity? You proposed two qualities in esse...
Lots of great ideas in this chapter – it rewards repeated reading. Let me just now stress one theme which Hypnagogue has also raised: which is the strong compatibility of the theory with quantum mechanics.
When most folks think about causality I think they have something inspired by...
The issue seems to be this:
How much of the problem is that first person experience (FPE) is beyond the reach of "physicalism" vs. the fact that today's physics (and the implied metaphysics of causality behind it) are incomplete but might someday be expanded to include a direct analogue to FPE?
Interesting debate. Here's a thought experiment:
Future physicists conclude that there exists in nature a property of certain complex natural systems which provides a function which coordinates the evolution of the system. This property is a added irreducible part of nature, which is...
Hi. I found the second link to be better written than the first. The first uses a poor example: the ant jaw example involves a temporally extended feedback loop which seems understandable without reference to downward causation. It also talks about "activation" of constituent part's causal...
FYI, as a follow-up, I wanted to mention that the journal Consciousess and Cognition has a new special issue on the Neurobiology of Animal Consciousness. Just what the doctor ordered! I have just read the introductory article by Bernard Baars so far. Here's the abstract:
The evidence for...
I throw this out to see if any forum participants have come across this idea or have opinions on it:
A while back I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference to an interpretation of QM which I had not seen before. Due to physicist Carlo Rovelli (of loop quantum gravity fame), I found it...
I'm in agreement. But I don't think a naturalistic panexperientialism has been explored enough so far.
I like a lot of what you say here. I want to have an explanation for both physical reality and first person experience, and I think it needs to be a reduction to an underlying framework...
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Paul.
You know that your first person experience exists. You do not know a PC exists. I am saying it is very reasonable to infer that experience exists elsewhere in nature, but it is a greater leap to say there is a PC, and all of nature is relegated...
If the underlying substrate is not one or many, it's certainly confusing to call it one consciousness!
What you are discussing sounds like neutral monism, and in the last century is mostly identified with James and Russell. A very good historical look at efforts to develop this (in Western...
I see a conflict between Paul’s view (which seems clearly to be idealism – please correct me if this is wrong), and some of Canute’s quotes, which refer to a more neutral basis for monism, from which consciousness as well as the rest of the world arise. My sympathies are with the latter...
Hi. I was off-line for the last week and I'm trying to catch up.
I don't have my own detailed theory of this, and everything I'm saying here is extremely speculative (A discussion of a detailed causal model which ends up with something like this characteristic is the subject of Gregg...
My ideas is that there is no gap in causality, but that we need a new theory of causation. I've been frustrated by the fact that when debating the issue of causal closure (and free will/determinism), it seems most people on both sides have in their minds a world of classical mechanics. I...
I'm trying out this way of thinking because:
1. I think "substance thinking" has completely failed on the mind/body question in the past. Descartes proposed substance dualism. Monistic responses to this were to say everything was matter (materialism) or everything was mind (idealism). All...