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> ... a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). I feel like this is, intentionally or not, aimed at l

• mannykannot 9y ago
  You are not likely to get an answer. This is a style of comment that is quite common in discussions where there are philosophical issues. The defining features are an assertion that someone is wrong, followed by a long list of general references, with the unstated implication that the alleged error will be corrected somewhere within them. The authors of such comments are careful not to take a position that can be debated, and in this case, the comment's author has been especially careful in avoiding giving clues that might indicate specifically what he objects to. This style is also seen in discussions where religion is raised, where it is used to avoid questions like why an omnipotent and benevolent creator thought smallpox was a good idea.
• danielam 9y ago
  I wasn't intentionally aiming at your comments, but some of what I wrote does seem to concern, at least loosely, some of the things you've written. As you can imagine, philosophical issues usually can't be resolved in a comment section, hence the links to material that addresses a couple of these issues. But for starters, the problem of qualia is neither here nor there. I will note that the problem is rooted in a Cartesian metaphysical tradition that persists even among materialists, though they are in an even worse place than their dualist counterparts. Whereas Cartesian dualists could at least defer to the res cogitans as the "substrate" in which qualia exist, materialists--having dropped the res cogitans while maintaining a more or less Cartesian res extensa--cannot hope to account for qualia because the res extensa, by definition, precludes qualia. The only recourse is to reexamine those broadly Cartesian metaphysical presuppositions, something few materialists seem to be doing. Putting aside the cryptodualisms of some of the more sophisticated materialists, perhaps one of the more annoying things you'll see is the invocation of "emergence" as a magical cure-all to any of the problems facing materialism. Another issue is what seems to be the claim that when accounting for consciousness, you've either got religion or a (reductionist) materialism. Nonsense. Aristotelians have always held that animals are both composed of matter[0] and conscious. One area Aristotelians and materialists differ is their concept of matter. The materialist's concept of matter is the reason why Descartes denied non-human animals consciousness. He understood that without the res cogitans--which he denied non-human animals--the impoverished res extensa he presupposed could not "support" consciousness. Aristotelianism avoids the problem without having to take refuge in substance dualism. [0] The exception is man. While most faculties of human beings are understood to be material, the exception is the intellect. Why? Because the intellect engages in abstraction. If matter is concrete and particular ("this red apple"), and universals existing apart from particulars are abstract ("redness"), then the intellect, in which they reside, cannot be material. Compare this with the imagination which always deals with images and thus particulars.