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From: adt@minster.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Harnad's epiphenomenalism
Message-ID: <540155568.11101@minster.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Feb-87 14:12:48 EST
Article-I.D.: minster.540155568.11101
Posted: Thu Feb 12 14:12:48 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Feb-87 00:35:31 EST
References: <4021@quartz.Diamond.BBN.COM>
Reply-To: adt@minster.UUCP (adt)
Distribution: world
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 28

In article <4021@quartz.Diamond.BBN.COM> aweinste@Diamond.BBN.COM (Anders Weinstein) writes:

>Well, I don't think we ought to give this up so easily.  I would urge that
>cognitivists *not* buy into the premise of so many of Harnad's replies: the
>existence of some weird parallel universe of subjective experience.
>(Actually, *multiple* such universes, one per conscious subject, though of
>course the existence of more than my own is always open to doubt.) We should
>recognize no such private worlds. The most promising prospect we have is that
>conscious experiences are either to be identified with functional states of
>the brain or eliminated from our ultimate picture of the world. How this
>reduction is to be carried out in detail is naturally a matter for
>empirical study to reveal, but this should remain one (distant) goal of
>mind/brain inquiry.
>
>Anders Weinstein		aweinste@DIAMOND.BBN.COM
>BBN Labs, Cambridge MA

Why is it necessary to assert that there are no subjective universes, all that
is necessary is that everyone in their own subjective universe agrees the 
definition of consciousness as they perceive it. Eliminating conscious 
experiences from our ultimate picture of the world sounds like throwing away
half the results so that the theory fits. The analogy of our understanding of
gold in terms of its atomic structure is a useful one but does not require
the rejection of subjective universes. If objectivism is taken to its limit
as above then surely it must be possible to define "beautiful" in terms of
physical states of mind, or "beautiful" should be eliminated from our
ultimate picture of the world. OR "beautiful" is not a conscious experience.
I would be interested to know which of these possibilities you support.