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From: bettingr@sunybcs.uucp (Keith E. Bettinger)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Summary: Study consciousness objectively or subjectively; either way you lose?
Message-ID: <3719@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 18 Jan 89 16:39:25 GMT
References: <564@soleil.UUCP> <1995@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <906@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@cs.Buffalo.EDU
Reply-To: bettingr@sunybcs.UUCP (Keith E. Bettinger)
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science
Lines: 42

In article <906@ubu.warwick.UUCP> mirk@uk.ac.warwick.cs (Mike Taylor) writes:
>
>  [ ... ]
>
>I will try to restate the point in its bare form: to analyse something
>by reductive techniques, we must be able to view it objectively.  But
>to view consciousness objectively is to omit the most important aspect
>of the phenomenon, namely the subjective experience of it, and thus
>any reductionist anaysis made on this basis will be incomplete and/or
>inaccurate.
>
>There - that wasn't so bad, was it? :-)

Maybe it IS so bad.  Let me try taking this position to its logical
conclusion. 

We study things objectively, but consciousness is "subjectivity" itself, so
that any objective study of subjectivity will be just missing the essence of
what is being studied.  Thus, we should reject objectivity for the one case of
studying subjectivity.

But we have already rejected subjective studies of phenomena, because its
person-dependent results are only useful to the person making the discovery.
Eliminating both means of investigation, this argument would seem to obviate
any reductive attempt to fully study consciousness.

Does this, then, argue for holism?

I'm sure this line of reasoning has a gaping hole in it, but it seems
interesting on the surface.  (Another in a series of Why-bother? arguments.)
Pardon my laziness, but I leave it to the esteemed members of the net to
plunge the dagger into the heart of this demon...

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