Skip wrote:
Ginkgo:In this instance, I was talking to the participants here present. None - to date - have answered the simple questions.Again, it depends on who who you talk to.
But matter in motion doesn't invariably culminate in a "we" that's capable of encounter and experience. Subjectivity may not be required for an encounter, but there it is anyway. And I didn't introduce the problem of subjectivity, because I don't believe it's relevant.If you ask a physicalist such as Dennett then he would tell you that no subjectivity is required when we,"encounter" an object. Subjectivity can be explained in terms of matter in motion.Well, obviously! What else could?The physical working of the brain accounts for our subjective perspective.That doesn't change the apple.. Your experience of the 'redness' of an apple is much the same as mine. But it isn't exactly the same. Our 'redness' is a unique intuitive experience.
Hence its objective reality and the unyielding fact that it can't be substituted for a baby or a steam engine, no matter how subjective each person's perception of them might be.
By this I was meaning depending on the philosopher and or scientist you ask. Penrose for example would answer your question in terms of, "objective reduction" of the probability wave. No one is required to be watching in order to collapse the wave function. It does it all by itself.
My mistake. What I actually should have said was that, "the physical workings of the brain account for consciousness" Substance dualists would disagree and argue that consciousness is distinct from the physical workings of the brain. So when you die this mean that consciousness (soul) lives on in some other world or dimension. In other words, they are saying that the physical brain is distinct from consciousness.
People such as Dennett reject this idea and believe that the perceiving individual is nothing special.
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
From the physicalists point of view the difference between a apple and a steam train is not a problem. All your need is an objective reality of physical things and a perceiving individual. Objectivity can be explained in terms of science and the subjective individual can be explained in exactly the same terms. It's all a neat packaged explanation.
Is this what you are getting at?