[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[david buchanan]

Matt, Scott and all:

Just finished reading this thread and have a zillion questions...

Matt had said to Scott:
The position (on Darwinism) I've taken from Rorty and Dennett is still that 
"consciousness" (as a demarcation point between us and rocks), like 
everything else, is something that's created in a language-game...

dmb says:
I have just a few minutes so I'll let this serve as an example.  Hopefully 
you can see the kind of the kind of questions that have me so confused. 
After reading a line like that I think to myself, well that can't mean what 
I think it means. As I read it, Rorty and Dennett have proposed a bit of 
impossible nonsense here. Consciousness is created is a language game? I'm 
thinking to myself, don't we suppose that consciousness is needed to speak 
any kind of language and to play any kind of game, so how could a language 
game create consciousness? I'm thinking, that makes no sense at all. That 
just can't be what Matt is saying. I wonder what he means. I wonder what a 
language game is. And I wonder how Darwinism got into the conversation. The 
only thing I don't wonder about is my confusion. Of that I am certain...

Scott replied to Matt:
... in mine consciousness is not something created in a language-game, 
rather that consciousness and semiosis are not separable, and not derivable, 
and so all there is are language games -- some human, most not -- rocks are, 
maybe, comparable to a letter of an alphabet of a grammar used in some 
non-human language game...

dmb says:
Non-human language? Rocks playing language games? I can't even imagine what 
that's supposed to mean.

Gents, it seems to me that you still haven't even yet agreed on what it 
means to be a physicalist or an essentialist. Working with serveral 
definitions at once makes it tough to follow, you know? I mean, is a 
physicalist one who believes all of reality can be explained in 
microstructural terms or is she merely one who is willing to say that 
science works and sometimes we should use it? Huge difference? The second 
kind of physicalist hasn't even entered a metaphysical conversation and her 
assertions should be greated with an enthusiastic yawn. The first is the 
worst kind of nihilist, essentialist and reductionist, no? I mean, its not 
JUST that you have no working definitions and are therefore not even 
discussing the same concepts, its ALSO that you seem to have a tin ear with 
repect to such radically different positions. I mean, these are not slight 
differences, not the kind of thing you get by qualifying a position. They're 
more like opposite postions - but with the same name.

My point? You guys are killing me with the jargon and slogans. And I think 
you've got yourselves pretty well tangled up too. For my sake, for SA's sake 
and, I suspect, almost everybody else's too, will you please give it to us 
in english. Go ahead and be pedantic, if that's what it takes. Cause I'm 
telling you, to regular people, your comments LOOK pretty weird. Most people 
just won't buy the idea that language games create consciousness or that 
rocks play such games.

Later,
dmb

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