[MD] Social level for humans only

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
Perhaps you can explain how bracketing consciousness off as a separate ontological category does anything but make a worse mess than SOM.

dmb says:
I think you're still not grasping the problem. Chalmers' is criticizing physicalist positions within the philosophy of mind. "The hard problem" is hard precisely because physical explanations do not explain anything except the physical processes. The eliminative materialists have eliminated everything but material processes and so Chalmers is saying that doesn't work. As he puts it in his 1995 paper, "To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say." 

Another way to put it is that Chalmers is criticizing the answer that the materialist school gives to the mind-body problem, which "says reality is all matter, which creates mind". Chalmers is saying no, it's not just a matter of matter. Pirsig can say this too and making such a distinction does not necessarily mean you're a Cartesian dualist. Even the MOQ, there is a line between mind (social and intellectual) and matter (inorganic and biological). If we transfer Chalmers critique into this framework, we could say the hard problem is designed to show why the former cannot be explained in the terms of the latter. The physicalists think they can, mostly because there is no such thing as mind apart from the material processes. Their answer to the mind-matter problem is to reduce mind to matter. The mind is what's eliminated. Now, I seriously doubt if Chalmers' dualism is an attempt to re-establish the Cartesian subject but he does maintain that phenomenal experience cannot be explained in terms of sensory processes. 



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