Wednesday 15 September 2010

Morning Scepticism: Greedy Reductionism

When it comes to human consciousness, there's one argument that leads to two contradicting conclusions. Since we are made of atoms and we are conscious, this must be explained in terms of atomic structure. A reductive regress either leads to atomic consciousness, or to dualism. It's like saying that since computers just manipulate the flow of electrons, either an electron is a web-page or a web-page is external to the physical computation. Computers at the core are electron flow, but a web-page is something more than reducing it to its parts.

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