[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Thu, 2/4/10, Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Secondly, "facts with subjective first-person ontologies"
> is a nightmarishly convoluted phrase. 

Sorry for the jargon.

> Does the universe even have facts in
> it, technically speaking? I suppose what  I'm meant to
> do is pick a component of my subjective experience, say, my headache,
> and call it a fact.

Exactly right.

> Then I say the fact of my headache has a subjective
> first-person ontology. 

Yes.

> But that's redundant: all subjective things are  first-person
> things, and vice-versa. And "ontology" actually means "the
> study of existence". 

I make the distinction because subjective experiences exist both epistemically and ontologically in the first person; that is, we can do epistemic investigations of their causes (why do you have a headache?) in the same sense that we do epistemic investigations of any third-person objective phenomena, and they also have their *existence* in the first-person and thus a first-person ontology. 

Some people especially my materialist friends seem wont to deny the first-person ontology of consciousness. They deny its existence altogether and attempt to reduce it to something "material", not realizing that in doing so they use the same dualistic vocabulary as do those with whom they want to disagree. Theirs is an over-reaction; we can keep consciousness as a real phenomenon without bringing Descartes back from the dead.

-gts