[ExI] common sense

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Mon Mar 8 11:15:48 UTC 2010


On 7 March 2010 19:57, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You asked why ever should we do an epistemic but not an ontological reduction of mental phenomena, and I hope you can see what I meant by my answer: we can reduce mental phenomena epistemically and causally (the job of neuroscience) but we cannot reduce those phenomena ontologically without losing our common sense. It literally makes no sense to reduce subjectivity to something objective, and for this reason I subscribe to a flavor of non-reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind.

One might well believe that the sky would fall were we to embrace the
opposite POV, but after all the idea that all (an indeed qualified
"all") human beings and only human beings have some mythical
"objective consciousness" is a such well-delimited bias, culturally
and historically, that its likely disappearing would probably change
very little in the world history.

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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