Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs by Marc Champagne

Author:Marc Champagne
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.3 How Low can we Go?

The Ancient Greek atomists were arguably the first to maintain that anything complex can be decomposed into simpler parts. Essentially, they drew on the following inference rule: P and Q, therefore P. The atomists deployed this inference in metaphysics, but Leibniz later saw that it is applicable to any domain, philosophy of mind included (Blamauer 2011). The logical implication of simplicity by complexity is so compelling that even an eliminativist like Paul Churchland must grant it:[T]he bulk of one’s sensational life is characterized, not by simplicity, but by an extraordinary and ever-changing complexity. Listening to a conversation, looking around a flower garden, tasting a braised-lamb stew, smelling the aromas in a wood-working shop—our sensations in such cases display intricacies that are amazing. And not always obvious. A young child may not appreciate that the distinctive taste of her first ice-cream cone resolves itself into sensations of sweetness, creaminess, and strawberry. And it may take her awhile to learn that such decompositions are both common and useful to keep track of. For the complexities we encounter are indeed composed, quite often, of simpler elements or constituting dimensions. In time, we do learn many of those simpler dimensions. A dinner-table conversation contains my brother’s unique voice as an identifiable element; the complex flower-garden displays the striking orange of a typical poppy blossom; the lamb stew displays the distinctive taste of thyme, sprinkled into the mix at the outset; and the smell of yellow cedar stands out from the other smells in the wood shop, at least to a seasoned carpenter. Each of these particular qualitative features of one’s inner phenomenological life is certainly a simpler dimension of a more complex whole . (Churchland 2011, 32–33)

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