An unoccupied position in logical space: absences are conscious. Right now, there is no trash can in my office. The absence of this trash can is itself conscious—at least that’s the idea. If absences have causal powers, why can’t they be conscious?
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You can make a mind out of brains (that is, a mind with neural realizers). But then, you can also make a mind out of silicon, at least in principle (A.I.). But by that same principle, you should be able to make a mind out of nothing (absences).
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You just need to arrange the nothing the right way, set it up so that it enters into the right causal relations. Or at least anyone who’s a functionalist about consciousness (and who accepts absence causation) should hold.
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that seems right, and interesting. But mustn't there be a lot of non-absence for this to make sense? "this effect is explained by that bit over there not happening, which is caused by some elaborate (present) structure" ?
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Yeah, that may be right. The thought started off as a kind of troll/joke and then it occurred to me you could make a somewhat more serious argument, but I haven’t thought it through yet.
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But the gardener’s failure to water the plant doesn’t cause the plant to die. Dehydration caused the plant to die.
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Agree that you can try to take that line, but it gets hard for some cases. Jonathan Schaffer argues that if you go this route you end up being forced to deny that gunshots to the heart can cause deaths (because the process involves the absence of oxygen in the brain).
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The gardener forgot because of the absence of a memory.
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Justin, you have publications. I think you should let me have this one.
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The "absence" of the water is relevant only in the context of the presence of the plant and it's environment, it's history, etc. The whole situation isn't exactly composed of nothing. You're playing word games.
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Time itself is an absence, measurable only as the interval between events and space only as the interval between objects. In both cases we accept time and space as functionally necessary for causality. This doesn't mean they exist in the same way an event occurs or an object is.
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Čini se da učitavanje traje već neko vrijeme.
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