a few open minutes appeared

Sooner than expected, I had a chance to look at the DEONTOLOGISTICS response in a bit more detail. A few quick thoughts before I run off to the next Kiran Desai lecture. Knowing Deontologistics, he will probably come up with another detailed reply right away; if he does, I will do the best I can to respond, but it might not be in “timely fashion.”

Here is one thing I noticed:

“It is implied that the former position takes consciousness to be exhausted by some scientific account of the structure of a given kind of entity (e.g., neurobiology), whereas the latter takes consciousness to be some kind of paradigm case of irreducibility, and thus to potentially tell us something interesting about the more general excess indicated in the first difference.”

Actually, no. I definitely do not claim that consciousness is a paradigm case of irreducibility. I have said repeatedly and clearly that I don’t think scientific discourse can even do metaphysical justice to chemicals and stones. The reason he thinks otherwise cna be seen here:

“It’s not a matter of claiming that all interactions between non-conscious entities are relative to consciousness, but rather that there are some characteristics that all such interactions share with the interactions between consciousness and other entities.”

Literally accurate, but he is implying much more here than he is saying. What I think he’s implying is what many have (wrongly) implied: namely, that I’m projecting special human traits back into inanimate matter, and hence am guilty of anthropomorphizing. But that’s not true. What I actually do is precisely what Deontologistics advises. Namely:

“It’s possible both to claim that there is some important structure common to all entities that science does not speak of, and to claim that we must understand consciousness in terms of it, rather than the other way around.”

But this is exactly my position! As for “consciousness as a paradigm case of irreducibility,” that’s not me. I also think cotton is irreducible to scientific discourse about it. Perhaps in principle we can make common cause on that point, but the people I called “scientific realists” never seem to want to grant very much room to the irreducibility in question. And that’s not just true of “positivists.”

“As such, I think that the second distinction just confuses the first. Although it draws a very interesting contrast between Grahams approach and that of others’, it doesn’t seem to be directly related to the real issue at hand.”

It is unclear to me how it confuses the other issue. In fact, I found the preceding paragraph or so before this to be not as clear as the rest of his post.

“Moving on to the first distinction then, the crucial issue is what this ‘excess’ of the real structure of entities over and above science’s description of them consists in. The problem is that there are at least two ways of conceiving of this excess, which I will call formal excess and material excess. Graham’s own position is very good for demonstrating this distinction, because it contains both kinds of excess.”

This sounds very interesting, and I will try to respond to it a bit later, because the paragraphs that follow are a bit technical and I want some quiet time to read through them.