Gordon says:
> >That ambition seems unattainable, since the subjectivities
> >investigating are themselves part of the world they are trying
> >to describe. A mentation-free world is by definition
> >unimaginable.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Surely a world must have existed long before the appearance of human
> beings (or any other creatures capable of subjective investigations
> of objects), and a world will continue to exist after the
> disappearance of human beings (and other creatures capable of
> subjective investigations of objects) as well.
Even if so the problem I mentioned would remain -- the world is not mindless, therefore a description of the world must include mentation _as_such_ (that is, not as mere descriptions of mechanical behavior), and those mentations must include the subjective experiences of the observers.
The gratuitous assumption of a mindless predecessor of the present world produces all sorts of difficulties, like the mind-body problem and the appearance of consciousness _ex_ _nihilo_, which seem superfluous to me. Why bother? Unless you like that sort of thing, of course.
-- Gordon