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Non-technical anti physicalist concerns

samadhi_smiles said:
Fausty, I think the idea is that what we say about human consciousness will extrapolate to consciousness, simpliciter.

Indeed, that could be the case. However, quite clearly this is far from an assumptive declaration everyone would support absent supporting data. In fact, I suggest (along with the affective branch of neuroscientific thought, and the D'Amasio position, amongst others) that it is by understanding the differences between ways of being conscious that we might begin to unpack what it is we're talking about when we talk about "consciousness" at all.

Specifically, the relationship between language and consciousness - a contentious subject, and hardly a settled area - implies, ceteris paribus, that assuming "consciousness" is species (or system-type) independent is. . . discongruent with Occam's Razor. To put it mildly. =D

Indeed, I'd point out this thread on a similar subject over at S&T (shameless plug) by computer scientist Jaron Lanier. Assuming that every flavor of sentient critter out there is conscious in a substantively identical manner to the hairless primates flies in the face of some fairly clear suggestions otherwise.

Given my, um, unusual family life one could say this position isn't unexpected for me to take. I'd say that I am, in a sense, uniquely qualified to comment on that specific theoretical position by the nature of my pair-bonding preferences. Doesn't mean I'm right, of course - just means I can be expected to have a personal sense of perspective aside from merely theoretic consideration.

Peace,

Fausty
 
First of all I want to second what samadhi_smiles said about Chalmers. Fausty's summary of Chalmers' views is an incredible distortion. I'm not sure if you just skimmed a little too fast or what, Fausty, but you are way off. As far as Dennett, I'm not sure if there is a real disagreement between us. You say that Dennett is saying that all the physical functions are enough to explain experience. I'm saying that he denies existence of the part of consciousness that is not definable in terms of physical functions. The point of both statements, I think, is the same (or close to the same).

samadhi-smiles: I'm aware that Dennett is a minority among physicalists and have said so in this thread. I just used him as an example of the "hard-line physicalists" (i.e. eliminativists) I was hoping to hear from in this thread. I agree that your list of philosophers represents a pretty good variety of more "main stream" physicalist writers. Although, I have to point out that Jaegwon Kim is no longer a physicalist in the same sense of any of the other writers you mentioned. His new(ish) book, Physicalism or Something Near Enough includes a defense of property dualism similar to Chalmers' (although, as the title suggests, this is relegated to a small section of the book).

As far as your criticisms: I'm not demanding that physcalism explain why a conscious state is physical, I'm demanding they explain how. And, to use the technical term that you used (and that I have been trying to avoid to stay true to the title of this thread :p), I am claiming that a physicalist must explain how consciousness supervenes on the physical. This involves explaining away the prima facie intuition that it does does not supervene on the physical. And, this, of course has proven to be very difficult. I mean, if staunch physicalist and King of Supervenience Jaegwon Kim has capitulated and written in print that qualia do not supervene on the physical and cannot therefore be reductively explained, then I think that goes a long way to show how difficult such a reduction is (at least to someone familiar with Kim).

Also, you seem to be confusing supervenience with causality. If it's possible for A to remain exactly the same but for B to differ and be absent, then B does not supervene on A. So, if it is possible for all of the physical facts to be the same but for the facts about consciousness to differ then consciousness does not supervene on the physical (and materialism is false).

I don't really have time to explain supervenience and why any physical view of the world worth it's salt requires that all things supervene on the physical, but those interested can check out this entry in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:

Supervenience
 
Fausty said:
I'll look forward to familiarizing myself more with his writing. I took data only from the article SW cited here in this thread. In that article, Chalmers uses "consciousness" and "human consciousness" interchangeably. If he was being less than precise, or if perhaps his thought has progressed since that article, good on him!

Gotta run for now - life intrudes.

Peace,

Fausty


Chalmers is just trying to be uncontroversial about whether or not other creatures have consciousness. There are still people who think that other animals aren't conscious so he's limiting himself to less controversial claims about human consciousness. This is standard in the literature unless one is specifically discussing consciousness in other animals. The reason for this is that there are some (almost all of whom are physicalist philosophers) who still believe that most, if not all other animals are not conscious and no one wants the meat of their argument to be dismissed because it is perceived to rely on a controversial claim about dolphins being conscious or whatever.
 
Fausty

My God, man. How can you read something and entirely miss the point like that? I was pointing out in the post about causality and constitution that everyone understands a distinction between correlation and causation. This is easy, and undergrad (high school even) work like you say. My point is that you don't seem to understand the distinction between causality and constitution, which should be just as easy (if an entirely different matter) to understand.

I'm not saying that if you understand that correlation does not imply causation then you will understand about constitution.

I'm saying that it's incredibly simple to understand that causation is not constitution and that Koch himself has written in print that he is only studying the causes of consciousness, not what consciousness is.

You say that I "distort" Dennett's views. Well, considering that I'm standing with the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and every other philosopher about his eliminativism, I think it's you that is distorting his views; just like you have grossly distorted mine and Chalmers'. It's easy to go with the least sympathetic reading possible of a professional paper or an internet post and then criticize it. It's a little bit harder to try to really understand what someone is saying before you criticize. But the latter definitely makes for a more interesting discussion.

In the end, it seems we get back to a statement that you feel something when you see the color blue, and nobody but you can know what that feels like. Ok. Fine. Fair enough.

That's not a theory of consciousness.

Yet another unsympathetic reading and distortion. I never suggested that "nobody can know what it feels like when I I see blue". Indeed, I've spent the whole thread trying to explain to you that "what it feels like" is something undeniable that everyone experiences and is well acquainted with. I've even said that qualia (another word for the same thing) should be taken as a fundamental type and that we should (and do) scientifically study how it is causally related to the rest of the world. I haven't changed my position at all. It's just that you keep missing that all of this is compatible with "what it's like" not being made up of physical stuff or processes. Brain states cause phenomenal states (yet another word for the same thing). But it is harder to say that they (or anything else physical) constitute them.

edit: interesting paper from Crick and Koch, 1998. There is a section called, "The problem of Qualia" which is the problem I have been trying to discuss in this thread, paying particular attention to explain why it is so damned hard. It seems like Crick and Koch were trying to tackle the problem in 1998 (yes, in terms of what I have called constitution) and I imagine their new book is the result of this research. I'll have to give it a read!

Crick & Koch

note to Fausty: Notice that they take Chalmers fairly seriously. They don't treat him like a superstitious old hack who believes in spirits for arguing that qualia is a fundamental, nonphysical type. This is what I call good, sympathetic reading and it couldn't be more different from the way you reacted to the same ideas presented in this thread. Granted, I can't say I did the best job explaining them, but I never said anything that entailed the superstitious, anti-scientific ideas you seem to have pegged me with from the get go.
 
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skywise said:
Also, you seem to be confusing supervenience with causality. If it's possible for A to remain exactly the same but for B to differ and be absent, then B does not supervene on A. So, if it is possible for all of the physical facts to be the same but for the facts about consciousness to differ then consciousness does not supervene on the physical (and materialism is false).
My example above utilized two different worlds: w1 (the actual) where consciousness supervenes on some physical set of properties and w2 (a possible world) where consciousness (the b facts) do not supervene on an isomorphic to w1 set of physical (a) facts as a result of differeing 'laws of consciousness' (presumably some set of relevant physical laws).

So, in our world consciousness certainly does supervene on some set of physical a facts and in another world it does not (as a difference in physical laws). sorry it was a minor point! Does that make sense/is clear to you?

Sorry for introducing that terminology into the debate...you're right its better to stay non-technical! (my first philosophy advisor taught me if I can't explain it in non-technical terms then I probably don't have a good grasp of it!).
 
Just to inject some levity into this thread (sorry I know its a serious discussion but humor me!). Here's a pic of Chalmers. Don't you think this dude trips on some seriously huge doses of LSD?? =D

DavidChalmers.jpg
 
skywise said:
My point is that you don't seem to understand the distinction between causality and constitution, which should be just as easy (if an entirely different matter) to understand.

Indeed, my point is that the relation between these two terms is utterly contested. In fact, I suspect it varies depending on context, area of use, etc. Conflating this (contested) relationship with the (uncontested) relationship between correlation and causality is disingenuous.

I'm saying that it's incredibly simple to understand that causation is not constitution and that Koch himself has written in print that he is only studying the causes of consciousness, not what consciousness is.

No, again I'm not going along with this. If you can find a direct statement from Koch saying "I am not studying what consciousness is," I'll eat my hat. He does of course study "what consciousness is" - he's a researcher of consciousness! True, he's not focused on the qualia or feeling or subjectivity or essential nature or ephemeral just-suchness - as I've repeatedly argued, eschewing the latter is not the same thing as disavowing interest in "consciousness."

You say that I "distort" Dennett's views. Well, considering that I'm standing with the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and every other philosopher about his eliminativism, I think it's you that is distorting his views; just like you have grossly distorted mine and Chalmers'. It's easy to go with the least sympathetic reading possible of a professional paper or an internet post and then criticize it. It's a little bit harder to try to really understand what someone is saying before you criticize. But the latter definitely makes for a more interesting discussion.

By definition, I come at this not from a philosophical perspective. As such, there's inherent friction in how I see the framing of the question, and the assumptions you bring to bear from your own perspective. This is intrinsic to cross-discipline efforts and I don't see it as automatically bad. Yes, if everyone agrees about everything it's all warm and fuzzy, but genuine insight rarely results therefrom.

As far as I can see, the only thing I've said about Chalmers, directly, is that he conflates "consciousness" with "human consciousness." To me this is a fatal flaw. I'm not deeply familiar with his work - as I've said, repeatedly - and I don't claim to be.

Regarding Dennett, I'm comfortable with my characterizations of his writing - based on my own, firsthand reading of him and not based on what someone else says someone else says about him. I could be totally wrong-headed in how I read him, but I'll stand by my statements based on my study of his work.

It's just that you keep missing that all of this is compatible with "what it's like" not being made up of physical stuff or processes. Brain states cause phenomenal states (yet another word for the same thing). But it is harder to say that they (or anything else physical) constitute them.

Indeed, "all of this" is also compatible with "what it's like" resulting from alien intervention from the planet Zoombar, or quantum foam fluctuations, or mass hallucinations, or any other of an unbounded class of conceptually possible explanations for a phenomenon. Heck, it could be Jesus of Nazareth who decides "what it's like" - with help from Mohammed.

My point is that the burden is on the person making such a claim to provide some basis for this claim. By conventional structure, explanations via metaphysical intercession are not our default mode of explanation in the scientific paradigm. You are, indeed, making a claim for magic - you are couching it in philosophical terms, and playing a bit of hide-the-pea with it when called to task. But it's still there. Some of the authors you cite are, in contrast, quite explicit about that claim - and willing to stand behind it. That claim was, in the past, the conventional assumption - just as the ether was explanatory for some phenomena before supercession by other, more empirically supported theories.

And, yes, I do claim that your argument boils down to "there something I feel that can't be explained by physical things - the definition of this thing I feel is that it is inexplicable by physical things - I challenge anyone to prove I'm wrong." This is a rhetorical dead-end, as Dennett himself directly states in the article of his you cited above. When we enter into "disprove the negative" territory, we re-enact the P = NP problem and come face to face with Godel. Hardly a definitive argument for spiritualism.

edit: interesting paper from Crick and Koch, 1998. There is a section called, "The problem of Qualia" which is the problem I have been trying to discuss in this thread, paying particular attention to explain why it is so damned hard. It seems like Crick and Koch were trying to tackle the problem in 1998 (yes, in terms of what I have called constitution) and I imagine their new book is the result of this research. I'll have to give it a read!

Crick & Koch

If that one strikes your fancy, I also strongly encourage you to read The Astonishing Hypothesis. Not surprisingly, Dennett (again in the summary you cite above) specifically references the (overwhelmingly supported) argument Crick makes in that work as entirely congruent with the position Dennett himself takes on the "hard problem." You'll have a terribly hard time pigeonholing either Crick or Koch into a non-materialist conception of consciousness.

In any event, it's a worthwhile read - dense, but rewarding. Having digested it, few will attempt to refute Crick's demolition of the "hard problem" analogue in perception analysis.

note to Fausty: Notice that they take Chalmers fairly seriously. They don't treat him like a superstitious old hack who believes in spirits for arguing that qualia is a fundamental, nonphysical type. This is what I call good, sympathetic reading and it couldn't be more different from the way you reacted to the same ideas presented in this thread. Granted, I can't say I did the best job explaining them, but I never said anything that entailed the superstitious, anti-scientific ideas you seem to have pegged me with from the get go.

As I said above, I've tagged Chalmers only with the fallacy of human universality. To me, that's a heavy tag indeed - I'd feel bad tagging him with yet more baggage. :D

I respect and appreciate your tolerance of my inherently abrasive discussion style in this thread. It's not meant as disrespectful. However, it does reflect genuine and deep ontological divergence between where you're coming from, and where' I'm coming from. You come at this, clearly, from the philosophical perspective. Your language and assumptions and expectations for the discussion all flow therefrom.

In contrast, I come at this from a systems theoretic framework - with a bit of neuroscientific spice thrown on top. Oh, and a pretty big chip on my shoulder about the assumption that human = universally representative. My definitional apparatus - as I warned in my first posts in this thread - is both ambiguous and actively in flux. My expectations for what we are getting at when we talk about "consciousness" are, most likely, divergent from yours. My interest in the subject, indeed, most likely springs from entirely different roots than yours - on all levels.

Now, we could pretend otherwise and have things be easy. Or, we can use these divergences to poke at loose spots in both of our conceptual apparati. I prefer the latter. In truth, I generally strike hardest at the heart of any subject that begins along the lines of "we can all agree that" or "it is fair to assume that". . . as they old saying goes, the risk of seminal intellectual error comes from what we think we know, that is not so. . .

It may be frustrating to you that I won't just accept what you write at face value, give the benefit of the doubt to any ambiguities therein, and skip over any rough spots in the framing of the discussion. But I don't share the same assumptive set that you do, I use the language slightly differently, and carry with me a class of quantitative and theoretical findings on consciousness that is unlikely to be found in the philosophical writing on the subject. This might mean I'm "wrong" and that I'm only polluting the purity of philosophical dialog on consciousness - crashing the party with orthogonal ideas.

However, I'd counter that, were philosophical discourse to have the ability to successfully unpack consciousness through rhetorical battles within the field, it would have done so long ago! In other words, if "you guys" were going to crack this nut, it'd have been cracked many millions of pages of arguments about "qualia" ago. ;)

Philosophy dead-ended on the "hard problem" and ground down into a morass of hyper-abstruce screeds on minutia, unintelligible to anyone outside of the self-selected class of specialists therein. As one of my doctoral advisors once remarked on Dennett's book "hmmm. . . Consciousness Explained?. . . you'd think if he really had explained it, it wouldn't take him 500 pages to do so." I do think the ongoing obsession, within academic philosophy, in re-labelling and re-treading and re-arguing the same old tired approaches to "consciousness" is a bit sad. If, truly, the central debate within the field is whether "consciousness" can be explained by the physical laws of our universe - or if instead we most resort to supernatural/mystical/non-"physicalist" expository tools. . . well, that sort of speaks for itself.

So, for the record, I'm just a systems geek - I don't know all the fanciest terms that are in vogue in that field. I don't know the distinction between "physicalist" and "materialist" and whatever-al-ist. I think, indeed, that it's all symptomatic of a bunch of hot air papering over an imaginary conceptual foundation. I see a system, and I see the system exhibiting quite fascinating properties - perhaps of a type not commonly seen in other systems. It makes me want to measure the properties, understand the system, seek out inspiration in other such systems with similar systems. Yes, and build models of the system to understand the dynamics more fully. It makes me want to challenges old assumptions about such things - because, clearly and unambiguously, these old assumptions have lead us exactly nowhere in actually making sense of this thing. If the best philosophy can do is continue to re-hash Descarte's "cogito ergo sum". . . well, sign me up for the next round of efforts, because I think a few hundred years has been enough time to argue that particular issue to death.

Peace,

Fausty
 
samadhi_smiles said:
Just to inject some levity into this thread (sorry I know its a serious discussion but humor me!). Here's a pic of Chalmers. Don't you think this dude trips on some seriously huge doses of LSD?? =D

DavidChalmers.jpg

Actually, I'd go so far as to say he's on quite an exquisite trip in that very photo. =D

Peace,

Fausty
 
^^^ So I read most of chapter one of Koch's book that you said you are reading. You're right that Koch seems to have completely changed his mind about leaving the "hard problem" to the philosophers and is trying to tackle it physically. Your wrong that what he is doing is compatible with Dennett's view. In fact, Koch makes a specific point to spell out Dennett's view as I have. He quotes Dennett as saying that the feel of pain is not real and that talk about real qualia is akin to talk about "real magic" (which sounds a lot like your view, btw). Koch then straightforwardly rejects this as not being his own view, stating that contra Dennett, he takes experience to be a brute fact and seeks to explain it (rather than eliminate it). It's not just a possibility that you've read Dennett wrong, Fausty, it's a fact. You're reading is contrary to all of Dennett's philosopher peers, Koch, me, and the meaning of the man's printed words that we all find fairly obvious (and that he never seems to object to).

Anyway, I think I'm going to buy his book. Like most practicing scientists I've met, the guy seems to be pretty open to philosophical discussion, if skeptical of philosophical conclusions in the absence of evidence. Unlike most practicing scientists he seems to be very well read in the literature. He even has a nice little sub-sub-section on Chalmers where he recommends at least browsing Chalmers' book, and gives reasons why he doesn't think we should accept Chalmers' hypothesis at this point. What's nice about this is that his reasons are good reasons. Not just tub-thumping about, "if it's not explainable in physical terms it's magic!"

As to your responses: I'm not going to argue with you about how words should be used. It's very boring and very tiresome. I say there is a distinction between causing and constituting. You point out that in some contexts, the words can be used interchangeably. I say, "fine, but there's still a distinction that I'm using these words to talk about" and give you an example where causality and constitution clearly come apart (the bloody nose). You ignore this example and harp on about how it's contested that this is the only use of these words. Bla bla bla bla bla. Maybe there are reasons to think that the neural correlates constitute qualia rather than cause qualia, but pointing out that the words "correlate" and "cause" can be used to mean "constitute" is not a reason for believing that the neural correlates do, in fact, constitute qualia. The whole "hard problem" of how neural stuff just is (or constitutes) experience is not going to be solved by deliberation about the appropriate uses of words!

Anyway, the important thing is that most people, including a neuroscientist as prestigious as Koch, all grant that there exist qualia and that they are hard to explain physically. Most people also grant that they haven't been explained physically yet. That really was the point of the thread: to make clear that there is a hard problem about consciousness. When I finish the last few pages of my thesis I'll try to find time to come back and discuss the physicalist view that I think is pretty decent, if not entirely convincing.

As far as I can see, the only thing I've said about Chalmers, directly, is that he conflates "consciousness" with "human consciousness." To me this is a fatal flaw. I'm not deeply familiar with his work - as I've said, repeatedly - and I don't claim to be.
.

And two people in this thread who are much more familiar with his work had pointed out that this is wrong. The problem with your interpretation of people's writing, as I have seen it with regard to how you interpret me, Dennett, and Chalmers, is that you take some very "surfacy" fact about the language being used and derive all of these weird conclusions from it. For instance, you wrote a ridiculous amount about my use of the word 'consciousness' even though I was only using it in a very specific sense. Likewise, you took the fact that Chalmers used 'consciousness' and 'human consciousness' interchangeably in one paper and deduced that this meant that he doesn't think anyone but humans are conscious and thinks that humans are the pinnacle of creation, etc. etc. There are many different reasons why Chalmers would use the term interchangeably, but you for some reason lock onto the least sympathetic (and least likely) reading possible. I just hate lazy misinterpretation.


Philosophy dead-ended on the "hard problem" and ground down into a morass of hyper-abstruce screeds on minutia, unintelligible to anyone outside of the self-selected class of specialists therein. As one of my doctoral advisors once remarked on Dennett's book "hmmm. . . Consciousness Explained?. . . you'd think if he really had explained it, it wouldn't take him 500 pages to do so." I do think the ongoing obsession, within academic philosophy, in re-labelling and re-treading and re-arguing the same old tired approaches to "consciousness" is a bit sad. If, truly, the central debate within the field is whether "consciousness" can be explained by the physical laws of our universe - or if instead we most resort to supernatural/mystical/non-"physicalist" expository tools. . . well, that sort of speaks for itself.... If the best philosophy can do is continue to re-hash Descarte's "cogito ergo sum". . . well, sign me up for the next round of efforts, because I think a few hundred years has been enough time to argue that particular issue to death.

Well, as Koch (since neuroscientists seem to be the only people who's views you respect) points out in the article I linked to, hardly any philosophers (including me) are concerned with anything having to do with spirits, mystics, or Descarte's views on mental substances. Furthermore, "the hard problem" (not a problem about spirits/magic) is only one among many problems in the philosophy of mind. It just happens to be the one I'm interested in (so your complaint should really just be about my sad interest, not all of philosophy's).

And to be frank, your dismissive attitude toward the philosophical discourse on the matter strikes me as stupid. It's just as bad as a religious person refusing to take evolution seriously because he does not, and makes no attempt to, understand it. And I also think it's stupid to argue that it shouldn't take 500 pages to explain something as complex as consciousness. There are are a great many long books with great explanatory power (even scientific ones!). This isn't even to mention the explanatory power of a large collection of smaller papers. Your complaint here seems akin to the quote people attribute to Einstein: "If you can't explain your theory to a 5 year old it's probably not worth explaining at all" (or whatever). Show me a 5 year old that understands Einstein's theories and then I'll eat my hat.

edit: No worries about your abrasive style. As I'm sure you've noticed, I can be pretty abrasive and have a pretty big chip on my shoulder too.
 
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samadhi_smiles said:
My example above utilized two different worlds: w1 (the actual) where consciousness supervenes on some physical set of properties and w2 (a possible world) where consciousness (the b facts) do not supervene on an isomorphic to w1 set of physical (a) facts as a result of differeing 'laws of consciousness' (presumably some set of relevant physical laws).

So, in our world consciousness certainly does supervene on some set of physical a facts and in another world it does not (as a difference in physical laws). sorry it was a minor point! Does that make sense/is clear to you?

Sorry for introducing that terminology into the debate...you're right its better to stay non-technical! (my first philosophy advisor taught me if I can't explain it in non-technical terms then I probably don't have a good grasp of it!).

The kind of supervenience you're using here is considered on just about all hands (amongst philosophers) to be too weak to do any real explanatory work. You basically just gave Chalmers' and Kim's argument against materialism when you said that there is a possible world in which the facts about consciousness differ even though the physical facts are the same as in our world. I'm really sorry, but I have to get back to my thesis and can't take the time/energy to explain why your "real world supervenience" idea doesn't do you any good. But, rest assured, the kind of supervenience that physicalists need and argue for is a trans-world supervenience. I reccomend you check out the article on supervenience from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy I posted. It will explain the point I have in mind and a whole lot more!

P.S. Since you seem to understand why identity theory was given up, maybe I can quickly point out the problem. One problem with identity theory (look up Kripke for more info) is that there exist possible worlds in which there are disembodied pains. By modifying to a supervenience view, a materialist can just say, "well, maybe brain state x isn't necessary for something to be a pain, but it is sufficient". But, if there are possible worlds where we have brain state x, but not pain, then the brain state isn't even sufficient for the feel and cannot be said to constitute it. Hope that helps.
 
skywise said:
^^^ So I read most of chapter one of Koch's book that you said you are reading. You're right that Koch seems to have completely changed his mind about leaving the "hard problem" to the philosophers and is trying to tackle it physically. Your wrong that what he is doing is compatible with Dennett's view. In fact, Koch makes a specific point to spell out Dennett's view as I have. He quotes Dennett as saying that the feel of pain is not real and that talk about real qualia is akin to talk about "real magic" (which sounds a lot like your view, btw). Koch then straightforwardly rejects this as not being his own view, stating that contra Dennett, he takes experience to be a brute fact and seeks to explain it (rather than eliminate it). It's not just a possibility that you've read Dennett wrong, Fausty, it's a fact. You're reading is contrary to all of Dennett's philosopher peers, Koch, me, and the meaning of the man's printed words that we all find fairly obvious (and that he never seems to object to).

I have to be honest that, at this point, I've completely lost the thread of what part of Dennett's thesis I've putatively misrepresented. My recollection is that you constituted Dennett, originally, as a straw-man "physicalist" (without defining the term) and asked if there were any other "physicalists" who could conceivably support such a position. I raised my paw. You then brought in Chalmers - a writer with whom I'm not familiar, and then Koch - an author with whose work I am fairly familiar. You've accused me of "misrepresenting" all of their positions, which seems like an unlikely trivumerate indeed. :)

Anyway, I think I'm going to buy his book. Like most practicing scientists I've met, the guy seems to be pretty open to philosophical discussion, if skeptical of philosophical conclusions in the absence of evidence. Unlike most practicing scientists he seems to be very well read in the literature. He even has a nice little sub-sub-section on Chalmers where he recommends at least browsing Chalmers' book, and gives reasons why he doesn't think we should accept Chalmers' hypothesis at this point. What's nice about this is that his reasons are good reasons. Not just tub-thumping about, "if it's not explainable in physical terms it's magic!"

Ok, summary: Koch explicitly rejects Chalmers' position, but he does so nicely. And he evidences having fully read Chalmers' work, before rejecting it. Fair enough. I'll accept your point, though I don't see any substance behind the degree of niceness of Koch's rejection of Chalmer and his ilk.

As to your responses: I'm not going to argue with you about how words should be used. It's very boring and very tiresome. I say there is a distinction between causing and constituting. You point out that in some contexts, the words can be used interchangeably. I say, "fine, but there's still a distinction that I'm using these words to talk about" and give you an example where causality and constitution clearly come apart (the bloody nose). You ignore this example and harp on about how it's contested that this is the only use of these words. Bla bla bla bla bla. Maybe there are reasons to think that the neural correlates constitute qualia rather than cause qualia, but pointing out that the words "correlate" and "cause" can be used to mean "constitute" is not a reason for believing that the neural correlates do, in fact, constitute qualia. The whole "hard problem" of how neural stuff just is (or constitutes) experience is not going to be solved by deliberation about the appropriate uses of words! (emphasis added)

Again this is quite where we disagree. I don't think definitional accuracy will "solve" anything, but I do feel that sloppy, less than efficacious language is unlikely to lead the way - and in fact has failed to do so for several hundred years. Effective definitional structure is a necessary - but not sufficient - element of progress in this field. I take this as axiomatic, and would cite as a tiny example amongst a sea of them the very frustrations we've both felt in trying to talk about these subjects here.

Anyway, the important thing is that most people, including a neuroscientist as prestigious as Koch, all grant that there exist qualia and that they are hard to explain physically. Most people also grant that they haven't been explained physically yet. That really was the point of the thread: to make clear that there is a hard problem about consciousness. When I finish the last few pages of my thesis I'll try to find time to come back and discuss the physicalist view that I think is pretty decent, if not entirely convincing.

No, that is most assuredly not the position with which you started this thread - and this is the "shell game" of which I've accused you previously. Quoting from your original post:

"The problem with consciousness is that it seems like no physical facts, however fine grained or complicated, will ever “add up” to the experience of blue (or pain, or any conscious experience)."

This is most clearly and explicitly not a statement acknowledging the "hard problem" of consciousness. Not even close. Perhaps you've now backtracked to this more reasonable position. Fair enough. But it's not accurate to, a posteriori, cite this as your original intent in this thread - unless your intent was wildly divergent from the language you chose to use.

And two people in this thread who are much more familiar with his work had pointed out that this is wrong. The problem with your interpretation of people's writing, as I have seen it with regard to how you interpret me, Dennett, and Chalmers, is that you take some very "surfacy" fact about the language being used and derive all of these weird conclusions from it. For instance, you wrote a ridiculous amount about my use of the word 'consciousness' even though I was only using it in a very specific sense. Likewise, you took the fact that Chalmers used 'consciousness' and 'human consciousness' interchangeably in one paper and deduced that this meant that he doesn't think anyone but humans are conscious and thinks that humans are the pinnacle of creation, etc. etc. There are many different reasons why Chalmers would use the term interchangeably, but you for some reason lock onto the least sympathetic (and least likely) reading possible. I just hate lazy misinterpretation. (emphasis added)

And just I hate lazy use of language! :) Seriously, this is a huge divergence in our approach to this issue. You call me to task, with some vehemence, for worrying about the fact that nobody can agree to a definition of, suggest quantitative measures of, draw even loose boundaries around, or elucitate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the word "consciousness." Perhaps it's tendentious for me to worry about this. I don't think it is.

Recall, perhaps, that in both "real life" and in academic gang affiliation, I am a "physicalist" in extremis; I talk to binary gate arrays with 1s and 0s. The sloppy use of "language," in this context, is not merely a matter to be brushed aside with "oh, we all more or less agree what we mean, there's no need to fuss with the ambiguities thereof." Computers, or any generalized Turing device, are not asked to interpolate our intentions from our language - we either use language in an essentially unambiguous way, or we chase our tails.

Simultaneously, I engage with non-human critters, on a daily basis, in both professional and family context. We don't have the use of spoken language to fall back on, and must constitute our shared experience outside of that channel. So, perhaps, my expectations of formal language are that it's more useful than other, perhaps somewhat ephemeral, modes of discourse.

In sum, I just hate it when language is used in a recklessly sloppy way - and when I point out such usage, I don't find it a convincing rejoinder to be scolded for pointing out said fact. In fact, it sort of substantiates exactly my concern in the first place. Q.E.D.

Well, as Koch (since neuroscientists seem to be the only people who's views you respect) points out in the article I linked to, hardly any philosophers (including me) are concerned with anything having to do with spirits, mystics, or Descarte's views on mental substances. Furthermore, "the hard problem" (not a problem about spirits/magic) is only one among many problems in the philosophy of mind. It just happens to be the one I'm interested in (so your complaint should really just be about my sad interest, not all of philosophy's).

I don't know about "philosophy of mind," and I'm not a philosopher. That said, I do think that you and I share some significant overlap in the sorts of things that turn our intellectual crank - though we come at them from highly divergent platforms, admittedly.

I do know that, no matter how you spin it or turn it or re-package it this is true: if you claim that "consciousness" cannot be explained by "merely physical" analysis - and you claim this not as hypothesis but as gospel fact, a priori, you are advocating an anti-scientific, fundamentally mystical position on the question. That's simply black and white, transitive logic. If physical laws of our physical universe cannot possibly elucidate the "hard problem," ever, in your frame of reference - then you are left only with mysticism to cite as expository basis for the topic at hand.

I can understand that this makes you uncomfortable, as it makes your well-couched, carefully-packaged, vaguely elliptical statement of purpose seem rather silly when stripped of bells and whistles. I'd say that, if you need the bells and whistles to keep your position from looking fundamentally silly, then the problem isn't my willingness to remove the ephemera - but rather the position itself.

And to be frank, your dismissive attitude toward the philosophical discourse on the matter strikes me as stupid. It's just as bad as a religious person refusing to take evolution seriously because he does not, and makes no attempt to, understand it. And I also think it's stupid to argue that it shouldn't take 500 pages to explain something as complex as consciousness. There are are a great many long books with great explanatory power (even scientific ones!). This isn't even to mention the explanatory power of a large collection of smaller papers. Your complaint here seems akin to the quote people attribute to Einstein: "If you can't explain your theory to a 5 year old it's probably not worth explaining at all" (or whatever). Show me a 5 year old that understands Einstein's theories and then I'll eat my hat.

Actually, I cited my doctoral thesis advisor - himself a dual Ph.D. in biophysics and physical chemistry - in making a pithy comment about book length. To be fair, I kind of agree with him - if general relativity took 500 pages of dense prose to "explain," I'd question whether it was really explaining anything. Put another way, one can build a statistical model to perfectly predict relationships within a given data set - just have the "model" be the data set itself, in entirety! That's, unfortunately, not much of a "model." Here, I slide into the more fundamental conceptions of Kolmogorov's Algorithmic Information Theory as basic substrate.

And, yes, I don't really get much of an intellectual rise out of modern, academic philosophy. Guilty as charged. I'll not pretend otherwise. I read a bit of it here and there, to keep at least tangentially current, but I'm far from an eager partisan. In being honest about this - and about my own academic affiliation - I feel I'm being neither religiously dismissive or aberrantly quarrelsome. I'm just saying what sorts of analytic methods ring my bell, after 20 or so years of playing with all sorts of tools. I am not, in fact, an universal dilettante - and I don't claim to be.

This does not, I argue, prevent me from making any comment on any subject ever mentioned by an academic philosopher. In fact, if I've gone to the effort to read and digest a particular work from this field, I don't mind positing my own distillation of same. The sort of academic parochialism that tries to wall off any "outsider" with abstruce language and claims that nobody can say anything about the special subjects without being a full-time, professional disciple of same strikes me as rather pathetic. Powerful tools, while often not simple, are nevertheless open to discussion from acolytes and unwashed alike.

edit: No worries about your abrasive style. As I'm sure you've noticed, I can be pretty abrasive and have a pretty big chip on my shoulder too.

Hmm, I'm not sure I'm carrying a chip on my shoulder. I do have a comfortable base from within a specific area of academic discourse. I try to reach out beyond that base, where doing so seems potentially productive. However, I don't try to pretend to be that which I'm not and I don't abandon my basic conceptual tools in doing so. If I see something that seems silly, I'll call it silly - and cite my reasons. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong - better than dancing in circles and pretending to agree with everyone about everything.

Finally, I'm not a professional academic, or even a professional student. I earn my bones elsewhere, and my academic work is valuable to me only insofar as I feel I'm understanding things more fully. I don't get a big rush out of writing papers designed to be read by other professional academics, couched in purely academic terms, adhering to the cultural conventions of the particular sub-sub-discipline within which I work. Heck, I couldn't do so if I wanted to: my formal research area - "Systems Theory" - is by definition cross-disciplinary at its core.

In short, I'm a chimera in this stuff. I gladly engage in drive-by critiques of parochial discussions, in furtherance of cross-pollination despite departmental walls. I'm sort of like a virus - everyone hates me, but I do have a way of stirring up informational transmission. That's the plan, anyway - if not, maybe I'm just the metaphorical version of ebola. :D

Peace,

Fausty
 
skywise said:
The problem with consciousness is that it seems like no physical facts, however fine grained or complicated, will ever “add up” to the experience of blue (or pain, or any conscious experience)....

Granted, one might point out that scientific discoveries are often unpredictable. Surely it would be arrogant to suggest that just because we cannot explain consciousness in terms of physical facts now, no one will ever be able to...

So, you quoted one part of my first post and ignored others. Yes, I said that it seems to be the case (that is, on first glance to a non-scientist or non-philosopher) that no amount of physical information will "add up" to information about consciousness (by which I meant qualia). I point out in the same post that this doesn't rule out that we will eventually be able to physically explain these things. It's just that its proven very difficult to explain thus far. This has been my view throughout the whole thread. You haven't realized this because you have been a sloppy reader, Fausty. You take a sentence out of context from the rest of the post, turn the "seems like" into "is and always will be" and blatantly ignore the part where I deliberately clarify that this is not what I mean. If this isn't "the hard problem of consciousness" in Fausty world, that's fine, but it's certainly a hard problem in it's own right to give a physical explanation of consciousness!

By the way, just claiming that it's unlikely that you've misread Dennett, Koch, and Chalmers isn't much of an argument. Re-read (or maybe read for the first time?) the little section Koch has on Dennett in the first chapter and its pretty clear that he says Dennett's view is not his own. If I'm not mistaken, you said the two views were compatible and I'm saying that by Koch's own words your wrong. You also said that Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness (as I have been using the word - qualia) and everyone but you, including Koch, says that he does deny it. He is an eliminativist, which is all I meant by "hard-line physicalist" and have said so multiple times now.

You say that I play a "shell game" but if you ask me it's you that's playing this game when you get backed into a corner and change the subject to semantics. I point out there is a difference between one sense of "cause" and one sense of "constitute" with a very clear example (the bloody nose). I suggest that this difference is applicable to consciousness and neural correlates. You change the subject to the conventional meaning of the words.

Also, you complain about the dense technical language in philosophy. I want to point out, however, that your use of language has been much more dense and technical than mine. I have spent the whole thread trying to avoid technical terms and just discuss the problem in every day terms, while you have criticized this as "sloppy language". Seems like your the one with the academic syndrome of demanding unnecessarily specific technical terms. Let's look at some phrases from your posts:

epistemological
information/algorithmic state matrices
stochasticity
quantum string fluctuations
10 dimensional brane resonances
self-referential definitional quagmires
numerous unnecessary references to Godel
Q.E.D.
in extremis
a priori


Notice that most of these terms have nothing to do with consciousness, but were just your high flown choices for analogy. And these are just the terms you used correctly! For someone so picky about sloppy language, you sure do fuck up a lot of your unnecessary technical terms:

a posteriori - not the phrase for "later" in latin or philosophy (the latin word for 'later' is 'posterior')
Descartesian = Cartersian.
Reductum ad Absurdio = Reductio ad Absurdum. Your phrase, if it made sense at all, would mean something like "Absurding to the reduction" – i.e. crazy talk. And given the context in which you used the term, you seem to have no grasp on what the Reductio method is either.
Hegelian - Hegel's "phenomenology" is a totally different subject then what we have discussed here. As someone who's read his work, it seems like you know nothing of him but just used his name to sound smart.
straw man - Not a person who opposes your position. A straw man is a person who does not exist. For example, when Fausty misrepresents my views and attacks them he is attacking not my views, but those of a straw man.
cogito ergo sum: you conflate this with unrelated views about property dualism

Now, up until now I've ignored all of this crap because I realize everyone makes terminological mistakes and what's interesting and relevant is what you meant by these words, not how your use of them is defective from either 1) the way they are used by everyone else or at least 2) the way they are used in the disciplines I am familiar with. Why was it so hard to do the same for me?
 
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2 circular arguments

1) consciousness = non-physical qualia, therefore consciousness is not physical.

2) consciousness = physical processes in the brain, therefore consciousness is a purely physical process.

Now, Fausty has been trying to peg me as defending argument (1) in this thread. If I were as sloppy and unsympathetic a reader as Fausty, I might try to peg him with argument (2). But, I'm not and grant that he doesn't mean to defend something as obviously circular as (2). (note: Argument 2 would not be circular if we were currently able to give a fully physical account of consciousness, but neuroscience being a young discipline, we're not).

Rather, I take Fausty to hold that there does exist some aspects of consciousness that we haven't yet fully explained, but that it is reasonable to think that they can be physically explained in principle. It would, after all, be really weird if there turned out to be non-physical stuff.

My view is not too different from this. I have said things like, "it seems to be the case that no amount of physical explanation will ever capture what it's like to see blue." By that I just mean that it seems that way right now. I have left it open whether or not this "seeming" is just a product of our current ignorance about the many subtleties of neurobiology. I'm not taking for granted that there is a physical explanation when we don't yet have one, and when it strikes me as very difficult to give one. But, at the same time, I'm not taking it for granted that there is no physical explanation waiting to be found. I find this to be a reasonable view in the absence of a completely physical explanation of consciousness. Especially when we have physical explanations of everything else in the world.

Now, you can say that I'm changing my view from what it was when I started the thread, but as the best authority on what I've been trying to say, I tell you that this is the point I have been trying to make all along.
 
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Okay, I'm not going to claim to have digested or even read all of this thread, but...

>>Because H2O constitutes, just is, water. If you're studying H2O, you're studying water! Now, if someone wants to say that a blue color experience just is, or is constituted by (not caused by!) brain process x, then a complete list of facts about brain process x should be able to tell us everything there is to know about blue color experiences (except maybe what complex effects the blue color experiences might have in certain causal contexts). If, on the other hand, brain process x just causes a blue color experience, then your concerns about unpredictability of complex systems applies, but doesn't get us anywhere with showing that blue color experiences just are some physical process.>>

Here is where I break from you. I do NOT accept that the definition of water is exhausted by its molecular description. To us, water is wet at room temperature...it's a fairly effective polar solvent...it is integral in Earth-dwelling life-forms' ability to maintain homeostasis. And so on...

In short, no phenomenon may be reduced entirely to a set of "analytically primitive" facts that exhaust that phenomenon. Rather, objects are fuzzy, ephemeral things that emerge as they are put to use in interactions.

Such is the case with concepts that touch on qualia. EG, blueness emerges as we interact with matter placed under light, ourselves having a certain physiology and wishing to communicate certain aspects of our experience to one another...eek, I'm starting to ramble.
...
To focus things in, what IS your argument, on positive terms, justifying that qualia should be treated differently from all other phenomena?
I can come up with:

1. Qualia are irreducible to physical interactions. So much becomes apparent by our ability to imagine alternate possible universes where qualia relate differently to physical phenomena.

I don't buy this argument particularly because it does not apply specifically to qualia. I can imagine universes where water is not wet, for example. Similarly, even though we might be able to spin a (convoluted, particular, and pretty much meaningless) causal story about how separate individuals interacting bring about causally a particular culture, the facets of this culture are not described exhaustively by this causal story.

I pretty much find this "possible universes" exercise epistemologically wrong-headed, as it assumes that properties correspond directly to objects that exist "as such".

2. Qualia are private.

This same critique could be launched at all being. Even scientific investigation depends on the "private" observations collected by the scientist, later distilled and expressed through language and mathematics.
...
In short, YES, I am with you in that qualia are not reducible to and cannot be explained away by molecular, subatomic, biological, etc. explanations. However, this isn't unique to qualia.

ebola
 
ebola? said:
Here is where I break from you. I do NOT accept that the definition of water is exhausted by its molecular description. To us, water is wet at room temperature...it's a fairly effective polar solvent...it is integral in Earth-dwelling life-forms' ability to maintain homeostasis. And so on...

I think you're right about the definition of water. It's not exhausted by 'H2O'. So, this can't be where we break from one another. I think where we break from one another is that I believe that the stuff that the word 'water' picks out in the actual world is, in fact, H2O. You don't seem to take this intuition seriously because you don't take seriously claims about the world "as such", right? You think that everything is a mental/physical web of some sort, if I'm not mistaken. This being the case, the arguments in this thread are not directed at you because the whole goal of the arguments is to show that it is hard to reduce qualia to the purely physical. Since you don't think anything is to be identified with or reduced to the purely physical, we both agree on this point. I'm just not as radical in thinking that nothing at all, including water, can be identified (or plausibly said to be fully constituted by) the purely physical.

To clarify something:

1. Qualia are irreducible to physical interactions. So much becomes apparent by our ability to imagine alternate possible universes where qualia relate differently to physical phenomena.

I would not argue exactly this. Rather, I would say that the irreducibility of qualia to a given set of physical facts becomes apparent by our ability to imagine the said facts holding in the absence of the experience they are being claimed to constitute.

This leaves open whether there is a set of physical facts that qualia might be reduced to. It's just that, so far, none of the physical facts claimed to explain consciousness seem to come even close.

Anyway, off to bed.
 
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>>I would say that the irreducibility of qualia to a given set of physical facts becomes apparent by our ability to imagine the said facts holding in the absence of the experience they are being claimed to constitute.>>

But as Fausty and I have been arguing, we can imagine numerous phenomena that can be broken apart in our imaginations to be conceived of separately. Many of these things are seemingly simple "physical" objects.
...
Being overly charitable to hard-line "physicalists", maybe they are saying something like the following:

Somato-neural events and qualia are descriptions of the same "thing", but they are just 2 different ways of looking at that thing. When I look upon the sky, my experience of doing so takes the shape of an image of the sky. This is how I know my own somato-neural events. However, a neuroscientist with a bad-ass scanning device (which does not yet exist) would know my somato-neural activity in a different way. She would likely describe the firing of blue-wavelength cones in my retina, lateral inhibition of adjacent, unactivated cones, electro-chemical signaling from retina through the thalamus, through the different levels of visual corticies, and to the frontal cortex, etc.

The point is that there is a single phenomenon here, but it may be described in multiple ways, on multiple "levels". None of these levels is reducible to the other, nor does any description exhaust said phenomenon. Yet they point to the same thing.

ebola
 
^^

I'm sorry but I just can't imagine H2O that does not exhibit all of the properties of water. Since you suggest that this is conceivable, I ask you to prove it by describing a case in which we have H2O but not some property of water. This would be a heavy blow to my argument, which appeals to the conceivability of a set of physical processes without phenomenal properties to criticize claims that phenomenal properties are identical to, or are constituted by the physical processes in question.

note: the property of water not constituted by H2O obviously cannot be the phenomenal feel associated with an experience of water if it is going to do your argument/suggestion any good.
 
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^^^ You searched for "water that's not wet". What ebola needs is H2O that lacks a property like wetness, that water would not lack under the exact same circumstances.
 
>>note: the property of water not constituted by H2O obviously cannot be the phenomenal feel associated with an experience of water if it is going to do your argument/suggestion any good.>>

This is the problem. Any description of matter will depend on the phenomenal feel encountered by researchers working through instruments.

I'll give a longer answer when less stoned.

ebola
 
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