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