Mary's Room & Color Irrealism
As you've probably heard before, Mary is a super scientist who knows all the physical facts about vision, but when she leaves her life-long black and white room and sees red for the first time and knows what it's like to have a color experience.
Whether Mary actually learns a new fact or is even suprised has been discussed to death. But there is another component, and that would be the status of color itself.
The physical facts don't include the experience of red. Experiential red isn't a property of light or objects. Rather it's a result of animal vision that sees and process light of that wavelength a certain way. Mary would know all about this.
The problem is accounting for how our visual system has color experience, since all the physical facts about vision would be without color. As such, Mary inside or outside of her room cannot explain how it is that we have color experiences, despite knowing all the physical facts.
This leaves one with several choices:
1. Color realism
2. Color eliminativism
3. Color identity
4. Hard Problem
5. Idealism/Anti-Realism
Number One would mean that our visual system is reproducing the color that is out there in the world, or somehow directly perceiving it. Thomas Reid is one philosopher who has defended such a position.
Two would be a Dennettian approach. We don't actually experience color anymore than p-zombies do. It's an illusion. As such, the physical facts leave nothing out, and there is nothing more to explain.
Three would be to espouse an identity theory of mind with physical facts about perception (brain states or what not). Some physical facts therefore explain color experience.
Four leads to dualism, panpsychism, cognitive closure, emergentism, etc.
Five would be a denial of physicalist and realist premises, obviously.
In my view, #1 is impossible, #2 is ridiculous, I don't know what to make of #3, I can't accept #5, which leaves #4.
Whether Mary actually learns a new fact or is even suprised has been discussed to death. But there is another component, and that would be the status of color itself.
The physical facts don't include the experience of red. Experiential red isn't a property of light or objects. Rather it's a result of animal vision that sees and process light of that wavelength a certain way. Mary would know all about this.
The problem is accounting for how our visual system has color experience, since all the physical facts about vision would be without color. As such, Mary inside or outside of her room cannot explain how it is that we have color experiences, despite knowing all the physical facts.
This leaves one with several choices:
1. Color realism
2. Color eliminativism
3. Color identity
4. Hard Problem
5. Idealism/Anti-Realism
Number One would mean that our visual system is reproducing the color that is out there in the world, or somehow directly perceiving it. Thomas Reid is one philosopher who has defended such a position.
Two would be a Dennettian approach. We don't actually experience color anymore than p-zombies do. It's an illusion. As such, the physical facts leave nothing out, and there is nothing more to explain.
Three would be to espouse an identity theory of mind with physical facts about perception (brain states or what not). Some physical facts therefore explain color experience.
Four leads to dualism, panpsychism, cognitive closure, emergentism, etc.
Five would be a denial of physicalist and realist premises, obviously.
In my view, #1 is impossible, #2 is ridiculous, I don't know what to make of #3, I can't accept #5, which leaves #4.
Comments (92)
Why isn't the position the color is inside and not outside is not a realist position. as in objective vs subjective realism. Are you saying our subjective reality is not real?
The physicalist would probably disagree. They might say that certain physical facts cannot be learned by reading a book or listening to someone speak; they must be seen.
Realism means mind-independence. Physicalism is an objective ontology. Yes, it does need to account for subjectivity, and that's a problem.
That doesn't help.
Doesn't help what?
Why? Because the physical is an objective description of the world.
So physicalism has a monopoly on the meaning of being a realist? I think Subjectivity has just as much a claim to ontological reality as what is mind independent and but subjective reality cannot be fully reduced to objective/physical reality.
No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-independent.
Thus, dreams are real, but they're not realist, because they have no existence independent of dreamers.
But for one to understand the description one must understand the language, and one can't learn a language just by being spoken to. You need to connect the words to something else. Can you learn about gravity – or even what it means for one object to move closer to another – if you're never shown one object moving closer to another and told that this event is described as "one object moving closer to another"? I doubt it. Does it then mean that gravity is a non-physical thing? No. So why is it different for colour?
I accept color realism, with the qualification that "out there in the world" includes the physical particles in an animal's or person's brain and body as well as the rest of the world (this provides an indexical onto the perceived object, where different creatures perceive an object differently). And, secondly, that normative factors influence the naming of colors (e.g., a blind person should also regard fire engines as being red).
Quoting Marchesk
From my own reading of him, I think Dennett also accepts color realism. In "Bacteria to Bach and Back" he says, "Yet another option insists that colors do indeed exist; they just aren't what the folk think they are. I have followed that path throughout my career, insisting that not only colors are real but also consciousness, free will and dollars."
In this case, the illusion is not that colors are experienced (they are), the illusion is the idea that objects have color independent of any perceptual experience that would give meaning to color terms.
So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not?
Realism being the case and things being real are not the same thing. Pain is real even if one is an anti-realist about pain.
I can't see your pain, I can only feel mine, so how do I know it is the case.
Physical facts don't include experience. There's your 'hard problem' in few words.
That's a good defense of color realism, but the physical facts about perception still leave out the experience of color. So you're left with #3 or #4. In order for the physical facts of perception to include the color experience, further argument is needed to show how they are identical, supervene, emerge, etc.
Your pain is real, but pain is dependent on creature with nervous systems existing. It's not a property of the hammer. The question of what's real comes up when we want to know what, if anything, exists independent of human perception, conception, language, cultural conventions, etc.
Everyone agrees that unicorns aren't real. But the idea of unicorns and their cultural representations do exist. But unlike horses, the existence of the unicorn depends on human beings.
Now if one doesn't accept the existence of mind-independent world, then horses could also be said to be ideas in human minds, although we perceive horses and not unicorns as living animals. However, the question can easily be asked why horses can't have minds too.
So anyway, the question of color realism is whether color is like pain or color is like shape, in that shape is taken to be a property of objects themselves, and pain is not. The hammer doesn't feel pain when I hit myself with it, but the shape of the bruise it leaves on my face is related to the shape of the hammer.
To paraphrase the ancient Cyrenaics, I am pained* but I am not hammer shaped. Am I colored or is the hammer?
*I am sweetened was the perceptually relative way the Cyrenaics would put things.
If I claim the X is the case, and that it entails that X is independent of thought, how did I get to X in the first place if not by thought. Sounds like a sort of contradiction.
I think Mary's room argument is an ontological argument, not an epistemological argument. It is not about some newly found ability, it is about experiencing more than what can be described as some sort of physical manifestation.
Self-reference warning: mind comprehending mind. ?
I don't have Mary's color experiences, just my own, when they occur, and we agree what to call them by pointing them out.
Doesn't seem anti-physicalist as such, more like a variety of Levine's explanatory gap.
But that's all this is: playing with words in order to finagle a cheap semantic victory. So subjective experiences are not objective physical facts, and physicalists only believe in objective physical facts, therefore... Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences.
The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective, and thus there are only objective facts. That's why Mary's room, the p-zombie argument, the mind/body problem, etc exist and philosophers debate both sides of the argument. Chalmers, Dennett, McGinn, Nagel, etc have written books on this topic.
Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. All of his arguments amount to subjective experience being an illusion.
Right, but let's say we want to know what bat sonar experiences are. We can only know about bat perception indirectly, since we're not bats and don't utilize sonar. But would any amount of indirect facts tell us what bat sonar experience is? Maybe if sonar experience is similar to vision (as Dawkins has suggested), then we could be noticing similarities in bat neurophysiology, but if not, it would seem we're out of luck.
Mary's in the same position regarding color until she leaves the room. I wanted to modify it to apply to all humans with regards to explaining why we have color experiences at all. If we don't perceive color as an objective property of light or objects, then there is a problem for physicalism, since all the physical facts leave out the color experiences.
Studies of people, born blind, who then suddenly become able to see (such as those who undergo cataract surgery), suggest they have to learn how to interpret what they see, learn how to coherently construct objects in space, which takes them months. A child has to learn that the toy truck is red, just as Mary has to learn that what she is experiencing is red, but she still experiences it, its experiential reality is prior to its determination, prior to knowledge.
It is simply the experience of the location of objects that reflect sound. You don't have to be a bat to know what that is, and the experienced location of objects is the same for humans and bats. Some blind people navigate by echolocation, and they use sounds that are easier for humans to produce and hear.
Quoting Marchesk
Experiences are biological facts. Talk of physical facts tend to leave out things which are not so relevant in physics, such as biological facts. How is that a problem for "physicalism"?
It's only a problem if biology isn't necessitated by physics. Physicalism is the modern version of materialism, which is an ontological monism. Matter is all there fundamentally is has been replaced by physics, which means that matter-energy, fields, spacetime is all there is.
It's an updated version of atoms and the void.
Interpretation is a use of language, recall, and unlike language you don't learn how you ought to see things. You see what there is to see, and retrieving a previously lost or reduced capacity to see is quite different from learning how to interpret what you see. Unlike different interpretations the object that you see is the same regardless of whether your capacity to see it is reduced or not.
Quoting Cavacava
What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so.
Mary should already know that what she is experiencing is called 'red', and she would probably use her colour meter out of habit like we use our direct experience.
For example, I've never been on the moon, but I've learned indirectly to know what it's like to be on the moon by reading other people's descriptions, seeing pictures and so on. On the moon I would hardly need to learn how I ought to experience what it's like to be on the moon.
Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam).
Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims.
I'm not so sure about this anymore, after having listened to an episode of Radio Lab in which a scholar of Homer noticed that he almost never used the word blue, and in fact used other colors to describe the appearance of the water, sky, etc. And after examining other works of antiquity, came across the same lack of mention for blue.
The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue.
As a test, he intentionally omitted teaching his young daughter about blue, and then when she was old enough to speak, started asking her what color the sky was.
At first she looked at him weirdly. He kept asking every time they were outside on a sunny day. Her answer went from confusion to black to white, and then finally she identified it as blue. His conclusion was that we don't see the individual color until our brains learn to discriminate it from other colors. At first his daughter was confused because the sky was a big nothing. Then it was some light color, and finally she realized it was blue like other blues in the environment, since we can produce blues and color things with it.
What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism".
Quoting Marchesk
Lapis Lazuli was the blue of antiquity.The ancient Greek temples and statues were coloured in blue and red like so:
Are you not aware of the philosophical literature on physicalism or materialism?
It's weird being in a philosophy forum where poster pretend that terms like realism and physicalism aren't well established terms in philosophy.
I don't make this stuff up. I wish I were that clever!
Why isn't the sky blue?
What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected?
There wouldn't be, but those facts would be either reducible to physical facts, or they would be emergent/supervenient on the physical facts. The physical facts are what determine the biological ones.
The question is whether this can work for mental facts.
Maybe it is math all the way down. Still leaves the mental a problem. Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe.
But isn't this the point of the Mary's room thought experiment: the subjective experience of being on the moon cannot be adequately described objectively.
I don't think your experience of being on the moon could ever be reduced to physicalistic interpretations such as neurons firing.
Astronauts go through extensive training to do just what you say " you hardly need to learn"
I believe that science (or Mary) can tell us something about how we have colour experiences.
It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists.
Quoting CavacavaA physicalist interpretation is just that - an interpretation, or a model, just as your visual experience is a model, not how the world really is beyond your experience of it. So to say, that there are neurons firing is a visual model, or explanation, of the world, or some process that is part of it.
It is objectively true that you are on the moon, but I don't think whatever could possibly comprise that experience, or for that matter any experience, can be fully reduced to objective description. I think there is subjective reality and it is part of what it means to experience anything. To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them.
What our statements refer to don't necessarily need minds. Likewise with experiences. From the fact that we perceive objects with our minds it does not follow that the objects would somehow depend on our minds. An overwhelming amount of the objects that we perceive are real, not hallucinated.
Right, well if we asked why water has the properties it does, we can see why this is so from the chemistry and physics of water. But if we asked why certain biological processes results in experience, it seems utterly mysterious. You're right that we can get at the how. By why anything material would have an accompanying experience is the hard problem. And why just some brain processes and not digestion or rocks or machines. (Or maybe machines can be conscious?)
Well let me ask you if you think the your experience of a red firetruck is a passive affair, that its givenness is the content of your experience of it, that any statements you make about it just make this explicit,
or
do you think the red firetruck is your representation of what is out there, and any statement such as 'it's a red firetruck' is the only content of that experience, that we are in fact responsible for how we take things?
Perception is interaction.
Dreams are not (at least not with anything extra-self).
Qualia (as particular formats of experiences) are the personal part of interaction, the part on our own end.
It is hardly passive, nor is a 'red fire truck' given as its content.
What constitutes the visual experience is, as you probably know, a firing of neurons in your head when your eyes get exposed to the electromagnetic radiation that is reflected by the truck. The content of your experience, i.e. the coloured shape that you see, is set by the truck's design and pigments as they absorb and reflect certain wavelengths of the available electromagnetic radiation. Within an interval of 700–635 nm they are, under ordinary conditions of observation, experienced as red.
How we talk about the experience, however, is learned. For example, that the colour is called 'red', and the shape is recognized as a 'fire truck' and so on.
Quoting Cavacava
It is typically in our interest to take things for what they are, and for what there is to see, and not explain it away as an illusory representation of something invisible out there.
Thoroughly materiallist, says that consciousness is an attribute of matter - coins the term 'perceptronium' - then vanishes into a cloud of quantum abstraction so dense that only the mathematically literate can follow.
That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't think so. I must say though that I have read little of Dennett, and what I have read I found surprisingly difficult to understand and accept, given the praise he is usually given for being accessible and persuasive. (Perhaps it is his smug, smart-alecky style that gets in the way.) What is clear from his writings and reactions to them is that he is not making ontological, metaphysical claims here. Rather, he is arguing that 'qualia' as a philosophical term of art serves no explanatory purpose, "cuts no philosophical ice, bakes no philosophical bread, and washes no philosophical windows" (as Putnam said on another occasion).
If I understood him correctly, he faults qualia precisely for their subjectivity. He refers to Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" metaphor about private language to argue that because qualia are supposed to be inaccessible to anyone but the subject, the specific referent of the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out. While we are talking about "qualia" - not behavior, not objective physical facts, but strictly private "facts" - we could all be talking about completely different things or no things at all, for all the difference it would make. That's the argument, anyway.
How do you feel about that?
But we can reduce it to an objective description. I simply need to describe what I'm experiencing. If you were there on the moon with me, what would be the point of describing it to you? It would be redundant.
Is it not part of objective reality that you are on the moon, that you have a vantage point, and that you have experiences? To say that there is "subjective reality" without the additional point that this "subjective reality" is part of the objective reality that I am part of too, is to trip yourself into the nonsense of solipsism.
Is positing something the same as giving it existence? I can think about being on the moon, but doing so doesn't put me on the moon. If it does, then why is thinking, or imagining something so different than actually experiencing it directly? Why is my imagining far less detailed and vivid than the real thing?
Right, one might add that Dennett and his opponents are therefore not even wrong. :D
Experiences are, indeed, qualitative, they are what things are like under such and such conditions of observation. An experience exists 'here and now' for the observer, which amounts to an ontologically subjective domain of the objective reality. But little prevents the observer from making his/her experiences accessible via epistemologically objective descriptions.
His intention though is not really to quine qualia ("deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant"); the title of his famous essay is ironic. He does not deny, in the face of the obvious, that there is something it is like to have a feeling, to undergo an experience. His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist."
Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them.
But they do deny the inner, private part. Experiences can be individual, but not inner or private.
Quoting SophistiCat
Right, but quining qualia amounts to redefining consciousness as having a functional/behavioral role only. Dennett did say in a recent talk I watched on youtube that we are the equivalent of p-zombies. There is nothing going on in our heads in terms of consciousness.
Quoting SophistiCat
Sure, and Chalmers discusses several versions of physicalism. Physicalism might be the case, but questions of consciousness and intentionality still remain puzzling.
Physicalists don't deny the inner, private part either as meant in the ordinary sense of those terms (e.g., that you can be stoic, hide your true feelings, be misunderstood, etc.). And certainly you could feel something that is unique to you, that no-one else has experienced before or can understand. What is instead denied is a radical privacy - the idea that no-one could experience or understand that feeling in principle, regardless of their physical brain state.
The reason that we can meaningfully talk about red apples is because our physical sensory systems are, in the relevant sense, the same. But they need not be, as considering how one would communicate the idea of red apples to a blind person demonstrates.
Quoting Marchesk
You'll find that he is denying epiphenomenalism, not redefining consciousness. See his paper on The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies. In particular, note his analogy with health that concludes:
"Supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination you can remove consciousness while leaving all cognitive systems intact--a quite standard but entirely bogus feat of imagination--is like supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination, you can remove health while leaving all bodily functions and powers intact. If you think you can imagine this, it's only because you are confusedly imagining some health-module that might or might not be present in a body. Health isn't that sort of thing, and neither is consciousness."
:-} Chalmers is a dualist, recall, and the alleged puzzle arises from taking dualism for granted.
You don't get to talk about a hard problem of consciousness with people who don't take dualism for granted.
It was ironic, but it makes a serious point.
Dennett denies that consciousness is real. That has been his fundamental argument all throughout his career. One of his early books was called 'Consciousness Explained', and the Wikipedia entry on it is quite informative. It points out that critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel and John Searle, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely redefining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to nickname the book Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away.
Quoting Andrew M
That's not it at all. What is being denied is the primacy of the subjective, the fact that the subjective nature of experience can never be understood in wholly third-person terms, from outside of experience, but is a simply another kind of phenomenon. Part of this is the idea that humans are perfectly reducible to objective analysis (which is a central aspect of Dennett's 'scientism'.)
Furthermore Dennett explicitly argues that the idea of the subject and subject-hood, generally, are at best epiphenomal illusions which in reality are simply the consequences of cellular transactions. Humans are in some real sense automata, they do what they are programmed to do by the 'Darwinian algorithm'. He explicitly, if humorously, says that humans really are 'moist robots', and then says 'so, what's the problem'? It's the fact that he doesn't understand why this is a problem, that's the problem!
Nagel's review of Dennett's latest book is called Is Conscousness an Illusion? Nagel says:
Steve Poole's review says:
Dennett's philosophy can be summed up as follows - molecules are the only real agents, real 'doers', in the Universe, and everything else we see is the product of their activities, which are really not so much intelligent as a kind of elaborate chemical reaction:
Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett, page 202.
Dennett's opponents, in essence, claim there is a subjective aspect to every act of knowing, even the so-called 'hard sciences' such as physics (a fact which has manifested in the 'observer problem'). The reason Dennett can even make his preposterous argument, is that the subject is ubiquitous and is implicitly invoked in every conversation, every 'speech act', even without being made manifest or explicitly referred to. It's unconscious, but not in the way Dennett claims: not because it comprises purely material actions on the cellular level acting out of an algorithm of which we're unaware, but because we so deeply embody it, that it is never an object of perception, it is never a 'that' to us. That is why Dennett can apparently argue for it's unreality; because you can never really pick out what mind is, or where it is, as it precedes any speech act, thought, or gesture. You can act like it's not there, except for if it really weren't there, you'd be dead, and Dennett wouldn't be able to tell you anything.
I've read Chalmer's entire book on consciousness, a couple of his papers, and seen several videos of him talking about consciousness, so I have a pretty good idea what he's arguing for and why.
He states in his book that physicalism is a very complete and satisfying account of the world, with one exception, and that's consciousness. Chalmers then provides reasoning for why he thinks every single version of physicalism fails, which is why he says he was led to endorse a form of property dualism.
You might think his arguments go wrong, or his intuition leads him astray, but I don't get the sense at all that he started out dogmatically as a dualist. Chalmers has no need to endorse dualism, other than finding physicalism to be inadequate.
Chalmers isn't like a theist arguing for God. Now Dennett and some who agree with him strike me as possibly being wedded to materialism or functionalism, and that leads them to argue the way they do.
Or maybe they simply aren't convinced by the likes of Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn, Block, Searle, etc. And that's fine, if so. I honestly can't tell who's right. No explanation for consciousness has ever totally convinced me from any side.
Here I might disagree. The reason we can talk meaningfully about our experience of red apples is because we have red experiences. It's true that our visual system, which is understood in physical/chemical/biological terms is key to our ability to experience red, but we are not communicating the facts of how our perception works or the optics of light bouncing off an apple. We're communicating an experience that those with color vision have.
And it's this experience that is missing from the physical/chemical/biological facts of perception, light or the object itself. That is the entire point of the OP.
Whether our experience of red is radically private or not doesn't change the fact that we don't know why having red experiences would accompany an explanation of perception.
Nagel's way of putting this is that science provides objective, third person explanations. But experiencing red is first person and subjective. So something is left out with any objective explanation. That explanation can be scientific, mathematical, computational, or functional and it will still leave the experience out, because all of those are objective explanations.
The SEP article on physicalism suggests that the question of consciousness and physicalism might be a question about objectivity in disguise. The real fundamental issue is around what's objective versus what's subjective, and why we understand the world fundamentally in terms of both concepts.
Looks like he was "led" from assuming dualism to endorsing dualism.
Quoting Marchesk
But how on earth could anyone know that every single version of physicalism fails to account for consciousness? He even looks like a christian rock musician O:)
How many violins can you build out of a pile of bricks? Does it depend on the size of the pile? The quality of the bricks? Brick technology? Some yet-to-be discovered brick?
A similar argument has also been advanced by an 'innovative dualist'" (note the reference to Churchland, who is a convinced physicalist)
What is it Like to Know? New Atlantis.
Also a comment on this phrase from the above essay:
I disagree with this. I would say that 'qualia' are attributes of sensory experiences, which possess a subjective element, i.e. they're undergone by a subject. That doesn't make them 'properties of the world'. Anyway 'Physical objects' are simply a special case of qualia, i.e. they associated with tangible or tactile objects and conform to mathematical predictions.
But the mathematical predictions they conform to, like the laws of motion, are not themselves qualia, nor are they physical. The whole status of scientific law is of course another question altogether, but if it is the case that scientific and arithmetical principles are not themselves physical then the whole physical project is untenable.
Any objections thus far?
Well it would have to be a problem in principle: that subjective reality in principle can't be reduced to objective reality, that this is a category error. I think that thought always was a possible configuration for matter, and over the eons biologic matter evolved to the point where this possibility is realized in the actuality of man. So property dualism, where what Mary felt when she experienced red could never been understood/felt without actually experience of it, similar to the bat argument. Mary's claim is ontological, it reflects how the experience of seeing red affected her, how she felt on seeing it, and not about her knowledge of the color.
'
The argument is really simple, actually. Physical concepts are objective. Conscious concepts are subjective.
It really goes back to Locke and his primary/secondary property distinction. If you use only the primary properties to describe the world, your explanation will leave out the secondary ones.
You don't get color, smell, etc from shape, number, etc. This isn't a problem until you need to explain the mind, since it's part of the world.
That's why it's a problem for physicalism.
Numbers are also only real for a mind capable of counting. There are no numbers 'in the world', but science could barely get out of bed without numbers.
Bricks? :-}
Quoting Cavacava
What is a "subjective reality", and who says anything about reducing it to an "objective reality"? In your use of the words 'subjective' and 'objective' dualism is assumed, so no wonder that there arises a "problem in principle" for you.
I don't think there are two realities, and the problem does not arise as I use the terms 'subjective' and objective' in the following way: an experience exists in a subjective domain in the objective reality, and as speakers we have the possibility to communicate our subjective experiences with the help of epistemologically objective descriptions.*
* On the distinction between ontologically subjective and objective, and epistemologically objective etc.. check out Searle, for example on YouTube.
Quoting Marchesk
Lol that's simply an assertion of dualism in which the distinction between the physical and subjective amounts to dualism.
Quoting Marchesk
Only under the assumption of property dualism: the dubious idea that the colour wouldn't be a physical pigment for instance but some mysterious entity lurking inside your consciousness. Hence the appearance of a "hard problem" of consciousness.
But it is simply false to say that it would be a problem for physicalism, for not all physicalists are property dualists.
Hint: it's an analogy.
So then where is the color we experience? Is it identical with some biological process, or does color supervene on the entirety of visual perception?
A physical pigment of what, though? I take it you don't think rocks have color experiences. That would be panpsychist.
If in the future we fully simulate vision, would the software have color experiences? Is there a way of arranging the bits such that they are conscious?
Neither.
What constitutes your colour experience is located in your head: a firing of neurons. But the colour that you experience is located outside your head, in the physical processes that reflect, transmit, absorb or emit light.
So, the experience is not just a firing of neurons but reaches out to the external objects and state of affairs that set the content of the experience. The internal experience that you have is, in this sense, inseparable from the external object or state of affairs that you experience.
Quoting Marchesk
A pigment
Quoting Marchesk
Who knows? If we can make artificial hearts pump blood, then perhaps in the future we can make artificial brains that have colour experiences, and their experiences would then be just as intrinsic and ontologically subjective as for humans. So, in this sense you might as well redefine us humans as "biological machines", and our visual systems as "software" that "simulate" colour vision.
A rearrangement of the syntactically arranged bits in a computer, however, won't make it conscious. Computers have no semantics, and as long as their instructions are observer-relative (e.g. programmed to mimic the behaviour of a conscious human) then I don't see how they could have any experiences of their own.
I would suggest that objective explanations always directly or indirectly reference experience. For example, you might explain addition by showing how you can group stones together or explain quantum mechanics by pointing out interference patterns on a screen. In other words, there is no view from nowhere.
Which would mean that any explanation of experience would itself need to be in terms of experience.
Perhaps an alternative way of framing the issue to the usual subjective/objective framing.
That works for perception, but what about dreaming or imagination? What if your visual cortex is stimulated by a magnet or electrode and you see color?
It is an alternative, but it prevents us from speaking of the world when humans aren't around, which would be most of the time, since humans only occupy part of the surface of one little pale blue dot for the past 50 thousand years or so.
Not at all. We experience and describe the world from a human vantage point but it is still the world, independent of what humans say about it, that we are experiencing and describing.
There was no language about dinosaurs until humans came onto the scene. It doesn't follow that the referents of that language (i.e., the dinosaurs) didn't exist.
The consequence of this reframing is that our reports of our experience are no longer infallible reports of a private theater. They are instead provisional reports of our experience of the natural world. For example, I might report that I saw a red apple but be mistaken about that. It might instead have been a green apple that just appeared red in that lighting. Others can judge whether my report was accurate or not by looking for themselves. And this may lead me to revise my own report of what happened at the time. That is, the correct report of my experience is that I saw a green apple that appeared red due to the lighting.
Sure, but what if I ask whether green is a property of the apple? Why do we care? Because we want to be able to get at an objective view of the world. When you ask me the mass of the apple, that mass doesn't depend on any sense modality humans have. Presumably, Martians with X-Ray vision will measure the apple to have the same mass, once we convert from their units to ours.
Color is a lot tricker than taste. Nobody is a taste realist, I take it. Nobody thinks that the apple objectively tastes sweet. It tastes sweet to animals whose taste buds detect a certain amount of sugar content. But what if we didn't' have a sense of taste or smell at all? Maybe we detected chemical content via spectroscopic eyes or some other sensory organ.
Independent, in what sense? We have sensory organs that are adapted to a particular range of stimuli, and intellectual capacities that we are told nowadays are the consequence of biological evolution. So how do we rise above those capacities and see the world 'independently' of those capacities? How do we know we're capable of seeing the world 'in itself' and as distinct from or apart from the categories of understanding through which we view it? I think that 'independence' is really a working assumption that is often treated as a metaphysical principle.
Properties like taste and color are pragmatic abstractions. What makes them objective is that they have an ostensive meaning and logic of use. It's not relevant at that level of abstraction what the underlying physical processes are.
These are the basic abstractions that we build on to get to more complex abstractions like "mass". If we had different sense modalities, then we would abstract the world differently at the sensory level. But we would still, in principle, end up with the same fundamental physics.
Independent in the sense that the world was there before humans were around to talk about it.
We don't rise above those capacities (which would be the view from nowhere). The ordinary use of terms like "see" imply that it is the world that is seen (as opposed to a private theater or Platonic cave). You could accurately call it a working assumption.
Why can't you accept #5? That seems like an unsettling declaration that lacks objectivity (no pun intended), or is perhaps based on a misunderstanding of Idealism.....
Oh well...
As it was said of Berkeley's thought in his own time, his arguments could be refuted by no one and yet convinced no one.....sad.
I'm convinced there is more to the world than what we perceive.
Ah, well I can't just let this opportunity at provocation go....so....
On what grounds do you believe that there exists more than consciousness and conscious content?
Science. I was intending on starting a thread on science and realism where I would explain.
Well that seems like putting the cart before the horse.....
Science assumes answers to questions I just asked you, for instance, if no logical grounds exist to believe in anything other than consciousness and conscious-content...then, for instance, there can be no such thing as physical causation (which science as we understand it assumes axiomatically).
So that seems to beg the question. Science assumes a mind-independent reality, how can you therefore use such to prove the existence of such?
Are you saying that based on the assumption of the existence of a mind-independent physical reality you therefore believe in a mind-independent physical reality? There is a fallacy in there, i'm sure you are aware.....but I am willing to wait for your upcoming thread if I am missing something essential.
Proof might not be doable in metaphysics, but I take it to be a most reasonable inference. If a plant is observed to have grown while nobody was around to perceive it, then it makes sense to suppose the plant underwent growth independent of any observers. There are all sort of things like that where the reasonable inference is that stuff is going on when we're not around to perceive.
The alternative is that somehow our experiences are structured as if stuff goes on without us. How experiences could be like that is a mystery.
Proof in metaphysics is demonstrated by logical necessity established through sound argument via deductive inference, all inferences are either deductive or inductive (inductive inferences are technically fallacious but regarded as reasonable so long as the conclusions are stated in a tentative and non-deductive manner).
In the example you used, "growth" is an imputed meaning to a group disparate perceptions, but there is not metaphysical or epistemic grounds to assert as a truth the belief that the plant grew independent of any one perceiving it. None.
Of course, if all reality in its temporal totality exists in a supreme consciousness from which our limited perceptual states originate, then in some sense the "growth" does happen independent of our own experience.
Your alternative of mystery is unnecessary, and going back to Mary, if qualia are states of consciousness that cannot be reduced to physical attributes by any logical proof, then it seems that percepts being bundles of these sensations (qualia) would imply the non-physical nature of reality as all of reality would be comprehended by these irreducible mental states. That is, all of the world of which we have any knowledge, is mental content, and given that we continuously receive new percepts of which we did not have knowledge, we must ask where such originated.....Well I can tell you they can only come from some other Consciousness, for something cannot give what itself does not have and only a consciousness can have conscious content (percepts and therefore qualia); thus, whatever occurs apart from our personal experience is necessarily occurring in some other Consciousness and that is a sufficient grounds for the objectivity you seek.
no mystery or speculation needed.
All I am saying, is that I do not think you are being intellectually fair to simply dismiss idealism; especially, since the realist interpretation you propose seems to be grounded on assumption, speculation, and lack of deductive proof.
To be honest,
I don't really want to derail your thread further from your main topic, I just wanted to voice my objection to you dismissing idealism out of hand.
I am perfectly content to wait until you have created a thread defending realism and science for me to hear out your case and critique it there in a more appropriate context.
I doubt that I will be posting further here, unless I feel it is necessary.
This thread hasn't been commented on for a while, so it doesn't matter.
I don't dismiss idealism out of hand, because I've been involved in plenty of very long idealism/realisms threads in the past, which challenged me to seriously consider the idealist arguments, but ultimately, realism is more convincing.
I don't see how the assertion of the improvable (deductively speaking) can be more convincing, but perhaps my standard of what serves as an appropriate criteria by which a philosopher may be convinced is too high....
If realism's claims could be demonstrated in syllogism, I would be more open to the position, but it seems all Realists have followed the sort naive realism of Thomas Reid in one way or another and that just seems to be poor philosophy.
That Berkeley's Idealism was more often ignored than answered is not a secret, but the fact that this state of affairs is not an outrage says more about our biases and corrupt nature than it does about Berkeley's actual premises.
I am not entirely convinced you are not being dismissive of Idealism because you prefaced your thread with a clear dismissal of consideration regarding the position of Idealism and then defended such to me with clear question-begging and an admission of a belief that your position was not provable (metaphysically), but "reasonable" nonetheless (whatever that means).....
Like I said, I would prefer to see you flesh out your realism in a large and thorough post on a new thread (as you have alluded to) rather than banter back-and-forth here. I would like to hear your well-articulated and well thought-out case.
I will be waiting.