Critical Review of 'Consciousness Denialism' by Galen Strawson
in the New York Review of Books
He says:
I demur, on the basis that consciousness is never an object, and is not found in nature. You find plenty of conscious creatures, but you never observe consciousness as such. That is why the folks he criticizes can even make their case; they're reasonably saying, hey if 'naturalism' concerns 'only things that can be observed', then there's no evidence of the first-person nature of consciousness, therefore no proof that it is real, given what they will accept as proof. That has always been the basis of behaviourism, of which eliminative materialism is simply another version.
Second point - Strawson appears to want to defend materialism, by saying that consciousness is 'wholly material or physical'.
What's wrong with this, is that the 'is' - which means 'the same as' or 'is equal to' - is itself not something physical. That's right! 'Is' or 'equals' or 'is the same as' is purely logical. It revolves around a judgement that 'this thing here' is or equals or is the same as 'that thing there'. And that kind of judgement is also something that is never found in the objective domain. It is an operation of thought, the relationship of ideas. There are no "=" anywhere in nature.
And what is 'physical', exactly? That is the question which the World's Largest and Most Expensive Machine has been constructed to answer. And right now, they're having quite a hard time arriving at a conclusion.
Overall, an exasperating review. Strawson is, of course, correct in saying that Dennett spouts learned nonsense, but he presents no alternative.
He says:
Naturalism states that everything that concretely exists is entirely natural; nothing supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. Given that we know that conscious experience exists, we must as naturalists suppose that it’s wholly natural. And given that we’re specifically materialist or physicalist naturalists (as almost all naturalists are), we must take it that conscious experience is wholly material or physical.
I demur, on the basis that consciousness is never an object, and is not found in nature. You find plenty of conscious creatures, but you never observe consciousness as such. That is why the folks he criticizes can even make their case; they're reasonably saying, hey if 'naturalism' concerns 'only things that can be observed', then there's no evidence of the first-person nature of consciousness, therefore no proof that it is real, given what they will accept as proof. That has always been the basis of behaviourism, of which eliminative materialism is simply another version.
Second point - Strawson appears to want to defend materialism, by saying that consciousness is 'wholly material or physical'.
What's wrong with this, is that the 'is' - which means 'the same as' or 'is equal to' - is itself not something physical. That's right! 'Is' or 'equals' or 'is the same as' is purely logical. It revolves around a judgement that 'this thing here' is or equals or is the same as 'that thing there'. And that kind of judgement is also something that is never found in the objective domain. It is an operation of thought, the relationship of ideas. There are no "=" anywhere in nature.
And what is 'physical', exactly? That is the question which the World's Largest and Most Expensive Machine has been constructed to answer. And right now, they're having quite a hard time arriving at a conclusion.
Overall, an exasperating review. Strawson is, of course, correct in saying that Dennett spouts learned nonsense, but he presents no alternative.
Comments (155)
I find that much of the discussion of consciousness is just confusion, and I say this from a Wittgensteinian point of view, i.e., that much of the confusion lies in the way we discuss the issue, and the way we use many of the words/concepts involved. So we create a world view with seemingly clearly defined words, this then shuts out others who have a more expansive use of the word/concept. Now it's not always as simple as this, but this is part of the problem.
Also what's weird about our discussion of what's material or natural, when looking at some of this stuff on the quantum level it seems to morph into the metaphysical. So there is no clear cut boundary when talking about what's metaphysical or not at a certain level of discussion. So the use of words I think on some level confounds us, and this is why I think we need to be careful about being too dogmatic about some of these ideas.
I would find a couple of things to quibble with here. First, if "concrete" (as opposed to "abstract") is here taken to mean something like "causally efficacious," then it doesn't necessarily follow from the premise that consciousness exists that consciousness is therefore concrete. An epiphenomenalist, for instance, would probably deny that consciousness is causally efficacious, and claim that only its attendant physical states possess such efficacy (whether, and to what degree, epiphenomenalism, can be reconciled with physicalism or naturalism is another deep question, but I at least prima facie see no contradiction between those positions).
Second, if physicalism is taken to be the thesis that "everything which exists is physical," then they would indeed be committed to either denying that consciousness exists (hardly a tenable position) or claiming that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. However, if physicalism is taken to be the thesis that "everything which exists is either physical or supervenes on the physical," then an immaterial consciousness poses no problem for physicalism/naturalism (provided that said consciousness is not of a distinct "substance," or anything of the sort).
I'd be interested in understanding what you mean by "...provided that said consciousness is not a distinct "substance," or anything of the sort." Do you mean by this that consciousness is not something we can point to and say, "This is consciousness," i.e., it's not like pointing to a tree and saying, "That is a tree."
It was actually in reference to substance dualism, and pretty much anything that that thesis might entail about consciousness. It might also rule out certain other positions such as Leibnizian "pre-established harmony" between the mental and the physical.
Firstly, let me say that I accidentally "flagged" (and then quickly unflagged) your post in trying to respond, so if armed men kick down the door to your house, mea culpa (I'm actually not totally sure what flagging does...).
Yea, I know little of Wittgenstein, and I understand that he's one of the more difficult philosophers (which itself is saying something, given that I'd characterize very little of philosophy as easy reading). I read On Certainty years ago, but not the Tractatus or anything else.
Isn't Strawson advocating neutral monism with this 'review'. I place that within scare quotes because I'm not sure which books he is reviewing.
I'm a little suspect on what denialism entails since it changes from philosopher to philosopher. If we are talking about qualia as atomized sense experience existing separtely from their neurological substratum then I can see why someone might deny that.
If we mean how the senses are grouped as a single first person unity then it would be difficult to argue against that. I've read quite a bit of Dennett and he doesn't appear to argue against that. Being physical should mean having physical effects on the world so consciousness should be physical in that sense because of the thousands of books about it.
I take issue to this statement in the 'review' btw : "When you reduce chemical processes to physical processes, you don’t deny that chemical processes exist."
This sounds fairly presumptuous. Because I believe many reductionists may deny that... [EDIT] well that they do not exist ontologically (everyone agrees they exist in epistemic terms).
I think this is the nub of the whole issue. There are different possible interpretations of the naturalist claim that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon; a kataphatic and an apophatic reading. The positive interpretation is that consciousness is physical, with the implication being that we know what it is to be physical. The negative interpretation is that consciousness is physical in the sense that it is not anything inherently or substantially different than everything else we understand to be physical, with the implication that we do not know (and perhaps cannot know) precisely and exhaustively what it means to be physical or material.
Also from the review:
They duly conclude that consciousness doesn’t exist. They reach this conclusion in spite of the fact that conscious experience is a wholly natural phenomenon, whose existence is more certain than any other natural phenomenon, and with which we’re directly acquainted, at least in certain fundamental respects.
Why do the Deniers ignore a long line of distinguished materialist predecessors and ally themselves with Descartes, their sworn enemy, in holding that experience can’t possibly be physical—thereby obliging themselves to endorse the Denial? The answer appears to be that they share with Descartes one very large assumption: that we know enough about the physical to be certain that experience can’t be physical.
Of course it is absurd to deny that consciousness exists. It also seems absurd to claim that it is a separate substance from physical or material reality. So, where does this leave us?
Quoting Wayfarer
What kind of alternative would you expect, or can you imagine, given that we cannot say what it means, in any exhaustive or definitive sense, to be physical, or to be real, or to exist and so on? If we do not comprehensively know what it means to be physical, then how much less could we know what it means to be, and yet not to be physical?
It is on account of our general ignorance, and our propensity to rely on intuitive notions derived from linguistic reifications to inform us about what is possible or impossible, that I think such "problems", including the so-called "hard problem", are really faux-problems.
Perhaps you see an ethical dimension to physicalist and non-physicalist standpoints? I see no inherent implications, one way or the other, for religion or spirituality. To say there is a transcendent God, for example, is, for me, just to say that there is a being or spirit which transcends our understanding and experience, and is not to imply any form of metaphysical dualism.
Yeah but we're not tenured as 'professors of philosophy'.
Quoting Sam26
Hence the never-ending discussion of philosophy of physics on these forums. The irony is that the kind of materialism that the 'denialists' generally argue for, has actually been demolished by the hardest of the hard sciences!
Agree with your remarks on the confusion surrounding the discussion of consciousness. It's the symptom of a conflict between different, and incommensurable, domains of discourse.
Quoting Arkady
A lot rides on the meaning of 'supervenes' here.
My analysis of 'substance' is that the meaning of the word has a completely different meaning in normal discourse than in classical philosophy. In normal discourse, 'substance' is something, conceived of, in the case of the mind, as 'an ethereal substance'. But the original meaning of substance is 'that in which attributes inhere'. In fact the Greek word translated as substance was 'ousia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being'. That does help show that the reading of 'substance' as the 'ghost in the machine' is misconceived.
Then again, Husserl criticizes Descartes precisely because Descartes tended to depict res cogitans as a kind of objective substance which could be understood naturalistically (see here).
Quoting JupiterJess
He's basically talking about Dennett, whose latest epic fantasy was published late last year. As for Strawson, he has become known as an advocate for pan-psychism, which is the subject of this thread.
Quoting Janus
I don't necessarily believe that at all. What I do say, is that the widespread acceptance of physicalism is a kind of myth - that science basically understands the nature of things, which is physical, and now what has to be done is to fill in the remaining gaps in our knowledge of the physical domain. That was the subject of Nagel's criticism in his book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Nagel tentatively suggests a kind of 'naturalistic teleology' as an alternative.
It's not clear what you "don't necessarily believe". Are you saying that we do have an exhaustive understanding of what it means to be physical?
Regarding the "naturalistic teleology" suggestion; do you think empirical evidence could be found to support it? In other words, can you imagine a way in which it could be rigorously tested?
Thanks for linking to this. It was instructive but almost painful to read (as is, elsewhere, Strawson's uninspired defense of hard-determinism in the philosophy of free will and determinism, and his related 'debunking' of the very idea of moral responsibility). While I've come to believe Dennett to be subtly misguided in about half of the things that he says, and insightful about the other half, Strawson seems to be enmired through and though in a bottomless pit of philosophical confusion. (This is all the more regrettable since his father, Sir Peter Strawson, was one of the most profound and influential thinker in the whole history of analytic philosophy).
While I don't agree with some of the allegedly "denialist" stances on consciousness that Strawson deplores, his own characterization of the broadly Wittgensteinian strand of though that he is opposes (i.e. the so called 'philosophical behaviorism', also propounded by Gilbert Ryle, and to some degree by Dennett who was Ryle's student) boils down to an almost farcical misrepresentation of it. The idea that whoever denies the claim that being in pain must amounts to nothing else but being 'directly' acquainted with an essentially private 'pain qualia' thereby also is denying that anyone ever is in pain, of feels pain, is ridiculous.
Strawson's broad brush narration of the history of the evolution of conceptions of subjective experience in the history of psychology also is deeply flawed. As a corrective to it, I would recommend Alan Costall's From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004), which is one of the most enlightening pieces that I have read over the last year on any topic.
Costall, just like Dennett and Strawson attempt to do, in their different ways, aims at disclosing the crypto-Cartesian assumptions that underpin much of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Dennett and Strawson both fail, in my view, with Strawson's attempt being the most unsuccessful. Costall himself goes much further in targeting the unwarranted Cartesian assumptions that condition the thinking of philosophers and psychologists who fancy themselves to be materialist anti-Cartesians but who just repeat the same (or worse) fundamental mistakes in fancier 'materialist' ways. (One of those mistakes is the uncritical reliance on representationalism in the philosophy of perception and of thought content. This is a mistake that Dennett partially overcomes.)
(I wanted to make another specific point but it currently escapes my mind, so I'll edit this space later on)
Very true.
It’s too sweeping to say that ‘we cannot say what it means to be real or to exist’. What I am saying is that it seems assumed by physicalists that the nature of the physical is itself understood or defined when (as Sam26 pointed out) the very nature of matter itself is still a metaphysical puzzle. That is why ‘materialism’ tends to end up as ‘scientism’ - it amounts to little more than an allegiance to science in the place of philosophy.
In respect of teleology - the question revolves around the notion of purpose or intention in the broadest sense. But a consequence of ‘eliminativism’ is that it says even our intentions are in some fundamental sense illusory - let alone whether intention is real in any cosmic sense. And I think it’s highly significant that the eliminativist attitude must insist that even our indubitable sense of first-person intentionality is an illusion. (Especially because an illusion is an erroneous or false interpretation of sense data, so even illusion implies an interpreting agent. A stone can’t suffer illusions.) So a natural theologian could easily argue, look, it’s an inevitable consequence that when you deny the intentional nature of creation, then you will end up undermining even the reality of the individual subject. Dennett, wittingly or not, has spent his career affirming such an argument!
In the context of the Western philosophical tradition, I tend to favour theistic evolution - but I don’t think that ever ought to be considered an ‘empirical theory’. So the fact that it’s not an empirical theory is not an argument against it. Rather it’s a misunderstanding.
What is ‘empiricism’ anyway? It comes down to acceptance of evidence that can be seen, touched, and experienced by the sense organs (augmented by instruments). So it often (and often unconsciously) excludes intuition and the ‘felt sense’ of being that is fundamental to what it means to be human. (We are after all beings.) This shows up in the many threads on this forum about whether or if existence has any purpose; it comes from the sense of life being a cosmic lottery or game of chance. And it’s endemic.
What is the point of an existential philosophy? It’s not to gain greater instrumental power, useful though it might be. It’s a ‘first person discipline’, not an objective science. That’s true even of existential atheism. But the fact that it’s not objective doesn’t mean it’s ‘merely subjective’, either. What modern culture has forgotten is the understanding of self-transcendence or self-abnegation which is fundamental to traditional philosophy and religious disciplines. This opens up a perspective which can’t be obtained through a purely objecitivist stance but which is also not simply a matter of subjective emotion. It is nearer the virtue of sagacity or philosophical detachment.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Agree. I felt the same way about his essay on panpsychism. I would like to agree with him but am puzzled by the way he clings to materialism. I suppose in the modern academy, to defend anything else just carries too much baggage. (It’s the main reason I departed philosophy as an undergrad.)
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Do you mean this passage?
[quote=Galen Strawson]Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelled anything knows what it is; anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or hot or cold or remorseful, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things involve what are sometimes called “qualia”—that is to say, different types or qualities of conscious experience. What I am calling the Denial is the denial that anyone has ever really had any of these experiences.[/quote]
Because I think that *is* true of what the eliminativists (what he calls ‘denialists’) are saying.
Nagel’s review of Dennett’s latest:
I think Dennett’s books turn out to be an extremely eloquent argument against the very thing that he constantly urges on us; they illustrate the persuasive power of materialism by demonstrating that even very intelligent authors will commit to frankly self-contradictory arguments to defend it. As they must, because according to Dennett, we’re no more than ‘moist robots’ (a term he has used previously only in partial jest).
Yes, we might say that eliminativists (and reductionists) about the mental, about consciousness, or about subjective experience, are "deniers" somewhat in the sense Strawson intends. But he clearly lumps them up with Wittgensteinian 'philosophical behaviorists', whose position he contrasts with his own idea that subjective experiences (and what those experiences are 'directly' experiences of) are material processes going on literally in the brain. 'Philosophical behaviorists' such as Wittgenstein, Ryle and (in certain respects) Dennett, criticize the crypto-Cartesian conception of 'qualia' conceived as substance-like objects of direct acquaintance that stand in between a cognitive subject and the world that she perceives or thinks about. It doesn't make much difference to this view whether the 'sense data' are conceived to be realized in material stuff (res extensa) or mental stuff (res cogitans). According to Wittgensteinians, as well as other 'relationalists' such as J.J. Gibson, Alan Costall, Patrick Heelan and Michel Bitbol (to name a few) consciousness is ineliminably relational and can't intelligibly be explained by reference to instrinsic properties of the brain or 'mind'.
Nagel's criticism of Dennett, which you quote, is revealing and on target. But this is a feature of Dennett's thinking where he badly fails to follow though on the consequences of his own Wittgenstainianism, and, in the interest of being a good bona fide physicalist, he aligns himself much too closely with Strawson's internalist views on mental content!
Very roughly speaking, supervenience is a type of relation between states or properties such that A supervenes on B just in case A states are an emergent property of B states, and a change or difference in A necessitates a change or difference in B, but not vice-versa.
What about the placebo effect, then? Those are examples of 'top-down causation' which would mitigate against a physicalist explanation, would they not?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I have only read reviews of Hacker's book but from what I can glean, it seems entirely reasonable to me. And if the author of 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' can dish it out, he ought to be able to take it ;-)
We can certainly say what it is to exist in the phenomenal sense. But metaphysics is always attempting to go beyond the merely phenomenal. You are agreeing that "the nature of matter is still a metaphysical puzzle", so you actually seem to be agreeing with me that, beyond a merely phenomenal account, "we cannot say what it means to be real or to exist".
Quoting Wayfarer
Intention is coherently understandable only when it comes to conscious agents, so I would say that is "its broadest sense". Materialism/ physicalism are not necessarily eliminativistic standpoints, and that is Strawson's point of dispute with Dennett (who admittedly does seem to be an eliminativist form the few things of his I have read). So, the contention that consciousness is a natural, rather than a supernatural, a material rather than an immaterial, and a physical rather than a non-physical, process, is not necessarily an eliminativist, or a reductionist, one at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't said that "theistic evolution" is an empirical theory. It is a metaphysical theory, obviously. I have said that it is fundamentalistic to assert that such theories are empirical facts, or supportable on account of empirical facts. The only argument against it as a "theory" is that it could never be intersubjectively corroborated, although it's obviously not impossible that there could be universal agreement about it. In any case it shares that honour with all the rest of the metaphysical theories. I cannot agree with Peirce's argument for theism; that it is likely to be the standpoint that is ultimately reached by the community of enquirers; because the future is uncertain.
Also, you don't seem to be clearly committed to theistic evolution at all; on account of your caveat "in the context of the Western philosophical tradition". In any case, the tradition in all its phases, analytic, phenomenological, existential, process-oriented, and postmodern has for the most part moved away from theism.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is exactly what I have argued for in many of my exchanges with you. That spiritual "knowledge" is a matter of intuition and feeling; and that it is not capable of corroboration in the way that empirical observations are. I have also many times made the point that this does not necessarily mean it is "merely subjective" (although of course it is possible to, just as many do, argue that it is).
Philosophy is in a kind of middle position between religion and science. Empirical evidence cannot be used to demonstrate the truth of philosophical assertions, because where philosophical standpoints deal with empirical facts, they constitute interpretations of those facts, interpretations which those facts cannot themselves unequivocally confirm or dis-confirm. Empirical facts may be used in arguments, and appeals to plausibility may be made; but there is no definite way to establish plausibility. What each person finds convincing will depend upon their own experience and set of presuppositions.Philosophers may convince by argument; but they also may quite legitimately convince by rhetoric, I believe; the force of which can be an appeal to individual experience, as well as the individuals understanding of collective cultural experience. Soi there can be no definitive intersubjective corroboration, but there may be, and obviously very often is, inter-subjective agreement when tit comes to philosophical standpoints and religious beliefs.
Ah - but can we?
Quoting Janus
I don't profess Christianity, but I am not atheist. In the context of Western philosophy, therefore, I tend to favour theistically-oriented philosophers, in a broad-brush sense (but never intelligent design or creationism).
I find the physicalist or naturalistic accounts incredible. I'll put it like this: I don't accept that the explanatory principle of nature, is identifiable within nature. I think if it were there to be found, we would have found it.
Now I know you and others often will suggest that, whatever this principle is, it is 'immanent' within nature - but I think of 'immanent' as being one pole of a duality, namely, 'immanent and transcendent'. And in theistic philosophy, it makes no more sense to speak of something that is only or purely immanent, than to speak of a mountain range where there are no valleys.
That is one of the senses in which I do agree with traditional philosophical theology - that the 'first principle' (the 'God of the philosophers', you might say) is both within and beyond creation. But it's not an objective reality (to which I can already hear the retort 'what other kind is there?')
Quoting Janus
It can be corroborated within the appropriate domain of discourse. That is the meaning of a now-archaic term, the 'scientia sacra', the sacred science.
And this is based on the observable universality of the principles that are expressed in the various forms of the 'philosophia perennis'. But that type of observation is not 'empirical' in the sense that most will accept. First, because from the viewpoint of the practitioner, it is 'intersubjective'. Alternatively, it might be studied through the perspective of comparative religion and mythology, such as in the work of Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade. But that includes the acknowledgement of forms of understanding that are culturally remote from our own and that are certainly alien to the 'scientific-secular' view of life.
Quoting Janus
Perfectly agree. I often remark, philosophy drops you at the border. What's beyond that - who is to say?
Why not?
Quoting Wayfarer
I would not agree that immanence and transcendence are polemical. For me It is all a matter of context. As I said a few posts ago, if I were to say that God is transcendent; I would mean that there is a being or spirit which is transcendent of our conscious experience, not that this being or spirit is transcendent of nature itself, because the latter would be to posit an ontological bifurcation of nature, of reality itself; it would be to posit metaphysical dualism.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is not corroboration in the sense that any suitably informed and impartial observer or participant would be forced to agree, though. This is clearly shown in the fact that different religions give different metaphysical and religious accounts. In contrast, science transcends (or at least should transcend) cultural traditions.
Mental causation is such a widespread phenomenon that one hardly needs to appeal to such things as the placebo effect to exemplify it. I decide to raise my hand and, lo and behold, my hand rises. The decision might have been the result of a deliberative process (and hence of 'mental events') while the outcome is a material process. There would appear to be a complete explanation couched in terms of low-level material/physiological processes that explains in causal terms why it is that my hand rose there and then. Those two explanatory levels pertain to two different domains (i.e. the intentional level of description of behavior, and the physiological level of description of biological processes) that still can be construed to relate to one another by an asymmetrical supervenience relation. You might (counterfactually) have decided to raise your hand earlier, or later, or not at all, but, in such cases, some of the antecedent circumstances of the physical motion of your hand necessarily would (counterfactually) have been different. We can count 'brain states' as part of those antecedent circumstances. Those are (low-level) neurophysiological states which instantiate, or realize, the (high-level) 'reasons' (roughly construed as beliefs and desires) why you would have decided to raise your hand there and then. (I am not actually endorsing this internalist representationalist view of mental content but it is good enough for the sake of simplicity and doesn't prejudge the present argument.)
So, the mere exemplification of mental causation, as an instance of (apparent) downward-causation, in the real world isn't threatening to the supervenience story. Someone who endorses Kim's causal exclusion argument might still acknowledge that the downward-causal story in terms of mental-causation constitutes a useful coarse-grained explanation of the observed event. In spite of its usefulness, Kim would argue that such an explanation is causally redundant because the genuine cause of the 'event' that occurred, as described fine-grainedly in terms of the low-level physiological or physical description, is operative independently of the high-level characterization of the process.
It's true that if we define the outcome (such as someone's arm raising) fine-grainedly in terms of underlying physiological or physico-chemical processes then the outcome is fully determined to occur in a causal sense. From this fact, Kim derives his causal-exclusion conclusion. He argues, on the basis of supervenience, that the outcome could not have been different unless the low-level causal antecedent had been different. And hence, the low-level explanation is deemed to be complete. And hence, the high level explanation, albeit useful for making coarse-grained predictions in the absence of specific knowledge of the underlying low-level properties, is causally redundant. We may thus conclude that 'the mental' (that is, the high-level intentional/psychological functional properties that supervene of the domain of physical states) is epiphenomenal.
The conclusion is unwarranted and very few critics of Kim manage to uproot the fundamental ground of his confusion, and hence the core flaw in his argumentation, although Peter Menzies and Christian List may have come closest in my opinion.
The main flaw in Kim's conception, I think, is that he tends to tacitly and uncritically rely on a metaphysical-realist stance towards low-level material constituents and, on the other hand, on an empiricist or nominalistic stance towards high-level composite entities that are materially constituted by those low-level constituents. While the individuation criteria by means of which we single out (coarse-grainedly) the high-level entities and define their (high-level) powers and properties are somehow defined pragmatically, or theoretically, the low level constituents (such a atoms and molecules, or whatever) are assumed to be causally efficient irrespective of our categorizations of them.
This is a picture that is very strongly indebted to the modern conception of classical mechanics: of objectively real particles and the objectively real forces being exerted between them (or the force fields mediating those forces). 'Objectively real' here is meant to signify that something exists independently of contextual factors or high-level relational characterrizations. The fundamental ground for all genuine causation in the material world consists in the intrinsic properties of corpuscules, and their intrinsic powers to affects the properties of other particles. Everything else that is being defined in terms of aggregates or emergent relational properties is supervenient on this fundamental 'objective' description.
How is Kim's argument affected if we relax those metaphysical assumptions and grant the same ontological status to relational properties that we accord to (putative) intrinsic properties of elementary material constituents? It collapses entirely, on my view. And the reason for that is very simple. If we acknowledge the idea that what makes something what it is isn't exhausted by what it is that this thing is materially constituted of but also is defined by its functional relations to other things, and also by the pragmatic context relative to which this thing is being single out as being representative of a definite category, of instantiating some definite property, then the distinction between the low-level basis of supervenience and the higher-level supervenient domain is abolished. Complete knowledge of the intrinsic properties of the material constituents, and of they elementary mutual interactions, would still constitute an incomplete knowledge of the world since it is fully abstracting away from what it is that those material constituents are constituents of.
Hence, for instance, the low-level explanation for the putative 'event' that was the occurrence of an upward movement of a hand doesn't constitute any kind of a rival causal explanation of the intentionally described event of someone's raising her hand. If what makes this action the action that it is precisely is a context of prior deliberation (for instance) then such actions must be distinguished from upward motions of a hand that might be the result of a stroke, or a strong gust of wind, or whatever. It is thus quite irrelevant that a strict supervenience relation still holds between the domain of intentional behavior and the material-physical domain. The low level explanation can't compete with the high-level one because it abstracts away from the very fact that the low-level outcome (the hand motion) happens to be an instantiation of the phenomenon that we sought to explain, and hence it doesn't even begin to explain why it is that a voluntary action intelligibly occurred.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I am reminded of an anecdote in a critical review of Krauss' foray into philosophy:
So - top-down causation even appears to be the case in respect of physical particles themselves! So much for 'fundamental particles', eh?
Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about what causes what. Mental causation is in no way in competition with e.g. neurophysical causation because in each case causation is situated within an independent, self-contained explanatory scheme. Only other factors within the same explanatory context are relevant to it.
I don't see how. Per physicalism, believing that a particular treatment is causally efficacious (which is all that the placebo effect is) has a corresponding physical state of the brain, which itself can have "downstream" causal effects, including remission of some disease or condition.
EDIT: I don't know if you did so knowingly, but your above point echoes an interesting argument made by Alvin Plantinga in one of the iterations of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, wherein he invokes the concept of "semantic epiphenomenalism" (EP). EP basically states that since natural selection only "sees" the physical states of an organism (including whichever brain states attend a particular belief), then the content of beliefs cannot be selected for, only their attendant physical states
So, according to Plantinga, EP implies that a purely naturalistic evolutionary process - or, at least one for which natural selection is the primary driver, presumably - would be extremely unlikely to produce organisms with reliable cognitive faculties, meaning that the naturalist would therefore possess a defeater for every belief he holds, including in naturalistic evolution.
Circling back to the question for supervenience, which you pose above, you will recall that supervenience allows for a given mental state to be multiply realizable, meaning that non-identical physical states can in theory each realize identical mental states. I could see this posing a problem not only for the placebo effect, but for virtually every purported mind-body interaction. Let us assume the physicalist thesis that mental states (though themselves non-physical) supervene on physical states. Let us also assume that given mental state M1 can be multiply realized by two distinct physical states, P1 and P2 (perhaps in 2 different individuals, or at different times in the same individual). Let us furthermore assume that the content of M1 is "a hungry bear is chasing me." Said belief would likely lead to certain physiological reactions, including an increase in stress hormones, elevated heart rate, a "fight or flight" behavioral response, etc. But, if we posit that said effects are caused only by the belief's attendant physical states, we are left with the puzzle as to how, in principle, two distinct physical states, P1 and P2, can each be the cause of identical downstream physical effects.
A detailed examination of EEAN would take us too far afield for this thread, but it's an interesting topic, IMO.
DOUBLE EDIT: after I posted, I saw that at least some of what I touch upon has already been discussed above. Apologies both for the lengthy post and for any repetition for the readers of this thread.
The neutron is not a fundamental particle. It is composed of quarks.
But in saying that, you’re saying a belief is physical. One minute you believe that the placebo will work - and it will, because you believe it. Then I manage to disillusion you - ‘look, it’s made of sugar’. So it won’t work. Nothing physical has changed - only your belief. Your perception has changed, your understanding of what it is, and that has consequences.
Whereas, if the pill was an aspirin, it would have physical effects. That’s ‘bottom up causation’.
This is why mind-body medicine is an embarassment to materialism - it ought not to work.
I have looked into the evolutionary argument against naturalism, but really it’s just a refinement of ‘the argument from reason’. And that, in turn, really amounts to the argument that reason itself comprises only the relationship of ideas. A rational argument can be represented - or realised - in any number of languages or media, while the meaning remains invariant. 3>2 is the case no matter how it is represented, or who is considering it.
And, there are no ‘point-particles’ which are indivisible - atoms in the original sense, whether they’re conceived as quarks or some other entity. Physics has demonstrated the ambiguity of so-called ‘fundamental particles’ - they’re now understood as excitation in a field, not as an indivisible material unit.
The portion of your post which I underlined is incorrect: if mental states supervene on physical states, then the physical state which corresponds to believing that the placebo will work is different from the one which corresponds to believing that the placebo won't work; so something physical has changed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Uh, I said that the neutron is not a fundamental particle because it's composed of other particles. Ergo, science does not claim it's indivisible (none of this supports theism, of course, contrary to whatever mileage your linked-to article might strive to get out of it).
Yes, but what changed the physical state? What was the causal factor? It was a change in the understanding, in the perception. That is why it can be described as a 'top-down' causal sequence. Whereas if the mental was indeed supervenient on the physical, then this ought not to happen. You might expect that a pill would change perception - that is 'bottom-up' - but you wouldn't expect that a change in perception would have physiological consequences.
Quoting Arkady
But aren't you saying that 'the quark' is 'the fundamental unit'? It therefore serves in the role previously assigned to 'the atom' i.e. the purported 'fundamental particle of matter'. Whereas, whether a quark, or indeed any of the denizens of the 'particle zoo', actually are 'particles' is, I think, an open question.
//ps// This question is addressed by Victor Stenger in Particles are for Real, one of the last things he wrote.
Entertain for a moment the idea that all mental states have physical correlates. This would mean that all mental processes; coming to understand something, for example, would have correlated physical processes.
So, we could (in principle) look at the process of coming to understand in terms of a complex series of physical interactions that culminate in a neural state which is correlated to the phenomenological or psychological state of understanding.
We can also look at the process of coming to understand in terms of a complex series of experiences in the context of prior understandings, and so on.
Let's say these would be two different ways of understanding the same process. But the two different ways cannot be commingled; they are incommensurable. This is just the kind of way of thinking Spinoza propounds as an antidote to Descartes' substance dualism. Extensa and cogitans are two modes of the one substance. It thus makes no sense to say that a neural process caused me to understand; it was my experiences which caused me to understand, and the neural processes are its physical correlates.
Looked at this way there is no mystery to the placebo effect. The difficulties, aporias and apparent paradoxes come when we try to understand the two incommensurable ways of understanding in terms of each other. We just can't do it, and it could well be impossible in principle.
Strawson is among many within the analytic community who have been unable to make the leap to a post-Nietzschean way of construing objectivity, causality and subjectivity. They don’t see that the problem is their reliance on an inadequate formulation of the physical, and an inadequate biological model. As a result, Strawson finds subjective experience to be so qualitatively alien with respect to his understanding of the non-experientially physical that he has no choice but to create a new category of the physical to make room for it. Post-Nietzschean philosophers from Rorty and Varela to Gallagher and the post-structuralists begin from a radical indissociability between subject and object. They typically embrace self-organizing systems approaches that reveal consciousness as emergent from autopeiotic living processes that already have many of the underlying characteristics surrounding of consciousness. It is telling that Strawson’s model of biological functioning Im is not informed by a self-organizing systems understanding.
Strawson wrote:
“Life* reduces, experience doesn't. Our theory of the basic mechanisms of life reduces to physics via chemistry. Suppose we have a machine that can duplicate any object by a process of rapid atom-by-atom assembly, and we duplicate a child. We can explain its life* functions in exquisite detail in the terms of current sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We cannot explain its experience at all in these terms.”
Post-Nietzscheans would argue that autopeiotic processes of life are not reducible to physics, at least not without a re-envisioning of physics in a direction suggested by Prigogine and Stengers.
Yes, I'm quite happy that you brought up the issue of the contextual character of causation. I was thinking about it while writing my post but decided not to delve into it in order not to overburden an already lengthy post.
There has been a recent upsurge of literature on the topic of contrastivism. Some papers focus on the contrastive character of causation while others focus on the contrastive character of explanation. From a neo-pragmatist or neo-Kantian perspective, though, those are two different ways to approach the same issue. There isn't any substantive content to the claim that the occurrence of event A caused (and thereby explains) the occurrence of event B that doesn't implicitly or explicitly relies on the specifications of the contrastive classes of events that would count as non-occurrences of A or B. Here is one nice example: Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck on red objects and, thereafter, the pigeon is presented with a crimson object and pecks at it. The cause of the pecking behavior, one might say, is the 'event' that consist in the presentation of the specific crimson object. But the pigeon would still have pecked at the object if it had been scarlet, say. So, the antecedent event only can be said to be causative and explanatory of the effect when individuated with reference to the contrastive class 'non-red' rather than 'non-crimson'. And the same can be said of the contrastive character of the effect.
Martijn Blaauw edited a volume on that theme: Contrastivism in Philosophy, Routledge Strudies in Contemporary Philosophy (2013). Chaper 1 (Causal Contextualism, by Christopher Hitchcock); chapter 2 (Contrastive Explanation, by Jonathan Shaffer); and chapter 3 (Free Contrastivism, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) are interesting and instructive although the last one, which deals with the application of this topic to the issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism, seems flawed to me. (It is instructively flawed, though, since the topic indeed is quite relevant to the problem).
Agreed. Nine years ago I wrote a paper (unpublished) on the topic of autonomy in which I distinguished four grades of autonomy, whereby each one realizes an irreducible leap from the previous one. The lowest grade of (proto-)autonomy is realized by spontaneously occurring dissipative structures (thanks to suitably established external boundary conditions). The second grade is realized by genuinely self-maintening autopoietic life-forms. The third one consist in self-moving and perceiving animals. And the last one consists in rational animals that can reflect on, and revise, their own autonomous laws of conduct. The last three grades, of course, parallel Aristotle tripartite division of the psuche.
If I say that mind does not [i]really exist, that there is no such thing as the mind, what exactly is it that I am saying? I could be saying that what people usually refer to as the mind is really nothing but the physical brain and that all the experiences that are enabled by the possession of a mind are really nothing but the electrochemical activity of the brain. I might be saying, if I am a ‘physicalist’, that this is the only reality; that any ideas about the existence of minds or about the existence of ‘selves’ that ‘possess’ minds are false, and are based on illusion.
If this were unequivocally true, then the greater part of human discourse about our actions would be mistaken because illusory. From a strict physicalist perspective this discourse, which is usually taken to issue from human ‘experience’, as well as the ‘experience’ itself, are reducible to physical brain and body states, for example the activity of neurons, contraction and relaxation of muscles causing gestures, movements of the body, particularly the hands and mouth, the emitting of sounds from the mouth which cause agitation and movement of air molecules, which impinge on the ear drums of listeners, causing electrochemical activity in their nerves and brains and so on.
But from a strictly physicalist viewpoint all the structures mentioned are ‘forms’ of materiality, which are not really determinate or fixed, in other words are constantly changing like Heraclitus’ river, and are also arbitrary insofar as they are perceptual/ conceptual representations.
It is the ‘materiality’ itself, which we have come to conceive, as clearly as we can in vaguely imaginable terms, as ultimate particles, which are believed to be the final, unchanging, perhaps everlasting, constituents of everything that exists.[/i]
Well, the problem would be, if you said that, that ‘illusions’ are artefacts of consciousness. They’re not physical things. Sure, again, a physical cause might generate an illusion, but they will only generate it in the case of a subject who is capable of being mistaken about something. No getting around it.
I mean you are evoking the subject and it's consciousness, which on the eliminativist perspective are both illusory, so that obviously won't do. And you are assuming that consciousness is not a physical process, which is precisely what you need to argue for without relying on that assumption.
My intuitive sense is that eliminativism is wrong, but I can't see how it, or for that matter, any other metaphysical view, can be definitively proven to be wrong.
You can also say that the cause of the pigeon's behavior was its prior training (contrasting it with untrained pigeons). Or the fact that it was awake and hungry (as opposed to asleep or sated). Or the fact that it was there and not elsewhere. And we've only considered the pigeon as an agent or an organism; we could go further into the various mechanical or physiological causes, and so on. There seem to be so many different causes of the same event operating at the same time, one ought to wonder how it is that they don't clash with one another! But of course they don't.
This ties in with what I said elsewhere about philosophers of mind: they sometimes seem unaware of the much wider context of their worries, such as that of epiphenomenalism. And just considering that wider context can serve, if not as a reductio, then at least as an important check.
As @Pierre-Normand noted, you need not appeal to such exotic examples as the placebo effect. One moment I was sitting on a chair, the next moment I decided to get up - and lo, I got up! "Nothing physical has changed" when I made my decision - or that is what a dualist would say, right? So it is a problem for the dualist to explain how a purely mental event could have a physical effect. For someone who says that the mental supervenes on the physical there is no such problem. "There is no difference without a difference" is the slogan of supervenience: there is no mental difference without a physical difference. So when I decided to get up, something physical did change.
And what I’m saying is that the assertion that consciousness could be ‘an illusion’ implies a conscious subject - one who is subject to the illusion. There can’t be an illusion without a subject of experience, as an illusion is misunderstood experience.
Quoting SophistiCat
The point I’m trying to make concerns ‘top-down causality’ - in this case, the hackneyed expression, ‘mind over matter’. Because when it comes to something as prosaic as standing up, a physicalist will simply say that even though you believe that was a voluntary act, in fact the action was the consequence of a causal sequence which is purely physical in nature; that what you perceive subjectively as desires and intentions, really are just neural events and muscular contractions. That is after all what ‘denialists’ argue; they’re effectively denying the reality of [s]agency[/s] conscious agents. And whilst i agree that this appears an absurd conclusion, I feel the placebo example throws that into relief rather more clearly.
I'll butt in for a moment (sorry Wayfarer).
I think they can be conceived of as illusory because subjects and consciousness are slippery fish to hold onto in terms of definitions.
Yet in all definitions I’m aware of, neither can meaningfully be when fully devoid of a first person point of view (one might sleep without dreams, but there’ll yet be a first person point of view aware of this subsequent to the sleep; otherwise we wouldn’t know that one can). So the emanativist is arguing against there being such a thing as a first person point of view being in any way ontic … likely so as to uphold an axiomatic system of metaphysics which their own first person point of view maintains is indispensable for making sense out of things. But inherent to this is a logical contradiction, just that it’s not spelled out. For a first person point of view cannot be illusory to the same first person point of view. And a first person point of view is not in any sense of the term a physical object. If logical contradictions serve to prove that that which is addressed is false, and if there is no justifiable alternative we can discern to a first person point of view holding presence while one is in any way aware, then the eliminativists are proven wrong by this lopsided contradiction.
Of course there would then be a lot of explanations still needed to make sense of things. Nevertheless, the eliminativist stance I so far believe is proven wrong by this inconsistency or reasoning.
What we think of as 'the subject of experience', the "one who is subject to the illusion", could simply be the physical body. You might not be able to conceive of how an illusion could appear to a physical body; but your inability to conceive it is no argument against the possibility.
But thinking of illusions in terms of "first person points of view" is already to assume that first person points of view are not themselves illusions. I am not an eliminativist: I am playing devil's advocate here. I don't see why the eliminativist must entertain the notion of a first point of view at all. In other words I can find no logical or performative contradiction in that standpoint.
You by definition are here being purely rationalistic, and ignoring that devoid of awareness we cannot rationalize. OK, so despite clear cut etymology and classical usages of the term, empiricism nowadays implies only experiences obtained via the physiological senses--such that ideas are not empirically known (unlike in the time of Lock and Hume). So I'll term it experientialism--such that we can only know of our ideas via awareness of them.
Without now drawing out the issue, would you in such offered context of concepts presume pure rationalism devoid of an experientialism upon which it is at least in part grounded?
I can't see how I am being rationalistic "by definition". I don't deny that we know of our thoughts by being aware of them, and I can't see how that fact tells us whether they, or our awareness of them, is either physical or non-physical. I would love to find a convincing argument against (eliminative) physicalism, that relied upon no tendentious presuppositions, to support my intuition that it is wrong.
:up:
Quoting Janus
A body has no illusions. Consciousness is a condition for illusion.
I do see Javra’s point. You’re taking something apodictic, and making it hypothetical, I think for the sake of argument.
Argument?
As much as I’m not on board with Cartesianism, this is where Descartes’ first person style argument becomes useful. Here’s a good natured challenge: you (anybody actually, as long as it’s a personal first person argument) can try to come up with a rational/justifiable alternative to you, the first person point of view which addresses itself as “I”, not holding presence while in any way aware of anything.
Don’t worry about the “thinking” part of the argument as Descartes laid it out; with the thinking part you can find justifiable (although likely noncredible) alternatives … thereby resulting in eliminativism as a possibility of what is. Strictly focus on, “I, an awareness, or a first person point of view (I've got to convey what I’m addressing linguistically, and the latter to me seems more precise), do not hold presence (I am not, or do not exist) as an awareness, whatever this might be (could be an entity, a process, both, or neither), while I am in any way aware (be it of perceptions, sensations, or understandings) because …”
You can use BIVs, evil demons, whatever you’d like, as long as the explanation is consistent and gives a valid alternative to being aware while aware.
If you cannot come up with a valid alternative to this proposition, “I, a first person point of view, am while aware (including of the thoughts I'm having which purport to present an alternative to my so being),” then it will surpass the certainty level of any other proposition to which there are rational alternatives, including that of eliminativism. In a colloquial sense, because the first will be by far firmer (recalling etymologies of truth and trust both winding back to tree, tree of life/knowledge kind’a thing I believe (held in pagan cultures long before Abrahamic religions were popularized); the axis mundi which is perfectly firm … also firmament, but I digress :grin: ).
This isn’t to say that the first proposition will be then demonstrated to be infallible. But it will be among the least fallible propositions that can be devised—again, because no justifiable alternative for it can be conceived in practice, hence no possible error for it can be conceived in practice regardless of how hard one tries. And since it falsifies eliminativsm, which does hold rational alternatives, it then proves eliminativsm to be wrong in terms of what is in fact ontic … this as much as 2 + 2 = 4 can arguably be firm/certain due to not holding any justifiable alternatives in practice (meaning, in practice where all hell doesn’t break loose due to rational contradictions [edit: to be clear, contradictions of reasoning] being accepted as instances of non-erroneous reasoning).
The perceptual process and the resulting understanding would themselves be physical processes: pressure waves in the air, photons, or tactile stimuli, etc stimulate our nerve receptors, and set up a cascade of events within our central nervous system. The information stating whether the treatment is a placebo or not is physically encoded in some manner, either in a particular sequence of squiggles on a page, or in a particular pattern of pressure waves in the air, or a particular arrangement of Braille, or whatever.
Likewise, with a fine-grained enough brain scan, one could presumably "read off" the mental state of the perceiver from the physical state of his brain: particular physical states encode particular mental states, even if one can't "see" the mental states directly (indeed, this needn't even be taken to be a hypothetical fantasy relegated to a philosophical thought experiment: some very preliminary steps towards "mind-reading" ability using brain scanning technology have already been taken).
I don't know if quarks are fundamental particles - I don't know enough about particle physics. Electrons, for instance, are taken to be fundamental particles, though.
I'll consider that to be hypothetical fantasy until you cite credible research.
For instance, this: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-predicts-what-youre-thinking/. There are other such examples.
Thanks for the link.
The cited research is fascinating, but provides evidence of correlation between mental activity and neurophysiology, not of causation, hence; it is incorrect to say, "...particular physical states encode particular mental states" when the research makes no such claim.
In fact, what is being predicted are neural activation patterns produced by thought, not thought produced by neural activation patterns.
From the introduction:
"Given the semantic and thematic characterization of the component word concepts of a proposition, the model can predict the activation pattern the reading of the corresponding sentence will evoke."
And:
"This study thus has two main goals. The main goal was to develop a mapping between a semantic characterization of a sentence (based on the individual word concepts in the sentence and their thematic roles) and the resulting brain activation pattern that occurs when the sentence is read. The mapping can then be used to predict the activation pattern of an entirely new sentence containing new words, simply based on its semantic characterization."
P.S. Spare me the other examples.
Nothing in "encode" was meant to imply a causal relationship. The research demonstrates a primitive form of technological-based mind-reading, which is exactly what I claimed, and which none of your complaints negates. If you wish to move the goal posts, then that is none of my concern.
Aha. But the issue is, to decide in what way all of those physical causes give rise to a perception of meaning is itself a matter of judgement. The definition of what is physical, what constitutes ‘a cause’ - all of these rely on reasoned inference, which is an act of judgement. You can’t step outside those acts, or put them to one side, and still see judgements or meanings in the data.
Quoting Arkady
I would presume nothing of the kind. You might infer anything you like, but again, the act of inference is a judgement. Have a look at Do you believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch.
Quoting Arkady
Depending on how they are assessed - in particular experimental contexts, they appear as particles. At other times, they can be thought of as waves, or even as pure potentialities, which is precisely why quantum physics tends to undercut materialism.
What about the illusions used by carnivorous plants, and flowering plants to attract pollinators. Will you claim that the insects that are fooled are conscious agents?
The question is whether eliminative physicalism/ materialism denies the reality of information.
Information is information, not matter or energy.No materialism that does not admit this can survive at the present day. Norbert Wiener- founder of Cybernetics.
And the further question is whether consciousness may be adequately understood in terms of information.
Whether or not that proposition is considered foundational will depend on starting presumptions. If you take phenomenology as fundamental, as ontology, then it will convince you of its being representative of what is foundational, but if you take the material as ontologically fundamental then it will not.
I’ll say OK to this. But you’ll notice that, here, I was only offering you what I take to be a sound argument for why eliminativism is demonstrably wrong.
Yes, I do agree with you that it is wrong; but I also acknowledge that my agreement is based on presuppositions. So it would seem that from the perspective of those presuppositions eliminativism is demonstrably wrong, but it does not seem to be demonstrably wrong in any definitive, unprejudiced way.
My playing devil's advocate was only prompted by Wayfarer's apparent belief that it is demonstrably wrong in a definitive, unprejudiced way; I was trying to get him to recognize and acknowledge his prejudices, in other words. It's no sin; we all have them.
Agree that we all have our biases, but you're loosing me with this. Other than the prejudice that something ontic is (a topic for a different debate ... but you'll notice it is equally upheld by eliminativism), where is the prejudice in there ontically being a first person point of view (a first person awareness which is debating the issue of whether or not it exists)?
And again, due to there being a contradiction of reasoning, one cannot hold both eliminativism and there being an awareness aware of eliminativism at the same time and in the same way; therefore, at least one the two is necessarily false.
Well, then it is a "judgment" which can be accomplished via machine-learning algorithms. I suggest that you check out the article I linked to in my discussion with Galuchat for an example of a primitive sort of "mind reading" accomplished via brain scanning (in any event, the "presumption" was under a physicalistic/supervenient picture of the brain, which was the subject of our discussion).
(BTW, it's interesting that the article which you linked to refers to the software making "inferences" based on the data, something which you apparently believe that software is incapable of doing, even though you cite this as a source friendly to your position.)
I notice you have to place judgement in scare quotes, to allow for the obvious fact that computers don't make judgements at all. They compute outcomes, which are then judged. Case in point, from the article I cited:
From the eliminativist point of view the first person point of view is not ontic, but epiphenomenal. This is a form of monism; but it is not neutral monism. From the point of view of subjective idealism the physical or material is epiphenomenal and the subject is ontic. Neutral monism wants to say that the physical and the mental are not substantially different. The alternative is substance dualism. All these positions rely on grounding assumptions; so none of them are definitively demonstrable in the sense of being free of prejudice.
Interesting question! And I suppose the answer must be 'yes' - insects are indeed conscious agents, albeit simple ones. Can you think of an analogy in the mineral or inorganic domain?
Quoting Janus
No, that's not the question. There's nothing about that in the review to which the OP is linked.
Quoting Janus
Do you think that principles are really 'prejudices'?
I put "judgement" in scare quotes because, insofar as this form of technological mind-reading relies on judgments at all, it is a type of judgment which can be carried out by machine. (The portion of the article you just quoted refers to software making inferences, I will remind you again!)
So you believe that insects do enjoy subjective experience, and make judgements and decisions? I think it's safe to say that this is not required; and that all that is required is a response to signs, to information. Consciousness may indeed be a complex elaboration of information, with reflexive self-consciousness becoming possible only with the ability to employ symbolic language.
The idea that there is a substantial, immaterial self-consciousness could be the epiphenomenal result of the reificatory power of symbolic language. That's why the question as to whether eliminativism denies the reality of information is indeed relevant to the OP.
Quoting Wayfarer
Unless a principle is inescapably self-evident to everyone; then yes, it must be seen as a prejudice, in the sense of its being an axiom that is founded on an intuition that is not shared by all. What else could it be?
In my honest (non-belligerent) impression, you are here accusing me of things that I am not culpable of as pertains to the argument I’ve offered. Where is the argument, of itself, flawed?
As to the prejudices you’ve invoked, these are the conclusions you conceive of as a result of various different premises. But I’m not here debating the repercussions of this stated argument in terms of a concluding ontology--so I will not address these various possible repercussions.
If nothing else, lets both at least pretend, with a friendly wink, that we currently are truth seekers attempting to be as unbiased about our own beliefs and concerns as possible.
An ontology described by eliminativism and the ontic presence of an awareness aware of such ontology are mutually exclusive ontic givens; they can’t both be ontic at the same time and in the same way (unless someone would like to propose an ontology in which mutually exclusive ontic givens are also mutually inclusive at the same time and in the same way, this being a so called possibility I'd argue to be invalid). We can discern different alternatives for eliminativism and, hence, possible errors in it (this without going into the specifics). We cannot discern valid alternatives to our ontic presence as first person points of view while we are aware.
Since only one of the two—eliminativism or non-eliminativism—can be true, which do you rationally find to be true (all biases as pertains to repercussions and concerns about them aside)?
Once we can rationally arrive at an answer to this question, then we can take thing further, if desired, in terms of what it might and might not signify. (However, I'm not personally interested in turning this threads topic into one of ontological worldviews.)
This doesn't mean that fMRI is not useful - it's a clinical procedure, and invaluable in brain surgery and medicine. But what I'm criticizing, is the notion that you can detect anything about the nature of meaning, or logic, or indeed thought, by using such an apparatus. So, no, the machine is not 'making judgements' - it is producing an output, which is then judged by human agents.
Quoting Janus
To say that insects 'enjoy' anything seems anthropomorphic to me. But they are subjects of experience, albeit primitive subjects of experience. And therefore, in some sense, forever beyond the purview of the objective sciences, as they're not only objects. (As per Core of Mind and Cosmos.)
I am not an eliminativist, and I'm not accusing you of anything other than that whatever perspective you support, it will not, cannot, be free of presuppositions.
Quoting javra
I would opt for non-eliminativisn, but I am not going to pretend that my opting for it is free of prejudice; free of subjective feeling and intuition. I also acknowledge that it is possible that my prejudices, subjective feelings and illusions are all epiphenomenal illusions; although of course I don't believe they are.
If you'd like to end it here, that's OK with me. If you'd like to work this out some more, then please specify which prejudice your are addressing within the argument. We certainly aren't here choosing which of our premises are true and which are false based on preformed beliefs about what the true conclusion is, I'm currently believing, for this would be irrational of us to do.
[edited. my bad, a mix of dyslexia and rushing things leading to too many typos]
"Enjoy" was used in sense of 'experience'; I used the former instead of the latter, though, because it seems clumsy to speak of experiencing experience.
Must the "subjectivity" of an insect be anything non-physical over and above its sensitive physical and/or neural nature? Perhaps you believe it is, but is there any absolute reason why it must be so?
Why not? Why cannot the intuition that awareness is ontologically different than physicality be a subjective epiphenomenal illusion? You haven't presented an argument for that yet.
Then your view is at odds with the evidence. I linked to an article study demonstrating just the opposite of what you say. The study found that brain scans could detect what a subject was thinking based on the physical state of his brain. If this isn't detecting the "meaning" of thoughts (in terms of propositional content), then what would constitute such a demonstration? The fact that the machine's output is judged by human agents is irrelevant. (And, lest you think that I'm basing my position solely on one study, this is merely one of several such studies.)
And, yes, psychology has a problem with replication, as do many other fields of science. But unless you're prepared to state that every instance of fMRI gleaning the content of someone's thoughts from the physical state of their brain was some kind of fluke (itself a position which would be going far beyond the evidence), then there is evidence that such a feat is possible. That's the thing about proofs of principle: you only need one success to demonstrate it. If I claimed that faster-than-light speeds were impossible, and you pointed to a raft of studies which detected faster-than-light speeds achieved by, say, electrons in a particle accelerator, it does me no good to say that 61% of such studies failed to be replicated. Even one successful experiment constitutes a demonstration that superluminal speeds can be achieved, and I would be compelled to revise my worldview accordingly.
Because then 1 + 1 will not be equal to 2 at the same time and in the same way that it is equal to 2, and we then ought not prefer one over the other since their both are equally true and are both equally not true ... and so forth/backward.
I have no idea what you are talking about here.
Well, that was the point: allowing for contradictions leads to a ubiquitous rational unintelligibly ... and that is why there being both an ontology of eliminativism and a non-eliminativst ontology at the same time and in the same way would be an invalid possibility.
But that was not what I asked you to provide an argument for; which you will soon see if you go back and read carefully.
OK, firstly, you added text to a sole phrase of "why not" which you don't acknowledge editing in the given post or in you're last. Interpretations of this are present in my mind, but I won't mention them.
so to now quote the entirety of the newly edited version:
Quoting Janus
Secondly, the "intuition" you are now addressing is something of which the first person point of view is aware ... so this moving of the goal post doesn't move anything in terms of this now argument.
Apparently I was adding text while you were responding; but be that as it may, you still haven't offered any actual argument. So, unless you do offer one, I am happy to leave it.
And that is precisely what the article that I linked to is criticizing. Of course, given huge expertise, predictive algorithms, and the like, then an expert can deduce something about Subject X's brain patterns, based on that data. But, let's take that same expert, and say 'OK - put aside all reasoned judgement. Don't use your capacity for inference in assessing that data and all your expert knowledge of what such things mean. Now - what do you see?' And the answer is, they will see a graphic representation, an image. So they have to rely on the very thing they're attempting to explain, in order to explain the data they're seeing. And you can't evade the inevitable circularity involved in that.
Quoting Arkady
But this is a completely different kind of phenomenon, to demonstrating velocity or mass or some other basic physical measurable attribute. Here what is being discussed is the basis of meaning, the nature of thought. So it's intrinsically a completely different kind of question, to what can be measured in relatively simple terms. All of your arguments here simply must be question-begging, because they will always assume the very thing that needs to be proven - you can't argue about the nature of reason 'from the outside'.
Quoting Janus
What do you mean, 'absolute reason'? What I will say is that the 'subject of experience' - in whatever form that might be - is not simply, purely or only an object. And that is why physicalism is the dominant paradigm - because it deals purely in objects, in what can be exactly described in objective terms. Heck, this is what Dennett is always on about - he wants to talk only in objective terms. But this doesn't take into account the philosophical insight that 'absolute objectivity' is an impossibility, as all knowledge is culturally mediated and dependent on our cognitive apparatus, the categories of the understanding, and so on (which I know that you know!)
The upshot is, that I say there's an ontological distinction between living and non-living things; and also between 'rational living things' and 'non-rational living things'. They are, if you like, different 'substances', in the classical sense of that word.
(Anyway, MUST sign out for the day, I'm supposed to be working and have a lot to do.)
for what have I not provided "any actual argument"?
"in my own work I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn’t entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that panpsychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don’t think we’re now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."
I would say that living bodies, whether plant, animal or human are not merely objects. I mean, what exactly is an object anyway?
Quoting Janus
‘What is described by physics’, I would have thought. That is the whole attraction of physicalism - that you can say exactly what something is, and predict how it will behave, according to laws.
If a physical object is defined as 'what is described by physics" then that is circular and is really no definition at all.
In the current understanding of physical science the behaviour of 'non-living' entities can be predicted only probabilistically. The behaviour of living organism can be predicted only statistically or 'on average'. The notion of physical prediction as mechanical precision is a ghost of Newtonism.
Yes, those also all are very good example of contrastive explanations of the effect (or 'event') to be explained. What is especially enlightening, and instructive, though, regarding the color example, is that in this particular case there is a breakdown of supervenience of the domain relative to which the cause operates (and its mention is explanatory) over the material specification of the explained 'event'. This isn't something that I had stressed in the message you replied to.
In all of your examples supervenience obtains. If the cause had been different, counterfactually, then the material basis for the process whereby the cause gives rise to the effect would also have been different. For instance, if the pigeon hadn't been awake then its eyelids would have been closed and hence it would not have visually registered the presence of the stimulus... etc.
On the other hand, in the example where the pigeon had been trained to peck at red objects and thereafter pecks at a crimson object, what makes it a cause (and a good explanation) of the pecking behavior that the object was red, while the fact that the object was specifically crimson is *not* a cause (and neither is it a relevant explanation of the pecking behavior) is the fact that the antecedent 'event' (contrastively defined as being subsumed under the general class "materially constituted the presentation of a red stimulus") belongs, indeed, to a general class that that explains not only the behavior of this pigeon at that time but, potentially, its pecking behavior at a later time, or the behavior of other pigeons that would have been (relevantly) similarly trained. But this fact of explanatory class membership isn't something that supervenes narrowly on the present and actual process that exemplifies it.
No: the article you linked to describes a problem with replication in certain types of studies (including those using fMRI), as well as false positives detected by the use of dubious software. It says nothing about the tout court impossibility of inferring the proposition or conceptual content of bran states from fMRI studies (or from brain imaging studies generally: fMRI is of course not the only such method).
I'm sorry, but this paragraph makes no sense to me. Could you be more specific in where the circularity lies in inferring (or whatever your preferred verb is when computers do it) the propositional or conceptual content of a subject's thoughts from brain imaging data?
Again, I fail to see where the question-begging lies. My example was an analogy of our disagreement here; I am aware that measuring an object's velocity is a "completely different kind of phenomenon" from measuring brain states. My point was only that, problems with replication aside, even a single success constitutes proof of principle (in this case, proof of principle that mental states are physically realized by particular types of brain states, brain states which can be detected via neuroimaging in order to say with at least some reliability what the subject is thinking about).
What I’m arguing is that when scientists analyse image of neural data, they’re employing the very faculty which they’re purporting to explain. After all, if you’re seeking to explain the nature of thought then you’re going to have to explain how logic operates, are you not? Logic or rational inference is fundamental to human thought and language. So you’re purporting to show how these are represented in the visual data. But even to do that, you’re necessarily saying ‘this pattern of voxels is associated with this area of the brain which we think is mainly engaged with such-and-such aspects of language’. But then you’re relying on the very faculty which you’re purporting to explain. It’s not as if you’re demonstrating that faculty ‘from the outside’ as it were - you can’t literally ‘see’ the act of representation in the data. You’re saying ‘that pattern of data means X’.
That interpretive act, the judgement that ‘this means that’, is fundamental to all rational and linguistic thought. We don’t notice it, I contend, because we’re always operating from inside it. That is why ‘denialism’ seems to be able to deny it. It is ‘invisible’ to us because we’re never apart from or outside of it - it is never present among the objective data of experience. But that’s because it’s ‘transcendental’ in the sense that transcendental idealism understands it - constitutive of, but not visible to, experience. The inivisibilty of the mind to objective analysis is the point of the departure for behaviourism, which was to become one of the main forms of what Strawson calls ‘denialism’ in the essay we’re discussing.
[This kind of critique is also found in Thomas Nagel’s book The Last Word.]
Conscious experience is never the object of experience in the moment of experience, rather the object(s) of the experience are. In that sense we do not experience our experience; we do not grasp it it as an object. However, phenomenologists, Husserl, Zahavi, Henry, Sartre and others have argued convincingly in various ways that pre-reflective (non-thematic) self-awareness must be inherent to conscious experience. In that sense we do experience our experience, our consciousness and our self-awareness.
It is by virtue of that prereflective self-awareness that self-awareness or consciousness can be objectified 'after the fact' using memory; we do it all the time. If it wasn't possible you would not be able to make any such claim as: "It is ‘invisible’ to us because we’re never apart from or outside of it - it is never present among the objective data of experience".
So, the point is that consciousness is not an immediate object of experience; but it certainly can be objectified in order to learn and understand more about it. And this would hold even if we thought that, ultimately, our pre-reflective self-awareness, our consciousness, is an epiphenomenal illusion; we could still learn about what that illusion is to us, without allowing that it is causally efficacious, which is really the point at issue.
Now, I'm not saying I hold to, or even more or less agree with, epiphenomenalism; but I do acknowledge that it is one of a suite of possible perspectives that are not inherently incoherent or self-contradictory.
That’s a good point, but not the point.
I’ll rephrase - ‘mind’ is not a visible or tangible object of experience.
This fact bugs materialists, for whom the only real things must be objects or at least ‘objectively real’ [as per the current ‘scientism’ thread.]
There’s a priceless quote from J B Watson which I can’t locate at the moment to the effect that the very notion of ‘mind’ is a ‘superstitious belief’. That’s why I say that the whole motivation of the Uber-materialists - Dennett and his ilk - is actually a dread of the realisation that the nature of mind is forever beyond the purview of science. The very fact of the first-person nature of conscious experience basically overturns materialism. All of this comes out in the debates between David Chalmers and Dennett. I’m sure that it’s why Penrose named his book Emperor’s New Mind.
I agree with you, but the materialist will say that first-personness is a material phenomenon, which we misunderstand to be an immaterial phenomenon. So it will overturn it for us, but not for them, because their starting presuppositions are different than ours.
You raise a good point. But I find that it doesn’t need to be evidenced by very complex arguments. We know of our own happiness or assuredness—to not mention other examples—strictly via self-referential experience of that which is experiencing—such that, in cases such as these, the object of our awareness is ourselves as the subject of awareness, as the first person point of view (e.g., “I am happy/confident/uncertain/curious/etc.”). In such core experiences upon which all other experiences are dependent upon, the “I” is simultaneously both subject of awareness and object of awareness without there being any experienced differentiation between the two.
This is different from experience wherein a) we are perceiving a percept via our physiological senses, this being the strict realm of modern empiricism (be the percept internal such as a full bladder or else external), or b) perceiving percepts of our own imagination (e.g., an imagined apple), or c) sensing a sensation such as that of a temptation in the form of an emotion we choose to either embrace of shun, or d) understand a meaning to something like an sign or an abstraction (the latter three not occurring via physiological senses but through experiential apprehensions of the intellect/mind by the first person point of view). In all four of these cases, though, there’ll be an object of awareness that is qualitatively other than the subject of awareness which is apprehending.
But again, in cases such as that of being happy/sad, the subject and object of awareness are one and the same given—which, via its perpetually changing being as such, then apprehends percepts, sensations, and understanding as other than itself which perceives, senses, or understands.
Interestingly for me, in this core type of experience, the object/subject dichotomy breaks down, such that it is both and neither. Making it into an object doesn’t fit the bill, for it is not. This non-duality of being might make little if any sense outside of direct experience; yet experience attests to it.
To get back in the main subject of this thread: To deny this experientially evidenced ontic given is to make use of this same ontic given so as to theorize in very abstract ways that it is an illusion, that it doesn’t exist. If this were true, everything else would be illusion by default; not here indulging contradictions of reasoning—for everything else we can be aware of is contingent upon this ontic given being non-illusory … and only secondly upon that which we are aware of—laws of logic included—being non-illusory.
But that’s not to say that there is no physical or that our minds’ processes are not directly correlated with our brains’ activities. Experience, if nothing else, evidences that there is such a thing as physicality and that the correlation holds, irrespective of what causal mechanism might be at work. Worst comes to worst from a materialist’s pov, the physical is what Pierce termed effete mind; doesn’t change the fact that it’s still physical in a common sense perspective of things.
you are much more thorough than myself in your analysis.
The problem I have with what you are saying is that it still subtly presupposes the subject/object dichotomy. We can objectify experience and thus come to experience objects. We are then lead to infer subjects (first person perspectives) and we may then come to presume the primacy of the subjective first person perspective.
So I would say that in pre-reflective experience it is not a matter of the "object/subject dichotomy" " breaking down" but that this experience is prior to any such dichotomy. Also this experience is not an "experientially evidenced ontic given" because that again falls back into the dualistic presumption that something ontic (the object) is being given to something else (the first person subject), and this contradicts the idea that primordial experience is prior to the ontic. This is precisely Heidegger's point with the ontic/ontological distinction.
So what exactly that primordial experience consists in; what the necessary conditions must be for its possibility and for its actuality can become metaphysical questions. Is it fundamentally akin to what we think of as physical: some sort of blind energetic or virtual process that gives rise to this world and the beings that experience it) or is it fundamentally akin to what we think of as mental: a spiritual and/ or intentional process. Or is it somehow both at once and/or neither?
Eliminativism opts for the former view; that ultimately reality is the result of blind forces, and it is this sense alone that they would say that consciousness is an illusory epiphenomenon. Now again, I want to emphasize that I do not hold that view; I am merely pointing out that, once you lose the lingering Cartesian dualist presuppositions, it is not inherently a self-contradictory view, as many of its critics seem to want to claim it to be
Sorry for the delay in my response: I've been out of town.
Perhaps I am just obtuse, but I still don't see the circularity here. I understand that there is an inherent circularity in trying to offer a wholesale justification, of, say, our senses by employing our senses, but I see no inherent circularity in employing our cognitive faculties in order to study our cognitive faculties. Moreover, I don't see how a priori philosophical analysis can escape these charges of circularity: we must employ the mind to pontificate about the mind, no?
That is cognitive science, but here we’re discussing philosophy, the nature of meaning and of mind.
Strawson 1, Dennett 0.
'Can't be done', shrugs Socrates. 'We don't have the technology'.
He walks away. Philosophy never gets born.
No, as usual with these kinds of debates; they are simply talking past one another. Nothing to see here, folks...
"Employing our cognitive faculties in order to study our cognitive faculties" could equally well apply to phil of mind as to cog sci. In any event, you and I were discussing cog sci, specifically the gleaning of the content of mental states from their attendant physical states as detected by brain imaging. You had claimed (following Nagel) that there was some inherent circularity in this endeavor (in that, in doing so, "you’re relying on the very faculty which you’re purporting to explain"), and I said I didn't see it. You then responded that we're not discussing cog sci. I don't find that to be a helpful response.
My criticism of examining questions about the nature of mind with reference to brain scans was a philosophical objection, based on an argument about the nature of reason and of meaning. Yes, we must employ the mind to raise such objections. But at the same time, from a philosophical point of view, one can do that without claiming that 'the nature of reason' - for example - is something that could even in principle be understood through the perspective of neuro- or cognitive sciences. In doing that, one relies on reason and logic, as do any of the sciences.
I maintain that there's a kind of category mistake being made in the very attempt, which goes right to the heart of this issue. This is because reason itself, and the ability of the human to grasp meaning and to engage in rational inference, is logically prior to any specifically empirical analysis of what the brain is or does. I explain that already in this post but the fact that you then try and respond on the level of cognitive science, indicates that you're not really coming to terms with the objection.
Quoting Janus
Not so. They're both well known, published philosophers, discussing a central question in philosophy, on the pages of the New York Times. (Although it is true that once you've accepted the inherently preposterous axioms from which 'the denialists' are arguing, then nothing anyone says will overturn it; it would take something profound, perhaps like what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor. )
How would any of this preclude the possibility that they are talking past one another?
The point is that they are considering consciousness from very different, and incommensurable, perspectives, namely phenomenology and natural science. The fact that they each want to extend their conclusions beyond the ambit of the disciplines within which they find their sense, and impose them on their opponent's discipline, is what constitutes the basis of their talking past one another. It seems humans can never be happy until their knowledge is absolutized. As I keep saying, this kind of polemical thinking is the foundation stone of fundamentalism.
My objection to your objection was not that one must employ the mind to raise such objections. My point was that phil of mind equally "employs our cognitive faculties in order to study our cognitive faculties," and thus any objection which attaches to that practice must also apply to phil of mind.
I don't think that such research is necessarily meant to elucidate the "nature of reason." The nature of thought, perhaps.
I don't know what you mean by my "try[ing] to respond on the level of cognitive science." I read your post: you don't need to refer back to it. As I said, I understand there would be an inherent circularity in trying to justify the veracity or reliability of certain perceptual or cognitive faculties by employing those same faculties, but that is not what this type of research is trying to achieve. They are using their minds to study the mind (indeed, what else would one use?); I see no circularity there, any more than it's circular to use rulers to measure the length of rulers.
The fact of the matter is, it has been empirically demonstrated that one can glean the conceptual or propositional content of a subject's mental states based on brain imaging to at least a limited degree, and there's no reason for supposing that this method won't continue to be refined and become more powerful). Your a priori theorizing is simply at odds with reality.
If you wish to assert that this practice entails a sort of vicious circle, then you must explain how philosophy of mind escapes this vicious circle, and not merely claim that it does so (you have a distressing habit of retreating into the "I'm talking about philosophy!" tact when you are challenged, as if scientific claims must somehow be expected to pass muster, but just "anything goes" when it comes to philosophical pontification).
And how do you split them? What is ‘propositional content’ without reason, or language? That’s the whole point.
I think you are confusing "reason" with "reasoning." In any event, not all thought is reasoning. If I ask you to form a mental picture of a hammer, and then scan your brain, you are not engaged in "reasoning" about anything, so far as I can tell: you are just holding a particular concept in your mind. (Which is why I took care to include "conceptual content" along with "propositional content" in describing such studies.)
Again, I never said that one needn't employ reason or language in studying reason or language: I simply denied that there is any prima facie circularity inherent in doing so (though I'm open to being convinced should you care to elucidate it. Perhaps I'm missing something here).
Philosophers likewise employ reason and language in analyzing reason and language: if there is a vicious circularity in doing so for cognitive scientists, why does it not follow that the philosophers' efforts are likewise viciously circular?
All human thought relies on language and abstraction, to which reasoning is fundamental. At the very least, abstraction involves the ability to say that something represents or means something else - which is very close in nature to the meaning of 'intentionality'.
You're simply assuming that representational realism stands up by itself. You have a mental model in which the mind mirrors or represents what it sees by generating images - then brain-scanning can essentially de-code the neural activity utilised in such representation - and bingo! We can 'read the brain'. But look at what is already assumed in that picture.
As that NYT article says the processes involved are highly speculative - they involve interpreting masses of data and then hypothesising about 'what the brain is doing'. My argument is that, this very activity of hypothesising, inferring, and saying 'this means that' is the very thing that you would need to explain, in order to show that this 'neural activity' really does amount to understanding the nature of thought. The whole purpose of fMRI and the like, is fundamentally medical - for which anyone who needs such intervention can only be grateful. But when the likes of 'the denialists' then brandish this as 'evidence' that 'science understands the nature of thought', then it's a completely different kind of claim altogether. The fact that this distinction is continually being blurred here makes discussion of it rather pointless, so, I am bowing out for the time being.
Agreed. To paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, for one to characterize a mental state as a state of belief isn't an empirical characterization but rather a matter of locating it within the space of reasons: a space the structure of which is defined by someone's ability to offer reasons supporting what one believes and to appreciate rational challenges to it. A brain scan may display something that counts as the neural correlate of a definite 'state of mind' (such as a belief, perceptual content, intention or motivation) only in the context where the empirical manifestation of this physiological correlate might inform us about a whole network of rational behavioral dispositions of an agent. The structure of this network is irreducible to the empirical-causal structure of the material realization of its nodes ('brain states') for the same reason why rational justifications don't reduce to physical laws. The latter aren't normative in the same way in which the former are, and any attempted reduction or identification would be tantamount to committing the naturalistic fallacy.
I quite agree that they are talking past one another, but there is nevertheless something instructive to see. The way in which they are talking past one another rather closely resembles the way in which Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris are debating the question of the nature of free will. Interestingly enough, Harris's hard determinist stance on free will is very closely aligned with Strawson's own. In this case, Harris and Strawson are both hard-nosed advocates of reductive materialism and deny the possibility of free will on the basis of the strict identification of practical deliberative processes with the underlying physiology. They also are dismissive of compatibilism on the ground that the compatibilist conception of free will (such as Dennett's) isn't, on their view, consistent with the alleged folk-notion of contra-causal free will: the ability to chose what to do irrespective of whatever process might be going on in one's head. In this case also, Dennett argues that free will exists even though free will isn't what such laymen (or libertarian philosophers) might think it is.
It is rather strange that in the cases of both free will and consciousness, Strawson takes the stance that neither one of those thing can possibly have an essential nature any different than common sense indicate that it must have, and, on the basis of those common sense definitions argues that consciousness must exist but free will must be an illusion! The intuitions that are at play, though, are deeply crypto-Cartesian and rely on a sharp separation between what is conceived to belong to 'the mind' (and thereby be 'directly' accessible to introspection) and what belongs to the 'external' material world and can therefore only be inferred to exist on the basis of both observation and theory.
Dennett questions (inconsistently) this Cartesian splitting of the mental and physical worlds. He also questions the strength of the commitments that ordinary folks have to it, as evidenced by their mundane uses of mental vocabulary and rational explanations of behavior. Unfortunately, Dennett has a tendency to want to have his cake and eat it too. So, he often argues convincingly for a non-reductive view of the mental (and of agency) that is roughly Wittgensteinian is spirit, and which he articulates with the idea of a plurality of 'stances'. But his commitment to physicalism also leads him to contradicts some of his commitments to emergentism and to rather crudely identify mental acts with a quasi-mechanical process of narrative construction of an essentially illusory mental reality. This gives rise to the sort of equivocations that Strawson latches on to convict him of consciousness denialism.
That seems like a very informed analysis Pierre-Normand :smile:
It seems you have indeed seen something interesting where I could not. I guess I'm familiar enough with where each of the protagonists is coming from to see that they are talking past one another, but not familiar enough with the work of either to see that there may be something instructive in that.
In any case I can only admire your grasp of these issues, without being able to fully understand its scope. :cry:
+1
Again, you are fulminating against an empirical demonstration on the basis of a priori arguments. The fact of the matter is that we can, through technological means, "decode" the content of at least a limited number of mental states by scanning their attendant physical states. So, whatever assumptions (pertaining to "representational realism" or anything else) undergird that endeavor have thereby been demonstrated to be correct. You are working backwards from the assumption that such a feat can't be done, and therefore hasn't been done, but this assumption is falsified by the experiment results.
And, if you took my comments to suggest that such studies provide an exhaustive understanding of the nature of thought, rest assured, I meant no such thing. fMRI studies (or brain imaging studies generally) are but a drop in the bucket of understanding the mind. There are an entire suite of experimental techniques brought to bear in this field. At best, they elucidate but a very small part of the nature of thought.
Right!
What you describe is a situation in which they are using their minds to study the brain, and making conclusions from this study, about the mind. To make these conclusions requires specific assumptions about the relationship between the brain and the mind. These assumptions are made by minds which are distinct from the brain being studied. Those mental assumptions are the premises upon which the conclusions are based, and these are property of the minds doing the study, not the brain being studied. Therefore the conclusions demonstrate something about the minds doing the study (the fundamental premises employed), and not the mind of the person whose brain is being studied.
BTW, it is circular to use a ruler to measure another ruler, that's why we have a defined object which constitutes the base for any measuring system. If one ruler measures another, and there is discrepancy, we ought to turn to that base definition to judge which ruler is correct. However, the base definition is merely a convention, an assumption, just like the assumptions which are required in the example above, concerning the relationship between the brain and the mind.
Sure, and once the ruler we use for measuring is calibrated against the defined object, we can happily use it for measuring other things, including other rulers. There's nothing inherently circular about that. And when we combine it with the measurements of other rulers, publish our conclusions, and let other measurers study and critique our measuring methodology, we have now have grounds for believing that we've reliability captured a datum about the objects of our measurements.
The point though, is that measuring a ruler with another ruler really is circular. It is the calibration against the defined object which removes the circularity. Then the question is how reliable, for the application, is the defined unit of measurement.
Exactly the point I made above:
Quoting Arkady
Calibrating one ruler by means of another may well be circular, but it doesn't follow that measuring a ruler with another ruler is circular.
True, measuring rulers with other rulers might just lead to an infinite regress, unless you come back to a prior ruler, then it's circular.
I don't see why it should be either circular or lead to an infinite regress. Again, we are not trying to calibrate or justify the reliability of a given ruler by matching it against another ruler. We are assuming that the ruler with which we're performing the measurement is reliable or accurate, and then using that to measure other items, including, perhaps another ruler.
If you believe that nothing can be reliably measured with rulers, then that is a different argument. But if you believe that we can reliably use rulers to measure objects why does it suddenly become problematic when said objects are other rulers? I think you have some 'splainin' to do, Lucy.
If there was a discrepancy between two rulers, then you would be forced to investigate further in order to discover which ruler was inaccurate. I presume this would be done by measuring both rulers against many other rulers. The one that accorded most closely with the most rulers would be the more accurate one.
Yup. I just don't see the circularity or regress that Metaphysician Undercover posited.
This is exemplified in many ways, but Chalmers' argument about the hard problem of consciousness is one case, and Dennett's response illustrates it perfectly. Chalmers points out that consciousness has an experiential or first-person aspect which can never, even in principle, be explained in purely third-person or objective terms.
Now what is Dennett's response to this? Very simple: he says there is no problem. He says the problem that Chalmers talks about doesn't exist or that it isn't real.
Again, there's a hopeless circularity in Dennett's argument, as 'stage magic' and 'illusions' both rely on consciousness; a non-conscious entity cannot suffer from illusions, as an illusion is precisely a mistaken interpretation on the part of a conscious agent. It is this kind of fundamental contradiction in Dennett's arguments which lead one of his critics to declare that 'some of his declarations are so preposterous as to verge on the deranged' (D B Hart in The New Atlantis).
The problem is that science never goes, and can't go, 'all the way down'. Science relies on our cognitive faculties, the kinds of things we choose to study, the way we study them, and so on. When we turn around and look at the nature of reason or the nature of mind, we're dealing with a question of a completely different kind. Again, that doesn't rule out cognitive science, but it does throw into relief the difference between cognitive science and philosophy.
I think underlying all of this is a very simplistic kind of Darwinism, which simply accepts that reason itself is like any other natural faculty, and which can be 'explained' in the same, biological terms as the attributes of other animals. That is certainly writ large in all Dennett's thinking (after all, he writes volumes about exactly this point.) Whereas, I say, that when h. sapiens actually reached the point of reasoning, story-telling and language, then their (our) being is no longer amenable to a simply biological explanation; we're no longer 'just animals'. I know that is a shockingly atavistic utterance but there it is.
To measure a ruler with another ruler, is to calibrate or justify it's reliability by comparing it to another ruler. What else could measuring a ruler with another ruler possibly mean?
Quoting Arkady
This doesn't make sense. What would be the point of measuring a ruler unless one was attempting to verify its accuracy?
Quoting Arkady
Like I said, there is no reason to measure a ruler except to verify its accuracy. The ruler's measurement is already stated, that's the only reason it could be a ruler, it already has a stated measurement. So to measure it is to question that stated measurement.
.
Right, it is a convention, an arbitrary assumption adopted by human minds. Circles of logic, and infinite regress of justification are avoided by referring to such conventions in mental principles.
Nope. You can measure a ruler for any reason whatsoever: for shits and giggles, because the hash marks have worn off and you no longer know how long it is, etc. You are attempting to make a logical claim (i.e. measuring a ruler with a ruler is circular) by appealing to the psychological motivations of the measurer (i.e. "why else would one measure a ruler with a ruler if not to calibrate them?").
Having said that, I don't even see an inherent circularity in using a ruler to measure another ruler in order to calibrate the measured ruler's (as opposed to the measuring ruler's) accuracy: if we have good reason to believe that the measuring ruler is well-calibrated (say, by comparing it directly against the standard unit of measurement), then we can use that to calibrate other rulers (if two rulers disagree, and we have good reason to believe that one ruler is well-calibrated, then it follows that the other ruler is probably the inaccurate one).
Sure. Humans have culture, not all of which is likely reducible to evolutionary explanations. Nothing shocking about that. Most scientists would probably agree with you, actually (and I am sure that most cultural anthropologists would agree with you, as they tend to resist the infiltration of biological explanations into their field).
Yes, this is the point. Without comparing it to "the standard unit of measurement", the measuring of the ruler's accuracy by measuring it with another ruler will lead to an infinite regress of one ruler measuring another, or a circle of rulers measuring each other. And the standard is a convention, which is an assumption of minds. So to avoid the infinite regress, or circle, we must assume as a priority, a mental property, the principle which serves as the standard or convention. To deny the priority of the standard, the principle, (which is a property of minds), is to fall into the circle, or infinite regress.
Of course. As I've twice pointed out, there's no problem using one ruler to measure another (even for calibration purposes), if we assume that one ruler has been calibrated. You yourself said, "It is the calibration against the defined object which removes the circularity." Hence my point that there's nothing inherently circular about using one ruler to measure another.
(I am curious: how do you think ruler manufacturers check the quality of their products if not by comparing samples of their output to some standard of measurement - in other words, using rulers to measure rulers?)
Do you recognize that the point being made is the necessity of the assumption? You say,there is nothing inherently circular, "if we assume...". Therefore I conclude that you recognize that there actually is something inherently circular about measuring one ruler with another, a circularity which is only removed by the application of that assumption.
Your criticism of Dennett would be more convincing if you provided an actual quote from Dennett rather than a statement from someone else talking about what Dennett says, and moreover a statement which itself provides no direct quote from Dennett.
Quoting Janus
Good questions. Along with the typical answers that so often lead to as of yet irresolvable conflicts between differing groups, there are also the affixed beliefs (which can be true of false) regarding the nature of causation. I so far do not know, for example, of many physicalists that accept even as remotely possible any causal mechanism which would be required for non-illusory agency. Would be grateful for any references to any established physicalist who does accept metaphysical freewill—although I know there’s been at least one physicalist here about on the forum who upholds top-down models of causation along side panseimiotics. To better illustrate these affixed convictions, unlike what was tmk first proposed by David Hume, modern day compatibilism is really a causally deterministic physicalism dressed up in fancy language games which yet preserve the ontology of causal determinism. Name it soft determinism, it's still causal determinism without exception. Hume, btw, rejected both causal determinism and causal indeterminism on logical grounds, while acknowledging that both are in some way required for life to be as it is—however, he did not go so far as to provide a causal alternative as regards mechanisms. Still, this form of causal compatibilism proposed by Hume has been for the most part utterly forgotten in today’s philosophical discourse, unfortunately, to my mind. This to me is then in parallel to the issue of what the stuff of reality really consists of. Open mindedness is not always a bad thing.
Quoting Janus
Yes, it is not an inherently self-contradictory view, since it only upholds those believed truths applicable to eliminativism and denies other experientially given facts which would contradict eliminitivism—such as that there needs to be some given to which illusions appear in order for there to be illusions in the first place, as Wayfarer has repeatedly mentioned in better ways than I just have. We’re culturally accustomed to the stance, and our so being accustomed psychologically grants it an authority of being true not held by novel ways of interpreting reality, even when the later are not self-contradictory. This, or itself, however fits in with the illusory truth effect.
That said, so too is the flat Earth theory not inherently self-contradictory—since it too only accepts those logical arguments and experienced data which do not deny the stated worldview which is maintained—and I’d venture that it too starts with different premises than what the rest of us start off with in discerning the shape of the planet. It is only self-contradictory to those who more impartially take into account data which flat-Earth theorists reject as being true.
So the eliminitivist view being coherent given its axiomatic premises does not place it on equal footing to other non-eliminitivist theories that more impartially take into consideration facts ignored by eliminativists—such as the requirement for awareness to be in order for awareness of anything (including of a theory of eliminativism) to be. It is after all not incoherent to be a non-eliminativist physicalist, for example (this having nothing to do with my potential dis/agreement with such ontological models in part or in whole). Some such are common enough frequenters of the TPF, such as in addressing physicalism from a vagueness and symmetry breaking approach (this at least to the degree that I properly understand Apo from former debates).
Steve Talbot Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness.
If there are conditions under which using one ruler to measure another is not circular (which you concede that there are), then the act is not inherently circular.
The question of how we can be justified that our measuring device is well-calibrated when we use it for measuring is a valid one, but it pertains to measuring absolutely anything and everything, not just other implements of measurement (including rulers). The "necessity" of assuming that our measuring device is reliable pertains to all such measurements. If it's not viciously circular in those cases, why, then is it viciously circular in the case of measuring rulers? Again, you have not explained your case, only asserted it.
The issue, as Wayfarer explained is in the necessity of such assumptions.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Arkady
So you have removed the circularity of that act, of measuring one ruler with another ruler, by referring to a particular assumption. We can use "the assumption" to avoid circularity in this measuring act. Now that you understand this, we can move on to Wayfarer's concern, which I'll call the act of measuring assumptions. Let's say that we can measure an assumption by comparing it to another assumption. But this is circular. How do we remove the circularity in this case? We cannot use "the assumption" to avoid circularity because this is the very circle which we are in.
I don't even accept the premise that using a ruler to measure another ruler is circular per se. I agree that using one ruler to measure another in order to calibrate or justify the accuracy of a ruler by means of comparing it against another could be circular under certain circumstances. I was merely pointing out that you yourself accept that it is not circular to do under particular conditions (e.g. when the measuring ruler has been calibrated against some measurement standard).
[quote=Wayfarer]The whole 'circularity' issue is this: that scientific analysis of anything whatever is based on certain axioms, presumptions, and rules. When you're dealing with the nature of reason itself, then you're actually turning around and looking at that which underlies all of those axioms and presumptions - often without actually recognising that this is what you're doing. You're treating the subject of experience as an object.[/quote]
I'm not clear on what you mean by "measuring assumptions." As I said to Wayfarer, if using our reasoning faculties to study our reasoning faculties is somehow viciously circular, then philosophy of mind is likewise vulnerable to such complaints, as phil of mind employs reason to study, inter alia, our reasoning faculties.
I also warned him against conflating the study of reason with the study of reasoning (the latter is much more in the purview of cog sci or neuroscience): they are not equivalent.
If I am trying to find a particular correlation, then this is not a problem. If I am trying to discover if I can fit object A into space B and the it can be done by comparing length then that will do. But that is a different process to describing something, to saying what something is, as we might want to do for 'consciousness'. Relating consciousness to some abstraction is not the same as saying what consciousness is, and the choice of which abstraction will be dictated by the observer.
In the case of consciousness, we might try to break it up into distinct parts like 'reasoning', 'perception', 'emotion', 'imagination' or whatever. But I do not think that we can clearly separate these things even in theory. Nor (in my experience) does my consciousness neatly shift from one mode to another. So we do not have even an arbitrary 'official standard' to work from.
.
And how does measuring a ruler with a ruler assume what is to be proven or demonstrated, which is the definition of circular reasoning?
Again, if this process is so viciously circular, how do ruler manufacturers perform quality checks on their products if not by some measuring implement which has been calibrated in accordance with the standard of measurement?
As Wayfarer explained, the circularity is only avoided by turning to first person experience. From this perspective we can ask questions such as "what is an assumption?", or "what does it mean to make an assumption?". Do you see a difference between determining the meaning of an assumption, and making an assumption?
Quoting Arkady
I think this passage indicates that you do not apprehend "meaning" at all. That you think "meaning" may be expressed as "propositional content" betrays this. Do you not recognize that what a given proposition means to me is not the same as what it means to you? That this is the case indicates that it is impossible to express meaning as propositional content. Consider, that what Wayfarer sees as circular, you do not see as circular. Therefore the propositions involved have a different meaning for Wayfarer than they do for you
Quoting Arkady
I don't know what you mean by "the study of reason". Nor do I know what you mean by "the study of reasoning". I've revisited your posts in an attempt to understand this distinction, but I haven't found it explained. Perhaps you could provide me with a description?
If we were just noting that 'ruler A is longer than ruler B' ' then we would not strictly be measuring because to measure is to apply an external standard, something that was neither A or B.
That A is longer than B is a fact, something determined empirically. The circularity would come in with our choice of external standard, because that standard is not a fact in the same way. To say ruler A is 'correct', whereas ruler B is 'too short', is an arbitrary choice. It is only true because we have all agreed that we will take ruler A as our standard, so it is a fact about human conventions. I think this can be called circular in the same way as the meaning of words is circular. 'Triangle' describes a certain shape. Why? Because we all agree that 'triangle' describes that shape.
I am not sure what to understand by 'circular reasoning'. I suppose that all reasoning is circular in that what counts as proof is something that follows the rules, but the rules themselves cannot be proved.
Ultimately they are comparing all one metre rulers with a standard metre ruler. But as Wittgenstein says, you cannot do a quality check on that standard metre. To do that would require another standard metre to compare the original standard metre against. And so on, So the standard metre is only 'accurate' because we have decided to take it as the standard for accuracy.
I would say there is a circularity in that but I do not know what to understand by 'viciously circular'.
Sorry, but you totally lost me here. I have no idea what you're getting at.
Firstly, it's not necessarily the case that "what a given proposition means to me is not the same as what it means to you:" different people may well glean the same meaning from the same proposition. If you wish to attribute some sort of extreme relativism to "meaning," wherein no two agents can possibly have the same understanding of a given proposition, speech act, or artifact's "meaning," then I don't even see how communication between agents would be possible. People disagree on occasion, yes, but it doesn't follow that said disagreement isn't sometimes just due to linguistic confusion on the part of one or both parties.
You seem to hold "meaning" in some sort of quasi-religious reverence. My point with regard to the brain scanning technologies discussed here was only that investigators can, with a certain degree of reliability under highly controlled experimental conditions, determine what a subject is thinking about using brain imaging. If you find it more "satisfying" to drop talk of "meaning" from any of this, then feel free to do so: I have no special affinity for the term.
Philosophy does the "thinking about thinking." Questions such as what reason is, which sorts of arguments and beliefs are reasonable or rational, etc. fall in the purview of philosophy. How agents reason, how the cognitive and neural mechanisms operate in their brain (and other relevant systems) when they're thinking is in the purview of cognitive science, neuroscience, and other allied fields.
Yes, it appears to be as if you have no real understanding of "meaning".
Quoting Arkady
I don't see how this is possible. What a given proposition means to me is produced according to my physical disposition, and my experiences as a human being, which are both completely different from any other human being. And this is the same with all other people. Therefore I think it is completely impossible that a given proposition can have the same meaning to different people.
If you attribute meaning directly to the physical existence of the proposition, you might claim that the proposition carries the same information to me as it does to you. But since there is a matter of interpretation, which is carried out according to the value structures of the individual, we cannot conclude that it means the same thing to you as it does to me.
Quoting Arkady
Yes, I've seen this argument before, and if you would give it any thought, you would see that it is absolutely non sequitur. Communication does not require that one person produce the same idea within another person, it just requires that we get the general idea across, the gist. If you define communication as requiring that one person interprets the very same meaning from a saying as another, then you completely misrepresent what communication actually is, and your argument is based in a false premise.
Quoting Arkady
Agreement does not require that both parties interpret the same meaning from what has been said. Agreement just indicates that each party accepts the meaning which they have interpreted. Agreement cannot be construed to imply that each party interprets the same meaning. So we can put disagreement aside, and look at agreement directly. When two people agree to the truth of a proposition, this in no way indicates that the two attribute the same meaning to that proposition.
Quoting Arkady
I don't see how you could possibly verify this claim. We cannot even determine what a person is thinking about by interpreting what they are saying, so how could you determine what a person is thinking about by using brain imaging? Sure, you could start with some assumptions like X image is equivalent to X thought, and proceed in this manner, but how would you know whether these assumptions are true? You could ask the patient, but it would just be a matter of interpretation, and how would you know that the patient is being honest? Would you start with a lie detector test? Doesn't the lie detector make the same claim anyway, to be able to determine what the patient is thinking? How are your referred experiments any more reliable than a simple lie detector?
Quoting Arkady
I still don't see the difference. If a philosopher is "thinking about thinking", isn't that person thinking about how reason operates? The question of which beliefs and arguments are reasonable is a different question, it is a question of judgement. We all have to make such judgements in our day to day life, and it seems like you are trying to restrict philosophy to the mundane. We have some innate judgement capacities and we learn others.
The matter of "thinking about thinking" is an exercise in examining such judgement making, and this is exactly the question of "how agents reason", which you say is proper to cognitive science. The problem with your approach, as wayfarer points out, is that you need to begin with some assumptions about how agents reason, derived from philosophy, in order to establish a correlation with brain imaging. If X image is equivalent to X thought, then you must start with the assumption of what X thought is. That is why the lie detector must start with a bunch of background questions to establish a baseline. But all of this relies on the assumption that a person's words are a good indication of what a person is thinking, and as I described above, in relation to "meaning", this is a false premise. When the philosopher practises "thinking about thinking", one comes to realize that words are very impotent for expressing what thought really is.
Consider this, we often think in words, we can decide what to say, we can do logic, and we do mathematics by thinking in symbols. We come to conclusions. But this is very shallow, off the top of the head stuff, it's more like recollection of memories. Meaningful thinking lies much deeper. I could tell you that two plus two equals four, and you might say that I am thinking this. But that's not really the case, I am simply recollecting it. When I am assessing different ways to apply this equation, then I am thinking. So if I tell you "my computer is on", the reason why I chose those words to say, and not something else to say represents my thinking. We really cannot get to the act of thinking, from examining the words spoken, because the words spoken are the manifestation of thought, the effect of it, not the thinking itself.
We cannot even determine what someone is thinking about by interpreting what they are saying? I'm going to stop this farce right here, because this is just such a wad of nonsense that it beggars belief. The very fact that we're having a conversation falsifies that spurious claim.
Sorry, but none of this explains why one cannot use one ruler to measure another. Yes, measurement standards are arbitrary, but once selected, it is not arbitrary as to whether or not a given artifact conforms to said standard.
That's absolutely correct. My saying this represents a very small portion of what I am thinking about at the moment, which is a very small portion of what I am thinking about in the span of five minutes. Furthermore, there is a very good possibility that I am being deceptive, and what I am saying doesn't represent what I am thinking at all. And that does not even consider the deficiencies of interpretation.
So it should be quite clear that we cannot determine what someone is thinking by interpreting what they are saying.
Quoting Arkady
The number of times I've had to reply to this non sequitur argument at this forum is amazing. That you and I can hold a conversation says nothing about your ability to know what I am thinking. The existence of deception ought to dispel this faulty conclusion.
Dennett has since responded to the article here: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/
"We say consciousness seems (to many who reflect upon the point) to involve being “directly acquainted,” as Strawson puts it, with some fundamental properties (“qualia”), but this is an illusion, a philosopher’s illusion. "
If this is Dennett's issue then I have no problem with that (and I say that as a quasi-dualist). I don't think reductionistic qualia (red, taste of coffee, ect) aka Locke's classical secondary properties are fundamental. The way they are united and the reasons why are is what is important. So far science has not touched this:
From scholarpedia:
"Because consciousness is a rich biological phenomenon, it is likely that a satisfactory scientific theory of consciousness will require the specification of detailed mechanistic models. The models of consciousness surveyed in this article vary in terms of their level of abstraction as well as in the aspects of phenomenal experience that they are proposed to explain. At present, however, no single model of consciousness appears sufficient to account fully for the multidimensional properties of conscious experience. Moreover, although some of these models have gained prominence, none has yet been accepted as definitive, or even as a foundation upon which to build a definitive model. "
[quote="Scholarpedia]"At present, however, no single model of consciousness appears sufficient to account fully for the multidimensional properties of conscious experience."[/quote]
To paraphrase: "at present, no single model of consciousness explains what it is that is doing the explaining".
When we are asking questions about the nature of reason, and indeed the nature of consciousness, they are very different kinds of questions as to those about neurology and cognitive sciences. In fact those kinds of questions are what Chalmers calls 'the easy questions' - not because they're not technically very demanding, but because they're amenable to objective description and analysis. They concern factors which can be quantified and measured. Whereas questioning the nature of reason, is questioning the very faculty which makes 'questioning' possible! That is why there is an issue of reflexivity, or recursion, involved in such questions, which is what makes them intractable from a scientific point of view. In other words, that is why they're philosophical, rather than scientific, questions.
So the whole point of Dennett's approach is that there is no difference between the two - that ultimately science can provide answers to philosophical questions. There is nothing genuinely 'first-person' that can't be understood in objective terms. But this leads to numerous absurdities. And also it's fundamentally anti-humanist - deprecating the irreducible nature of first-person experience. As Strawson notes in his reply:
Nor, it follows, are there actually any real beings! When Dennett says that we're 'moist robots' - he's not kidding! We're not actually 'human beings' - we only seem to be!
I agree with most of what you're saying, but the "easy question" pertains to consciousness. I agree that first-person, subjective experience is not something to be captured in a brain scanner, but it doesn't follow that the study of consciousness is ruled out tout court. Science can, and does, study consciousness.
Studying the brain with FMRI nonetheless relies on first person reports in order to know what is purportedly being thought, felt or experienced and to correlate that with the areas of observed brain activity.