Dennett on Colors
I was at the bookstore and saw Daniel Dennett's 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. Having a few minutes, I turned to the chapter and read his account of colors.
Dennett states that prior to evolution, it's a mistake to think of the world as being colored in any way that we experience color. Rather, color evolved as a coevolutionary coding scheme between plants and animals. Flowers guide insects to nectar using a color scheme, just as fruits guide mammals to spreading their seeds. Of course the actual evolutionary account is going to be a lot more complex, but those two examples suffice.
As such, color is the result of animals who evolved the means to detect the visual coding scheme of other organism, depending on the species needs. Dennett says that nature doesn't produce epistemic engines, rather it produces creatures who perceive the world according to their "narcissistic" needs. This goes for the other sensor modalities as well.
Therefore, the scientific account of color is going to be a complex explanation of the coding scheme in question, such as the trichromatic colors humans see that we call visible light.
This raises several questions/issues for me.
1. Does it dissolve the hard problem of consciousness by providing a scientific explanation for colors, sounds, smells, etc?
2. Does this entail that direct perception is false, being that secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) are not properties of things themselves, but rather coding schemes that relate to the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves (using the two examples above)?
3. We know that color experience is produced after the visual cortex is stimulated. This can the result of perception, memory, imagination, dream, magnetic cranial stimulation, etc. If a person's visual cortex is damaged enough, they lose all ability to have color experiences, including being able to remember colors. It's hard to avoid concluding that color experiences are generated by the brain. But that sounds like the makings of a cartesian theater, which Dennett has spent his career tearing down.
Dennett states that prior to evolution, it's a mistake to think of the world as being colored in any way that we experience color. Rather, color evolved as a coevolutionary coding scheme between plants and animals. Flowers guide insects to nectar using a color scheme, just as fruits guide mammals to spreading their seeds. Of course the actual evolutionary account is going to be a lot more complex, but those two examples suffice.
As such, color is the result of animals who evolved the means to detect the visual coding scheme of other organism, depending on the species needs. Dennett says that nature doesn't produce epistemic engines, rather it produces creatures who perceive the world according to their "narcissistic" needs. This goes for the other sensor modalities as well.
Therefore, the scientific account of color is going to be a complex explanation of the coding scheme in question, such as the trichromatic colors humans see that we call visible light.
This raises several questions/issues for me.
1. Does it dissolve the hard problem of consciousness by providing a scientific explanation for colors, sounds, smells, etc?
2. Does this entail that direct perception is false, being that secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) are not properties of things themselves, but rather coding schemes that relate to the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves (using the two examples above)?
3. We know that color experience is produced after the visual cortex is stimulated. This can the result of perception, memory, imagination, dream, magnetic cranial stimulation, etc. If a person's visual cortex is damaged enough, they lose all ability to have color experiences, including being able to remember colors. It's hard to avoid concluding that color experiences are generated by the brain. But that sounds like the makings of a cartesian theater, which Dennett has spent his career tearing down.
Comments (86)
You do wonder how evolution produced a being that could write a book by that means. But then if such a being did evolve and did write a book, it might be only to satisfy a narcissistic need. It couldn't after all have anything meaningful to say, because 'meaning' is only an adaptation.
firstly, Dennett is inconsistent with applying the Cartesian theatre. Look at his past adoration for the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness and tell me how that is not the CT.
Anyway I'm not impressed by the Hard problem as it is phrased. Though the bottom up evo-psych explanation doesn't make sense from a philosophy of action pov either. We see phenomenal objects and respond to them as phenomenal objects and not biological code. I don't think it's controversial to say color was created by natural selection provided NS accounts for more than just random mutation but purposeful selected choices by the organisms.
Look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq6V4OD_DSs
It's undeniable a phenomenal Jesus appears and that's what is being discussed here. When I type this post I am reacting to the image of Jesus and not say- it's dimensions, hue, tone, (bit pieces). How on earth can evolution avoid addressing phenomenal objects?
Are objects of veridical perception phenomenal? It seems that way if color, sound, etc. are phenomenal.
I suppose an evolutionary account would say those kinds of illusions are a byproduct of how our visual system works. Sometimes it can be fooled. As for how we turn colors into shapes and what not, that would probably involve different brain regions dedicated to the task.
But why it's sometimes phenomenal and sometimes not? I don't know. Dennett liked to say there were computing "agents" in the brain, and once one got focus, the contents of that "agent" would be phenomenal, to paraphrase his argument. But why getting focus would led to a phenomenal experience still seems unexplained.
What is explanation? I'd say he adds meaning to the situation, but I still don't feel satisfied. What would an answer to the hard question even look like. Can being itself or the space in which all questioning and explanation takes place be explained? If explanation is just a tool, just an implicit rule for pressing buttons, then that's something else. If it is supposed to obliterate wonder, I'm guessing that 1000 years from now (if we are still around) that the same issue will be in play.
Quoting Marchesk
Even if they are also coding schemes in one framework, they are 'directly' exactly what they already are. Can Dennet give an account of meaning itself? That 'inner' dimension in which his theory is intelligible for us? Is such an account thinkable? It would of course presuppose meaning.
Quoting Marchesk
Good point. It makes sense to me that we could lose color through brain injury, and that colors are somehow generated by the brain. I even understand that of course a scientist would want to explain these things. On the other hand, one gets the sense sometimes that there is such a fear of ghosts and so on that basic facts are avoided as much as possible.
But the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves are properties of those coloured things.
[quote=Evan Thompson]Being coloured a particular determinate colour or shade … is equivalent to having a particular spectral reflectance, illuminance, or emittance that looks that colour to a particular perceiver in specific viewing conditions.[/quote]
It's the leaves--not an "idea" or representation--that are green, but they only look green to certain perceiving beings in certain environments. Thus, colour is entirely relational. According to taste one could see this as a deficiency in the language--because of the way we use "colour", we can't say whether colour belongs solely to us or to the things we're looking at--or else one could see it as expressing the essentially relational nature of perception.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't think saying that the brain produces the experience of colour entails that there is an interior spectator. I imagine Dennett might say, not that the brain produces colours for us to look at internally, but that the relevant events in the brain just are those colour experiences. That's not how I would put it myself, but I don't think the Cartesian theatre is entailed either way.
Perhaps not, but it does still leave all of Chalmers' arguments for the hard problem in play. How do we account for brain events having color experiences?
Quoting jamalrob
Yes, but our experience isn't of the chemical makeup, but rather of color. And if that color occurs in the brain, then it's hard to see how we could be directly perceiving a red apple.
I don't see why. Evan Thompson's description is consistent with an account of perception that has been described as "direct". But then, different people mean different things by "direct perception". The substance of my post was the bit about colour being essentially relational.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm not sure. With some kind of combination of evolutionary biology, ecology and phenomenology, I'd guess. That's handwaving, I know.
The Cyreneacs liked to say they were sweetened or reddened instead of the apple being sweet or red, which acknowledges that color and taste are properties of the perceiver, which John Locke also pointed out. Dennett starts by mentioning Locke's primary and secondary qualities.
Quoting jamalrob
Because color and taste are in the brain, not out there in the world.
Quoting jamalrob
Indeed, we've had this discussion before. But I take it to be a dispute over whether something mental or the object itself is the content of perception. Since objects aren't actually colored or sweet, I have some problems with the second option.
Why do you reject the relational account, under which colour is a property of perceived things, as perceived in a certain way in a certain environment?
Because that property is generated in the brain. Also, consider that perceptual relativity means that an objects relational properties can vary.
What is the point then?
Then I don't agree with the point that relational properties means direct perception is the case, because what I'm aware of is dependent on the kind of perceiver I am, and not the object itself.
Thus direct perception on this account depends on both perceiver and perceived. As seems kind of obvious when you think about it.
And if the fact that different perceivers perceive in different ways were enough to kill off direct perception as a philosophical position, then the fact that dogs can't see green would have resolved this issue a while ago.
Well, they are green under certain conditions for the sort of eyes and nervous system I possess. The reason for supposing the green is mental is because it's being generated in the brain, and yet it's not reducible to neurons firing, at least as far as current neuroscience goes.
If the relational account can show that green, taste, etc. are not mental, then Dennett is a long ways toward dissolving the hard problem.
Our bodies (eyes, brain, etc) respond in specific ways to our environment. To me that doesn't make colour merely of the body. It is how we see things, and the way we see things is owing to the way our brains and eyes are (and how we behave). But still, it is the things that are green.
NOTE: Haven't we been here before March, many many years ago? :rofl:
Let's try this for temperature. Three people are in a room. One complains that it's hot, another that it's cold, and third that the temperature feels just fine.
Who is right? We can consult the thermostat and all agree that it measures the room temperature at a certain degrees F or C. But what of our experience? Do we suppose that the room itself is either cold, hot or just right?
Of course not. Things feel cold or hot to humans because of the kind of temperature ranges we can survive in, and what the status of our individual bodies are at that moment. If I just walked out of a freezer, the room will probably feel warm.
And we also know from physics that heat is really the amount of energy in a system. It doesn't make sense to ask whether the sun feels hot or space feels cold, absent an animal that can feel hot or cold when exposed to either (assuming it survives).
As such, when we say it's cold outside, that's an experience of our bodies reacting to the amount of energy in the environment. We perceive cold water, but that experience of cold is from us. And thus we can agree with the Cyreneacs and say, "I am cold". Therefore, our perception has a component that isn't in the water itself, since water can't feel cold or hot.
Well yes, perception is relational, depending on both perceiver and perceived (I'd also want to add the environment and the actions of the perceiver, but we can leave it aside for now).
Temperature perception is variable in a way that colour perception is not, and this is expressed in the way we talk and think about hot/cold vs green/blue/red etc.
So would you say that we directly perceive the red apple, but not the cold water, which might feel warm to someone used to ice swimming in Siberia?
It doesn't dissolve the hard problem, though it does indicate that at least everything pertaining to consciousness but the hard problem is solvable.
We can imagine physical mechanisms which discriminate between different wavelengths of light, and we can even imagine plausible evolutionary histories...
The hard question would be, why does our experience of color feel like an experience at all?
Quoting Marchesk
The chemical makeup and other spectral properties of objects are indeed properties of objects. When photons strike an atom or molecule, it can be absorbed, reflected, or some combination of both. When white light strikes a "green" object a certain portion of its energy is absorbed and the rest is reflected as a photon with a different wavelength. That change in wavelength carries information about the chemical and molecular makeup of the object it last struck, and it is that information color discriminating eyeballs have tapped into. It might be fair to say that our phenomenological perception of color is an abstraction, but it is not fair to say that it does not convey information about the external world.
Quoting Marchesk
In light of damage to the brain eliminating one's ability to have color experiences, Dennett would probably say that this validates his view that the hard problem is itself a fundamental misunderstanding (that the mechanisms of our behavior are the experiences, and without them the Cartesian homunculus ceases to apparently exist).
EDIT: in fact, the framework of direct vs indirect takes us down the wrong path here, I think. So yeah, temperature perception is a good example.
Yes, but the feeling of the water comes from us, and we're aware of it in perception. That suggests we're aware of something we might be tempted to call mental when perceiving temperature.
Yeah, that sounds correct. And Chalmers arguments for the hard problem escape Dennett's assessment in that book. We still want to know how/why red is an experience.
If the Scientific explanation, for something like the experience of the Color Red, consists of an analysis that ends with particular Neurons Firing then that would not solve the Hard Problem. The Scientific explanation must go beyond the Neurons and tell us How it is that Neural Activity can produce a Conscious experience like Redness. What property of Neurons produces this Redness and How does a particular Conscious Mind perceive this Redness thing. We need to give more importance to the Experience itself. Start with the Experience and work back to the Neural Activity. How can that experience of Redness ever come out of Neural Activity? That is the Hard Problem.
Quoting MarcheskDirect perception is obviously false with any analysis of the chain of processing from Retina to Cortex to Experience. The Experience is at the end of this chain of Processing and is always a Surrogate for the External World perceived thing. We never Directly See anything.
Quoting Marchesk
Science can tell you what the resultant Neural Activity is for the Perception of the Color Red, but Science can only speculate that there is some undiscovered Property of Neurons that produces the actual Experience of Redness. Science does not know How Neural activity produces Redness. There is a Huge Explanatory Gap here.
Different animals (and even different people) experience that wavelength in different ways. Does it make sense to say that two different organisms are given the same information about the object being looked at despite seeing it to be different colours (e.g. orange for one, red for the other)?
At best there's indirect knowledge after finding out what kind of wavelength elicits what kind of colour experience in oneself. But prior to any kind of scientific analysis of light and perception, what does me seeing a thing to be green tell me about that thing, other than that it is such that I see it to be green?
Did he mention that eyes independently evolved more than 50 times? The insect eye is not the forerunner of human eyes. Fish eyes are.
I think he needs to address that before claiming to explain sight. What are the similarities in eye development? How are they different?
Qualia is a separate issue.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine the colours of a world which existed without any organic matter. There would be some variance of colour, but the world would be quite bland. "Colour", as we know it in the bright array of flowers and other pigments, is entirely created by biological existence. Colour is not defined by individual segments of a wavelength spectrum, because colour is created by combinations of various different wavelengths.
The question of whether colour is properly understood as attributed to the perceiving subject, or the perceived object, is really insignificant, because even if colour is properly placed as existing within the object, colour as we know it is created by the biological systems of that object. Inorganic matter, without a living being to separate fundamental elements, and synthesize, is inherently bland and without colour.
When I read something like that, I don't think, "Okay, let's roll with that then and expect everything else to accomodate it."
I think, "Hmm . . . it rather seems to me like a mistake to think of that as a mistake." I give the person a chance to make their case, but the vast majority of the time, when people say things like that they fail to make a good case for their claims in my opinion.
You can try and defend color realism - that objects are actually colored like we perceive them to be, but it's a difficult position to maintain. Dennett does go into why that it is. One reason is that the reflective surfaces of objects is not always directly related to the colors we see. Another reason is that organisms with better eyes than us will see different combinations of colors.
If you consider what the sky would look like on a sunny day if we could see the entire EM spectrum, we know that it certainly wouldn't be blue, given all the other radiation that would need to be colored somehow.
That's setting up a false dichotomy (and kind of a comically simplistic/confused one at that).
The false dichotomy has it that either:
(a) things are colored as we perceive them to be, in a way that's both qualitatively the same as our perceptions qua our perceptions, including with just the same constraints, AND the same for all observers,
OR
(b) prior to evolution, the world isn't colored in any way that we experience color
That's a false dichotomy, because for one, the world can be colored in a way that we experience color, prior to evolution, where (i) the world isn't qualitatively limited to color as we experience it--there's more to it, even though what we experience of it is there, too, (ii) the way that it's colored isn't identical to a color experience in that it's not itself a color experience--in other words, we're not conflating the experience with what's experienced, but that doesn't imply that we're not directly or accurately experiencing things (it only implies that experiences and non-experiences are not identical), and (iii) in general, as a truism, no phenomenon is identical from every different reference point, or when interacting with different things that limit information in different ways; and nothing is ever "reference-point free." In addition, it's almost never the case that two things are interacting at different reference points where they're not part of some broader system--so for example, observing a colored object where lightwaves are interacting with other substances, including air. Again, this doesn't imply that we do not directly or accurately perceive things. It only implies that we're accurately and directly perceiving complex systems of things, from particular reference points.
My comment in no way amounted to saying that that was impossible. Possibility isn't sufficient for belief.
Although now that we mention whether it's impossible, what exactly are we coding if not color in our color-coding?
How photons of a certain wavelength bounce off objects, or are refracted by air, water, glass, etc. It's a good evolutionary strategy to use that to navigate the world of everyday objects.
Well, that's what color is, sure. So how are we coding that if things aren't colored?
Because photons aren't colored. They are packets of energy having frequency and wavelength, carrying the electromagnetic force.
It also tells you that the object is not red, or blue, or yellow.
If I place colored balls before you (two green and one red) your eyes will tell you that the two green balls share a similarity that the red ball does not. If I place three apples before you, you may discern from color which of them are ripe and ready to eat. In these cases we use color as an empirical heuristic for other properties, but it's often quite reliable.
Individual photons aren't colored, no. Light in wave form is colored. Again, that's what colors are.
Strictly speaking, color is abstracted from the force of the crashing of the light wave.
Color is derived from photonic after-math.
Which is just telling you something about how the object doesn't appear to you. But that's not really in question here.
That doesn't really tell you much about the external world. If I were to tell you that I'm holding two of the same thing in my hands I hardly think that counts properly as conveying information to you about what's in my hands.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Wouldn't that count as indirect perception? The apple appears green and I have learnt that apples which appear green are ripe and so "see" that an apple is ripe if it appears green.
It tells you something about how it relates, or doesn't relate (separation/difference), to other objects, and if the colors change, that tells you something about a change in the object (or the light striking it).
What exactly color differences and color changes tell us about objects is mostly fallible association, but evidently it has been useful.
Quoting Michael
Imagine that nobody could perceive color, or only one color if that makes it easier, and could instead only differentiate light data on a scale of luminosity/brightness...
We would no longer be given access to as much information about material, chemical, and structural differences when we compare and contrast objects (only an objects tendency to absorb or reflect light would determine it's hue). In short we lose a powerful tool of discrimination.
Color differences are inexorably based on tangible differences between external objects, and while we abstract and run wild with fallible presumptions about the meaning of color, there is still some small amount of real information retained in our color coding of light data.
In the world without color, you could tell me the luminosity of the objects in your hand, and this could convey some information pertaining to the emmisivity of the objects (i.e: they're "bright"). In the world of color, you can tell me that they are "green" or "red" in addition to whether or not they are bright. The more of our abstract interpretations of sensory input that you convey to me (shape, weight, thermal behavior, smell, taste, noise, observable behavior) the more information I have about what is in your hand.
By telling me that the two objects in your hand are the same sort of thing, you have indeed given me information about the objects in your hand. If you can hypothetically be holding two of anything, the total number of combinations of things you could be holding would be the total number of possible things squared. By telling me that they are the same thing, you have effectively removed the squared function and reduced the number of options I can choose from.
In more or less the same way, when you tell me that the single object in your hand is green, you've given me information about what it is if only by narrowing down what it isn't.
There may only be correlation between the color of apples and their ripeness, but so long as there is consistency, there will be utility. That we consistently perceive color differences, and that these color differences consistently reflect evolutionarily pertinent facts, is what has mattered.
Color is not first hand information (nothing we have access to is), though it strongly appears to be derived from it.
Sure, and binded together as a single phenomenon we can discuss physically on message boards ect.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes I'm familiar with his multiple drafts model. So a particular slice of information becomes "famous" in the brain and so all the other brain compartments for a brief time bend around that so that the next slice will be consistent to the prior one in some way, which is claimed to be like a parallel processing computer.
So the brain is built up out of neurons and synpases and is interacting with some emergent noise that appears "phenomenal" (the hard problem, the binding problem et al) which is seemingly bending the organ to its will and the organ to its, like classic mind-body interaction.
I wonder how many times the thought "dualism may be correct" crosses his mind but then he had to create a new draft (pun unintended) with different wording.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
I guess it's supposed to complement Stove's Worst Argument in the World with the Silliest Claim Ever Made, although Stove's argument isn't mentioned.
I think that however one views the self- as a real thing or not- will determine how they explain the experiences of color or whatever else.
I think Dennett would call himself a pseudo-realist about the self. It depends on what kind of stance you're taking, which means what sort of explanation you're using at that moment.
Suppose that the experience of color was the result of an evolutionary adaption and that color was not a feature of the universe, the person who is dissatisfied with physicalism would suggest that any kind of subjective experience is incompatible with physicalism- that physicalism can't explain these experiences- and that the origins of color are not really the point.
The "hard problem" of consciousness really revolves around what the nature of consciousness is and if physicalism is undermined by it.
Yeah, although Galen Strawson in the link I posted above makes an interesting claim about physicalism (distinguishing it from the science of physics) that permits consciousness.
It looks like Prof. Strawson is a panpsychist.
Does an immaterial mind make the hard problem of consciousness any easier?
It seems like it has its own difficulties. Consider that when you walk from place to place, and that there is an immaterial mind and a material world, you experience a change in location, but an immaterial mind is immaterial and should not be able to change from location to location so it seems that an immaterial mind can't explain our commonplace experiences of moving from place to place. Assuming that the mind is immaterial, if you asked, "where is my mind" then you should be guilty of making a category error, but clearly we experience the feeling of moving from one location to another.
I see.
So what theory of the mind do you subscribe to?
I don't have one. You?
@Wayfarer made a thread about this.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3174/critical-review-of-consciousness-denialism-by-galen-strawson/p1
Dennett gave an official response here: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/ Which I posted pn page 5 of the thread (also discussed).
Whatever 'mind' may be, it's never an object of experience. It's never known as a 'that'. And, if you think about it, that is not true of anything that can be measured or apprehended by the senses (or by scientific instruments, which are simply augmented senses.)
So the notion of an 'immaterial mind' is deeply misleading as it suggests a kind of ethereal stuff or thing which somehow embodies ideas and causes things to happen. It is precisely the stupidity of such an idea, which Cartesian dualism gave rise to and which in turn gave rise to the 'modern mind-body problem' in which Dennett's ideas are situated.
I think the only useful way to think about mind (or strictly speaking the rational intellect) is in terms of 'that which interprets meaning'. That is after all what makes it possible for us to think and speak, being 'rational animals' (and also, handily, the very faculty which distinguishes us from goats and bats.)
I think Chalmer's 'hard problem' certainly states the fundamental problem, but in a somewhat roundabout way. After all, it boils down to talking about 'what-it-is-like-ness' to describe the difficulties of describing mind in perfectly objective terms. Whereas the way I argue the case is to say that mind is clearly not amenable to empirical disclosure. Which is exactly what behaviourists argued 50 years ago, and what Dennett is arguing now.
But just because it's not amenable to empirical disclosure can't mean that it isn't real. What Dennett argues, is that what we interpret as subjective experience, is really the result of the unconscious competence of billions of cellular automata that give rise to the illusion of the subject. So, as I quoted in that earlier thread:
[quote=Thomas Nagel]Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”[/quote]
So the upshot is, Dennett's work is not simply mistaken, it is drop-dead preposterous. Because of the simple fact that the first-person nature of consciousness is not something amenable to scientific empiricism, then Dennett just has to be able to show that it's unreal, so as to 'maintain his thesis at all costs'. But that does do a service to the community, by throwing the inherent contradictions of Dennett's style of materialism into sharp relief for all to see.
Except himself.
Dennett's response to Strawson was that of course he doesn't deny consciousness, he's merely denying what certain philosophers make of consciousness. Which sounds good until you take into account the implications, which is that we're conscious in the same way that a philosophical zombie is conscious.
Paraphrasing:
"Of course colors, sounds, tastes, dreams, hallucinations, inner dialog, etc. exist. They're just not what they seem to be. They're actually just this physical description of brain activity, or the result of this evolutionary process."
That sounds rather like elimination to me. So when Dennett says that yes, we're conscious of seeing a red object, he means that the right sort of color discrimination is going on in the brain. But that misses the point.
If I'm wondering whether a computer program is conscious, I'm not asking about how good it is at discriminating colors. I'm asking whether it has an experience of red, green, etc.
Similarly, when Siri say it's "Brrrrr, 20 degrees out", I don't suppose that Siri feels cold. But if Siri were a robot that could detect temperature similar to us on it's synthetic skin, then I would wonder whether this was just a function, or actually accompanied by experience.
That's why the book you refer to was widely derided as 'Consciousness Ignored' :smile:
So what is the metaphysical nature of the mind? Is it physical or not?
Quoting Wayfarer
So he sounds like a nominalist.
If dennett is a nominalist, then he will not deny that there are experiences, but he will instead argue that there is no self behind those experiences.
Continuing along those lines - if mind is what grasps meaning, then what is it grasping? What is your theory of meaning? Obviously it’s a very broad question, but the sorts of disciplines that consider it include semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy - none of which are obviously connected to the study of the physical.
Me, I don’t think that logic (or maths for that matter) can be explained or understood in physicalist terms. Why? Because in order to begin to even define what constitutes ‘the physical’, requires logical inference — ‘this means that’, ‘because of this then that must be the case’, and so on. And that solely comprises the relationship of ideas. We have to be able to grasp relationships like ‘more than’, ‘equal to’, ‘less than’, even to begin to define what is physical. That is all basic to rational thought. Physicalism wants to say that this can be accounted for in terms of neurobiology, but try putting logic aside and then doing neurobiology. I think you would find there are some thoughts you just can’t get outside of.
That language makes me squirm a bit. Grasping is a metaphor. It makes it sound like the mind is an animal reaching out to concepts.
Do you think it's possible for metaphors to be misleading?
Do you have an example of a rogue metaphor?
The selfish gene evolving the meme machine producing the intuition pump, including multiple drafts, but no theater.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1876 ed., 68-69, emphasis added
So here you have something, admittedly posited as ‘a metaphor’, which then assumes an absolutely central role in the process which is central to the entire theory, and which is central to all Dennet’s work. But it begs the question of what the metaphor is for.
To help people understand natural selection: it is as if there were a breeder selecting suitable variations.
Quoting Wayfarer
How is it duplicity if it's explicitly metaphorical?
EDIT: sorry @Marchesk, this is off-topic
But it becomes implicit, assumed. It’s a sleight of hand. It’s as if nature is a guiding intelligence, just like you-know-what. But it’s actually not the act of an agency, because all there actually is, is the ‘struggle for life’, growth, inheritance, variability and so on. But by introducing the metaphor of agency, Darwin treats selection as an agency, a veritable deity - which is exactly how it appears to us nowadays. People speak of the amazing things that evolution does, but evolution doesn’t *do* anything. It is a process, not an agency, but in the popular imagination, has assumed the attributes of venerable deity.
And it’s not off-topic because Daniel Dennett’s writing is based on just this.
Otherwise, you seem to be railing against the popular conception of evolution. I agree that people get it wrong, but in my experience they don't seem to misunderstand it in the way you describe, and in any case I don't see how such misunderstandings are caused by a metaphor.
EDIT: By far the worst popular misunderstandings of evolution are: evolution as a ladder leading to humans (which predates Darwin), and the related idea that e.g., humans evolved from chimpanzees
Maybe a little. If color didn't exist prior to evolution, did smoothess? What about spacial dimensions? Time? Is there some part of our experience that didn't come into existence with evolution? If so, which part?
If experience in general came into existence as a survival mechanism (which is a dubious concept), then it would appear that evolution made the world that evolution took place in. I'm sure this has to be a strawman.
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3. Quoted by Steve Talbott, Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, New Atlantis.
The reason I single Dennett out, is exactly because this is not a 'straw man argument', i.e. he really believes it.
The Hard Problem would be solved if there really was a Scientific explanation for Color. Science has known for a hundred years that when we experience Color that certain Neurons Fire. But Science has no Explanation for the Experience that we have when those Neurons Fire. That is the Hard Problem. Saying things like Secondary Qualities and Coding Schemes explain nothing. The Hard Problem lives on.