Qualia
Since there has been a recent controversy regarding qualia on this forum, I thought I might as well make a thread on it.
The issue I have with the qualia debate is with those who try to reduce qualia to something that is not qualia. I think the primary motivation behind this move is a desire for a conservative ontology - with the advances of science, we no longer believe in ghosts, spirits, phlogiston and God...up next are abstract objects and those mysterious little things called qualia. They don't belong in the ontology of these detractors, but only because of an aesthetic reason.
Yet qualia is different from ghosts, spirits, phlogiston and God, and perhaps even abstract objects. Phlogostine was once thought to be released in chemical combustive reactions - it was a hypothetical placeholder for a phenomenon we didn't know how to explain. An unobservable that nevertheless does the ontological work, similar to how electrons are unobservable and yet do all the work we need them to do (and likely actually do exist in some sense). Phlogiston, ghosts, spirits and even God are meant to act as an explanation to something that is lacking in explanation. Even abstract objects, like universals, are unobservable in both the transcendent and immanent sense but nevertheless used to explain similarity.
Qualia is different. Qualia is what we experience. How could we possibly be wrong about this? How can something be so intimate to us and yet illusory? In order for something to be an illusion, it must appear to something in a context (a mind). Attempts to reduce or eliminate qualia to something non-qualitative is neither intuitive nor justified, and seems rather like a leap of faith based on shaky parsimonious beliefs and an irrational fear of the non-material. Qualia is seen as just one of those naive things that science will eventually dismantle in its unstoppable drive forward.
And what are the consequences of dismantling qualia? What happens to our manifest image? Does pain no longer hurt? Does red no longer look red? The absurdity of this leads me to believe that the entire project to dismantle qualia is fundamentally flawed.
Indeed incredulity is a poor argument in itself. I don't have a refined argument for what qualia is to offer an alternative view. Yet we need not have an alternative view to look skeptically upon some theories.
The issue I have with the qualia debate is with those who try to reduce qualia to something that is not qualia. I think the primary motivation behind this move is a desire for a conservative ontology - with the advances of science, we no longer believe in ghosts, spirits, phlogiston and God...up next are abstract objects and those mysterious little things called qualia. They don't belong in the ontology of these detractors, but only because of an aesthetic reason.
Yet qualia is different from ghosts, spirits, phlogiston and God, and perhaps even abstract objects. Phlogostine was once thought to be released in chemical combustive reactions - it was a hypothetical placeholder for a phenomenon we didn't know how to explain. An unobservable that nevertheless does the ontological work, similar to how electrons are unobservable and yet do all the work we need them to do (and likely actually do exist in some sense). Phlogiston, ghosts, spirits and even God are meant to act as an explanation to something that is lacking in explanation. Even abstract objects, like universals, are unobservable in both the transcendent and immanent sense but nevertheless used to explain similarity.
Qualia is different. Qualia is what we experience. How could we possibly be wrong about this? How can something be so intimate to us and yet illusory? In order for something to be an illusion, it must appear to something in a context (a mind). Attempts to reduce or eliminate qualia to something non-qualitative is neither intuitive nor justified, and seems rather like a leap of faith based on shaky parsimonious beliefs and an irrational fear of the non-material. Qualia is seen as just one of those naive things that science will eventually dismantle in its unstoppable drive forward.
And what are the consequences of dismantling qualia? What happens to our manifest image? Does pain no longer hurt? Does red no longer look red? The absurdity of this leads me to believe that the entire project to dismantle qualia is fundamentally flawed.
Indeed incredulity is a poor argument in itself. I don't have a refined argument for what qualia is to offer an alternative view. Yet we need not have an alternative view to look skeptically upon some theories.
Comments (240)
I am reading round the topic and found a nice essay by Chomsky from the 90's about language and mind, much of which is about linguistics, but some of it is about terminology. While he comes from a naturalistic perspective he was interestingly relaxed about the supposed distinction between 'mental' and 'physical' that analytics get worked up about. These are just words we use, they don't represent ontological categories. If belief and desire precipitate action, in our usual way of putting things, who is to say they are merely 'mental'? I see 'belief' and 'desire' in other people's demeanour and behaviour. Conversely, to call someone 'hot-blooded' or 'sharp-tongued' is not to refer to them by physical terms.
'Qualia' have become a bit of problematic catch-all, representing too many things to too many different people, at least that's my take on them. But then, at the moment I am much more excited in opposing the 'causal closure of the physical', which people of a natural-scientific inclination seem to presume awfully easily. They can't provide me with a forecast-successful empirical model of the little spider that keeps crawling across my desk - but say that physics is causally closed - it beggars belief. Or so I think! But I'm such an empiricist I suppose. I love science because it's empirical, getting to the bottom of all sorts of phenomena, and hate it when people try and impose Big Theories on me with evidence that's a chain of a thousand inferences from the actual phenomenon I'm experiencing.
I suppose, lastly, that's why one would want to hang on to qualia: because they represent feelings we have that Big Science with its Big Theories seems to be trampling out of existence. Perhaps I should be at the barricades for them after all, but 'in the literature' they have been rather misused to mean all sorts of things, so I don't know if there's a way of hauling them back in.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~abailey/Resources/levine.pdf
I don't think anyone denies that pain hurts or thinks that science will someday explain it away. Instead, the objection is that the term lacks a meaningful referent or useful function, similar to the older notion of "sense-data" in perception. Our experiences have a qualitative nature. It doesn't follow that qualia is a thing or that we experience qualia.
Yeah, I have never quite understood either (a) the desire to eliminate (the idea of) qualia, (b) the notion that there's anything mysterious about qualia. Both sides of that have always seemed ridiculous to me.
Qualitative/qualities/qualia are just the properties of something (with "qualia" being reserved for a specific context, of course). So how would how you feel and think and act ever not be qualitative?
Quoting mcdoodle
I'm a physicalist. My physicalism has nothing to do with subservience or deferment to the scientific discipline of physics, and as an ontological stance, it is in no way dictated by epistemic abilities, psychological satisfaction, social conventions, etc. with respect to empirical models/"explanations," etc.
Consider a faulty scientist and a faulty robot. The scientist is an expert in light, but was born with a rare condition affecting her optic nerve, that makes it unable to transmit blue light signals. The robot has a loose wire, so it too is unable to transmit blue light signals from its camera. The scientist is fixed by a doctor, and the robot is fixed by an engineer.
So, what has changed? Both the robot and the scientist can now recognise blue and are able to use that recognition to perform certain tasks. Both the robot and scientist experience blue.
But, only the scientist now *knows* what it is like to experience blue, the robot does not. There are also a couple of curious aspects of this experience that she notices - she, despite her extensive knowledge, could not predict what the experience was going to be like, and she can't describe it either.
Only the scientist possesses the quale of blue.
It seems a bit easy just to deny qualia exist, rather than recognise there is a potentially deep philosophical problem to solve.
Re the science predicting what the experience would be like, propositional knowledge simply isn't identical to experiences. It's not identical to anything else that's not (the same) propositional knowledge.
But where is the "terminus"? Both robot and scientist are being affected by blue light - i.e. some atoms are being affected.
We know, via computational universality, that consciousness *cannot* be a peculiarity of an exact state of matter.
Also, depending on how you define consciousness, there exist conscious entities that don't possess qualia - e.g. all non-human animals.
The fact remains that qualia are unpredictable and indescribable - very odd indeed!
I wrote this a while ago in a similar thread I started: "Is "mind is an illusion" a legitimate position in Philosophy of Mind?"
Here is what I wrote: Here's the thing, even if consciousness is mirage-like, this mirage "exists" in some way, even if the origins of the consciousness is somehow descriptively from something else. What's funny about Dennett's position is he seems to go into painstaking detail to say he is not committing the homunculus fallacy but then does so by saying the mind is an illusion. Why? Because the illusion has to subside somewhere. Explaining the "actual" origins of the illusion, and ways in which it "we" are fooled, means that all these tricks and mirages are happening "somewhere" and that implies that there is a projector of mind where the illusion is playing out and that is the homnuclus fallacy. The illusion itself has to be accounted for as something that "feels like" it is happening.
I was just using that term as a way of denoting the phenomenon at the location of the robot's circuits and the scientist's brain.
Quoting tom
I don't think we know any such thing, especially not via "computational universality." For one, that would surely rest on a mistaken ontology of mathematics.
Quoting tom
Such a thing is not possible in my view. "Qualia" is just a term for the qualities, the properties, that is, of conscious phenomena. If an entity has consciousness, that conscious phenomena has properties.
Quoting tom
Not at all. Again, it's just the properties of conscious phenomena.
Good points, schopenhauer1
Just as we have a conscious mind, we have an unconscious one and qualia allow us to define them according to their function in specific contexts.
If we hit someone over the head and knock them out we say they are "unconscious" and to claim they are still conscious without any empirical evidence is either semantic splitting of hairs or mystical metaphysical mumbo jumbo along the lines of saying everything is consciousness. We have only so many words to choose from to define their mental state of unawareness just as we only have so many words such as "time" that describe change. Some cultures have no future tense or verbs "to be", but English speaking cultures are not among them and even they recognize change. We live, we die, we are conscious or unconscious and according to even the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction without there being a way to negate what someone calls "consciousness" its just so much gibberish.
It seems like you just didn't read my response that closely. I said, "I certainly buy that there are unconscious brain processes." So yeah, the person who is knocled out is unconscious, and their brain is still active. What I disagree with is that there's any good reason to say that those unconscious brain processes amount to mentality, so that they're having thoughts etc. just where they're not aware of them.
The most recent evidence in physics is that the brain maximizes entropy and consciousness is therefore an emergent property. Humor is another example of an apparent emergent property. Infants do not laugh or express any sense of humor for the first four months. They must first build up a pattern matching "data base" where the pattern of humor revolving around what is low in entropy, or what's missing from this picture, leaps out at them from the data just as we might assemble a table top puzzle and the picture it contains will suddenly start to leap out at us as we collect more of the Big Picture of what it looks like.
What that means is there is no clear dividing line between what is a conscious or unconscious mind any more than there is between what is humorous and what is serious because it remains context dependent upon whatever "data base" we are currently using in a given situation. Sometimes I like to joke that the brightest lights are often left on when nobody is home. What is memory and what is awareness becomes context dependent because there is no way for us to distinguish between the two ourselves.
Computational universality is a principle of physics. It has nothing to do with mathematics, or its ontology. All known laws of physics, and all future laws will respect this principle.
We know that a universal computer can be put in 1-to-1 correspondence with the human brain (or any other finite physical system).
"A black hole has no hair! Gravity without mass! Time is what prevents everything from happening at once! There is no law except the law that there is no law!" John Wheeler
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics you are wrong!" Richard Feynman
I think its existence is incontestable. It is a known fact that one's mental processes are in part directed by sub-processes of which one is not conscious (by definition) but which have a considerable bearing on one's actions and decisions. Of course such psychological issues are in some sense 'soft science' but I think the general notion of the unconscious is also supported by neurological studies as well.
That's actually a paraphrase of a fairly well-known philosophical thought experiment called Mary's Room (in that case, the color in question is red, but the idea is the same). Interestingly, Frank Jackson, who defended dualism when he originally proposed Mary's Room, later changed his mind and started to defend materialism.
I agree with this entirely.
Qualia is just a fancy word for abstraction.
Why would the robot need to experience blue in order to know what blue represents? Why couldn't it represent a 475nm wavelength of EM energy with some other symbol in it's memory and still "know" what the scientists "knows"?
We don't have qualia just to have qualia. Qualia inform us of some state-of-affairs outside of our minds. If a banana is yellow, it is ripe and ready to eat. If it is black it is rotten and not good to eat. When you say "The banana is yellow", aren't you really meaning that the banana is ripe? If the robot were to bypass it's qualia and just say, "the banana is ripe". How is that any different? Both the scientist and robot know the banana is ripe. Why would the robot need to experience yellow to know the banana is ripe? Knowledge needs to be redefined to take into account the fact that information is stored (long term memory like a hard drive) and can be accessed when similar information arrives in working memory (short term memory like RAM) in order to interpret the information in working memory. Knowing is simply the ability to interpret some bit of information using stored memory. This why I can say that "I know how to tie my shoes" even when I'm not tying my shoes, nor accessing memory with instructions on how to tie my shoes. I know how to tie my shoes even when I'm sleeping because the instructions are stored in my long term memory.
Quoting tom
I think it is anthropomorphic to claim that all non-human animals don't possess consciousness to some degree. When we share nearly 99% of our genes with chimps, what is it about that 1% that prevents the chimp from having consciousness? How do you explain how a chimp can know that when another chimp is staring in another direction, then they look in that direction too. This must mean that they can model other chimps' mental activity - that they know that other chimps have access to information that they might not until they look in the same direction.
To me, all animals with central nervous systems have consciousness to some degree. The brain is the central location where all sensory input coalesces into a whole experience of visuals, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations at once. This provides a benefit to organisms who have this system because it allows you to compare the information from one sense to another in real time. You can discern more detail about things, and make less mistakes, with more senses accessing it. When you see someone from behind and you mistake them for someone you know until you hear them speak, is an example. The key difference between humans and other animals is that humans seem to have acquired this mental ability to turn their mental processing back on itself - of thinking about thinking - of thinking about themselves doing the thinking - to reflect on the process itself rather than just be the process.
What would that even mean? (And physics research on brains?) Maybe if you'd link to the research you have in mind, it would make more sense than your attempted paraphrasing of it.
Anyway, nothing you said after that in any way implies (and it doesn't even seem to have the slightest bit to do with) the idea of mental content that we're not aware of.
So it's not part of computability theory, which is a branch of mathematical logic?
Physics describes the fundamental relationships between anything observable and, for example, they've also shown how quantum mechanics applies to the brain.
The brain maximizing entropy means its organized to produce the lowest possible energy state of the system. Two pendulum clocks hung on the same wall will coerce one another to swing in unison by vibrating the wall, thus, producing the lowest possible energy state of the system. Its analogous to a car engine idling which can then leap the fastest into a higher energy state, while going from a higher energy state down to a lower one takes more time. My own belief is it reflects the original impetus of the Big Bang still expanding and means the human brain is actually a creative engine that only incidentally happens to resemble a computer simply because its another way to be creative.
Among countless other things, this would explain why the human brain capacity is estimated to be over a petabyte, or the equivalent of the entire worldwide web, yet human memory is notoriously fallible. What it also implies is there is no clear way to distinguish between the human mind and brain because they form the particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics and are indivisible complimentary-opposites. Already neurologists have shown that at their most fundamental level of organization the two can substitute for each other roles providing better error correction and greater efficiency. The current suspicion among many is that the architecture of the mind-brain describes how the fundamental laws of nature are organized possibly due to supersymmetry applying to everything.
I'm calling bs on you, wuliheron. Let's see a reference to one of the studies you're talking about.
Here's what you claimed:
"The most recent evidence in physics is that the brain maximizes entropy"
I'm saying that's b.s..
There's an easy way to show that I'm wrong, to establish that it's not b.s.--how? Well, simply reference a study done under the rubric of physics that claims that "the brain 'maximizes entropy.'"
Re very non-specifically mentioning Penrose, for example, I'd guess that you're referring to [I]The Emperor's New Mind[/i]. I read that, though quite some time ago, so I don't recall anything Penrose said in it about entropy, but at any rate that's a popular work that doesn't count as any sort of research, and it's especially not physics research.
[quote=Tom]The curious case of the robot and the scientist.
Consider a faulty scientist and a faulty robot. The scientist is an expert in light, but was born with a rare condition affecting her optic nerve, that makes it unable to transmit blue light signals. The robot has a loose wire, so it too is unable to transmit blue light signals from its camera. The scientist is fixed by a doctor, and the robot is fixed by an engineer.
So, what has changed? Both the robot and the scientist can now recognise blue and are able to use that recognition to perform certain tasks. Both the robot and scientist experience blue.
But, only the scientist now *knows* what it is like to experience blue, the robot does not. [/quote]
I think this is quite misleading, there is a confusion about what we are denoting with the word "blue".
There are two possibilities:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/oct/18/consciousness-is-tied-to-entropy-say-researchers
These results are similar to the recent simulation of a Mott Transition which indicated that the Big Bang was cooked neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. That contradicts the classical mathematics which quantum mechanics are formulated in, but indicates the brain is organized around both content and what's missing from this picture. For example, the visual centers have proven to be organized around what's missing from this picture.
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html
Those are just the first two best websites I could find in 30 seconds. I offer free lessons in how to use a dictionary and search engine before possibly inserting your foot into your mouth.
The particulars of Penrose's theory never impressed me much, he's just too metaphysically oriented in his approach if you ask me and quantum mechanics have proven to be metaphorical. However, he consulted neurologists to figure out where quantum mechanics might be in the brain. My own suspicion is that a universal recursion in the law of identity is what we are observing and what is consciousness or awareness and knowledge or memories are indivisible complimentary-opposites with their identities inevitably going down the nearest convenient rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference.
Among other things it would explain why both our neurons and a black hole convey any mass, energy, and information with the highest efficiency for anything their size. It would also mean everything that exists can be described using a simple systems logic as revolving around what does not exist. Similar to some of the newer quantum Field Theory ideas, but can reconcile thermodynamics with Relativity and quantum mechanics using a distinctly contextual or metaphorical approach that leverages the symmetry.
The actual paper is "Towards a statistical mechanics of consciousness: maximization of
number of connections is associated with conscious awareness" by R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg and J.L. Perez Velazquez
You can read it here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.00821v1.pdf
Is the paper a physics study? Not really. The authors' professional affiliations are:
* Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS and Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
* Neuroscience and Mental Health Programme, Division of Neurology, Hospital for Sick Children.
* Institute of Medical Science and Department of Paediatrics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
* Krembil Neuroscience Centre, Toronto Western Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
If you had said, "Some cognitive scientists/medical researchers have claimed . . . " I wouldn't have questioned that part. They do utilize some concepts from physics in the analysis they're doing, but it's a cognitive science paper, not a physics paper.
At any rate, I'd agree that they are making a claim about "maximized entropy," although it seems to me that the conceptual assumptions they're making about order/disorder, and subsequently the application of the term "entropy," as well as the actual empirical phenomena they're analyzing to make their claim--oscillations from MEG/iEEG/EEG recordings, not to mention the analysis that they're employing, is quite ridiculous.
The other paper, "Consciousness in the universe: a review of the 'Orch OR' theory," by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, isn't about entropy.
And again note that Hameroff's professional affiliation is this:
Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson,
That's also not really an empirical research paper.
What would you say the difference is? Are you referring to reasoning with "high level consciousness" maybe?
For example if someone is in deep sleep (possibly drug induced) or is in a coma I would say he has a far lower level of consciousness than if he is awake and the brain is working at full potential.
Why would you believe that people are conscious while in a coma?
Anyway, I would agree that there's a difference between consciousness, when present, while asleep and while awake, although it seems to be more of a qualitative difference.
In a universal recursion of the law of identity it would display four fold supersymmetry vanishing into indeterminacy. Pattern matching ruling the universe would mean there are possibly four rudimentary types of consciousness with autism possibly being one. Everything can be described as both social and creative in distinctive ways with a recent study indicating that our immune system seems to play a huge role in how our brain functions and how social we are in general. It should also be able to explain how quorum sensing works.
I would believe it with a certain specific connotation of the word "conscious", check these:
You're joking, right?
But studies like this:
"In the 2006 study, Owen and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate if a 23-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state would respond to a series of pre-recorded spoken statements. Owen and his colleagues found that the statements produced brain activation patterns that were very similar to those observed in healthy volunteers, in regions known to be important for the processing of speech."
Only tell us about observable phenomena, while consciousness isn't actually third-person observable.
We believe that consciousness is correlated with particular observable third-person phenomena, of course, and I believe that mental states are identical to particular brain states, but we don't know, and can't know, exactly what the correlations are.
The problem with the equation of mental states and brain states is that to say that something is 'identical' is to assert equivalence, to say that 'X=Y'. Mental and logical operations, such as the law of identity, consist solely of the relationships of ideas. Ideas can be represented in any variety of media, including brain-states, but ideas themselves are not actually physical objects. So it is not possible that ideas and brain-states are the same.
No joke, it would explain why the LHC mass of the Higgs Boson suggests cosmic ray energy level experiments are required to settle the issue of supersymmetry as reflecting just how fundamental symmetry and asymmetry are in a paradox of existence or universal recursion of the law of identity. It means reality is fundamentally analog with digital logic merely representing causality. I like to say reality without dreams and vice versa is impossible. This is the logic the NSA and Google and everyone wants for designing a super Von Neumann architecture among other things.
Same planet, different karmic universe. An unusual metaphorical scalar version of John Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle where its difficult to say just who is being created and who or what is doing all the creating. Curioser and curioser.
I think the term 'qualia' attempts to designate a supposed entity which is a hypostatization of the quality of experience. I don't think we experience qualities of experience at all; we experience activities involving things and those activities have qualities. So we experience the activity of drinking beer and the beer has a taste. We don't experience the quality of the taste of the beer; we experience the taste of the beer, and we assign different qualities to the different tastes of beer. Of course, language with all its ambiguities is never going to perfectly pin this down. But I think it is out of the ambiguities of language that the idea that qualia somehow actually exist grows.
If qualia are merely an abstraction that doesn't relate to physical reality then why don't we just call them that?
Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order (1929).
So, different from abstractions because they involve experience, whereas abstractions, like mathematical laws, do not.
Then I suppose I have to suggest insanity.
Even if we decide that ideas and brain states are not the same thing.
Without brain states ideas are not possible.
Feynman said, "I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
That's an interesting citation W and seems to be pretty much in accord with my own thinking about qualia.
Thank you.
What do you see as the relevance of the Feynman quote--that your brilliance is being too easily dismissed?
I think what you're thinking is that you can provide an account of ideas with reference to brain-states - but what is 'an idea'?
You might say it is something that can only exist 'in a mind' or 'in a brain'. But if you take the primitives of mathematics and geometry - natural numbers and geometrical forms and theorems - these are able to be discovered by any mind, so they're not in the mind, in the sense of being the product of brain-states. They are only perceptible by a mind, but they are not created by the mind; any mind that perceives that A=A, will be perceiving the same thing.
H. sapiens has evolved to the point where such things as numbers and forms can be recognized by them, but they're not the originators of those things, nor can they be feasibly described in terms of neurology, in my view. That is simply the wish to provide an account for mental activities in terms that are explicable by neuroscience. It all goes back to one of the fundamental materialist dogmas, that 'the brain secretes thought'. I think, however, it can be shown that thought (in the sense of ideas, as defined above) are of a different order to the kinds of things that neurology can be expected to explain.
An A is a symbol for a distinct object from anything which is Not A.
In order for A to equal A it must also be true that Not A is never equal to A.
This to me simply means that at some fundamental physical level distinct points in space are real.
I can not grasp the notion of forming such notions of distinct abstract identities, like A, were it not true in a physical reality that no such distinction could be drawn.
To my mind at a fundamental level it must be physically possible to draw distinction else it would not be possible to form such distinction in the abstract.
I can make no sense of the notion that the possibility for forming relationships between distinct objects is possible abstractly but is not also possible in a physically real sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am a monist.
I believe it is most philosophically efficient to define reality as a single form, not separate things as with dualism or pluralism.
To me it boils down to semantic preferences.
I just think it is more philosophically tidy to define reality such that abstractions of the mind are not immaterial things.
In my mind all abstracts are made possible from possibility which is physically real.
That is to say a given set of relationships or distinctions can be drawn because such things occur in reality.
If distinctions and relationships among distinctions where not a physical possibility it makes no sense to me to say they exist exclusively in the abstract.
To my mind the abstract is founded upon the physical because if distinction and relationships could not physically occur I can make no sense of what it would mean for them to occur in the abstract.
But Dennett is an eliminative materialist, which Wittgenstein never was.
Dennett's view is that what we take to be qualia, what appears to us as first-person experience, really is the snap, crackle and pop of synapses. They can be explained as such 'without residue'. That is why he says, only half-jokingly, that humans are moist robots (and then adds 'and so what?')
I think the real motivation for Dennett (and others of his ilk) is a deep-seated fear of the un-knowability of the mind. There's an interesting quote floating around out there, by John B Watson, founder of behaviourism (in my view, the godfather of eliminativism) where he frankly states that he wishes to eliminate 'mind' from all forms of scientific discourse, because it is a relic of a superstitious past. The mind is, in my view, and I think his, irredeemably spooky, so a thorough-going objectivism can't admit its reality.
That is why Dennett is dismissive of arguments for the reality of the first-person perspective. His whole life's work is to try and demonstrate that the first-person perspective can be reduced to third-person descriptions of natural processes, with nothing left out. Which is the gist of the argument between Chalmers and Dennett.
I don't believe the distinction between the mind and the brain is necessary.
I have never seen any argument such that by force of logic we must conclude that the mind and brain are not terms indicating the exact same phenomena.
But I'm simply arguing that logic is the relationship of ideas. Logic can be represented physically, but it is not in itself physical. (And besides - what is 'physical'? That's an enormous can of worms, which the World's Largest Machine is still trying to unravel.)
I know this is very deep question, and we're not going to solve it here. But my case rests on the fact that without the ability to make rational inferences, to say 'this means that', and so on, we can't come to any conclusions about 'what the brain does', or even 'what is physical'. Logical inference, in that sense, is epistemically prior to any kind of scientific analysis - without logic you couldn't get to first base in science of any kind. So in what sense is logic 'founded on the physical? In reality, the opposite obtains: our definition or notion of the physical, is founded on logic.
We assume nowadays that science has an in-principle account of how 'the brain produces thought'. That after all is the central dogma of scientific materialism. But as the critics of materialism (e.g. Thomas Nagel in his most recent book) argue that this dogma doesn't stand up under rational scrutiny.
I think it's moot whether mind is 'a phenomena' at all, but that is another large question.
You asked why would I "think" that a person in a coma is conscious, those ones are generally considered acceptable motivations to think so. If you want to assume the radical skeptic position that wouldn't acknowledge any consciousness until you are able to feel it in first person then you are a solipsist and it doesn't make sense to consider the problem of people in a coma since even perfectly asleep people are problematic.
I think this can be confusing. When we drink beer we are not just experiencing "the activity" or "the taste OF BEER", we are instead experiencing the consequences of this activity to the human sensory apparatus, which is quite different from the consequences of the same activities to other kind of sensory apparati. The "feeling of drinking beer" of a human is different from the "feeling of drinking beer" of a horse. This is the point of the qualia: there is a mediation between the activity and the neural structure that encodes and present this activity to the "self".
First off, you're apparently using "solipsism" to refer to a belief that one can't know that anyone else has a mind. There's a problem with that. We can let the IEP explain:
Solipsism is not a view that I hold, and as explained above, that would even be the case if I believed that I can not know that anyone else has a mind. (I don't believe the latter claim, but if I did . . . )
Secondly, for some strange reason you're apparently completely ignoring the factor of others persons' first-person reports of their mental experience. I don't ignore that. I consider that, in conjunction with confirmation that they have brains functioning in particular ways, if their mentality is at all in doubt (for example, if we have reason to wonder if the person isn't maybe really a robot instead), to be sufficient evidence for others' mental phenomena.
If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that sensory apparatus of the scientist and of the robot can detect blue light, but neither is capable of transmitting that signal to their respective CPUs.
You claim that the quale of blue is "produced by the radiation", but it cannot be. It cannot even be produced by the electrical or nerve signal. You further claim that the robot cannot "experience blue", why not? It is certainly detect blue, is affected by blue, and can make decisions based on this.
Furthermore you claim that "there is no point in considering the knowledge about the light radiation". Really?
The quale, qualia being a term conventionally limited to mental contexts, is produced by the phenomena of electromagnetic radation being reflected off of an object in conjunction with the light waves traveling through the air between you and the object in conjunction with your eye being stimulated by those light waves in conjunction with your optic nerve sending that signal to your brain etc. In other words, it's the product of a "system" that includes all of those things (plus we could go back to the light source and so on).
Quoting tom
It doesn't have a brain. Mentality, which is what experience is a part of, seems to be something peculiar about the particular materials, in the particular structures, undergoing the particular processes, that comprise brains functioning in mental ways.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So why doesn't the robot possess qualia then? It has all of those features. Why don't non-human animals possess them?
And by the way, it is possible to create qualia in the human mind by direct nerve stimulation, or by use of the imagination.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Are you pretending to have invented new physics that only occurs in brains? Seems very Deepak Chopra to me. Claiming that there is "something peculiar about the particular materials" doesn't strike me as as particularly scientific.
But we know that because the human brain is computationally universal, it can be put in 1-to-1 correspondence with any other computationally universal device, so qualia cannot be a "peculiar" property of "particular materials". No new physics required!
I answered this in the post you're responding to. (I'll just assume that you answer posts as you read them rather than reading the whole thing first, then going back and responding.)
Quoting tom
Sure. I didn't describe the only system--quite obviously, as not every system is going to be a description of perceiving color qualia from external sources. Different descriptions will fit different examples. That shouldn't require explaining.
Quoting tom
It strikes you as unscientific that different materials, in different structures, undergoing different processes have different properties? Hahaha.
Quoting tom
You're the Deutsch acolyte, aren't you?
Computational universality is nonsense (well, outside of the purely formal/mathematical construction of it; that is, as it's nonsense construed as something with any broader ontological applicability), and Deutsch sucks. We could go step by step through that. Let's start with analyzing just what correspondence is re 1-to-1 correspondence.
I was replying to your objection:
My point is that this kind of objection also applies to consciousness of people that are awake with fully functioning brain.
The difference is that in the one case we're talking about people who are conscious and who can give us reports of their first-person experience. (While in the other case, if the person can talk to us at a later time, they often tell us that they had no first-person experience.)
I wanted to mean: maybe the robot can experience his own "robotic" quale of blue but it cannot experience our human quale of blue (assuming there is a unique quale of blue for every human) - that is what we could mean by the word "blue".
What I mean is that the experience of the quale is unrelated with the knowledge of the radiation.
Philosophers don't define terms like "insanity" which even psychologists don't use. Its promoted by three year old children calling each other names on the playground and by legal courts attempting to draw lines in the sand. Feynman saw the humor in quantum mechanics was related to just such attempts to define what is real and unreal, sane and insane. Without any references to object physical reality it becomes merely another abstraction, just as apparently "qualia" has become for you, where the only way to make progress is to prove yourself wrong.
But this difference is not relevant for that specific objection: "Studies like this [...] only tell us about observable phenomena, while consciousness isn't actually third-person observable". Reports of first-person experience are just other kind of "observable phenomena" for any external observer. A machine can "report personal experience" if programmed appropriately without having any, while a human can be unable to report anything (for example if he didn't learn a language) yet he could be having first-person experience.
If you don't feel that reports of first-person experience matter, that's fine. That's how you feel.
Not everyone feels the same way.
Re machines, I already anticipated and addressed that objection above (because it's as cliched as bringing up Hitler when we're talking about ethics).
We are not discussing about our personal opinion, we are discussing about arguments.
What you take to be sufficient to believe or not believe a claim can't be anything other than a personal opinion.
It seems to me that you are describing materialism there. But why do you say it is eliminative?
To say that a solid chair is really a distribution of atoms and mostly empty space does not make us eliminative about solid chairs. They are different concepts and there may also be explanatory gaps in our understanding of how the physics relates to our ordinary concept of chairs.
Similarly, a natural explanation of first-person experience does not imply a denial of our experience, including our beliefs, feelings, desires, etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
What Dennett is dismissing is the infallible authority of the first-person perspective, not the reality of first-person experience. That is, our reports of our experiences are always open to investigation and analysis and can, at least in principle, be mistaken.
This, I think, just follows from Wittgenstein's private language argument. We are reporting on our experience in the world (the apple is red, etc.), not on a private, inner world.
The term 'eliminative materialism' refers to a school of thought, of which Daniel Dennett is a prominent advocate (others including the husband and wife team of Pamela and Paul Churchlands.)
(Actually even that is not really correct - 'eliminativism' insists that the first-person experience, the subject of Descartes' 'cogito', is unreal.)
Eliminativism is a radical school of thought, in that it really does question the reality of first-person experience - not simply 'reports' about it, but the reality of it. And it is exactly in that context that the term 'qualia' is debated. It's got little to do with Wittgenstein's 'private language' argument, as I have noted, Wittgenstein was not a materialist, but Dennett is.
Here are excerpts from last section of the Wikipedia article on Dennett's book Consciousness Explained, which explicitly argues that first-person experience is unreal:
Emphasis added. You might think this is a self-refuting argument, as Searle does, and as I do, but it's better to be clear that this is what Dennett is really on about.
//edit// That's why I am claiming that Dennett and others of that school, are the direct descendants of behavioural psychologists like J B Watson and B F Skinner. They too deny the reality of mind and they too treat humans as being essentially automata or robots.
Very strange.
I find that this issue is confusing to people due to the conflation of thought and mind. Thought is a computation carried out by the brain, whereas mind is some intangible quality of being and consciousness. It appears that these eliminativists are making this conflation and by explaining thought as computation(including the subconscious thinking) which can be mimicked by computers and robots, they ignore the intangible nature of mind on the assumption that it is simply a product of a certain complexity of that same computation.
So, whilst I agree that 'mind is intangible', if you were challenged to show why you believe there is an intangible thing called 'mind', I think you would find it quite difficult to demonstrate. Dennett would have no trouble showing you that what you take 'mind' to be, can be accounted for in his terms. You might intuitively feel that he's not correct, but actually showing why he's wrong is not so easy. He would say 'the reason we ignore the so-called "intangible quality" you're referring to, is because it isn't real'. And I think that you would find it quite difficult to persuade him that it was!
By way of background, have a look at this long read.
— René Descartes
Discourse on Method in Discourse on Method and Related Writings (1637), trans. Desmond M. Clarke, Penguin
1637!
Andrew was saying that what you describe there is just materialism. It's not eliminativist.
For example, I'm a physicalist/"materialist," but not an eliminaltivist. My view is that qualia and first-person experiences are really "the snap, crackle and pop of synapses." That denotes materialism, but it's not sufficient to denote eliminativism.
Now I say, there is no way to show that this "equals" is a material process. There's nothing in physics itself that comes even close to providing that. And whatever conclusions you want to draw about, or from, neuoroscience, relies on your ability to argue that this means that (and so on). And that process is, I say, purely the relationship of ideas, there is nothing physical about it.
What does any of that have to do with whether "what we take to be qualia, what appears to us as first-person experience, really is the snap, crackle and pop of synapses" is sufficient to count as eliminative materialism rather than just materialism in a broader sense (of which eliminative materialism is a subspecies)?
(a) I don't buy that there is anything that isn't a particular. I'm a nominalist.
(a1) Obviously, nominalists disagree that thinking can't obtain under nominalism.
(b) I don't buy that there are real abstract objects.
(c) I don't buy that there are universal truths.
(d) The idea that one has to embrace anti-materialism to explain thinking is false on my view; and in fact, the very notion of nonphysical existents is incoherent on my view.
(e) I don't know who he was referring to re associating thinking with simple "rule-following," but that's not my view or the view of anyone I'm familiar with (that I recall at least).
(f) Re the argument based on knowledge being an "infallible state," the idea that knowledge is an "infallible state" is nonsense in the first place.
(g) Re "to conflate knowledge and belief"--what is he talking about? Standardly, knowledge is justified true belief (sans Gettier objections). That's not a conflation, that's the received view of what knowledge is, and it goes all the way back to Plato. I suppose he's saying that it isn't just belief (he should make that explicit, though). But justified true belief is still belief, and it's fallible.
Re your comments by the way, no one is saying that equality is a process (of any sort, physical or nonphysical). It's a relation; namely, the relation of identity. I'd not be able to make any sense out of saying that the identity relation of the morning star to the evening star isn't physical. (Although, of course, a fortiori I can't make sense out of saying that anything is nonphysical, since the notion of nonphysical <
That's I meant by 'awkwardly worded on my part'. What I'm saying is that relations of identity i.e. that 'neural events' are the same as 'the act of thinking', relies on or is an abstraction. Logic itself relies on abstraction. It immaterial whether you buy it, you need to refute it.
This is fundamental to the whole argument about mind and matter.
First, that it's identical isn't a statement of logic or anything like that. It's an ontological fact.
Re logic relying on abstraction, sure--I'd agree with that. But we'd disagree on what such abstractions are. In my view they're particular brain states.
You can't get outside abstractions and logic, and look at them 'from the outside'. They are always internal to the act of thinking, and therefore prior to whatever inferences you wish to make. And they are basic to science itself.
So whatever answers you find in analysing the data, must assume what they set out to prove - which is the exact meaning of 'question-begging'.
Dennett, unlike eliminative materialists, generally accepts our ordinary common-sense mental terms which he describes as the "intentional stance". What he rejects is any epiphenomenal or radically-private instantiation of those terms. Here's Dennett in "Quining Qualia":
Note that he explicitly accepts the reality of conscious experience. Instead, what he goes on to reject is the idea of private phenomena as an object or property of conscious experience, namely qualia.
Quoting Wayfarer
Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness as the above "Quining Qualia" quote makes clear. Contra Searle, Dennett rejects a first-person/third-person phenomenal distinction. Instead the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have - exhibit behaviorally.
Per Wittgenstein's private language argument, we can only describe our experiences in publicly-accessible language. That does not imply that the language only refers to the behavior (which Wittgenstein's critics accused him of). It instead refers to the first-person experience which is not separable from the behavior. There is no private qualia property that could, even in principle, be switched on or off.
Rejecting the qualitiative difference between the first and third person perspective is the nub of the entire debate. Denett grants that first-person experience has properties, but he denies that they're intrinsic, he denies that there is anything that can't be explained in third-person terms. They appear real, but are not intrinsically real.
Qualia are not objects of consciousness, or objects of experience, but elements of experience. Or, put another way, experience has a qualitative dimension, which is expressed (clumsily) as 'what-it-is-like' to be something. That qualitative dimension of experience, is not an object of consciousness, which is why a materialist philosophy of any type must say that it can be accounted for in third-person terms.
Denett's philosophy simply exploits this epistemological blind spot to say that there is really no subject of experience at all, that the experience of subjectivity is an artifact of 'folk psychology' that has no objective reality (which in one sense is true - hence the ability to "exploit" the blind spot). Dennett is no bar-room philosopher, and he develops his arguments with considerable sophistication, but that is the nub of it, and why John Searle, Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and others, all say that he is actually ignoring the nature of consciousness, rather than explaining it.
But as it concerns this 'epistemological blind spot' it is the kind of argument that can't be won - it requires an actual change in perspective, something like a gestalt shift, because it really amounts to philosophising on the basis of a kind of cognitive deficiency.
It's all tied back to Dennett's atheism and his belief that Darwin 'is the greatest thinker in history'. Denett's belief is that life is 'an algorithm' which develops from a complex chemical reaction, and then unfolds according to neo-Darwinian logic; and that organic molecules are the source of all intentional action and consciousness in the Universe:
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3.
So, of course, humans are not actually persons or free agents - they are 'moist robots' who are simply following the algorithm which is encoded in their genetic program in order to propogate. Dennett routinely throws that line out, as if to shock, and then says: so what's the problem?
John Searle called Dennett's philosophy a form of intellectual pathology.
Which isn't a problem. I'm not denying abstractions. I'm saying that they're particular brain states (namely, the brain states that amount to concepts.)
Quoting Wayfarer
You could at least hypothetically see the areas of the brain that engage when the test subject forms a concept (I say at least hypothetically because I don't know if anyone has attempted a research project for this). That would be seeing an abstraction, as that's what abstractions are.
Quoting Wayfarer
Empirical claims are not provable, period.
Surely he thinks that they can exhibit behaviorally, or that they're just the sorts of things that sometimes do exhibit behaviorally, no?
Although if there's a difference between what does exhibit behaviorally and what doesn't but could (and what nevertheless occurs while not exihibiting behaviorally), it would seem that one can't actually identify the "intentional stance" as what exhibits behaviorally.
You continually claim that materialists philosophers must come to such and such conclusion, where that flies in the face of the fact that I'm a materialist philosopher who hasn't come to that conclusion.
What makes the difference here is my "perspectivalism" or "reference-pointism." For ALL phenomena, x at reference point A is different than x at reference point B; that is, at least some properties of x are different at A and B. And everything is from some reference point. (Also, combination of reference points are just another reference point--"point" is not being used in a literal, mathematical sense.)
First person and third person are different reference points (obviously).
So qualia from one reference point will not have the same properties as qualia from a different reference point.
How would you define "object"/"object of experience" here?
I've been arguing that to equate a 'brain state' with a concept, requires conceptual analysis, and so must involve a circular argument. You can't say what a brain state is, without relying on concepts, so to say that a brain state is an explanation of a concept, involves a circularity. I don't think you've got that.
In an interview, Dennett says:
The fact that Dennett can ask this question clearly indicates his shortcomings. Science is not omniscient, it is not all knowing; it deals with specific questions in terms of general principles. Much of science's effectiveness is drawn from what it excludes; it excludes unnecessary factors in order to isolate the specific causal factors for specific questions and to attain certainty. This obviously has proven extraordinarily effective across all kinds of subjects. But there are many questions it doesn't deal with, many aspects of existence it doesn't encompass; those who don't understand this fact have fallen into the trap of scientism. And Daniel Dennett is well-known as an advocate of scientism and scientific reductionism.
So in regards to the rhetorical question: 'why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?': there's a very good answer to that. Science deals with objects, and humans are not objects, but subjects of experience. And, notice that this is the very thing that Daniel Dennett is obliged to deny. Why the denial of the human subject might be a problem is not something he can see. And why can't he see it? Because it's his blind spot!
Materialist philosophers must say that some material existent is the basis of reality. It used to be the atom; post relativity and quantum mechanics, it is now said to be 'matter-energy-space-time'. But whatever conclusion they come to, must assert the primacy of something that can be designated as 'material' or 'physical' (although that is nowadays a constantly-changing concept).
Naively! 'An object' is just what it sounds like - ping-pong balls, computers, cars, trees, planets, stars, to pick a random sample. Objects are just that - things that exist in the world.
Philosophically speaking - anything with which you have a relationship of 'otherness' with, i.e. something other to you, is an object of experience; anything that can be analysed or measured by the senses or by instruments is an object of experience.
Where it becomes difficult is precisely when you start to think about the reality of abstract objects, like numbers and geometrical rules. Are they really 'objects'? I say not. A numeral is an object - you can carve it out of stone - but what it signifies is purely intelligible, i.e. a relationship of quantity (although number is notoriously hard to define. That is why, for example, the Wikipedia entry on the Philosophy of Mathematics is such a large article, with many, often exclusionary, arguments.)
But the point in respect of this thread, is that 'qualia' comprise an aspect of experience - it is the experience of seeing red, tasting an orange, climbing a tree. The point about them is, that they're irreducibly first-person, so certainly not 'objects of experience' in the sense given above. Whereas those who deny that qualia are real, are saying there's nothing about 'experience' that can't be fully explained in third-person terms; that the concept of qualia is, in philosophical terminology, otiose; qualia exist, but only as an appearance, they have no inherent reality.
Now I'm saying a lot of the controversy about this point arises from the fact that the self, or the subject of experience, is never an object of experience, as per the explanation above. It is transcendental, in the sense that Kant and Husserl held, namely, a necessary condition of experience, which is not itself disclosed in experience. (There is a well-known analogy for this concept in the Upani?ads, namely, that of 'the eye that can see other things, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp things, but it cannot grasp itself'.)
So I'm arguing that self, in this sense, is something that must be excluded by materialism, or at any rate, it has to be accounted for in terms of the activities of brains, molecules, and physical forces, and so on - if there is a real subject, it defeats materialism. That attitude is what materialism or physicalism is, after all. And it appears possible to exclude the subject, because it really is nowhere 'out there'; it never is an object of experience, in the way others are, or animals are, or planets, stars, mountains, etc; it is not 'objectively existent'.
But then the issue is, you're denying the very faculty that is proposing the argument! This is the common objection to materialism - that it is self-refuting, that it denies the very faculty which makes philosophical argument possible in the first place.
Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology p144
So materialism is the attempt to 'naturalise' knowledge - to locate it or account for it in the 'domain of objects'. And I'm arguing, it isn't there - that materialism is, for this reason, radically mistaken.
Here's a forum comment on Dennett which exposes this error:
Source
If you are arguing that the self must be excluded from physicalism because physicalism can only account for things in terms of physics, then why don't you start with an easier target. Under your caricature of physicalism, it certainly cannot account for life. Physical forces are nowhere mentioned in the theory of evolution, but rather replicators subject to variation and selection.
What it's like to see red is the experience. It is hardly an aspect of itself but things that reflect or emit light.
Even if that were so, it would be about making claims as such. But that has no impact on what's the case ontologically. I'm saying that they're identical ontologically. Our claims do not matter for whether that's the case or not. It's not as if what's factually the case in the world somehow hinges on the claims we make or how well we make them, whether we make fallacious claims or not, etc.
In any event, I wasn't forwarding an argument, so the criticism that something was fallacious as an argument (specifically via circularity) doesn't even apply.
Quoting Wayfarer
But who said that it's an "explanation" of anything? I completely avoid the loaded word "explanation" except for criticizing what a mess it is whenever we try to hinge arguments on whether something is an explanation or not.
Quoting Wayfarer
If only that comment had something to do with the earlier comment of yours that sparked my comment.
So, if you're not forwarding an argument, making a claim, or explaining anything, what, in fact, are you talking about?
How about pointing towards that which is beyond experience? To that a description or explanation doesn't amount to the presence of any state, whether an object of experience or not?
I mean Terrapin hasn't got the details right, but why do you find it so absurd that someone would act as if the world is always more than descriptions and explanations? Who would be interested in trying to reduce the world to merely our experience of objects? Only those who thought our knowledge amounted to an account of everything.
But then first person experience is an object, since it exists in the world, and like everything else, it is the properties of particular matter, in particular structures, undergoing particular processes. (In my view of course.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Per the way you're defining objects, I wouldn't say that whether something is first person experience has anything to do with whether something is an object.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems like you're saying that experience (or that perhaps one's self) is something other than experience. I suppose you're positing the infamous "homunculus" here. I don't buy any of that. Talking about "experiencing one's experience" is nonsensical in my view. Experience is experience (of course).
Quoting Wayfarer
In the homunculus sense, where it's something "behind" experience, you mean? If so, good riddance. I don't think the idea of that is any less nonsensical if we parse it under dualism, by the way.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not denying a non-homunculus self that's simply awareness/consciousness etc. (In my case, at least.) It's just getting rid of the silly idea of there needing to be something different "behind" awareness, experience etc.
And by the way, remember when I said that you continually claim that materialists must think such and such, despite the fact that some of us think no such thing? You're doing that again herein assuming that we're all eliminative materialists.
Re Husserl, why are we caring what his view was? Do we have some commitment to follow suit with him for some reason?
That ontologically, concepts, qualia, abstractions etc. are identical to brain states.
That's an ontological fact. As such it doesn't matter whether we make claims about it or not. It in no way hinges our claims, etc.
Umm . . .
But it doesn't! If you were asked to point to a location for 'first person experience', where would you point? (This is fundamental to the topic. In fact it would be more accurate to say the world exists in first-person experience.)
It's something other than an object, namely 'the subject of experience'; that to which or whom experiences occur. It is precisely that which Dennett denies.
What do you mean by 'ontological'?
My claim is that materialists must think the fundamental stuff of the world is material. Don't they?
I mention Husserl because his analysis is directly relevant to this discussion, which is about philosophy of mind - not as an authority, but because he has articulated some important objections to naturalism.
Because descriptions and explanations are given by an agent. They're not self-existent.
For sure, but isn't that the point? The agent is more than any description of them. How then can we expect a description or explanation of them to be exaustive?
You say to describe or explain experiences, we need to give an exaustive account, as if knowing someone had experiences had to amount to being everything. How can we expect any knowledge to do this?
Is it not true that any instance of knowledge is less than the world? Why would we ever suppose we had to be "exaustive" to know or explain anything? To do so is to reduce the world to only our descriptions.
More to the point how can the "hard problem" function without this reductionism? If we are honest about knowledge, then we understand that it can never be "exaustive."
The "hard problem" is demanding the incoherent-- knowledge which exaustive of the subject. It is just as, if not more, reductionist as any eliminative materialist.
I am not saying that. That is what materialism is saying.
What David Chalmers says in his essay Facing Up to the Hard Problem is:
How is that 'reductionist'?
I think the debate is whether there are subjective phenomena. Everyone agrees that smelling a rose is a qualitatively different experience to seeing someone else smell a rose. However the phenomena are the same in both experiences.
Quoting Wayfarer
Dennett espouses what he calls a mild realism about mental terms. For example in "Real Patterns" he says, "I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather like centers of gravity."
I would claim that an abstraction over something physical is real, not merely apparently real.
What we think and feel may not always be noticeable in everyday observable behavior but, per materialism, there is always some material instantiation (e.g., in brain activity, particles shifting around, or some such).
Quoting Terrapin Station
The "intentional stance" is identified with the objects of experience - the actual pain, smell, belief, etc. The exhibited behavior enables us to form the relevant language concepts for those objects. But things are not always as they appear - a person might be in pain but concealing it, or a person might not be in pain but faking it.
Everything always obeys the laws of physics - even tigers must do that. But what is remarkable about these laws is that they permit abstractions that are real and causal. The Schrödinger equation is completely uninformative if you wish to explain why a person was eaten by the tiger, yet it is universal and applies to the tiger and the tiger's meal.
Life used to be a deep mystery, and no doubt there were those who maintained that it could not be explained physically. But then a theory at the correct level of emergence was discovered, which not only explains life, bit explains it rather simply as a phenomenon of replicators subject to variation and selection.Life must obey the laws of physics just like everything else, but these laws appear nowhere in its explanation.
The claim that consciousness or qualia cannot be addressed from the physicalist perspective, is the claim that no theory of them, at the appropriate level of emergence, is possible. i.e. The problem of qualia is insoluble and not amenable to reason.
As one who was accused before of presenting a 'caricature of physicalism', I have to take issue with this statement. First, I think it is a reference to David Deutsch's so called 'constructor theorem', which is not actually a predictive scientific theory at all, but sleight-of-hand pop metaphysics based on questionable interpretations of quantum physics.
Secondly, the conundrums that have been thrown up by physics about the nature of matter have given rise to all manner of metaphysical speculation, such as those proposed by David Deutsch and also by Max Tegmark, comprising the idea of infinitely many parallel universes. And these extravagent speculations are based on nothing more than the difficulties of explaining what is seen in experiments involving sub-atomic particles (so called). There's nothing in any of that which comes close to addressing the physical issues involved in the origination of DNA, as such.
So how it can now be declared that 'the mysteries of life' have been 'solved', when the purported 'simplest components in the Universe' turn out to require the inference of infinite parallel dimensions? When there are so many vast unanswered questions in fundamental physics and cosmology? As if this has all been solved, as if we know what there is to know. Remember well Lord Kelvin's famous prediction, that 'the details have all been worked out, now it's just a matter of decimal places'.
Except for the Michelson Morley experiment.
Correction - not amenable to objectification.
Be honest, you haven't read a single Constructor Theory paper. And no, it's a reference to the theory of evolution, maybe you've heard of it?
Quoting Wayfarer
The good old bait-and-switch.
We don't know the historical events that gave rise to the abstractions with which the theory of life operates. But once we have digital information, error correction, replication under variation and selection, we have life, according to the theory of evolution. (Though admittedly, digital information and error correction are "pop-metaphysical sleights of hand" introduced by Constructor Theory)
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you offering your conceptual difficulties with quantum mechanics as an argument against evolution in particular, or theories at the appropriate level of emergence in general?
Right, so then we couldn't say that the intentional stance is the same thing as what exhibits behaviorally.
For the non-eliminativists about mind, mind is an abstraction over matter. People are capable of shifting particles around. They can change the world or change their minds.
No. We are interested in what the person is really experiencing, not what they appear to be experiencing.
There's not a difference in my opinion.
There can be a difference in what's really going on that is causing whatever experience they're having, but that's a difference in that case between some events that aren't experience and the experience a person is having.
Sure, say that you're experiencing the walls melting. Well, that's both what you appear to be experiencing and what you're really experiencing, since there's no difference.
However, what's really going on that caused that experience might be that you took some LSD. But that you took some LSD and it's having the effect of making you see the walls melt isn't what you're experiencing when you experience the walls melting. (Earlier, of course, you surely experienced taking some LSD (well, unless it was given to you surreptitiously).)
The point here was to explain in which sense we can talk about different degrees of consciousness. One way of seeing it was to consider different "states" of the brain: it doesn't really matter if you take a coma to have a degree of consciousness or not, the point is that there is a wide range of possible mental states between being in a coma and fully aware.
Another reason to make a distinction between different degrees of consciousness is to consider the evolution from our monocellular ancestor to contemporary human beings: would you say that there is a precise point in this line of evolution where consciousness appears abruptly? Or would you think that consciousness evolves throught seveal steps?
Damasio for example identifies three main levels of consciousness.
I went to Deutsch's site, viewed the videos, read the abstracts, googled discussion of the topic. There is not much discussion. I have also read about Deutsch's first book, Fabric of Reality. My feeling is that Deutsch is highly overrated as a philosopher, regardless of his scientific contributions.
You're much more inclined to condescension than debate. Yes, of course I have 'heard of evolution', and no, I am not an ID advocate. (But from the perspective of evolutionary materialism, anyone who questions the mainstream view has thrown in their lot with ID - that is exactly what Thomas Nagel was accused of, despite his declaration of atheism. That is because evolutionary materialism is monistic, like the religion it evolved from. )
In any case, what I was taking issue with was this statement:
I don't think that any such theory has been established. The only idea that sounds like it comes from the video on the Deutsch site by one of his associates, which puportedly applies 'constructor theory' to evolution, which is what I think you're talking about here.
Regarding 'my conceptual difficulties with quantum mechanics', I don't have any particular to me. The interpretation of quantum mechanics is a highly vexing issue, which is giving rise to enormous debates. Papering it over with pop philosophy doesn't change that fact. My point is, the nature of matter is still an open question, let alone the nature of life.
But is mind reducible to matter?
I'm fine with their being different "levels" of consciousness. I just don't see a good reason to buy that one level features the subject with no awareness of consciousness.
Because Charmers is acting like our experience are reduced that particular idea of "experience." The premise of the "hard problem" relies on this reductionism. Materialism is strawmanned with the accusation they claim exhaustive account account of subjects.
If I say, for example, that conscious states are caused by objects in the world, "the hard problem" will accuse me of not guessing enough description because my account is not exhaustive. But that was never my argument. I know what I'm saying is not exhaustive of a subject. I'm only talking about one minuscule part of the world and its subjects, that some conscious states have been caused by the body.
How can anyone expect this to exhaustive? The entire point is that it is not. To know states of the body and states of experience cause hardly says anything about a subject, let alone amounts to the Being of the subject (and so would qualify as an "exhaustive account").
And, when some alludes this (as Terrapin did, when saying there was no "exhaustive account" to give), the proponents of the "hard problem" complain an exhaustive account must be given, else subjects and their thoughts can exist. As if subjects were nothing more than an experience of our knowledge.
"The hard problem" accuses knowledge of consciousness and body of a failure it never commits. It says the materialist needs to give and "exhaustive account" when no materialist was ever claiming to do so. Not even the (mistaken) eliminative materialist makes such a claim. To say we know bodies cause states of consciousness (whether in a reductionist manner or not) is not to claim exhaustive knowledge of subjects. It's only say we know that bodies have sometimes caused states of consciousness.
Only to the reductionist who doesn't take subjects seriously.
Objects aren't just things which exist in the world. They are things someone is (or might be) aware of in experience.
But it's never the whole story. Any "object" I might experience is also more than my experience. A ping pong ball, a computer, a car, a tree, a planet, a star, a human arm or a memory of what someone had for breakfast are all subjects. They all more than anyone's experience of them. My experience of my hand is not my hand. The sight of my eye in the mirror is not my eye. The thought of what I did yesterday is not what I did yesterday. Our experiences are not the only states which always extend beyond experience of them. It's true of any state.
OK, but you're using the word "experience" in a subjective sense here. In its objective sense ("practical contact with and observation of facts and events"), you're experiencing an hallucination.
When you report that you saw the walls melt, we can take the context into account to figure out what you mean. If it is really thought that you're making an objective claim, then we can go and check the walls.
No. Mind and matter belong to different categories and to suppose that mind reduces to matter is a category mistake. Mind is not matter. Instead, mind is an abstraction over matter.
Gilbert Ryle gives an example of this mistake in "The Concept of Mind":
I wouldn't say there is a non-subjective sense of experience. You could just use it to denote "events happening to a person" I suppose, but once you introduce observation as you did above, you're in the realm of subjectivity, not objectivity.
Since we've covered hallucinations and mistakes, we might as well cover illusions as well! When there is a straight stick partially submerged in water that looks bent, we're not seeing a bent stick, we're seeing a straight stick that appears bent. There is no need to invoke qualia or sense-data to explain the experience.
Subjectivity is a domain in the realm of objectivity.
Thankyou - that is an instructive example. I found this summary on Wikipedia:
That underlined sentence is the basis for Dennett's 'intentional stance' argument (and as noted, Dennett was a student of Ryle's.)
But I take issue with this argument, on the grounds that it rests on Ryle's interpretation of the meaning of the term 'substance'. I don't think that Cartesian dualism does posit 'an immaterial substance' in the way that Ryle's argument depicts it (although to be fair, Descartes' concept of mind easily lends itself to such a misrepresentation.)
As I have said throughout this thread I agree that mind is not an object. But I think the notion of 'immaterial substance' is mistaken, and so the criticism of 'mind' based on such a depiction is also mistaken; and furthermore I disagree that this means that intentional agents can be regarded as simply 'bundles of dispositions'. That is essentially the same kind of argument, advanced on the same grounds, as the behaviouralist arguments of Watson, Skinner and others. (Dennett does acknowledge that he is a type of behaviourist).
Now as for your description of mind as 'an abstraction over matter' - what do you propose that means?
[quote=TheWillowOfDarkness"]Because Charmers is acting like our experience are reduced that particular idea of "experience." The premise of the "hard problem" relies on this reductionism. Materialism is strawmanned with the accusation they claim exhaustive account account of subjects.[/quote]
What you're claiming is a 'straw-man' is exactly the claim that is at issue.
Usually when a materialist says that matter exists or is real, she means that matter exists or is real independently of all and any thoughts about it, that is, that matter is not a mere abstraction. If mind exists or is real independently of all and any thoughts about it, then it must be something more than a mere abstraction, no?
So does mind exist, or is it real, or not? And if it does exist or is real, then how? The same question may also be asked about the self.
What would you think it would happen to the pehonomenal experience, to the self and/or to the consciousness when there is no "awareness of consciousness"? Would it stop its existence? Is consciousness something that can pop in and out from existence to non-existence and vice-versa, unlike matter-energy? Or is there a mental/phenomenal substance that can become conscious or inconscious? How would we call this substance?
Wait, you're making objects into subjects, or vise versa, which is the case? A subject is an aspect of your experience, how an object appears within your mind, as a subject. What justifies your assumption that a subject is an object, or that an object is a subject?. Surely an object is not necessarily a subject, as there are unknown objects. And a subject is not necessarily an object as there are fictions. So your conflation of these two is mistaken.
Says th expert in "sleight-of-hand pop metaphysics".
Quoting Wayfarer
The theory is called The Theory of Evolution.
Quoting Wayfarer
Um,, well, since life is not reducible to matter, which has been pointed out to you several times, how could anything at a higher level of abstraction such as a mind. So, the answer is NO!
As a matter of note, no theory at the appropriate level of abstraction is reducible.
That's right, minds are not conscious, human beings are. Mind is the category that mental terms belong to just as matter is the category that physical terms belong to. In ordinary usage, we say we have minds (we have beliefs, purposes, desires), change our minds (revise our opinions), make up our minds (make decisions and choices) and so on. In Aristotelian terms, man is the rational animal.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ryle uses the phrase "ghost in the machine" to characterize Descartes' mind-body dualism. Whether substance or property dualism, the idea of a division between subjective and objective phenomena persists. But rejecting dualism doesn't mean resigning oneself to the machine half of the bargain. It means bringing the ghost out into the light of day as full-blooded objective phenomena.
This means that feelings, pains, desires, beliefs, etc. become things that we can observe in others as well as ourselves. This is the intentional stance. As an added bonus, the problem of other minds is dissolved.
When we recognize that people have intentionality, we have abstracted over the matter that their bodies are made of. They are not merely machines, nor ghosts in machines, but human beings.
That's right, matter, minds and selves are real independent of whether anyone ever forms the abstractions. But we need to form the abstractions if we want to talk about those things.
OK, but when you say " mind is an abstraction over matter." it makes it look as though you are asserting that matter is more than a mere abstraction but that mind is not. If mind is not a mere abstraction, and it is not reducible to matter, then that seems to leave the question as to what it is unanswered.
Why do you think that Dennett has latched onto that phrase 'moist robots' to describe humans, then?
I don't buy that. All human beings are conscious, but not all human beings have the same mental attributes or abilities. That is simply behaviourist sloganeering.
A mind. An existing state that is a mind. Not a brain or body, but the states which are the existence of instances of awareness and thinking.
Abstraction is just our representation and discourse. Any time something is thought about, we are using an abstraction of what we know. My thought of a hand is not a hand. It's my thought. I've abstracted the hand-- what is not the hand expresses a meaning of the hand.
I'm saying all objects are subjects. The inability of our knowledge to be "exaustive" is only restricted to people or experience, it's true of every state if the world. There is no state which is also the experience of that state. To be an object, a state which may be experienced, can only entail being more than an object, else existence (thing-in-itself) is reduced to our experience (our representation of a thing).
So any unknown object must also be an unknown subject-- any unknown thing, like anything, is more than any representation of it. When I talk about an unknown object, I speaking about something which is more than my experience of not being aware of something.
I'm not conflating the subject and object (i.e. object=subject). The point is that any state must be an object AND a subject. Fictional entities aren't an issue because they don't exist. They.aren't a state of the world. (unless we are talking within the context of their fictional world, in which case they are both subject and object).
This seems to be an obvious truistic definition of mind. I am trying to find out what the materialist thinks mind is if he wants to say both that mind is real and that it is not reducible to matter. I am not asking to be schooled in the bleeding obvious such as "my thought of a hand is not a hand". I'm asking for answers that justify materialist doctrines and you're not really saying anything, you're just regurgitating platitudes.
I know... but that's exactly the issue. For the materialist is interested in the mind being material. As a non-reductuve materialist, the point is the mind is a thing in-itself, a state of the world which is a mind. That obvious truism is what the materialist is seeking to say-- the mind is a state of the world, not some "mystery" or "magical woo" or "distant realm without relation to anything else." To be real (existing) and not reducable to matter (not any of those empirical forms we experience) is exactly this obvious truism.
Even the reductive materialist is attempting this. Why do they equate the mind with the brain? Well, they are trying to point out minds are states of the world, bound up with all other interacting objects and subjects. The reductive materialist just accepts the dualist myth that minds experiences cannot be states themselves, so they resort to reductionism to try and grasp the worldliness of minds. Since minds themselves cannot exist (as per substance dualism), they must be an "illusion" with something else really going on (brains).
I'm not dealing in platitudes here. My argument is asking that we take the existence of minds seriously, that we understand that minds exist, rather than trying to say they are given by something else.
I don't see the logic here at all. Why does being an object entail being more than an object? Why must a thing be more than what it is?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Since a subject is an article apprehended to be discussed or otherwise dealt with, it is overtly contradictory to speak of an unknown subject. That's nonsense.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't see how you can believe this. A fictional thing is clearly a subject, that is why we can talk about unicorns and things like that, they are subjects. By what principle do you assert that such subjects are also objects? That they are not objects is the reason why we say that they are fictional.
I'm still trying to understand what it could possibly mean to be a "non-reductive materialist". if the mind is not reducible to material, then "states of the world" surely are not either. So states of the world are not material (otherwise they would be reducible to the material) yet states of the world are obviously not merely thoughts about states of the world either. It seems to me, then, that the non-reductive materialist cannot really be a materialist in any ordinary, or even in any coherent, sense at all.
As to whether the mind is a mystery; isn't it a mystery if we don't, or especially if we cannot, understand what it is? And isn't the world itself a mystery in this sense? As to "magical woo": isn't that just a meaningless fashionable derogatory catchcry? Or else explain to me what exactly you think it is.
What does your ping-pong ball say to that?
@Tom - I am more than familiar with the theory of evolution, but I don't accept it is the all-powerful explanatory theory you make it out to be. It is primarily a biological theory about the origination of species, and so what it says about the nature of mind must always view the question through a biological perspective. And when that is applied to philosophy of mind, the result is 'biological reductionism', of which Daniel Dennett is a world-famous exponent.
For sure, I don't know. I haven't heard it say anything to me, but then I may not know everything about the ping pong ball. It might be screaming out to me in some language I do not understand. Perhaps part of sound of the paddle hitting the ball is a crying for me to stop.
But that sort of a little beside my point. A subject is defined by being more than experience of it. It's not a question of consciousness, sapience, sentience or communication. Anything that's more than an experience of it is a subject, concious or not.
That's funny, because the meaning of 'subject' that is alternative to "aware experiencer" or "conscious agent" is something along the lines of "area of discourse"; and under this definition the subject is precisely what we can talk about.
I know just how it feels. :’(
:D X-) >:)
Of course, come to think about it, conversely Willow knows just how it feels as well.
It more or less the opposite. A subject is what is NOT discourse. That which is more than any experience. Existence (thing-in-itself) which is never any representation (experiences).
Talking about it isn't a problem. In talking about the what's more than experience, we aren't claiming our discourse as the thing-in-itself. Subjects are still so regardless of whether we talk about them or they speak to us.
It sounds to me like you are claiming 'noumenon' and 'subject' are synonymous. I can actually see some logic to this idea, but I doubt it is the logic you would acknowledge. Still, this seems to be a very eccentric use of 'subject'.
If you make up your own unconventional meanings of terms, then you have the advantage that you can always disagree with everyone no matter what they say, and with the advantage that they will never be able to work out exactly why you disagree; a fact which renders your position inviolable.
Depends, there's a whole school of thought which uses the "noumenon" as an excuse to say we don't reallu know anything, as if our experiences not being the thing-in-itself meant we don't really know the thing. To this, I would object in the strongest possible terms. It's substance dualism or "magical woo (in a wider sense, I take this to mean: "presence, force, state or action outside the world" )," where our experiences are considered of a seperate realm and having nothing to do with what exists.
As a distinction between existence and representation though, it works perfectly. What is,at stake is not knowledge, but the role of knowledge in existence..
The distinction means representation or ideas cannot form existence. No state can be dependent on experience because that amounts to reducing an object to its representation.
No matter how accurate a representation (e.g. "Willow is a poster on ThePhilosophyForum"), it's not enough to define existence. Experiences cannot give existence. No matter what is know, it takes more than that idea to form existence.
Recognising subjects is sort of the ultimate refutution of idealism. Idealism is a reductionism: anything I might encounter (supposedly) given by my representation. Without that experience, the state (supposedly) cannot be.
To a lot of philosophy, recognising the subject is strange indeed, for it's constituted by denying the subject-- idealists say states are given by representation, substance dualist dismiss that subjects exist, etc., etc.
For anyone other than the materialist, the subject is sort of the enemy. If the [i]rock[/I] (as opposed to "the world" ) in front of me is more than my representation, I cannot claim it depends on my representation or knowledge. For anyone who thinks discourse is the be all and end all of existence, the subject cannot be part of the world. It must be put beyond the world, either in some disconnected transcendent realm or by not having a presence at all.
You seem to want to accuse me of making up new terms which have no bearing on arguments of the past. I am not. My point always been focused on the errors of substance dualism. You appear to saying I'm using terms differently, so the positions, such as substance dualism or idealism, cannot be mistaken. As if because what I'm saying isn't really "materialist," it doesn't show that positions opposed to materialism are incoherent.
To this I say you are not paying attention to what I have argued. My initial was a statement directly opposing substance dualism: minds are states of the world, not something of another realm. You objected this was only an "obvious truism." How can this be so when a major, quite possibly the major if we go by Western philosophical canon, metaphysical postion on mind and body explicitly denies minds are part of the world?
Regardless of whether we call this postion "non-reductuve materialism" or not, it's still calling out the error of substance dualism. It's still identifying that the materialists (regardless of any errors they make) are correct to object to substance dualism putting minds outside the world.
The fact is, though, that we really do only know things, know what things are, in the context of them being experienced by us. Put another way, we only know things in their perceptual relations with us, and as they are conceptually modeled. What things are in themselves, or even whether they are anything in themselves or whether the idea of them being anything just in themselves is even coherent, we cannot know.
I can't help but notice the similarity between the first phrase 'what it was to be', and the phrase associated with the topic of qualia, namely, '"what it is like to be" something'.
All is in the world, we just don't know what the world is intellectually in abstract subjective terms, whilst we do know it and know there is nothing external to it through our bodies and living in the world.
It's quite simple - theories at the appropriate level of emergence cannot be reduced. e.g. the theory of evolution cannot be reduced to quantum field theory.
Quoting John
It means that the "states of the world" cannot be explained in purely physical terms. In the end, any complete astrophysical theory will have to take account of intelligent life in proximity to stars, and what they choose to do.
Everything obeys the laws of physics.
(a) Is this even a reasonable starting point? 'Everything obeys the laws of physics', for instance, won't do: is that the current laws, liable to be overturned in future, or the future imagined perfect ones? But if it's the future ones, mightn't they actually include what's currently called 'mental' within their purview? So should we just define 'physical' as 'non-mental'? There are various formulations to try and summarise what 'physical' would mean, and to counter the argument that you just end up in Galen Strawson's phrase with 'physicSalism'.
(b) If it is a reasonable starting point, what's the phrase 'the mental' doing? What are beliefs? What is phenomenological experience? What meaning do first person accounts have? Is all our mental stuff just epiphenomenal? Or does it occupy a discrete realm (as Davidson's anomalous monism argues)? Or is every little thing mental, hence panpsychism, which might leave a physical explanation intact? Or is every little thing protopanpsychic, a more attractive version to a naturalistic explanation, since it would say, all stuff has the potential to be experiential, and at some point in evolution various biochemical events occurred to trigger 'consciousness' or whatever it is?
Pardon me, I'm actually immersed in a module about this stuff at the mo'. See, and I managed to describe it without using that awkward beginning with qu-....
Over the last 200 years, the understanding of the laws of physics has reached a point where we know certain principles that all future laws will respect: unitarity, conservation laws, computational universality, Lorentz invariance ...
When quantum mechanics and general relativity are unified, do you really think that will render the statement "everything obeys the laws of physics" false?
Quoting mcdoodle
It's past laws that did that. All sorts of inexplicable phenomena were "explained" by positing some strange essence or force - phlogiston, vital forces, etc. Of course, as these were investigated, they were found to be fictions, yet flammable substances still burn and life goes on.
Consciousness is very much a mystery, but pretending to solve it by declaring that matter possesses some unyet discovered physics that only manifests itself in the human brain, seems strikingly unscientific.
Quoting mcdoodle
These things are software feature.
Quoting mcdoodle
The idea that animals have qualia, is an improvement on the idea that everything does. It is still unscientific and wrong.
Or to take it out of the realm of the body, it would be like needing to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden in some other metaphysical state or something like that.
I'd have no idea how you'd be defining the two terms in that case.
You should be saying that you had a subjective experience of seeing Alice--that's what seeing Alice is, after all, but of course you're also saying that you trust your subjective experience to be an accurate perception of something objective--Alice crossing the street. Alice crossing the street isn't identical to having the experience of seeing Alice cross the street of course.
They are both abstractions and they are both real. But there is a dependency and a direction of dependency. Mind depends on matter, just as universities depend on buildings. But mind is neither reducible to matter nor something immaterial in addition to matter.
That's my account of the logical landscape here. As you note, that leaves open the question of what mind and matter is.
By your definition, a mindless facial-recognition-equipped robot would have the "experience" of "seeing" Alice.
This is of course nonsense. The sequence of events can be explained, and even predicted, with a simple theory of how a computer works with certain software running. To impute any subjectivity to the robot is just superstitious irrationality.
Bravo!
Whereas, now it's dark matter and dark energy.
Because he doesn't preclude robots being conscious. Searle similarly says, "'Could a machine think?' The answer is, obviously, yes. We are precisely such machines." (Minds, Brains and Programs)
But are humans merely machines or merely animals? Is it the vital spark of immaterial phenomena that accounts for the difference? Or is a different logical conception of the machine required that doesn't, itself, reduce to the machine?
But mind can also act on or have causal influences over matter, in fact, it does this all the time. For instance, in the case of brain injury, the mind is able to re-route its activities so as to repurpose parts of the brain to fulfil its needs. The subjects of 'mind-body medicine', psycho-somatic illnesses, the placebo effect, and neuroplasticity are evidence for such abilities. Whereas if mind was purely a consequence or result of cellular interactions, these couldn't be accounted for, as all of the causation could only act from the physical to the mental.
Humans are 'rational animals', i.e. able to grasp through abstract thought, language, intuition and imagination, things which animals cannot. In my view, machines are not sentient, being simply assemblies of switches. They can emulate some activities of intelligence, but they are not beings. If we were to create a truly sentient machine, then we would have to endow it with rights, as it would no longer be a machine, but a being (although this distinction is invisible to the likes of Dennett, it is concealed by the 'blind spot' referred to earlier.)
Humans are not 'machines' according to the definition of that word. Such sentiments are simply the lingering influence of yesteryear's mechanist philosophies.
— René Descartes
Discourse on Method and Related Writings (1637), trans. Desmond M. Clarke, Penguin
Since the thing-in-itself doesn't have any detail in representation, there is no quality or detail to ascribe or describe. Any such detail would be our representation, and so not knowledge of the thing-in-itself at all. There no other content to it. The thing-in-itself can only be the thing-in-itself, else we are reducing it to some representation.
From this, we know anything(thing-in-itself) can only be itself. We know that anything being more than itself is incoherent. To say we "cannot know whether there is anything more than the thing-in-itself" is to ignore what we know in the distinction between representation and the thing-in-itself.
Quoting tom
These two statements seem to contradict one another, or to be, at the very least, inconsistent with one another. If states of the world cannot be explained in purely physical terms then what warrant do you have for saying they obey the laws of physics?
Yes but on this account "to be itself" is not to be anything at all; and so seems somewhat oxymoronic.
I would say that how and what we think about the question concerning the dependency and direction of dependency between mind and matter is itself dependent on whether we look at the question from the 'point of view' of either mind or matter.
So, from the point of view of the scientific way in which mind is commonly understood to be supervenient on the brain, and hence on matter, we have mind dependent on matter.
Conversely, from the point of view of perception, insofar as no matter can appear at all except it be to a mind, we have matter dependent on mind.
Taken together we have a codependent arising of mind and matter. Can we be justified in saying that either matter or mind could have pre-existed this co-arising?
Explain what a chess program does in terms of the Standard Model. Then show how what it does contradicts any law of physics. Then get back to me.
All this example seems to show is that it is a category error to speak of the chess program either obeying or disobeying the laws of physics.
Instead of the chess program, pick literally anything.
The chess program obeys the laws of physics as does everything else.
For parsimony's sake it is better to stick with the example at hand. So, explain to me how the chess program obeys the laws of physics.
In terms of representation, yes. Which is the issue with the idea with using the thing-in-itself as a measure of how much we know about someone. To say we "can't really tell anything about anything" because we don't have access to the thing-in-itself is incoherent.
The idea knowledge is "tainted" by our perspective is to literally ignore what it means to know something about a state. We have people saying I can't know a red cup is a red cup because I only have access to my representation, as if the thing I experienced was somehow not what I saw because I don't have a representation of the red cup in-itself.
Within anti-realism there is a great irony. The world is meant to be of the perspective (representation), but it is exactly that which it denies. The red cup is, supposedly, only me, with what the "really is" hidden away in the thing-in-itself. Anti-realism literally asserts the oxymoronic idea that things of the world are really outside perspective.
In terms of the thing-in-itself though, it is not oxymoronic at all. This is how the subject defies reduction. No matter what is said about any state it is always more than representation. Itself, rather than merely the experience or representation of someone who is aware of it. And if we are interested in the distinction of the thing-itself from representation, this is exactly what we are trying to say. Otherwise, we are collapsing the-thing-itself and representation into each other or outright saying there is no such discintion.
[quote=John]Yes but on this account "to be itself" is not to be anything at all; and so seems somewhat oxymoronic.[/quote]
More specific to the discussion of metaphysics and the mind and body, this is undoubtedly the reaction of positions like idealism, for they only locate things in representation. For something to be "more" than experience is a contradiction to the idealist-- it would mean things exist without being represented in a mind. The idealist must reject the presence of the "thing-in-itself." It can never exist.
In other words Kant only did half the work. He posed the "thing-in-itself" and "representation" to eschew the idea of things mattering to us outside representation, as if we could have knowledge that wasn't our experience, but in doing so, he placed that which is beyond experience outside the world.
So rather than recognising the thing-in-itself and representation as a distinction between existence and representation in experience, many following misunderstood the "thing-in-itself" as a measure of knowledge, as if we must get outside our perspective to really know what's going on in the world.
I'm not sure what school of thought you refer to here. The central point about the noumenon, which is the idea of the 'in itself', is that we cannot know anything about it from our senses, because they give us knowledge only of phenomena. And we "reallu" do know a lot about phenomena; so the thinking of noumenon is no threat to that knowledge.
It's not substance dualism. Transcendental idealism does not propose a phenomenal substance and a noumenal substance. If you think that then I then you should read up on the subject. The noumenal is not necessarily thought as a "separate realm"; it is merely the attempted thought of 'what would be' or really more accurately 'what would not be' in the total absence of the human mind. So to talk about "realms" and really even to talk about 'would be' or 'would not be' is already to illegitimately introduce thinking that is conditioned by phenomenal experience. So, to try to think the noumenal is to try to place your thought in an unfamiliar space where you should be able to begin to glimpse the scope of the problem.
The lesson that lies in trying to think the noumenal is that it makes no sense to speak of objects existing in some hypothetical absence of human perception and thought.
Yes, this is true, but only in relation to phenomenal existence; phenomenal existence is never exhausted. But it makes no sense to say this of an emptily purported noumenal 'existence', because we have no contentful idea at all of any such thing.
No, I accused you only of using terms in ways peculiar to you, not of inventing new terms. What exactly would you say are "the errors of substance dualism"? For, me any thinking based on the idea of substance is erroneous. I would also say that all positions are more or less incoherent; it depends on from perspective, that is from the point of view of what presuppositions, you consider them.
It's not clear what you mean by "state of the world" or "another realm" or "part of the world"; so there is nothing concrete here for me to respond to.
But that's exactly what my argument is pointing out as incoherent. The thing-in-themselves are part of the phenomenal realm. My computer, itself, exists. My body, itself, exists. My experiences, themselves, exist. Things in themselves exist-- the phenomenal realm is wider than representation. The purported noumenal is in the realm of existence. All subjects within the world are there in terms of themselves. My knowledge of a state is not the existence of that state.
This is why transcendental idealism falls into substance dualism. It would have us believe that the noumenal is outside the world. As if what was beyond our experience (existing states, thing-in-themsleves) were not within our world. Rather than recognising I know a red cup (representation) which is also a state of existence (a thing-in-itself), it claims the world in which I live only contains my experience and that the thing-in-itself lies in a different realm.
Since the idea of the thing-in-itself is precisely the (admittedly empty or apophatic) idea of what is not part of the phenomenal realm, what you say is simply a contradiction.
So, to say that the nounemal is not part of the (phenomenal) world is not (necessarily) to say it is "outside the world" at all. Because to say that would seem to imply that it must be 'located' 'somewhere else' which would be an incoherent positivistic notion.
To the understanding which only considers our knowledge, sure. In the sense you are describing, the thing-in-itself and phenomenal correspond to the realms of know and not knowing respectively. The noumenal is outside the "phenomenal realm" in this sense. It is what our representation can never be, what knowledge cannot be.
The problem is that phenomena are more than knowledge. The red cup I see is not my representation of the red cup. It's it own state. It exists. To say the phenomena of the red cup only involves what I know is outright dishonest. It's not the state of my knowledge. It's a thing I know about.
And for sure this is a positivistic notion, but that's the point. How can we say there is a thing without posing a presence? Something does need to be located. One cannot have a thing-itself-without a thing-itself. An existing phenomena, whether we know about it or not, has presence.
In "Being" a thing has location, not an empirical spacial one per se, but a worldly one. If my experiences exist, then there are things-in-themsleves are present, they are located in world. The noumenal is worldly (but, as per its definition, not representation).
The understanding of "phenomena" most often attributed to Kant is deficient. It only talks about what we know. It fails to consider what exists and how that extends beyond our experiences.
You see the red cup via your representation of it. The red cup is what appears via your and others' representations of it. It doesn't make sense to say that it exists as a red cup beyond that, except in a kind of empty formal sense. This is just to say that you don't know what the concrete existence of the red cup is beyond our representations of it. Its empty formal existence is precisely its noumenal existence; the 'red cup in itself'; that can actually be nothing positive or concrete for us; and is thus definitely not located in phenomenal space. Nor is it located 'anywhere else' other than indeterminately in a kind of logical space.
I didn't say anything that suggested that. And I don't know what "definition" you're referring to. I didn't give any definitions anywhere.
There's no reason to believe that a robot would have experience, because there's no reason to believe that consciousness isn't a property of the particular matter, structures and processes that comprise brains.
There is a problem with your comparison with "need to urinate":
- need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance
- there are other kind of possible comparisons, for example consider matter/energy or other stuff that satisfy conservation laws (maybe volume in incompressible fluids), they behave like "substance", not like properties, one wouldn't say that "you don't need to posit that you ALWAYS have the same amount of matter/energy, just sometimes it's hidden in the background", it wouldn't sound reasonable, it would violate intuitive and experimental conservation laws
Why do we have to think that consciousness behaves like a property (appearing and disappearing) and not like a substance (being conserved)? How can we know for sure that "consciousness only obtain when particular brain states obtain" if we never have direct access to the consciousness of anything but ourselves?
Figuring that you'd probably read it as a reference to a feeling rather than a requirement to empty one's bladder because it's full, so that the body would automatically evacuate one's urine whether the feeling were present or not, I gave the other analogy (re arroyos/washes). Why did you ignore that other analogy?
Quoting Babbeus
You don't have to think that unless you want to be coherent, I'd say. Everything is a property. Property-free substances do not obtain. That idea is incoherent.
And this isn't anything about certainty. Forget about certainty. It's stupid to worry about in my opinion. It's about reasons we have for believing one thing versus another, or simply why we'd believe one thing versus another.
"Requirements" don't belong to the ontology, they exist in the world of "prescriptions", requirements don't exist in any scientific-reductionist account of the world. At most you could have transmission of information inside the nervous system which is ultimately a change in the shape/configuration of the physical world and therefore is still just a "property" and not a "substance".
And again: why did you ignore the other analogy?
Water is a substance that can move and sometimes can be inside a wash sometimes can be elsewere. Our theory about how it works doesn't include the possibility that this substance can stop existing and/or start existing, we consider the flowing substance to just change its location or shape within the framework of a "conservation law" (it can't pop up from nothing and/or vanish).
If we want to think about consciousness like water inside a wash it would lead us to think that when it is not inside the "wash" of matter it is elsewere (but where?).
The analogy/question was whether we need to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden (however it is). I wasn't asking you about other ways that you could look at water.
I'm asking for precision here. If you're referring to future laws of physics, then you should say so. If you are referring to them, how can you know what will be in them? If you accept structural realism about future physical understanding, which is what your first para seems to say, then I think you should define physicalism that way and not refer to 'laws'.
Well, panpyschic material is not more nor less undiscovered than your 'unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity'. They're both speculations. I too think panpsychism is unlikely but I think we need to unpack what 'unscientific' would mean. Many people are claiming that first person testimony about consciousness is not susceptible to scientific investigation, and I wonder if this is what lies behind the word 'unscientific'. So-called special sciences use testimony all the time however and make excellent science, if somewhat looked down upon by enthusiasts for physics chemistry and biology.
This is the particular area I'm reading about at the moment in fact - those sciences where a mixture of mental and physical terms are accepted in scientific discourse, like the study of placebo effects where 'mental states' are central, or the neuroscience of prosthetic aids where 'belief' or 'directed will-power' has to be used by people who have implants to 'train' their implants. I am wondering whether a general argument about 'mental' and 'physical' terms can be assembled from such cases or whether we're stuck with interactionist dualism, as this approach looks to be on the surface.
In ordinary use, perceptual terms like "see" have success criteria. Gilbert Ryle called such terms achievement verbs. So to see Alice cross the street entails that Alice crossed the street.
Yes, we can certainly treat people's health in psychological terms and that will have physical effects. But this does not imply that there are immaterial substances or properties. I think it is a mistake to think of the mental as a kind of ethereal parallel to the physical. Mental terms and physical terms operate in very different ways.
To press the university analogy, a university is the way in which its buildings are organized. The university (and its character) is not epiphenomenal to the buildings, the buildings have no universityness property, and there will be no university left if you take away the buildings. We can talk meaningfully about universities without supposing they require an immaterial explanation.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree.
I don't really follow you here. We can say that the dinosaurs appeared on earth millions of years ago, despite no-one being around to see them. Or, in another sense, that the dinosaurs didn't appear to anyone because no-one was there to see them. But in what sense would dinosaurs be dependent on mind?
I agree with that too, but it conceals more than it reveals, especially in the way it is used by Ryle and Dennett. In effect, the ghost is declared unreal, and all that is left is the machine.
We don't feel the need to say that the water is flowing and hidden when there is no water, but we do feel the need to say that the water is always somewere in some form.
I do think of myself as a kind of realist; I used to say I am a logical realist. I think this is kind of like Kant's notion of being an empirical realist. The objects of experience are objectively real in the sense that they are reliably available to be be perceived. It seems obvious from experience that they do not depend on anyone's, or even everyone's, perception of them in order to be said to exist in this sense. So, I have long thought that the empirical object is merely a formal identity, a kind of independent fact. Perhaps it is, as you said of mind earlier, an abstraction over the material. What is the material? Is it some kind of ultimately constituent substance? Or is 'material. just an adjective that signifies what is the most general quality possessed in common by all the objects of our senses?
So, the empirical object seems to be just the logical projection of our in-common perception and conception of objects into the 'noumenal background'; in this sense it is a legitimate, if taken pragmatically, but an illegitimate, if taken substantively, objectification of the non-objective; or perhaps it would be better to say of the proto or evenmeta-objective. This 'position' of mine really is not either idealist or realist in the commonly understood sense, because I do not posit either mind or matter as constitutive.
So, getting back to our dinosaur example; we say that it is a fact that the dinosaurs existed prioir to the advent of any mind that could say that it is a fact. But then the question is: was it is a fact 'back then'? Facts are not material entities, they are of or about material entities, so if dinosaurs existed back then; it must also have been a fact back then that they existed. But the 'ofness' or 'aboutness' of facts means they are intentional; and intentionality can be understood only in reference to minds.
The other way to go is to say that it is a fact now that dinosaurs existed back then, but it could not have been a fact then, because there were no minds back then that it could have been a fact for. But then it would seem to be unintelligible to say that dinosaurs existed back then, because if they existed it must have also been a fact that they existed.
If we want to say it was a fact back then, it seems we must posit a mind for which it was a fact; and this would be tantamount to positing God. The same problem exists right now, in regard to the almost infinite number of purported facts about the universe that we have absolutely no knowledge of, or cannot even begin to imagine. The logic of our experience, common sense, says such unknown facts must exist, but how can it be intelligible to say that they exist if there is no mind or consciousness for which they exist?
The truth of logic doesn't take an existing mind. God is non-existent. A realm outside space-time, outside existence, which remains true no matter what. The infinite of meaning is so without existence. For example, the unknown world everyone is dead. This doesn't exist at the moment. It will never be known to anyone. Yet, it still means.
One of the pitfalls of this discussion is misunderstanding "say." We forget we are people who exist and a speaking about something we don't know. It is certainly intelligible for us to talk about this. In this respect, the unknown world is still for us. Who the unknown world means to, and so is amounts to us talking about something, is already answered. It matters to us. We are saying they exist. To say their is no mind and consciousness for which theses unknown things exist is to ignore our own existence. The unknown world doesn't need someone to know it or live through it to be for someone. It just needs someone to be aware of it and speak about it.
I agree that, per ordinary usage, machines (and robots) are insentient. But you seem to accept that it is possible, in principle, to create a sentient machine - which we would recognize as a being with rights. The issue then is what would explain the difference between the sentient machine and the mere machine.
Would there be some immaterial substance or properties in addition to the matter it is composed of? Or would our mental terms be abstractions over the matter it is composed of?
It seems to me that we can intelligibly hold the latter view while also holding that their pains, desires and beliefs would be real.
Why do you say that I think that? I don't actually believe it, I was simply pointing out rhetorically, that if a machine really was able to think, then it would no longer be a machine but a being.
That's the nub of the argument. I said some pages back that I take issue with the way Gilbert Ryle understands the word 'substance'. To explain why is difficult, however. I think in Descartes' time, 'substance' had a different meaning to what we now give it; a 'substance' was the 'bearer of predicates', in other words, 'that in which attributes inhere'. There is really no counterpart to that idea in modern thought. What happened in the period between Descartes and the modern period, was the almost-universal conception that real substances are atomic or at any rate describable in such terms. So Descartes' 'immaterial substance' then becomes conceived as a kind of 'ethereal substance' that somehow acts through or on res extensia. But I don't think that 'res cogitans can be described or thought of objectively at all - it is not something that exists in the sense that bodies exist, at all. But that doesn't mean it is unreal - on the contrary, all such judgements as to what is real and what is not, what exists and what is not, are made by and in the mind.
This is very close to Husserl's critique of Descartes as described in 'The Crisis of the European Sciences'. Husserl also says that Descartes was correct to point to the fundamental nature of res cogitans, but then made the mistake of treating it naturalistically, i.e. as a component or part of nature. Really the word 'subject' is closer in meaning to Descartes' 'substance', because that connotes the idea of a 'being' rather than a 'thing'.
Underneath this, there is the issue that Descartes recognised modes of existence, i.e. different things exist in different modes. Now modern philosophy has generally abandoned that conception, so there is no way of translating his 'res cogitans' into the modern lexicon - it's like trying to depict a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space.
So when Dennett insists that 'intentional agents' can be understood solely in terms of their actions, and not in terms of the content of their minds, it is a consequence of this absence or the loss of that dimension in modern culture. That is why Dennett's critics say that he ignores or explains away consciousness - I have already given some quotations which I believe illustrate that very clearly. As I see it, Dennett has more or less spent his whole career trying to show why Descartes' cogito is a groundless argument. So he thinks, and will freely say, that religious philosophers have devoted their careers to an illusion - and they would say the same about him! But what it would take for Dennett to understand that would be a real 'meta-noia', a transformation of outlook, a through-the-looking-glass change of perspective, not simply a verbal distinction. Perhaps also something like a gestalt shift.
Anyway, my working definition of mind is 'that which cognises differences'. This goes for very simple creatures - the ability to cognise difference and respond is identifiable even in bacteria. But rational minds are able to recognize abstractions and logic. and they do that by assigning and discerning meanings. So animals inhabit an 'umwelt' , whilst humans also inhabit a 'meaning-world', which consists of the operations and judgements of their minds in response to what they experience, see and understand.
Sorry for such a long post but this is central to the argument.
Future laws of physics must respect current knowledge and experimental evidence.
Are you aware of Noether's theorem? If you are, how can you doubt that conservation principles will always be respected by the laws of physics?
I'll ask the question again. Do you think that the unification of the Standard Model with General Relativity will render the statement "Everything obeys the laws of physics" false?
Can you imagine the situation where a law of physics is falsified, and the scientist declares that certain particles at a certain time just happened to be NOT obey the laws of physics? Best of luck publishing that paper!
Quoting mcdoodle
That is nothing more than an expression of ignorance. Yeh sure, the Standard Model and fairy-theory are intellectually equivalent.
Quoting mcdoodle
Placebo effects!!?
In a pragmatic everyday sense, what you say about the objects of experience is similar to my own view. However I would instead say we are experiencing the world rather than projecting onto a noumenal background. The difference here is that I think we can investigate those objects and discover further objects of experience at a deeper level. For example, per our earlier discussion, I think our experience of (what we call) gravity is our experience of spacetime curvature. Also I would say our abstractions must eventually ground in something concrete, whatever that turns out to be.
Quoting John
I agree with your first sentence, but not the second. When we say that something is a fact, we are saying that it is proven or known. On this view it is intelligible to say that dinosaurs existed back then, but unintelligible to say that it was proven or known back then.
There are facts that are not widely known (little-known facts) but not, I think, unknown facts.
It's difficult to be precise about this stuff, but I think precision is a good idea. We haven't got to my personal views, although your remarks are becoming unnecessarily personal, we're just trying to discuss the right terms for the debate. Panpsychism is a legitimate area of philosophical enquiry, even if, like you, I doubt it's a goer. Your sentence 'Do you think that the unification of the Standard Model with General Relativity will render the statement "Everything obeys the laws of physics" false?' seems to me empty: it asks me to speculate about a future event that you seem to think is certain to happen in some way you don't explain. I don't know what's exclamatory about 'placebo effects': they're a puzzle that requires explanation, since they mess up a lot of drug trials, for a start. I'm doing a lot of reading about them at the moment, if you want some references.
So, for you there are no unknown facts about the universe that are yet to be discovered? Such as for example, whether some particular distant galaxy has a black hole at its center or is some very precise number of light-years across, or contains exactly so many stars?
I hope I can butt in to ask, one puzzle for me in this area is why some terms are deemed 'mental' and some 'physical' and where the border falls. For instance, a description of a chemical compound, while arguably an abstraction over more primitive physical terms, is deemed physical, but words like 'thought' are deemed mental. I presume the one is vertically constitutive of and the other is just supervenient on the physical, but I'm not clear. To describe someone's character I might call them 'hot-blooded' or 'cold-hearted' but these are understood to be mental descriptions.
I'm interested for instance in the practising medical scientist's use of terms. In dealing with pain in a phantom limb, for instance, the patient's belief seems central, and we have no idea what the physical equivalent of their belief in their limb is. So the working scientist has to engage in methodological dualism. And yet a different, theoretical scientist argues that this 'belief' is non-primary, even though they can offer no empirical model of explanation.
Right. If we find out those things, then we will have discovered new facts about the world, not existing facts.
Yes. And your definition is the flip side of behaviorism - the idea that it is the body that does things.
What I'm trying to suggest is an alternative to the idea that it is either the mind or body that does things. It is instead human beings that do things. Human beings have minds and bodies, but mind and body are two logically different categories. It is not, per dualism, the mind that is the subject of experience and the body that is the object of experience. Instead a human being is both the subject and the object of experience.
I think they have a pragmatic origin. We understand other human beings to be intentional creatures and we develop mental language around that. That works well for humans, somewhat less well for animals and bacteria, and pretty badly for trees and particles. Coming from the other direction, we find commonalities between humans, animals, bacteria, trees and particles that we develop physical language for. They are logically distinct categories and the terms we use depends on the purposes at hand.
Quoting mcdoodle
A practicing medical scientist is interested in what works. So if using psychological language brings about the desired physical changes, then it makes sense to do that. Further research could be conducted to find out what is physically happening. I wouldn't say the belief is non-primary. It's just language at a different level of abstraction that may or may not be appropriate. But the philosophical point here is that nothing in addition to, or contrary to, the physical is going on.
Well, that's true from a common-sense viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of philosophical analysis, it leaves many questions unanswered. (And to be honest, I think I'm aiming at someone standing behind you X-) .)
So, what was the fact prior to its discovery?
By the definition ("something known or proven") of a fact given earlier, the question doesn't make sense. Since no-one knew about the state in question, there was no such fact at the time. --e.g. dinosaurs existed, but it was not a fact. At least until some entity knew about them.
Prior to discovery or knowledge, there is no fact to be anything.
I'd say the point of this distinction between existence and facts is to avoid the confusion of that very distinction. What exactly is the difference between ontological and epistemological fact? Is something that is known (e.g. a dinosaur) different from the state that exists (e.g. a dinosaur)?
"Ontological fact" is a distinction without difference. We use it to refer to states of existence we talk about, states of existence we know. -- "Dinosaurs were an ontological fact."
It's no different to saying: "I know dinosaurs existed."
In the context of the relationship of knowledge to existence, this is rather important. It means we are still treating the question of unknown existence as if it was known-- no wonder it always appears bizarre to say an unknown existed.
The point of seperating existence and fact is to disrupt this confusion. Dinosaurs existing is a fact. We know about it. What the "ontological fact" and "epistemological fact" distinction is trying to do is incoherent. If we are speaking about something, it is known. "Ontological" and "epistemological" fact cannot help but be one and the same.
To seperate between existence and fact is a different. It doesn't bring with the baggage that what exists must be unknown. Dinosaurs both existed and are fact (as someone now knows about them). The fact a state is unknown at some time is no longer understood to mean a state is never known.
Thus, for example, we can say that prior to being discovered by humans, no-one knew about dinosaurs for millions of years. Their existence is no longer dependent on someone knowing about it. In our understanding of the facts, we are aware dinosaurs existed without people knowing about them.
As Willow points out, there wasn't one. I'm just following standard usage here - the OED defines a fact as "a thing that is known or proved to be true".
We don't call things facts unless we think they are established knowledge. Aliens may well exist, but we wouldn't say it was a fact, we would say it was a conjecture or an opinion.
I see that Wikipedia defines a fact as "something that has really occurred or is actually the case". In that sense, we could say that it was a fact back then that dinosaurs existed. But all we're saying is that dinosaurs existed back then. Is this sense of the term actually serving any useful function?
From the SEP:
[i]What might a fact be? Three popular views about the nature of facts can be distinguished:
A fact is just a true truth-bearer,
A fact is just an obtaining state of affairs,
A fact is just a sui generis type of entity in which objects exemplify properties or stand in relations.[/i]
Would you say the existence of the dinosaurs was a state of affairs? The point for me is that states of affairs are, and the existence of dinosaurs is, at least in part, an ineliminably conceptual, as well as a physical or material, matter.
No, I wouldn't - I don't see what purpose it would serve. I would just say that dinosaurs existed.
I see those definitions as language on holiday. They are an attempt to elucidate a sense of a term that serves no useful function and that no-one, except philosophers, cares about.
The existence of dinosaurs is not eliminably conceptual. But the words in that sentence are. The conceptual map is not the territory.
If the territory is utterly a-conceptual then how could our conceptual judgements bear any relation to it whatsoever?
It was Wittgenstein who said "the world is the totality of facts, not of things". I take that to mean the world is the totality of states of affairs, not the totality of epistemic facts. The totality of states of affairs constitutes the total nexus of relations between things, and things themselves are also, unless they be some kind of posited, but really incomprehensible, atomic simple, further complexes of relations. Relations are not physical, but rather conceptual, which leads to the conclusion that the world must be, at bottom, not merely brute non-conceptual entities, if the idea of such entities even makes any actual sense, but also the conceptual relations between them.
For what it's worth I think the idea of "language on holiday" is vacuous. There is no such thing; there is just language at work in multifarious contexts; none of which are presuppositionlessly priveleged. There is no one logic of usage; there are many logics of usage; and we cannot afford to ignore any of them if we want to gain a comprehensive understanding of what our experience and what we say about it logically commits us to.
Because we differentiate features of the territory. But differentiating them is a cognitive and conceptual process.
The territory has its rivers and hills. But there is no map until we create one.
Quoting John
OK, I'll accept the totality of facts in this sense for the sake of argument. And I agree that there were relationships between things (say, the dinosaurs and the earth).
So we have abstractions of matter. But the abstractions are not something separate from, or additional to, the matter. They are ways of looking at matter. However it still requires a cognitive process to actually look at and conceptualize matter in that way.
Is what you are claiming that, the autonomous and complex entities, that appear in most of our explanations and indeed in our best theories, are not in fact real?
Is that supposed to mean anything?
Quoting Andrew M
Now you claim tigers are real?
What's going on?
So, the abstraction - i.e. the real tiger in reality, is not the same thing as your conception of the abstraction.
Seems obvious, why is that important?
It just came up as part of a discussion with John where he is arguing (as I understand him) that some things in the world, such as relations between things, are conceptual and thus imply intentionality.
My argument is that relations between things are instead abstractions. That does not, by itself, imply intentionality. But conceptualizing those relations does.