trendkill

Apostate1970 with his giant paragraph that I didn't read all of :P appears to be describing the hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers is its best-known philosophical proponent. Other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, believe that there is no "hard problem", that consciousness is not fundamentally different from everything else and that it's just a mistaken intuition that makes people think it is special.

The Dollar

The qualia are important here because we are discussing religion that is supernatural. Are the qualia of natural conscious experience as 'natural' as they appear? It is easy for the likes of Dennett to dismiss consciousness altogether - afterall there is a school of thought that dismisses freedom of choice and all manner of other subjective matters. All you are left with is a dumb robot then - a zombie, no matter how sophisticated. By romoivng or redefining terms in the lexicon the idea of conscious self awareness can disappear but atheistic rationalist ideologies that have attempted to suppress the 'self' like communism have crumbled whilst relgions for all their faults have lasted. Perhaps what keeps relgion alive is the acceptance of the 'supernatural' which is the most rare of lifes gifts?

trendkill

It's a common belief that Dennett "dismisses consciousness altogether", but he says he believes in consciousness, and I tend to agree. He just doesn't think consciousness is what many people think it is. And if you read some of his more in-depth arguments for this position, it doesn't exactly come off as thoughtless or "easy", either.

I tend to agree; rejecting freedom of choice is almost as thoughtless as accepting free will. :P It is transparently obvious to me that freedom isn't what most people think it is.

Or maybe what keeps religion alive is that it panders to intuition while rejecting reason. It's odd that you excoriate people for believing the "easy" thing and then praise religion because people find it attractive rather than because it's justified.

Apostate1970

yes, that's exactly correct. and every functionalist response (such as Dennet's) has utterly missed the point. functionalism is a tempting position because it provides a framework for asking and answering every question in the public/physical realm. every question that can be answered by being put to a reproducible test it can answer. every discrimination that this can make, it can make. but there are features of our experience that can not be so addressed. i simply can never know, and no test can ever tell me, and none of your or anyone else's behavior could ever reveal, that you see what i see when i see red... nothing anyone says or does could ever reveal this. why? because my experience is not yours but my own. this is largely what "having a mind" means... numerical uniqueness and privacy. if, in fact, you do see red when i do, then in that measure my experience is yours, but only in that measure. and that you do is something that is utterly and forever closed to me except as a matter of "faith"... something that I can never know except insofar as it seems reasonable and parsimonious for me to accept. the functionalist always slips in something else besides the experience of red itself in trying to disprove this... in trying to prove that i can, after all, know that you see red as surely as i know that i see it. i think that this epistemological idealism... the desire to convince oneself and others that we can lay hold of certain knowledge which can not be had... is a large part of what is behind functionalism. but those of us who have inner experience and have minds know that this is nonsense and will never work. those of us who think clearly also know that this surreptitious slip is the same technique that the radical skeptic uses... they replace the actual experience itself with a representation of it. it is really ironic that both the epistemological idealist and the epistemological nihilist use the same technique.

how does this bear on the god question? well, for one, it would leave open the "argument from religious experience". things like miracle claims, various wagers, various arguments for traditional gods, etc. all fail miserably. ontological arguments may succeed in a way but merely by illustrating the sort of thing that a god would have to be rather than requiring commitment to it. but if someone claims direct experience themselves, then who can argue? it will still be possible to doubt the claim. it will still be possible to dismiss the claim as a mischaracterization of some other experience. but you can't really argue with it per se.

personally, I think that if the religious apologists and evangelists confessed that all of their other efforts were bound to fail and reconceived their own mission as being one of attempting to give a vivid and accurate voice to their own personal religious experience... if they thought of themselves as re-entering Plato's cave and merely trying to describe the light to those within rather than trying to win an argument with them... if they thought of themselves as trying to use the power of the imagination to give some tiny glimpse of what they saw to people that could not see for themselves... then the whole world, religious and irreligious, would be vastly better off. i also think that this approach would be vastly more consistent with the spirit of the gospels' teaching and commissions.

there are also other ways that this sort of dualism/parallelism/dual-aspect theory could bear on theological questions but that's too much to go into here.

coincidentally, i wholly reject the label "supernatural" for qualia, mentality, etc. these are pre-eminently natural categories. "supernatural" is really just an indefensible or nonsensical category that, on the final analysis, can at best only come out to mean something like "described or attested to by an authority but otherwise unexplained".

trendkill

Well, I used to think that until recently, but the thing is, I couldn't prove this, and neither can Chalmers or anyone else. I now think that Dennett's view is a bit more credible than Chalmers'. Don't get me wrong, it is far from proven that there is no hard problem, but there is at least some evidence that it doesn't exist*, and the reasons for thinking otherwise are mostly intuitive and not evidence-based. I think it really comes down to the fact that people just feel that no amount of third-person physical observation can yield an explanation of "redness". But it might be just that we don't understand the complexities of the way the mind works, and when we get right down to it, the quale of "red" might be logically entailed by the physical phenomena involved.

Merely noting that people can't have one another's experiences is not sufficient to show the existence of the hard problem. The hard problem of consciousness is not supposed to be the problem of why first-person subjective experience is unique or private, it is the problem of why there should exist any such experience at all, since the physical facts don't appear to be able to explain it.

Bottom line, we probably aren't justified in declaring the existence of the hard problem until we've largely solved the "easy" ones. Which I understand we are quite far from having done. And not only that, but even if the hard problem does exist--the explanatory gap between physics and experience could be epistemological and not ontological. I.e. it could simply be a brute fact of the nature of matter that red looks the way it looks. Which means there would still be no basis for invoking the supernatural.


*The evidence that there is no hard problem is that at least some aspects of experience appear to be logically entailed by the physical facts. It's not random that things with a certain shape and composition feel hard, sharp, etc. E.g. you couldn't just switch the qualia of pillows with the qualia of knives and not run into any inconsistencies. The pillow has no sharp edge to specify the location of the cutting sensation, for instance. So when we acknowledge this entailment, then we must acknowledge the possibility that said entailment holds at every explanatory level, so that once we solve all the easy problems we may well be able to note that the physical facts constitute a complete explanation of the sensation.

-Jay-

This seems to be a better fit for S&S.

regards,

NinJay
qua GRD Mod

LeoM

True, Materialist's have to explain how a self can be produced by a brain. Where the dualist's say that their are two realities a mental realm and a physical realm.

LeoM

Evidence is growing that the mind can change the brain- neuroplasticity

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The.../9780060988470

Lekatt

I think you have asked the right question. Being aware of self as a unique individual is the beginning of real wisdom. It does not matter what your beliefs are. Then comes understanding yourself. Finding what your motives and beliefs really are and how you act on them. Testing your beliefs in the real world to see how they work. Realizing your beliefs may not be yours, but what others want you to believe. This finally leads to being who you really are, and understanding why. This leads to making good choices for your life.

http://aleroy.com/Learn.htm

Panpsychist

I can only tell you how I resolved the issue. For now.

I view "supernatural" as ultimately saying "The laws of nature are such that they address at least certain individuals at the level of the Person, and cannot be reduced to a far lower level".

For example, the stars in astrology affect persons on high levels, such as their love, economic success, and so on; not on a lower level such as their molecules. The purpoted existenced of Heaven means that the "person" is transported to paradise, Providence that the world is guided by concern for the fate of humans, God's omnipotence that the person God has special rules that apply only to him (and not to his constituents), and so on.

With this understanding, consciousness is not in-itself supernatural. Even if you're a dualist, believing that spirit and matter are two substances (I don't), this isn't supernaturalism. It will only be supernaturalism is you think a person is not composed of more elementary mental/physical constituents which are themselves governed by laws that do not take the person into account.

I personally believe that consciousness, in the sense of being-aware-of-X, is omnipresent in the universe, accompanying every physical interaction. But this does not mean that things are supernatural. The fundamental rules do revolve around awareness-of (simply because consciousness is ubiquitous so any rule could be cast in these terms), but not around qualities of a Person (such as his will, memories, moral significance, economic success, and so on). Therefore there are no insubstantial minds (mind is matter), you cannot address the spirit of the tree (it has none; only its constituents are aware-of, and no part of it is aware-of- your speech, let alone comprehends it), you cannot bend spoons by your sheer willpower (but can will the spoon to bend and then bend it with your hand...), nothing breaks the laws of physics, and so on.

I don't expect you to follow my rather-esoteric views, but perhaps this will encourage you to realize that there isn't really anything supernatural about consciousness. Even if you see it as a different substance, this need not imply supernaturalism.