sodium

Your question is about the materialist view, so I'm going to assume materialism for my answer. Let's say you ask an alien with advanced technology this question. Here is how he might answer it.

Being from an advanced civilization, he could scan your brain at a minute level, and see the chain of cause and effect taking place in your neurons. He could then see where the question was coming from, which, assuming materialism would be a chain reaction in your brain. So, he would conclude that the one asking the question was the brain, and not some immaterial mind.

Then he would consider what you mean by "anything like it is". He would note that your brain had the ability to assign names to general kinds of brain states. For example, when your brain is registering pain, it can trigger synapses similar to your hearing the word "pain", in order that you can associate the brain state with a word. But, he would note that you don't know that these words refer to brain states, and you call them mental states.

By "anything like it is", he would determine that you mean having mental states like these named ones. And seeing that these actually refer to brain states, he would note that your brain does have these brain states during its operation, and in fact, you couldn't have the brain states without the mental states, because the mental states are how your brain refers to the brain states.

So, he would explain this situation, and all your questions would be answered

boneyard bill

I have been having computer problems and have been unable to post detailed answers to this board. The computer shuts me down and erases everything I've typed. So I will try to respond to the arguments put forth here by a series of short posts. But they won't be point by point.

boneyard bill

Sodium suggests that we don't need to worry about what various claims mean and just get on with the scientific work. But scientific work does not proceed in a vacuum. If one postulates that mind is an inherent property of matter, then the questions asked, the experiments conducted, the conclusions reached, will be very different than if one does not.

Most people on this thread seem to be assuming that mind is an inherent property of matter but refuse to accept the postulate. This leaves their own thought very confused, but they don't realize it.

boneyard bill

The question involved here is a logical one. Science has nothing to do with it except incidentally. The question is: "Can materialism be logically coherent in the absence of a reductive explanation of sentient experience?" In other words, without a reductive explanation is materialism self-contradictory?"

Most materialists have agreed that a reductive explanation is necessary, and were confident that such an explanation could be found in information processing and that research in artificial intelligence would provide it. But after billions of dollars were spent on this throughout the '80's, it now becomes clear that this is unlikely. As John Searle, a materialist, pointed out, information processing is itself an observer-related concept and therefore can't really do much to explain the observer.

The point that artificial intelligence has been able to duplicate some aspects of mind functioning if off-point. So can an abacus. The question here is the "hard problem" of philosophy of mind, and the hard problem is sentient experience.

boneyard bill

There is no reductive explanation for sentience in spite of contacycle's claim. Even materialist philosophers agree on that. If there were such an explanation, we would no more be debating this point than we would be arguing about the theory of phlogiston. The question would be settled.

Why is a reductive explanation needed?

Because of the materialist claim. This is a burden the materialist position places upon itself. Materialism is a reductionist philosophy. It claims that everything that exists simply is material and material processes. Therefore, if this is true, everything can be accounted for as material or a material process. This is the materialist ontology.

If you claim that matter causes sentient experience but that sentient experience is not, itself, material; you have departed from the materialist position. Because sentient experience still hasn't been accounted for as material. If it isn't a material process but is produced by material processes, this means there is something in the nature of material processes that we have left out. Our ontology must be adjusted to account for the existence of sentience. But if our ontology has to be adjusted, it is not longer a materialist ontology.

boneyard bill

Let us make the comparison with gravity, which I did before very briefly. When Newton first proposed his theory of gravity, it was opposed by the materialists. Why? Because he had not produced a reductive explanation of gravity. They wanted gravity explained in terms of some physical process - suction, a vacuum, or a vortex. They wanted to know what purely material mechanism kept human beings from flying off into space.

Newton postulated that matter can exert action at a distance. A large massive body will attract smaller massive bodies to it causing them to revolve or fall or whatever. Note that Newton claimed that gravity was an inherent characteristic or matter.. This was a fundamental postulate of his system. And when his system came to be accepted, this became a fundamental law of science. We no longer concern ourselves about a reductive explanation of gravity. Gravity is a given. It just is. That's just the way the universe works.

But his theory of gravity also changed the way we understand matter. It had a new property. Matter was now understood to possess the ability to attract, or be attracted to, other material objects.

boneyard bill

We have a perfect analogy with philosophy of mind. We can try to find a reductive explanation. But many people are now convinced that we are no more likely to do that than we are likely to find a reductive explanation of gravity of the type that early materialists were looking for.

Some people claim that Eistein did produce a reductive explanation for gravity. Einstein explained gravity as the curvative of space-time.

Actually, space and time are not material. Nor is action at a distance a material principle. Materialism has survived by materializing the immaterial. The actual history of science has been a steady retreat from materialism. Whether the concept of matter serves any useful purpose at all is itself an interesting debate.

Science is data. Materialism is an interpretation of the data. The two are not the same. The noted physicist John Wheeler has pointed out that the concept of matter is unnecessary for physics. Everything we know can be accounted for as information. We don't need any unknowable metaphysical entities such as "matter" to explain the data.

That is the reason why discussions such as this are relevant. What is matter, and what qualities are we attributing to it? How does this help us to explain? Are we better off without the concept? etc.

boneyard bill

The question then, is whether we should continue to seek a reductive explanation for sentience or accept that sentience is a fundamental characteristic of matter and use that claim to explain other things just as Newton gave up on a reductive explanation of gravity, accepted it as fundamental and used that to explain other features of the universe.

But in this case, the latter course would mean abandoning materialism altogether. It's one thing to materialize an immaterial space and quite another thing to materialize mind.

Ultimately, the name of the position doesn't mean much. The important question is, what is implied by this or that claim or assumption.

boneyard bill

That is the recent state of the debate. But some people have claimed to have produced a "non-reductive" explanation for sentience.

This is the identity theory. It's actually an old theory, and if I recall correctly, it was rejected some time ago by materialist philosophers themselves.

Their point was, and mine is, whether or not this is a non-reductive explanation; it faces the same ontological burden. The identity theory does not prove that a c-firing in the brain is nothing but the vision of a nice set of boobs. It posits it. It makes the claim, but the claim is unsubstantiated. An unsubstantiated claim is a postulate. A postulate carries with it ontological costs. You can't get around it logically.

If you say that the firing of a c-fiber just is the vision of a nice set of boobs, you are still making a statement about the nature of material processes

The identity theory, therefore, is not consistent with materialism.


These posts are really a summmary of what I have been saying all along, and none of the responses have refuted anything I have said.

That alcohol impairs brain function is no more relevant than the fact that if I pour beer into my computer it will also cease to function properly.

Asserting that sentience has been explained is simply untrue.

Stating theories or opinions as fact do nothing to refute a logical claim.

As far as I can see, most of the posters on this thread hold BOTH the materialist and property dualist positions simultaneously!

That is why philosophers engage in these discussions. To clarify exactly what is being claimed and what is not and elucidate the implications of the various claims.

I haven't been able to answer every claim point by point, but i think the foregoing explanation will suffice as an answer if anyone wants to take the time to study the points I have made and connect the dots logically. I'm not saying anything original here. All these things have been hashed out by the philosophers in academia for a long, long time.

Primal

According to this bees, mice and intelligent enough computers are not material, for we do not have acess to experience as experienced by them.



Likewise ultra-violet and infared light are not material, as we cannot actually "see" it.


Nor is smell, or taste, or test, or electromagenetic waves.


The argument is in short a non sequitur and circular.

It is assuming from the onset one of two questionable things, only direct observation of an object makes it material, that the mind is immaterial from the onset and the burden of proof is on materialists to prove otherwise or that only direct experience as consciousness proves that the system is material.


But I likewise cannot experience another person's respiration as respiration, or another person's digestion as digestion. Does that mean such things are immaterial?


The whole point is such things can be easily resolved as a hardware problem.


Imagine two computer, they can maybe see eachother's processes if they both had camera's pointed at the others screen.

But they'd never experience another's program as their own program. They would never "see through eachother eyes". Unless we imagine, we somehow now connect a wire that lets them do so, then they can see through eachother's eyes. They can monitor another computer's program's almost as if it were there own.


Now the above example shows that the problem was not necessarily an ontological one, but simply a hardware one.


To take the analogy further, yes I cannot experience another person's consciousness or thoughts directly. I can only, like the computer limited to a mere camera observe their behavior and make inferences.

I however if I was given the right hardware, a sort of wire, may be able to experience another person's thoughts or consciousness directly. That is not impossible.

Hence the materialist can see the problem as not so much a ontological one but a software one. This shows the idea of qualia does not necessarily demand dualism, that materialism can simply see it as a hardware problem, thus materialism remains the most parimonious position.

Already in fact is such a thing becoming a reality though, a doctor has already connected one man's brain to a computer so that he can move the mouse cursor by just thinking:


http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailarchi...msg01787.shtml

Monkey's brains are being directly to robotic arms that they can control:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scien...ain001115.html


Another great leap forward comes from the event in which scientists have actualy connected computers to a cat's brain: allowing them to play what the cat was actually seeing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/468857.stm



Perhaps someday then a human being may be able to connect to another, and then experience his or her consciusness as their own or at least a direct experience.

Again the problem is a software ibe, making this argument against materialism not so much a valid refutation as an appeal to ignorance. It is like saying "since we cannot experience ultra-violet light directly: it is not material"

or when the creationist says "If evolution cannot explain X, X could not have evolved."