Mr. Sammi

If the brain is a medium ALSO used to interpret external sequences, then regardless of the source of the external sequences, once the brain is non-functional, whether temporary or permanent, this does not ultimately prove the brain cannot support acts of a dual Cartesian manner. In this case the brain is unavailable to recieve/support the mind whose ultimate source may reside outside the brain.

When the body dies in Cartesian duality, does this not imply the mind is displaced because the brain is dead and incapable of itz supporting act. This scenario is identifiable when the brain is not functioning due to whatever cause. Is death proof against this duality?

Body, brain and mind are all dead at the same time the being is pronunced dead on Earth.

My final question on duality would be : Is brain necessary to house the mind?


Sammi Na Boodie ()

Corey Hammer

When have I not been polite? Have I called people names? I may be a little confrontation in my arguments, but I am not impolite.

Please find where I said anything close to that. The absolute closest I come is saying that I'm a doctoral candidate in the field (experimental psychology), and that was in response to a question you asked.

The substantiation can be used with common knowledge, logic, and philosophy of science. Brain damage causes impairments in mental, emotional, and physical functioning. The brain is an organ in the body. Therefore, that which is called the mind is in fact the brain and consequently a part of the body. Because we cannot test for (nor have a potential test for) a invisible force that is separate from the brain , but unable to get around brain damage, we assume that such a thing does not exist (i.e, lack of testability).

Do you have evidence that indicates otherwise? For example, does damage to Wernicke's or Broca's areas ever not result in impairments in reading or speech at least for a time, especially in adults?

Otherwise, please check the following resources:

Psychology 5th Ed., by Bernstein et al. (intro psych)

Cognitive Neuroscience by Gazzanniga (I can't remember how to spell his name and the book itself is a little too radical in its approach.)

Social Cognition 2nd (1990) by Taylor & Fiske. Specifically, the chapter on consciousness. It's old, but good.

Did I say quantum randomness? Does a dice roll require quantum randomness? No. Coin flip? No.

I wish I could find the reference, but a researcher has programmed artificial ants...that required only 3 rules because most ant behavior is essential random, but it works.

This makes absolutely no logical sense. In addition, you still logically cancel yourself. You say we can understand 3rd person aspects of mental behavior, but then say we cannot understand 1st person aspects. What about ourselves? Can we not know ourselves? Can we attribute reasons for our own behaviors and thoughts?

The correct answer is that we can and many times are often wrong. Best of all (and in complete contradiction to your statement) is that psychology has well-studied attributions. The book listed above: Social Cognition has two whole chapters on it. So, we can know the first-person aspects of mental behavior, understand them, and know how they go wrong.

Methodological naturalism...to paraphrase Terry Pratchett...know it, love it, fear it. Only things that are testable fall within the realm of science, everything is religion or philosophy. The only valid way of understanding the natural world (so far discovered) is science. Everything is outside science's purview (God(s), the soul, the Force, etc.) and science ignores it. Unless it can be tested, it isworthless to science and an understanding of natural processes. And, just because something is elegant does not mean it is correct. Ptolemy's view of the universe was elegant. Freudian theory is elegant. Both are wholly or in part, completely and utterly wrong (or untestable). Elegance means nothing...it is a value placed on something by people. What matters is testability.

This is an appeal to incredulity, a logical fallacy. Just because you cannot think of a way does not mean it cannot be so.

What physical processes are you talking about? Your statement is vague. DO you mean brain functioning? If so, then we do not experience most of it. Most functions occur below the threshhold of consciousness. If so, psychology has shown again and again that your hypothesis is incorrect. For an example, I refer you to Bargh et al. (2001)-December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He tests and shows evidence for goal-directed behavior that is nonconscious-therefore below the level of conscious experience.

Your "solution" is incoherent itself and also untestable in its current form. Therefore, it has no scientific value. You can always restate it to make it more coherent and testable.

But, you could also be wrong about what you experience. Prior expectations influence what you see even at the moment and especially recall later.

Good question...the answer is Wernicke's and Broca's areas. As for specific biological mechanisms, science does not yet know.

I will keep asking you to clarify what you mean as I did in my initial reply...which by the way, you never did.

If you can list the name completely that would be great. Also, more recent work is more likely to be an accurate measure of understanding. I would say much before 1990 is way out of date.

Jesse

Jesse:
That depends on some questions about physics that we don't have a final answer to yet. In any case, I don't think that quantum randomness would have any functional importance to our behavior--if you had a detailed deterministic computer simulation of a human brain, I suspect that qualitatively it would behave identically to a real human.

Corey Hammer:
Did I say quantum randomness? Does a dice roll require quantum randomness? No. Coin flip? No.

But in classical physics, there is no true randomness--complete knowledge of initial conditions and the laws of physics would allow you to predict the future precisely.

Corey Hammer:
I wish I could find the reference, but a researcher has programmed artificial ants...that required only 3 rules because most ant behavior is essential random, but it works.

But if the computer is not using a random number generator, running it again from the same initial conditions would produce exactly the same behavior. And you could actually examine what the computer is doing moment-by-moment to have a causal explanation for each and every thing that happens in the simulation, each and every bit-flip that the computer performs along the way. If you had a detailed brain simulation running in a computer, you could likewise have a causal explanation for every event that occurred in the simulation, at least in principle.

Jesse:
No, I'm saying we could have a complete causal explanation for all behavior, a complete understanding of the third-person aspects of what "minds" do (including everything they say about the mind/body problem), but we still wouldn't fully understand the first-person aspects of mind, the fact that all these actions and behaviors are accompanied by consciousness and experience.

Corey Hammer:
This makes absolutely no logical sense. In addition, you still logically cancel yourself.

Instead of simply asserting this, please explain how. If it's a logical contradiction, you should be able to break it down into something like a syllogism to show exactly where the contradiction lies.

Corey Hammer:
You say we can understand 3rd person aspects of mental behavior, but then say we cannot understand 1st person aspects. What about ourselves? Can we not know ourselves? Can we attribute reasons for our own behaviors and thoughts?

Those are still causal explanations though--when we psychoanalyze ourselves we are analyzing our own minds from a 3rd-person perspective, trying to infer things about our own motives using just the same sort of reasoning we'd use to understand someone else's motives. We might later decide this analysis was wrong. I'm using 1st-person experiences to refer only to things like <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/" target="_blank">qualia</a> which cannot be doubted--if I am experiencing the blueness of the sky, I can doubt that I'm looking at the real sky, I can even wonder if I might be using the wrong word when I call it "blue", but I cannot doubt what the color looks like to me in that very moment--if it looked different I'd be having a different experience! The other notable thing about 1st-person qualia is that I can never really be sure if other people using similar words are actually having similar experiences--this sort of incommunicable aspect of qualia is actually the basis for Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" paper that started the thread.

Corey Hammer:
The correct answer is that we can and many times are often wrong. Best of all (and in complete contradiction to your statement) is that psychology has well-studied attributions. The book listed above: Social Cognition has two whole chapters on it. So, we can know the first-person aspects of mental behavior, understand them, and know how they go wrong.

I agree that our descriptions of our reasons for doing things can be wrong, but that's not what I meant by 1st-person experience. I don't directly experience such things as "motives," I only infer them by trying to see myself as I see others.

Jesse:
As I said, it's not a very popular position, since it rejects both the "soul-ist" view that our behavior can never be fully understood in terms of physical processes, as well as the materialist view that "physical processes" are all there is (but it all depends what you mean by 'physical'--for me the most elegant solution is the panpsychist idea that everything we call a 'physical process' is really an experience of some sort).

Corey Hammer:
Methodological naturalism...to paraphrase Terry Pratchett...know it, love it, fear it. Only things that are testable fall within the realm of science, everything is religion or philosophy.

How many times do I have to repeat that I agree with you entirely on this, and thus I see these sorts of questions about the ultimate nature of consciousness as purely philosophical, not scientific?

Corey Hammer:
The only valid way of understanding the natural world (so far discovered) is science.

Yup

Corey Hammer:
Everything is outside science's purview (God(s), the soul, the Force, etc.) and science ignores it.

I don't understand this sentence. "Everything is outside science's purview"? Perhaps you just meant science ignores everything that is outside its purview, but that's an empty statement (how could it not ignore things outside its purview?)

Corey Hammer:
Unless it can be tested, it isworthless to science and an understanding of natural processes.

Yup

Corey Hammer:
And, just because something is elegant does not mean it is correct.

Yup

Corey Hammer:
Ptolemy's view of the universe was elegant. Freudian theory is elegant.

I guess it's just an aesthetic judgement, but I'd have to disagree with you there. Haven't you heard of all the arbitrary epicycles Ptolemy had to include to get his theory to agree with observation? And how are all the weird assumptions of Freudian psychology (the oedipus complex, penis envy, the id/ego/superego division) "elegant"?

Corey Hammer:
Both are wholly or in part, completely and utterly wrong (or untestable). Elegance means nothing...it is a value placed on something by people. What matters is testability.

Elegance means nothing? A lot of important ideas in physics originated wholly out of a desire for elegance, and only later were tested and found to be accurate. General Relativity is one example. String theory may turn out to be another. But I do agree that elegance alone proves nothing, and that something has to be tested before it can be called science. Again, though, I am not claiming that my views are science, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Jesse:
Hold on, what is your definition of a "scientific" statement? For me it must necessarily be something that can be tested, at least in principle. I do not see any way, even in principle, that you could test whether a given physical process (as viewed from the outside) is associated with some inner experience or not.

Corey Hammer:
This is an appeal to incredulity, a logical fallacy. Just because you cannot think of a way does not mean it cannot be so.

Not at all...since my view assumes the physical world is self-contained, that all physical events can be explained wholly in terms of physical causes, by definition my view would lead to precisely the same predictions about events as a purely materialistic theory. How can you "test" one theory against another except by finding examples in which they give different predictions about some event?

Jesse:
The first statement is a formulation of the problem. If the idea of physical processes not accompanied by experience is a coherent one, then no matter how much we understand about the physical processes in our brain we will never really understand why they are associated with experience.

Corey Hammer:
What physical processes are you talking about?

When I said "If the idea of physical processes not accompanied by experience is a coherent one", I was referring to any physical processes in the universe. If it is coherent to imagine that even some physical processes could take place without any accompanying experience, then the question of why the ones in our brain aren't like that too remains puzzling.

When I said "no matter how much we understand about the physical processes in our brain we will never really understand why they are associated with experience" I was referring to whatever subset of brain processes are associated with my experience in this moment.

Corey Hammer:
Your statement is vague. DO you mean brain functioning? If so, then we do not experience most of it. Most functions occur below the threshhold of consciousness.

See above--"whatever subset" of the processes going on in my brain that are associated with experience. I have no idea what this subset would look like, I don't assume that everything going on in the brain would be included.

Jesse:
The second statement is a possible resolution to the problem, not a definition. I do not "define" physical processes as experiences [snip]

Corey Hammer:
Your "solution" is incoherent itself

Why is it incoherent? You don't think it's concievable that every physical process is associated with some small amount of experience?

Corey Hammer:
and also untestable in its current form.

Didn't say it was, in fact I explicitly pointed out that it wasn't.

Corey Hammer:
Therefore, it has no scientific value.

I agree, that's why I said it was a philosophical issue rather than a scientific one.

Jesse:
my own experience is the one thing that it is impossible for me to doubt.

Corey Hammer:
But, you could also be wrong about what you experience. Prior expectations influence what you see even at the moment and especially recall later.

My internal description or analysis or memory of an experience could be wrong. But the experience itself can't be "wrong" in the moment--I can't be experiencing something other than what I'm "actually" experiencing! This is tautologically true, provided you accept that "my experience" is itself a well-defined notion with definite properties.

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>

Feather

Just to clarify, Jesse, in your last post you were responding to Corey; not me.

Your definition is incomplete. A "scientific statement" is merely a statement about the universe (natural world). The statement carries with it that the observable and its properties can be "tested."

In that case the question is unanswerable and therefore is nonsensical. For any two people could "philosophise" two completely different and even contradictory "answers" and never be able to prove the other's wrong.

Now you're reversing yourself again. The notions of "coherence," and in fact "logic" in general do not necessarily reflect reality. I can make a perfectly valid and sound logical argument that has nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of reality, in other words.

So while it is true that statements accurately describing reality must be logically sound, it is not necessarily true that logically sound statements accurately describe reality. This is perhaps the most basic axiom in any logical construction (i.e. p =&gt; q does NOT imply q =&gt; p).


And yet you've attempted to propose that the act of "reasoning out" a "solution" to the "problem" of mind/body can in fact do just that--conform to reality. You do this by suggesting that the mind is somehow separate from the body; an unphysical "entity."

Well, hell, we're never "sure" of anything. Why bother?

Once again you're confusing "logical truth" with "nature of reality."

And you're committing the same fallacious psuedo-skepticism that Descarte was guilty of. It's patently absurd.

You can doubt everything. That doesn't mean that your "view" is rational.


You'd be wrong. Science is what it is by defintion. In otherwords, you can propose a set of axioms that are different from those of which "science" is composed. But they probably would not explain the natural world so well.

No. Plato had a scale or ladder of forms describing "reality." You are obviously familiar with the concept.


Nonsense. How do you know your experiences weren't made up and put in your head by some vicious demon? Descarte would like to know.

Hogwash and garbledygook. How can you even make the distinction between "third person" and "first person?" Skepticism of skepticism is a circular argument, logically incoherent, and plainly incorrect, in terms of logic.

And yet you insist that it is not so.

Pray, offer some line of reasoning that supports your assertions.

And now for the offensive:

Your premise is that "mind" is inherently unphysical (without the realm of science).

Then pray tell how does 'mind' interact with body? Are you asking me to believe that a completely non-physical "object" can interact with a completely physical object and be unmeasurable?

How can you even logically formulate a statement in support of this notion? It is self-contradictory by definition.

Corey Hammer

Jesse, you were replying to my post, not Feather's. Quick question. Jesse, are you a philosopher or a scientist?

Editted to add: Damn, Feather, you beat me.

This is a straw man, and doubly so. First, classical physics is in fact, not how the universe works anyways...on the micro level, it functions by the rules of quantum physics. Secondsly, we are talking neuroanatomy, not physics (though in fact it could be traced back to quantum physics as everything else can as well). The random component derives from the neurons' behavior and how they work together, not physics directly.

Because I cannot find the study, I cannot refute this. However, I remarked that ant behavior was modeled using only 3 rules. To be explicit, there was a random component in the model.

Logical contradiction maybe was not the precise wording I desired. You were saying that we can know everything we want to know about 3rd person mental experiences, but not from a first person. However, the problem with that is we experience the world from a first-person perspective. Your statement basically says that we cannot understand the first-person perspective but we can understand the third-person perspective. Logically, that means we can understand our perspective from the third-person but since we are ourselves (& experience the world first-person), we have an understanding of at least one first-person perspective. Thus, you cancel yourself.

Nope...you have it backwards. We apply our motives to others. See work on the Theory of Mind by development psychologists as well as work on Social Interaction theory. You are limited by motives and strategies that are in you cognitive toolset.

Okay, now I understand where you are coming from. If we take a narrow view, where we say we must have a perfect understanding of the first-person, then you are correct. We will never have a perfect understanding of the first-person perspective.

However, that does not mean we cannot create highly accurate models of it. Models are exactly what they state they are...the best possible representations that we can get. I believe we are talking at cross-purposes here. You want absolute proofs as per philosophy, but that's not what science gives you. Science gives you its best guess of an approximation at something.

In addition, if we make the assumption that people behave in similar ways because their brains are basically similar in construction, chemistry, and function. We can then construct models that allow to examine how people experience the world first-hand.

Again, we're talking about different things. However, I will not that no where on that page is the word or concept: empirical. The whole thing seems to be the flights of fancy of philosophers and based on absolutely no evidence at all. They list no evidence for qualia from science. At least, we agree about testability.

That's a typo...my bad. Everything else [outside that which is testable] is outside science's purview.

That's right. I don't care if other theories were created for elegance and found to be true. Elegance is still a value judgement that is completely unrelated to it explanatory value. Explanatory value and ability to make predictions are the only true messages of a theory's success.

How many times do I have to say this? It is an appeal to incredulity because you personally have said, "I can't think of a way to show B. Therefore, A is correct." That, Jesse, is an appeal to incredulity. Michael Behe of ID'ist infamy does that all the time. That's the whole of your argument. You are essentially trying to prove a negative.

A) You're misusing coherent. A different word would give the context far better.

B) It's still an unsupported assertion. Why, oh why should it be puzzling? Most processes in our brain DO take place without our direct experience.

You are again, trying to prove a negative.

You contradict youself: First you say, "some physical processes could take place without any accompanying experience, then the question of why the ones in our brain aren't like that too remains puzzling..." then you say the above. Which is it? Is it puzzling we don't have processes we don't experience or do you think that you that it isn't?

So, do you "experience" the bonding of oxygen to hemoglobin? In other words, yes, there are physical processes beyond our direct perception.

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: Corey Hammer ]</p>

Jesse

Feather:
Just to clarify, Jesse, in your last post you were responding to Corey; not me.

Whoops! Sorry about that, I just went back and edited it.

Jesse:
Hold on, what is your definition of a "scientific" statement? For me it must necessarily be something that can be tested, at least in principle.

Feather:
Your definition is incomplete. A "scientific statement" is merely a statement about the universe (natural world). The statement carries with it that the observable and its properties can be "tested."

I disagree, I don't think statements about the natural world which are in principle untestable can ever really be scientific statements. For example, "Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one" cannot for me be a scientific statement, unless some future modification of quantum theory results in what were once mere interpretations actually leading to different predictions.

Jesse:
So to me these are basically philosophical questions, not scientific ones.

Feather:
In that case the question is unanswerable and therefore is nonsensical. For any two people could "philosophise" two completely different and even contradictory "answers" and never be able to prove the other's wrong.

Sure--I'd say, "tough luck for them, no one ever said we humans would be able to know the truth about any proposition." I don't think solipsism can ever be tested one way or another--it's just some basic need for reality to make sense that makes me find it very unlikely.

Jesse:
If the idea of physical processes not accompanied by experience is a coherent one, then no matter how much we understand about the physical processes in our brain we will never really understand why they are associated with experience.

Feather:
Now you're reversing yourself again. The notions of "coherence," and in fact "logic" in general do not necessarily reflect reality. I can make a perfectly valid and sound logical argument that has nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of reality, in other words.

You're putting my argument in reverse. I agree that not every logically consistent set of statements is true, obviously, but I'm saying that if a set of statements is logically inconsistent, we can rule them out immediately. If "physical processes unaccompanied by internal experiences" was actually logically incoherent, it could not be true. However, I don't think there's any obvious logical incoherence there; still, there might be metaphysical "laws" like "to exist is to be experienced" which would make it impossible or "metaphysically incoherent." Once again, this may be an area where we can never know the truth of the matter, even though the question has a true answer (or it may just be gibberish, as a logical positivist would argue...I don't think it is though).

Feather:
So while it is true that statements accurately describing reality must be logically sound, it is not necessarily true that logically sound statements accurately describe reality.

Sure, I wasn't arguing that they do--that would be silly.

Feather:
And yet you've attempted to propose that the act of "reasoning out" a "solution" to the "problem" of mind/body can in fact do just that--conform to reality. You do this by suggesting that the mind is somehow separate from the body; an unphysical "entity."

Actually my solution is that they are not separate--that physical processes are not a fundamentally different type of thing (Descartes would have used the term 'different substance') than experiences.

The point is that in our ordinary way of thinking we do imagine that some physical processes go on "in the dark", sans subjectivity, and if that's the case I'm saying our own first-person experience of "qualia" (the redness of red, the experience of sonar from a bat's perspective) are in a fundamentally different category than any such mindless process. If you discard the original premise of mindless, qualia-less physical processes the problem might disappear.

Jesse:
However, unless we can actually prove this incoherence by showing it leads to some sort of self-contradiction, this will always be just a possible answer to the problem, we'll never be sure it's the correct one.

Feather:
Well, hell, we're never "sure" of anything.

OK, but when you're dealing with empirical issues at least there's the prospect of new evidence which would give you a higher degree of confidence in one answer or another. The lack of "sureness" here is more like with the different interpretations of QM, where it seems that no experiment will settle the matter (although some experiments might make some interpretations more intuitively plausible than others, like seeing a quantum computer do a calculation which would take more bits than are available in the entire universe if it were run on a classical computer).

Why bother?[/i]

Why bother to what?

Feather:
Once again you're confusing "logical truth" with "nature of reality."

And you're committing the same fallacious psuedo-skepticism that Descarte was guilty of. It's patently absurd.

You can doubt everything. That doesn't mean that your "view" is rational.

Huh? I'm not doubting anything--the only time I brought the issue of "doubt" up was when I argued that our first-person experiences are the one thing we can't doubt, no more than we can doubt our own existence. But I'm not suggesting the external world doesn't exist either.

Jesse:
I would say there is no clear definition of "physical" and that it would be better to say that science can only study what is testable, but otherwise I agree.

Feather:
You'd be wrong. Science is what it is by defintion. In otherwords, you can propose a set of axioms that are different from those of which "science" is composed. But they probably would not explain the natural world so well.

Ok, but I think the need for tests is part of the definition (or axioms if you prefer) of science. Do you think science can ever tell us whether the many-worlds interpretation or the Bohm interpretation is the correct one, in absence of any possible test that could distinguish the two?

Jesse:
But unlike Plato's Forms (what 'ladder'? Are you thinking of Plotinus?)...

Feather:
No. Plato had a scale or ladder of forms describing "reality." You are obviously familiar with the concept.

I was not aware that there was any hierarchical ordering among the forms though--I though it was just the world of forms on the one hand and the world of matter on the other. I could easily be wrong on this though, I'm no expert on Plato's philosophy.

Jesse:
...[O]r supernatural entities in religion, my own experience is the one thing that it is impossible for me to doubt.

Feather:
Nonsense. How do you know your experiences weren't made up and put in your head by some vicious demon? Descarte would like to know.

In that case my experiences would not accurately reflect outside reality, but they'd still be my experiences. The demon could not "falsely" make me experience the color green when I was "actually" having an experience of the color red--the notion is self-contradictory.

But as I said at the end of my post to Corey, this assumes that "my experience" is a well-defined notion. It's possible--and materialism would seem to imply this position--that whether a given system is conscious, and what it is like to "be" it, is a question that has no "true" answer, and is just a matter of outsiders projecting their own ideas onto its behavior. An analogy would be the quality of "cuteness"--no one would say there's an "objective truth" about whether a given animal is cute or not, it depends on the observer.

If consciousness is just a matter of outside opinion like cuteness, questions like "when in the history of life did consciousness first arise?" would also have no true answer. You’d just have organisms with successively more complex reactions and behaviors, but you couldn’t ask if any given one was really consciousness, it would just be up to you how to define "consciousness" and which organisms would qualify according to you. Same would go for the question of whether a given A.I. was "really" conscious or just a clever imitation. Just as with the question of whether an animal is cute or how many grains of sand you need to to make a "pile", there’d be plenty of gray area and room for different people to give different answers, none more correct than another.

But I don't think consciousness is like that. Even if everyone in the universe agreed I was unconscious and had no real experience, they'd be wrong, because the truth is that I am conscious, a truth that is self-evident from my own perspective. Same goes for any other system—it either has an inner experience or it doesn’t, regardless of what our speculations might be. This notion that there must be a single truth about whether a system is conscious, and what it is like to be it, is the one that separates my position from that of a pure materialist. If it is not self-evident to you that you are really conscious, regardless of what anyone thinks, and that your experience is like this rather than like something else...well, in that case there’s really not much more I can say to convince you.

Jesse:
As long as you can imagine that there are such a thing as "physical processes" which only have a third-person aspect but no first-person aspect, the question of how to reconcile these two sides remains.

Feather:
Hogwash and garbledygook. How can you even make the distinction between "third person" and "first person?"

The third-person description of a system involves nothing more than causal relationships, while the first-person point of view includes qualia—it’s "what it is like to be" that system. For a materialist only the third-person side of things is "real" because only third-person statements can be definitely true or false, while speculations about the first-person side of a system have no more "real truth" than statements about whether a system is cute.

Feather:
Skepticism of skepticism is a circular argument, logically incoherent, and plainly incorrect, in terms of logic.

And yet you insist that it is not so.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that I was expressing "skepticism of skepticism"—what are you referring to here?

Feather:
And now for the offensive:

Your premise is that "mind" is inherently unphysical (without the realm of science).

Then pray tell how does 'mind' interact with body? Are you asking me to believe that a completely non-physical "object" can interact with a completely physical object and be unmeasurable?

Well, I don’t say mind is unphysical. I say that if you take the usual materialist view of consciousness where it is possible to concieve of systems that lack consciousness altogether, then you have a big problem because our first-person experience of "mind" seems to fall into a fundamentally different category. But I don’t believe this—I think reality is made up of nothing but conscious experiences, which can be described in third-person cause-and-effect terms by other minds. From this third-person perspective it does seem that causes and effects obey regular laws—I don’t think it’s necessary for minds to have some sort of "free will."

This description of <a href="http://www.hedweb.com/lockwood.htm" target="_blank">Naturalistic Panpsychism</a> (skim down to the middle of the page) is not too far from my own views, although I don't agree with everything there.

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>

Jesse

Corey Hammer:
Quick question. Jesse, are you a philosopher or a scientist?

I've done a lot of reading in philosophy, but my degree is in physics.

Jesse:
But in classical physics, there is no true randomness--complete knowledge of initial conditions and the laws of physics would allow you to predict the future precisely.

This is a straw man, and doubly so. First, classical physics is in fact, not how the universe works anyways...on the micro level, it functions by the rules of quantum physics.

This was the background to my statement:

I've quoted the full background to my comment so the context would be clear. First you argued that I was wrong to say we could in principle understand all our behavior causally, "because all behavior has a random component to it." When I said that this randomness has no functional importance to our brain, so that we could always just imagine an uploaded human mind running on a deterministic computer simulation, you said that you weren't talking about quantum randomness. But then when I pointed out that in a purely classical world without quantum randomness, everything would be predictable in principle, you scolded me for ignoring quantum laws!

My original point remains—aside from the possible true randomness brought in by quantum physics, which is unlikely to play any important role in our "intelligence" anyway (I’m assuming a simulated human brain would exhibit the same sort of intelligence as a real brain, passing the turing test perfectly), all of our behavior is in principle explainable in purely causal terms.

Corey Hammer:
Secondsly, we are talking neuroanatomy, not physics (though in fact it could be traced back to quantum physics as everything else can as well). The random component derives from the neurons' behavior and how they work together, not physics directly.

I don’t see why "direct" vs. "indirect" is important. Either way, aside from quantum randomness you could in principle predict everything we do given complete knowledge of initial conditions and laws. For the sake of the argument perhaps we should just imagine we are talking about "uploaded" human minds running on deterministic classical computers.

Jesse:
Instead of simply asserting this, please explain how. If it's a logical contradiction, you should be able to break it down into something like a syllogism to show exactly where the contradiction lies.

Corey Hammer:
Logical contradiction maybe was not the precise wording I desired. You were saying that we can know everything we want to know about 3rd person mental experiences, but not from a first person. However, the problem with that is we experience the world from a first-person perspective. Your statement basically says that we cannot understand the first-person perspective but we can understand the third-person perspective.

I didn’t say we "cannot understand the first-person perspective." I just said that complete knowledge of third-person facts alone would still leave some truths about reality uncovered.

Corey Hammer:
Logically, that means we can understand our perspective from the third-person

What do you mean by "understand our perspective"?

Jesse:
Those are still causal explanations though--when we psychoanalyze ourselves we are analyzing our own minds from a 3rd-person perspective, trying to infer things about our own motives using just the same sort of reasoning we'd use to understand someone else's motives.

Corey Hammer:
Nope...you have it backwards. We apply our motives to others. See work on the Theory of Mind by development psychologists as well as work on Social Interaction theory. You are limited by motives and strategies that are in you cognitive toolset.

Yes, both elements (attributing our own feelings to others and trying to imagine our own actions as seen by others) are involved, I was oversimplifying a bit. But the point is that any analysis of "why" we did something is always a causal analysis, and that analysis can be wrong—it’s an analysis, not a direct experience like seeing a color or hearing a tone (qualia).

Jesse:
I'm using 1st-person experiences to refer only to things like qualia which cannot be doubted...

Corey Hammer:
Okay, now I understand where you are coming from. If we take a narrow view, where we say we must have a perfect understanding of the first-person, then you are correct. We will never have a perfect understanding of the first-person perspective.

However, that does not mean we cannot create highly accurate models of it. Models are exactly what they state they are...the best possible representations that we can get.

But to me "models" are always telling us something about causal relationships, not about qualia. What would a model of a bat’s qualia look like? Could we ever know what bat sonar is like from the inside, even in principle?

Corey Hammer:
I believe we are talking at cross-purposes here. You want absolute proofs as per philosophy, but that's not what science gives you. Science gives you its best guess of an approximation at something.

I don’t want a proof, I’m just making an argument that qualia seem to be a fundamenally different sort of thing than anything that could fit into a materialist view of the world. In principle, we could have a really complete third-person account of how bat brains work, but it’s not clear this would provide any real progress in answering Nagel’s question.

Corey Hammer:
In addition, if we make the assumption that people behave in similar ways because their brains are basically similar in construction, chemistry, and function. We can then construct models that allow to examine how people experience the world first-hand.

What would be an example of a model that allows us to examine how other people experience the world? It seems to me that to the extent you can understand that, it is always by making the extra-scientific assumption that similar behavior or similar causal structure implies similar experience.

Jesse:
Elegance means nothing?

Corey Hammer:
That's right. I don't care if other theories were created for elegance and found to be true. Elegance is still a value judgement that is completely unrelated to it explanatory value. Explanatory value and ability to make predictions are the only true messages of a theory's success.

I agree that elegance is a value judgement, but the fact remains that historically our sense of which theories are most "elegant" is correlated with which theories later turn out to agree with experiments. It’s as if reality’s "tastes" are similar to ours for some reason.

This is related to Wigner’s question about the reason for <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html" target="_blank">The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences</a>.

Jesse:
I do not see any way, even in principle, that you could test whether a given physical process (as viewed from the outside) is associated with some inner experience or not.

Corey Hammer:
This is an appeal to incredulity, a logical fallacy. Just because you cannot think of a way does not mean it cannot be so.

Jesse:
Not at all...

Corey Hammer:
How many times do I have to say this? It is an appeal to incredulity because you personally have said, "I can't think of a way to show B. Therefore, A is correct." That, Jesse, is an appeal to incredulity. Michael Behe of ID'ist infamy does that all the time. That's the whole of your argument. You are essentially trying to prove a negative.

OK, given the scientific assumption that the only way to "test" one theory over must always involve finding empirical evidence that agrees with one but disagrees with the other, then it is impossible to test. If you have some other notion of "test" that involves no empirical evidence whatsoever, maybe it could be tested.


Jesse:
If it is coherent to imagine that even some physical processes could take place without any accompanying experience, then the question of why the ones in our brain aren't like that too remains puzzling.

Corey Hammer:
A) You're misusing coherent. A different word would give the context far better.

If "coherent" only refers to formal logical coherence, you’re correct, but I think the word is often used in a more general sense.

Corey Hammer:
B) It's still an unsupported assertion. Why, oh why should it be puzzling? Most processes in our brain DO take place without our direct experience.

Physically, every event in the universe (including my own actions) would be exactly the same even if my brain processes were also happening in the total absence of experience (again, assuming the notion of physical processes sans experience is even possible). That means an exhaustive physical description of reality would still be missing something, spelling fatal problems for materialism.

Jesse:
When I said "no matter how much we understand about the physical processes in our brain we will never really understand why they are associated with experience" I was referring to whatever subset of brain processes are associated with my experience in this moment.

Corey Hammer:
You are again, trying to prove a negative.

Again, I’m assuming there’s no soul/matter interaction, physical events are explained wholly by physical causes. If so, no amount of physical understanding of how the brain works could explain why we live in possible world A, where certain brain processes are associated with experience, as opposed to possible world B, where they all happen "in the dark." After all, physically the two worlds are identical. I think this is a perfectly good proof, although it does depend on the original assumption about the physical world being wholly self-contained.

Jesse:
See above--"whatever subset" of the processes going on in my brain that are associated with experience. I have no idea what this subset would look like, I don't assume that everything going on in the brain would be included...

Corey Hammer:
You contradict youself: First you say, "some physical processes could take place without any accompanying experience, then the question of why the ones in our brain aren't like that too remains puzzling..." then you say the above. Which is it? Is it puzzling we don't have processes we don't experience or do you think that you that it isn't?

The "fatal problem for materialism" I describe above occurs if any physical processes in the entire universe are associated with experience while others are not, no matter how rare they are. Obviously in a world where certain physical processes happen in the dark (pool balls colliding, say), there is nothing "puzzling" about other physical processes that also happen in the dark, regardless of whether they occur in the brain or somewhere else. The only puzzle is if any subset of processes in the universe are associated with first-person experiences.

Jesse:
You don't think it's concievable that every physical process is associated with some small amount of experience?

Corey Hammer:
So, do you "experience" the bonding of oxygen to hemoglobin? In other words, yes, there are physical processes beyond our direct perception.

I don’t experience the physical processes going on in your brain either, but you do (some of them anyway). In a panpsychist view every process is associated with some kind of experience, but there’s no requirement that everything that happens within the boundaries of "my" skull is part of my own experience. Maybe you could think of the universe as an enormous collection of events, and every possible subset would be associated with a unique experience (or maybe some subsets would be ‘isomorphic’ and therefore associated with identical experiences, like two computers running the same program).

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>

galiel

We don't know yet. Tremendous progress is being made. That current lack of knowledge doesn't constitute proof of the mind/body duality. The track record suggests that we will continue to increase our understanding. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that there is some impassable threshold or barrier beyond which scientific inquiry will fail to be adequate. In fact, all evidence to date suggests that such barriers (many have been posited in the past in areas that are now clearly within the realm of scientific understanding) do not exist.

Corey Hammer

No, I scolded you for using a straw man argument about physics. At the level of cellular functioning, quantum forces are at play. However, and you would know this if you would read the full statement, the randomness is behavior IS NOT due to quantum fluctuations, but instead to how and why neurons fire and how they are organized.

This is still a straw man. You are not arguing against what I actually said.

So, if we ignore randomness, we can predict everything. Of course, we can, but then our model is wrong. But, you are still arguing against the wrong thing. You leapt onto an aside as if it was the real argument. Hence, why the original comment was in parantheses.

No, we are talking about reality.

No, you didn't, and is technically correct. However, we can have a "better than working" understanding though not perfect (i.e., a scientific model).

English is limited in conceptualizing ideas like this. It means understanding our normally first-person perspective from a third-person perspective instead, but not quite. Imagine person who is both here and there. That person has an experience over there, and thus also observes it outside himself from here. Thus he had a third-person perspective of his experience, but also a first-person perspective as well. He is able to see outside himself. Reverse that and you have something close to what I meant.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

You have no evidence for qualia presented. Models provide explanations about the real world and guide further work. If qualia exist, then they must be definable by a model and provide predictions about related phenomena. And, you betcha we could model a bat's internal representations and understanding. Understanding animal mental states is going to be the key to a more complete understanding of our own mental states and processes.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

You don't want proof yet still you want to propose an argument. Take your pick, if you want to talk about the real world and not philosophy, you need "proof" also called evidence. You don't get to pick. You want to make an argument; you offer evidence for your position, and you have none stated so far.

Again with the qualia. I've not seen anything besides philosophical meandering on the subject. Either provide empirical evidence as to their existance or drop them as unsupported.

I hate to tell you this, but you don't "see" or "hear" anything. What you think you see is processed bits of stimuli created by your brain. Your visual and auditory cortex, not to mention associative cortex, play havoc with all the stuff your senses take in, and it may not even reach the conscious level. It may not even make it past the sense organ! By the time, your perceptions make it to consciousness, they've been laundered better than Tony Soprano's grocery money.

And, how are these so-called qualia qualitatively different from subliminal stimuli that still greatly affect our behavior?

It's called a theory of mind...it's what children first develop as they begin to understand that others have intentions and information that are different from what the self possesses. A scientific theory of mind(s) is something that we work towards in understanding what consciousness is.

Synesthetics are another good example. I can easily imagine light having sound and sounds have smells. They perceive the world in a different than normal people as their wiring for processing senses has been crossed. I can imagine these and imagine experiencing them.

No. This is not extra-scientific. You can test your specific predictions and if replicable then you can assume that there is similarity. These are not assumptions. That is why scientists insist on replication and rigorous peer review.

If I remember rightly, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was considered tripe until empirical observations showed it was correct. It was not until empirical evidence developed for it that it was considered elegant. Our "tastes" changed to match reality. So, I repeat, elegance does not matter one whit.

You demonstrate a lack of knowledge about testing theories and hypotheses. If two theories predict two opposite phenomena arising from similar circumstances, then that means there is a third and overarching theory which covers them both. This has always been the case in the sciences. The current big (& currently intractable) one is Grand Unification...but it will eventually be solved.

Theories compete by seeing how much each explains, how they explain, what they predict, and how well the prediction are born out.

I recommend reading Kuhn sometime about paradigm shifts.

Again...this is an unsupported assertion as well as making vague statements about physical events and sameness without defining what those mean. You argument is poorly constructed and phrased. Hydrogen fuses in stars the same way no matter how our brains are constructed or what patterns of activatio lie on our neural circuits.

You said every process.

Yet another fallacy...startling close to the one made by theists when they say to atheists, "How can you know there is no God? You've not been everywhere in the universe." It makes the fatal flaw of constructing a straw man of what an atheist really believes: that s/he sees no evidence for God.

What!? Define experience. Use concrete words.

I repeat most processing in the brain occurs without our awareness. You are constructing straw men about how the brain acts.

I don't care about proofs. This isn't philosophy; this is science. Evidence based on research is what I care about.

I've decided to not respond to anymore of your post because it all unsupported arguments and whimsy as far as science is concerned. Reality does not conform to one's comfy philosophy, and the mind/body "problem" exists only in the "minds" of the philosophers discussing it.

Jesse

Jesse:
I've quoted the full background to my comment so the context would be clear. First you argued that I was wrong to say we could in principle understand all our behavior causally, "because all behavior has a random component to it." When I said that this randomness has no functional importance to our brain, so that we could always just imagine an uploaded human mind running on a deterministic computer simulation, you said that you weren't talking about quantum randomness. But then when I pointed out that in a purely classical world without quantum randomness, everything would be predictable in principle, you scolded me for ignoring quantum laws!

Corey Hammer:
No, I scolded you for using a straw man argument about physics.

What straw man argument??? You specifically said "Did I say quantum randomness? Does a dice roll require quantum randomness? No. Coin flip? No." I took this to mean you were talking about purely classical forms of unpredictability, like chaos.

Corey Hammer:
At the level of cellular functioning, quantum forces are at play. However, and you would know this if you would read the full statement, the randomness is behavior IS NOT due to quantum fluctuations, but instead to how and why neurons fire and how they are organized.

Of course the randomness is due to quantum forces. If we find out tomorrow that quantum "randomness" is only a product of some deterministic pseudorandom algorithm, for example, then we will be back to being able to predict behavior exactly as in classical physics (in principle). The only thing that stands between us and that goal is quantum randomness.

Jesse:
Either way, aside from quantum randomness you could in principle predict everything we do given complete knowledge of initial conditions and laws.

Corey Hammer:
So, if we ignore randomness, we can predict everything. Of course, we can, but then our model is wrong. But, you are still arguing against the wrong thing. You leapt onto an aside as if it was the real argument.

I think you’re just missing the point of my argument. When I talked about science being able to predict every aspect of our behavior, what I was getting at was just the point that intelligent behavior can probably be understood in a purely material way (though we haven't gotten to that point yet), there’s no need for a cartesian soul interacting with the brain through the pineal gland. Thus, if you can explain the behavior of a simulated brain on a deterministic computer, and the behavior of this simulated brain is qualitatively identical to that of real brains, that means that the unpredictability in real brains is irrelevant to my main point. It doesn’t contribute anything to the "intelligence" in our behavior—intelligent behaviors can still be understood in a purely physical way, with no references to a nonphysical mind. Quantum randomness would only add "noise" to this that would make it impossible to predict the behavior of real brains exactly, but again, this unpredictability would have nothing to do with free will or creativity or anything else that makes the behavior of intelligent beings interesting, so it’s irrelevant to what I was arguing.

Jesse:
I didn't say we "cannot understand the first-person perspective." I just said that complete knowledge of third-person facts alone would still leave some truths about reality uncovered.

Corey Hammer:
No, you didn't, and is technically correct. However, we can have a "better than working" understanding though not perfect (i.e., a scientific model).

"Better than working" understanding of what, exactly? As I said, I don’t think any amount of increased understanding of intelligent behavior brings us any closer to an understanding of qualia and experience.

Jesse:
What do you mean by "understand our perspective"? [sic]

Corey Hammer:
English is limited in conceptualizing ideas like this. It means understanding our normally first-person perspective from a third-person perspective instead, but not quite. Imagine person who is both here and there. That person has an experience over there, and thus also observes it outside himself from here. Thus he had a third-person perspective of his experience, but also a first-person perspective as well. He is able to see outside himself. Reverse that and you have something close to what I meant.

I agree that through science we can have a better understanding of our normally first-person perspective from a third-person perspective (understanding the workings of our brain, for example). What I dispute is that science can give us a better understanding of why the first-person perspective (qualia) exists in the first place, or what the qualia of others (bats) is like.

Jesse:
But to me "models" are always telling us something about causal relationships, not about qualia. What would a model of a bat’s qualia look like? Could we ever know what bat sonar is like from the inside, even in principle?

Corey Hammer:


You have no evidence for qualia presented.

To me they’re self-evident, as I’ve already said. To try to "argue" for qualia would be a bit like trying to argue the fact that I exist—it’s not something that can really be discussed, you either get why it’s obvious or you don’t.

By the way, call me crazy but I find the head-banging-against-the-wall emoticon pretty rude. I just presented my point of view, I’m not trying to twist anyone’s arm into agreeing with me—you were the one who started this argument with me, not the other way around. No one is forcing you to continue it.

Corey Hammer:
Models provide explanations about the real world and guide further work. If qualia exist, then they must be definable by a model and provide predictions about related phenomena.

So are you ruling out a priori any realities which are not definable by such models? As I already pointed out, a possible world A in which qualia exist and a possible world B where they don’t migh be identical in every possible physical way, in which case there would be no "predictions" you could make that would distinguish one from the other. Every physical event that happens in one possible world would be mirrored exactly in the other, right down to the conclusions that the qualia-experiencing-Corey and zombie-Corey draw about the existence of qualia.

Corey Hammer:
And, you betcha we could model a bat's internal representations and understanding. Understanding animal mental states is going to be the key to a more complete understanding of our own mental states and processes.

We could model the relationship between a bat’s various mental states or chart out how its brain responds to various stimuli, but I don’t see how you expect to model what it is like to experience bat sonar from the inside. Perhaps you feel that the question doesn’t make sense, that there’s no "real truth" about what it’s like beyond our interpretations, in which case just say so. This gets back to the basic issue I was talking about in my post to Feather:

Jesse:
I don’t want a proof, I’m just making an argument that qualia seem to be a fundamenally different sort of thing than anything that could fit into a materialist view of the world.

Corey Hammer:
You don't want proof yet still you want to propose an argument. Take your pick, if you want to talk about the real world and not philosophy, you need "proof" also called evidence. You don't get to pick. You want to make an argument; you offer evidence for your position, and you have none stated so far.

You have no proof, or even "evidence", that solipsism is false. That’s the way it works in philosophy—you have arguments, but usually not proof or empirical evidence. I’ve offered several arguments, such as my claim for the self-evident nature of qualia along with the point that a world without qualia would still be physically identical to our world (assuming no Cartesian mind/matter interaction), showing that qualia are "something extra" beyond the material. Also see my argument above about whether consciousness/qualia are all a matter of interpretation like "cuteness" or whether there’s a real truth about consciousness-related questions; if there is, this would also demonstrate that consciousness is "something extra" since you could have a complete physical understanding of a system without any need to decide if it’s conscious or not.

Jesse:
...not a direct experience like seeing a color or hearing a tone...

Corey Hammer:
Again with the qualia. I've not seen anything besides philosophical meandering on the subject. Either provide empirical evidence as to their existance or drop them as unsupported.

So you don’t think it’s self-evident that you have qualia? You don’t think there is a real truth of the matter to the question of whether you or conscious or not, it’s just a matter of opinion like with "cuteness?" Maybe you’re a zombie. And as Jaron Lanier (inventor of virtual reality) pointed out, <a href="http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/lanier_zombie.html" target="_blank">you can’t argue with a zombie</a>.

Of course I kid—whether you claim to believe in qualia or not is irrelevant to deciding whether you’re a zombie or not, since all the same processes that go on in a real person’s head are mirrored in the zombie’s head, so both will have the exact same opinions about consciounsess and qualia. But that just shows why your call for "empirical evidence" can never be met, even if my view is right—both the qualia-verse and the zombie-verse are physically indistinguishable, and thus a universe where qualia exist will contain precisely the same empirical evidence as a zombie universe where they don’t.

Corey Hammer:
I hate to tell you this, but you don't "see" or "hear" anything. What you think you see is processed bits of stimuli created by your brain. Your visual and auditory cortex, not to mention associative cortex, play havoc with all the stuff your senses take in, and it may not even reach the conscious level.

You’re talking about the issue of whether what I experience has any correspondence with what’s out there in the outside physical world. But that’s irrelevant to the qualia issue—the qualia of seeing a blue sky in a dream is the same as the qualia of seeing a blue sky when awake, it doesn’t matter whether the experience was based on information coming in through the optic nerve or if it’s just your brain inventing things.

Corey Hammer:
And, how are these so-called qualia qualitatively different from subliminal stimuli that still greatly affect our behavior?

They’re qualitatively different because I actually experience tham, rather than simply noticing (or not even noticing) that my behavior is being influenced.

Jesse:
What would be an example of a model that allows us to examine how other people experience the world?

Corey Hammer:
It's called a theory of mind...it's what children first develop as they begin to understand that others have intentions and information that are different from what the self possesses.

But a lone conscious child in a world of zombies would develop exactly the same theory of mind. This is just based on analogies between other’s behaviors and our own behavior when we are having certain experiences, we aren’t learning anything about other’s experiences directly (no matter how much behavioral information we collect, we are not closer to knowing what other people’s experience is really like, since their zombie twins would behave exactly the same).

Corey Hammer:
Synesthetics are another good example. I can easily imagine light having sound and sounds have smells. They perceive the world in a different than normal people as their wiring for processing senses has been crossed. I can imagine these and imagine experiencing them.

But you have no way of knowing whether your imagination is accurate, except by making untestable assumptions like "similar behaviors indicate similar inner experiences"—if correct, this assumption would suggest that the closer your behavior is to real synesthetes, the more accurate your imagination is. But the assumption itself is completely untestable—for all you know people with very similar behaviors might be having radically different inner experiences.

Jesse:
It seems to me that to the extent you can understand that, it is always by making the extra-scientific assumption that similar behavior or similar causal structure implies similar experience.

Corey Hammer:
No. This is not extra-scientific. You can test your specific predictions and if replicable then you can assume that there is similarity. These are not assumptions. That is why scientists insist on replication and rigorous peer review.

Uh, how would you test the assumption that similar behavior means similar inner experience, without actually viewing someone else’s qualia directly? How can you be sure that the experience you label as "green" is not most similar to the experience I call "blue", but we never realize it because we both call grass "green", skies "blue", etc.?

How do you know I’m not a zombie who simply behaves identically to someone with real first-person experiences, for that matter? How would you possibly "test your specific predictions" to answer this question yes or no? Please be specific.

Jesse:
...but the fact remains that historically our sense of which theories are most "elegant" is correlated with which theories later turn out to agree with experiments. It’s as if reality’s "tastes" are similar to ours for some reason.

Corey Hammer:
If I remember rightly, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was considered tripe until empirical observations showed it was correct.

I don’t think that’s accurate. In any case, Einstein certainly thought his ideas were elegant; all the more so for his theory of general relativity, which was motivated almost entirely by the desire for theoretical elegance (think of the equivalence principle, for example).

Corey Hammer:
It was not until empirical evidence developed for it that it was considered elegant. Our "tastes" changed to match reality. So, I repeat, elegance does not matter one whit.

Not one whit, eh? Can I ask how much physics you’ve studied, and whether you know any physicists? If elegance matters not one whit to you, what do you think of string theory?

Jesse:
OK, given the scientific assumption that the only way to "test" one theory over must always involve finding empirical evidence that agrees with one but disagrees with the other, then it is impossible to test.

Corey Hammer:
You demonstrate a lack of knowledge about testing theories and hypotheses. If two theories predict two opposite phenomena arising from similar circumstances, then that means there is a third and overarching theory which covers them both.

That’s only the case when you have two theories that are extremely successful in their own domains but break down and yield different predictions in certain extreme cases, like quantum mechanics vs. general relativity. In most cases, when two theories predict opposite things, it just means one of them is wrong.

In any case, this is irrelevant to my point about qualia, since in this case we have two theories which predict precisely the same thing about all possible empirical results, so there is no way you could test one vs. the other. An analogy from science would be the different "interpretations" of quantum mechanics—are you familiar with this idea? Do you think it’s possible to test one interpretation of QM against another?

Jesse:
Physically, every event in the universe (including my own actions) would be exactly the same even if my brain processes were also happening in the total absence of experience...

Corey Hammer:
Again...this is an unsupported assertion

No, it’s a consequence of the postulate I made earlier that the physical world is self-contained, not influenced by any dualistic mind-stuff. If you want to argue with this postulate that’s fine, but I’m just showing consequences of the postulate if it’s true. If the physical world is indeed self-contained, but nonphysical qualia also exist, then they cannot be having any physical effects whatsoever on the outcomes of events. And I’ve already explained why I think nonphysical qualia must exist.

Corey Hammer:
as well as making vague statements about physical events and sameness without defining what those mean. You argument is poorly constructed and phrased. Hydrogen fuses in stars the same way no matter how our brains are constructed or what patterns of activatio lie on our neural circuits.

Ok, at any time t the distribution of matter and energy will be precisely the same in the zombie-verse and in the qualia-verse, down to every atom in a star and every pattern of activation in a given organisms’ brain. How complicated is "identical?"

Jesse:
That means an exhaustive physical description of reality would still be missing something, spelling fatal problems for materialism.

Corey Hammer:
Yet another fallacy...startling close to the one made by theists when they say to atheists, "How can you know there is no God? You've not been everywhere in the universe."

No, because I’m not saying qualia are out there somewhere we haven’t looked yet, to me they’re right here in my experience at this moment. But as I said, if this sort of thing isn’t self-evident to you there’s not much point in arguing about it.

But the point is, if you accept the following:
1. The physical world is self-contained—all physical events explainable in terms of physical causes
2. Qualia exist
3. Physical processes can happen in the absence of qualia

…then you are led to the conclusion that a "zombie universe" is possible in which all the same physical processes that happen in our universe happen identically there as well, except they all happen completely "in the dark" with no accompanying qualia. There must be something that distinguishes our universe from that one, but it can’t be a physical difference by assumption, so qualia do indeed "spell fatal problems for materialism." But of course, you’re free to avoid this conclusion by denying one or more of the 3 premises.

Jesse:
If so, no amount of physical understanding of how the brain works could explain why we live in possible world A, where certain brain processes are associated with experience, as opposed to possible world B, where they all happen "in the dark."

Corey Hammer:
What!? Define experience. Use concrete words.

Experience, consciousness, qualia, the property of there being "something it is like to be you"—they are all interchangeable. Like "existence" of "truth" you can’t really define them in terms of anything more basic.

Corey Hammer:
I repeat most processing in the brain occurs without our awareness. You are constructing straw men about how the brain acts.

How can I be constructing straw men when I have said nothing about how the brain works? Remember, a zombie’s brain would work precisely like mine, in every physical respect. It’s just that while some fraction of the processes in my brain seem to be associated with experience, for the zombie none of them are.

Jesse:
After all, physically the two worlds are identical. I think this is a perfectly good proof, although it does depend on the original assumption about the physical world being wholly self-contained.

Corey Hammer:
I don't care about proofs. This isn't philosophy; this is science. Evidence based on research is what I care about.

What’s with this fixation on science? I’ve alread said my views are philosophical, not scientific. Given the fact that any research you could do in the qualia-verse would by definition yield precisely the same results in the zombie-verse, it’s clear that "evidence based on research" won’t help one iota in trying to understand qualia. In much the same way, any possible research you could do in a reality where the many-worlds-interpretation is correct would yield precisely the same results as it would in a reality where Bohm’s interpretation is correct. When two pictures of reality are indistinguishable experimentally, science cannot help you decide which is correct.

Corey Hammer:
I've decided to not respond to anymore of your post because it all unsupported arguments and whimsy as far as science is concerned. Reality does not conform to one's comfy philosophy, and the mind/body "problem" exists only in the "minds" of the philosophers discussing it.

You seem to have a rather "comfy philosophy" yourself, in which all meaningful questions can be answered by science. But reality has no obligation to conform to your philosophy either.

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>