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Old 07-27-2003, 12:50 AM   #181
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boneyard bill,
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The claim that mind is inherent in some material processes would still not be acceptable to the materialist but would, I believe, be acceptable to most property dualists.
Then I would have to agree with the materialists. I don't believe that mind is inherent in any material processes, but that mind is a material process.
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Old 07-27-2003, 12:55 AM   #182
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The problem with reductive explanation in this special case is only one of description. I ask you again, what would you consider to be a sufficient explanation?
It isn't merely a matter of description. Identity implies ontological identity. If you ignore the ontology you get complete incoherence as I tried to point out in a recent post to Adrian Selby. You wind up with first person reports being the same thing as third person reports which is false by definition.

Certainly, had the AI people who tried to reduce sentience to information processing succeeded, that would have produced a reductive explanation. The problem with that as it turned out, is that information processing itself is an observer-related concept so the whole project really wasn't thought out as well as they had assumed. Philosophically, it was a mish-mash. And if you can't work out the philosophical problems, you're going to have an even harder time working out the technical ones.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:03 AM   #183
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It's an example of a reductive explanation. It has nothing to do with the electrical discharge of a c-fiber firing in the brain.
My point was that both the flow of electrons and electricity are material processes which can only be viewed from the third-person perspective. So, which one represents the mind? Neither.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:08 AM   #184
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Third-person reports are first-person reports. The seeming contradiction arises where you take these two phrases out of their appropriate contexts. This context, usually, is the situation where you are speaking of two individuals, with one monitoring the other's brain activity.
I think you miss the point of the claim. All reports are first person reports. The person in question here is one making a so-called objective report and one making a subjective one.

However, since materialists try (usually not very successfully) to avoid mental language; the identity theorists use the term "first person report" instead of subjective experience, and the use the term "first person report" instead brain processes.

The two reports are said to be reporting the same event even tough the reports are different. But the two reports are equal in their epistemological status. So the two reports are equally reporting the same ontology i.e. brain processes and sentient experience are equally a part of the event. If you try deny the ontological implications you're left with the ludicrous claim that two different reports are identical.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:16 AM   #185
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Adrian Selby writes:

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You say that isn't what sentient experience is, now tell me why.
Because that is not the sense in which I have been using it, and this discussion has proceeded on my usage of the term. I have said repeatedly that sentient experience is the product of the 5 senses. If you want to bring in some other definition at this stage it's just going to throw the discussion into confusion. I am not prepared to argue for or against the concept of sentient experience that you put forward. Such a concept is simply irrelevant to the claims I have been making.

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Explain how its possible for the mind to have knowledge without sentient experience, aren't you the one presupposing a mind distinct from the brain here?
A computer has knowledge without having sentient experience. It has information. But that information is in a different form from sentient experience.


Sorry, but I haven't been able to work things out the way ex-creationist explained. Perhaps I am missing something but I can't make it work.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:33 AM   #186
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Adrian Selby writes:

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the mind is the brain, in my view
Of course this cannot be the case as my example of the tree pointed out. The brain may, indeed, produce the mind. But even if this is a completely material process, mind and brain still cannot be the same thing.



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The experience of what is seen is a conflation of numerous filtering processes and reconstruction processes, from the data given by the retina into a model of what is out there, and the understanding comes from the categorial relations that the brain through its conceptual model imbue the experience with. To say its merely five senses seems erroneous to me, or at least inadequate.
But it's precisely this sense experience that cannot be explained. I basically agree with your characterization of how the brain deals with sensory inputs. That process gives us all the information we need, presumably, to deal with our environment. But we don't simply know that information. We experience it. Why is that, and how does it come about? That is really what this discussion is all about.

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I would ask whether because apes have sight, taste touch and smell they equally have sentient experience, and therefore a mental life and qualia etc. Do you think they do?
Absolutely.

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What kind of organism is thus on the borderline in your view regarding sentient experience? Isn't it the case that its not merely the possession of senses that defines sentience but also self awareness?
I see no need for a borderline for sentient experience any more that we have a borderline for gravity. There is a point at which gravity becomes a pretty useless referent. But that point may vary from object to object and from purpose to purpose in any particular study. It is a practical question.

I think that the senses are involved in self-awareness, but I don't think self-awareness is involved in the senses. The senses are a pre-condition of self-awareness. Not the other way around.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:34 AM   #187
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the identity theorists use the term "first person report" instead of subjective experience, and the use the term "first person report" instead brain processes.
This is a mischaracterisation as I've already said, I do not use the term 'first person report' instead of brain process, I use the term mentalling to describe the undergoing of a brain process, the first person report is the report of what is occurring when, in my view, they undergo a brain process, i.e. whatever they're undergoing, they report, this report describes what is happening when they're mentalling. The report is not the same as the process, its a report of the process.

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are you incorrigibly analytic?
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:43 AM   #188
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Adrian Selby writes:

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This is an ass backwards way of thinking about it I'm afraid. The experience of yellow in my view is a report of a set of brain states undergone.
An unsubstantiated claim does not get substantiated by adding an ad hominem to another unsubstantiated claim.

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just what the sense of sight is if not physical?
It is simply the sense of sight. It is one of the senses by which I know the physical, and it is a particular way in which I know what is physical.

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I would be grateful if you could point me to your specific theory of mind, as you seem to be charging me with making all kinds of postulations when everyone, Bill, everyone makes postulates, everyone postulates from within their conceptual models.
But my theory of mind isn't very different from yours. And I have no objection to postulates. I only point out that such postulates have ontological implications.

This discussion began as a discussion of the identity theory. My only claim here is that the identity theory is a form of property dualism which the materialists have tried to present as a kind of "non-reductive" explanation for sentient experience. I claim that the failure to reduce amounts to a failure to be materialism.

For some reason, you object to your ideas being called property dualism.
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Old 07-27-2003, 01:53 AM   #189
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Adrian Selby writes:

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I'd be keen to see what proven facts you offer in your theory of mind for how the experience of yellow relates to brain states that occur simultaneously and why you presuppose that the 5 senses alone constitute or equate to sentient experience.
I don't have any sophisticated theory of mind. I'm perfectly willing to accept the correlations that neuro-scientists have found between brain states and experience as the last word on the subject.

When it comes to interpreting that data, however, I think it is a great error to presuppose a materialist interpretation and I think that's what happens in much of the research.

Of course these scientists aren't reading these boards, but they are reading journals and some of those journals have these arguments as they are discussed by the various philosophers of mind in academia. I hope that we might be reaching some students who will one day be neuro-scientists but even that may be a bit optimistic.

I have used the terms "5 senses" and "sentient experience" synomously in this thread. This is probably not quite accurate. It is likely that sentient expereince involves a certain amount of interpretation of the inputs from the senses. That, however, is not relevant to what we are discussing.
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Old 07-27-2003, 02:04 AM   #190
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Adrian Selby writes:

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Brain processes are not third person reports, how is a brain process a report of a brain process. You seem muddled
You missed the point. It's the identity theory that is muddled. I was repeating the identity theory and showing how, following its logical conclusions and still denying any ontological problem leads to a contradiction.

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The reduction is with regard to what we once thought was distinct, but doesn't now appear to be, thanks to the models we can develop through cognitive science, neuropsychology and AI and cybernetic research.
There is no reduction involved here. And if the reduction is claimed in order to shore up some of these theories (you call them models) then the theories are doomed to fail in the long term. You have to do the philosophical work before you build your model. Unfortunately, most working scientists aren't sufficiently aware of that and perhaps not even qualified. That's one of the reasons we still have philosophy departments in colleges and especially philsosphical journals.
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