Adrian Selby

It is a relationship only in a vocabulary sense, that there are two vocabularies that are used to describe a given phenomenon, the referents for which are constituted in the first and third person vocabularies. The difference between either report is merely the difference between undergoing a phenomena and describing what's undergone, the immediate and mediate modes of access. I daresay you don't believe the debate is advanced by me stating terms are substituted, that doesn't mean it isn't. It is the precise point of this flavour of identity theory that the terms on which you're considering the problem are problematic. You see, the problem, as we both recognise, is describing what the correlation between the reports is, I'm saying the correlation is one of identity, with the difference being only phenomenological. There are other flavours of identity theory, such as the eliminationist and critical realist flavours, which this is not one of.

I take it your problem is that you think that the experience of seeing great boobs does not seem to be translatable in terms of things that can be derived from physical matter et al? If this is, roughly put, your view, I'd say only that you're asking rather a lot of an entirely inappropriate vocabulary. The fact that I find a great set of boobs gives me a rush and other feelings might not in those terms seem to be understandable when we're talking about laws of physics et al, but then those terms have a purpose in certain realms of discourse, predominantly in this case interpersonal, though of course, it could be a scientist who's wired me up measuring correlations. Now I sit down and suppose how it is that there can be this 'me' with things going on in my consciousness, and the best model I can find to fit is the biperspectival identity theory. This model, outlined in this thread very briefly, is open to outright disproof (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...5&pagenumber=2)
while it commends itself for reasons outlined in the post.

I can only show you I guess in terms of intersubjective confirmation, essentially, that there is a correlation and that whenever there is a process, there is a 'mentalling', and that whenever there is not a process, there is not a 'mentalling'.

When the person reports an experience, and then at the point at which they're undergoing the experience they see the MRI or whatever other meaurement go crazy, then I wonder how it is one can think that two different things have happened, or rather, that there is some other relationship than that there are simply different modes of access to that which occurred. I point you to the comment I made that the problem people can have is that the best neutral vocabulary we have for describing what is going on happens to be one of the two vocabularies that are employed according to the different modes of access. Mind you, this is kind of the purpose of the scientific, third person vocabulary.

Also, I can outline the flaws in existing theories that posit an ontological duality of mind and brain and suggest that these run counter to the evidence being gathered in relation to the correlation, and how what we understand of physical systems is building a third person vocabulary by which we can understand our subjective experience. The only value in this third person vocabulary is that it removes the 'specialness' that a history of Cartesian dualism and the precedent spiritual explanations for our experience has ingrained. The model will live or die by how useful we find it in explaining this part of our experience, i.e. how well it fits in with our overall conceptual model and the metaphysical root of it.

They are not the same, they have the same referent. That referent is the phenomena, I use the word 'phenomena' because it is the closest I can get to a neutral vocabulary, because I'm trying to make the point that an experience and a c-fiber firing are descriptions of the same phenomena from different perspectives. Thus, this model doesn't suffer from the problem you subsequently outline that I will be reducing talk of one thing to another, to wit Just because when we try to understand what is going on we can only point at neurons doesn't mean that there can be something substantial in the fact that the undergoing of the c-firing does not 'feel like a c-firing' after all, I hope you're not implying that unless we know what experience to call a c-firing we can't have c-firings being experienced, or that one must talk of c-firings if one is to talk of what's 'really' going on. One never actually experiences a c-firing particularly, one's experience is always the result of the holistic operation of many brain functions. This of course removes the problem to another level, yet I think its important not to get hung up on some image of a tiny bit of stuff having an electrical charge and a person flushing at the sight of a magnificent 'set' The modes of access thing I refer to is central to the problem. It's already alluded to earlier in the thread, namely with seeing someone eating and feeling full. Our mode of access is limited, but it is public. I don't see the need to think that the only move is to say that because the third person mode of access is public it has primacy, it does, if we're trying to demonstrate for the benefit of understanding what is going on in brains when people experience things.

However, if there is no more than a brain there, then given all the recent research into AI, and more sophisticated cybernetic modelling etc. it appears that we can create physical systems that begin to share features with us that are helpful to term 'intentional' or 'problem solving'. It's this kind of thing that makes me think that the ascription of these 'mental' terms is done mediately by observers, but that first person confirmation is limited by the complexity of the system itself and its ability to communicate and self reflect on those aspects of itself that we ascribe those 'mental-like' properties to.

I agree, though I disagree that mind 'stuff' is at all a good way of describing what I'm saying, having said previously that mind stuff is not the kind of 'thing' that inheres in matter, rather that mentallings are the undergoing of physical processes. Mentallings are not 'mind stuff' they are the subject's interpretation of the experience of having physical processes in the system that they are constituted of, this system being physical.

A great many things, the acceptance of an understanding of humanity and consciousness that is rooted in a third person neutral vocabulary that puts the brain, and neuropsychology where it should be, at the forefront of the drive to understand what it is to be human.

Adrian Selby

Indeed, I would say that we've a more developed understanding of systems of matter. I don't think there is anything more out there than 'matter'. People having experiences is just them being matter that undergoes state changes and its the complexity of the system that has an 'emergent' them capable of self scanning these state changes and creating sounds and signs by which to communicate what these are.

sodium

Well, of course that's the question. I made the assertion in trying to present my explanation for the phenomena you mention, to show that materialism is consistent with the evidence. But that doesn't mean I have no argument against non-physical processes. Here are two arguments for materialism vs. interactionism.

1) Materialism should be the default assumption. If I showed you some sort of natural process, (like the weather), that could be roughly explained according to physical laws, you wouldn't hypothesize an immaterial component to the weather. So, why hypothesize such a thing for the brain, if there is no evidence.

2) It’s hard to explain how the immaterial mind interacts with the material brain, and explain why the immaterial mind appears to be so directly affected by changes in the brain. Why, for example, do people not think as well when they're drunk, if the mind is immaterial?

Reasoning, for example. Although reasoning could be described as an intelligent process, it does not seem to break down into intelligent sub-processes. Unless you imagine a group of tiny elves debating about what your next thought is going to be.

My view is that we have a number of fairly general-purpose behaviours. So, each new activity doesn't require a new hard-wired instinct. I think there are a lot of hard-wired instincts, though, and the suckling reaction is probably, at least partially one of them. But I don’t see how the question of specific-purpose behaviours vs. general-purpose behaviours is related to the question of whether sensations are physical.

They disappear in a thick fog. Non-materialist explanations don't tend to be explanations at all. If I explain pain by saying that pain is caused by the ineffable and irreducible qualia of pain, I haven't really explained anything. If I explain mental activity by saying that it’s done by an immaterial mind, I've only put the problem beyond human access. That’s like when Trinitarians explain the Trinity by saying that it is beyond human understanding.

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

It is true that if a materialist is going support his claim, at some point he will have to be able to eliminate mental vocabulary entirely and still be able to communicate. This is a necessary part of the materialist project, and the failure of the materialist to do can, in fact, be used as an argument against materialism.

However, at the same time, the substituting of material for mental terms presupposes materialism. So when you say a first person report is only phenomenologically different from a third person report, you are saying that a mental state is different from a physical one although they both relate to the same event.

Fine. But a mental state, a first person report, involves (to use materialist language) a totally different substance than the third person report. That substance is qualia. And the identity theory does nothing about explaining it. That's why qualia has become so controversial because materialists simply deny it and call upon their critiques to define it and give it properties like immateriality and non-intentionality, etc, and the debate degenerates into side issues. That's why I limit my definition to the five senses. If you don't have them, there's no point in discussing it with you.

But I digress. The point is that using only materialistic language presupposes materialism and gives the materialist a subtle edge in debates like this. I won't begrudge you that edge. But a debate is a reasoning process, and we should presuppose as little as possible in a reasoning process so we shouldn't presuppose materialism and the exclusive use of materialist language does that.



And which came first, the chicken or the egg? Correlation doesn't prove causality much less identity.

But to refer to the theme of my previous post. How is this not a postulate of your system? If it isn't a postulate what is it? Your claiming that certain mental reports are reporting the same event as certain physical reports. Fine. That suggests that the mental and the physical are aspects of the same thing. And that is a fine postulate for your system. But you seek to deny the mental by labelling it a "first person" report. And you seem to deny that you've postualted anything at all.

BB writes:

Selby responds:

It sounds like you're saying you agree with a form of property dualism but don't like to call it that. You seem to have agreed that mind is inherent in matter. You just don't want to say it that way. I have no argument with you're wanting to say "mentallings" instead of "mind," but then why don't you want to say "physicalings" instead of "physical.?" I don't see where anything in our existence is static. In fact, the apparent durability of our environment may be large constructed from our own "mentallings."

In any case, if you agree with the above statement, why don't you accept it as a fundamental postulate of your system and run with it? I think that is far more useful than trying to find a reductive explanation for consciousness (which I suspect is a complete will 'o the wisp).

BB asks:

Selby replies:



WOW. How can you say that? Just the opposite is true. First of all, you previously agreed that first person experiences (mind) are inherent in third person (matter) processes. And that, indeed, is what follows logically from the identity claim.

But how is a third person (materialist) vocabulary neutral? But secondly, and most important, how do you expect to understand "what it is to be human" by treating humans as an object?

What it is to be human is, first and foremost, above all else, to an experiencer of this world. What it means to be human is to possess qualia. Without it, we aren't even animals. We're machines. I don't see how we can understand what it is to be human but studying us as machines.

boneyard bill

posted by Adrian Selby:

BB writes:
Selby responds:



Needless to say, the concept of "emergence" suffers from the same problem as the identity theory. "Emergence" either refers to a process that can be reduced to matter or it becomes a fundamental postulate of your system and leads to a new understanding of the nature of matter.

Now one of the problems of saying that everything is matter is that it's rather like saying that everything is everything. We have matter on the one hand and we have things that don't seem quite so material on the other.

Materialism is either a reductive science that truly believes that everything in existence can ultimately be explained with reference to matter and material laws, or it abandons the reductive standard, accepts changes in the meanings of its terms and simply become thoroughly obscurantist.

I can accept that people having experiences is matter undergoing a state change. But for that to be possible it requires understanding matter to have a character which it has not, up to this time, been understood to possess. That character is mind, and I don't see where it is useful to save materialism by smuggling mind in the back door as a "first person experience." That's what requiring material language does. It presupposes and materialism with the result that it obscures far more than it clarifies.

excreationist

boneyard bill:
Well as I said earlier, our brain has about 100 billion neurons. And each neuron is connected to about 10,000 others, and at each connection (synapse), some information can be learnt and stored. That's about 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1 quadrillion) synapses storing information.
Artificial neural networks use similar principles to the brain though at the moment they only involve a few thousand neurons. That link mostly talks about specialized neurocomputers.
Cyberlife-Research, run by the guy who made the Creatures games, is working on a self-motivated robot (uses abstract "drives" to formulate goals) due to the lack of neurons it probably wouldn't be capable of learning very intelligent behaviours (i.e. not self-conscious like a young well-raised human). (in a similar way, there is a limit to how intelligent a mouse or a dog or a chimp can learn to become)
Because of the huge number of neurons and synapses we have, and the time it takes to train the neurons (many years during infancy and childhood), I think it is reasonable to believe that our intelligence only involves a super-large highly-trained mechanistic neural network (with appropriate drives - like seeking newness and coherency) rather than also a supernatural component.

boneyard bill

Sodium writes:

The point here is to explain. The best explanation is the one that should prevail. We don't need any default assumptions. In fact, we don't need materialism at all. Everything we know now can be perfectly well explained. Including all of our science without reference to materialism. As John Wheeler, the noted physicist said. (I must paraphrase). We don't the concept of matter. All of physics can be competely explained as information. So there's no reason to assume materialism at all, default or otherwise.

It's hard to explain how the Earth holds the moon in orbit around itself without a material umbilical cord to keep it in place. That's why we have fundamental laws, like the law of gravity. In fact, early materialists criticized Newton's law of gravity for just this reason. He didn't have a material explanation. They wanted an explanation in terms of suction or some other know material mechanism. Somehow, though, we've gotten to the moon without it.

Of course the brain doesn't work as well when you inundate it with alcohol. My car doesn't work as well when someone put sugar in my gas tank either. But I can still listen to the radio.

BB asks:
I take this to mean you didn't really have anything in particular in mind.

My point was that these problems have a more adequate explanation in terms of qualia. The term "general-purpose behaviours" explains exactly as much as the term "instinct" does. That is, nothing at all.

But we've actually explained a behavior when we say we did it because it felt good. Or because we want to live. Or because we like this or that color.

OK. You've convinced me that you're not very good at coming up with non-material explanations. But see my previous post for why qualia can be useful in explaining behavior where materialism has to resort to non-explanations like "instincts."

I have no argument with the claim that the pain in my leg is caused by a pinched nerve in my back. I simply deny that the pain is the pinched nerve or the firing of c-fiber or some other physical activity.

As for mental activity, what is material about logic? Can you show me where, in time or space, Pythagoras' theorem is located? Why does mental activity require matter? We can't emulate it without materials: computers, calculators, etc. But that's a limitation on us, not on logic.

Adrian Selby

Really? I'm sure at some point the materialist would need to show a sophisticated enough model in the third person neurophysiological vocabulary that it covers and explains in its way the mentallings that humans report. Getting rid of our socially useful natural language explanations seems pointless, it isn't an efficacious thing for a start to insist that instead of saying 'OWWW' I say 'C_FIRING'. It doesn't communicate the kind of information I need to communicate, which isn't to say that my expression of pain isn't the result of undergoing a c-firing.

Does it? What is this talk of substances? Why invoke other 'substances'? Are you suggesting there's a substance ontologically distinct from matter? A first person report is merely a report, a mental state, in my view is a physical state undergone. I know I'm re-iterating, I just don't know yet why I'm having to concede to invoking qualia, and quite what problems that solves, given it means introducing a new substance. If qualia are merely the information from the senses, then I would have thought qualia are undergoing of brain processes that are interpreting raw sense data, I don't think we undergo raw sense data, this data is filtered etc. so I would say qualia is one way of describing the undergoing of physical processes, and that the brain's self scanning and attempts to categorise awareness of itself finds terms such as this useful. I'm not sure I need to invoke other substances.

You allude to an alternative model for understanding the mind brain relationship when you say a c-firing causes pain, i'm interested to know where the pain is occurring, so if its 'the subjective self' what is the nature of that self, is it non physical etc.

Well, as I spent some time saying, and with reference to the link, the model commends itself for various reasons, one of which is providing an answer to why the correlation that is consistent with science, and the fact that there do not appear to be mentallings where there are no physical processes.

I'd be interested to know, with reference to your model, what you think happens when laying inside an electromagnet that can stimulate individual neurons in your brain. Given the experiments where this stimulation immediately produced in the subject the recollection of memories, previously not at the forefront of their consciousness, it would appear that the scientist is stimulating memories, yet, clearly, is only stimulating neurons. If he is only stimulating a neuron, and the first person report is of a memory, hitherto unrecalled, I do not see a more parsimonious way of explaining why that is. Anyway, we all presuppose things, and it seems to me the way we change our views is to be presented with information that exposes contraries and contradictions in our conceptual model. I haven't had that so far.

Not quite, the mentalling is the undergoing of a physical process, that we know only through the subject's report.

It might be slackness on my part, I do mean to equate mentallings with physical processes or perhaps state changes in the brain.

I prefer to think I have a model not for a reductive explanation, but rather a model that is consistent with the view that there is only one ontological realm, the material, and then to show how it is possible to analyse and understand characteristics of what we take to be mentallings (intentions, goal directedness, emotions) and show how they can be understood in terms of brain processes, thus illustrating that if we ask certain questions, namely, 'what is the nature of this mentalling' we have an answer 'it is the undergoing of a physical process'.

It's anthropomorphically neutral, it is not a vocabulary that is based on an animistic orthodoxy generated by previous dualistic thinking, that in turn has its roots in religion and spiritualism.

Machine seems to be a derogatory term here, I think you don't have an appreciation for the awesome complexity and refinement of the 'machinery' in your head. Identity theory isn't behaviourism, it isn't attempting to say that intentions etc. are merely dispositions to behave or whatever, it is an attempt to integrate the first person experiences, the mentallings into a physicalist picture, part of the agenda is inevitably going to be to see how we can model physical systems that evidence behaviour akin to our own. The clear disproof or killer blow for this enterprise is if there is some facet of mind that cannot be replicated, for that would show that 'machinist' explanations are fundamentally incapable of constructing models that offer adequate accounts for processes that we report as mental.

The enterprise is not yet finished, by a long chalk.

I like this approach, rather than a reductive one. Matter has emergent properties, I don't think that's a totally new concept, the emergent properties of thermostats is that they control temperature, something that as mere aggregates of components they are unable to do.

I would be happy to say that explaining with reference to matter and physical laws is sufficient, not that we must reduce one thing to another, indeed, I've said all along that I'm not sure how we would start at a position where there was more than one thing such that a reduction would be needed. I also don't see that an accusation of obscurantism gets us anywhere, after all, heliocentrism was at one point obscurantist.

Well, you'll have to lay some options on the table then, because as it stands, dualism does a great job in terms of not having to find materialist explanations for our mental life, but that doesn't mean it isn't riddled with other problems, and its finding a model that is riddled with the least incoherence and contradictions that is the point of all this

Cheers Bill,

Adrian

excreationist

boneyard bill:
Logic involves consistent patterns in the physical world. The physical world remains fairly stable and consistent (it is made up of the same elementary particles, etc), so there are a lot of patterns in it.

It is an interesting pattern that involving 3 lengths of the sides on a right-angled triangle. This pattern has been given a name by people (Pythagoras' theorem) and that part of the pattern exists in our brains and in books, etc.
I'm not sure why the theorem is so elegant.... maybe it's because a right angle is involved. (On the other hand, the decimals of Pi and "e" aren't elegant at all)

I think it requires complex machinery. i.e. the 1 quadrillion or so synapses and 100 billion neurons I was talking about earlier. And also interaction with a complex environment so that patterns can be learnt from it through seeking goals which are motivated by drives. (BTW, a main talent of neural networks is to learn patterns and to infer things) I think complex machinery (to do computation) requires matter of some sort... possibly virtual (computer simulated) matter, but that in turn would probably have a physical basis. For those who don't believe that our thoughts require a physical neurocomputer, (non-materialists) then the brain isn't really needed...
I guess thought could just happen in a mystical realm with no machine-like mechanism. I mean in a magical world anything can happen after all, and a reductistic explanation isn't needed.

The computers and calculators can use patterns that exist between quantities to come up with an answer. e.g. 12 sets of 12 objects is 144 objects - no matter what objects are involved. (besides maybe quantum physics objects)

BTW, wetness is kind of similar to the topic of mental activity... Water is wet. But where is the wetness of water? A single water molecule isn't wet (I think). And if you converted water into oxygen and hydrogen gas using electricity, those things definitely wouldn't be wet. Wetness is a potential property (or a pattern of behaviour?) of matter. It doesn't mean it exists in every bit of matter. I think consciousness and mental activity is similar though much much more complex processes are involved.

contracycle

... at which point I was asked what those reasons are.

Well, in the first instance, we know we can attach electrodes to the physical brain and insuce sensations, memories, tastes, smells etc. We routinely tamper with the brains of rats, cats and monkeys, and thus have a large body of experimental data supporting the fact that material intervention produces behaviour and experience in the subject. In cases of human brain surgery, patients have reported smells sounds and sensations of touch, even laughter, appearing "irrationally" from an internal perspective but correlated with the physical intervention.

Secondly, we know that there is a huge apparently causal relationship between the physical brain and what we perceive as consciousness; i.e. brain damage frequently produces erratic behaviour. In extreme cases, such as gross trauma to the brain, consciusness appears to cease (duh). In lesser cases, the denial of oxygen to the brain produces a series of independantly observable symptoms (eg the "funky chicken" spasm experienced in G-induced Loss Of Consciousness).

The thesis that consciusness is an inherent material property of this system does not appear to me controversial. At the very least, any counter-claim to the effect that notional qualia are really existing immaterial things rather than merely descriptive terminology needs to explain why this material causal relationship should be discounted.

Why should I deal with notional 'qualia' when I can instead deal with the physical phenomenon underlying those 'qualia'? This is where the first/third person dichotomy of experience was introduced. You may 'experince' "saltiness", but what in fact HAPPENED was that a set of receptors on your tongue fired, and neurons back to the brain fired, and the brain crunched the data in whatever symbolic system it uses - and your 'qualia' of taste is merely the subjective experience of the event.