Dominus Paradoxum

Or, in other words, the qualia that accompanies the event is just the qualia that accompanies the event. What is this supposed difference between qualia and subjective experience? And the very point in question is, why should there be any subjective experience of the event? My computer does a lot of information processing, but it does not seem to have any experiences. The very nerve of this issue is: Why should there be "anything it is like" for my brain to undergo these various information processings? Now I, at least, am not saying that we could think without a brain. But it still does not follow that our subjective experience "just is" a certain brain process.

Adrian Selby

Because its the brain, it's not a grossly primitive (by comparison) computer. It is the nature of the systems that constitute the brain, particularly the self scanning and environment modelling along with the ability to communicate that engenders the question.

If we were all incapable of communication, suspended brains linked to bodies totally comatose for example, we might also wonder how there can be 'anything it is like' to be said brains with comatose bodies, after all, we'd only see neurons firing. It's the fact that communication exists, that we can act that gives us first person reports that there are things going on in other people that go on in ourselves, and that these things we've categorised, partly, as 'being these things'.

I am interested in the whole question of being, and its metaphysical status, at the moment I'm inclined to think its just the brains way of understanding its surroundings and its own state changes. It being awesomely complex, it would come as no surprise that said state changes when the brain is working holistically generate the self from that, the self being a concept the brain uses to continue processing its environment in a way beneficial to its survival.

Wyrdsmyth

Let's get to the point. What do you qualia supporters argue for, exactly? I mean, how do you see qualia, and its implications about reality? As some kind of spiritual dualism, or what? What do you think is going on here? I'm curious how you think reality is. Do you think we are disembodied souls linked to physical bodies, or what?

For some reason, this conversation is getting me to think of Zen Buddhism. Now we are asking what is the "I" that is having the experiences... The Zen Master would say, there is no "I" and it is but an illusion. If you peel the onion, eventually you might think you would get to the essential thing that is at the core of the onion, that gives it its "onion-ness." But the Zen Master would say, no, you only end up with nothing, but a pile of discarded layers of onion.

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

The materialist doesn't need to do that. The materialist would need to show that a complete scientific description of our experiencing of the world can be given without recourse to mental language.



I wouldn't call it a substance. You're the one insisting on materialist language. Nor am I insisting on an ontological distinction. I'm suggesting an ontological identity. But the identity is not matter. Because once the identity is made, matter ceases to be matter. It becomes mind/matter.





I suggested earlier that the data (I don't think you mean sense data) we receive is in digital form but the world we experience is in an analog form. So I don't think what's going on is a filtering so much as it is a constructing of a model of our environment. But that is not the difficult issue.

The difficult issue is how and why we have sense data at all. The senses cannot be explained, even in principle, by any known physical laws. Nor do materialists have any explanation for why we have these senses. In a materialist model, all of our behaviors can be accounted for merely by our having the necessary information. Why does this information take the form of qualia?

If I have a pain in my leg, then I would conclude that the pain is in my leg. But, while I'm no expert on neuro-physiology, I don't believe that the process is one in which I hurt my leg, a nerve sends a message to the brain that the leg is injured and the brain sends a message back to the leg telling it to hurt. What happens is that a nerve sends a msg to the brain and the mind (which may a may not be identical with the brain) represents to my conscious mind that there is pain in my leg.

The conscious subjective self consists, basically, of qualia plus memory. Neither of these are physical. I don't want to get into possible unconscious levels of the self.

And if there are mentallings without physical processes, how would we detect them? What can we measure that isn't physical?
In other words, how do we know that there aren't mentallings without physical processes? (And how would ever find them if you define mentallings as physical processes in the first place?)

More parsimonious than what? You didn't give an explanation for me to critique. We have a correlation. Stimulating a neuron will help the individual to recall a memory. Why is that? You didn't give an explanation of how that is possible. If there is no reductive explanation for this process, then we have the makings of a fundamental law. Stimulating region x will induce memories of category y. But this is science. It isn't materialism or idealism or dualism. It's just the data. But if the memory takes the form of qualia, it something the materialist cannot explain.

But you conceded that first person reports (subjectivity) are inherent in the material processes. That is a great conceptual leap from the standard materialist position. Of course, it's the logical outcome of the identity position. But it isn't materialism. It is property dualism. As I said earlier, the identity position is property dualism in disguise.


You don't know that any physical process in going on through the subject's report except the moving of the subject's lips. What you know through the subject's reports is that the subject is experiencing something. We all infer from third person reports that that experience is the result of physical processes. But you are claiming that the subject's report is nothing but a physical process. Fine. But if that is the case, physical processes are very different from what we have hitherto understood them to be!

Now physical processes become mental processes as well. It is a complete change in our understanding of matter. If certain physical processes in the brain are consciousness, then is it not also theoretical possible that certain physical processes in the sun are also consciousness? We cannot ask the sun if it is conscious, but that is hardly proof that it is not. On the contrary, we have to include that as possibility within the system you have proposed.

Materialists don't want to have to do that. That is why the search for a reductive explanation of consciousness in material terms is so important to them. If you have a reductive explanation of consciousness you would be able to say the sun is or is not conscious.

How do you do that? How do you show that my experience of the color yellow, which is patently not material, is material? You have to show that it is nothing but a material process. If you cannot show that it is nothing but a material process, you have to find some other ontological box to put it in. You want to stuff it into the materialist box anyway. But, as I've repeatedly pointed out, when you stuff it into the materialist box, you get something that isn't material anymore. If you stick consciousness into the materialist box, you have conscious materialism. And that is what you are doing.

BB asks:
I'd have to call this the "my superstition is better than their superstition" argument.

I don't know much about animism but I don't think it is dualistic. Certainly dualism is not the basis of Western religion. In fact, it is more closely connected to secularism. True, Descartes included an argument for god in his meditations, but Descartes set himself up as the final judge on statements of truth. He would accept nothing that wasn't a clear and distinct idea in his own mind or that he could not establish through his own reason from those clear and distinct ideas. His position was very modern in this respect and a complete break with medieval thought.

But here is the problem. A materialist vocabulary presupposes that materialism is true. But a proof that assumes what it sets out to prove is no proof at all. So a materialism cannot be proven to be true using a materialist vocabulary.

All that a materialist vocabulary can do is smuggle in mental concepts using materialist terms. This obsures the mental component and that is why I claim that such an approach in obscurantist.

That is precisely what the identity theory does. Since a reductive explanation of consciousness cannot be produced, identity theorists have tried to substitute a materialist vocabulary. But that doesn't change the meaning of the term. A first person report is still a subjective report. And a subjective report is still a mental report.

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

In order to replicate mind using material processes, you first need a reductive explanation of sentient experience. This is why materialism is losing so much ground lately and this is why the reductive explanation of experience is such an important issue. Without a reductive explanation of experience, it isn't possible even theoretically to replicate the human mind.



We've come full circle. This is basically the answer I said, in my first post, that I always get. "Scientists just haven't had enough time." I believe then that I called this an argument from faith, and I think that point still holds.

I have no idea what the future holds. But when in comes to a materialist explanation of mind, every materialist I encounter suddenly becomes a psychic. The chances are just as good that future scientific discoveries will lead us farther away from such a solution as that they will lead us closer.


The emergent properties of thermostats were also designed by an intelligent agent so I'm no so sure that this is a very good example. But aside from that, the problem of emergence has the same problem as the identity theory. Either you have a reductive explanation or these emergent properties are a fundamental postulate of your system. If they are a fundamental postulate, they feed back into your ontology and matter becomes something other than matter.

When was heliocentrism obscurantist? Eratosthenes had it absolutely right even to the correct size of the Earth.

I have already dealt with the point of obscurantism in my previous post. I don't think I need to add anything here.

On that point I agree. But if we accept consciousness as fundamental then we can use that postulate to explain other things. But that is just the problem. For those scientists researchers and philosophers who are already committed to materialism, it is just too upsetting to accept another model. One thing our postulate could do a lot to explain, for example, is evolution. But you can expect a battle royal over that one.

So this isn't just about philosophy of mind or just about neuro-science. It's about an entire world view. And it's about academic authority, tenure, selling books, defense contracts, and a whole lot of other things both noble and mundane.

boneyard bill

To anyone interested.

I'm having computer problems so I may be off the net for a few days. This has been an interesting discussion, but it may be nearly played out by now anyway. Thank you all for your participation.

Boneyard Bill

contracycle

No that just obfuscation - you are simply asserting that something is "mind/matter" without any apprarent basis other than the (indeed) subjective convinction that these mysterious qualia "need to be accounted for".

I have no problem with the term mind/matter, because I see no principled distinction between mind and matter. Mind is organised matter. The delusion that mind is someething special is human hubris.

To help us avoid falling off cliffs

This seems a very confused argument. Firstly, why can the senses not be explained? Of course they can - we now an awful lot about why the mechanicsms of communication, and the benefits that communication bribgs to a living organism. Please xpand this statement, as iot appears to be completely nonsensical.

"why does it take the form of qualia" has been explained on numerous occassions now; that is the brains subjective experience of processing inputs. Computers would have exactly the same experince of variables being shunted around their processing space too - except not, for design reasons (i.e. computers are not evolved and are not real time).

Obviously not. No message goer back to the leg "telling it to hurt", becuase how would the leg do that anyay? And if it did, how would your brown know? No - a message arrives at your brina indicating punbcture, loss of blood, tissue damage, and subjective experience of that input you label pain. Thats all there is to it. Ths is no more than watching the dials indicating gas and tire pressure in a vehicle.

Yes

How are they "not physical"? Or at least, what is your basis for asserting they are not physical? Would you also assert that a magnetic dot on a disk indicating a 1 rather than a 0 is also "not physical"?

Data is recorded by sequentially patterning the substrate. The answer is: because memory is the storage of data in a physical medium.

Baseless assertion. Materialists have explained it at great length, now. Can you please now expound your basis for the ASSUMPTION that materialists cannot explain it?

In what way?

Why? We can provoke complex behaviour out of purely physical computers; this asseretion that it "cannot be explained" seems to me to be a special appeal to ineffability.

Remember that obscure investigations are not the only variety - as mentioned before, we can saw peoples heads open and compare the observed responses with the subjective experience. We can model transfere of energy via cat scans and see differential brain activity. The claim that we cannot correlate physical process with subjective experiencenis false.

The dichotomy you imply between the two is a false one.

Not since Einstein it isn't.

Yes its possible. Not that efforts to detect consciusness in aniamls are underway. Note that attempts to replicate consciusness in silicon are underway and have been for decades. There are reasons the sun is not likely to be conscious - insufficiently differentiated internal components, I suspect, will prevent it from being conscious.

I just have. If you'll forgive me, you apopear to be ioperating in total ignorance of the body of work speculating on artififical life and artificial intelligence. Several people have now alluded to the approach that there is a complexity threshold of internal maintanennce whiuch, when crossed, pemrits the subjective experience of consciousness. What problem do you have with this claim?

It patently IS material. A switch in your brain went from 0 to 1.
That is all. Equally, you do calculaus to catch balls without ever doing it consciusly. Your conscoiusness is only one component of the brains apparatus.

Easy enough. People can be made colopur blind by brain damage.

There is at this time no basis for thinking it is anything other than a physical process.

Why is it not material, just becuase it is information? Why is that not material?

But here is the problem. A materialist vocabulary presupposes that materialism is true. But a proof that assumes what it sets out to prove is no proof at all. So a materialism cannot be proven to be true using a materialist vocabulary.

All that a materialist vocabulary can do is smuggle in mental concepts using materialist terms. This obsures the mental component and that is why I claim that such an approach in obscurantist.

Why can it not be produced?

And neither of them are significantly different to what a car would "think" of its own workings within the capacity it has to do so. If I have a chip which is monitoring tyre pressure, and the pressure changes a little light goes on and a 'bing' noise is heard, would that not implay that the machoine too experienced "qualia", or at least would be seen to have if only it could communicate the experience?

I don't think there is any basis whatsoever for claiming that qualia are non-physical, or inadequately explained by physical process. Please expand on your basis for so claiming.

excreationist

What about the memories that ants have? e.g. it might go for a long journey and remember the direction it needs to go to get back to its ant-hill (navigating using the sun, etc). Was memory involved? Can what the ant was doing be explained in purely physical (material) terms? Or not, because according to you, memory isn't physical - what is an ant's memory then?
I think memory involves physical codes that are encoded and decoded by a physical system. There is a pattern linking a code to its meaning or function/purpose and the physical encoding/decoding mechanisms translate inputs into the code and translate the corresponding outputs from the code.
I guess I think memory is a functional property of certain physical systems - like how rotation can be a property of certain physical systems...

They haven't had enough time to study *all* of the brain in detail... (on a neuronal level) yet they keep on making big advances... e.g. the motion processing system in the brain (they also did experiments on monkeys)

Maybe the materialists' theory will eventually be shattered, but so far, I think research hasn't been at all problematic for the materialistic worldview. (OBE's could possibly be used as an objection)

There is an internal flow of information in the brain - mental reports involve the content of this information. Part of this information involves comparing various possibly conflicting priorities. The goal-related information has to be processed together to ensure that the most important priorities are carried out and all of the constraints are taken into account. (e.g. crossing the road might be a high priority, but the presence of traffic needs to simultaneously taken into account). So the goal-related information is processed in an intimately interconnected way - I think that is what "we" are conscious of... that information. The shapes we see, etc, are just addition information that we use in order to seek/avoid things. We also learn things and I think that also is done in an intimately interconnected way - otherwise we wouldn't be able to associate smells with fire or unseen objects - or sights (a dropping object) with sounds (the expected collision sound), etc.
That stream of information that is processed and analysed by the "central executive" area (which may be in fact smeared across the brain - not localized) is the mental report. People ask why the mental report exists, so materialists like myself are trying to come up with an explanation... to do that involves referring to the original question (the existence of mental reports).

Adrian Selby

Experiments with parallel processing networks and cybernetic modelling are attempts to replicate functions of the mind, and have achieved success, with regard to many features we ascribe to minds, memory, stimulus-response, strategy etc. To replicate a whole 'mind' is of course not yet possible.

This is irrelevant, not least because we could have been put here on earth by aliens. I daresay this isn't true, it certainly however does not mean that thermostats do not have emergent properties, or that them being designed in any way affects the particular point I was making.

I'm not sure what you're asking for here, I can explain every facet of thermostats and how they work, and describe their physical properties. Are you looking for an explanation of 'temperature control' in physical terms?

I don't think your conception of matter is the same as mine, because from my view, there is only matter, with some systems of matter capable of communicating and undergoing states which people with third person modes of access cannot access. This would be true of primates and other higher life forms. I do not think it is true of matter per se. It is the organisation of matter that's the key, not just matter.

The materialist only needs to show that there are fewer inconsistencies and problems with the materialist explanations for consciousness than other explanations. A non mental language is developing that describes the processes that we report as mental.

The mind represents to the conscious mind? Oh well, I have to say I personally prefer the explanation that the pain is the undergoing of the brain process which is the receiving of the message from the leg.

I don't see a more parsimonious way than the biperspectival identity theory. Which I've outlined in my posts and in the link provided in an earlier post.

I've offered an explanation, the senses are the physical constructs that, from interaction with the environment send signals to the central nervous system, that, being a human brain, constructs a model of the environment from them. Why do we have senses? As was mentioned before, to enable us to survive.

I take it you're not equating the senses with physical systems.Memory is not physical? I can damage your memory by damaging your brain. This doesn't seem to prove anything I guess, and I'm not being facetious, but where we mess with the memories of rats and other lab animals in experiments, are we prodding their qualia?

The biperspectival identity theory thinks science is a really good thing, and that philosophers ignore it at their peril. Scientific advances are affecting the way philosophers think about the mind body problem. Materialism isn't affected necessarily, after all, the identity theory posits that there is just matter, and that the ways of talking about the matter have the same referent, which is physical.

I disagree that materialism cannot be consistent with the view that certain organisations of matter can be capable of having a phenomenological distinction in virtue of the immediate mode of access resulting from being that physical system.

It would certainly be a leap entirely without warrant, after all, we understand the sun's construction and its constituents and how it works to a hugely greater degree than brains, and it doesn't contain the characteristics of systems that we understand to have consciousness.

Materialists have never been able to disprove the notion that Descarte's mind isn't there. I can show you the correlation, I can show you the process happening through an electrode type setup as its happening to you. Just because I can't be your neurons firing seems flimsy ground to conclude that we can postulate that the brain process might have nothing to do with mind process we could postulate as separate.

The identity theory fully acknowledges the first person experience in its model of what's going on. I just think we're working with a different conception of what is materialism, you don't seem to think that relations have any bearing on the features of the aggregates of components that become a system when they have relations. I may be wrong.

You could, my view is that certain models will prove more useful at supporting observations about things than others. I don't think this leads me to conclude certain models are better than others, especially if the metaphysical root models are fundamentally different.

sodium

In that case, just say that. If you don't worry about what it actually means, the materialism vs. interactionism debate never even comes into it.

But what I still want to know is how drinking alcohol can impair your thought process. Is it because thinking is done by the brain, although some other stuff is still done immaterially? Or is it because thinking is done by an immaterial mind, but there is a fundamental law which states that if alcohol affects your brain, that your mind should be affected in a specific way? Is there really a fudamental natural law to do with alcohol, or is there some more general law of which this is an application?