boneyard bill

deleted by boneyard bill

[ February 14, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]</p>

boneyard bill

deleted by boneyard bill

[ February 14, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]</p>

excreationist

Adrian: The experience of orange is no more than various fibers firing in response to areas of reality that, due to their properties, allow light to refract at certain frequencies.

BB: And if you claim the correlations are the experience, isn't this an axiom of your system?

ex: For me at least, this would be an axiom of my materialistic framework,

BB: You don't seem to be following the logic of this discussion very carefully. If this is an axiom of your system, then your system isn't a materialist one.

The axiom would be much stronger than mere "correlation" being involved - I'm saying that our sensations and experiences are solely a result of straight-forward physical processes. Are you saying that this isn't a materialistic thing to say?

ex: but I am still open to any concrete evidence for dualism - That physical hardware is not required to do some kind of brain function - like OBE's, NDE's, ghosts, etc.

BB: Materialism and dualism aren't the only alternatives. What I'm claiming is that panpsychism fits the evidence best. Panpsychism is a kind of mind/matter monism. I'd just like to call it "monism," but that isn't the used most often so I have to go with panpsychism.

I know they aren't the only alternatives. So with panpsychism, is it possible for video cameras or rocks to have human-level consciousness? And how exactly (in your opinion) is panpsychism different from <a href="http://www.dictionary.msn.com/find/entry.asp?search=epiphenomenalism" target="_blank">epiphenomenalism</a>?

ex: pain signals are just neural signals that are used by our motivational system to label certain situations and memories as being "undesirable"

BB: Yeah. But that doesn't answer the question, "why does it hurt so much?"

As I said earlier, our motivational system automatically avoids pain signals, depending on their intensity. To put what the motivational system is thinking into explicit words, it might go something like this:
"This pain signal is very intense - therefore it has a very strong priority for it to me avoided."

"The pain signal is still there! It MUST be avoided in the near future!"

"There is a course of action that can be followed to avoid this pain so this course of action will be followed since this pain signal is SO SEVERE that it MUST BE AVOIDED!!!"

"The pain signal remains, but since the course of action is being followed, it should end soon."

Basically the pain signal means "there's something wrong! Do something!!!"

If it has a low intensity, this is just mild discomfort. This means "by the way, there's a problem that should probably be fixed sometime."

On the other hand, an intense pain signal means "DO SOMETHING NOW!!!! THERE IS A HUGE PROBLEM!!!!"

And as I said earlier, "we" are the main processor in our brain's motivational system. "We" also coordinate our actions - and we are informed of summarized information from our senses since this information is necessary to coordinate our actions and other (subconscious) thought processes.

So since we do the motivational system's job, we experience that message "THERE'S A HUGE PROBLEM!!! DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW!!!!!". Certain drugs can stop the pain signal getting through to us and we no longer feel a compulsion to fix the problem. Basically by defition it HAS to hurt (be negative/undesirable), so that the motivational system tries to avoid it.

Again, the reason why it hurts so much is because an intense pain signal means we have to try and avoid the signal RIGHT NOW. In many cases, this is appropriate - e.g. if your hand is touching a very hot object, or if you sat on a tack, or if the shower water is boiling hot. But at other times the intense pain signal isn't appropriate. But this is just evidence that we evolved in a pretty clumsy way rather than being perfectly designed.

BB: Maybe physical events are the phony ones. After all mental events are directly experienced. I know hardness. I have no direct evidence of any cause for that hardness. Hardness and other sense data, exhaust my information.

Ex: Yeah, the world is just an illusion.... why bother with science. Let's just be mystical and meditate or whatever.

BB: That completely avoids the point. We don't need a concept of matter to model the world scientifically. The question is whether the materialist model works better than the alternatives in accounting for the data. No one is proposing to toss out the data. The question is how best to interpret it.

Well as far as I know we live in the real world. Do you have any evidence that we actually exist in the Matrix or inside the mind of God?

[ February 14, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

Well now you leave me confused. I thought you were defending metaphysical materialism, and metaphysical materialism claims that nothing exists except matter and material processes. So a perspective must be matter or a material process for a materialist. But you're saying otherwise. So the points I'm making are not pertinent to your position. So before I go any further, I need to understand what your position. It might be that I would agree with you if I understand the context of your claims.

boneyard bill

excreationist writes:

The position as you stated it is not the philosophical doctrine called metaphysical materialism. Metaphysical materialism doesn't say that are sensations and experiences are the result of physical processes. Materialism says they ARE physical processes. The pain in your foot and the firing of a c-fiber are the same thing in the sense that electricity is the same thing as the flow of electrons. Electricity is caused by the flow of electrons. Electricity is the flow of electrons. By the same token the materialist doesn't claim that the firing of a c-fiber in your brain causes the pain in your foot. He says that the firing of a c-fiber in your brain is the pain in your foot.

And this is where the problem arises. Because the materialist cannot show this to be true. We know from our research that water is h2o. We have provided a reductive explanation. The term water has been reduced to the chemical compound we call h2o. But there is no reductive explanation for why we should consider the pain in your foot as being the exact same thing as a c-fiber in your brain.

If I say "there the same event. It's just that the pain in my foot is what the event 'firing of c-fiber x in my brain' feels like on the inside," I still haven't produced a reductive explanation. But I can establish this correlation as a fundamental axiom of my view. But if I assert this as an axiom, I am no longer taking a materialist view. Why? Because the firing of c-fiber x is a physical event. But I haven't shown that the pain in my foot is a physical event. I've merely shown that it is caused by a physical event. But a physical event causes something non-physical, then something exists besides matter and material processes in which case metaphysical materialism is false.

I hardly think that video cameras or rocks have "human-level" consciousness. But at a minimum you have to say that matter and material processes have the potential to produce consciousness. So we could say they possess "proto-consciousness" or something like that. I have compared it to gravity. Our theory say that a flea must exert a gravitational force. But, of course, such a point is a trifling part of any reasonable definition of a flea.

Do have evidence of anything at all that isn't sense data?

Vorkosigan

Because the firing of c-fiber x is a physical event. But I haven't shown that the pain in my foot is a physical event.

The sensation of pain in the foot is indeed a physical event. Damage the nerves running from the foot to the brain, and no pain sensation is felt. The nerves carry information in the form electrical impulses. Once in the brain, many different regions and neurotransmitters are associated with pain. Their behavior can be tracked through various scientific apparatus. Nobody has ever seen anything that demands a non-material explanation. Can you cite some evidence for that?

You would argue that at some point, nothing physical happens. Something immaterial does. So why evolve an elaborate apparatus for physical transmission of pain, when the sensation of pain, you claim, is not physical. Wouldn't it be simpler to have direct transmission through the aether or cosmic consciousness?

If pain is not physical, why do cut nerves stop it? Why do drugs modify or eliminate it? Why does damage to the brain modify or eliminate it? Where does the transition between the physical and non-physical take place? How does the non-physical portion of the process detect when a physical process is sending a brain signal? Where is the information processed in the non-physical? In the evolutionary process, how did the immaterial insert itself? What were its evolutionary effects? What were the selection pressures that led to its adoption?

Here is a page on the neuroanatomy of pain:
<a href="http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/pain/pain3.htm" target="_blank">http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/pain/pain3.htm</a>

Michael

Adrian Selby

"So a perspective must be matter or a material process for a materialist. "

yes, I said that a perspective on the pain in your leg can be described physically.

Adrian

Dr. Retard

Not quite. That's only the view of the identity materialist (e.g., J. J. C. Smart and U. T. Place). There are also materialist functionalists (who claim that sensations and experiences can be realized in many different physical processes and therefore not identical to any single collection of processes; e.g. David Lewis) and eliminative materialists (who deny that there are such things as sensations and experiences).

The bottom line materialism under discussion in philosophy of mind AFAIK: phenomenological properties (like sensations and experiences) logically supervene on material properties (like physical processes). On materialism, materially indistinguishable events have to be phenomenologically indistinguishable, as a matter of logic. (Just like if you have the physical properties of an substance, you get the chemical properties for free).

excreationist

boneyard bill:
Like Dr. Retard says, there are different kinds of materialists. I am a functionalist - so different physical behaviours are responsible for different functions in physical systems.

I never said that! Pain is a signal within a motivational system. Systems are entities that change over time. A c-fiber can be static - a firing c-fiber on the other hand is a different thing... And it is not about them being the same thing... I mean cats are animals, but cats and animals aren't exactly the same thing. Cats are a type of animal, and firing c-fibers (I'm guessing) are a kind of pain signal, assuming they are in a fully functional motivational system.

I'm not concerned with what part of the brain my model translates to. I have talked about a reductive explanation which involves a motivational system which you have conveniently completely ignored.

Well that's what I think.

No.

boneyard bill

Turtonm writes:

Because pain is caused by physical events and processes. That is not the issue. But how can the sensation of pain itself be described using nothing but physical language? That is the issue. No one is arguing that the firing of c-fiber x doesn't cause the pain. There is nothing in this debate that contradicts the physical evidence. But the ability to correlate physical events with non-physical ones still means that non-physical events exist, and that is what the materialist denies but cannot prove.