boneyard bill

contracycle writes:

If you haven't figured it out from what I've had to say so far, I don't know what else to say. I has nothing to do with the brain responding to inputs. We're talking about sentient experience. Re-read my summary.

boneyard bill

contracycle writes:

I agree. As my post pointed out, materialism has accepted what was once considered to be immaterial into its definition of material. If you want to carry that a step further and declare that the "materialism" is now the view that was once called "property dualism," I have no problem with that. But, as I pointed out in my reply to Selby, you also have to accept all the implications for science that this new definition of matter entails, and those implications could be very far-reaching.

boneyard bill

contracycle writes:

No, matter and information are not indistinguishable. Matter has certain characteristics that need not apply to information. Matter occupies space. It is inert. It behaves according to probabalistic laws. These laws do not change over time. And there are undoubtedly a number of other characteristics of the materialist model that I can't think of.

But even if you were correct, the problem would remain; only the nomenclature would change. We would then be trying to explain a certain type of information which philosophers call qualia.

boneyard bill

Primal states:

BB asks:



Primal responds:



Qualia is not a radical new substance. But to claim it cannot be defined as not material is to claim that it must be material to start with and that makes no sense.

Qualia are fundamental. We all know what they are because we all experience the world. Qualia constitutes what the knower of the world is. Without qualia, we know nothing at all. If they are not fundamental and are composed somehow of something else, it remains for the person making that claim to what the more fundamental units or processes of qualia actually are.


BB:
Primal responds:



This is not a reductive explanation. This is a law-like explantion. A law-like explanation doesn't give you materialism, it gives you property dualism. How many times do I have to point this out?

Who's doing the finding and how do they know? Human beings are doing the finding and they know through observations, either directly or by observing measuring instruments. And they now the results of their researches because of qualia. That is what their observations are. So they don't have to look for a substance totally unlike matter. Their own observations are that substance.


Is this the argument from faith again? Or is it an argument from authority? Probably both.

Of course there is. But it starts with what is basic. If the assumptions or presuppositions of your system are incorrect it doesn't matter where you go from there, you're not going to get it right. And if your basics are correct, it still doesn't matter if you don't ferret out all of the implications of your starting point.

I'm not arguing for pluralism. I'm arguing for a mind/matter monism that is somewhat unfortunately referred to in philosophy as property dualism. And the problem isn't a lack of perfect understanding of the mind. The problem the absence of an "in principle" explanation not the lack of detailed one.

Your point here is just a variation on the argument from faith. Science just needs more time to come up the answer. Aside from the fact that the answer, if there is one, needn't necessarily come from science; it is quite obvious that science could just as easily take us further away from a reductive explanation as that it could bring us closer. So this argument is only convincing to someone who is already a convinced materialist.


I saying that materialism has no explanatory power with respect to sentient experience . Materialism can explain how the information related to the senses reaches our brain, and I assume that neuro-scientists can explain the pathways and map the brain according to certain areas for certain functions. But the exerience itself is unexplainable.

How the visual information from a yellow object reaches my brain is explainable through materialism. But my actual experience of the color yellow (the qualia) is not.

Adrian Selby

You suggest it would have to be done with a postulate. What does this mean. So, we postulate there is a disembodied mind, that, having no spatial characteristics nevertheless somehow always appears to 'connect' to a spatially located brain and just the one spatially located brain, there seems to be no 'point of contact' that anyone can successfully describe, and it is impossible to test, as far as I'm aware. We're also invoking an extra ontological realm, and we're short of a description of just why changes to the brain affect something non spatial, or why we would otherwise assume that everyone has a perfectly healthy mind distorted by the brain that it is somehow attached to, or indeed that the evidence of changes in the brain structure itself somehow alter the mind, where the mind is a disembodied 'person' that is, unlike the brain, capable of intention, reason and so forth.

I'm talking about models that fit the facts, and models that work well in accordance with observations, no observations can ascertain this extra ontological realm, and do not account for the above, whereas models that posit the brain is the mind do not seem to be making as many assumptions, and crucially, do not differ from observation. If we're having to reconceive things fine, that is no argument against a materialist model, it seems to me its only you doing the reconceiving anyway.

To re-iterate, its not a new definition of matter per se, unless you can defend why simply systems could be sentient when there's not a shred of evidence that they are, they're not even purposive like simple organisms are, so I really think you're barking up the wrong tree with this idea that all matter must be somehow sentient. Matter is capable of sentience only when arranged in a certain order such that it forms a certain sort of system. We know this through observation.

You also keep re-iterating that the sentient experience is not explained, when I've done so at length, I've said that the undergoing of the brain process is the undergoing of the mentalling. Sure its postulated, but it fits the facts that we have regarding brains, if you can provide evidence of mentallings where there is no 'brain' process you might both prove Cartesian dualism and disprove identity theory in one swoop. I look forward to it, but if you can't, I don't see on what grounds you can dispute this explanation for what sentient experience actually is. I did ask if you'd put a model for the mind brain relation on the table for us to analyse, but I've yet to see it, that way we can see to what extent our models are coextensive, as well as internally coherent.

Matter does not contain sentience, organisations and matter that is systemically related to other matter has the property of sentience, it is in the relations, not in the bits of matter as an aggregate. The concept of proto sentience does not seem useful here. Proto sentience does not, as far as I can see, imply that matter has a property, merely that you're saying matter could have a property of sentience, well yes, if its suitably organised and of a suitable nature. Matter is not purposive, but organisations of matter are. Matter is not goal directed, but organisations are, matter does not have memory, but organisations of matter have. If the matter is sufficiently organised, then all these traits and lots more occur. Again, I'm open to disproof on this, I need to know there are mentallings without brain processes and then I'll be forced to accept something other than materialism.

I don't see how this affects Darwinism by the way.

contracycle

None of these apply, or apply ambiguously, to photons. I'm unsure how many would apply to quarks. Thus, as I mentioned previously, you are really talking about Matter as conceived by Newtonian physics, not post-Einsteinian physics.

And this is why your assertions about the non-material nature of the mind are so off base. You openly admit you have no basis for this claim but your own subjectivity - and I say, why then should I consider it to have any merit at all?

Which we have done. You have yet to explain why a cars tyre pressure indicator going 'bing' is not a suitable analogy. All we have is the liturgy that the mind is immaterial repeated ad nauseam.

contracycle

What basis do you have for thinking that there is a substance at all? I suggest that you are discussing PROCESS, not SUBSTANCE.

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

It means you would have to posit a law-like relationship. You couldn't produce a reductive explanation. My point about the identity theory is that it posits a law-like relationship i.e. that third person reports and first person reports are reports of the the same thing. The positing of a law-like relationship has ontological implications whereas a reductive explanation does not.


Not quite. Of course, in Cartesian dualism the mind is non-local i.e. locality is not a feature of the mind. This is no cockamayme theory but an observable fact. Even from a physicalist point of view the mind cannot be local. The problem is reconciling that fact with the claim that mind equals brain. I think that claim is an exaggeration even of physicalism. I doubt even materialist philosophers take that claim seriously because it is so easity refuted.

The mind cannot equal the brain. They are two distinct things although certainly it is possible that the mind is a product of the brain.

Mind is non-local. Mind represents space to us, but it does not occupy space itself. Let me give you an example. I am looking out side my window at a tree. The image of the tree is in mind. It certainly isn't in my brain. After all, the image of tree is about twenty feet tall. There is no way that it could fit inside my brain. So the mind and the brain are not the same thing.

Now a materialist with the proper expertise could explain how, at least in principle, you could take the proper visual sensors and hook them up to a computer and program the computer to know that the tree was there and occupied that particular space to the hieght of twenty feet and the proper width and the shape of the branches. And he could show you how the computer could "know" that. If the computer were part of a robot, the robot could walk around the tree and not hit it etc.

But the materialist cannot tell you how to make the robot "see" the tree. The robot has visual information about the tree, but the robot does not have a visual experience of the tree. And this is the difference, not between mind and brain, but between a mechanical mind and a real one.

The materialist can create a mechanical mind out of a computer. But this mechanical mind is also non-local. This mechanical mind has information about a twenty foot tree and that tree won't fit inside the robot's computer. Nor is this "informational tree" identical to the physical tree. So non-locality is not a problem, even for the materialist.

And if the mind is non-local, it is also disembodied since a body occupies space. So a disembodied mind is not a problem either.

Locality and space derive from the information that the mind receives. Cartesian dualism, being a dualism, agrees with the materialist that this information is transmitted through a physical medium. But it denies that the mind is the product of that physical meduim.

My individual body and my personality are the products of my physical being because my locality and therefore my personal experiences and my individuality are all dependent on my physicality.

But my ability to experience, rather than merely to know, is due to a universal mind. There is a law-like relationship between the physical processes in my brain and the universal mind. Just as the identity theory claims that there is a law-like relationship between first person reports and third person reports.

Of course, it is impossible to test the Cartesian theory against the identity theory. They both account for the same set of facts.

The difference is that the Cartesian theory is not reductionist. There is nothing more to be discovered. The identity isn't reductionist either. But it claims to be a non-reductive explanation of sentience. My point has been that it is an explanation, but it isn't a materialist explanation. It gives up the materialist philosophy in an effort to save it.

contracycle

what?

Well go on, refute it then.

Nonsense, in fact self-contradictory nonsense. The size of the image, if you will, might only be a couple of millimeters on the receptor of a pin-hole camera. Therefore the imagebof ther tree is nothing like 20 feet tall. Secondly, you hop elegantly over the fact that the brains recognition of 'tree' may not require an image at all - in fact there is no reason to think that anything resembling a physical image exists beyond the retina.

Only if we ASSUME, a priori, that "seeing" the tree is in some meaningful way distinct from locating it in space and recognising its physical properties. What basis do you have for this prima facie absurd claim? How can you assert that the robot is NOT seeing the tree? What basis do you have for the claim that there IS a difference between a mechanical mind mind of silicon and a mechanical mind made of jelly? I say again - you are arguing your conclusion.

Please provide an experiment with which we could test or verify this claim.

No, it takes us back to superstition, diesmebodied spirits, uiniversal consciousness and other mystical hokum.

You have failed to demonstrate the mind is non-local, as your tree scenario founders on the facts. You have in no way demonstrated the non-locality of the mind, and could IMO do with a crash course in modern robotics.

boneyard bill

Adrian Selby writes:

Of course, the model I presented fits the facts just as well as the materialist model does. But the materialist model doesn't account for sentience. The identity theory does, but only through the use of a postulate. Cartesian dualism also uses a postulate. There's no way to determine which postulate is correct. (If, in fact, either of them are.)



How do you know this? What evidence would it take to convince you that simple matter is sentient? Does it have to be able to speak? How do you know that an electron doesn't orbit a proton because it "loves" the proton? Such language is banned from use in descriptions of such behavior so are science has never moved in that direction. But I can imagine some alien civilization on another planet that might have a science that accepts such descriptions.

Now I'm willing to concede that for some forms of matter we might conclude that they possess sentience in much the same degree that a flea possesses gravity. I've never experienced the gravitational attraction of a flea. I doubt very much that anyone has bothered to measure it and see if a flea actually possesses the gravitational attraction the theory ascribes to it. When describing a flea, no one bothers to mention that among its characteristics it has a gravitational attraction of ten to the minus 2 kazillionths of a G. But the fact that a flea possesses a gravitational attraction of some infinitesimal degree is entailed by the theory of gravity. Likewise the fact that matter possesses some sort of proto-sentience is entailed by your claims.

I don't dispute you explanation. I think it is a reasonable one. It may not be the correct one, but it is reasonable. What I claim is that it is not a materialist explanation. What I said in my very first post, I believe, is that this explanation is a form of property dualism masquerading as materialism. But because it is property dualism, it has ontological and metaphysical implications that are quite different from materialism.



I've been advocating property dualism all along (although I insist that "mind/matter monism" is a more accurate characterization). So we don't differ dramatically on that point. My point is the additional implications that such an ontology implies for other area of science.

I have stated previously that I use the term "matter" to refer to both matter and physical processes.


And some forms of matter have some of these traits and not others, and some of these forms are not necessarily what we would consider sentient. But we've never really looked into this because we haven't regarded it as a possibility. And we haven't regarded it as a possibility because materialism has said it's an impossibility. But if our science said that it's theoretically possible then our whole approach to what is a valid research project would change. That is why the ontological implications are important. We don't waste research dollars on impossible projects.

You've already accepted something other than materialism. But aside from that, how would you measure a "mentalling" without some physical processes? The physical is, basically, "that which can be measured." And materialism is, roughly, the view that anything that can't be measured doesn't exist. But our daily experiences are filled with things that can't be measured. Above all, we cannot measure the measurer. Our sentient experience is that by which, ultimately, all things are measured.

I've already addressed this.