Marduk

“I'm not sure that I'm getting your drift here. Care to expand that thought a bit for me? “


Mostly I was agreeing with what Jesse said:

“but that this still does not resolve the mind/body problem. In other words, even if you have a complete physical explanation for the fact that I say "I am conscious" or "I don't think the mind/body problem can be resolved," you still have not explained why I actually experience things--why all these physical processes don't go on "in the dark", why I am not a "zombie" who acts conscious but really isn't”

It seems we’d be just like computers/robots without a ‘mind’, they don’t ponder things like the hardware/software problem.

Jesse

marduck:
It seems we’d be just like computers/robots without a ‘mind’, they don’t ponder things like the hardware/software problem.

My point was actually slightly different--I'm saying that even if we had a complete physical understanding of how the brain works, and could consequently explain everything we do (including pondering the nature of mind), we still wouldn't have explained why we actually experience things (although we could explain why we talk about experiencing things, or even why I wrote this post!)

Feather

We also don't know "why" particles obey Schrodinger's Equation. Your question has no meaning, in other words. Any answer a person can come up with is untestable and unverifiable.

Moreover, your proposition asserts without proof that there is somehow something "more" than the "mere" physical processes within the brain.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: Feather ]</p>

Jesse

Feather:
We also don't know "why" particles obey Schrodinger's Equation. Your question has no meaning, in other words. Any answer a person can come up with is untestable and unverifiable.

Sure--that's why I think the mind/body problem is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. That doesn't mean the question has no meaning, though, unless you are a positivist.

Feather:
Moreover, your proposition asserts without proof that there is somehow something "more" than the "mere" physical processes within the brain.

Yes, but the assertion is based directly on my own conscious experience, the one thing that even a solipsist cannot doubt. Of course, my unconscious zombie twin, who is just a sum of physical processes, would say exactly the same thing (but he would just be mouthing the words without any conscious understanding of their meaning).

All this is assuming the notion of physical processes sans experience is a coherent one. One solution to this dilemma would be the panpsychist idea that everything that we label a "physical process" is really a conscious experience of some kind, and that the notion of any process happening "in the dark" is impossible somehow (perhaps existence and consciousness are two words for the same thing).

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: Jesse ]</p>

Corey Hammer

Again, you're missing the point. Mind is a colloqiual term that had no real meaning in any of the cognitive sciences. It's a shorthand that still used because of its convenience. A more proper term is covert behavior.

What makes us so qualitatively different from other animals? The short answer is absolutely nothing. TO borrow a phrase from biology, we are mice, only more so. Every single mammal, to a greater or lesser degree relative to each other, possesses much the same neurophysiology that we do. All the basic mechanisms are there...our are more fully developed in this direction.

Religion and philosophy both exist because that is how we first tried to answer questions about the natural world. Natural philosophy eventually evolved into the sciences that we have today.

Well, we can never explain everything we do because all behavior has a random component to it. Secondly, you second statement is logically cancelled by the first. You essentially said that "We can know everything, but we can't know this."

abe smith

I'd just like to suggest to you , Corey, that most of us here at the EyeEye site have learned, over time, to be a little polite to one another. The chances are great that your personal assurance that you know all there is/that is necessary, to know, about the processes of um, human experience , is somewhat premature. I will attempt to connect to the (limited) refs you cite; but I don't think
my request for substantiation has been answered, = to document for me that the "mind/body problem" has been solved. Abe

Jesse

Jesse:
I'm saying that even if we had a complete physical understanding of how the brain works, and could consequently explain everything we do (including pondering the nature of mind), we still wouldn't have explained why we actually experience things (although we could explain why we talk about experiencing things, or even why I wrote this post!)

Corey Hammer:
Well, we can never explain everything we do because all behavior has a random component to it.

That depends on some questions about physics that we don't have a final answer to yet. In any case, I don't think that quantum randomness would have any functional importance to our behavior--if you had a detailed deterministic computer simulation of a human brain, I suspect that qualitatively it would behave identically to a real human.

Corey Hammer:
Secondly, you second statement is logically cancelled by the first. You essentially said that "We can know everything, but we can't know this."

No, I'm saying we could have a complete causal explanation for all behavior, a complete understanding of the third-person aspects of what "minds" do (including everything they say about the mind/body problem), but we still wouldn't fully understand the first-person aspects of mind, the fact that all these actions and behaviors are accompanied by consciousness and experience. As I said, it's not a very popular position, since it rejects both the "soul-ist" view that our behavior can never be fully understood in terms of physical processes, as well as the materialist view that "physical processes" are all there is (but it all depends what you mean by 'physical'--for me the most elegant solution is the panpsychist idea that everything we call a 'physical process' is really an experience of some sort).

Feather

Jesse, you're essentially making scientific statements and simultaneously trying to exclude (preclude?) science from answering your question.

When you write, "for me the most elegant solution is the panpsychist idea that everything we call a 'physical process' is really an experience of some sort)," you make an observation regarding the content of reality--an inherently scientific act.

To claim that full understanding of "experience" is beyond "complete" understanding of the associated "physical processes" while defining "physical processes" as "experiences" is self-contradictory. If I define A as BC and discover all the properties of BC, then I have, de facto discovered all the properties of A by definition.

Either an entity is physical or it is not. If a thing is not physical, how can it even be comprehended? By what mechanism can we understand that which is not physical? Science cannot do this--it is only useful for studying that which is physical. Religion cannot verify that their conception of the non-physical is correct (because it would then have to have some observable, measurable, "understandable" physical existence and no longer be non-physical). Plato's Ladder of Forms is like religion in this sense.

One can rationalize 'til he is blue in the face and make no progress toward understanding anything.

Jesse

Feather:
Jesse, you're essentially making scientific statements and simultaneously trying to exclude (preclude?) science from answering your question.

When you write, "for me the most elegant solution is the panpsychist idea that everything we call a 'physical process' is really an experience of some sort)," you make an observation regarding the content of reality--an inherently scientific act.

Hold on, what is your definition of a "scientific" statement? For me it must necessarily be something that can be tested, at least in principle. I do not see any way, even in principle, that you could test whether a given physical process (as viewed from the outside) is associated with some inner experience or not. I can't even think of a way to test the idea that other animals, or even other people, have inner experience or not. So to me these are basically philosophical questions, not scientific ones.

Feather:
To claim that full understanding of "experience" is beyond "complete" understanding of the associated "physical processes" while defining "physical processes" as "experiences" is self-contradictory.

The first statement is a formulation of the problem. If the idea of physical processes not accompanied by experience is a coherent one, then no matter how much we understand about the physical processes in our brain we will never really understand why they are associated with experience. The second statement is a possible resolution to the problem, not a definition. I do not "define" physical processes as experiences, I just suggest that the notion of physical processes that are not also experiences may be incoherent somehow, in which case the problem would go away. However, unless we can actually prove this incoherence by showing it leads to some sort of self-contradiction, this will always be just a possible answer to the problem, we'll never be sure it's the correct one.

Feather:
Either an entity is physical or it is not. If a thing is not physical, how can it even be comprehended? By what mechanism can we understand that which is not physical? Science cannot do this--it is only useful for studying that which is physical.

I would say there is no clear definition of "physical" and that it would be better to say that science can only study what is testable, but otherwise I agree.

Feather:
Religion cannot verify that their conception of the non-physical is correct (because it would then have to have some observable, measurable, "understandable" physical existence and no longer be non-physical). Plato's Ladder of Forms is like religion in this sense.

But unlike Plato's Forms (what 'ladder'? Are you thinking of Plotinus?) or supernatural entities in religion, my own experience is the one thing that it is impossible for me to doubt. If I'm looking at the sky, I can doubt third-person facts like that it's really emitting light in the blue wavelength or that it even exists in the external world at all, but I can't doubt my own first-person experience of seeing the color blue. Experience is the most self-evident fact there is. As long as you can imagine that there are such a thing as "physical processes" which only have a third-person aspect but no first-person aspect, the question of how to reconcile these two sides remains.

abe smith

Okay, Corey: I want to get a handle on How do electrical impulse events taking-place in ("my") living nerve-cells of the brain "come out at the other end" in the form of words-structured-into-
non/nonsensical-sentences? If you find that I am too ignorant to say anything to you that makes any sense to you, say so, & I'll go elsewhere & ask someone else. My impression is that the guy who wrote *Goedel Escher Bach* (Douglas I-Forget) was able to talk about this; probably i shd go to his more-recent work. If you are moved only to sneer at me, don't bother.