jpbrooks

I agree. but the materialist would probably argue that the belief that the data will eventually be discovered is not mere credulity but is based on evidence from scientific investigation in areas such as
Cognitive Science. Materialists would argue that even if the theories that you have examined could be demonstrated to be inconsistent, science continues to confirm the truth of materialism by not having to replace the current "Scientific" view of physical phenomena with another view, such as Idealism.

Well, my assumption was that your criticisms of the materialistic theories that you considered in your post were all based on the idea that a materialistic theory of mental phenomena should not have knowledge "gaps" that reflect areas where the required further scientific research is likely to "fill in" those "gaps".
In saying this, I am not saying that materialism will be able to provide satisfactory answers to all of its possible objections. I am not a materialist. I just want to be fair in assessing the theory.

jpbrooks

Correct. The "omniscience defense" is not valid as an argument in the absence of positive confirming evidence for the truth of a view.

True, but only in areas where materalistic explanations and predictions of observed phenomena have come to be viewed as controversial. For most of physical science, materialism still seems to suffice.
But again, I am not a materialist. So my comments should not be viewed as an endorsement of materialism.

Exactly. But the materalists claim that non-materialists/anti-materialists are exploiting "gaps" in scientific knowledge
to argue that the "gaps" themselves show that their various views are true.

At this point, I have opted not to take sides on the Idealism vs materialism issue, preferring instead to make note of any truths that arise out of dialogues between the two opposing views.

I'll be back later.

Abrupt

Eh. You'd think physicalism would exorcise Ryle's "ghost", but you'd be only half-right. Most serious philosophers of mind are physicalists of one sort or another, but many of them are still weighed down by assumptions about the mind and consciousness that are fundamentally Cartesian in nature - specifically that there's some kind of control center in the brain where peripheral information processed by various cerebral subsystems enters a privileged "conscious" or "meaningful" or "intentional" medium. As Dan Dennett might put it, it gets marched out onto the stage of the Cartesian theater, for some internal "audience" to behold. This audience is no longer a metaphysical Self, but rather something like Fodor's LOT-translator, or Searle's nonfungible consciousness tissue, or whatever. This doctrine of "Cartesian materialism" ends up replacing a ghost with a homunculus, which is an improvement, but not much of one.

I certainly agree with that. It's really shocking how obvious the answers to certain traditional philosophical problems appear when you consider the mind to be a fundamentally biological thing, produced by millions of years of evolution, and now involved in one computational process or another.

By interpreting (a) behavior, and (b) brain states.

That "brain states" clause is important. Occasionaly, one is told a story about the fall of behaviorism from its lofty perch in psychology and its subsequent replacement by "cognitivism". Behaviorism was oversimple, the story goes, since it ignored the mind (or rather, the brain) and so ran into troubles explaining certain aspects of human activity, such as language acquisition and so on. Cognitivists are different. They take the brain seriously, looking for structures in the human cognitive archictecture that correspond, on whatever level, to our folk psychological understanding of how minds work.

There is some truth to this story, but it is somewhat misleading. If there is a cognitivist/behaviorist fence still around today, the only difference between the two sides is that behaviorists want to emphasize behavior and cognitivists want to emphasize cognition. But everyone will agree that behavior and cognition are two sides of the same coin. Even "internal" events that a wily interpreter would be unable to scry from someone's behavior are really "behavior", too. They are behavior in the brain, and they supervene on behavioral dispositions. This is a different story, and the moral is that we should consider the newfound focus on cognitive architecture an improvement over the glory days of Skinner & co., but we should keep the behaviorist skepticism about "privacy", nonetheless.

Replace "correct" with "complete", and I'll agree. But as a good modern behaviorist (though I don't much like the term), I would also point out that a complete analysis would have to involve complete knowledge of the brain state, anyway, and besides, a complete analysis is not on offer in the first place.

Frankly, I think the idea that one could have the same set of behavioral dispositions attached to different "feelings" or vice versa is incoherent, so if behaviorism can't account for it, I say so much the better for behaviorism. No philosopher has yet been able to give any reason for anyone to take such a notion seriously. Mutants, zombies, Mary, inverted spectra - they're all cleverly designed to bring out the vague intuition that there's just something more to experience than all the "merely" dispositional and informational things that happen in the brain. But a vague intuition is all that it is, and while a proper theory would have to be able to explain this intuition, it need not pay it any respect.

No argument there. :notworthy There are escape routes that identity theorists can take to get away from multiple realizability, e.g. by saying that the identity relation is between mental and physical tropes, but I would agree that most of these escape routes lead to causal functionalism.

Jackson's knowledge argument is another fine piece of intuition-mongering. There is no reason at all to accept (P3), but of course it seems crazy not to. Why? Simply because when people try to imagine the hypothetical, they tend to miss their target by several orders of magnitude. Of course if you simply raise someone without exposing her to color and have her read some neuroscience books on color vision, she will learn something from her first color experience. But Mary is not just someone who read some neuroscience books on color vision; she is, ex hypothesi physically omniscient with respect to her brain states, which means that she can perfectly predict her dispositional state upon having her color experience and so cannot really learn anything. If it seems utterly weird that Mary should learn nothing, it is only because the idea of being physically omniscient is itself utterly weird.

Well, how do we distinguish any functional state from other functional states? By specifying the function, of course!

Been there, done that. What qualia?

I should hope that Blackburn then goes on to explain what is wrong with such an analysis, but if not, I'll be glad to oblige. Suppose one jolly day you are walking down the street and a bolt of lightning from the heavens strikes you in the head and flips your color qualia. Suddenly, you see fire engines as green and grass as red. Now the question then is, do you notice? Ex hypothesi you can't notice, since "noticing" would make a functional difference, and qualia can't make functional differences (which sounds an awful lot like a fancy way of saying "there are no qualia", but whatever). But then we are left with the unsettling conclusion that your qualia could be flipping back and forth every other minute without your noticing. Maybe your qualia got inverted while you were reading this post. Somehow, this seems to rob the concept of its intuitive appeal, wouldn't you say?

As for the Chinese Room, it's a good argument to use against Cartesian materialists who think that meaningless peripheral information must be translated for use by the inner "I" - and Dennett used it in that capacity before Searle did - but it just won't do for people who think the meaning is in the symbols themselves, not in the brain of a homunculus. "If you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of itself."

excreationist

My idea is that everything we are aware of is in working memory (aka short term memory), and it is only a few thousand bits of data. To give the data a richer meaning, the data triggers associations and data with lower priority (less emotional content?) is discarded from the working memory and replaced with the new data. New associations can be triggered quickly - I think the brain cycles at about 50 Hz - giving the illusion that we have instant access to the associations that makes our understandings of things "rich".
I think there is a central structure that is used for learning and association (not necessarily physically in one piece?) - this is because we can associate anything together - we can associate smells (of smoke) with concepts (smoke and fire) - we can associate visual shapes (words) with objects or properties or concepts - we can associate spoken sounds with visual sensations (colours) - etc... in any combination. I think that we automatically associate all elements of our experiences together... (including our emotions) - then when we have experiences where there is one area of similiarity, that association gets strengthened. e.g. after a while a dog might learn that it was the sitting after the command "sit" that lead to the emotional reward (food/affection) rather than other things like a bell it heard ringing before hand. So we find patterns, but initially we mightn't know what things are related to what so our brain just associates them all together - just in case.
Also, I think the pleasure signal is used by the brain to mean that a certain situation, etc, is the goal. The pain signal means that certain situations need to be avoided - depending on the signals intensities. Whenever we feel pain or pleasure, the contents of our working memory (awareness) are associated with those emotions and cause that situation to become more or less desirable. When the brain is working out what to do it would receive an emotional response - e.g. that newness is required due to boredom - and then it works out how to best react using problem solving strategies that the brain has learnt over time.
So what do you think of that? It don't think it involves a homunculus (little man)...