quote:I suspect that you're using "observe" very differently than I am. Are you simply saying that you are aware of experiencing things, and aware of that awareness, and that this awareness does not seem to you to possess a physical component? And that therefore it should be safe to assume that it does not?
No, I am saying that there are things I know are in my mind that I am calling experiences (although it is more like a continuous indivisible stream of experience), and it does not fit various criteria for being physical. It cannot be broken into parts, be rebuilt out of matter outside my mind, I cannot study it objectively, I cannot communicate its nature to you, etc. Also unlike physical things, they can be examined by me in a direct way that does not rely on any assumptions (examining physical things relies on the assumptions that my eyes tell the truth, that my senses tell the truth, and that I am generally not hallucinating about what I am observing.) This is why I can know that these experiences exist, and know that they don't fit certain criteria for being physical - because I can examine them directly in a way that physical things cannot be examined.
That's just how experiences are. If you don't believe me, my guess is that only introspection will convince you of it. (Although there are some philosophical arguments that will point you in the right direction, which is what I'd like to try to do. )
quote:Can you tell me -- in a way which does not rely on prediction -- what is good and what is bad?
I'm not sure any philsopher or person in all of history has ever given an accurate explanation of what distinguishes good from bad. So, no, I can't.
However, I can tell you some things that I think are generally bad or generally good. Pain, for instance, is generally bad. That's an easy one - and yet you could do no physical experiment to show it is true. It relies on our own personal experience of pain, and our knowledge that the experience is bad.
quote:Whatever you want to call it, experience, awareness, consciousness...they're all just words that describe concepts. concepts whose components are all physical in nature. just because the sum total of these components "seem" to you to be non-physical, doesn't mean there is a basis to assert this.
What is your basis for asserting that they are physical? If there is no basis either way, why should I not go with what "seems" to be true?
quote:I am pretty certain there will NEVER be a way to chemically cause a person to think about say a brick.
Bets? Watch closely, now, there may be questions afterwards.
DON'T THINK ABOUT PURPLE RHINOCERI!
Now then. Did you think, even for a moment, about purple rhinoceri? And I didn't even have to use any chemicals. Honestly, this is trivial.
No it isn't. All you did was mention an object and in response I visualized it. And since your command was to not think about it, I corrected the response by ceasing to think about it. Congratulations you have proven that I have reflexes that I have developed since birth. So what am I thinking about now? After your momentary stimulus has ended, its back to business and I decide what I am thinking about. I even decide HOW I would like to to think about it. Your example is like saying that because my spinal cord controls quick motor reflexes that therefore its the same thing as my brain.
quote:You are more removing a restraint I have created for myself more then directing what I think about.
A purely semantic difference and completely uninteresting. I changed the frequency of your thoughts about <whatever>; therefore I control what you think about.
Its not semantics at all. I created the link between the event and the chemical that causes depression. Whenever the chemical is produced I by habit dwell on the sad event. You remove the improper chemical and thus I am less prone to thinking about the sad event. Its the same thing as throwing all the cookies out of the jar so your kid stops seeing them and is prompted to ask you for one. You didn't make your kid unable to think about cookies, or even canceled the thought midthink (yes I created a word). All you did was remove what will likely cause the thought to come up.
Or does your mind run constantly on stimulus/response? Are you completely incapable of controlling your thoughts? Are your thoughts all reflexes then? If you can control your thoughts, where does that control come from? I don't know about you but sometimes I have thoughts that I know are bad or improper, and I have to consciously decide to not think about them. What gives me that ability?
I would argue your soul is what ultimately governs the river of your thoughts. But I would be willing to concede that evidence indicates that its probable your soul and your brain are very thoroughly connected.
Tom: I'd like to see the "research" and the case study of that woman before I respond as if what you said was fact.
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quote:It cannot be broken into parts, be rebuilt out of matter outside my mind, I cannot study it objectively, I cannot communicate its nature to you, etc.
Before I challenge any of these points, can I ask why these are your criteria for "physicality?"
quote: That's an easy one - and yet you could do no physical experiment to show it is true. It relies on our own personal experience of pain, and our knowledge that the experience is bad.
You just broke your own argument. The idea that "pain" is "bad" relies on a definition of "bad" which means "undesirable." Once we've defined "bad" as something which we do not desire, things we do not desire can easily be considered "bad." Only if we desired pain (either because we enjoyed it, or because we felt it was necessary) would it not be "bad" in any given situation.
We have no knowledge or experience of "bad." We have created the useful fiction of "badness," and assigned it a value that eventually ties directly back into physicality. We then classify as "bad" those things which possess the real-world attributes that we've defined as "bad."
There's nothing in the idea "pain is bad" that relies on a single non-physical experience. It uses some semantic fictions, but semantics aren't things.
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quote:I'd like to see the "research" and the case study of that woman before I respond as if what you said was fact.
quote:What is your basis for asserting that they are physical? If there is no basis either way, why should I not go with what "seems" to be true?
My basis is that everything else in the known universe is physical. Everything I see is particles interacting with eachother. Everything in the universe is made up of the same stuff all interacting in different ways. And they all interact based on simple rules. It "seems" to you that there is something non-physical happening when you experience things, the same way it "seems" to you that you are looking at a real solid monitor on a real solid desk on a real solid floor. But just because you can't see the true nature of what makes up your physical world, does't mean there is anything mystical or magical or non-physical about what is really going on. And by the same token, just because your personal experience "seems" to be something non-physical, doesn't mean that it isn't all based on those same laws that govern everything else. And honestly, what possible reason would there be for the particular combination of atoms that makes me up to suddenly produce some sort of non-physical conscious entity that doesn't exist in 99.9999999% of all the other combinations of atoms in the universe?
Where were these souls for most of the history of the universe? Where were these souls during the millions of years we evolved? When did they decide to enter our bodies(and no other creatures bodies)? What did we do to become worthy? And isn't it a little coincidental, that according to your view they decided to merge with us around the same time we developed enough awareness to experience the world around us in a conscious manner?
Add to all this all the knowledge we've acquired about how our bodies work, how our brain functions, what is really happening internally, etc...we understand our behavior, actions, emotions now in relation to the physical processes that govern them, and we're learning more and more about the brain and thus about our conscious experience.
So given all this, what possible reason could I have to posit the idea of something non-physical occuring in my mind when I experience things. It seems to me that you're saying something along the lines of, "these concepts we're talking about can't be physical because they're *concepts*!" Well sure, of course. and you're right, the soul can't be physical, because it's just a concept. Which makes it a concept, not real.
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You know, over the years many of us jatraqueros have had very similar discussions to this one, and they always reach a similar impasse... to me it seems that Tresopax and those who think like him simply come to the debate wanting to believe in the soul; while there are some in the materialist camp who also come to the table wanting to disprove the existence of the soul, most of us, I'd wager, have been slowly converted to our materialism from earlier, different philosophical stances. For example, I was a fundamental Christian as a teenager, and I entered college gung-ho about defending my faith in the classroom (my minor was philosophy for that first year). Very slowly, over a period of nine years, the weight of the evidence dragged me away from my dualist vision. Believe me, I scoured the research and racked my brain for a legitimate way to continue believing in the soul... I really, really wanted there to be one... but by the time I was 27, I had been convinced by the depth and breadth of our present knowledge about the universe that there simply COULD NOT EXIST A SPIRITUAL PLANE. Not a fun conclusion. The next nine years (up to the present) have been a search on my part to find the beauty in meaning in THE WAY THINGS REALLY ARE. There is quite a bit of it. I don't need a soul to MEAN. Qualia don't have to exist for my experiences to have VALUE. Granted, it isn't an objective value, but I don't give a damn about that. The subjective, virtual meaning they have works just fine for me.
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I think we *started* the soul discussion at an impasse, since we didn't define "soul," and I don't know what people mean by it.
Now, I gave examples of things that exist and are non-physical, and ended up with a lack of agreement on what "thing" and "exist" mean. This is an effective way of _stopping_ thought about an issue by ensuring that there are no terms for discussing it. But if we allow sufficient terms to discuss things that some people say aren't things (the word "thing" is really the only thing general enough to apply), then we could go further.
We could discuss whether the soul is something like pi and e; or whether it's something like a spleen; or something of its own type. Of course, we still wouldn't reach an agreement, but I think our dissent would end up as something more like "the soul is merely an epiphenomenon of brain function" or "the soul is more than those things, and here's what." That might be interesting.
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quote:to me it seems that Tresopax and those who think like him simply come to the debate wanting to believe in the soul; while there are some in the materialist camp who also come to the table wanting to disprove the existence of the soul, most of us, I'd wager, have been slowly converted to our materialism from earlier, different philosophical stances. For example, I was a fundamental Christian as a teenager, and I entered college gung-ho about defending my faith in the classroom (my minor was philosophy for that first year). Very slowly, over a period of nine years, the weight of the evidence dragged me away from my dualist vision. Believe me, I scoured the research and racked my brain for a legitimate way to continue believing in the soul... I really, really wanted there to be one... but by the time I was 27, I had been convinced by the depth and breadth of our present knowledge about the universe that there simply COULD NOT EXIST A SPIRITUAL PLANE.
And my story is quite the opposite. I am a moderate Christian who originally believed atoms could explain all important things about me in life, including all my thoughts and feelings. That was because I believed firmly in science's ability to study everything, given everything it has correctly told us about the world over the past few centuries. The idea of a mind floating around somewhere seemed to me as crazy as believing that ghosts were haunting my house. I trusted science far too much to accept something like that. I did believe in a soul, but to me that was an abstraction.
It was only as a philosophy major in college, being exposed to the arguments for and against dualism, that I slowly changed my mind. Several of the arguments designed to illustrate the non-physical nature of qualia seemed compelling to me, and I could not figure out how to explain them in any physical way. The more I read materialists philosophers trying to resolve those problems, the more I got the impression that they were entering the discussion wanting to find any way they could to avoid admitting a soul. Materialists would try increasingly convoluted arguments, or try to assert assumptions that just didn't make sense. It reminded me of those who believe the Bible is literally true, and will bend over backwards to try and explain things in a way to make the world seem consistent with the Bible. Materialists argued in the same fashion, except instead of Religion driving it, it seemed to be a desire to affirm Science. (Given the ascension of science in academia, I think philosophers are afraid to sound wacky by expressing support for an idea that sounds very unscientific at first - I think many very much want to try and reconcile philosophy with what science assumes is true.)
I do remember the moment I finally changed my mind, because I decided to write a paper on it - and I couldn't figure out what side to take. I was sitting in my dorm room trying to figure out if I was actually experiencing the bright orange sunset outside my window, or if I was just reporting to myself that I was experiencing it. Eventually, after a great deal of thought, I concluded that I could not just be reporting it without actually experiencing it - that would create a sort of paradox, because the report is still an experience itself. It would be logically consistent for an outside observer to believe I was merely reporting it to myself, when viewed from the outside, but internally I could be absolutely certain I was experiencing it. It was at this point I changed positions, and I have yet to get an answer from materialism that allows me to explain that very simple yet important problem.
So, I know what it is like to believe in materialism. I am aware of the difficulty in rejecting a sort of paradigm that science has found so successful. There is a very strong motivation to WANT to believe in materialism, to make the world more simply explained, and to be consistent with the current popular scientific view. However, the evidence is just too compelling. Unless some solution I can't imagine comes around someday to explain away that evidence in an honest way that does not rely on assumptions that just don't appear to be true, I can't accept materialism.
quote:Before I challenge any of these points, can I ask why these are your criteria for "physicality?"
Because physical things seem to always have these features. It is possible that the mind is a physical thing that is totally unlike all other physical things, but that seems to dilute the concept of "physical" into something meaningless to me.
quote:There's nothing in the idea "pain is bad" that relies on a single non-physical experience. It uses some semantic fictions, but semantics aren't things."
Why else would pain be bad? It is useful from an evolutionary standpoint - creatures that don't feel pain don't realize when they are injured, and thus die rather easily. The only reason we consider pain to be bad is because the experience itself is undesireable to us. If it weren't for the experience, pain would be like that warning light that tells me when my car is running out of gas - there's nothing bad about that.
quote:My basis is that everything else in the known universe is physical. Everything I see is particles interacting with eachother. Everything in the universe is made up of the same stuff all interacting in different ways. And they all interact based on simple rules.
This is circular. You are asserting your conclusion (everything is physical) in order to justify that conclusion. I'd say many things in the universe are not physical.
quote:Where were these souls for most of the history of the universe? Where were these souls during the millions of years we evolved? When did they decide to enter our bodies(and no other creatures bodies)? What did we do to become worthy? And isn't it a little coincidental, that according to your view they decided to merge with us around the same time we developed enough awareness to experience the world around us in a conscious manner?
The souls may have been around forever, or may have been created when we were.
I assume it is not a coincidence that they are merged with our physical bodies in whatever way they are. I assume there is something about our bodies that results in this happening. None of this is a reason not to believe in souls.
quote:So given all this, what possible reason could I have to posit the idea of something non-physical occuring in my mind when I experience things.
Because experience is inconsistent with the properties of physical things, as I talked about in earlier posts. They aren't "concepts". They are experiences.
That convinces me that the soul is either nonphysical, or a physical thing that can somehow generate nonphysical experiences (like an auia).
quote:Now, I gave examples of things that exist and are non-physical, and ended up with a lack of agreement on what "thing" and "exist" mean.
Here's the deal: if the soul is something like "pi" or "e," a definitional concept used to describe a property of something -- and not a thing itself -- then it's just another convenient fiction, just like "pi" or "e". In that context, we'd use the word "soul" as a convenient shorthand, an abstration, for "the bunch of inputs and outputs that make up your sense of self."
quote:I concluded that I could not just be reporting it without actually experiencing it....
Again, I think your use of the word "experience" here is very broken.
quote:Why else would pain be bad?
Again, pain exists. "Badness" does not exist. Badness is something we broadly define as something that is undesirable. If we do not desire a given sensation of pain, pain is therefore -- to us -- bad. If we conclude that pain is in general undesired, we can speak broadly of "pain" being "bad." That does not mean that pain is empirically bad, as if "badness" were some inherent property of the universe; badness does not carry a charge or spin in a given "direction." Pain is bad because the concept of "badness" we invented is delimited in a manner that includes pain.
quote:I'd say many things in the universe are not physical.
And I would ask you to demonstrate one.
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quote:Badness is something we broadly define as something that is undesirable. If we do not desire a given sensation of pain, pain is therefore -- to us -- bad. If we conclude that pain is in general undesired, we can speak broadly of "pain" being "bad."
You've changed the words but the same point remains. Why would pain be undesirable, except for the experience we have when we are in pain?
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quote:I'd say many things in the universe are not physical.
posted
I'm reading Minsky's The Emotion Machine right now, and he makes the point that "feelings" and "experience" are concepts that, contrary to the normal practice, need more complexity added to them instead of simplification. In other words, feelings are likely made up of many levels of mental resources (Minsky argues that feelings are different approaches to problem solving cascades of activity in the brain that shut off certain resources and turn others on), and to understand why and how we feel, we must break those "emotions" down into smaller, easier to analyze parts. Nothing, I repeat, is solved by postulating monadic entities... unless you don't want to actually solve the problem.
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Strider, he's trying to say that the sensation of pain isn't physical. That the actual EXPERIENCE of pain contains some non-physical, Platonically essential quality to it.
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quote:Why would pain be undesirable, except for the experience we have when we are in pain?
Except the "experience" we have when we are in pain is just signals sent to our brain telling us(over and over again) that our current physical state is not one to be desired. It tells us in such a way that I assume must have evolved over time to really "make us listen" in a sense. If damage to the body didn't produce extreme negative feelings in the organism that was damaged, this would be a huge survival disadvantage. So yes, pain is undesirable because of the experience it produces. But we're back to square one, because I still don't see anything about what just happened as non-physical, because again, experience is a just a word to describe a multitude of physical phenomena going on.
also, explain the documented condition of people who can't feel pain because of genetic disorders(lack of formation of nerve cells, messages not reaching the brain). Wouldn't the fact that this can happen imply that pain is a physical phenomena?
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The reason we experience emotions, sensations and so forth as something significantly different from other physical phenomena is that we are constantly applying the intentional stance to ourselves. This perceptive trick, through which we attribute internal belief states to other human beings and successfully predict their behavior, when applied to ourselves, creates a recursive feedback loop in which we perceive ourselves as an entity, then as an entity perceiving itself as an entity, etc. Eventually this strange loop of perception analyzes all of our conscious thought, imbuing all of our emotions and experiences with intentionality... to me, this is why we perceive our internal life as being different... because of these strange loops of perception.
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quote:Except the "experience" we have when we are in pain is just signals sent to our brain telling us(over and over again) that our current physical state is not one to be desired. It tells us in such a way that I assume must have evolved over time to really "make us listen" in a sense.
If there is no soul, who is this "us" that the signals are telling? If there is only the physical brain, all the signals are doing is triggering other signals or mechanical actions. Any sort of explanation of why pain is undesireable that requires an "us" being told not to desire it is an explanation that implicitly accepts the existence of a soul. If there truly is no nonphysical soul, then your explanation should be able to explain it solely in terms of chemical brain signals and mechanical actions, and should not have to rely on any mysterious "us".
quote:also, explain the documented condition of people who can't feel pain because of genetic disorders(lack of formation of nerve cells, messages not reaching the brain). Wouldn't the fact that this can happen imply that pain is a physical phenomena?
It would suggest that pain is triggered by certain physical nerve cells, which is quite different from saying pain actually IS a bunch of physical nerve cells.
quote:The reason we experience emotions, sensations and so forth as something significantly different from other physical phenomena is that we are constantly applying the intentional stance to ourselves. This perceptive trick, through which we attribute internal belief states to other human beings and successfully predict their behavior, when applied to ourselves, creates a recursive feedback loop in which we perceive ourselves as an entity, then as an entity perceiving itself as an entity, etc. Eventually this strange loop of perception analyzes all of our conscious thought, imbuing all of our emotions and experiences with intentionality...
So how does creating a recursive feedback loop do this? I can program my computer to recursively tell itself that it exists, after all, and it will run through the loop an infinite number of times. Yet, it doesn't seem to become a conscious self. That's because the computer has no "us" in it to tell - all it does is repeatedly rearrange bits from 0 to 1 and back, no matter how many times the loop runs through. So why should a recursive loop in my brain do anything different?
Note that you, too, use "we" repeatedly in your explanation. As in "we perceive ourselves". Yet a physical explanation should not rely on any "we". Each brain signal is only triggering physical responses in other brain cells. They are like a long set of dominoes. So then the question is, if you got a large enough set of dominoes and arranged them in the right order, would they begin to have experiences? If you could get dominoes that right themselves back up after they fall, and if you could arrange them to loop back around recursively to simulate a recusive feedback loop, how would that make it any more likely that those dominoes become conscious?
It is easy enough to say a recursive feedback loop can cause us to start experiencing sensations, because complicated things tend to sound possible, but how does it actually work? Is there any explanation that does not rely on some sort of "us" to tell "we" exist?
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Right... the "we" and "I" are deliberate shorthand expressions. Here's the "just-so" story (read Hofstadter's work for a much more involved explanation... I'm just a layman... in fact, read V.S. Ramachandran's awesome article): The evolved resources in the brain that historically worked to attribute intentionality to other organisms were, at some point, turned upon the organism they themselves were part of. The use of resources evolved for the evaluation and prediction of other organisms to do the same for the source brain/body creates a distancing in the various cognitive processes, promoting the illusion that these myriad brain modules are actually one single conscious mind.
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I'm not sure it's possible to argue this. Once you accept that your brain is playing a trick on you even as you speak, there's no guarantee it can only play one trick. If your brain deceives you to make you think you exist as one entity, your brain might also be deceiving you to make you think you don't.
That is, if our brains don't work when we think about ourselves, then they don't work when we think about ourselves.
There may be a way around this beyond just saying "I believe," but I don't see it yet.
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quote:I'd say many things in the universe are not physical.
And I would ask you to demonstrate one.
Wouldn't your response to such a demonstration be, "This is not a thing in the universe, because all things are physical"? That is, demonstration isn't relevant. If you define "doohickey" to mean "green thing," it would be pointless to challenge someone to show you a red "doohickey." You'd simply say, "That's no doohickey -- it's not green!"
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quote:If there is no soul, who is this "us" that the signals are telling? If there is only the physical brain, all the signals are doing is triggering other signals or mechanical actions.
This is in fact demonstrably true. Reflex reactions to pain, for example, occur considerably before you become "consciously" aware of the pain.
quote:Yet, it doesn't seem to become a conscious self.
If you were doing nothing but sitting on the floor thinking to yourself "I am a conscious self. I am a conscious self. I am a conscious self," I probably wouldn't think you were a conscious self, either.
quote:Wouldn't your response to such a demonstration be, "This is not a thing in the universe, because all things are physical"?
Close. Show me a non-physical "thing" that is neither a concept, a property, nor a term (as I exclude those from my definition of "thing.")
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quote:If you were doing nothing but sitting on the floor thinking to yourself "I am a conscious self. I am a conscious self. I am a conscious self," I probably wouldn't think you were a conscious self, either.
So if I programmed my computer to run such a loop, it won't appear conscious to an outside observer but actually will be a conscious self?
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No, Tresopax. No one's talking about a single loop within (relatively) simple architecture. I'm talking about hugely complex systems of discrimination and prediction being utilized by even larger supersystems of mentation to mirror all of the systems in the brain as a unit, as if they were being seen by another organism.
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quote:Here's the "just-so" story (read Hofstadter's work for a much more involved explanation... I'm just a layman... in fact, read V.S. Ramachandran's awesome article): The evolved resources in the brain that historically worked to attribute intentionality to other organisms were, at some point, turned upon the organism they themselves were part of.
Ramachandran's article seems like an excellent explanation for self-awareness. Building around the concept of "mirror neurons" he suggests that we have evolved the capacity to be aware of ourselves in a similar sort of way that we are aware of others. He says "I suggest that self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for 'looking at myself as if someone else is look at me' (the word 'me' encompassing some of my brain processes, as well)."
The trouble is that self-awareness is not the problem. Or, that is to say, the ability of a brain to model itself in the way your brain models others is not really surprising. One could write a computer program telling the computer to model itself in the same fashion. Many complex systems could be built to include information about themselves within them.
The real problem is that explaining self-awareness in no way solves the problem of conscious experience. That is because the information stored within a brain (whether it is about itself or about someone else) only serves to influence physical actions - just like how the information in a computer is meaningless to the computer except insofar as it controls the flow of electricity through the computer to produce certain actions. Thus Ramachandran's solution can explain how we ACT in a way consistent with possessing information about our internal workings, like how a computer can be programmed to display how much memory it is using. But Ramachandran's solution cannot explain why any of that would be accompanied by experiences. We don't just ACT like we possess experiences. We DO possess experiences.
One can say "Well, experiences are just what happens when you report information about yourself to yourself." But why does ANYTHING extra have to happen when you report information about yourself to yourself? And who is "yourself"? When my computer reports to "itself" how much memory it is using, I just assume all that is going on is a whole bunch of switches are being switched back and forth from 1 to 0 and back, don't you? I don't think there is any real "itself" in the computer that it is talking to - that's just a shorthand way of speaking about how the bits are processing. The bits don't mean anything more to the computer when talking about the computer itself than when talking about any other given thing. The bits don't mean anything at all to the computer, except insofar as they control how the pieces of the computer act. So why would it be different with the computer that is my brain?
So, Ramachandran has a good explanation for one particular mystery of the mind (how the brain possesses self-knowledge), but it doesn't solve the big problem. This is a common issue when it comes to explanations of the human mind - explanations typically swap an easier problem for the hard problem, then solve the easy problem.
quote:I'm talking about hugely complex systems of discrimination and prediction being utilized by even larger supersystems of mentation to mirror all of the systems in the brain as a unit, as if they were being seen by another organism.
"Being complicated" does not equal "Can do anything". If it doesn't work at all on the simple level, why should we assume that doing the same thing in a much more complicated way would make it work?
If I see a tree fall in my yard, it would be dishonest of me to then try to convince myself that I saw no such tree, just in order to fit some sort of worldview I'm trying to justify.
It would be even more dishonest of me to deny the existence of my experiences, because at least in the case of the tree falling it is possible I just imagined it. That escape doesn't exist for experiences, because imagination itself is an experience.
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What's the difference between reporting information about yourself to yourself and observing that you have reported information about yourself to yourself? The latter is just one additional iteration of the former.
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Well, there is a difference in words. Do you consider "observing" to mean the exact same thing as "reporting to yourself"? I'd think there is a difference.
Regardless, the dispute isn't over the difference between reporting information about yourself to yourself and observing that you have reported information about yourself to yourself. Rather, the dispute is over the difference between reporting information about yourself to yourself and experiencing something while reporting information about yourself to yourself. The difference between those two is that the latter entails having an experience, whereas I see no reason why the former would.
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I don't see the distinction. In fact, I think "reporting to myself" is pretty close to an exact functional description of "observing."
I still have absolutely no idea what your definition of "experience" is meant to encompass. You're using it a lot, but it doesn't seem to mean anything consistent.
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Well, I can report to myself that I have 11 toes. "Dear self, I have eleven toes." But I don't think I can observe myself having 11 toes, unless I (a) hallucinate, or (b) actually have 11 toes. That is because reporting to myself entails just a transfer of data, whereas observation involves an experience that backs up the data.
As for "experience", what I mean by that is "what it is like" to have something happen. For instance, the experience of smelling apple pie is what it is like to smell apple pie. The experience of observing I have 11 toes is what it is like to see myself having 11 toes. And so on. "Experience" is very similar to the term "qualia", but most people don't know what "qualia" is, so I don't want to use that term. Also, many use "qualia" to refer more specifically to sensory experiences, whereas I'd use the term "experience" to cover anything that has a "what it is like" aspect to it.
Here is one broader explanation of qualia from a Wikipedia article, that sums up what I would consider to be "experience". (The whole Wikipedia article is there if you want more detail.):
quote:There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time. One of the simpler, broader definitions is "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc'"
quote:Well, I can report to myself that I have 11 toes. "Dear self, I have eleven toes."
Can you really? I don't think you can. Because even as you're saying that to yourself, another part of yourself is saying "I don't really have eleven toes."
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
The January 29th issue of Time magazine was a special issue devoted to the brain. There was one article in particular called "The Mystery of Consciousness" by Steven Pinker that touched on many things we talked about in this thread.
His basic premise is that the idea of a self and free will are illusions brought about by our experience. That consciousness IS neural activity.
Definitely worth a read. The whole brain section was interesting.
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I think Mr. Pinker's assertion is NOT that consciousness is just an illusion. Rather, if you read the end, he asserts that consciousness does exist, and that "our own consciousness is a product of our brains".
Note also that on page 6, he gets into possible explanations for the "Hard Problem" of consciousness, which is the problem I have been talking about in this thread (the Hard Problem is the problem of qualia, more or less.) He gives Dennett's solution (denying the existence of experience) but seems to not buy it:
quote:Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.
The complaint he offers above is exactly the thing that is wrong with Dennett's solution, and with eliminativism in general - it simply denies reality. It is easy to make any model work if you simply say everything that doesn't fit the model doesn't really exist. But the fact of the matter is, experience does exist.
Here is his description of what he argues that the majority of neuroscientists believe:
quote:The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer.
This is the problem when it comes to what seems to be the popular view of consciousness among scientists: It amounts to optimistic thinking. We don't have an explanation for the Hard Problem, but physical brains seem to explain everything else, so we can safely assume it will explain the Hard Problem too eventually, they say. The scientific community is simply assuming materialism will be correct.
The trouble with this is something the article does not explain completely - why the "Hard" problem is "Hard". Mr. Pinker says "the problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place". But the "hardness" of the Hard Problem goes beyond just not knowing what a solution looks like. The Hard problem is hard because it seems to be logically impossible to explain with a physical mechanism. That is for the reasons I gave above - because the characteristics of experience conflict with the features of physical things. It is "hard" in the same way it is "hard" to make a square circle, or to make a two-sided triangle, or to explain how you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old yet you also believe dinosaurs existed millions of years ago.
That's the problem I have with the "cheery optimism" about physicalist models of the mind. It is one thing to assume your model will eventually explain something it hasn't yet explained. But it is something quite different to assume your model will eventually explain something whose nature fundamentally contradicts the model.
posted
Ah, I see. I'm not sure I see where he argued that anything was an illusion. He definitely did argue that consciousnesss IS neural activity though.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
hmmm...i guess those words aren't specifically used in the paper. But I do feel it's his point if you pay attention to his arguments. Also, in the paper copy of the magazine, there is heading just above the title of the piece that reads:
quote:you exist, right? Prove it. How 100 billion jabbering neurons create the knowledge-or illusion-that you're here.
posted
Sight is illusion to, in the neurological model.
I use my brain primarily for controlling my body, I don't really use it to store my personality or important stuff like that. It may be more reliable and stable than a human brain, but it's still...you know, a brain. As D would say, sick!Posts: 763 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote: They can grow active neural tissue in a dish these days, you know. I don't know that anyone is making the claim that this stuff is conscious, though.
Thought is the traffic. The tissue is just the road.
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quote:But the fact of the matter is, experience does exist.
Yes, it really does. Perhaps you don't experience anything (you might be a philosophical zombie!) but I can tell you that I do, so I can say with certainty that experience DOES exist. For instance, when I smell apple pie, I definitely experience it as a very good sensation. And given that you can't look into my mind, I don't see how you could possibly claim to know whether I do or do not experience anything.
If you don't like my use of the word "experience" then mentally substitute some other word every time I write it if you like, as long as you know what I am referring to and that it does in fact exist. Call it "qualia" or "XYZXYZ" or whatever. The difference is semantics. The important issue is that it does exist, and does pose a "Hard Problem" for materialist models of the mind.
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posted
Here's the thing: qualia do not exist. "Experience" as you're meaning it -- a discrete, metaphysical, non-metaphorical lump of awareness -- is bunk. There's no "hard problem," period, because it just doesn't exist.
We don't see the space between atoms, either. We don't perceive the universe as being made up of mostly nothing. And yet it is. We conveniently overlook all the space between particles to see the larger picture; the same thing happens with "experience," which is just a convenient fiction used as shorthand for a much more complex system.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Definitions and terms don't exist either. Neither does bunk. I'm not just being difficult. When you eliminate from existence entire classes of things, you render your own discussion invalid, as well.
It might be an interesting challenge to try making an argument about the nonexistence of convenient fictions *without* using the convenient fictions.
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quote:It might be an interesting challenge to try making an argument about the nonexistence of convenient fictions *without* using the convenient fictions.
Sure. In the same way that it's quite interesting to catch a ball by calculating its weight, vector, and airspeed, then manually adjusting each of your muscle fibers to move the molecules of your arm into the correct position to intercept the molecules that make up the ball.
There's a reason those fictions are convenient, and it's that our brains -- and the other subsystems that make up our senses -- are not wired to be consciously aware of all the various inputs. We streamline them and actually submit them to pre-processing well before they intercept our consciousness, so that we don't have to do physics to catch a ball.
But that doesn't mean that we can't. More importantly, it doesn't mean that the best way to catch every ball is to rely on instinct and stick our hand out there. The same principle by which we catch a ball was used to send someone to the moon, but we didn't just hurl a rocket up there in that general direction; we first made sure we understood the physical principle that underpinned the ways in which things fall and are caught, even though our bodies told us something quite different.
My "self" tells me that I have a self. It also, depending on the situation, reminds me that I have a knee -- usually when it's strained or skinned -- or a stomach. Very, very rarely do I ever become aware that I have pores, or capillaries, or neurons. But I am a collection of all these things, and there's no reason to assume that the collective shorthand my physical self-awareness uses to refer to the various parts of my body as a single unit is limited to my physical self. My sense of self is just as much a superset of various subdepartments and dedicated functions; my "awareness" is at any time a confused and fluctuating series of constant inputs. There is no steady state of "me."
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posted
Hah. So Tom says that "experience" doesn't exist, because the "self" is an illusion.
I don't need philosophy to know that he's lying, but that's because he provoked me into peeking in on his consciousness, a long time ago. Not pretty. But definitely a consciousness. More than one, actually, which was the horrible and not pretty part of it.
Well, that's only my opinion, though. At some point, Tom freely chose that existance. Whether some part of him now regrets it is not really my concern. I'm not in the business of abrogating human decisions just because they're stupid.
But man, I wouldn't even consider my brain a necessary element of my self. Meanwhile Tom wants to throw in his pores and crap? I don't get that at all. He doesn't even have good body awareness for a human, why would he need to consider his pores and capillaries elements of his self, even if they were coextent (which they are not)?
I don't know that very many humans can directly sense an inert physical object like a ball (let alone its mass and velocity) and then adjust muscle fibers directly to catch the ball. Wouldn't it be simpler (if you could do that, I mean) to just catch the ball without using your body at all? What's the point if you don't use the provided control interface?
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quote:I don't know that very many humans can directly sense an inert physical object like a ball (let alone its mass and velocity) and then adjust muscle fibers directly to catch the ball.
Nor do I. But you have to admit that it WOULD be "quite interesting," neh?
As you've pointed out, we have a "control interface" that greatly simplifies our interactions with our environment. We disagree, however, on whether or not that interface has been "provided."
Moreover, by believing in a "self," you -- in my opinion, at least -- are ascribing to one level of the interface an autonomy and coherence that does not exist. It's like saying that chocolate, because of its obvious existence and importance, is not made of atoms.
The "self," as a collection of things, exists in the same way any collection exists: as a conceptual framework that makes it easier to address the parts. In the same way that "chocolate" is made up of molecules of various ingredients which have changed through incorporation into chocolate, or the same way it's possible to affect all members of an instance in code by calling a method, I believe it's possible for the "self" to affect its components.
So, yeah, it's useful. But it's still a fiction.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I love reading about this philosophical stuff, guys. I don't really have the ability to contribute, and I wish I did--but I want you to know that I have a lot of respect for all of you.
Tom, I like how you use analogies so I can understand where you're coming from.
I think on the topic of "experience", the problem is in our definition of "exists". Experience does exist as we have defined it as the "INSTANCE of personally encountering or undergoing something"(dictionary.com). The "instance" is what exists. That is how I see "experience" as real--it's constantly happening. When we construct all of the experiences into a "self" is the fiction--which doesn't exist.
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