History Were Historical Shifts in Philosophy Right or Wrong Turns?

[Mentat]

I want to take a look at the history of philosophy. I would say it's a look at the history of "philosophy of mind", but it covers more than that.

I want to look at the points throughout history where a shift was made, to the using of terms and concepts that had never been used before. I want to do this because I want to see if any of them were wrong turns, that have changed philosophy for the worse. If it's true that some of these "turns" were bad ones, I don't want it to appear as though the philosopher(s) did something wrong, or as if it shouldn't have happened. After all, how can we learn from a mistake we never make? How, in turn, can we call something a mistake, if it is what arose necessarily from the questions being asked at the time?

 

[Mentat]

First turn.

The first "turn" I'm going to consider, is going to be the most recent in my consideration. All subsequent turns will be further and further in the past, relative to the previous.

The first "turn" I want to consider is that made by Immanuel Kant.

Would we have questions of p-consciousness and a-consciousness, if it weren't for the distinction he made between what is perceived by the senses and what is reflected in our (biased) minds? Would philosophers be trying to come up with a theory of knowledge that is absolute, if it hadn't been for this new distinction, that Kant made, which allowed for the idea that a clearer mirror would produce a more accurate representation of the physical Universe?

His turn, however, was the logical one, since he was preceded by Hume, and wished to refine Hume's concept. So, the next turn I want to consider is that of Hume...

 

[Mentat]

Ideas versus Impressions.

There were a lot of new concepts introduced by David Hume, but the two most important (to this discussion) will be "ideas" and "impressions".

According to Hume, "impressions" appeared to come from without and were impressed on the mind, whereas "ideas" are reflections thereof within the mind. Since we can never experience anything outside of our own experience, Hume's philosophy ended in Solipsism. After all, if the only things we ever experienced were our impressions and the ideas that were based on them, how could we be sure of the existence of anything outside the mind? IOW, impressions and ideas are both mental phenomena, and are thus not proof, or even indications, of anything that isn't a mental phenomenon.

But, Hume would never have been able to speak intelligently of such terms, had it not been for Locke. We wouldn't have known what the heck he was talking about. So, my next "turn" to consider is that of Locke...

 

[Mentat]

Meaning, tablets, and inward-facing eyes...

Locke introduced to philosophy the concept of an inner representation of external phenomenon. Perhaps "introduced" isn't the right word (maybe "refined the already existent concept" is better).

In any case, without Locke's belief that "meaning" was something extra, not intrinsic to any objective phenomenon, Hume's concept of "impressions" and "ideas" would have made no sense.

Locke basically showed the philosophical world that, since meaning was not something intrinsic to bits of ink on parchment, or sounds traveling through the air, they must instead have something to do with the mind's perception of them. A sound entered the ear, and was, at some point inscribed on the "tablet" of the mind, which was then read by the mind's eye. NOTE: This is not how he actually worded things, and (as with every other philosophy that I have and will discuss(ed)) it is but a fraction of the contribution made by the philosopher. However, this is my way of referring to the "wrong turn" the evolved from his insight.

I will continue this tomorrow, as I have to leave now...

 

[Mentat]

Last few turns: Descartes to Plato

Well, inspite of the fact that I've been paraphrasing gortequely, I will have to make the rest of my posts even more paraphrased, as I may have to get off-line at any moment. Let's see if I can make my point by then.

The very concept of mind and body (as separate entities, or as ontologically distinct), on which Locke's own philosophy was based, goes back to the great Descartes himself. Descartes, in his "First Philosophy" gives us the reason for this distinction (a distinction which was (IMSO) the first in a series of "wrong turns"), by describing how he arrived at that which is indubitable. At the end of his dubito, the only things left are those describable as aspects of the cogito.

This need for incorrigibility, in turn, can be followed back to Plato and Aristotle. Before them, the Pyrroneans (probably spelled wrong) and Sophists (and pretty much everybody else, for that matter) were content to deal with "relative truth" and the winning of the argument at hand, instead of dissolving every possible future argument. After Aristotle, however, the concept of an absolute truth, and the role of philosophy as finding those absolute truths, became deeply ingrained, and is the first (from a historical PoV, now) of the "wrong turns", that I want to put into question.

 

[Mentat]

Discussion or correction of any of the above paraphrasings is welcome, but the main point of the thread is incorrigibility, the way it lead philosophy into where it currently finds itself, and whether that very first step (made by Plato and Aristotle) should ever have been made. If so, should the steps that followed have been made? If so, why all the philosophical problems?

If, instead, we were to avoid taking any of those turns for granted, we may arrive at something very much like Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

Wittgenstein's earlier work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was an excellent work, but it was along the same path that leads off from Kant's "turn". But, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein takes none of those "turns" for granted, and goes back to the essential concept of winning in debate.

He gets rid of the concept of ultimate truth, and instead talks about relativity. He gets rid of mind-body distinction/dualities, because they are reflections (indeed, exist only for the purpose of) the need to find incorrigible truth.

 

[Mentat]

Thank you for your posts, mapper. Perhaps you should start a separate thread on the wrong turns that you wish to discuss. This thread is more about the history of philosophical thought, and the mistakes (IMO) that philosophers have been making, due to their desire for ultimate truth.

 

[mapper]

Yeah my posts were deleted. Wasnt really on your topic so sorry about that.

 

[Mentat]

Now that I've got a little more time.

Let me explain more clearly what the point of the thread is. Basically, I want to understand why (if there even is a good reason) we made the turns described above. Why did we start searching for a vantage point for absolute truths? Why did we think that we could do so by introspection? Why did we begin separating primary and secondary ideas, and ideas and impressions, and concepts and intuitions, thus making the concept of "mind" that much more complex and intractable?

This path has only lead us to philosophical problem on top of philosophical problem, and shouldn't that at least hint at the possibility that we've been going about it the wrong way?

Why doesn't mainstream philosophy take seriously the potential for Wittgensteinian thought to remove such problems?

 

[Canute]

I agree that philosophy (the western kind) has taken some wrong turns, imo often due to its close links with Christian theology and the wrong turns taken by the Church. But I don't see this quite the way you do. To me all those philosophers you mention were arriving at the same conclusion because it's the only conclusion to arrive at, not because they were building on each others work (although of course they were doing that as well).

It is simply a fact that certain knowledge is identical with its object (Aristotle), that the knowledge gained via our senses is not certain (Kant), and that the knowledge gained by our reason is not certain (Kant? Hume? Goedel anyway).

On the Wittgenstein thing I don't agree with the interpretation of the Tractatus that led to logical positivism, and get the impression that not too many people do these days. It's very difficult to show that metaphysical questions are not real questions (if that's what you meant).

On the whole though I agree with what you say. There is something amiss with western philosophy. It should have moved on by now instead of being stuck where Plato and Aristotle left it.

 

[Mentat]

Thanks for the response, Canute.

I hadn't considered Christianity's role in influencing modern philosophy...but it's something to ponder.

As to Wittgenstein, basically, whenever I refer to his philosophy I'm usually referring to his post-Tractatus stuff (the reasoning you'd find in the Philosophical Investigations). Combined with the historical approach of Heidegger and Dewey (among others), Rorty has formulated a philosophy completely independent of the post-Descartes notions of Duality. I'm just wondering if he may not be on the right track. Have you ever read any of Rorty's philosophy?

 

[Mentat]

From "Questions on Ontology"

This is from my thread, "Questions on Ontology". I think it's worth pasting here, as it is slightly more on-topic here, and may fuel some debate (if I'm lucky)...

Originally Posted by Fliption
Perhaps it would be better if you laid out how that works. As you may recall, we've had a few of those "Wittgenstein" folks participate in some discussions claiming grand things about how language causes all philosophy problems but then they never have the patience or competence to explain their position.

My Reply...
That's because Kantian, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Lockean biases are so deeply ingrained in the reasoning of most people. I'll give it a try:

Through a Wittgensteinian approach we can first see language as not a singular process or ability, but as many. He calls each individual process/ability a "language-game", and the "family resemblances" between such "games" are many, but there is no singular quality that exists in all of them.

Now, games all have their own pieces and their own rules. Taking the "language-game" concept into history, Rorty thinks we will start to see (for an example) "ontological dichotomies" of mind and body or of universals and particulars as merely social conventions of language. IOW, whereas the mind-body distinction was originally designed (and later refined) specifically to establish a framework of things that could not be doubted -- from which we could extrapolate other "truths" and against which we could rigorously test conjectures, theories, even whole paradigms -- Wittgenstein does away with "absolute grounding" for truth (Rorty refers to "absolute grounding" as "polishing our Mirror of Nature, so that our inner representations are as accurate as possible"), and adopts a more relativistic viewpoint. Then, all that is left is to solve the puzzles that our language-games can create.

As an example, let's look at the concept of "a-consciousness" and "p-consciousness". These stand for "action-consciousness" and "phenomenal-consciousness" in the philosophical language-game. No other language game uses a distinction even remotely like this, because no other game needs it. Thus, it is only a puzzle brought on by an aspect of this particular game. Now, let's dissect the "pieces" and their roles.

"Phenomenal" is a term that has reference to events occurring in the mind, or otherwise being of a mental nature. Specifically, phenomenal-consciousness is that consciousness that is more than just neural processing of information or the uttering of responses. It is, to put it yet another way, the perception of "redness" beyond the simple electro-chemical processing of photonic information.

Now, why do we even have this concept (this "piece" in our "game")? Well, our philosophical language-game has allowed for such a distinction for some time (ever since Descartes). But why did Descartes come up with it? Well, if one looks at the time in which he was living, one can easily see how it would become necessary for him to try to establish which things could and could not be doubted. And, since you have first-hand priveleged access to what you are perceiving, that must be undoubtable. IOW, it's the one thing about which you could be allowed (by society? by other philosophers?) to be incorrigible, and nobody would mind; nobody could contest it, since it was your experience.

But, now, if "redness" was just a reflection of how something seemed to you, and had nothing to do with anything real...and if neuroscience could establish a well-grounded understanding of how we process every different kind of phenomenon, then you might not be allowed to be so incorrigible. After all, you could tell us how it seemed to you, but the neurologist could tell us how it actually was. And this is not so strange as it may seem, since people have always talked about how things seemed to them (for example, there are those who percieve an order and intelligence in the Universe...perfect clock-work) until science came in and showed them that their views needed correction (quantum mechanics, for example, does away with the clock-work Universe concept fairly well).

All I'm basically saying (for those of you who skipped ahead to the end ) is that our ability to be incorrigible about how something seems to us was blown way out of proportion (eventually becoming considered an ontological dichotomy (of all things!)), and has become the basis for a large slew of words (p- and a- consciousness among them) that would have had no meaning whatsoever without that misconception.

The usual objection is that our conscious experience ("experience" here being used in a way quite different than in any other language-game) cannot be doubted. How something seems to us cannot be overruled by someone else, and pain, "redness", love, etc, have no more existence other than how they seem to us. But, pace Rorty, I ask if that is really so. Is it really even comprehensible to speak of a "pain" without speaking of a being that is in pain? Much like beauty or valor, which cannot be spoken of intelligently (at all, really) without referencing the context (how can you speak of beauty without speaking something that "is beautiful"). What has happened, which has infected our philosophical language-game, is that words we use to describe these states have indeed been used to refer to particulars, our of context.

That is why it is nothing more than a language puzzle: it has no substance outside of one specific language game, and only has substance therein because of a misconstruition of a state for a particular.

There's obviously more to this (much more), but I'll stop here for now.

 

[selfAdjoint]

And when someone comes to another group's game, as a Briton viewing baseball or an American viewing cricket, it seems ridiculous. Why do they have those funny pieces, and those stupid rules that don't allow an honest alien to express himself clearly?

 

[Mentat]

And when someone comes to another group's game, as a Briton viewing baseball or an American viewing cricket, it seems ridiculous. Why do they have those funny pieces, and those stupid rules that don't allow an honest alien to express himself clearly?

Thus, Rorty's illustration of the Antipodeans. Do you know it?

The basic concept is that humans finally encounter another (seemingly) intelligent race. They go to visit their world, and they see grand examples of culture and intelligence. However, when they ask the people questions that involve the concepts of "raw feels" or "qualia", they are not only left without response, the Antipodeans can't even begin to make sense of what these things are, or why they should be so important. The evolution of the Antipodean race/culture has been different from our own only in that they had early exposure to the concepts of neurophysiology and such. With this knowledge, they have always expressed (for example) what happens when one is smacked across the face in terms of "stimulated C-fibers".

Now, the closest thing the philosophers of Earth can make to "progress" with these poor creatures is to get them to admit (quite freely, actually) that it is possible to believe that your C-fibers have been stimulated (because of the concomitant T-fiber stimulation, which can be stimulated without the corresponding C-fiber's also being stimulated) and be wrong.

But when it comes to "raw feels" and "incorrigibility about mental states" or "qualia", the Antipodeans are at a complete loss, because they don't even have words for such things...they don't mean anything to them.

And, for all of you who think that we know such things because they are "obvious" to us, or because they are "primary" in our "experience": the ancient Greek philosophers (pre-Plato) didn't have words for any of that stuff either. They got along with their philosophy (some of it quite deeply concerned with what can and cannot be known, what can and cannot be doubted, and how we know anything at all...viz, Pyrronean skepticism) just fine, without ever invoking any of these terms or anything like them.

 

[Canute]

If Rorty had flown on just a few more parsecs he'd have discovered the planet of the AntiAntipodeans. These people believe that mind is fundamental and have never bothered doing neuroscience. When you speak to them of qualia, of how things appear and of states of being, they seem just like us. However when you speak of c-fibres in the brain they look back blankly.

Hmm. Not sure that works, but it could probably be made to work.

Why not just say that the reason we have words for raw experiences is that we have raw experiences, and that they are clearly something different to c-fibres firing. Even if brain does cause mind this is true. After all, we have a word for 'cake', not just words for flour, butter, eggs and fruit.

The idea that sentient beings could have intelligence and a well-developed and shared language but have no word for sentience seems unlikely to me. The clincher is that we (and the Antipodeans) know when we have been hit across the face. If we could only know this by studying our c-fibres then we'd have to go to the doctor to find out whether someone had hit us or not. When we got there he'd ask why we thought we'd been hit, and wouldn't have the words to explain why, for we'd have no word for pain.

The only reason that a neuroscientist is interested in c-fibres is that they are useful in explaining the state of being in which one feels as if one has been hit across the face, and other such states. If we did not have such feelings then we'd be like Rorty's Antipodeans, uninterested in c-fibres and unable to make first person reports. Also, when we talk about c-fibres we are talking about our inner perceptions and conceptions of them, for this is all we know about c-fibres. If we can't talk about mental states then we can't talk about how c-fibres appear to be to us.

But when it comes to "raw feels" and "incorrigibility about mental states" or "qualia", the Antipodeans are at a complete loss, because they don't even have words for such things...they don't mean anything to them.

Surely they are zombies then, not just linguistically challenged?

And, for all of you who think that we know such things because they are "obvious" to us, or because they are "primary" in our "experience": the ancient Greek philosophers (pre-Plato) didn't have words for any of that stuff either.

Erm, are you sure? What's all that stuff Animaximander and Parmeneides go on about then, 'Being', appearance and reality and so forth.

They got along with their philosophy (some of it quite deeply concerned with what can and cannot be known, what can and cannot be doubted, and how we know anything at all...viz, Pyrronean skepticism) just fine, without ever invoking any of these terms or anything like them.

But they did invoke these terms. They said that 'knowing' is inextricably tied up with 'Being'.

To go back to theology and philosophy - What Christian theology did was to objectify God, against the advice of all Christian mystics and against the (reported) advice of Jesus. This allowed the development of the institution, and of a priestly class standing as gatekeepers between Man and God. It seems to me that this led to the objectification of everything and thus to analytical theology, analytical philosophy, and the scientific method. Could it be that science has flourished best in Christian countries for this reason?

 

[Canute]

I was thinking about what you said about language. It seems to me that we give names to things for which we have concepts. Wouldn't it be better then to say that our problems are caused by misconceptions of what things really are, rather than the misnaming of things or the misuse of language?

Hmm, or is it the misnaming of things which causes us to misconceptualise them? I suppose it works both ways.

 

[Mentat]

If Rorty had flown on just a few more parsecs he'd have discovered the planet of the AntiAntipodeans. These people believe that mind is fundamental and have never bothered doing neuroscience. When you speak to them of qualia, of how things appear and of states of being, they seem just like us. However when you speak of c-fibres in the brain they look back blankly.

Hmm. Not sure that works, but it could probably be made to work.

Nope. Sorry, but it doesn't change the situation in the slightest. Indeed, the anti-antipodeans would be just like us (or, at least, where we currently find ourselves), and so wouldn't be any help in ascertaining how consciousness could exist completely independent of anything like "raw feels", if such things even exist (which is what it called into question by this case, since they were invoked to help explain consciousness).

Why not just say that the reason we have words for raw experiences is that we have raw experiences, and that they are clearly something different to c-fibres firing.

We don't necessarily have "words for raw experiences", as you put it. The very phrasing of that is indicative of your still being stuck in a post-Cartesian framework. We have terms like "raw feels" or "qualia", but that doesn't mean that they refer to anything physically identifiable. They could, quite simply, be useless words in every language-game other than post-Kantian philosophy (as I think I've already shown them to be), and the only purpose they've served there is to further complicate matters and create philosophical "problems".

Even if brain does cause mind this is true.

What is this "mind" you keep talking about? I never said that the brain "caused" anything.

The idea that sentient beings could have intelligence and a well-developed and shared language but have no word for sentience seems unlikely to me.

I didn't say that they had no word for "sentience". Sentience is self-consciousness and awareness. They clearly are capable of such processes, otherwise they would not have been able to say that it was "I" who had "my" C-fibers stimulated.

The clincher is that we (and the Antipodeans) know when we have been hit across the face. If we could only know this by studying our c-fibres then we'd have to go to the doctor to find out whether someone had hit us or not.

You missed the point. They have privileged access to what's going on inside them (it doesn't matter how, it's part of the story). We, OTOH, claim to have some privileged access, and yet the words we are using don't describe anything that's going on inside us (as your "doctor" could quickly tell you).

The only reason that a neuroscientist is interested in c-fibres is that they are useful in explaining the state of being in which one feels as if one has been hit across the face, and other such states.

That's only true of our neuroscientist is a post-Kantian philosopher on the side. Real neuroscientists are interested in c-fibers for the same reason molecular-biologists are interested in mitochondria: it's their field.

If we did not have such feelings then we'd be like Rorty's Antipodeans, uninterested in c-fibres...

But they are interested in their c-fibers. They're just not interested in discussing terms that have no meaning to them (of which "c-fiber" is not one, but of which "qualia" and "raw feel" are indeed).

...and unable to make first person reports.

The antipodeans do indeed make first-person reports. Why should it be otherwise? How can one refer to "my" c-fiber, or the fact that it the stimulation of concomittant t-fibers is strongly indicative thereof, and still not be making a first-person report?

Also, when we talk about c-fibres we are talking about our inner perceptions and conceptions of them, for this is all we know about c-fibres. If we can't talk about mental states then we can't talk about how c-fibres appear to be to us.

C-fibers appear to us exactly as they always have. A stimulated C-fiber is one phenomenon that is different from other phenomena. We (Antipodeans) can tell the difference, and speak intelligently about it, but we cannot speak intelligently about "mental states" since this concept is completely foreign to us.

Surely they are zombies then, not just linguistically challenged?

"Zombies" is also a foreign word to us. Could you perhaps define it in terms we might understand?

Erm, are you sure? What's all that stuff Animaximander and Parmeneides go on about then, 'Being', appearance and reality and so forth.

Yes, there were distinctions between how something appeared (or something about which you could be fairly confident) and how something actually was. This requires the concepts of skepticism and criticalness, but not the concept of a "veil of mind" which conceals the true nature of things from a central mind. I have studied the ancient Greek language for a while now. I can assure you to a high degree of certainty that there is no term for such things (I'm as sure of that as I can be, but not absolutely so; this does not indicate anything wrong with my "mental apparatus", merely that I may not have all the facts).

But they did invoke these terms. They said that 'knowing' is inextricably tied up with 'Being'.

And it is. What has that to do with mind-body duality?

To go back to theology and philosophy - What Christian theology did was to objectify God, against the advice of all Christian mystics and against the (reported) advice of Jesus. This allowed the development of the institution, and of a priestly class standing as gatekeepers between Man and God. It seems to me that this led to the objectification of everything and thus to analytical theology, analytical philosophy, and the scientific method. Could it be that science has flourished best in Christian countries for this reason?

Possibly. However, all throughout the Holy Scriptures, God Himself commands that no physical representations be made of Him. This was not because He Himself was not physical (or, at least, He never said that this was why), it was because He was not like anything that we could possibly find here on Earth. Thus, to make a representation of Him that was like something that He had created (since, according to Scripture, He created all things) was an insult.

 

[Mentat]

I was thinking about what you said about language. It seems to me that we give names to things for which we have concepts.

Of course it seems that way to you. No offense, but this is purely Lockean thinking. Wittgenstein himself fell into the same trap, when he wrote his Tractatus. However, he didn't fall prey to the same bias in his Philosophical Investigations, which is why, when I refer to Wittgenstein's philosophy, I almost invariably mean the latter.

What I'm saying is that this is a very tempting belief, but not a necessary one. To even refer to "concepts" as something distinct that can be assigned to words (or that can have words assigned to them) is to speak Locke-ish. It's a fine language-game, but I think it's out-lived its usefulness.

Wouldn't it be better then to say that our problems are caused by misconceptions of what things really are, rather than the misnaming of things or the misuse of language?

Hmm, or is it the misnaming of things which causes us to misconceptualise them? I suppose it works both ways.

Canute, examine what you are saying. Can you not see the inability to think/speak without some reference to the indubitable (that which is "actual", relative to those things which are not). If so, can it not be that this concept of finding a "solid grounding" is the first in a series of "wrong turns" which will lead you right back to where mainstream philosophy is right now? Right back to the "problems"?

If, instead, we were to abandon the concept of an "absolute/indubitable grounding", we'd never have to worry about "hard problems of consciousness", "representations", "behaviorism", "materialism", "idealism", etc.

 

[Canute]

We don't necessarily have "words for raw experiences", as you put it. The very phrasing of that is indicative of your still being stuck in a post-Cartesian framework. We have terms like "raw feels" or "qualia", but that doesn't mean that they refer to anything physically identifiable. They could, quite simply, be useless words in every language-game other than post-Kantian philosophy (as I think I've already shown them to be), and the only purpose they've served there is to further complicate matters and create philosophical "problems".

Wouldn't it be simpler to say that we have a word for pain because pain is a raw experience, and we have terms like 'raw feel' and 'qualia' because we have raw feel and qualia? Just as we have words for c-fibres because we have c-fibres. Raw experiences exist, as you say, so what does it matter whether raw experiences are physically identifiable? They still need a name so that we can talk about them.

What is this "mind" you keep talking about? I never said that the brain "caused" anything.

Are you saying that you don't know what I mean by the word 'mind'?

I didn't say that they had no word for "sentience". Sentience is self-consciousness and awareness. They clearly are capable of such processes, otherwise they would not have been able to say that it was "I" who had "my" C-fibers stimulated.

So, they know that they have sentience, but have no words for the experiences by which they know they are sentient. This seems a very unlikely scenario to me. Are you denying the existence of conscious experience?

You missed the point. They have privileged access to what's going on inside them (it doesn't matter how, it's part of the story). We, OTOH, claim to have some privileged access, and yet the words we are using don't describe anything that's going on inside us (as your "doctor" could quickly tell you).

When I tell my doctor I'm in pain he knows what I mean. Of course my doctor cannot observe this pain, we all know that pain is not a physical thing. Are you suggesting that 'pain' is a word with no referant?

But they are interested in their c-fibers. They're just not interested in discussing terms that have no meaning to them (of which "c-fiber" is not one, but of which "qualia" and "raw feel" are indeed).

If they have no raw experiences then they are not sentient, and your thought experiment fails. If they do have raw experiences then it seems likely that they'll give them names.

The antipodeans do indeed make first-person reports. Why should it be otherwise? How can one refer to "my" c-fiber, or the fact that it the stimulation of concomittant t-fibers is strongly indicative thereof, and still not be making a first-person report?

Reporting the state of ones c-fibres is a third-person report, not first-person. We have no first-person access to the state of our c-fibres.

C-fibers appear to us exactly as they always have. A stimulated C-fiber is one phenomenon that is different from other phenomena. We (Antipodeans) can tell the difference, and speak intelligently about it, but we cannot speak intelligently about "mental states" since this concept is completely foreign to us.

This suggests that the Antipodeans did not know that they were having experiences, or had mental states, until their science had developed to the point where they could observe the behaviour of c-fibres in their brains. Presumably one day one of them looked through a microscope at their own c-fibres and deduced that they were conscious. It would mean that an Antipodean would have to go and see a neuroscientist to find out whether they were happy or not.

"Zombies" is also a foreign word to us. Could you perhaps define it in terms we might understand?

A creature who is not sentient but behaves just like an Antipodean.

Yes, there were distinctions between how something appeared (or something about which you could be fairly confident) and how something actually was. This requires the concepts of skepticism and criticalness, but not the concept of a "veil of mind" which conceals the true nature of things from a central mind. I have studied the ancient Greek language for a while now. I can assure you to a high degree of certainty that there is no term for such things (I'm as sure of that as I can be, but not absolutely so; this does not indicate anything wrong with my "mental apparatus", merely that I may not have all the facts).

Do you not think that Plato's cave allegory, and his talk of Ideas and Forms, was about this very issue?

And it is. What has that to do with mind-body duality?

My point was just that the Greeks knew the difference between Being and physical phenomena.

Possibly. However, all throughout the Holy Scriptures, God Himself commands that no physical representations be made of Him. This was not because He Himself was not physical (or, at least, He never said that this was why), it was because He was not like anything that we could possibly find here on Earth. Thus, to make a representation of Him that was like something that He had created (since, according to Scripture, He created all things) was an insult.

Not an insult but a mischaracterisation, one which leads to serious misunderstanding and wrong turns. For Christian mystics, Sufis, Taoists etc. it is not just physical representations which are to be avoided, but all representations. They say that what is fundamental is Being, not a being.

I don't mean to be difficult but I really cannot understand your second post. Are you suggesting that the only reason we think we have experience is that we have a word for experience, and that if we stop using the word we will no longer think we need to explain what experiences are? That's how it seems.

 

[Mentat]

Wouldn't it be simpler to say that we have a word for pain because pain is a raw experience, and we have terms like 'raw feel' and 'qualia' because we have raw feel and qualia? Just as we have words for c-fibres because we have c-fibres. Raw experiences exist, as you say, so what does it matter whether raw experiences are physically identifiable? They still need a name so that we can talk about them.

I never said that "raw experiences" exist. I said that our terms (such as "raw experiences" or "qualia") exist. These terms don't need to refer to anything real in order to exist as terms.

No, it's not simpler to say that we have a word for pain because it is a "raw experience". We could just as simply say that we have a word for "pain" because we didn't start off with more specific/physiologically-oriented ways of referring to stimulated c-fibers (or whatever fibers are stimulated when something potentially harmful occurs on your sensitive tissues). It's a "short-cut" word; nothing more.

Are you saying that you don't know what I mean by the word 'mind'?

No, but...for the purpose of the discussion, what do you mean by that word?

So, they know that they have sentience, but have no words for the experiences by which they know they are sentient. This seems a very unlikely scenario to me.

The experiences? You mean like getting one's c-fibers stimulated and recognizing that it was their own c-fibers that were stimulated rather than someone else's? They do indeed have words for these things.

Are you denying the existence of conscious experience?

Another bit of philosophical jargon: "conscious experience". "Experience" in every other field (besides philosophy of mind) has to do with how long you've been doing something, or how adept you've become at it (whatever the activity may be). "Consciousness" in every field besides PoM is a reference to whether you are "awake", and capable of interacting normally with your environment. I'm positive that these are not what you mean by "conscious experience", since it would then be the same as saying "adeptness, due to prior attempts, at being awake".

So, please define "conscious experience" in, at least, basic terms.

When I tell my doctor I'm in pain he knows what I mean. Of course my doctor cannot observe this pain, we all know that pain is not a physical thing. Are you suggesting that 'pain' is a word with no referant?

I'm suggesting that it's a short-cut way of referring to some stimulus that is (at least potentially) harmful. Being "in pain" is being stimulated in that manner. But when you refer to "pain" as though "a pain" were a quantum entity (which makes no sense to me whatsoever), then you create the possibility of detecting such an entity within you, and the doctor will never find it. Therefore, the word "pain" cannot have reference to a quantum entity, as there is no such entity.

If they have no raw experiences then they are not sentient, and your thought experiment fails. If they do have raw experiences then it seems likely that they'll give them names.

That's exactly what the philosophers that met them said. To that, of course, the Antipodeans said, "fine, we don't see why 'sentience' is so important to you anyway, if we've gotten on just as well as you have without it". You see, our telling them that they don't have "sentience", by virtue of not having "raw feels" hasn't changed anything. Their culture is still every bit as advanced and complex as ours. Their literature is still every bit as beautiful or poignant. Their art is still every bit as captivating. If "raw feels" exist, and if you have determined that they don't have them, so what?

Reporting the state of ones c-fibres is a third-person report, not first-person.

It is first-person since it refers to the state of one's own c-fibers.

We have no first-person access to the state of our c-fibres.

We don't, that's very true (which is why I think it very odd that we (philosophers) think of ourselves as having anything like priveleged access to our inner workings), but the Antipodeans do. And, if we had had that access throughout our history, it is very likely (IMHO) that words such as "qualia" wouldn't have ever even been invented.

This suggests that the Antipodeans did not know that they were having experiences, or had mental states, until their science had developed to the point where they could observe the behaviour of c-fibres in their brains. Presumably one day one of them looked through a microscope at their own c-fibres and deduced that they were conscious. It would mean that an Antipodean would have to go and see a neuroscientist to find out whether they were happy or not.

No, no, no, you missed the point. The Antipodeans, as a part of my thought-experiment, have always been able to see what's going on inside of them. I don't care how, this is just the case for the purpose of the thought-experiment.

A creature who is not sentient but behaves just like an Antipodean.

But what is "sentience" to you? A philosopher once tried to explain it to an Antipodean. The conversation went something like this:

P. "Sentience" refers to having knowledge of oneself from a first-person perspective, and the ability to have intelligence, creativity, etc.

A. But I (note his use of the word "I") do know about myself; better than you do about yourself, I might add, since you cannot behold your inner workings. And it would affect my i-fibers greatly if you were to imply that I'm not intelligent or creative. I have mastered complex maths, and have painted pictures that have won me great acclaim.

P. But you don't have "raw sensations" or "feels", by your own confession.

A. I confessed only that I didn't know what those terms meant, nor could I find any room for them in any good explanation of my inner workings (of which I am infinitely more knowledgeable than any human). If I have them, then they must be quite useless, since I've never observed them, and I have complete access to what goes on inside me.

Do you not think that Plato's cave allegory, and his talk of Ideas and Forms, was about this very issue?

Do you mean "cage" allegory?

Whereas I've been brushing up on my Greek language skills, I have not recently looked into Plato. Could you perhaps provide some quotes (in context is best) that have to do with Ideas and Forms in Platonic philosophy?

I do remember that Plato helped pioneer the dichotomy (ontological or otherwise) between universals and particulars. He (like Pythagoras, now that I come to think of it) believed that all forms were a manifestation of a much more universal idea. Is that what you are referring to?

My point was just that the Greeks knew the difference between Being and physical phenomena.

Only insomuch as they also knew the difference between the gods and the physical; or between the spirit that can live on after the death of the body, and that body itself.

What I'm saying is that they had no concept of a mirror of nature, from which certainty could be gathered. They had skepticism, but not with reference to the indubitable mind and the veil that covers the "actual objective realm" from our "mind's eye". Their skepticism was simply to do with "what can be known with any degree of certainty?", "what is certainty?", "how is it attained?", "does it have practical use?".

They also did not have words for concepts like "qualia" or "phenomenology". They had "nous" which was their term for "knowledge" or "mind", and "logos" which meant "reasoning" or "logic". The philosophy of Heraclitus (at least, I think it was Heraclitus...like I've said, it's been a while) even went so far as to make "nous" something like a Universal force, which could decide between "becomings" (since he didn't think there were any "beings").

But they never had a word that defined "mind" a priori as something distinct from the brain's processes of reasoning and data-input.

Not an insult but a mischaracterisation, one which leads to serious misunderstanding and wrong turns. For Christian mystics, Sufis, Taoists etc. it is not just physical representations which are to be avoided, but all representations. They say that what is fundamental is Being, not a being.

Deuteronomy 4 (NIV)
(16) so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, (17) or like any animal on Earth or any bird that flies in the air, (18) or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below. (19) And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars-all the heavenly array-do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.

Romans 1 (NIV)
(21)For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (22)Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools (23)and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

(24)Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. (25)They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen.

That's what I was trying to say: The God of the Bible is indeed insulted by attempted representations of Him that are, instead, representations of things He created.

I don't mean to be difficult but I really cannot understand your second post. Are you suggesting that the only reason we think we have experience is that we have a word for experience, and that if we stop using the word we will no longer think we need to explain what experiences are? That's how it seems.

"Experiences"...this is the beginning of your problems, in two ways. First, it suggests a use of the word "experience" completely different from its usual use (in every occupation other than PoM). Secondly, it refers to "experience" in terms of a plenum of quantum "experions" (or however you want to refer to your quantum "experiences"). It gives each "experience" an individual nature, and makes them into entities, whereas every other use of "experience" has it as a continual accumulation of facility.

No, I'm not saying that "mental/conscious experience" can be reduced to words, I'm saying that "mental/conscious experience" are words (which is obvious), and that they are no more than that, until somebody finally proves otherwise. I, personally, don't know what to make of them. They are not very "good" words, because I can't use them...I guess I'm an Antipodean...or a zombie, or whatever.

 

[Canute]

I think I'll back out of this one if that's ok. If you don't know that you have experiences despite the fact that you have no idea what's going in your brain then there's nothing I can say to change your mind.

The 'God' question is interesting though. Your extracts say that God should not idolised, but not why we should not do this. In all 'mystical' traditions, including the Christian and Islamic ones, it is because to objectify God is to misunderstand the word 'God', and so to obscure the truth from oneself. In these traditions of self-exploration the words 'God' and 'Allah' play the same role as 'Tao' in Taoism or 'emptiness' in Buddhism. To objectify these things is to mischaracterise them and to place them apart from oneself. For instance in Sufism 'Allah' is very definitely not a God external to ourselves, but a unique state of Being.

 

[Tournesol]

Hi

According to Hume, "impressions" appeared to come from without and were impressed on the mind, whereas "ideas" are reflections thereof within the mind. Since we can never experience anything outside of our own experience, Hume's philosophy ended in Solipsism. After all, if the only things we ever experienced were our impressions and the ideas that were based on them, how could we be sure of the existence of anything outside the mind? IOW, impressions and ideas are both mental phenomena, and are thus not proof, or even indications, of anything that isn't a mental phenomenon.

It is certainly a wrong turn to say that we experience internal impressions
instead of external objects. But one does not have to throw out
the baby with the bath water. The scientific understanding of perception --
that is the departure from naive realism -- indicates that the way things seem to us, the impression they create in us -- is not what they are, is not
a mere duplication. Of course it would be impossible to say that without
a measure of realism about what things actually are, which is a strong
hint that the solpistic conclusion is the wrong one. Having admitted
the internal/impression external/object distinction, we can say that
we have direct access to internal impressions as part of the process
of indirectly perceiving internal objects -- and thereby avoid the confusion of saying that we "see" impressions
instead of objects.

"Phenomenal" is a term that has reference to events occurring in the mind, or otherwise being of a mental nature. Specifically, phenomenal-consciousness is that consciousness that is more than just neural processing of information or the uttering of responses. It is, to put it yet another way, the perception of "redness" beyond the simple electro-chemical processing of photonic information.

Now, why do we even have this concept (this "piece" in our "game")? Well, our philosophical language-game has allowed for such a distinction for some time (ever since Descartes). But why did Descartes come up with it? Well, if one looks at the time in which he was living, one can easily see how it would become necessary for him to try to establish which things could and could not be doubted. And, since you have first-hand priveleged access to what you are perceiving, that must be undoubtable. IOW, it's the one thing about which you could be allowed (by society? by other philosophers?) to be incorrigible, and nobody would mind; nobody could contest it, since it was your experience.

OTOH, we don't need to found the phenomenon/noumenon (impression/thing)
contrast on incorrigibility or any other epistemological criterion. Non-naive
realism requires, as a matter of fact, that things are not the way they are percieved, and "phenomenon" and "impression" are just two of the labels
we have so far collected for the-way-they-are -ercieved.

But, now, if "redness" was just a reflection of how something seemed to you, and had nothing to do with anything real...and if neuroscience could establish a well-grounded understanding of how we process every different kind of phenomenon, then you might not be allowed to be so incorrigible.

Indeed, but if the "phenomena" aren't founded on incorrigibility, in the first place, that doesn't matter.

But when it comes to "raw feels" and "incorrigibility about mental states" or "qualia", the Antipodeans are at a complete loss, because they don't even have words for such things...they don't mean anything to them.

And if we had a solution to the Hard Problem, we could examine their brains
and see whether or not they did in fact have qualia/pehnomenal consciousness (in our vocabulary). Their ability to report on their
own neural activity as such might indicate that their brains are wired up differently -- perhaps in a way that doesn't gerneate qualia in the first place.
At the end of the day, the fact that people different from us don't talk
about qualia doesn't tell us whether or not people like us have qualia.

And, for all of you who think that we know such things because they are "obvious" to us, or because they are "primary" in our "experience": the ancient Greek philosophers (pre-Plato) didn't have words for any of that stuff either. They got along with their philosophy (some of it quite deeply concerned with what can and cannot be known, what can and cannot be doubted, and how we know anything at all...viz, Pyrronean skepticism) just fine, without ever invoking any of these terms or anything like them.

Sure. The idea that a rainbow is a mere phenomeon is no more
or less obvious than the corresponding idea that it is all to do with sunlight being refracted through raindrops. But if you are going to explain one half of the story, and introduce some jargon ("refracted") while you do so,
don't you need to explain the other half, also with its own jargon ?

We, OTOH, claim to have some privileged access, and yet the words we are using don't describe anything that's going on inside us (as your "doctor" could quickly tell you).

Says who ? You seem to be assuming that someone looking at
a scan of my brain knows everything that is going on, and my
own reports don't add anything -- and moreover my own reports
are not simply another way of saying what is going on (that could
be translated if we solve the Hard Problem). Your assumption that
the 3rd-person stance and physicalese trump everything else is
rather question-begging, I think.

 

[Mentat]

I think I'll back out of this one if that's ok. If you don't know that you have experiences despite the fact that you have no idea what's going in your brain then there's nothing I can say to change your mind.

But you haven't defined the term, Canute. Can you? Do you even know what they mean? If not, then I would suggest dropping them altogether (they are not as necessary as you think). If so, then why can you not describe them in anything like a coherent way (please don't take offense to this; no one else has been able to either, IMHO)?

The 'God' question is interesting though. Your extracts say that God should not idolised, but not why we should not do this. In all 'mystical' traditions, including the Christian and Islamic ones, it is because to objectify God is to misunderstand the word 'God', and so to obscure the truth from oneself. In these traditions of self-exploration the words 'God' and 'Allah' play the same role as 'Tao' in Taoism or 'emptiness' in Buddhism. To objectify these things is to mischaracterise them and to place them apart from oneself. For instance in Sufism 'Allah' is very definitely not a God external to ourselves, but a unique state of Being.

But you have misunderstood the Christian teaching on this point (though I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to contradict you on the other religious PoVs). According to those extracts, as well as many others -- that I could find for you if you so wished --, there can be no idols made of God because: 1) We have no idea what he looks like (there are scriptures wherein God asks, rhetorically, "to which of these things can you liken me?"); 2) He has created all things, and thus to idolize anything that looks like one of His creations is to worship, not Him, but something lower than Him (which is what is implied in both of the quotes in my previous post).

 

[Mentat]

Hi

How do you do?

It is certainly a wrong turn to say that we experience internal impressions
instead of external objects. But one does not have to throw out
the baby with the bath water. The scientific understanding of perception --
that is the departure from naive realism -- indicates that the way things seem to us, the impression they create in us -- is not what they are, is not
a mere duplication.

What do you mean? The scientific understanding of perception has led us to the understanding that we don't have "impressions" at all, but that we instead perceive actual, objective phenomena, by way of cortical stimulation and preservation of such stimulations by the synchronous re-stimulation of arrays of neurons.

IOW, science has helped us understand that the whole concept of "impressions" on the mind was mis-guided, since we don't need a "mirror of nature" in order to experience. We are, ourselves, a part of nature; and, no matter how complex, our interactions therewith are just that, interactions.

Of course it would be impossible to say that without
a measure of realism about what things actually are, which is a strong
hint that the solpistic conclusion is the wrong one. Having admitted
the internal/impression external/object distinction, we can say that
we have direct access to internal impressions as part of the process
of indirectly perceiving internal objects -- and thereby avoid the confusion of saying that we "see" impressions
instead of objects.

But to say that we have "direct access" to one, but only indirect access to the other lends itself entirely to the distinction between things about which we are allowed to be incorrigible and which things can be brought into doubt. After all, if one thing is directly visible to us, and the other is merely indirectly so, does it not stand to reason that we can be much more certain of the one than of the latter?

OTOH, we don't need to found the phenomenon/noumenon (impression/thing)
contrast on incorrigibility or any other epistemological criterion.

That is how it has been founded throughout history. It was, indeed, the whole purpose of invoking the distinction in the first place.

Non-naive
realism requires, as a matter of fact, that things are not the way they are percieved, and "phenomenon" and "impression" are just two of the labels
we have so far collected for the-way-they-are -ercieved.

To say that something "that things actually are not the way they are percieved" is to fall into the post-Kantian trap of trying to "polish our Mirrors of Nature" (Rorty's terms) so that we can perceive objective phenomena to the greatest level of accuracy possible.

This reasoning, once again, leads you to the distinction between the dubitable and the indubitable.

And if we had a solution to the Hard Problem...

Same trap. The "hard problem" is as intractable as it is, IMHO, specifically because of its being based on so many wrong turns. The hard problem uses the distinction between phenomenological and objective realities as though it were an obvious and indubitable fact, whereas philosophy was conducted without such a distinction for millenia. Only when Descartes wished to root "absolute truth" in something indubitable did we ever begin to need such metaphorical (and they really are nothing more than bad metaphors, IMO) concepts as "tabula" and "mirrors of nature" and "qualia".

Their ability to report on their
own neural activity as such might indicate that their brains are wired up differently -- perhaps in a way that doesn't gerneate qualia in the first place.

And the fact that their society is every bit as complex and intricate as ours, regardless of whether or not they "have qualia" doesn't create a problem for those of you who think that "qualia" are necessary for consciousness?

At the end of the day, the fact that people different from us don't talk
about qualia doesn't tell us whether or not people like us have qualia.

And the fact that people like me do talk about having "qualia" (if you are indeed a person like me) is in no way indicative to me (or, at least, not in any conclusive way) that you have them either.

Sure. The idea that a rainbow is a mere phenomeon is no more
or less obvious than the corresponding idea that it is all to do with sunlight being refracted through raindrops. But if you are going to explain one half of the story, and introduce some jargon ("refracted") while you do so,
don't you need to explain the other half, also with its own jargon ?

I don't think there are two "halves" of the issue at all. There is refracted sunlight, and there is a convenient term for referring to a large band thereof.

Says who ? You seem to be assuming that someone looking at
a scan of my brain knows everything that is going on, and my
own reports don't add anything

That's not really true. Your assumptions, as per the heterophenomenological approach of Dennett, should indeed bear great weight, but only with regard to how it seems to you. You do not have privileged access to what's going on inside you because you don't have any way of accessing such information. If you did, medical science would be far advanced by simply asking you what's wrong with you, instead of all this ridiculous sample-testing, X-ray taking, diagnosis-making foolishness that physicians carry on now.

-- and moreover my own reports
are not simply another way of saying what is going on (that could
be translated if we solve the Hard Problem). Your assumption that
the 3rd-person stance and physicalese trump everything else is
rather question-begging, I think.

And I think that continuing to use terms that have no definition or meaning outside of "pure philosophy" (post-Kant, post-Locke, post-Descartes, post-Plato) is quite "question-begging" also, as you are no closer to answering the single-most important question: Do you really need these terms/concepts, in the first place?

 

[Tournesol]

What do you mean? The scientific understanding of perception has led us to the understanding that we don't have "impressions" at all, but that we instead perceive actual, objective phenomena, by way of cortical stimulation and preservation of such stimulations by the synchronous re-stimulation of arrays of neurons.

Firstly, I am talking about the 'scientific' understanding that developed
over the early modern perdiod, well before such a thing as a neuron
was known of. Secondly the only criterion of an "impression"
is that it is different in some way from the object. Whether it
should be thought of as quale, nerual activity, both or neither,
is another question. Note that the Rortian project seeks to avoid
answering the second question by disposing of Mind tout court.
If Rorty is wrong that Mind can be dispensed with by dispensiing with incorrigibility, and if I am right that some sort of physical/mental
distinction is needed to avoid naive realism, then the second
question needs to be answered in separate, non-Rortian terms.

But to say that we have "direct access" to one, but only indirect access to the other lends itself entirely to the distinction between things about which we are allowed to be incorrigible and which things can be brought into doubt.

You can derive a mind/body distinction from indirect/direct access, and you
may be able to derive an incorrigible/corrigible distinction from it, but that doesn't mean the MB distinction is derived from the incorrigible/corrigible. As it happens,
I don't think qualia deliver a useful or interesting kind of incorrigibility.
I want to know whether there is a red ball in front of me, not whether
I have the sensation of a red patch. ("intuitions wihtout concepts are blind").

That is how it has been founded throughout history. It was, indeed, the whole purpose of invoking the distinction in the first place.

That is the contentious theory of Prof. Rorty, and it is what I am arguing against here, so I am certainly not going to take it as fact.

To say that something "that things actually are not the way they are percieved" is to fall into the post-Kantian trap of trying to "polish our Mirrors of Nature" (Rorty's terms) so that we can perceive objective phenomena to the greatest level of accuracy possible.

Firstly, to say the opposite is to lapse into naive realism.
Secondly it is not about accuracy; even if my mental imprssions
are mere proxies or symbols, that doesn't mean they are inaccruate.
I only misperceive when I receive the wrong impression (generate
the worng neural activity if you like -- this point is entirely neutral
about whether impressions are qualia or not). This tendency
to confuse the map-territory distinction with systematic
misperception is, IMO, one of the real wrong turns here.
I find the "Mirror" jargon just as dispensible as some find the "qualia" jargon

Same trap. The "hard problem" is as intractable as it is, IMHO, specifically because of its being based on so many wrong turns. The hard problem uses the distinction between phenomenological and objective realities as though it were an obvious and indubitable fact, whereas philosophy was conducted without such a distinction for millenia.

Quite. It arrived with the collpase of naive realism. Do youwant to reverse that ?

Only when Descartes wished to root "absolute truth" in something indubitable did we ever begin to need such metaphorical (and they really are nothing more than bad metaphors, IMO) concepts as "tabula" and "mirrors of nature" and "qualia".

I am mounting an agument against that claim.

And the fact that their society is every bit as complex and intricate as ours, regardless of whether or not they "have qualia" doesn't create a problem for those of you who think that "qualia" are necessary for consciousness?

What fact ? There are no antipodeans. However, there is a way things seem to me.

And the fact that people like me do talk about having "qualia" (if you are indeed a person like me) is in no way indicative to me (or, at least, not in any conclusive way) that you have them either.

I am not saying I have them because I talk about them, I am
saying I talk about them because I have them!

I don't think there are two "halves" of the issue at all. There is refracted sunlight, and there is a convenient term for referring to a large band thereof.

But the band isn't 'out there'. It is a virtual image.

That's not really true. Your assumptions, as per the heterophenomenological approach of Dennett, should indeed bear great weight, but only with regard to how it seems to you. You do not have privileged access to what's going on inside you because you don't have any way of accessing such information.

I do have some access and some way of accessing such information.
But then I am no basing my claims in incorrigibility.

And I think that continuing to use terms that have no definition or meaning outside of "pure philosophy" (post-Kant, post-Locke, post-Descartes, post-Plato) is quite "question-begging" also, as you are no closer to answering the single-most important question: Do you really need these terms/concepts, in the first place?

Yes, I need them to avoid the confusions that go with naive realism.
People who aren't familiar with philosophy (and are therefore, by default, naive realists) do fall into confusion. People get confused about the "if a tree falls in the forest ..?" question. With my vocabulary, I can answer it: it causes
sound -waves in the air, but no sound-impression to any onlooker.

 

[Mentat]

Secondly the only criterion of an "impression"
is that it is different in some way from the object.

In some way different from what object?

Note that the Rortian project seeks to avoid
answering the second question by disposing of Mind tout court.

Well, he's not alone in this. Quine and Sellars were quite eliminativist. Indeed, Wittgenstein's later philosophy is very much in favor of this approach.

If Rorty is wrong that Mind can be dispensed with by dispensiing with incorrigibility, and if I am right that some sort of physical/mental
distinction is needed to avoid naive realism, then the second
question needs to be answered in separate, non-Rortian terms.

But you are making an ad hoc (or ad hominem) assumption, whereas he is merely negating one (a dangerous and mis-guiding one, at that, in his opinion). The burden of proof thus rests on you, as I've been trying to explain to AKG.

You can derive a mind/body distinction from indirect/direct access, and you
may be able to derive an incorrigible/corrigible distinction from it, but that doesn't mean the MB distinction is derived from the incorrigible/corrigible.

But it is, historically speaking. Besides, you can derive the mind-body distinction from direct/indirect access, and the only use for a concept such as direct access vs. indirect access is to establish which things can be assumed a priori and which things only a posteriori.

As it happens,
I don't think qualia deliver a useful or interesting kind of incorrigibility.
I want to know whether there is a red ball in front of me, not whether
I have the sensation of a red patch. ("intuitions wihtout concepts are blind").

Because you can obviously take the latter for granted, a priori, can't you?

That is the contentious theory of Prof. Rorty, and it is what I am arguing against here, so I am certainly not going to take it as fact.

Heidegger and Dewey, in their historical approaches to philosophy, have borne this out as well. He is building from their approaches. Besides, as I've said, there is no other known or conceivable (AFAIK) use for the distinction between direct/indirect access (or concept/intuition, or idea/impression, or mind/body) except to establish the indubitable (or the "assumable", if that's a word). I examined these philosophies to great length before ever reading Rorty.

Firstly, to say the opposite is to lapse into naive realism.

Why "naive"? How about "unbiased by the typical thinking of philosophers"?

Secondly it is not about accuracy; even if my mental imprssions
are mere proxies or symbols, that doesn't mean they are inaccruate.

The very distinction between "objective phenomenon" and "subjective experience thereof" allows for "inaccuracy" ("inaccuracy" here simply means that "subjective experience thereof" doesn't equal "objective phenomenon").

If, OTOH, we remove the distinction (and you have yet to give a good reason to invoke such a concept ITFP), and start from scratch, we can avoid the whole "mirror of nature" problem (and, in turn, the "hard" problem).

We only come to the "problems" of philosophy of mind because of building off these "wrong turns" (or, at least, that's the position I'm defending here).

I only misperceive when I receive the wrong impression (generate
the worng neural activity if you like -- this point is entirely neutral
about whether impressions are qualia or not).

That's because you are still talking about "impressions", as if we could assume a priori that they even exist. "Neural activity" is not some scientific way of explaining what an "impression" is (contrary to popular belief among Chalmereans), it is an explanation of that which actually goes on in the brain of a conscious entity (instead of all the "writing on tablets" and "observing with our mind's eye").

Quite. It arrived with the collpase of naive realism. Do youwant to reverse that ?

If "naive realism" is the ability to do philosophy without invoking meaningless distinctions (and they are meaningless until you (or someone who agrees with you) can assign them some coherent meaning), then I don't see the problem.

Just because we have made "progress" in a particular direction, doesn't mean that we're on the right track (it just means we're on a track). That's why I entitled my thread "Wrong Turns".

I am mounting an agument against that claim.

You can't change history. Have you read Descarte's First Philosophy? It all starts with the dubito.

What fact ? There are no antipodeans.

There are in the thought-experiment at hand.

However, there is a way things seem to me.

I'm not disputing that. I'm just asking you to consider the possibility that we treat your report about how things "seem to you" as a raw piece of information very much akin to a Doyle's "report" about the living habits of Holmes.

I am not saying I have them because I talk about them, I am
saying I talk about them because I have them!

And that is yet another verbal (or, rather, scribal) report, nothing more (at least, to me). And I don't really know what else it could be. It might hold up in argument, because people don't like to dispute someone's own reports about how things seem to them, but that doesn't mean that it's true in any "absolute" sense (whatever that means).

Therefore, you can talk about how things seem to you all you like, and I will take note of it in heterophenomenological manner. But that doesn't change the fact that the raw information is the report. After all, if there were anything more to it than that which you report then either you are purposely leaving something out, or you think/believe there is something more to what you are reporting about than that which you are able to report, and then that would be taken as yet another report of belief...nothing more.

But the band isn't 'out there'. It is a virtual image.

You mis-read me. There is a term for a large band of such refracted light waves. A "large band" just means a collection of such refractions over a large space, which really is there, and the term we use to describe it -- while short-cutting deep physical explanation of it -- is "rainbow.

I do have some access and some way of accessing such information.
But then I am no basing my claims in incorrigibility.

What the heck are you talking about. You don't base a claim on incorrigibility, you make a claim and decide whether or not to be incorrigible about that claim.

And I maintain that you do not have a way of accessing it, until you can tell me what that "way" is.

Yes, I need them to avoid the confusions that go with naive realism.
People who aren't familiar with philosophy (and are therefore, by default, naive realists) do fall into confusion. People get confused about the "if a tree falls in the forest ..?" question. With my vocabulary, I can answer it: it causes
sound -waves in the air, but no sound-impression to any onlooker.

That is one answer. But the question is only a "problem" in the first place because of its philosophical nature. Instead, the Wittgensteinian would simply say that "sound" is a term that applies to its being received and processed by an entity capable of such, and that the question was merely a word-puzzle.

In fact, your answer just raises more problems, like: Does "onlooker" allow for a deaf onlooker? Does it allow for a machine that records sounds, but doesn't have "sense-impressions" (like a tape-recorder)? Etc.

 

[Canute]

But you haven't defined the term, Canute. Can you? Do you even know what they mean? If not, then I would suggest dropping them altogether (they are not as necessary as you think). If so, then why can you not describe them in anything like a coherent way (please don't take offense to this; no one else has been able to either, IMHO)?

You must be unique amongst human beings for not knowing what an experience or a mind is. I'm afraid I can't be bothered to follow you down that route.

But you have misunderstood the Christian teaching on this point (though I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to contradict you on the other religious PoVs). According to those extracts, as well as many others -- that I could find for you if you so wished --, there can be no idols made of God because: 1) We have no idea what he looks like (there are scriptures wherein God asks, rhetorically, "to which of these things can you liken me?"); 2) He has created all things, and thus to idolize anything that looks like one of His creations is to worship, not Him, but something lower than Him (which is what is implied in both of the quotes in my previous post).

It's no good quoting from the Bible to counter my assertion that the Bible misrepresents the teachings of Jesus. It's clearly pointless. Can I suggest that you read the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, The Gospels of Thomas or Mary, the writings of the Essenes or Nazirenes, the writings of twenty centuries of masters of the orthodox Christian tradition, and so on, rather than the Bible, written long after the events and carefully written/compiled to an agenda. A lot of it is online. His teachings are perfectly clear on the issue of objectifying God and why one shouldn't do it. He gives the same reasons as does the prophet Mohammed, the Buddha and Lao-Tsu. Imho it's best to research these issues as a historian, not as a institutionalised Christian believing all that garbled stuff about designer/creator Gods who get offended if one doesn't worship them. If you look into this I think you'll find that the view I'm putting forward is the view of most scholars working outside of the Church hierarchy.

How you can claim to understand his teachings while saying that you don't understand consciousness, which is largely what he is talking about, I don't know. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, as is 'God', yet you say that there is nothing within except illusory epiphenomena.

 

[loseyourname]

Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, as is 'God', yet you say that there is nothing within except illusory epiphenomena.

The Stone Roses taught that same thing.

Anyway, if I'm reading Mentat here correctly (is that an Egyptian god or something - Mentat?), he thinks that we have no need of the word "experience" in the sense you are using it because we can use other words that refer only to the dispositional states of neuronal arrays during what we now call a "conscious moment." Better to use one term to refer to one concept rather than two. You think you actually are referring to two concepts, that the dispositional states of neuronal arrays is not the same thing as "experience." Perhaps there is an identity in the sense that one cannot exist without the other, but they are nonetheless distinct phenomena. Neither of you is alone in your view. Personally, I don't really see any way to rule out the possibility of Mentat's proposition. If there existed a species of beings capable of identifying and labelling through introspection alone exactly the dispositional state of every physical process occurring in the brain that correlated with what we refer to as a "conscious experience," then perhaps they would never develop such a phrase as ours, indeed, the very concept would seem incoherent to them.

 

[Canute]

. Personally, I don't really see any way to rule out the possibility of Mentat's proposition. If there existed a species of beings capable of identifying and labelling through introspection alone exactly the dispositional state of every physical process occurring in the brain that correlated with what we refer to as a "conscious experience," then perhaps they would never develop such a phrase as ours, indeed, the very concept would seem incoherent to them.

Very true. And if there existed a species who had consciouss experiences and talked about them but who had no idea of the dispositional state of their brains at any time then obviously this would prove that brains don't exist. I suppose we'll just have to wait until we've invented interplanetary travel before we can settle the issue.

 

[loseyourname]

Very true. And if there existed a species who had consciouss experiences and talked about them but who had no idea of the dispositional state of their brains at any time then obviously this would prove that brains don't exist. I suppose we'll just have to wait until we've invented interplanetary travel before we can settle the issue.

You mean if there were creatures who had conscious experiences but didn't have brains. Humans had conscious experiences well before they ever realized they had brains and that certainly didn't prove that brains don't exist. I know you are attempting a reductio, but hey, just give a little creedence to what is being said. How can you expect to be taken seriously when you won't take anyone else seriously?

This thought experiment is only designed to point out that our sensual abilities as a race have a lot to do with how we develop concepts. Aristotle developed the concept of a "nutritive soul" because he couldn't sense the mechanisms of metabolism going on within plants. I know that you give special creedence to the concept of "conscious experience" because, well, you can directly experience it. But consider the example given here. Forget these mythical Antipodeans. If "experience" within you really was only the dispositional propensity of one part of your brain to simultaneously store information gained from the senses or from direct thought processes and send it to reporting centers, would you know the difference? In fact, your brain does this quite a bit without you "experiencing" it. What exactly do you think the difference is? Mentat has given his hypothesis. He believes the difference to be simply that in what we term "conscious" processing, the results are sent in a manner such that they are also reported to what we conceive of as a "self." There are hypotheses for what this manner may be, but I highly doubt he subscribes to any of them, as they are all problematic at this point.

But what about you? What do you think is different about the processes in your brain that are made accessible to your experience? Why some and not others? Under the right circumstances, they seem to have equal hold over your behavioral tendencies, so the idea of a Cartesian theater where the self beholds these facts of experience and makes decisions based on them is pretty much conclusively illusory.

 

[Canute]

You mean if there were creatures who had conscious experiences but didn't have brains. Humans had conscious experiences well before they ever realized they had brains and that certainly didn't prove that brains don't exist. I know you are attempting a reductio, but hey, just give a little creedence to what is being said. How can you expect to be taken seriously when you won't take anyone else seriously?

That's a fair point. However I must admit that I find the argument that experiences are brain-states quite impossible, as yet, to take seriously. Perhaps this is lack of imagination, although I'm not clear what 'imagination' might mean if it is just a disposition of neurons. Can Antipodeans imagine things?

At the moment I can't understand how would one could know what state ones brain was in except by experiencing looking at it? What would 'knowing' mean if one cannot experience knowing? And if experiences are brain-states what on Earth is this 'consciousness' thing that so many scientists are trying explain?

This thought experiment is only designed to point out that our sensual abilities as a race have a lot to do with how we develop concepts.

It's not designed to point it out, it's designed to test the plausibility of the idea that brain-states are experiences. It asks the question - could Antipodeans as defined exist? I would say no, because their definition is self-contradictory. How can one know one has brain-state but not have the experience of knowing?

If "experience" within you really was only the dispositional propensity of one part of your brain to simultaneously store information gained from the senses or from direct thought processes and send it to reporting centers, would you know the difference?

I not only would, I do. I know nothing about my brain-states, but I know about my experiences. Ergo, they are not identical. Even if my brain-states are entirely responsible for my experiences they are not identical.

In fact, your brain does this quite a bit without you "experiencing" it. What exactly do you think the difference is? Mentat has given his hypothesis. He believes the difference to be simply that in what we term "conscious" processing, the results are sent in a manner such that they are also reported to what we conceive of as a "self."

This illustrates the problem with the idea you're defending. Who is this 'we' and what is this 'self'? And what do you mean by 'conceive?

But what about you? What do you think is different about the processes in your brain that are made accessible to your experience? Why some and not others? Under the right circumstances, they seem to have equal hold over your behavioral tendencies, so the idea of a Cartesian theater where the self beholds these facts of experience and makes decisions based on them is pretty much conclusively illusory.

Hang on, who mentioned Cartesian theatres? Not me. I'll happily agree that self is an illusion, a mere collection of memes. But it does not follow from this that consciousness is identical with brain, or that consciousness is no more than brain. As to why I am conscious of some of the results of my brain processes and not others I have no idea. Perhaps it's evolutionary, with functions that can be automated becoming unconscious over time.

I can quite understand why someone might conclude that conscious experiences are entirely caused by brain states. However I really cannot make any sense of the idea that conscious experience are brain states. It seems about equivalent to saying that the picture on a computer screen is identical with the state of the processor. If it were then there would be no point in having screens, we could just observe the states of the processor instead.

 

[Mentat]

You must be unique amongst human beings for not knowing what an experience or a mind is. I'm afraid I can't be bothered to follow you down that route.

As you wish. However, I should find it most distrubing of everyone responds as you do. After all, if there really is something more to the great philosophies that depend on such distinctions as you take for granted, then I should like to know what it is (I have studied them all, and have found nothing so intuitive or obvious as you imply).

It's no good quoting from the Bible to counter my assertion that the Bible misrepresents the teachings of Jesus. It's clearly pointless. Can I suggest that you read the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, The Gospels of Thomas or Mary, the writings of the Essenes or Nazirenes, the writings of twenty centuries of masters of the orthodox Christian tradition, and so on, rather than the Bible, written long after the events and carefully written/compiled to an agenda.

Not really. You see, the teachings of Jesus (and his apostles) are based on that which was written before him (in the so-called "Old Testament"), by the confession of himself and those apostles. And, the last apostle to die, John, proclaimed that any addition to those things which had been written (ending in his "scroll") would be a sin deserving of all the plagues and curses therein.

If there is more to Christianity than that which the Bible contains, Jesus was not a Christian, nor were his apostles.

A lot of it is online. His teachings are perfectly clear on the issue of objectifying God and why one shouldn't do it. He gives the same reasons as does the prophet Mohammed, the Buddha and Lao-Tsu. Imho it's best to research these issues as a historian, not as a institutionalised Christian believing all that garbled stuff about designer/creator Gods who get offended if one doesn't worship them.

Well, that is, after all, the opinion that Jesus himself held. Jesus quoted freely from "the prophets", who describe God in just such a way as you seem to hold in disdain. Jesus also spoke of "God" (probably using the Hebrew name, "Yahweh"/"Yehowah") as being his "Father" and the "one sending me forth", indicating a singular entity. Jesus called himself the perfect reflection of his Father, which would also indicate a person (since Jesus was himself a person).

This is not about religion or worship. I'm just stating the facts as an in-depth study of the Scriptures has revealed them to me. Regardless of whether the God of the Bible exists or not, He (again, a reference to a singular personage, as made frequently in the Bible, and by Jesus) is described a certain way, and these "Orthodox Christians" seem way off-base when compared to that description (again, a description subscribed to by Jesus himself).

How you can claim to understand his teachings while saying that you don't understand consciousness, which is largely what he is talking about, I don't know. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, as is 'God', yet you say that there is nothing within except illusory epiphenomena.

Actually, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven was "among" them. It is a gross mis-translation to construe it as being "within" (my study of Greek (and more nascent study of Biblical Hebrew-Aramaic) was fueled by an interest in just such mis-translations).

Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of Heaven are perfectly reminiscent of the prophecies of Daniel (with regard to a 'kingdom that would crush and put an end to all these kingdoms (he had ennumerated some major world powers, and then described the mixed state of nations and governments at the "time of the end", prior to this verse), which would stand to time indefinite'. They don't refer to some inner-state, but to an actual kingdom.

Even if you don't think Jesus was the "Christ" or "Messiah", you must admit that most of his claim to such titles relied on the accuracy of "the prophets". These self-same prophets spoke of God as just the singular, personal, and (when necessary) vengeful God that you claim to be completely distinct from Jesus' own teaching.

 

[Mentat]

(is that an Egyptian god or something - Mentat?)

Actually, it comes from two different science-fiction books (or, rather, series of books): Bruce Coville's "Aliens ate my homework", and Frank Herbert's "Dune".

Anyway, if I'm reading Mentat here correctly, he thinks that we have no need of the word "experience" in the sense you are using it because we can use other words that refer only to the dispositional states of neuronal arrays during what we now call a "conscious moment." Better to use one term to refer to one concept rather than two. You think you actually are referring to two concepts, that the dispositional states of neuronal arrays is not the same thing as "experience." Perhaps there is an identity in the sense that one cannot exist without the other, but they are nonetheless distinct phenomena. Neither of you is alone in your view. Personally, I don't really see any way to rule out the possibility of Mentat's proposition. If there existed a species of beings capable of identifying and labelling through introspection alone exactly the dispositional state of every physical process occurring in the brain that correlated with what we refer to as a "conscious experience," then perhaps they would never develop such a phrase as ours, indeed, the very concept would seem incoherent to them.

I would say that you are quite close to my meaning, but then you are also quite far (if I'm reading you correctly, that is).

I don't think that brain states influence mental states, nor that there is a causal relationship between cortical dispositions and "conscious experience".

I, instead, deny the very existence of "experience" as anything other than an empty word (at least, when used in the context of philosophy of mind (clearly, "experience" has many good uses in other fields of study, but the way it's used in philosophy is completely useless, IMHO)). I don't think that brain states are related to mental states, simply because I don't believe that there are any "mental states".

 

[Canute]

Mentat - You're way off with the Christian stuff. You seem to have missed the fact that the earlier texts on which the Biblical Gospels were largely based are now well known, many of them having been rediscovered. Still, no matter. I think we might as well just agree to differ on all these things.

 

[Mentat]

Mentat - You're way off with the Christian stuff. You seem to have missed the fact that the earlier texts on which the Biblical Gospels were largely based are now well known, many of them having been rediscovered. Still, no matter. I think we might as well just agree to differ on all these things.

That doesn't seem very reasonable...but I guess I don't want to argue either. If you choose not substantiate either position, then I guess I will have to stop countering you altogether.

I would really like to understand your position, and why you hold it. But I can't force you to instruct me (I am, after all, a very irritating student...or so I've been told).

 

[selfAdjoint]

Mentat - You're way off with the Christian stuff. You seem to have missed the fact that the earlier texts on which the Biblical Gospels were largely based are now well known, many of them having been rediscovered. Still, no matter. I think we might as well just agree to differ on all these things.

The subject of Bible scholarship is way off topic here, but I know something about it, and it is much more confused and contentious than you make out, Canute. Certainly there is nothing there firm enough to base an argument on.

Bottom line, no new manuscripts have been turned up (the dead sea scrolls to the side), but only fragments. And thus there is no firm modification of traditional readings but only different scholars' interpretations, which are driven by their private agendas, whethere to "demythologize" or find femimist gospels, or whatever. This interpretation limit applies to the dead sea scrolls too. Do they have something to do with Jesus or Christianity? A lot? Nothing at all? It's all in the eye of the believer.

 

[Tournesol]

In some way different from what object?

The scientific theory of perception has it that perception start
with an external object which causally interacts with a medium
(sound, light) which gives rise to some kind of respones
in the perceiving subject. I am using 'impression' to mean the
response in general, ie without prejudice as to whether it is
purely nerual or involving subjectivity/consciousness/qualia.

If Rorty is wrong that Mind can be dispensed with by dispensiing with incorrigibility, and if I am right that some sort of physical/mental
distinction is needed to avoid naive realism, then the second
question needs to be answered in separate, non-Rortian terms.

But you are making an ad hoc (or ad hominem) assumption, whereas he is merely negating one (a dangerous and mis-guiding one, at that, in his opinion). The burden of proof thus rests on you, as I've been trying to explain to AKG.

I making two assumptions and I can support them both:

1) A distinction is between properties of objects of perception and
the impression of the perceiver is needed (to avoid naive realism)

2) there is a difference between the impression as it seems
to the subject and description of the accompanying neural activity.
(based on my own experience).

Quote:

You can derive a mind/body distinction from indirect/direct access, and you
may be able to derive an incorrigible/corrigible distinction from it, but that doesn't mean the MB distinction is derived from the incorrigible/corrigible

.

But it is, historically speaking.

I contest that.

Besides, you can derive the mind-body distinction from direct/indirect access, and the only use for a concept such as direct access vs. indirect access is to establish which things can be assumed a priori and which things only a posteriori.

Heidegger and Dewey, in their historical approaches to philosophy, have borne this out as well. He is building from their approaches. Besides, as I've said, there is no other known or conceivable (AFAIK) use for the distinction between direct/indirect access (or concept/intuition, or idea/impression, or mind/body) except to establish the indubitable (or the "assumable", if that's a word). I examined these philosophies to great length before ever reading Rorty.

I have given an example of such use.

Why "naive"? How about "unbiased by the typical thinking of philosophers"?

"Naive realism" is a technical term for a pre-scientific understanding
of reality, particularly perception. Naive realists think rainbows
really are arches in the sky, sticks really do bend when you put them
into a glass of water, and so on. The problem for you is how
to keep your neuroscience without undermining the much more basic
scientific understanding that underpins the departure from NR.


Quote:
Secondly it is not about accuracy; even if my mental imprssions
are mere proxies or symbols, that doesn't mean they are inaccruate.

The very distinction between "objective phenomenon" and "subjective experience thereof" allows for "inaccuracy" ("inaccuracy" here simply means that "subjective experience thereof" doesn't equal "objective phenomenon").

It allows for the wrong turn whereby the map/terrain distinction is
confused with systematic misreperesentation, but it does not
force it upon anybody.

If, OTOH, we remove the distinction (and you have yet to give a good reason to invoke such a concept ITFP), and start from scratch, we can avoid the whole "mirror of nature" problem (and, in turn, the "hard" problem).

Only at the (unnecessary and avoidable) price of lapsing into
naive-realism, anaesthesia-feigning, etc. We can
also avoid it by understanding correctly how representations and symbols work, without incurring those penalties.

Quote:

I only misperceive when I receive the wrong impression (generate
the worng neural activity if you like -- this point is entirely neutral
about whether impressions are qualia or not).

=Mentat
That's because you are still talking about "impressions", as if we could assume a priori that they even exist.

Given the way I am using "impression", that is neither an assumption nor
a-priori.

"Neural activity" is not some scientific way of explaining what an "impression" is (contrary to popular belief among Chalmereans),

Given the way I am using the word "imprssion", it is.

it is an explanation of that which actually goes on in the brain of a conscious entity (instead of all the "writing on tablets" and "observing with our mind's eye").

To say that it is the only way of looking at the only thing that is
going on is question-begging.

If "naive realism" is the ability to do philosophy without invoking meaningless distinctions (and they are meaningless until you (or someone who agrees with you) can assign them some coherent meaning), then I don't see the problem.

So sticks really do bend when you put them into water ?

You can't change history. Have you read Descarte's First Philosophy? It all starts with the dubito.

That Descartes said what he said is historical fact. That it has the significance
you and Rorty give it is a contentious interpretation.

There are [ antipodeans ] in the thought-experiment at hand.

Thought-experiments aren't facts. You can claim that antipodeans
have no deficit in culture or aesthetics, but I don't have to believe that is actually possible.

Quote:
However, there is a way things seem to me.

I'm not disputing that. I'm just asking you to consider the possibility that we treat your report about how things "seem to you" as a raw piece of information very much akin to a Doyle's "report" about the living habits of Holmes.

If you think you can "explain away'' my experiences as neural activity,
fine: let's see you try. But surely the point of a Dennett-style apprach is to
insist that there is nothing to explain away in the first place ?

I am not saying I have them because I talk about them, I am
saying I talk about them because I have them!

And that is yet another verbal (or, rather, scribal) report, nothing more (at least, to me).

Quite. But it isn't just a report to me.

And I don't really know what else it could be. It might hold up in argument, because people don't like to dispute someone's own reports about how things seem to them, but that doesn't mean that it's true in any "absolute" sense (whatever that means).

But I am not saying that my reports are incorrigible. I am saying there
is a way things seem to me, and it is not captured by any third-person
physcal description I have seen.

I do have some access and some way of accessing such information.
But then I am not basing my claims in incorrigibility.

What the heck are you talking about. You don't base a claim on incorrigibility, you make a claim and decide whether or not to be incorrigible about that claim.

You are basing your claims on incorrigibility, inssofar as you think the whole
MBP can be undravelled by no longer taking subjective reports as incorrigible.

And I maintain that you do not have a way of accessing it, until you can tell me what that "way" is.

it's ususally called consciousness. Even antipodeans have a version of it.

Yes, I need them to avoid the confusions that go with naive realism.
People who aren't familiar with philosophy (and are therefore, by default, naive realists) do fall into confusion. People get confused about the "if a tree falls in the forest ..?" question. With my vocabulary, I can answer it: it causes
sound -waves in the air, but no sound-impression to any onlooker.

That is one answer. But the question is only a "problem" in the first place because of its philosophical nature.

But can be and is posed by people with no particular philosophical background.
Getting rid of philosphical jargon and going back to ordinary language
dioes not put us into a position where we can answer all the questions
we can ask. We would need to go back further, maybe to Wittgensteins
"slab! block!" language.

Instead, the Wittgensteinian would simply say that "sound" is a term that applies to its being received and processed by an entity capable of such, and that the question was merely a word-puzzle.

I think it is a word-puzzle too! It's just that too unravel it you need
to make some kind of internal/external distinction.

In fact, your answer just raises more problems, like: Does "onlooker" allow for a deaf onlooker? Does it allow for a machine that records sounds, but doesn't have "sense-impressions" (like a tape-recorder)? Etc.

All fairly trivial.

 

[Mentat]

The scientific theory of perception has it that perception start
with an external object which causally interacts with a medium
(sound, light) which gives rise to some kind of respones
in the perceiving subject. I am using 'impression' to mean the
response in general, ie without prejudice as to whether it is
purely nerual or involving subjectivity/consciousness/qualia.

Not true. You said that the impression is somehow different than the object. That statement quantizes "impressions", even if simply by virtue of their comparison with "objects". All of this, in turn, leads one (inevitably) back to "hard problems", "qualia", and "mental states", and I see no reason to take this "wrong turn" with you.

Besides, if "impression" could refer to a purely neural response to some external stimulus, than the rule that it must be different from that which it observes would not hold when the person was observing neural patterns (perhaps someone else's, perhaps their own; it is technologically possible in principle).

I making two assumptions and I can support them both:

1) A distinction between properties of objects of perception and
the impression of the perceiver is needed (to avoid naive realism)

"The impression of the perceiver"...do you mean the activity that the object stimulates, or how the object seems to the person?

2) there is a difference between the impression as it seems
to the subject and description of the accompanying neural activity.
(based on my own experience).

There is also a difference between how Sherlock Holmes is described by Doyle, and the bits of ink on the pages of "The Hound of Baskervilles".

By virtue of heterophenomenology, the reports of how something seems to the observer are raw data to be treated as one treats a novelist's fiction. As such, there isn't so much a difference between Sherlock Holmes and ink as there is between Doyle's reports about Holmes and ink.

I contest that.

No you don't...that is, until you actually present some valid contest.

I have given an example of such use.

What example?

"Naive realism" is a technical term for a pre-scientific understanding
of reality, particularly perception. Naive realists think rainbows
really are arches in the sky, sticks really do bend when you put them
into a glass of water, and so on. The problem for you is how
to keep your neuroscience without undermining the much more basic
scientific understanding that underpins the departure from NR.

What are you talking about? Who says a stick doesn't "really" bend when it goes into water? If one defines "bend" as an apparent curvature (and given the non-Euclidean geometries where such concepts as "bend" and "curve" are quite different than normal experience, this is not much of a stretch), then it is indeed the case.

This is not a trivial point, since you appear to be trying to establish that, because something seemed to be a certain way until science proved it otherwise, "seems" and "objects" must be different in some non-trivial way. But they're not. How something seems to you (or to society in general) is different from the object that is being examined only if you hold that there is an "actual" way that the object is, and that we are simply perceiving it wrong. That, again, is within the confines of attempting to establish indubitability (only it shifts to the objective world for certainty).

It allows for the wrong turn whereby the map/terrain distinction is
confused with systematic misreperesentation, but it does not
force it upon anybody.

You're missing the point. Even the map/terrain distinction lends itself to the bias that there is one set of things that we can see "right in front of us" (or most clearly), and those things which the "map" represents (which are not "right in front of us" in that sense).

Only at the (unnecessary and avoidable) price of lapsing into
naive-realism, anaesthesia-feigning, etc. We can
also avoid it by understanding correctly how representations and symbols work, without incurring those penalties.

You have yet to prove that by me.

Given the way I am using "impression", that is neither an assumption nor
a-priori.

The way you are using "impression" is quite different from the way that you are claiming to use it.

To say that it is the only way of looking at the only thing that is
going on is question-begging.

No it's not. To say that we are attempting to understand what it going on inside our heads need not have anything to do with trying to understand "qualia" or "mental states" or anything like that, so long as we don't assume that such things actually occur inside us.

That Descartes said what he said is historical fact. That it has the significance
you and Rorty give it is a contentious interpretation.

What interpretation? He began his quest with the dubito and ended it with the full-fledged cogito (mind-stuff and all).

Thought-experiments aren't facts. You can claim that antipodeans
have no deficit in culture or aesthetics, but I don't have to believe that is actually possible.

And that's the point of the experiment. You believe that something is missing. Now, if you were confronted with a society exactly like the antipodeans, you would have to change your mind. As it is, there are no antipodeans. What is important, however, is that you have yet to prove the impossibility (in principle) of there being such creatures.

If you think you can "explain away'' my experiences as neural activity,
fine: let's see you try. But surely the point of a Dennett-style apprach is to
insist that there is nothing to explain away in the first place ?

There are reports to explain (please see my "Heterophenomenology" thread, and read the link), but I don't see what else there should be. After all, if there were something else, why didn't you report it? If, OTOH, you believe (and report) that there are things about your "experience" that are ineffable, then we must simply take that as another report, and attempt to explain it also.

Quite. But it isn't just a report to me.

Then what else is it?

But I am not saying that my reports are incorrigible. I am saying there
is a way things seem to me, and it is not captured by any third-person
physcal description I have seen.

But the way things seem to you (raw seems) is a concept grounded in incorrigibility. The fact that you can be absolutely, 100% positive, that that is indeed how things seem to you, reveals this fact.

You are basing your claims on incorrigibility, inssofar as you think the whole
MBP can be undravelled by no longer taking subjective reports as incorrigible.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I guess that's close to accurate. I'd prefer to say that we can avoid the whole MBP, simply not discuss such things, and get on fine without it (the sciences do on a daily basis, as does every other human endeavor). That the MBP is based on incorrigibility is not just an historical fact, but one to which almost all of your comments have added additional credence.

it's ususally called consciousness. Even antipodeans have a version of it.

The antipodeans have a way of seeing their insides. This could, perhaps, be a second set of eyes, which points inward. It could be a connection to some fourth-dimensional extension (as in "Spaceland") which sees them from a fourth-dimensional perspective. All that matters is that they can see their insides, and you cannot see your own.

But can be and is posed by people with no particular philosophical background.
Getting rid of philosphical jargon and going back to ordinary language
dioes not put us into a position where we can answer all the questions
we can ask. We would need to go back further, maybe to Wittgensteins
"slab! block!" language.

That's a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein which perhaps requires its own thread...for now, let me assure you that people with no philosophical background go about their whole lives without ever using your words (and I hold, until proven wrong, that "qualia", "mental state", etc, are nothing but empty words/phrases). That these terms have been infiltrating the common vernacular does not change the fact that they have added nothing to understanding of anything which we actually encounter in life. Philosophers of Mind are quite alone in their preoccupation with such things.

I think it is a word-puzzle too! It's just that too unravel it you need
to make some kind of internal/external distinction.

No, you don't. You need to make a distinction between air waves, and air waves that enter a recording device. This distinction is made perfectly clear in the very phrases used, and is no problem at all.

All fairly trivial.

Oh really? I recall reading many excerpts from Chalmerean philosophers which have questioned just such things to exhaustive lengths (especially that second part about whether recording devices, which clearly process sounds, have "sense-impressions" like we do, or have "qualia" like we do).

 

[loseyourname]

I don't think that brain states influence mental states, nor that there is a causal relationship between cortical dispositions and "conscious experience".

I, instead, deny the very existence of "experience" as anything other than an empty word (at least, when used in the context of philosophy of mind (clearly, "experience" has many good uses in other fields of study, but the way it's used in philosophy is completely useless, IMHO)). I don't think that brain states are related to mental states, simply because I don't believe that there are any "mental states".

I never answered this; sorry. I'd say you are reading me wrong. My explanation of your posts wasn't that you think brain states influence mental states, but that mental states are brain states and so in any meaningful explication of what a mental state is it is best to completely drop the concept of "mental state" and talk only of brain states.

 

[Tournesol]

The scientific theory of perception has it that perception start
with an external object which causally interacts with a medium
(sound, light) which gives rise to some kind of respones
in the perceiving subject. I am using 'impression' to mean the
response in general, ie without prejudice as to whether it is
purely nerual or involving subjectivity/consciousness/qualia.

Not true. You said that the impression is somehow different than the object. That statement quantizes "impressions", even if simply by virtue of their comparison with "objects".

Nope. I can talk about catching colds without quantising colds. straw-man.

All of this, in turn, leads one (inevitably) back to "hard problems",

Not by itself. If impression are purely neural there is no HP. In any case,
if everything that leads to the HP is indisputable, we are simply
stuck with the HP. The only other option is to deny the indisuputable
(eg pretend to myself that there is nothing going on subjectively
and reports just pop out of my mouth).

Besides, if "impression" could refer to a purely neural response to some external stimulus, than the rule that it must be different from that which it observes would not hold when the person was observing neural patterns

That would be introspection, not perception.

I making two assumptions and I can support them both:

1) A distinction between properties of objects of perception and
the impression of the perceiver is needed (to avoid naive realism)

"The impression of the perceiver"...do you mean the activity that the object stimulates, or how the object seems to the person?

As explained, either.

2) there is a difference between the impression as it seems
to the subject and description of the accompanying neural activity.
(based on my own experience).

There is also a difference between how Sherlock Holmes is described by Doyle, and the bits of ink on the pages of "The Hound of Baskervilles".

Not analogous, because stories cannot read themselves.


Quote:
I contest that.

No you don't...that is, until you actually present some valid contest.

Saying something is invalid doesn't show it to be invalid. Try harder.

What example?

The tree in the forest.

Quote:
"Naive realism" is a technical term for a pre-scientific understanding
of reality, particularly perception. Naive realists think rainbows
really are arches in the sky, sticks really do bend when you put them
into a glass of water, and so on. The problem for you is how
to keep your neuroscience without undermining the much more basic
scientific understanding that underpins the departure from NR.

What are you talking about? Who says a stick doesn't "really" bend when it goes into water? If one defines "bend" as an apparent curvature .

If it's apparent , it's not real. The two words are opposites, FYI.

This is not a trivial point, since you appear to be trying to establish that, because something seemed to be a certain way until science proved it otherwise, "seems" and "objects" must be different in some non-trivial way. But they're not. How something seems to you (or to society in general) is different from the object that is being examined only if you hold that there is an "actual" way that the object is, and that we are simply perceiving it wrong. That, again, is within the confines of attempting to establish indubitability (only it shifts to the objective world for certainty).

That there is a way things actually are, and that it is not given by straightforward
perception, but requires thought and experimentation to uncover
are basic postulates of science. In your efforts to be hyper-scientific
you are pulling the rug from under science. Note, BTW, that what "really"
is the case as far as science is concerned is opposed to what is
"incorrigible" as far as experience is concerned, so it is hardly the same
issue.

You're missing the point. Even the map/terrain distinction lends itself to the bias that there is one set of things that we can see "right in front of us" (or most clearly), and those things which the "map" represents (which are not "right in front of us" in that sense).

Yes. We need that distinction to explain how we can be mistaken about things. Even your reports are a kind of map.

The way you are using "impression" is quite different from the way that you are claiming to use it.

evidence ?

No it's not. To say that we are attempting to understand what it going on inside our heads need not have anything to do with trying to understand "qualia" or "mental states" or anything like that, so long as we don't assume that such things actually occur inside us.

"need not" does not mean "must not".

What interpretation? He began his quest with the dubito and ended it with the full-fledged cogito (mind-stuff and all).

He did , and that does not mean the whole of the Phil. of Mind revolves
around Descartes, epistemology, incorrigibiity, mirrors, etc.

Now, if you were confronted with a society exactly like the antipodeans, you would have to change your mind. As it is, there are no antipodeans. What is important, however, is that you have yet to prove the impossibility (in principle) of there being such creatures.

Sure. I can do that by arguing that I have qualia (in some sense),
that they are very much connected with my own aesthetic appreciation, etc.

You could say that it is imaginable for people exactly like humans
to exist without lungs, and I suppose it just about is, but as far
as I am concerned, I need my lungs, and in this universe humans
need lungs to live. It's the difference between logical possibility
(just about anything) and (meta)physical possibility (much more restricted).


Quote:
If you think you can "explain away'' my experiences as neural activity,
fine: let's see you try. But surely the point of a Dennett-style apprach is to
insist that there is nothing to explain away in the first place ?

There are reports to explain (please see my "Heterophenomenology" thread, and read the link), but I don't see what else there should be. After all, if there were something else, why didn't you report it?

I did! The something else beside the report per se, is what it is a
report of -- experience!

If, OTOH, you believe (and report) that there are things about your "experience" that are ineffable, then we must simply take that as another report, and attempt to explain it also.

One possible explanation being to take it at face value-- yet that is forbidden.

QUOTE]But it isn't just a report to me.
[/QUOTE]

Then what else is it?

experience

But the way things seem to you (raw seems) is a concept grounded in incorrigibility.

I have not explained it that way. Straw man. Try to deal with the arguments
I am actually making.

The fact that you can be absolutely, 100% positive, that that is indeed how things seem to you, reveals this fact.

I never said anything of the kind.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I guess that's close to accurate. I'd prefer to say that we can avoid the whole MBP, simply not discuss such things, and get on fine without it (the sciences do on a daily basis, as does every other human endeavor).

Nope, actual real scientists do take subjectivity seriously.
The imaginary scientists promoted by Dennett and co are another matter.

That the MBP is based on incorrigibility is not just an historical fact, but one to which almost all of your comments have added additional credence.

You are not engaing my actual comments.

The antipodeans have a way of seeing their insides. This could, perhaps, be a second set of eyes, which points inward. It could be a connection to some fourth-dimensional extension (as in "Spaceland") which sees them from a fourth-dimensional perspective. All that matters is that they can see their insides, and you cannot see your own.

Since my subjective reports can scientifically be correlated with objective
neural activity the obvious explanantion is that I can see what is going
on inside me, but in different terms.

That's a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein which perhaps requires its own thread...for now, let me assure you that people with no philosophical background go about their whole lives without ever using your words (and I hold, until proven wrong, that "qualia", "mental state", etc, are nothing but empty words/phrases).

They probably don't use the word 'oesophagus' but they know they have one.

 

[Tournesol]

No, you don't. You need to make a distinction between air waves, and air waves that enter a recording device. [

That is some kind of internal/external distinction.

Oh really? I recall reading many excerpts from Chalmerean philosophers which have questioned just such things to exhaustive lengths (especially that second part about whether recording devices, which clearly process sounds, have "sense-impressions" like we do, or have "qualia" like we do).

Yes. Once you have accepted that you need an internal/external distinction,
there is a subsequent question about how best to characterise it in the
case of humans -- as neural activity, qualia or whatever. But you cannot
avoid that subsequent questions by refusing to make the internal/external
distinction at all, since that leads away from science back to naive realism.
Your characterisation of this kind of "hard problem" question as unnecessary
and avoidable therefore fails.

 

[Mentat]

I never answered this; sorry. I'd say you are reading me wrong. My explanation of your posts wasn't that you think brain states influence mental states, but that mental states are brain states and so in any meaningful explication of what a mental state is it is best to completely drop the concept of "mental state" and talk only of brain states.

Yeah, that's closer to my actual position. I'd say that the terms we use to describe "mental states" are simply short-cut terms, used in the absence of any clear understanding of what actually goes on inside our bodies (particularly, our brains). We, as humans, like to think that we have privileged access to our insides, since they're our insides (I'll leave it to the evolutionary psychologists to try and explain why this is the case ). It's territorial, I guess. But the simple fact is, we don't know everything about our insides, and making up terms for short-cut explanations was alright until people started treating them as though they were more than what they are.

 

[Mentat]

That is some kind of internal/external distinction.

Again, no, they need only be processed. That our processors our inside is irrelevant.

The distinction is between a sound wave that has been processed, and a sound wave that hasn't. These are merely distinction about the history of that particular wave.

Yes. Once you have accepted that you need an internal/external distinction,
there is a subsequent question about how best to characterise it in the
case of humans -- as neural activity, qualia or whatever. But you cannot
avoid that subsequent questions by refusing to make the internal/external
distinction at all, since that leads away from science back to naive realism.
Your characterisation of this kind of "hard problem" question as unnecessary
and avoidable therefore fails.

Science does just fine without even addressing such questions as the one we were considering ("if a tree falls in a forest..."). Science simply does not address them. That you refer to my dismissal of them as un-scientific (and naive) is indicative of a gross misconception about science.

 

[Mentat]

Nope. I can talk about catching colds without quantising colds. straw-man.

You are quantizing your case of the cold. Besides, to refer to "an impression" and relate it to "an object" is, by necessity, to quantize both (simply by use of the word "an/a", and by virtue of the object being singular/quantum).

Not by itself. If impression are purely neural there is no HP.

If "impressions" exist in any quantum sense (that is, if I can speak of "a perception" (rather than the process of perceiving), or of a "Final Draft" of my conscious perceiving of anyone thing) then we will be unable to avoid the hard problem. Why do you think this thread is called "Wrong Turns"? If it were possible to make a wrong assumption, but still be "on the right path", then "turn" wouldn't be a good analogy.

The only other option is to deny the indisuputable
(eg pretend to myself that there is nothing going on subjectively
and reports just pop out of my mouth).

I don't mean to sound like a therapist, but are you afraid of the concept of "reports just popping out of your mouth"? What if they do so in a predictable and pattern-oriented manner?

That would be introspection, not perception.

Not if s/he were looking at someone else's neural patterns (or at a computer image of their own, or whatever).

As explained, either.

Ok, then I need you to expound on what you mean by point 1, please.

Not analogous, because stories cannot read themselves.

Neither can a human (without special instrumentation, that is). It is the myth that we have privileged access to our inner-workings that causes some of our biggest "problems".

Saying something is invalid doesn't show it to be invalid. Try harder.

I'd like to think that there is something more to proving a point invalid than providing a unchallenged refutation, but I can't see what it would be. I have provided refutation to everything you have posted, and so cannot think of how your points could possibly be more invalid, at this point (no personal offense intended).

If it's apparent , it's not real. The two words are opposites, FYI.

No there not. What is a "real" bend, Tournesol? Is it in Euclidean terms, or in the terms of any of the innumerable other possible geometries? There is nothing more to the "bending" of a stick then how it appears.

That there is a way things actually are, and that it is not given by straightforward
perception, but requires thought and experimentation to uncover
are basic postulates of science. In your efforts to be hyper-scientific
you are pulling the rug from under science.

You are wrong. I have studied the philosophy of science. What you describe might have held up under the logical positivist view, but that has long been abandoned.

I will grant that, historically, the idea of an absolute reality was essential to science, but that's just because scientists were still trying to understand the mind of God (Why did He make this this certain way? What was His purpose? Since He is a rational and intelligent being, there must be a rational and intelligent explanation for His creations. etc). Scientists are no longer working under those assumptions.

Relativity in how things "actually are" is now an integral part of science, since the concept of "theory" (which is disprovable, but never provable) requires it.

Note, BTW, that what "really"
is the case as far as science is concerned is opposed to what is
"incorrigible" as far as experience is concerned, so it is hardly the same
issue.

Again, wrong. What is "real" in science (and in every other endeavor of man -- except, perhaps, philosophy) is that about which one can speak incorrigibly, without fear of contradiction. That's as "real" as anything ever gets, in any field except philosophy. That is yet another indication that incorrigibility is integral to the current concepts of philosophy, and that it is philosophy's Achille's heel.

Yes. We need that distinction to explain how we can be mistaken about things.

Ah, yes, but "mistaken" in what way? What would it mean for us to be "mistaken", and what would it require for us to change our opinions?

Even your reports are a kind of map.

Your reports are the only thing I might consider a "map" (in this context), and that only in the heterophenomenological sense.

evidence ?

You claim to be using "impression" to mean any effect that a stimulus might have on us (though it seems obvious, from the term "stimulus", that it merely "stimulates" us...I could still accept the use of the term "impression" in this way), and yet persist in quantizing our impressions and perceptions (even while you deny it outright, I have shown that, in every case, your use of such terms has been quantum in nature).

"need not" does not mean "must not".

It does as per Ockham. Why invoke an extra assumption that lends nothing to our explanations of anything, and that we can thus easily live without?

He did , and that does not mean the whole of the Phil. of Mind revolves
around Descartes, epistemology, incorrigibiity, mirrors, etc.

That's why this thread is called "Wrong Turns" in the plural. There have been many wrong turns, by I have traced them back to Descartes and his dubito. I am not the first to do so. That all of the problems seem to disappear when we stop trying to ground our beliefs in something certain lends further credence to the concept that post-Kantian-oriented philosophy of mind (Chalmerean, at its worst...perhaps Rylean at its best) is little more than dubito-revisited.

Sure. I can do that by arguing that I have qualia (in some sense),
that they are very much connected with my own aesthetic appreciation, etc.

You could say that it is imaginable for people exactly like humans
to exist without lungs, and I suppose it just about is, but as far
as I am concerned, I need my lungs, and in this universe humans
need lungs to live. It's the difference between logical possibility
(just about anything) and (meta)physical possibility (much more restricted).

Your very example does you in. It is impossible in principle for anything like a human to survive without lungs (given that which is scientifically known about humans). There is nothing in the scientific explanation about humans that requires (or even deals with) qualia, as Chalmers and his followers are quick to point out. They view that as a problem with science. I view it as intelligent people refusing to make assumptions a priori.

I did! The something else beside the report per se, is what it is a
report of -- experience!

But you are simply reporting again. There is nothing else besides the report, anymore than there is something "more" besides the report that Doyle makes about Holmes' adventures. Everything about Sherlock and his adventures is exhausted in Doyle's account of them. Now, Doyle could say that there was more to it, and that Sherlock was actually real, but then we'd think he'd had too much to drink.

The same goes, pace Dennett, for your reports about conscious experience. They are your reports, and are to be considered as the raw data. There is nothing more to your fiction, which you present to the heterophenomenologist, than that which you report.

One possible explanation being to take it at face value-- yet that is forbidden.

No, that's exactly what Dennett is saying we should do! It is you who are trying to add something to your reports. We (heterophenomenologists) are simply "taking it at face value"!

I have not explained it that way. Straw man. Try to deal with the arguments
I am actually making.

That you don't see the logical end of each of your lines of reasoning is not my problem. I have tried (and continue to try) to show you that all of your arguments lead back to incorrigibility and Descartes, but you simply deny it (without solid reasoning to back up your denial).

I never said anything of the kind.

Previously posted by you:
I am saying there
is a way things seem to me...

You can look it up (it's a few posts back) to see if I'm quoting you out-of-context, or if I'm miscontruing this, but the implication of this statement is clear.

Nope, actual real scientists do take subjectivity seriously.
The imaginary scientists promoted by Dennett and co are another matter.

First off, Dennett and co. do take subjectivity seriously, just not in the way you'd like them to.

Secondly, scientists who study the brain, the body, social relations, history, etc, do so with no regard whatsoever to qualia or subjective experience. Historians and the like take into account the fact that one's own perception of a state of affairs needn't be perfectly accurate (relative to another's account, or relative to physical data), but this has nothing to do with MBP, HP, or anything like them.

Finally, that the neurological sciences can get on with a study of thought, and that historians and sociologists can get on with a study of our conscious interactions throughout time, without qualia or mind-body distinctions is clearly indicative of the uselessness of such terms (and that is the point I was trying to make).

Since my subjective reports can scientifically be correlated with objective
neural activity the obvious explanantion is that I can see what is going
on inside me, but in different terms.

Wrong again. Heterophenomenology was devised specifically to explain how your reports are to be treated scientifically. That your subjective reports sometimes correlate with objective neural or physiological activity does indicate that you have some knowledge about your inner-workings, but such is extremely limited.

OTOH, there are the innumerable times when a person has reported that they are going to have a heart-attack or that they are going to vomit, when no such thing was actually going to occur. It was a false alarm, which would not be possible if you could actually view your insides.

They probably don't use the word 'oesophagus' but they know they have one.

Some of them know that they have a "pipe", of sorts, down which food travels toward their bum, but that doesn't mean that they know they have an esophagus (since such entails quite a bit more than a mere "pipe").

 

[loseyourname]

That's why this thread is called "Wrong Turns" in the plural. There have been many wrong turns, by I have traced them back to Descartes and his dubito. I am not the first to do so. That all of the problems seem to disappear when we stop trying to ground our beliefs in something certain lends further credence to the concept that post-Kantian-oriented philosophy of mind (Chalmerean, at its worst...perhaps Rylean at its best) is little more than dubito-revisited.

Sorry to pick on this one little snippet here, but it might be worth pointing out that this could be said about any human endeavor. They'd all become immediately easier and we'd remove a good deal of problems if we simply stopped trying to be certain of anything. Philosophy and every other field of enquiry would revert to sophistry and we'd be left with lawyers instead of philosophers and scientists.

 

[Mentat]

Sorry to pick on this one little snippet here, but it might be worth pointing out that this could be said about any human endeavor. They'd all become immediately easier and we'd remove a good deal of problems if we simply stopped trying to be certain of anything. Philosophy and every other field of enquiry would revert to sophistry and we'd be left with lawyers instead of philosophers and scientists.

That doesn't contradict my point at all. As the existentialist philosophers would be quick to point out (if any still existed ), philosophy is only a segregated, distinct profession because it keeps trying to ground itself in certainty.

I would debate the placing of "science" in this category (of neo-Kantian, certainty-establishing, geisestwissenschaften), since science is more concerned with practical truths-for-the-time-being.

 

[loseyourname]

That doesn't contradict my point at all. As the existentialist philosophers would be quick to point out (if any still existed ), philosophy is only a segregated, distinct profession because it keeps trying to ground itself in certainty.

Well, philosophers I know personally say that any time a field of philosophy achieves some level of certain, concrete results, it branches off and becomes science. All of the natural sciences and even psychology essentially began as philosophy. They'd say the philosophy that remains philosophy is characterized by its inability to come to any conclusions. One might say it is the least able of all pursuits to ground its claims in certainty.

I would debate the placing of "science" in this category (of neo-Kantian, certainty-establishing, geisestwissenschaften), since science is more concerned with practical truths-for-the-time-being.

I think science belongs. In fact, ideally I think the justice system should belong as well. Both are designed to be part of the search for truth. They tail off for practical reasons at what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or in the case of science, what reasonably fits the data and cannot be falsified, but these are only practical concerns because in both fields it is not possible to have complete certainty. It is likely that in many philosophical pursuits this is the case as well (complete certainty is a practical impossibility), but it does not mean the philosopher should cease to look for truth any more than the ideal scientist and ideal lawyer should.

I'm going to be honest here and admit that I haven't actually read Wittgenstein (he is on the reading list later in the semester for a class on causation that I'm enrolled in), but I have read modern philosophers of religion that cite his ideas as validations for their claims. They say that no particular language game can be critiqued from the POV of another language game, and within the religious language game (in which words mean completely different things than in scientific language), the claims made by the religious are correct, which really only means consistent with their other claims. I think you can see quickly why fideism becomes undesirable. Any group of people can simply say they are speaking a different language from the group that doesn't agree with them (even though they are both speaking English) and that they are correct from the POV of their own language game. Do you really want a theory of knowledge and meaning that leaves scientific knowledge on the same level as religious claims, the claims of terrorist organizations, even the claims of occultist mystics?

 

[Tournesol]

You are quantizing your case of the cold. Besides, to refer to "an impression" and relate it to "an object" is, by necessity, to quantize both (simply by use of the word "an/a", and by virtue of the object being singular/quantum).

My point was that you CANNOT infer metaphysical quantisation
directly from grammar, and I illustrated it by an example that nonbody
would be crazy enough to believe in: the example of "a cold" as an actual
entity. You may be insulting enough to think that I believe that colds
are actual things, but what do you mean when you say "I caught a cold"?

If "impressions" exist in any quantum sense (that is, if I can speak of "a perception" (rather than the process of perceiving), or of a "Final Draft" of my conscious perceiving of anyone thing) then we will be unable to avoid the hard problem.

Nope, the HP is about explanatory gaps. Purely nerual explanantions
are popular with the people they are popular with rpecisely because they don't have that kind of problem (and, no, that doesn't justify them).

I don't mean to sound like a therapist, but are you afraid of the concept of "reports just popping out of your mouth"? What if they do so in a predictable and pattern-oriented manner?

Fear has nothng to do with it; it's just no the way things are.

Neither can a human (without special instrumentation, that is). It is the myth that we have privileged access to our inner-workings that causes some of our biggest "problems".

Circular. You are appealing to your no-consciousness conclusion to support
the aptness of an analogy which is itself being put forward to support the no-consciousness conclusion.

No there not. What is a "real" bend, Tournesol? Is it in Euclidean terms, or in the terms of any of the innumerable other possible geometries?

Whichever is really applicable.

There is nothing more to the "bending" of a stick then how it appears.

A profoundly unscientific comment.

I will grant that, historically, the idea of an absolute reality was essential to science, but that's just because scientists were still trying to understand the mind of God (Why did He make this this certain way? What was His purpose? Since He is a rational and intelligent being, there must be a rational and intelligent explanation for His creations. etc). Scientists are no longer working under those assumptions
Relativity in how things "actually are" is now an integral part of science, since the concept of "theory" (which is disprovable, but never provable) requires it.

Nope. Relativism is not demonstrated by Popper-style considerations. ]
The fact that you cannot have final knowledge of the way things are
does not mean there is no way things are.
The fact that you cannot have final knowledge of the way things are
does not mean the truth of a theory consists of its acceptance, or
that incompatible theories can be equally true (the latter tow comments
are implications of relativism).


However, I am glad that you have made it clear that you have no
sympathy with realism, and are therefore not really basing your approach on science.

Ah, yes, but "mistaken" in what way? What would it mean for us to be "mistaken",

Among other things, it mean the way things seem to us is not how they are.

Why invoke an extra assumption that lends nothing to our explanations of anything, and that we can thus easily live without?

Qualia are part of the explanandum, so one would not expect to find them in the explanans.

Your very example does you in. It is impossible in principle for anything like a human to survive without lungs (given that which is scientifically known about humans). There is nothing in the scientific explanation about humans that requires (or even deals with) qualia, as Chalmers and his followers are quick to point out. They view that as a problem with science. I view it as intelligent people refusing to make assumptions a priori.

I think Chalmers-style qualiaphilia makes a wrong turn there. There
are some aspects of human behaviour which would be crazy if qualia
did not exist in some sense, therefore they do have an explanatory/causal role. Trying to promote qualia on the basis that they are epiphenomenal
is seld-defeating.

I did! The something else beside the report per se, is what it is a
report of -- experience!

But you are simply reporting again. There is nothing else besides the report, anymore than there is something "more" besides the report that Doyle makes about Holmes' adventures.

Yes there is. The fact that the report is all there is for you does
not mean it is all there is for me. To infer from "this is all the information I have" to "this is all that exists" is to make the same error
as a solipsist -- another Wrong Turn.

The same goes, pace Dennett, for your reports about conscious experience. They are your reports, and are to be considered as the raw data. There is nothing more to your fiction, which you present to the heterophenomenologist, than that which you report.

You mischaracterise het. The het-ist is supposed to take my reports
at face value unless there is specific reason to the contrary.

One possible explanation being to take it at face value-- yet that is forbidden.

No, that's exactly what Dennett is saying we should do! It is you who are trying to add something to your reports. We (heterophenomenologists) are simply "taking it at face value"!

That doesn't make sense. If I say "There is more to my experience than
the reports thereof", you are insisting on not taking it at face value--you are telling me I must be wrong.

I never said anything of the kind.

Previously posted by you:
I am saying there
is a way things seem to me...

My:
"I never said anything of the kind"
was a repsonse to your:-
"The fact that you can be absolutely, 100% positive, that that is indeed how things seem to you, reveals this fact. "

See what's going on here ? I didn't make the comment about
incorrigibility that you attributed to me. You are imagining
that I'm talking about incorrigibility when I am not; you are arguing
with an imaginary opponent.

You can look it up (it's a few posts back) to see if I'm quoting you out-of-context, or if I'm miscontruing this, but the implication of this statement is clear.

It doesn't have any implication about "absolutely, 100% positivitity"
for me -- you are reading your own obsessions into it.

Since my subjective reports can scientifically be correlated with objective
neural activity the obvious explanantion is that I can see what is going
on inside me, but in different terms.

Wrong again. Heterophenomenology was devised specifically to explain how your reports are to be treated scientifically. That your subjective reports sometimes correlate with objective neural or physiological activity does indicate that you have some knowledge about your inner-workings, but such is extremely limited.

Ok, so it's not incorrigible -- I never said it was. Now deal with real
issue: the difference in format, in presentation between neural firing
and subjective exprience.

Some of them know that they have a "pipe", of sorts, down which food travels toward their bum, but that doesn't mean that they know they have an esophagus (since such entails quite a bit more than a mere "pipe").

Whatever. You can't infer from the fact that someone doesn't employ
a particular bit of jargon that they are not talking about what the
jargon refers to: they could be using other terms.

 

[Tournesol]

Here's a thought experiment for you:

Zed is a neuroscientist. He is in the habit of sticking his head in a brain scanner and
correlating his subjective experience with what the scanner shows. Eventually
he gets so good at this that he doesn't even need to look at the scanner any more.
He can describe to an audience of his colleagues what is going on in his brain
purely on the basis of introspection: "as I eat this strawberry ice-cream, neural cluster JB853 should be firing at a frequency of 24.5hz" -- "Yes Zed, that is what the scanner shows".
IOW, he can now imitate an Antipodean. And Antipodeans know what is going on in their heads. So Zed knows, too. The only difference is that he can express it in
two ways, the Antipodean way, in neural language, and the ordinary way, in the language of seemings and feelings. He is, as it were, bilingual. But then, who
is to say that those of us who are monolingual who only speak the language of seemings and feelings do not know what is going on in our heads ?

 

[Mentat]

Well, philosophers I know personally say that any time a field of philosophy achieves some level of certain, concrete results, it branches off and becomes science. All of the natural sciences and even psychology essentially began as philosophy. They'd say the philosophy that remains philosophy is characterized by its inability to come to any conclusions. One might say it is the least able of all pursuits to ground its claims in certainty.

But the idea that they all branched off from philosophy makes philosophical points appear to be those which must be understood/agreed first, in order for other fields to do their work. That implies, once again, that philosophy is the firm "ground" upon which to found our assumptions (which, in turn, form the bases of our fields of study).

Rorty would say that that's what's wrong with philosophy today. Philosophers are so concerned with getting the "first questions" answered first (and grounding all others in these "first questions") that they will always be stuck at "square one". Wittgenstein's therapeutic approach to philosophy, on the other hand, suggests exorcising our "problems" by dealing with them in terms of puzzles in a language-game. IOW, if philosophers would adopt a more social approach (and a more relative one ("what move can/cannot be made, in this particular game?")), they wouldn't constantly run into "problems".

I think science belongs. In fact, ideally I think the justice system should belong as well. Both are designed to be part of the search for truth. They tail off for practical reasons at what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or in the case of science, what reasonably fits the data and cannot be falsified, but these are only practical concerns because in both fields it is not possible to have complete certainty. It is likely that in many philosophical pursuits this is the case as well (complete certainty is a practical impossibility), but it does not mean the philosopher should cease to look for truth any more than the ideal scientist and ideal lawyer should.

But what if our "ideals" are misguided?

You're wrong about science, btw. Theories, the highest points of the scientific method, can be falsified. Indeed, they can never be completely "proven", in any normal sense. They can be disproven, and they can amass greater and greater amounts of "proof" that agree with them, but they can never be absolutely adopted as "facts" or "laws" or any other such things.

As to lawyers, their purpose is not to establish absolute truth, but (as you said) to establish truth beyond "reasonable doubt". What one society considers "reasonable" may not be the same as what another society does. Again, it is quite relative and (dare I say) fickle.

Our "ideal" scientists and lawyers are only ideals in terms of philosophy as a search for absolute truth (a goal that the lawyer and scientist will always fall short of attaining, but a goal nonetheless). There are other ways of doing philosophy.

I'm going to be honest here and admit that I haven't actually read Wittgenstein (he is on the reading list later in the semester for a class on causation that I'm enrolled in), but I have read modern philosophers of religion that cite his ideas as validations for their claims. They say that no particular language game can be critiqued from the POV of another language game, and within the religious language game (in which words mean completely different things than in scientific language), the claims made by the religious are correct, which really only means consistent with their other claims. I think you can see quickly why fideism becomes undesirable. Any group of people can simply say they are speaking a different language from the group that doesn't agree with them (even though they are both speaking English) and that they are correct from the POV of their own language game. Do you really want a theory of knowledge and meaning that leaves scientific knowledge on the same level as religious claims, the claims of terrorist organizations, even the claims of occultist mystics?

Well, think of this: can science ever be used to falsify the belief in a god?

This could be argued ad nauseum, but the usual consensus is that it cannot. Nor, AFAIK, can any other system/field of study ever be invoked to "prove" or "disprove" a religious precept.

Thus, the relativism inherent in Wittgenstein's philosophy may not be so counter-intuitive after all (and, of course, even if it is, that doesn't make it wrong).