JDStupi said:
Thanks for the reply Ken G. I wish to add that I am not entirely "committed" to viewpoints as much as it may seem, though I suppose I am simply trying to look at it from a different view.
I wasn't really aiming that comment at you, it was more of an aside about my reactions when I hear philosophers use the expression "I am committed to..." . I know why they do that, it is to say "by proclaiming my allegiances, I can save myself 90% of the arguments I would need to put forward, because you will already know them based on the history of those allegiances." But the same can be accomplished just by saying "I am currently swayed by such-and-such a position", or "I am now interested in pursuing the ramifications of such-and-such an ism." That's in the spirit of a hypothesis, rather than a stultifying belief system, and certainly not a commitment.
I suppose it it may be simply un-intuitive for me to regard consciousness as a substance. I don't have a problem with relationalist views, simply the seemingly simplistic idea of consciousness as some substance with properties we predicate to it.
But if you look up a definition of consciousness right now, will it not look much more like a set of predicated properties, rather than a process of emergence? The definition list properties, so it is already a kind of substance-- the idea that it emerges from something else is added on top of that, rather belatedly, and without much in the way of solid evidence. When you note that an awake person is more conscious than a sleeping person, it is not because you sense the presence or absence of a process of emergence, it is because you either detect or do not detect the properties that define the substance itself.
Now, it is not necessary to consider consciousness to be a
physical substance like a planetary nebula, I did not mean to carry the analogy that far. I reject physicalism on the grounds that it has not made its case, it is just a convenient assumption that many like to make to simplify their reasoning. That makes it a hypothesis, not a belief system, when used responsibly. So we can hypothesize that consciousness cannot be a substance because it doesn't seem to make much sense to give it physical characteristics (rather than experiential ones), or we can hypothesize that consciousness is an experiential substance (like a qualia) that is nonphysical, but that is nevertheless defined by its properties and does not need to be created by a brain, it can just be interfaced with, interacted with, detected, or stored by a brain-- perhaps like a glass in the rain collects water without generating the water. But it must begin with allowing the possibility of interactions between what we count as primarily physical with what we count as primarily nonphysical, or more accurately, the recognition that the concepts of physical and nonphysical are not fundamental aspects of reality, they are polar modes of thought that we subject reality to.
In fact, given the advent of Modern Physics, I would say that the simplistic notion of matter as being some substance which we attribute properties to as being overly simplistic.
Agreed, another reason to be suspicious of physicalist idealizations. When it is hard to even define what "physical" means, we have a hard time claiming that everything is it. Fields, virtual particles, extra dimensions, multiverses-- "physical" just ain't what it was cracked up to be in Newton's day.
I could quite possible say that my problem is that the positing of some substance called consciousness seems to me to be the superflous positing of an entity. Whereas you might point out that it is only superflous insofar as I start with a physicalist ontology, at which point the dualism becomes ad hoc.
Yes, that is just what I might say.
Ultimatley, I am not prepared to make a compelling argument for I cannot argue that my position must necessarily be the case, I can only argue that given the acceptance of some set of assumptions it must be the case.
If that kind of honesty was characteristic of physicalist perspectives, I'd have no problem with them.
We are not accepting the same basic assumptions, and therefore I can't argue as to what necessarily must be the case.
The issue is not which assumptions we should accept, it is the whole question of whether we need to "accept" assumptions at all. It gets back to the basic issue of, is the purpose of philosophy to generate a personal belief system, or is it just to see where certain assumptions lead. I'd have no problem at all with the statement "the assumption that consciousness emerges from a strictly physical system leads me to conclude that X would then be true about consciousness", especially if X was something different from the very assumptions that are being adopted (which so far I really haven't seen). That's the challenge, to create an argument like "assumption A leads to conclusion X", not "assumption X leads to conclusion X", which is all I really see from physicalist arguments. Note I am not talking about using physical models of the emergence of consciousness, that's just making a model, I'm talking about physicalism-- the claim that nothing else exists or could ever matter, the claim that there could not be any value in any nonphysical perspective. It's institutionalized lack of imagination.
If there is one thing that I realize, it is that in philosophy (life) there are aspects of reasoning which are not dictated by logic or reason alone. As William James stated, there are "tender-minded and hard-minded philosophers" and it is epistemologically the case that we can never establish definitively the ontological primacy of the physical or the mental. I suppose this is what seems to motivate a phenomenological project, based around situated ontologies viewed from the inside where we bracket our ontological assumptions and simply treat the world of phenomena. This may be (excuse me for extrapolating) close to the type of epistemological position you tend to take. Namely, that the Scientific project does not require ontological commitment to a physicalism.
Yes, that's just what I'm saying. It seems to be an almost invisible prejudice that physicalism can be equated to science, but there's just no such equation when the demonstrable goals of science are at the forefront.
My contention is essentially the same as Berkeley's argument against materialism (nowhere near his original words): "How can we abstract away all properties of matter which relate themselves to our experience and define that as the material substratum, when we only know matter through its appearance in our experience". Replace "matter" with "consciousness" (or it seems any x with matter) and this is the argument I am presenting
But that sounds more like what I'm arguing to me-- that it makes little sense to conclude that consciousness is fundamentally emergent from the physical, when our most direct connection with consciousness is the nonphysical experience of it. Instead, I prefer the stance that although we know perfectly well that consciousness is not emergent from the physical, all the same we anticipate progress in understanding consciousness by adopting a physical approach. That more or less sums up the Scientific project.
You may rightly point out, though, that as I myself brought to the forefront, the argument applies equally to matter as well as consciousness. It would seem the idea that matter can be more easily defined and abstracted away from is simply a socio-cultural contingency more so than a philosophical necessity. This may be your point.
Then I needn't say it!
Also, excuse me for possibly erroneously extrapolating, but it doesn't seem as though you are a solipsist. It doesn't seem you deny the existence of things in the absence of your presence, simply that distinctions must be drawn between the world of phenomena and the concepts we form thereof, and that we can speak about "independantly existing" reality only if we are here to experience it. You are making an epistemological claim, not an ontological one.
Yes that's true, I'm not being solipsistic in the sense that I'm claiming reality lies on "our side" of the observer/observed duality, I'm solipsistic only in the sense that I'm claiming we have no idea what reality is, but we have a means of gaining knowledge about reality via the observer/observed duality. Just as you say, it is an epistemological stance, not an ontological one.
The point, which seems in my interpretation close to what your point sometimes is, is that reality simply is. Reality is, and reality occurs regardless of what labels we apply to the various phenomena in our relatively arbitrary divisions we create. The "information" is there in the sense that the anteater follows "it" and "it" is "real", but the "information" is not necessarily there, for the anteater will do what he does regardless of the appellation "information", which has a specific theoretical background and interpretational structure behind it.
I see more the weight of the latter part of this reasoning. Let me give an example-- when I say that physics began with physicists, it is normal for people to ask "are you saying that the laws of physics didn't apply prior to human appearance on Earth?" And of course I am not saying that-- I am saying that physics, once it appeared, applied retroactively, because that is a constraint on physics-- it has to apply retroactively, it has to apply over all times.
This may be able to be argued even from a Quinean Indeterminacy of translation perspective. Given observations of some animals behavior we can not ever say, that the specific "information" within our theoretical framework is uniquely determined by the animals behavior. There exists a number of other ways to define and coneptualize the animal's behavior and we could argue that given some equivalent theory P' the interpretation given to that behavior under that theory "exists" and is "corroborated" by the behavioral predictions. Even if the underlying ontology is radically different.
Yes, I think that's an astute point.
It is also interesting to note that the above quote may be similar to Einstein's physical/philosophical development, for he openly acknowleged that scientific theories are "free constructions of the scientist's mind" and that science does not describe phenomena as they must be but provides a "window on nature". So far as I can tell, his qualms with QM were based off of what he considered as necessary conditions for any successful explanation of nature, namely a principle of spatial individuation.
Yes, I agree with Einstein on the "window on nature" perspective, that language seems very appropriate. And I side with Bohr on the issue of what are necessary conditions for explanations of nature-- the "stop telling God what to do" perspective. We are here to learn the lessons of nature, as they intersect with our ability to perceive and reason, not to tell nature how she must behave, or even that she has to be "physical."