I must admit, I only remember the experiments itself, not the introductory or commentary of the videos. I don't agree with the statement that consciousness IS brain activity. I'll go more into that later.
Q Goest said:
So far, this seems reasonable. x causes y, and x* = x, so x* doesn't need to produce physical state y because x already did that. In fact, x* just drifts off by itself, analogous to a shadow that never enters the causal chain. The paradox arises because we have excluded x* from doing any causal work but we still want to claim that there is a reliable correlation between our mental states and our reporting of them. The SCE still wants to claim that when physical state x reports x*, that the cause of y is x and not x*.
I wouldn't say x* = x. I would say, instead that x* is a different frame of reference of x (which means there would be a transform operation involved: x* = T(x). This fits the analogy of the shadow in that way. One may argue that a shadow is somehow causal, but we generally put the blame on the owner of the shadow as being the cause and the shadow itself being the effect (the owner is blocking the sun's photons from hitting the concrete sidewalk, what we call a shadow isn't a substance, it's a lack of 'substance': namely, photons.)
To understand this properly, we have to make a clear distinction between x and x*, the physical state and the mental state.
1) The physical state is what happens, it is the behavior and what is spoken. The physical state includes anything that is objectively measurable.
2) The mental state is how something feels. It includes the qualia that we experience such as the color red or the feeling of pain or the smell of a rose. The mental state includes anything that is only subjectively measurable.
in 1), did you mean to include "what is spoken" as x? You had elsewhere defined it as y, which I would have agreed more with.
Subjective experience may by far be the most difficult thing to figure out how to measure , but is it truly impossible? I can't find the paper right now (I will look harder after this post, or maybe somebody else knows the study that I'm referring to) that showed how dogs stored smells was very similar to how we stored notes. In the way we can detect octaves, the dog can detect an extra enzyme on an aroma.
Between humans, we can share the experience of red, and neurologists can measure brain activity in several test subjects imagining or observing red.
The more qualia we begin to map out in terms of neurological activity, the more chances we have of discovering emergent properties, and explaining (which we already can in terms of core physics) why some members of our species don't experience red like we do.
If you were a neuroscientist and a musician, wouldn't it be enriching for you to play different kinds of music on many different types of subjects while using something like an fMRI? Or even to do experiments in the qualia, red (given that you're not colorblind).
If we get a firm physical grasp of how we can experience the color red, and then we can physically altar someone who is colorblind to be able to experience red (using what we've discovered) have we not made the case?
What if we observed physically similar phenomena. Could we make a particular kind of weather pattern experience the color red? No probably not, but that's not suprising because it's not the same physical phenomena, it's just similar (hypothetically of course). It can never be the same physical phenomena without actually having the components of the brain.
The paradox therefore, is that the mental states, x*, can't be reliably reported by x. Here, the term "reliably reported" means that there is a reliable, 1 to 1 correlation between the physical state and the mental state which is everything the SCE wants to claim. The paradox arises because the SCE wants to claim that x not only correlates with x*, but that once x causes y, it has also provided a reliable report of x*. But if x causes y which provides a reliable report of x*, then x* has entered the causal chain of events and has influenced something physical.
I find no reason to believe the transform x* = T(x) has a 1 to 1 correlation with x. The transform could map n-dimensional space to m-dimensional space for all we know. You'd also have to define "reliable". We can report emotions to each other in a way that's vaguely consistent using language. In the same we, most of us agree on what the color red is (and the failure of a colorblind person to do so can be explained physically). There's always some confidence less than 100% in our report, but that goes with any observation. Of course, when reporting emotions, our confidence is considerably lower than when reporting something like length.
The SCE attempts to get around this paradox by suggesting that "[counsiousness and brain activity are] different aspects of the same physical process. ... so your consciousness IS your brain activity." If the two are the same, then we should be able to objectively measure mental states, but remember that things defined as mental states are these subjectively measurable phenomena that are not things that regard the physical movement of matter.
I personally don't agree that consciousness is brain activity. I only demand that consciousness results from brain activity. If you can stop all brain activity, you stop consciousness. I don't mean to say that consciousness exists in all brain activity; just that if you shut the whole thing down, you'll be sure to nail it.
These phenomena may be supervenient on the physical comings and goings of physical matter, but they are not the physical movements themselves. Mental states are additional phenomena that are not explained by explaining the measurable interactions between neurons, chemicals, molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles. The description of those physical movements will never tell us ANYTHING about what it is like to experience the color red, pain, or the smell of a rose. So the attempt to get around the paradox by the SCE fails and mental states can not be reliably reported unless the mental states can enter the causal chain.
In physics, we have lots of things that aren't the physical movements themselves. They are a summation or a statistical abstract of the system. We chose such parameters, not because they're inherent to the system (though they may be) but because they're relevant to the way in which we view the system and our process of understanding it in a categorical way (because stereotyping makes learning faster, if flawed).
That's a real problem for anyone that wants to challenge mental causation. This issue hasn't been taken up in the literature to the extent I've done so here, though there are similar ideas that have been published. If mental states are reliably reported by physical states, then we have to accept that somehow mental states enter the causal chain, and thus we may have a case for downward causation. Whether or not it really is downward causation requires another discussion that is out of the scope of this thread.
What if qualia are classification schemes that our brain uses to integrate and store sensory data? The definition of mind is vague, of course. If you would include all of the brain's activities and function as mind, then I'd think you'd be taking it too far. I was always under the impression that "mind" was only the part that you're aware of.
For instance, we don't notice that the floor is pushing up on our feet as we sit here reading posts. That stimulus isn't being directed the the higher functions of the brain that we associate with mind. It's being handled by lower function until the point where you begin to ponder "hey... the floor is pushing up on my feet".
In the same way, short of us pondering it, the color red isn't brought to our mind's attention when we observe it. One of our memory functions classifies light (with a particular range of frequencies) and files it away and compares it to similar observations in the future. We can view the resulting discussion, later some day, on physics forums, as a result of many different brain functions all fulfilling their "duties" in exactly the way the neurons allow them to.
That is, there may be no single decision-making process in the brain that we can wrap together in a tidy bow and call "mind". And there's no reason for me to believe our experience as an individual encompasses a significant fraction of all the things our brain is doing at once.