Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[GE Morton]

There is zero evidence in all of science that would show that brain events cause mental events.

Really? A bee stings you. Nerve fibers carry information from the site of the sting to your brain, provoking a number of neural events. An instant later you feel pain, a mental event. No causal relation there?

Perhaps you've adopted some eclectic definition of "evidence"?

[Faustus5]

The "raw feels" are the qualia. Quining qualia means eliminating the "raw feels" and ending up with p-zombies.

I don't know what you think good philosophy amounts to, but surely making up crap, as you have done in this quote, doesn't count.

Quining qualia just means re-imagining what they are in a theoretical framework that differs from yours. If it meant ending up with P-zombies, Dennett would not be the vociferous denier of P-zombies that he is.

Being honest about what the folks you disagree with actually believe is a pretty important virtue if good scholarship is something you value.

A functionalist explanation of GNW information processing in no way addresses the Hard problem.
The issue of 'conscious vs unconscious events in the mind' also in no way addresses the Hard problem.

Except that we think the hard problem is a completely bogus invention of bad philosophy, a problem that is specifically designed to be impossible to solve. So we just laugh at it and move on.

The GNW is a good attempt, but I think Dennett and his followers should just steer clear of philosophy altogether. They just don't know what they are talking about, and end up denying the existence of consciousness.

Let me repeat: Being honest about what the folks you disagree with actually believe is a pretty important virtue if good scholarship is something you value.

[Faustus5]

Philosophy of mind rather tries to explain that correlation, in terms of understanding how and why experience exists. (We can understand the function of experience in terms of utility). That's the philosophical issue. Because if we look to our physicalist scientific model of the world - reducible material stuff and forces which act on it - there is no apparent explanation for how certain physical brain activities correlate to experience.

In my opinion, literally the only way you can get that explanation is by mapping all the events that happen in people's bodies going from stimulus to motor response and memory formation, in increasing levels of detail. If they tell me one type of pain is sharp and another is dull, for instance, I want to see what happens inside them that is different and leads to different descriptions of their feelings.

If a philosophical ideology tells me that there is something missing from this picture that is still being left out and not being explained, I'm just going to ignore it. I honestly think scientists can and should ignore this sort of thing, because it just isn't a serious way of understanding reality.

It wouldn't be predicted by our physicalist understanding of how the world works. It can't apparently explain it.

Well, we've already had cases where scientists who know a lot about how the brain works have predicted specific kinds of hallucinations that had never been observed up to that point. A hallucination counts as an experience, doesn't it? And right now, we can look at a brain scan and tell whether someone is observing or thinking about an object versus a face. So there's that, too.

As technology and cognitive neuroscience improves, we'll be able to add more and more to what we can predict in advance, from a third person perspective.

This may not satisfy some philosophers, and I get that. I just don't think those philosophers are doing useful work.

[Pattern-chaser]

A bee stings you. Nerve fibers carry information from the site of the sting to your brain, provoking a number of neural events. An instant later you feel pain, a mental event. No causal relation there?

No, I think that's a correlation. And correlation is not causation, as we have all heard a thousand times from our statistics lecturers, yes?

[GE Morton]

A bee stings you. Nerve fibers carry information from the site of the sting to your brain, provoking a number of neural events. An instant later you feel pain, a mental event. No causal relation there?

No, I think that's a correlation. And correlation is not causation, as we have all heard a thousand times from our statistics lecturers, yes?

Yes, and it's an important point. However, some correlations are causation. Keep in mind that events in every causal sequence are also correlated. We can consider A to be the cause of B if B always follows A (ceteris paribus). But if B only correlates with A 70% of the time, we can't draw that conclusion.

[Faustus5]

Well, I think most people --- virtually everyone --- would disagree, would affirm that the evidence shows, conclusively, that brain events do indeed cause mental events.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever which supports the bizarre position you have adopted. None. Zip. Zero. And incidentally, you are literally the only person I've ever encountered who holds this "I'm really a dualist but I'm going to pretend otherwise" view.

But if you dogmatically insist that physical events can only cause other "physical" events, (with "physical" understood in the colloquial sense), then you'll be forced to an easily refuted claim the mental event and correlated, causative brain event are identical.

In the real world, positions that are enthusiastically endorsed by a large number of smart people are rarely ever "easily refuted", even when those people turn out to be just flat out wrong decades later. Food for thought.

Oh, there are thousands of those. Anyone who undertakes to locate the neural underpinnings of color discrimination, olfactory or tactile or auditory discriminations, depression or elation, etc. --- all mental events --- will acknowledge that difference.

Note that I asked for a citation from the scientific literature which endorses the very specific idea you have been promoting, and you couldn't do it. To wit, the idea that brain events cause mental events that are physical yet still not themselves brain events. No one but you thinks this way, at least that I'm aware of.

"An abundance of scientists who believe . . ." Are you now resorting to appeals to authority?

What I'm appealing to is sanity and serious scholarship. When you say that something is "obviously" false when it is a mainstream belief, you're playing games and not engaging seriously with the many scientists and philosophers who do not see things the way you do. Go ahead and insist they are wrong--they might very well be wrong!--but don't be glib and arrogantly assume you have all the answers that have evaded thousands of smart people who have been thinking just as hard about these issues as you have.

It is obvious that they are not identical if one uses the term "identical" with its common definitions.

Golly gee wilikers, maybe this is a clue that when it comes to mind/brain identity, the difficulty of the issue comes from mistakenly thinking we should be using common definitions of identity. Did this thought ever occur to you? Perhaps consciousness is the one area where thinking "normally" about identity is the very thing that trips people up.

As Terrapin has been trying to calmly explain, and what nobody but me seems to grasp, when a physical system is representing a state of affairs to a bunch of other networked systems it is connected to, the network gets an experience of what is being represented (a pain, an after image, a beautiful sunset). When a different, unconnected network is, say, watching a brain scan of the first system, it's experience is of watching a brain doing stuff. All that makes a brain event your own mental event is the way you as a network are wired to the event.

What you're claiming there is that an effect can't be "physical" unless it is reducible to accepted laws of physics, and derivable from accepted physical models.

I am making no such claim. Very little in science can be reduced, because the requirements for successful reduction are very difficult to achieve. So the mind/brain identity I endorse is explicitly non-reductive.

Yes, Dennett does not deny conscious experience. He denies qualia because he construes that term as implying some "non-phyical substance." But it doesn't.

Actually, it does.

Well, yes there is such a "standard term." It is, "qualia." My own definition, given earlier, was, "the distinctive quality of a sensory impression which allows us to distinguish it from other impressions delivered over the same or other sensory channels."

If all that people like you meant by "qualia" was this, no one would have a problem with it. But you go beyond this to views that are utterly un-scientific.

[Atla]

There is zero evidence in all of science that would show that brain events cause mental events.

Really? A bee stings you. Nerve fibers carry information from the site of the sting to your brain, provoking a number of neural events. An instant later you feel pain, a mental event. No causal relation there?

Perhaps you've adopted some eclectic definition of "evidence"?

You don't seem to have any grasp what "scientific evidence" means. Science can't detect pain and mental events.

[Atla]

The "raw feels" are the qualia. Quining qualia means eliminating the "raw feels" and ending up with p-zombies.

I don't know what you think good philosophy amounts to, but surely making up crap, as you have done in this quote, doesn't count.

Quining qualia just means re-imagining what they are in a theoretical framework that differs from yours. If it meant ending up with P-zombies, Dennett would not be the vociferous denier of P-zombies that he is.

Being honest about what the folks you disagree with actually believe is a pretty important virtue if good scholarship is something you value.

A functionalist explanation of GNW information processing in no way addresses the Hard problem.
The issue of 'conscious vs unconscious events in the mind' also in no way addresses the Hard problem.

Except that we think the hard problem is a completely bogus invention of bad philosophy, a problem that is specifically designed to be impossible to solve. So we just laugh at it and move on.

The GNW is a good attempt, but I think Dennett and his followers should just steer clear of philosophy altogether. They just don't know what they are talking about, and end up denying the existence of consciousness.

Let me repeat: Being honest about what the folks you disagree with actually believe is a pretty important virtue if good scholarship is something you value.

I'm not the one making up crap. 'By qualia I don't mean qualia, but when it comes to the Hard problem, I did mean qualia by it' is anything but consistency and intellectual honesty.

[GE Morton]

You don't seem to have any grasp what "scientific evidence" means. Science can't detect pain and mental events.

LOL. Really? Scientists don't detect pain when they're stung by bees? Or do you just mean that scientists can't detect --- which means feel --- others' pain via scientific methods? The latter is true enough. Does that mean pain doesn't exist?

Methinks you need a broader understanding of what constitutes "science."

[Gertie]

Faustus

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 4:18 pm Philosophy of mind rather tries to explain that correlation, in terms of understanding how and why experience exists . (We can understand the function of experience in terms of utility). That's the philosophical issue. Because if we look to our physicalist scientif…

In my opinion, literally the only way you can get that explanation is by mapping all the events that happen in people's bodies going from stimulus to motor response and memory formation, in increasing levels of detail. If they tell me one type of pain is sharp and another is dull, for instance, I want to see what happens inside them that is different and leads to different descriptions of their feelings.

That's simply noting correlations.

If a philosophical ideology tells me that there is something missing from this picture that is still being left out and not being explained, I'm just going to ignore it. I honestly think scientists can and should ignore this sort of thing, because it just isn't a serious way of understanding reality.

It's not an ideology to ask for an explanation. You of course can choose to ignore anything not obviously explicable by science, but there's no reason philosophy should.

Gertie wrote: ↑
Yesterday, 4:18 pm
It wouldn't be predicted by our physicalist understanding of how the world works. It can't apparently explain it.

Well, we've already had cases where scientists who know a lot about how the brain works have predicted specific kinds of hallucinations that had never been observed up to that point. A hallucination counts as an experience, doesn't it? And right now, we can look at a brain scan and tell whether someone is observing or thinking about an object versus a face. So there's that, too.

As technology and cognitive neuroscience improves, we'll be able to add more and more to what we can predict in advance, from a third person perspective.

This may not satisfy some philosophers, and I get that. I just don't think those philosophers are doing useful work.

What our current scientific understanding wouldn't predict is how and why experience correlates with certain physical processes at all. That's the Hard Problem Dennet refuses to acknowedge. If your position is it simply doesn't interest you and you prefer to ignore it that's fine, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. And if you're going to endorse a particular position like Identity Theory I'd have thought you'd have considered how such an idea might explain the mind body relationship, why it's a better explanation to you, the pros and cons.

[Atla]

You don't seem to have any grasp what "scientific evidence" means. Science can't detect pain and mental events.

LOL. Really? Scientists don't detect pain when they're stung by bees? Or do you just mean that scientists can't detect --- which means feel --- others' pain via scientific methods? The latter is true enough. Does that mean pain doesn't exist?

Methinks you need a broader understanding of what constitutes "science."

You don't seem to have a good grasp that "science" deals with the objective. Weird.

Broader understandings, such as self-reported subjective stuff, are typically no longer considered "science".

[Pattern-chaser]

No, I think that's a correlation. And correlation is not causation, as we have all heard a thousand times from our statistics lecturers, yes?

Yes, and it's an important point. However, some correlations are causation. Keep in mind that events in every causal sequence are also correlated.

No, some correlations turn out to be causal, but we don't assert as much until we've demonstrated that they are actually causal, yes?

We can consider A to be the cause of B if B always follows A (ceteris paribus). But if B only correlates with A 70% of the time, we can't draw that conclusion.

I don't think we can, but maybe I just don't understand the details of the statistics that describe such things. Perhaps A always follows B because C, the actual cause, causes B to happen first, followed by A?

[GE Morton]

Yes, and it's an important point. However, some correlations are causation. Keep in mind that events in every causal sequence are also correlated.

No, some correlations turn out to be causal . . .

You appear to be denying what I said, but you're not. Some correlations are also cause/effect relations. They don't "turn out" to be those; they are those all along. What turns out is our discovery of that relationship.

. . . but we don't assert as much until we've demonstrated that they are actually causal, yes?

Yes. They are "actually causal" when B follows A predictably, every time.

I don't think we can, but maybe I just don't understand the details of the statistics that describe such things. Perhaps A always follows B because C, the actual cause, causes B to happen first, followed by A?

In that case the "actual cause" --- Aristotle's "efficient cause" --- of B is A. The "actual cause" of A is C. Most effects are products of fairly long causal chains.

[Terrapin Station]

No. It is a transformation of a reference frame, or of some 3D object within that frame (which operations are equivalent). The apparent properties of the thing --- what is visible from a given viewpoint --- will change accordingly. But the properties of the thing(s) viewed don't change.

This is something else we need to clear up that you keep repeating. Apparent properties are properties, aren't they? You could argue that they're not properties of a particular thing, but regardless of that, they are properties, no?

[GE Morton]

Well, I think most people --- virtually everyone --- would disagree, would affirm that the evidence shows, conclusively, that brain events do indeed cause mental events.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever which supports the bizarre position you have adopted. None. Zip. Zero.

What? Are you agreeing with Atla, that brain events don't cause mental events? (Remember that you've already admitted that mental events exist).

And incidentally, you are literally the only person I've ever encountered who holds this "I'm really a dualist but I'm going to pretend otherwise" view.

Nope. I'm a pluralist who rejects the monism/dualism dichotomy --- a "pluralist" who holds that there are as many existents, and categories of existence, that we find it useful to postulate. None of them need be considered "basic," foundational, or primal, but all of them should be related in some coherent way. Monism/dualism is an archaic ontological dead-end. (The only thing we might fairly deem ontologically primal are those very subjective experiences we're trying to account for, the phenomena from which all scientific/conceptual analysis begins).

Note that I asked for a citation from the scientific literature which endorses the very specific idea you have been promoting, and you couldn't do it. To wit, the idea that brain events cause mental events that are physical yet still not themselves brain events. No one but you thinks this way, at least that I'm aware of.

Are you offering that ad populum argument as a refutation? And of course, I'm not going to embark on a search of that immense haystack for that particular needle. It doesn't matter whether anyone else "thinks this way" or not. Those who might disagree need to broaden their conception of what counts as a "physical effect" (and not by very much).

What I'm appealing to is sanity and serious scholarship. When you say that something is "obviously" false when it is a mainstream belief, you're playing games and not engaging seriously with the many scientists and philosophers who do not see things the way you do. Go ahead and insist they are wrong--they might very well be wrong!--but don't be glib and arrogantly assume you have all the answers that have evaded thousands of smart people who have been thinking just as hard about these issues as you have.

Yes, the mind/brain identity thesis is obviously false. But see next comment.

Golly gee wilikers, maybe this is a clue that when it comes to mind/brain identity, the difficulty of the issue comes from mistakenly thinking we should be using common definitions of identity. Did this thought ever occur to you? Perhaps consciousness is the one area where thinking "normally" about identity is the very thing that trips people up.

Well, Faustus, if the common definitions of "identity" are inadequate, and you have some other criteria in mind for declaring two distinguishable things to be identical, then you need to set forth that criterion. Neither a correlation between A and B, nor a causal relation between them, constitutes an identity between them. As far as I can see those latter relationships are all you have. So please explain how you get from them to "identity."

As Terrapin has been trying to calmly explain, and what nobody but me seems to grasp, when a physical system is representing a state of affairs to a bunch of other networked systems it is connected to, the network gets an experience of what is being represented (a pain, an after image, a beautiful sunset). When a different, unconnected network is, say, watching a brain scan of the first system, it's experience is of watching a brain doing stuff. All that makes a brain event your own mental event is the way you as a network are wired to the event.

Well, I agree with all that! But you seem to be oblivious to the key issue: those experiences are not identical (per the common definitions), and are not transformable into one another via some simple algorithm, as are perspectival differences. Only when they are, are you entitled to claim the two things perceived ("experienced") are the same thing. The first-person experience is quite distinct from, not predictable from, and not transformable into, the third-party experience. Indeed, they are apprehended, neurologically speaking, via entirely different mechanisms. You just have to accept that the first-party experience is a empirically distinct effect of certain physical processes, but is inexplicable via scientific methods because it is private, inaccessible to third-party analysis and observation. Declaring them to be identical with their physical correlates is just a lazy way to dismiss the problem.

The real objection to this view will be that an ubiquitous empirical phenomenon is thus left inexplicable scientifically. Yes, it will be. But it is far from the only thing scientifically inexplicable. At least in this case we know why it is inexplicable.

Well, yes there is such a "standard term." It is, "qualia." My own definition, given earlier, was, "the distinctive quality of a sensory impression which allows us to distinguish it from other impressions delivered over the same or other sensory channels."

If all that people like you meant by "qualia" was this, no one would have a problem with it. But you go beyond this to views that are utterly un-scientific.

That is the same definition I gave earlier, and have assumed all along. Where do you think I "go beyond" that view?