Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Atla]

Is it completely meaningless to say that the existence of the Christian God, or Zeus, or whoever, was disproven?

Not meaningless, no. It would be wrong to say so.

After all, we can't prove a negative.

Exactly so.

I don't think that's a useful approach. Technically, anything can be doubted*, we can never 100% prove or disprove stuff. So if we stick to this approach, then isn't all proof and disproof rendered pointless, doesn't all discourse come to a dead end?

(*except that there is something rather than absolutely nothing)

[Atla]

I feel the same way about neuroanatomical explanations of conscious experience. Why did this pain feel sharp and this one feel dull? Because in one case this kind of nerve was stimulated, and in the other case a different kind of nerve was stimulated. Why does chocolate taste this way, and hot sauce tastes that way? Because chocolate stimulates the following kinds of nerves located here and here and here, activating these kinds of brain areas, whereas hot sauce causes the following activities in these different nerves and brain areas over here and here.

How can you tell based on a third person perspective, that pain actually feels like anything, or that chocolate actually tastes like anything? How can you infer that based on the observed activity of nerves and brain areas?

[Pattern-chaser]

Not meaningless, no. It would be wrong to say so.

Exactly so.

I don't think that's a useful approach. Technically, anything can be doubted*, we can never 100% prove or disprove stuff.

(*except that there is something rather than absolutely nothing)

OK, agreed.

So if we stick to this approach, then isn't all proof and disproof rendered pointless, doesn't all discourse come to a dead end?

Yes; no. Proof and disproof has always been pointless, for the reasons you observe. And yet discourse can continue more or less as normal. The only problem arises when someone cannot resist the siren call of certainty, and they start to look for ways to be certain, to prove and disprove stuff, to know, without doubt. If we accept uncertainty, openly, consciously and knowingly, we can discourse widely, I think.

[Atla]

I don't think that's a useful approach. Technically, anything can be doubted*, we can never 100% prove or disprove stuff.

(*except that there is something rather than absolutely nothing)

OK, agreed.

So if we stick to this approach, then isn't all proof and disproof rendered pointless, doesn't all discourse come to a dead end?

Yes; no. Proof and disproof has always been pointless, for the reasons you observe. And yet discourse can continue more or less as normal. The only problem arises when someone cannot resist the siren call of certainty, and they start to look for ways to be certain, to prove and disprove stuff, to know, without doubt. If we accept uncertainty, openly, consciously and knowingly, we can discourse widely, I think.

Can't tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me or disagreeing with yourself or whatever. Obviously proof and disproof aren't about absolute certainty, absolute certainty is for the delusional.

[Pattern-chaser]

Can't tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me or disagreeing with yourself or whatever. Obviously proof and disproof aren't about absolute certainty, absolute certainty is for the delusional.

Going by your final six words. I think we agree pretty closely.

[Atla]

Can't tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me or disagreeing with yourself or whatever. Obviously proof and disproof aren't about absolute certainty, absolute certainty is for the delusional.

Going by your final six words. I think we agree pretty closely.

Ok, so: dualistic philosophy, separateness, 'thing'-ness etc. were pretty much refuted.
Well, one can still come up with pretty insane ideas without evidence, to make dualistic philosophy work. And one can say that separateness was only partially refuted, or that its refutation is inherently circular. The idea of 'thing'-ness, and the subject/object dichotomy, were so thorougly beaten into oblivion though that it's not even funny.

[Faustus5]

Again the unanswered question lies in why particular nerves correlate with any experiential state at all. That's where the explanatory gap lies.

And my position remains that the neuroanatomical accounts I describe do indeed answer any reasonably formed questions you could have in mind, and that the hard problem is just a phantom that can and should be dismissed as a artifact of bad philosophy. Solving the "easy" problems is all anyone will ever do, and that's enough.

Where you see a deep mystery which I'm just turning my back on, I see a problem that has been invented by philosophers who defined the issue so that it is literally impossible to explain in a satisfactory manner. I see no value in that kind of thing.

[Faustus5]

How can you tell based on a third person perspective, that pain actually feels like anything, or that chocolate actually tastes like anything? How can you infer that based on the observed activity of nerves and brain areas?

By studying the brains of thousands of very different subjects as they describe various sorts of experiences, finding out what causal pathways lead from stimuli to brain activity, to motor outputs, and looking for commonalities among all subjects and the reports they make of their experiences. Once a rich data set is collected of this sort of thing, we will reach a point where scientists would be a to tell from a brain scan whether a subject is (for example) tasting chocolate versus kimchi, to what kind of chocolate they are tasting and how spicy the kimchi is. We can already, in primitive form, do something like this right now.

That still leaves a lot out, though--but for reasons that a pragmatic and not metaphysical. For instance, your tasting of kimchi might trigger very personal memories of, for example, a really bad date you went on where you first ate the stuff. This will make your experience different in ways that would be impossible for this kind of scientific project to detect.

[Gertie]

Again the unanswered question lies in why particular nerves correlate with any experiential state at all. That's where the explanatory gap lies.

And my position remains that the neuroanatomical accounts I describe do indeed answer any reasonably formed questions you could have in mind, and that the hard problem is just a phantom that can and should be dismissed as a artifact of bad philosophy. Solving the "easy" problems is all anyone will ever do, and that's enough.

Where you see a deep mystery which I'm just turning my back on, I see a problem that has been invented by philosophers who defined the issue so that it is literally impossible to explain in a satisfactory manner. I see no value in that kind of thing.

The mind-body problem is straightforward enough to grasp. And it's obviously legitimate to ask what the nature of that relationship is.


Your response is science can only note correlations in this case, and therefore trying to explain the relationship is ''bad philosophy''. While also claiming the opposite, that you know the answer, which is the philosophical hypothesis of materialist Identity Theory...

[GE Morton]

It's not an ideology to ask for an explanation.

But it is an ideology to ignore an explanation when it is given.

You of course can choose to ignore anything not obviously explicable by science, but there's no reason philosophy should.

What I will ignore is bad philosophy which decides to re-invent the rules for what counts as a scientific explanation without giving good reasons for doing so.

A scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is one that describes what physically happens and why, tracing casual connections in a system from beginning to end. Then it is done. So a scientific explanation of a mental state will be one which traces all the causal pathways from brain events to the motor events subjects use to describe what their experiences are like. That's it.

No, that is not an explanation of a mental state. It is an explanation of a physical system. The observations you describe will predict how that system will behave; it won't tell us a thing about what that system experiences --- what it senses and feels, or if it feels anything at all.

Perhaps we need a reminder of what an explanation --- scientific or otherwise --- is. It is, in short, a set of propositions relating a phenomenon or event --- an effect --- to some antecedent complex or sequence of phenomena or events, its causes. Any such set of propositions is a theory of that phenomenon. A theory explains the phenomenon in question if, and only if, it allows us to reliably predict that effect from the given antecedent phenomenon.

A neurophysiological explanation of consciousness will allow us to predict that biological systems of a certain design will manifest the behavioral indicators of consciousness, but it won't allow us to predict what any particular physical stimulus will feel like to the stimulated system, or whether it will feel anything at all. E.g., it won't allow Mary, or us, to predict what red will look like when she leaves her black & white room, or what cinnamon will taste like to someone other than ourselves. That is the "explanatory gap."

Now there is an inductive leap involved here --- we cannot possibly doubt that we ourselves experience a distinct, unique sensation when our optic nerves deliver signals to our brains indicating light reflected from a red rose is stimulating them, or when a certain complex of chemicals excites our gustatory and olfactory nerves. But we can rationally doubt that other people also experience something (roughly) similar when similarly stimulated. Nonetheless, we confidently assume they do.

If they do, then we have a universal effect manifested by physical systems of a certain design which no theory of neurophysiology can fully explain --- because it cannot predict those effects, which are not identical to physiological events we are pretty confident are their causes (at least, not without inventing some eclectic and undefined meaning of "identity").

[Atla]

How can you tell based on a third person perspective, that pain actually feels like anything, or that chocolate actually tastes like anything? How can you infer that based on the observed activity of nerves and brain areas?

By studying the brains of thousands of very different subjects as they describe various sorts of experiences, finding out what causal pathways lead from stimuli to brain activity, to motor outputs, and looking for commonalities among all subjects and the reports they make of their experiences. Once a rich data set is collected of this sort of thing, we will reach a point where scientists would be a to tell from a brain scan whether a subject is (for example) tasting chocolate versus kimchi, to what kind of chocolate they are tasting and how spicy the kimchi is. We can already, in primitive form, do something like this right now.

That still leaves a lot out, though--but for reasons that a pragmatic and not metaphysical. For instance, your tasting of kimchi might trigger very personal memories of, for example, a really bad date you went on where you first ate the stuff. This will make your experience different in ways that would be impossible for this kind of scientific project to detect.

Sure, but how can you tell that those feels and tastes that the subjects describe, actually exist? How does science measure experience itself?

[Pattern-chaser]

Obviously proof and disproof aren't about absolute certainty, absolute certainty is for the delusional.

Going by your final six words. I think we agree pretty closely.

Ok, so: dualistic philosophy, separateness, 'thing'-ness etc. were pretty much refuted.
Well, one can still come up with pretty insane ideas without evidence, to make dualistic philosophy work. And one can say that separateness was only partially refuted, or that its refutation is inherently circular. The idea of 'thing'-ness, and the subject/object dichotomy, were so thorougly beaten into oblivion though that it's not even funny.

No, "refuted" means "disproven", and these things have not been proven or disproven. And "proven" - unqualified; without context - does give us "absolute certainty", although the prefix is approaching overkill. Things like dualism lost the consensus, and most of us accepted and agreed that dualism is not a great way of looking at things. This is the way our conclusions are differently-expressed once we accept that certainty is a dream. So we do agree, but I still prefer a more honest way of expressing and acknowledging the more, er, tentative nature of what we actually know. Nothing was "beaten into oblivion" - we have abandoned certainty as a bad idea, yes? But we have managed to select certain ideas over others because they're more useful, a state that could change in the future, as science does when new data becomes available. For now, we know of no useful application for dualistic ideas; can we agree on that? I think we can.

[Atla]

No, "refuted" means "disproven", and these things have not been proven or disproven. And "proven" - unqualified; without context - does give us "absolute certainty", although the prefix is approaching overkill. Things like dualism lost the consensus, and most of us accepted and agreed that dualism is not a great way of looking at things. This is the way our conclusions are differently-expressed once we accept that certainty is a dream. So we do agree, but I still prefer a more honest way of expressing and acknowledging the more, er, tentative nature of what we actually know. Nothing was "beaten into oblivion" - we have abandoned certainty as a bad idea, yes? But we have managed to select certain ideas over others because they're more useful, a state that could change in the future, as science does when new data becomes available. For now, we know of no useful application for dualistic ideas; can we agree on that? I think we can.

"Proven" unqualified doesn't give us "absolute certainty" in any intelligent conversation, I'd say claiming that it does, merely insults people's intelligence.

The other problem is that you seem to have very little idea about some of the more recent scientific discoveries, which had major implications for philosophy. I'd say 90%+ of people on philosophy forums have very little idea, so that's a common issue. By disproven/refuted I did mean disproven/refuted (no absolute certainty talk), but we could start at least 5 more topics based on the few things a listed, and there's more.

[GE Morton]

It’s like making a big deal out of the way a stream looks like from a helicopter hundreds of meters in the air and what it looks like as you are knocked off your feet once you personally step into its current.

No, it isn't. That is a perspectival difference. Differences due to perspective --- looking at a given phenomena from different viewpoints --- are transformable into one another by simple algorithms or methods. E.g., you can perceive the stream from your latter viewpoint by jumping out of the helicopter into the stream. No such method is available for transforming the sensations experienced by Alfie when presented with a certain sensory stimulus into observations Bruno might make of Alfie's brain while that is happening. There is no way for Bruno to put himself in Alfie's position, to see what Alfie is seeing at that moment, as there is with your helicopter observer. Calling that difference a "difference in perspective" is perhaps a convenient and comforting analysis of the problem, but it is incorrect. It is hand-waving.

You're right that's what's important for how we function day to day. And we understand utility based accounts, that's not a problem. Philosophy shouldn't be parochial and ignore questions which aren't immediately useful. Or easy. And say we came to discover our personal experience is not specific substrate dependant, we might be able to discard our mortal bodies, that looks important! Or when we develop AI which passes the Turing Test, it will be important to know if it genuinely has experience in terms of how we treat it. If panpsychism is true it will revolutionise our relationship with the world. There are plenty of ways that understanding experience is important too.

I'm a bit mystified by your apparent attraction to panpsychism. First, I'm not sure why you might think it even counts as an explanation for mental phenomena, that it solves the "Hard Problem." How does "everything has experience" explain why Alfie has experience? Panpsychism enlarges the problem; it doesn't solve it.

And, of course, that theory, which entails predictions that are unconfirmable and unfalsifiable, is vacuous, as devoid of explanatory power as "goddidit."

What attracts you to it?

[Gertie]

GE

I just don't have a bias against panpsychism. I suspect our attraction to monism might be more about us than the way the universe necessarily has to be. Monism is tidy, and unity is 'elegant' and satisfying, but maybe it's just us bringing those type of criteria to the table.

Then there's the Hard Problem. If experience is fundamental its existence and nature doesn't need explaining (except in terms of why is there something rather than nothing). What is still left unexplained is the details of the mind-body relationship, but with panpsychism perhaps a science of consciousness becomes potentially doable, like IIT is trying to come up with.

I don't write off Atla's monist Idealism position either, if we're going for monism why not go with the substance we directly know exists, rather than go with the substance it presents as a representative model? It's a fair point.


Basically my position is we don't know enough to claim we can have an answer. So I'm very open-minded in principle, but very sceptical of any specific claim. Saying ''I don't know'' is the only justifiable current position imo, when no one claim can answer the basic question ''How can you know?''. As we know more I suspect the direction of travel will be away from materialism as we currently think of it. QM is the latest paradigmatic shift which challenges us to re-think the underlying fundamental nature of reality, who knows what is still unknown.

You rightly point out the best we're likely to achieve is a model (our perceptual and cognitive toolkit is limited and flawed, and QM challenges even our notion of basic logic as reliable). The map-territory problem is perhaps only strictly escapable ultimately in an unsatisfying solipsism. But we should still strive for better maps and philosophically examine their strengths and weaknesses. Currently I think philosophy of mind is mostly stuck brainstorming the problem with whole cloth 'What Ifs...' It's the next step (comparing/weighing/testing/even criteria for consensus) which the nature of the problem makes trickier.

Monist materialism as described by physics seems to have hit an impasse with experience, the Hard Problem is real regardless of your preferred explanation. It might be an opportunity to re-think the map. Deciding/testing how to update the map is the problem. Either experience is reducible (or otherwise explainable) in terms of materialism or it isn't. So far at least it demonstrably isn't. I don't think neuroscience or AI will give us that answer for reasons I've mentioned before, but we should keep trying and see what happens.

What bugs me is people claiming to know an answer they clearly can't know. That's what smacks of ideology to me. You at least understand the problems and go beyond one sentence 'explanations', and that turns out to be ridiculously rare for a philosophy board.