Philosophy Discussion Forums

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 5th, 2020, 11:11 am

evolution wrote: ↑September 5th, 2020, 11:08 am But you write considerable amounts as though you KNOW about things objectively.

Sure, as if I know what the deal is about a lot of objective things. And indeed that's the case. What's the issue?

You are mostly WRONG.

evolution wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:00 am

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 5th, 2020, 11:11 am
Sure, as if I know what the deal is about a lot of objective things. And indeed that's the case. What's the issue?

You are mostly WRONG.

I think I'm right, you think I'm wrong. You think you're right, I think you're wrong. You're not just figuring this out now, are you?

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:05 am

evolution wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:00 am

You are mostly WRONG.

I think I'm right, you think I'm wrong.

ONCE AGAIN, you are COMPLETELY and UTTERLY WRONG.

When will you STOP ASSUMING and BEING SO continuously WRONG?

Most of the time I do NOT 'think' you are wrong. I KNOW you are WRONG.

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 5th, 2020, 11:25 am You think you're right, I think you're wrong. You're not just figuring this out now, are you?

But the difference is I can PROVE when you are WRONG. BUT, you can NOT do the same with 'Me'.

(It's been 7 pages since this first appeared and it was only the day before yesterday. This topic is nothing if not popular.)

Pattern-chaser wrote:Does anyone have anything to say "on the absurd hegemony of science", or has that discussion finished now?

If science did achieve hegemony, I wonder who the president/emperor/prime minister/duce should be. I wonder how things would go if an attempt to rule purely according to scientific principles were made. Would it be like when Spock has to take over as captain and things quickly go pear-shaped because he lacks the necessary interpersonal skills?

evolution wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:18 am Most of the time I do NOT 'think' you are wrong. I KNOW you are WRONG.

Knowing that P is a matter of believing (where the belief is justified and true) that P. Belief is a type of thought.

So if one knows that P, one thinks that P.

Re evolution, I'm well aware that you like to believe that you have no beliefs, by the way.

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 8:23 am Does anyone have anything to say "on the absurd hegemony of science", or has that discussion finished now?

I guess my original point about Dennett was, that qualia eliminativism is one of the most absurd ideas of all time though. A good example of what can happen when people (want to) confuse scientific third-person-view instrumentalism with fundamental ontology.

There is no fundamental ontology without qualia playing a central role in it. Phenomenology however seems to take it into the opposite absurd extreme. The answers lie in between.

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:41 am

evolution wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:18 am Most of the time I do NOT 'think' you are wrong. I KNOW you are WRONG.

Knowing that P is a matter of believing (where the belief is justified and true) that P. Belief is a type of thought.

So if one knows that P, one thinks that P.

SEE, from my perspective, you are just completely and utterly WRONG, AGAIN.

Knowing that P is NOT NECESSARILY a matter of 'believing' ANY thing at all.

If I KNOW some thing, then I KNOW it. And, I do NOT 'have to' believe it.

There is also a very strong distinction between 'thinking' P, or some thing, and 'knowing' P, or some thing. Obviously. This is WHY there are two distinct different words, with distinctively different definitions, and/or meanings.

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 10:52 am Re evolution, I'm well aware that you like to believe that you have no beliefs, by the way.

But I JUST have NO beliefs.

You just ASSUME and/or BELIEVE otherwise, correct?

Atla wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 11:02 am

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 8:23 am Does anyone have anything to say "on the absurd hegemony of science", or has that discussion finished now?

I guess my original point about Dennett was, that qualia eliminativism is one of the most absurd ideas of all time though. A good example of what can happen when people (want to) confuse scientific third-person-view instrumentalism with fundamental ontology.

There is no fundamental ontology without qualia playing a central role in it. Phenomenology however seems to take it into the opposite absurd extreme. The answers lie in between.

That is the 'true' answers 'lie' in between.

evolution wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 11:11 am If I KNOW some thing, then I KNOW it.

Is that your philosophical analysis of what knowledge is?

Atla wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 11:02 am There is no fundamental ontology without qualia playing a central role in it.

Then I guess fundamental ontology must be a bogus as qualia, if that is the case.

But it isn't. Those of us who think qualia are a silly idea only philosophers would invent can do just fine in other areas of philosophy, including ontology.

GE

OK. So what does it mean to say neurons, chemicals, etc present that model they've produced to themselves?

I don't think I said (quite) that. I said that brains create a virtrual model of the organism of which it is a part, including itself, and of the environment in which it finds itself. That model becomes the subjective "me" and the external world as perceived.

Yes I understood that part. I'm still confused about the final part of the process, how this model is 'presented' to the brain/consciousness or somesuch.

If the model is a product of the brain, a separate thing like steam from a train, how is the brain 'aware' of its contents? Or how does the model 'present itself' to the brain? The model/product is what's made of the seeing and thinking experiencing stuff, right? So the physical brain isn't 'looking' at the experiential product like a little homunculus in a Cartesian theatre - Dennett rightly dismisses that. So how does the communication from the experiential model back to the model maker brain work, in order to take the appropriate physical action?

Well that would depend on whether that recreates the necessary and sufficient conditions for experiential states to manifest, and while we know brains have them, we don't know what those conditions are. They might be substrate dependent (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestra ... %20neurons. ).

Heh. I've read Penrose's Emperor's New Mind. A thought-provoking book, but the theory is so speculative and so dependent upon controversial quantum theoretical phenomena that it is not likely to spur much interest any time soon. It can't be ruled out, of course, but the solution is probably much simpler.

I've tried to watch some of his talks, waaay over my head. But I have a hunch that if anybody's going to crack this it will be somebody with the scientific chops and open-mindedness of a Penrose.

The point re multiple realisability stands tho - if you don't have an explanation which covers basics like necessary and sufficient conditions, how do you know you're not missing something necessary which is a feature of biological brains, their chemistry and so on. Simply including the model maker in the model, and copying functional processes and dynamic complex patterns of interactions might not be enough.

Right. And when Dennett says we have to talk about consciousness in functional terms, he's saying he can't explain it any other way. And I think that's because of what Chalmers calls The Hard Problem, which Dennett denies exists. Or ''dissolves'' - which I suppose it does if you ignore it. How can you be a materialist which is an ontological account rooted in matter and the smaller bits of matter it's reducible to, and just ignore the biggest problem this raises re experience...

I agree. That "Hard Problem" is real,


but the solution is (fairly) simple, and does not require dualism or mysticism. At the same time, some aspects of it will be permanently inexplicable --- even if we invent an AI system that passes the Turing test.

And the solution is??

I don't find the functional approach to phenomenal consciousness satisfactory. It might or might not work to produce an experiencing machine, but it'll be by immitating certain functional features of a known experiencing system (brains), not by explaining it in the way reductionism might. Hence the problem of how to test AI for phenomenal experience - we won't know if reproducing that model making function has captured the necessary and sufficient conditions for experiencing. We might only have created a machine which is very good at mimicking experiential states, and is incapable of understanding and correctly answering questions about feelings, thinking, seeing, etc. We should still def be trying it to see what happens of course, it's a possible practical way forward.

You have to keep in mind that those questions you would ask of the "experience machine" apply just as well to humans. I can only know that you are a conscious creature, a "thinking machine," via your behavior. I have no more access to your "inner world" than I would of that machine. That is just the nature of the beast --- the subjective experience of a conscious system, biological or electronic, will be intrinsically, impenetrably private. We can only impute inner phenomena to it by inferences from its behavior.

Not only from behaviour, also self reports, and crucially here, inference from analogy.

I can assume that you're a conscious being not only from your observable behaviour and self-reports - the tests we can also hope to apply to AI. But also from analogy based on our physical similarity. We're made of the same observable stuff and processes, with some minor variations. So it's reasonable to assume that if I'm conscious, you are too. We don't know if AI will capture the necessary conditions for experience, because we don't know if any are located in the shared biological substrate you and I have. (And if it does, we can't be sure we'd recognise it if the particular nature of substrates play a role in the particular nature of experience).

Atla wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 1:01 am
Electromagnetic fields are physical and analyzable.

Analyzable, yes. Physical? Sort of. "Fields" (gravitational, magnetic, electrical) are all theoretical constructs invented to explain various types of action-at-a-distance (e.g., the ability of a magnet to move a body some distance away from it). We can't see, touch, or measure any of those fields directly; we can only observe and measure the effects they are invoked to explain. They are pretty ephemeral.

So that would mean that the model is in fact physically identical to a part of the brain.

Well, you can call an effect of a process a part of the processing mechanism if you wish, but that would be somewhat unconventional. I don't think the Earth's magnetic or gravitational fields are treated as part of the planet in most geology texts. Those would be covered in astronomy or physics texts.

If you want to start working on the Hard problem, you first have to discard ideas that probably don't work. Strong emergence is a good example of it, here we pretend that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, in short it's a scientifically accepted version of magic. We are still at square one, trying to bridge the explanatory gap, and we are still fully involved in dualism, we simply convince ourselves that we aren't.

I share your sentiments there, and your skepticism of "emergence." It sounds very much like a "just so" story, and like magic.

But we need to grasp what makes the Hard Problem hard. It is hard because the phenomena we are trying to explain is intrinsically subjective and private. That means that scientific method, as usually understood, is inapplicable to it and impotent to solve it. Scientific method presupposes, and depends upon, publicly observable phenomena, things we can describe in publicly verifiable ways using terms with agreed upon meanings, things within our common experience which we can weigh, measure, manipulate, analyze, compare with other things, things for which we can obtain repeatable, consistent answers to the questions we pose about them. In short, science is a public methodology for investigating public phenomena.

So the problem is more severe than mere irreducibility; it defies the fundamental assumptions and prerequisites of science itself. How can we explain a phenomenon we cannot observe or describe objectively, cannot measure or analyze, from known scientific facts or principles, or derive it from them?

Yet "mental" phenomena --- thoughts, impressions, feelings, qualia, ideas, knowledge, etc., etc. --- are undeniable; we all experience them (strictly speaking, we only experience our own mental phenomena, but we assume that other creatures do as well), and we talk about those phenomena, meaningfully, all the time. And being inquisitive creatures we're driven to try to explain them.

So what to do?

The best we can do, I think, is a functional explanation. We can investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness to appear --- we can handle that scientifically; we know quite a bit about that. But just how and why those conditions produce that effect will forever remain an unanswerable question. We can, somewhat wistfully or metaphorically, describe it as a field effect, an emergent effect, or just magic. But we'll have to accept it as "brute fact."

It will not be the only "brute fact" we're forced to accept without explanation. We can't explain why a particular radium atom fissions at a certain time; we can't explain why the speed of light is C; we can't explain why the Big Bang happened (if it did).

There is another interesting reason for supposing that consciousness will never be fully explicable scientifically. Our scientific understanding of ourselves and the universe is a conceptual model we have created. But no system can completely model itself, or anything larger than itself. That would require a system larger than the system to be modeled.

Just some thoughts.

Gertie wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 3:13 pm
Yes I understood that part. I'm still confused about the final part of the process, how this model is 'presented' to the brain/consciousness or somesuch.

If the model is a product of the brain, a separate thing like steam from a train, how is the brain 'aware' of its contents? Or how does the model 'present itself' to the brain? The model/product is what's made of the seeing and thinking experiencing stuff, right? So the physical brain isn't 'looking' at the experiential product like a little homunculus in a Cartesian theatre - Dennett rightly dismisses that. So how does the communication from the experiential model back to the model maker brain work, in order to take the appropriate physical action?

More later, but see response to Alta below.