GE Morton wrote: ↑September 13th, 2020, 7:01 pm
GE Morton » Today, 12:01 am
Terrapin Station wrote: ↑Yesterday, 6:21 pm
For some reason, by the way, GE, you appear to be unable to grasp the difference of "observational circumstances" of first person/being x and third person/viewing x as something other than being x.
I have utterly no idea what you're trying to say there. Do you?
I think this is a damned difficult topic. GEM I’m not sure you are wrong but I have some doubts all the same. I lean towards a particular version of identity theory, (embodied identity theory), so I think I broadly agree with TS, but I’ve not yet completely fallen over. I am not sure whether detailed description of the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness is needed to resolve matters as you suggest. (Given my limited understanding of biology you may guess I am hoping not). And I note that private experience is increasingly open to objective, scientific scrutiny. Let me share my thinking and see what you think. I suspect we have some areas of agreement and some of disagreement.
Firstly, the effects of some drugs, brain injuries, sleep, dreaming and brain scans etc. suggest that perceptual, cognitive and affective states are linked with brain processes, and experiment suggests a direct link. Change the brain and you can change the experience and vice versa. I think this gives identity theory some plausibility.
A concern is that objective accounts of an experience may fail to capture the subjective nature of the experience. The subjective appears to be something extra that needs explaining. But as has been pointed out, if consciousness is identical to a brain state then brain processes do not generate or produce consciousness, they are consciousness (and vice versa). If X generates Y it is not identical to Y. In your example GEM, if bees or the things that they do generate honey, then bees or the things they do are not honey. But identity is symmetrical and if consciousness is a brain process, it is not an extra property. There is no new thing to look for. (Gertie, your point about a homunculus is well taken).
The claim, then, is that some objective events are identical to some subjective events. The fact that there are different ways of encountering a thing does not necessarily mean we are encountering different things. A thing may be encountered subjectively as lived experience, or objectively as when observed by another. Note that, in viewing consciousness as a brain process, mentality is not somehow eliminated by the analysis as some have argued. We are not left with just the objective physical description of events. The physical process is also a mental event. A difficulty is that some argument will not allow analysis involving anything other than the comparison of objective physical events even though (as I think you recognise) this may be inadequate to the task in hand. In other words I am concerned that, for some, identity is only permitted to be established by observed similar properties from an objective POV, and this will not allow, by definition almost, a different POV (e.g. one allowing that subjective experience could be identical to objective experience), simply on the grounds that the two perspectives are different. I think that may be question begging and while such out of hand rejection is understandable, it may not be right. I will accept that the proposed identity may not be right, but it still seems possible, and to me likely, that it is right.
The brain may be modelling the external world, but identity theory proposes that this modelling just is the processing being done by the brain, not some extra epiphenomenal thing. An external observer using a scanner to watch your brain working cannot experience what your brain is experiencing, since they can only experience what their own brain is experiencing. But this just is what it means to have different perspectives. So the suggestion is that the issue is effectively one of different perspectives, rather than different substances. Here I find myself agreeing, I believe, with TS. We can engage with a thing perceptually (subjective experience) or consider/observe how we do this (objective description). Of course considering something objectively is itself a subjective experience. A complaint is that they are just too different to be the same thing. But the whole point is that different perspectives just are different. The inside of your house does not look like the outside of your house, but it is your house all the same (assuming you have one).
If this works then there seems nothing missing here. Some say you can’t see a thought. But by this view you can, though you can only directly experience your own. This does allow that a clever external observer may be able to decode brain activity, and tell what the thought or subjective experience is likely to be, and researchers are making progress here. I have read that currently, decoding of information gained by brain scans enables researchers to determine what playing card someone is holding with better than 90% accuracy, and it is thought that in the future brain decoding will be capable of extracting information an investigator might want, such as the encryption code to a file or the combination to a safe.
We may still ask how it comes to be that some physical events can be mental ones. It is a fair question. I think a reasonable inference is that this is linked to the nature and complexity of the events in question. It seems not unreasonable to argue that organisms have evolved to have a perspective and this is tied to what they do in living their lives. Subjective experience is an evolved feature that can be explained by the biological history of the organism.
How do we decide on identity? Well, are we justified in saying (in time honoured tradition) that the morning star is the same as the evening star? Even without powerful telescopes, when we examine where and when we encounter these two things it seems we are (something recognised it seems even in ancient Sumeria). And again, we may ask whether these two things, the physical and mental, are the same thing. Again, we answer by looking at how we encounter these things, and the evidence and reasoning outlined above seems to me to justify the view that they probably are. We may not know or fully understand why or how Venus comes to have the properties it has, and we may not know why and how brains come to have the properties they have, but arguably that is a separate issue to any putative matters of identity.
To play with your thought experiment, it seems possible that if we are looking at a screen showing our brain activity while looking at the screen, it may be an example whereby both the objective and subjective can be objectively seen to coincide. Flash up a red square, a blue triangle, a green circle or whatever and see the changes in brain activity that result. This would seem to support mind-brain identity. Or again, imagine you are in a house looking at a screen showing the outside of the house. You doubt the house on the screen is the same as the one you are sitting in because it looks different from the outside. But you see on the screen someone walk up to the house and start chucking bricks through the windows. At the same time a brick smashes a window on screen, a corresponding window in the house you are sitting in is smashed by a flying brick. You would probably conclude the house you were in was the same as the house on the screen, and you would be unlikely to argue that it couldn’t be because you don’t know how to build a house.
And I am conscious I have waffled on about a topic I find quite difficult. The waffling reflects the difficulty I am having no doubt. Apologies.