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

[Faustus5]

We've known this for a long, long time and didn't need to be told by scientists that this was the case. It was never a scientific discovery.
{/quote]
Your ignorance is astounding

Your doubt is only based on your ignorance.
Are you a flat earther too?
Educate yourself and come back.

Get a life

I guess I was right after all. Thanks for confirming I was right to be suspicious of your claims, since you can't or won't back them up.

To wit:

Peirce was a philosopher, not a scientist.

Qualia were invented in a paper that was philosophical by nature, not scientific (i.e., it referenced no studies, no experiments, contained no detailed anatomical claims, etc.).

I am happy to be corrected, but childish accusations of ignorance not backed with any attempt at scholarship are essentially self-refuting.

[Sculptor1]

Peirce was a philosopher, not a scientist.

Let's face it . You did not have a clue how the concept of qualia came about. When I informed you, you got defensive.
Peirce was a scientist, and like all the best most interesting scientists, they all have an interest in the philosophical implications of their scientific work.
Science is after all natural philosophy.

Grow up.

[Faustus5]

Peirce was a philosopher, not a scientist.

Let's face it . You did not have a clue how the concept of qualia came about. When I informed you, you got defensive.
Peirce was a scientist, and like all the best most interesting scientists, they all have an interest in the philosophical implications of their scientific work.
Science is after all natural philosophy.

Grow up.

What scientific contributions did Peirce make to his field of science? What field was it?

What scientific studies, experiments, or anatomical discussions occurred in the paper by him which mention qualia for the first time?

By the way, it's perfectly okay for qualia to be a non-scientific concept first articulated in a philosophical paper. I don't know why you are so desperate to misrepresent the history of this term. Must be filling some sort of weird need.

[Sculptor1]

Let's face it . You did not have a clue how the concept of qualia came about. When I informed you, you got defensive.
Peirce was a scientist, and like all the best most interesting scientists, they all have an interest in the philosophical implications of their scientific work.
Science is after all natural philosophy.

Grow up.

What scientific contributions did Peirce make to his field of science? What field was it?

Do your own reading.
Like I said above. Educate yourself,

[Gertie]

Woss

I think you have the nub of the problem. My concern is that the criteria for identity you prefer just will not do here. They work well, perhaps, where we compare two objective viewpoints. I don’t think it can work for the subjective / objective identity of the kind I’m suggesting. If we hold to those criteria, (and you do and welcome), I think the answer always comes out that mind and brain are separate things. If we declare those criteria inadequate or inappropriate then a resolution of the kind I suggest may be possible. You pays your money as they say. I see no further resolution so I will hold to my viewpoint (but your argument is not lost on me and I repeat, I am not certain of matters in this area). Thank you, also, for your considered reply.

A Physicalist Identity Theory which has to ignore physics and how we understand identity has a lot of explaining to do.

As a wholecloth ''What if...'' hypothesis it's very appealing, it solves the problem at a stroke. But as with many of these What If hypotheses and Isms, once you start to ask how it works, how it explains experience rather than how it characterises it, you hit problems. Or rather the Hard Problem.

The perspective based approach notes there are different perspectives because experiential states exist. It analogises from objects appearing differently to an observer depending on their physical relationship, which we understand. But it doesn't address the Hard Problem - how and why does experience manifest.

An explanation of that should be able to tell us if rocks experience, for example. Because it would tell us if this first person 'what it's like' perspective is present in all objects, or just some. If just some, why just some. Or it might tell us it's something about the relational interaction between objects which somehow results in experience, or whatever. But it's not an explanation, so it doesn't tell us anything of the how (the Hard Problem), which is the mystery we are trying to answer.

[Atla]

As for the Hard problem, you have to turn it inside out to 'resolve' it. They always try to figure out how experience arises from something as fundamental as physical stuff. But it's experience that's fundamental, and the idea of physical stuff occurs within it. Our idea of physical stuff is also a qualia, an experience.

Physical stuff is simply a cognitive overlay, a map consisting of 'things', like protons and fields. We use this map to talk about the terrain. But the terrain is actually void of 'things', 'thing'-ness is a feature of human thinking.

Imo physical stuff is maybe best thought of as a structural description of the world. But a structural description of the world is not the world itself, that's why the Hard problem is kinda silly. Also, that's why it's insufficient to simply say that the spatio-temporal coordinates are different, when trying to solve the Hard problem.

[Steve3007]

viewtopic.php?p=367159#p367159
This is an interesting post but I can't quite get a handle on what to say about it yet. So I'm going to mark it here for now and hopefully return to it.

[Wossname]

y Gertie » Today, 8:02 pm

A Physicalist Identity Theory which has to ignore physics and how we understand identity has a lot of explaining to do.

As a wholecloth ''What if...'' hypothesis it's very appealing, it solves the problem at a stroke. But as with many of these What If hypotheses and Isms, once you start to ask how it works, how it explains experience rather than how it characterises it, you hit problems. Or rather the Hard Problem.

The perspective based approach notes there are different perspectives because experiential states exist. It analogises from objects appearing differently to an observer depending on their physical relationship, which we understand. But it doesn't address the Hard Problem - how and why does experience manifest.

An explanation of that should be able to tell us if rocks experience, for example. Because it would tell us if this first person 'what it's like' perspective is present in all objects, or just some. If just some, why just some. Or it might tell us it's something about the relational interaction between objects which somehow results in experience, or whatever. But it's not an explanation, so it doesn't tell us anything of the how (the Hard Problem), which is the mystery we are trying to answer.

I don’t have an answer to the hard problem. I have never claimed to. I hear your dissatisfaction, and I share it, but I am not sure your criticism of identity theory is entirely fair.

Let me say at the outset that I don’t write off Panpsychism, but it goes beyond what we have evidence for (I think) and just offers another mystery. I’ve not had time to check Atla’s links yet. (Thanks though Atla. For now I’ll run with and explain my worldview, but I am not knocking yours).

So - we know some physical things are conscious. It does not seem (to me at the moment) all physical things are. Consciousness seems linked to life and it seems likely that life may well have evolved to be this way. How did it manage to do it? Dunno. But it is the case that consciousness provides two perspectives (inside/subjective, and outside/objective), these do exist and these are fundamentally different just by virtue of being different perspectives. So I don’t accept that physics is ignored. Rather it would seem a mistake to view this as an unbridgeable gap because of physics when the physics may not be the problem, the limits of the potentialities of matter are unknown, we have barely scratched the surface in our understanding of what brains do, and the evidence is that it is possible (brains have mentality) it’s just we don’t know how it is done.

I agree there’s stuff we don’t know, but that does not mean it can’t be this way, it appears in fact that it is this way, all theories run up against the hard problem, but some seem to multiply problems which does not seem very helpful. So I’m running with it as a preferred option. Perception is what animals do. No-one fully understands how they do it, but that is not a bar to identity theory. What organisms perceive, the methods they use and the value they attach to the perceived information seems linked to their particular evolutionary niche, and so embodied identity theory seems a viable bet. It explains important aspects of conscious experience. And in this theory rocks do not have consciousness because there is no need for such an evolutionary development in rocks. And there is no evidence rocks do have it (I say).

I am not dissing any other views. My preferred option has a problem, agreed, but its problems are no bigger than any other and I think they are probably less than most. So no, the theory has not solved the hard problem, and nor should it claim to. But that does not, I would argue, invalidate the theory. I’ve opted for what seems to me the most likely explanation. I accept I may have it wrong. I’m not sure I trust any claims to certainty here.

[Terrapin Station]

Mary's room, by the way, however we started talking about that, is a rather stupid thought experiment. On the view that qualia are physical phenomena (which is the view I and many others share) it's not possible for Mary to gain all physical knowledge of color without experiencing color.

The theory stipulates that she "knows all there is to know about neurology and the physics of light" EXCEPT what what a perception of color "looks like." That exception is built into the scenario, the point of which is to ask whether she can derive that information from the other knowledge she has.

At any rate, the notion that any set of propositions captures everything about any particular other phenomena, no matter how simple, is absurd as well, and shows a lack of analyzing what propositions are, what their relationship to other things is, and how that relationship works.

There is no claim that she "knows everything about" the subject matter. The claim is that she knows "all there is to know," i.e., what is generally known by experts in those fields (except what a color percept "looks like"); that she is herself an expert in those fields.

BTW, being an expert doesn't require knowledge by acquaintance of the subject matter. E.g., a physician doesn't have to be a cancer victim to be an expert oncologist.

Your complaint is pettifoggery.

The thought experiment says, " She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. "

Or in other words, "Mary has all the physical information concerning human color vision before her release."

(See https://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/JacksonfromJStore.pdf and/or https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/)

If qualia are physical, which is what my side is proposing, then in absence of experiencing color qualia, it's necessarily not the case that one has all the physical information there is to obtain, or that one has all the physical information concerning human color vision.

The thought experiment is idiotic.

[Gertie]

Atla

As for the Hard problem, you have to turn it inside out to 'resolve' it. They always try to figure out how experience arises from something as fundamental as physical stuff. But it's experience that's fundamental, and the idea of physical stuff occurs within it. Our idea of physical stuff is also a qualia, an experience.

Right, if experience is fundamental, how it is explained ends there.

Physical stuff is simply a cognitive overlay, a map consisting of 'things', like protons and fields. We use this map to talk about the terrain. But the terrain is actually void of 'things', 'thing'-ness is a feature of human thinking.

Imo physical stuff is maybe best thought of as a structural description of the world. But a structural description of the world is not the world itself, that's why the Hard problem is kinda silly. Also, that's why it's insufficient to simply say that the spatio-temporal coordinates are different, when trying to solve the Hard problem.

I agree that gets us out of the Hard Problem as we talk about it, and is a coherent hypothesis.

The problem I think it presents, is that everything we claim to be able to know inter-subjectively (which gets us out of solipsism), is rooted in treating the physical map as the territory. The model of the material world (which we know is at best flawed and limited) is the context where we can meet and talk and compare notes about what it's like to see a red apple and so on.

And I don't see a route to being able to know if the explanation that all that exists is this 'field of experience' (as I imagine it) is correct? Maybe IIT can discover the mathematical dimension where it exists, or QM come up with something... I don't think meditation or self-reflection is reliable evidence that only experience exists, because those can always (I think) be correlated with brain states - if some eperiential state definitively can't, then that's whole new ball game.

It's the same old prob imo - how can we know?

[Gertie]

y Gertie » Today, 8:02 pm

A Physicalist Identity Theory which has to ignore physics and how we understand identity has a lot of explaining to do.

As a wholecloth ''What if...'' hypothesis it's very appealing, it solves the problem at a stroke. But as with many of these What If hypotheses and Isms, once you start to ask how it works, how it explains experience rather than how it characterises it, you hit problems. Or rather the Hard Problem.

The perspective based approach notes there are different perspectives because experiential states exist. It analogises from objects appearing differently to an observer depending on their physical relationship, which we understand. But it doesn't address the Hard Problem - how and why does experience manifest.

An explanation of that should be able to tell us if rocks experience, for example. Because it would tell us if this first person 'what it's like' perspective is present in all objects, or just some. If just some, why just some. Or it might tell us it's something about the relational interaction between objects which somehow results in experience, or whatever. But it's not an explanation, so it doesn't tell us anything of the how (the Hard Problem), which is the mystery we are trying to answer.

I don’t have an answer to the hard problem. I have never claimed to. I hear your dissatisfaction, and I share it, but I am not sure your criticism of identity theory is entirely fair.

Let me say at the outset that I don’t write off Panpsychism, but it goes beyond what we have evidence for (I think) and just offers another mystery. I’ve not had time to check Atla’s links yet. (Thanks though Atla. For now I’ll run with and explain my worldview, but I am not knocking yours).

So - we know some physical things are conscious. It does not seem (to me at the moment) all physical things are. Consciousness seems linked to life and it seems likely that life may well have evolved to be this way. How did it manage to do it? Dunno. But it is the case that consciousness provides two perspectives (inside/subjective, and outside/objective), these do exist and these are fundamentally different just by virtue of being different perspectives. So I don’t accept that physics is ignored. Rather it would seem a mistake to view this as an unbridgeable gap because of physics when the physics may not be the problem, the limits of the potentialities of matter are unknown, we have barely scratched the surface in our understanding of what brains do, and the evidence is that it is possible (brains have mentality) it’s just we don’t know how it is done.

I agree there’s stuff we don’t know, but that does not mean it can’t be this way, it appears in fact that it is this way, all theories run up against the hard problem, but some seem to multiply problems which does not seem very helpful. So I’m running with it as a preferred option. Perception is what animals do. No-one fully understands how they do it, but that is not a bar to identity theory. What organisms perceive, the methods they use and the value they attach to the perceived information seems linked to their particular evolutionary niche, and so embodied identity theory seems a viable bet. It explains important aspects of conscious experience. And in this theory rocks do not have consciousness because there is no need for such an evolutionary development in rocks. And there is no evidence rocks do have it (I say).

I am not dissing any other views. My preferred option has a problem, agreed, but its problems are no bigger than any other and I think they are probably less than most. So no, the theory has not solved the hard problem, and nor should it claim to. But that does not, I would argue, invalidate the theory. I’ve opted for what seems to me the most likely explanation. I accept I may have it wrong. I’m not sure I trust any claims to certainty here.

I'm fine with all of that. My personal mission is to challenge anybody who says they know the answer.

What I'd query here is how we can reasonably come to a preference for the best explanation?

What sort of criteria are appropriate, and why? That seems like something philosophy potentially can come to a consensus on (or maybe not). At the moment there's not even agreement on what wholecloth hypothesis we should be attempting to falsify, it's more akin to lots of ideas competing for likes, this one or that coming into and out of fashion.

[Terrapin Station]

Right, if experience is fundamental, how it is explained ends there.

On the presumption claiming something as fundamental is sufficient as an explanation, but then we have the problem of needing to explain everything that we didn't say was fundamental, and we still have the need to address what counts as an explanation, why it counts as an explanation, etc.

[Gertie]

Right, if experience is fundamental, how it is explained ends there.

On the presumption claiming something as fundamental is sufficient as an explanation, but then we have the problem of needing to explain everything that we didn't say was fundamental, and we still have the need to address what counts as an explanation, why it counts as an explanation, etc.

Right. What it solves is the Hard Problem presented by monist materialism as described by physics (eg how can experience be reducible to/an emergent property/some other aspect of fundamental material stuff).
How it explains experience itself creates its own set of problems.

[evolution]

But if you can NOT or will NOT clarify in relation to who or what EXACTLY you pose your questions in relation to,

But I just did: Just answer in relation to whatever analysis of propositional knowledge you personally use--whoever you agree with, let's say.

I do NOT have an analysis of propositional knowledge that I personally use.

[GE Morton]

I think there is pretty widespread agreement among modern philosophers (hardcore naive realists excepted) that the phenomenal world, the world we experience, is a conceptual model of a hypothetical external, "noumenal" world which we can never experience directly.

Luckily, free thinkers don't have to be as inept as Kant and his followers.

There is no fundamental divide between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world.

You might explain how you understand the term "fundamental" (which term you also use problematically in the quote below). You probably also don't understand what the "noumenal" world is (it is not the external, physical world described by science).

The term "fundamental" is usually meant to denote something irreducible to anything simpler. But the phenomenal world is not reducible to the noumenal "world," even in principle --- because we have no knowledge whasoever of that "world" ("realm" is a better term for the noumena; "world" has misleading connotations). Hence we can't derive any phenomena we might experience from it, or equate them with it.

Meaning that the phenomenal world is a model of the external noumenal world, and also one with it (continuous with it), at the same time.

That is incoherent. If it is distinguishable from it then it cannot be "at one with it at the same time." Nor can we say that it is "continuous" with the noumenal realm, since we don't know the extent of that realm. And, again, you seem to be confusing the "noumenal world" with the external, physical world described by science. You might try reading Kant more carefully.

The phenomenal world is already direct experience, it's a bit of the 'absolute reality'.

Yes, the phenomenal world is the world we perceive, experience. The noumeal realm is a realm of existence we hypothesize to exist to explain, supply a cause for, our percepts and other experiences --- no cause for them, or even for our very existence, being apparent within experience.

As for the Hard problem, you have to turn it inside out to 'resolve' it. They always try to figure out how experience arises from something as fundamental as physical stuff. But it's experience that's fundamental, and the idea of physical stuff occurs within it. Our idea of physical stuff is also a qualia, an experience.

Yes, experience is fundamental (as above defined), but it still requires an explanation --- some cause for it. Else we are trapped in solipsism. But you make a sound point with, "idea of physical stuff occurs within it. Our idea of physical stuff is also a qualia, an experience." "Physical stuff" is indeed itself a conceptual construct. So we're trying to use mental constructs to explain themselves. Not a promising endeavor.

BTW, I myself used the term "conceptual model" in a misleading way in the quote above. A "conceptual model" is one consciously, deliberately constructed by us. The world described by science is a conceptual model. The model I described earlier is not a conceptual model; it is created subconsciously by our brains, becoming coherent in the first few months of life, and presented to us automatically. It becomes the world as we know it. Perhaps we can call it a "cognitive model."

Also, the term "qualia" is used by most (though perhaps not all) to refer only to the distinctive, singular sensations elicited by sensory inputs, which allow us to distinguish among them (colors, odors, flavors, sounds, etc.). Other mental phenomena, such as thoughts, knowledge, ideas, memories, etc., while raising many of the same issues as qualia, are not qualia.

Physical stuff is simply a cognitive overlay, a map consisting of 'things', like protons and fields. We use this map to talk about the terrain. But the terrain is actually void of 'things', 'thing'-ness is a feature of human thinking.

Well, your "terrain" there sounds much like Kant's noumenon. But we can't say anything about that "terrain," not even that it is "devoid of things."

Imo physical stuff is maybe best thought of as a structural description of the world. But a structural description of the world is not the world itself, that's why the Hard problem is kinda silly. Also, that's why it's insufficient to simply say that the spatio-temporal coordinates are different, when trying to solve the Hard problem.

The Hard Problem is hard when addressing it scientifically, because scientific methods presuppose, and were developed to investigate, objective, public phenomena. But qualia and other mental phenomena are intractably private, and not accessible to empirical methods. They are beyond their reach.