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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
No but here are links to the books referred to I believe.
Amazon.com: Perception as Bayesian Inference (9780521064996): David C. Knill, Whitman Richards: Books
Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology: 9780262161831: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com
Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See: Donald D. Hoffman: 9780393319675: Amazon.com: Books
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
When I said "tripped up", I meant literally tripped up in his speech. Not being able to make sense of something in one's mind will often do that when one is trying to explain what they mean in a coherent manner. It demonstrates a level of confusion. Or maybe he was feeling like he was going to sneeze or something ... LOL. I dunno. I just thought I'd point it out. See it for yourself in the direct quote and the video.
On logical consistency, what I'm saying is that the CRT ( Conscious Realism Thesis ) seems logical because he includes "the World" in the theorem, and therefore it seems as though he recognizes that there is a world out there beyond our selves; but in the definition of Conscious Realism, that world ( W ) consists only of other conscious agents, which makes the logic circular and therefore although internally consistent, doesn't explain why the world "out there" should be discarded from the thesis and simply replaced with conscious agents.
Neither does it explain how stimuli such as photons ( his own example ) can come into the eye as a stimulus response and give rise in some way to the MUI icons. The CRT ( basically the same as subjective idealism ), would suggest that the photons that come into the eye are being sent from other conscious agents rather than any objective light source. I don't think you'll find many who think that idea should be taken seriously. I'm just trying to save you some time here in your search, but by all means feel free to continue pondering the implications for yourself. I think you'll come to the same conclusion.
That wording ( 5 ) appears to conflate material reality ( the objective universe separate from ourselves ) with mental reality ( the subjective experience of being in the objective universe ). Phenomenal objects; e.g. a Ferrari in ones driveway, aren't made of the same type of physicality as their mental counterparts ( the Ferrari we imagine is in our driveway ). For reasons that seem more obvious to bankers than philosophers, the former will also make it much easier to get a car loan than the latter ... LOL. So I'm not saying that, "conscious experience is not something". I'm saying that it is it's own special type of something that while physical in nature, is of a type that is distinct from all the other types of physical things.
On this, I suggest that if you haven't already done so, that you first review: Brain in a Vat Argument, The | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Actually, when describing his Conscious Realism Thesis, he does quite literally replace spacetime and the material world with consciousness only. It is I who is suggesting that doing so is where he goes over the ledge. If however, you don't go over that ledge with him, then there is usefulness in the way he formulates the hypothetical connections between conscious agents.
Conscious Agents exist because a philosopher ( Shaun Gallagher ) conceived them.
Conscious agents are assumed to interact for the purpose of thought experiments about consciousness.
Conscious agents are assumed to interact by affecting the experiences of other conscious agents.
A system of conscious agents may or may not share one POV depending on what one means by "POV" and "experience"
I'm sure you do. There are different ways of answering the questions depending on context. I've used one particular context that may seem a bit facetious on the surface, but can be taken quite seriously as well. It all makes for interesting discussion. Why do you feel that you ( as a conscious agent ) exist?
Hey, if we've kicked the can down the road, then we've gotten a little further down the road and shared a small part of the journey. It's all good
.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Donald D. Hoffman | University of California, Irvine
Edge.org
A good reminder, lest we become complacent:
Why such optimism? First, the mind-body problem is now recognized as a legitimate scientific problem. In 2005, the journal Science placed it second in a list of 125 open questions in science. During the twentieth century, a multi-decade detour into behaviorism sidelined scientific investigation of the mind-body problem. But three decades into the cognitive revolution, the problem was dusted off and again given serious scientific attention.
Second, scientists soon rediscovered that the problem is surprisingly hard. Neurophysics, real and artificial neural networks, classical and quantum algorithms, information and complexity—standard tools that prove powerful in the study of perception, cognition and intelligence—
have yet to yield a single scientific theory of conscious experiences.
We cannot, for instance, answer the basic question: Why must this particular pattern of neural activity or this functional property cause, or be, this particular conscious experience (say, the smell of garlic) instead of that other conscious experience (say, the smell of a truffle), or instead of no conscious experience at all? Precise predictions of this type, de rigueur for genuine scientific explanations, have yet to be fashioned, or even plausibly sketched, with the standard tools.
And I like the spirit of this:
Third, although science is laudably conservative, yet when pushed to the wall by recalcitrant data and impotent theories, scientists have repeatedly proved willing to reexamine dearly held presuppositions and to revise or jettison the ineffectual in favor of unorthodox assumptions, provided that these assumptions permit the construction of explanatory theories that answer to data. Aristarchus, then Copernicus, countenanced a heliocentric solar system, Newton action at a distance, Einstein quanta of light and distortions of space-time, Bohr probability waves, superpositions and nonlocality. Theories of quantum gravity now posit eleven dimensions, vibrating membranes, and pixels of space and time. The initial response to such proposals is, invariably, widespread incredulity. But considerations of explanatory power and empirical adequacy, wherever they point, eventually win the day. Scientists revise their offending presuppositions, adjust psychologically as best they can to the new world view, and get on with the business of science in the new framework.
Edge.org
A good reminder, lest we become complacent:
Why such optimism? First, the mind-body problem is now recognized as a legitimate scientific problem. In 2005, the journal Science placed it second in a list of 125 open questions in science. During the twentieth century, a multi-decade detour into behaviorism sidelined scientific investigation of the mind-body problem. But three decades into the cognitive revolution, the problem was dusted off and again given serious scientific attention.
Second, scientists soon rediscovered that the problem is surprisingly hard. Neurophysics, real and artificial neural networks, classical and quantum algorithms, information and complexity—standard tools that prove powerful in the study of perception, cognition and intelligence—
have yet to yield a single scientific theory of conscious experiences.
We cannot, for instance, answer the basic question: Why must this particular pattern of neural activity or this functional property cause, or be, this particular conscious experience (say, the smell of garlic) instead of that other conscious experience (say, the smell of a truffle), or instead of no conscious experience at all? Precise predictions of this type, de rigueur for genuine scientific explanations, have yet to be fashioned, or even plausibly sketched, with the standard tools.
And I like the spirit of this:
Third, although science is laudably conservative, yet when pushed to the wall by recalcitrant data and impotent theories, scientists have repeatedly proved willing to reexamine dearly held presuppositions and to revise or jettison the ineffectual in favor of unorthodox assumptions, provided that these assumptions permit the construction of explanatory theories that answer to data. Aristarchus, then Copernicus, countenanced a heliocentric solar system, Newton action at a distance, Einstein quanta of light and distortions of space-time, Bohr probability waves, superpositions and nonlocality. Theories of quantum gravity now posit eleven dimensions, vibrating membranes, and pixels of space and time. The initial response to such proposals is, invariably, widespread incredulity. But considerations of explanatory power and empirical adequacy, wherever they point, eventually win the day. Scientists revise their offending presuppositions, adjust psychologically as best they can to the new world view, and get on with the business of science in the new framework.
I think we have to challenge the underscored portion of McGinn's sentence. How do we"know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness" if we cannot prove it, i.e., demonstrate it, which McGinn goes on to recognize?
We also do not know how McGinn is defining 'consciousness' in that sentence. Is he thinking in that statement only of consciousness as awareness of self and environment in waking states or is he thinking of consciousness as a spectrum of experience known {comprehended} prereflectively as well as reflectively in the evolution and development of consciousness within the evolution of species of life. In physical evolution, living species develop increasing levels of consciousness and increasing powers of recognizing their situatedness relative to what appears as environment and 'world'. In humans, the philosophizing species, consciousness demonstrates the further capability to reflect on its own nature relative to
a) the physical being of the things-that-are, and
b) the developed social/cultural, historical being constructed out of the activities of conscious beings in situation].
What is refreshing in Hoffman's thinking, and moreso in that of Christopher Fuchs (see the Quanta interview with him that I posted last night), is their apparent ability to recognize that consciousness is broad, deep, and multileveled, and exceeds the possibilities of description offered by neuroscientists who presuppose that brain functions alone can account for consciousness. Phenomenological philosophy recognizes that human consciousness could not arise without existing in a physical world, that consciousness stands both within and at a slight distance from the natural physical world out of which it has evolved. This is the meaning of what Evan Thompson writes in the NDPR review quoted several times above:
“… As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).
We can now state the objection that phenomenology makes to the methodological component of scientific naturalism. Phenomenology charges that scientific naturalism is oblivious to the priority of the world as the space of meaning and does not recognize the need for specifically philosophical methods, especially transcendental and existential phenomenological ones, for investigating and understanding it.
Many of the essays take this phenomenological charge against naturalism as the background against which to consider whether there may be ways to revise phenomenology and naturalism in order to make them compatible or somehow reconcilable. Central to these discussions is the problem of consciousness. One approach, known as the "naturalizing phenomenology" project (Petitot et al. 1999; Roy et al. 1999), seeks to absorb phenomenological analyses of consciousness into some kind of naturalistic framework. Another approach, "phenomenologizing nature," uses phenomenology to enrich our understanding of nature, especially living being and the body, in order to do justice to consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Ultimately, both strategies are necessary and must be pursued in a complementary and mutually supporting way, if phenomenology is not to be reduced to or eliminated in favor of scientific naturalism, and if naturalism is not to be rejected in favor of metaphysically dualist or idealist forms of phenomenology.”
But Hoffman seems to be comfortably (even blissfully) unaware of phenomenological philosophy and recent developments in biological research concerning protoconsciousness as rooted in the affectivity of primordial organisms, and thus unaware of the ways in which affective neuroscience and phenomenology increase our understanding of the evolution of embodied prereflective consciousness that enables the development of reflective consciousness and mind. Indeed, Hoffman builds his ambitious hypothesis on a mechanical theory of visual processing (not a broad investigation of perception involving the complement of sensory experience and sensory-motor contingencies), and never connects his notion of perception to either consciousness or mind. His ideas might range over a variety of topics [many not adequately connected to his core hypothesis], but his approach remains reductive and also fanciful.
For example, Hoffman writes (quoted in post 139):
"But what is your relational brain? Does it resemble your phenomenal brain? There’s no reason to suppose it does. In fact, as we saw with the volleyball, there’s no reason to suppose that the nature of the phenomenal brain in any way constrains the nature of the relational brain. Your phenomenal brain is simply a graphical interface that allows you to interact with your relational brain, whatever that relational brain might be. And all that’s required of a graphical interface is that it be systematically related to what it represents."
Hoffman's profound error is in assuming that something he calls the 'relational brain' can be distinguished from what he calls the 'phenomenal brain', failing to comprehend the phenomenological insight that the phenomenal appearances by which we have awareness of and access to actual 'things' in our environment also disclose to us our (ambiguous) relation to those things, to that environment -- this disclosure constituting the existential situation that Heidegger is at pains to articulate in Being and Time, one of the most influential texts in modern philosophy. Well after all, Hoffman is not a philosopher. But then why should we take him seriously as a philosopher? The next question is, should we take him seriously as a scientist?
McGinn's claim above, that "brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness," also rests on incomplete reading of [or perhaps no reading of] phenomenological philosophy. He's not alone in that, which is unfortunate since it is this 100-year-old school of philosophy, supplemented by Panksepp's new Affective Neuroscience, that seals consciousness and mind back into the evolution of physical nature from which both capacities arise.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
He provides two very good reasons for why the world "out there" should be discarded and replaced with consciousness.
(1) The mind-body problem. A very serious scientific problem that scientists havent gotten close to resolving using the physicalist paradigm.
(2) Hoffman presents a very good argument that the Hypothesis of Faithful Depiction is wrong. Thus, the apparently physical world that appears to us in experience need not be a faithful depiction of objective reality and most likely is not.
Ill have to re-watch the video you reference. In all the material ive encountered, Hoffman makes it very clear that photons are part of the UI and thus not a fundamental denizen of objective reality.
So while we may subjectively perceive photons to stimulate cells in the eye, understand that perception hasn't evolved to disclose objective reality to us veridically, only adaptively. It follows then that the photons and cells we perceive are icons—quite rich in their own right—of more complex processes taking place in objective reality.
In order for you to overcome this problem, Ufology, I think you'll need to defend the Hypothesis of Faithful Depiction.
You're presupposing that objective reality is material. How do you know that objective reality is material? That is, how do you know that objective reality is composed of quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, molecules, cells, etc?
Also, you continue to insist that consciousness is physical but you provide no model—not even a conceptual model—that can begin to support this claim.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Hoffman's profound error is in assuming that something he calls the 'relational brain' can be distinguished from what he calls the 'phenomenal brain', failing to comprehend the phenomenological insight that the phenomenal appearances by which we have awareness of and access to actual 'things' in our environment also disclose to us our (ambiguous) relation to those things, to that environment -- this disclosure constituting the existential situation that Heidegger is at pains to articulate in Being and Time, one of the most influential texts in modern philosophy. Well after all, Hoffman is not a philosopher. But then why should we take him seriously as a philosopher? The next question is, should we take him seriously as a scientist?
Good questions - I hope to follow up on some of the ideas above, you've mentioned them before - but my time on the internet has been limited, I may have more time the next few days. And also poke a little into Hoffman's work ... my gut feeling is there are richer sources of the very things that I do like about Hoffman's paper ... and that a good philosophical analysis might leave it wanting ... but this is a problem, isn't it? Narrowing the search ...
McGinn's claim above, that "brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness," also rests on incomplete reading of [or perhaps no reading of] phenomenological philosophy. He's not alone in that, which is unfortunate since it is this 100-year-old school of philosophy, supplemented by Panksepp's new Affective Neuroscience, that seals consciousness and mind back into the evolution of physical nature from which both capacities arise.
Yes - phenomenology is increasingly interesting to me ... Heidegger is a real struggle, I think I've re-read his intro and first 50-60 pages four times now in the past few days ... this cost in time and effort is daunting and you've got to put it into a larger historical context, you've got to go back to Hegel and Kant and from there ... all the way back to the Greeks. The same ideas come up for re-working over and over.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
A 100-year-old school of philosophy that hasn't made any progress in resolving the MBP.
And while there are currently ongoing attempts to naturalize phenomenology a la Thompson, a resolution of the MBP still eludes us.
As noted Hoffman's thesis of Conscious Realism is certainly not the complete picture, but his desire to branch away from physicalism/emergentism is certainly warranted.
The question is how much data, as well as what kinds/types of data, are 'answered' by Hoffman's "unorthodox assumptions"?
Another question is what Hoffman means by 'answered'? Not every hypothetical answer offered in response to complex problems (such as the mind-body problem now hoary with age) can claim the status of a scientific 'theory' [a term reserved for scientific theories that can be and have been tested and eventually receive credibility among scientists and philosophers]. Hoffman protects his hypothesis from the challenge of falsifiability by claiming that it is unfalsifiable (a claim that has been refuted by some scientists in forums I've quoted above). Hoffman's skill as a rhetorician should be recognized before accepting claims such as the one quoted above, where he claims that what he has is a theory rather than a hypothesis. Indeed some physicists in the forums I cited coincide in thinking that what he offers is only a "framework" for a hypothesis.
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What is the source of the quoted passage to which you respond in this post?
As I've explained before, phenomenology does not claim in itself to have "resolved the MBP." The resolution of this problem [identified by you, as I recall, as second in a list of unsolved problems still confronting science] waits upon and might be achieved by integrated research efforts underway among phenomenologists and naturalists in science and philosophy, as reported in Evan Thompson's NDPR review. I anticipate progress on the MBP from that integrated effort.
Neurophenomenology and affective neuroscience are very new disciplines, and only part of what will be needed for progress on the MBP, which has been with us for millenia. How long do you think you can stand to wait for a resolution of the MBP? I hope you are not losing sleep over it.
While I've lamented the rigid objectivist presuppositions of physicalism, I see emergentism as a step in the right direction, a direction continuing in renewed efforts to comprehend the relationship of consciousness, mind, and nature.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Patience, courage - endurance, tolerance for ambiguity are easily as important as any intellectual ability in philosophy.
In therapy it's often said "your issues are your issues" and the hard problem may be one of man's "issues" (aporia) ... the MBP is only one of many such: free will, questions in morality - etc ... I don't think we give up, but I do think McGinn's idea of cognitive closure needn't be thrown away either - exactly what you do with ideas about the limits of ideas .... "forbidden" occult knowledge ... clearly that is also aporic.
I should have added that, your having not as yet read any phenomenological philosophy, I would not have expected you to recognize the progress it has made [particularly in Merleau-Ponty's works] in demonstrating the intimate and inescapable relationship of mind and body. While you wait for a full resolution of the mind-body problem you might find some satisfaction in finally reading this philosophy.
What do you mean by "objective reality"? Do you mean
'reality in itself'? As beings capable of taking perceptual perspectives on the being of the environments in which we find ourselves existing, how could we expect to have access to any 'thing-in-itself', let alone any entire 'reality-in-itself'? That we cannot know any 'reality-in itself' does not mean that we can obtain no knowledge whatever of the reality in which we exist.
Also, what is Hoffman's evidence that a) there exists a 'reality-in-itself' beyond the reality within which we exist (and to which we have partial, perspectival, access), and b) that our limited access to this experienced reality is somehow legislated by consciousnesses that are located outside the margins/horizons within which we exist ?
You also refer at times to "phenomenal objects." What does that term signify to you?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I can't say Heidegger is a "pleasure" but it's very rewarding ... I know you've said Merleau-Ponty is much more enjoyable and I know I will get to him. The Greek philosophy I've read has been a pleasure and Nietzsche can be very ... stimulating, he is certainly a genius and in the front rank of world literature. Interest and pleasure aren't sure guides to philosophy, but they become more certain as you work with them.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Not everyone accepts that the mind body problem is a legitimate "problem". Searle calls it a "false dichotomy" and similarly, I would say that the mind-body problem is a scientific problem to the same extent that there's a magnet-magnetism problem or a mass-gravitation problem. That's because science deals with the properties and behavior of the extant, not the nature of existence itself. That's the job of philosophers So the mind-body problem is only a "problem" for philosophers who choose to look at the co-existence of the mind and body as "problematic" in their context, and therefore since the nature of the problem in philosophical terms it's not relevant to science, I would question the relevance of your comment. Searle has no problem saying that we can take an objective and scientific approach to studying subjective experience. I agree.
We know our senses can be fooled and that what we perceive is a mental construct rather than an experience of the actual object being perceived, but this translates to: "Objective external reality isn't what we perceive it to be." not to "There is no objective external reality."
I included the time references ( I do review the content relevant to my posts even though it has been suggested by others at times that I don't )
Hoffman makes it quite clear at the start of the video that we don't perceive photons. We perceive the resulting mental experience that the photons initiate via the biology of our eyes and visual processing centers in the brain. He even has pictures that explain this in no uncertain terms. This is just fine. It's where he wanders off in his suggestion that all reality including spacetime and atoms and so on are also conscious constructs that he falls off the ledge.
If you're alluding to the mind-body problem, as the "problem", then it's not a "problem" for me because I accept that there are both minds and bodies and that they coexist in the universe as physical, in the sense that physical is not to be confused with "material", as in material vs. non-material. So for me, unless you are alluding to a different problem, there is no "problem to overcome". There are only relationships to study.
Not quite. Basically, I'm presupposing that all reality is physical in the sense that that everything that exists has properties and behaviors that lead to arbitrary relationships between them. This is a physicalist ( as opposed to materialist ) perspective because the "physical" isn't simply what we perceive to be "material". To be more specific there are branches of Physicalism and although I'm not sure where the philosophers would place me if they were able to see inside my head, it seems that I'm somewhere off in the realm of Emergentism. This seems to be a good overview: http://www.brynmawr.edu/biology/emergence/stephan.pdf
I don't actually "insist" that consciousness is physical but I do look at it as a physical phenomenon in the same way as we look at other phenomena like gravity, magnetism, etc. as being physical phenomena, and are equally perplexed as to the fundamental nature of their existence, but nevertheless have been able to map out their relationships to other materials and phenomena in a way that has proven to be very useful in many practical applications.
I'm not sure what would qualify in your comment as "beginning to support this claim.", but I would say that the number of posts I've contributed more than constitute a "beginning" and most are either based on or include accepted scientific information, particularly those that directly correlate brain function to conscious experience, and those that explore the idea that consciousness is an emergent property.
I'll close this post by saying that somewhat ironically, even though Chalmers criticizes emergentism, he also favors the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena. So Chalmers is actually endorsing emergentism, and his objection to it because it doesn't explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields, is irrelevant. We may never be able to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields just like we may never know why objects should have mass.
Why type questions imply some purpose, and purpose is a concept that only has meaning to entities that are capable of understanding that concept, which is only a very small subset of all which appears to exist. So there is no reason "why" many things happen unless we invoke some omniscient God and claim it's all because of his or her divine will. In short: In the absence of a creator there is no "why" answer for fundamental phenomena. There is simply acceptance that it exists. Feynman goes through a rather long winded and painful explanation of this below as well:
Why Type Questions - Feynman
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Let's have a look at this approach - at @ufology's approach and also the post above where he looks at the mind-body problem as "semantic" (if I remember correctly) - what, if anything, is missing here? What, again, if anything, is wrong, with being content with this view at this point? (And content in the way Searle seems to be in a writing I will post below ...?)
I keep coming back to the quotes in Hoffman's paper - Stephen Pinker, for example, "I have no idea ..." etc - there being no scientific theories of consciousness, should we accept all of the above with confidence? 0000
Also, there seems to be some confusing language around "emergence" and "fundamental" here:
I'll close this post by saying that somewhat ironically, even though Chalmers criticizes emergentism, he also favors the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena. So Chalmers is actually endorsing emergentism, and his objection to it because it doesn't explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields, is irrelevant. We may never be able to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields just like we may never know why objects should have mass.
Specifically: "... the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena" - that part seems confusing to me, to say "consciousness is fundamental" "which" (fundamentality presumably) "is also a feature of emergent phenomena" - so both consciousness is fundamental and emergent phenomena are fundamental? That seems confusing as "emergent" and "fundamental" are often presented in opposition to one another?
The Stanford Encyclopedia gives a exhausting, if not exhaustive, account of emergentism here:
Emergent Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
An article we've discussed several times here on the thread.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Collection of articles by John Searle:
Professor John Searle | Slusser Professor of Philosophy
From "The Future of Philosophy" - but similar ideas also found in the paper "Consciousness" on the same page.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/future_of_philosophy.rtf
page 12 section titled: 1. The Traditional Mind-Body Problem.
"As long as we continue to talk and think as if the mental and the physical were separate metaphysical realms, the relation of the brain to consciousness will forever seem mysterious, and we will not have a satisfactory explanation of the relation of neuron firings to consciousness. The first step on the road to philosophical and scientific progress in these areas is to forget about the tradition of Cartesian dualism and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as photosynthesis or digestion. We must stop worrying about how the brain could cause consciousness and begin with the plain fact that it does."
And then this part is curious:"
"I find it truly amazing that the obsolete categories of mind and matter continue to impede progress. Many scientists feel that they can only investigate the "physical" realm and are reluctant to face consciousness on its own terms because it seems not to be “physical” but to be "mental", and several prominent philosophers think it is impossible for us to understand the relations of mind to brain. Just as Einstein made a conceptual change to break the distinction between space and time, so we need a similar conceptual change to break the bifurcation of mental and physical."
This was written in 1999 - so I'm not sure if he would feel that this continues to impede progress today ... and in the comparison to Einstein - it's a little ambiguous if he means that a new conception is needed - because the paper overall seems to say we know all we need to know to get on with it - or if we simply need to do the getting on with it, so that may just be a case of the old philosopher's rule: "invoke Einstein (or Feynman) any time you are talking to scientists." ;-)
Also, I'd like to have a look at the very last part of the Dennett, Chalmers, Hoffman discussion above - where Chalmers responds to an implication by Dennett that something mystical or quasi-religious is behind Chalmers and other's (as I understand it, anyone disagreeing with Dennett!) viewpoint. Some refusal to accept themselves as something that can be described as "just" or "merely".
Finally, I want to draw out something Searle says about reduction:
"The obsession with epistemology, and its endemic obsession with overcoming skepticism, led to a second feature of philosophy in the three centuries after Descartes. For many philosophers real progress required logical reduction. To understand a phenomenon we had to reduce it to simpler phenomena. Thus many empirically minded philosophers thought that the only way to understand human mental states was to reduce them to behavior (behaviorism). Analogously many philosophers thought that in order to understand empirical reality we had to reduce it to sensory experiences (phenomenalism). A natural consequence of the obsession with epistemology was to see the solution to the skeptical problem in reductionism. So there were, in my view, twin errors that pervaded philosophy and which I hope we have now overcome. These are skepticism and an inappropriate extension of reductionism."
Professor John Searle | Slusser Professor of Philosophy
From "The Future of Philosophy" - but similar ideas also found in the paper "Consciousness" on the same page.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/future_of_philosophy.rtf
page 12 section titled: 1. The Traditional Mind-Body Problem.
"As long as we continue to talk and think as if the mental and the physical were separate metaphysical realms, the relation of the brain to consciousness will forever seem mysterious, and we will not have a satisfactory explanation of the relation of neuron firings to consciousness. The first step on the road to philosophical and scientific progress in these areas is to forget about the tradition of Cartesian dualism and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as photosynthesis or digestion. We must stop worrying about how the brain could cause consciousness and begin with the plain fact that it does."
And then this part is curious:"
"I find it truly amazing that the obsolete categories of mind and matter continue to impede progress. Many scientists feel that they can only investigate the "physical" realm and are reluctant to face consciousness on its own terms because it seems not to be “physical” but to be "mental", and several prominent philosophers think it is impossible for us to understand the relations of mind to brain. Just as Einstein made a conceptual change to break the distinction between space and time, so we need a similar conceptual change to break the bifurcation of mental and physical."
This was written in 1999 - so I'm not sure if he would feel that this continues to impede progress today ... and in the comparison to Einstein - it's a little ambiguous if he means that a new conception is needed - because the paper overall seems to say we know all we need to know to get on with it - or if we simply need to do the getting on with it, so that may just be a case of the old philosopher's rule: "invoke Einstein (or Feynman) any time you are talking to scientists." ;-)
Also, I'd like to have a look at the very last part of the Dennett, Chalmers, Hoffman discussion above - where Chalmers responds to an implication by Dennett that something mystical or quasi-religious is behind Chalmers and other's (as I understand it, anyone disagreeing with Dennett!) viewpoint. Some refusal to accept themselves as something that can be described as "just" or "merely".
Finally, I want to draw out something Searle says about reduction:
"The obsession with epistemology, and its endemic obsession with overcoming skepticism, led to a second feature of philosophy in the three centuries after Descartes. For many philosophers real progress required logical reduction. To understand a phenomenon we had to reduce it to simpler phenomena. Thus many empirically minded philosophers thought that the only way to understand human mental states was to reduce them to behavior (behaviorism). Analogously many philosophers thought that in order to understand empirical reality we had to reduce it to sensory experiences (phenomenalism). A natural consequence of the obsession with epistemology was to see the solution to the skeptical problem in reductionism. So there were, in my view, twin errors that pervaded philosophy and which I hope we have now overcome. These are skepticism and an inappropriate extension of reductionism."
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