objectivity found wanting?
Dianelos Georgoudis
is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe. Yet
consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that - which shows
that the rule "We should only believe in the existence of something
when there is objective evidence for it " is wrong, as we have just
found a counterexample.
If one should relax this rule and say "We should only believe in the
existence of something when it is directly perceived or when there is
objective evidence for it" then one can justify the existence of
consciousness by pointing out that one's own consciousness is directly
perceived, therefore it exists, and therefore consciousness in general
exists also. But what about the existence of other peoples'
consciousness? We don't perceive it directly and neither is there
objective evidence of it. Yet we know other peoples' consciousness
exists also - we are practically certain about that. So this form of
the rule doesn't work either.
How about: "We should only believe in the existence of something when
it is directly perceived or when there is evidence for it."? That's I
think the rule that rational thought should follow. But it's not
objective anymore. (And it makes you think what subjective evidence
there is for the existence of other peoples' consciousness.)
In short what I am claiming here is that objectivity directly leads to
the solipsistic view that one is the only conscious being there is.
Objectivity and non-solipsism are logically exclusive.
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> the best explanation.
Descartes nonsense. Consciousness is a state of mind able to identify.
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_Consciousness.html
Descartes argued that consciousness is axiomatic because you cannot
logically deny your minds existence at the same time as using your mind
to do the denying. However, his formulation and derivation of the axiom
were wrong, in that he assumed one can be aware, without something to
be aware of.
Consciousness is the faculty that perceives that which exists.
Directly or indirectly, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived
from one's awareness of the external world. Some object, i.e., some
content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a
process of cognition directed outward -- a process of apprehending some
existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of
cognition directed inward -- a process of apprehending one's own
psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external
world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. ... A
content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.
Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Because to be conscious is to perceive something, consciousness
requires something outside of itself in order to function;
consciousness requires and is dependent upon, existence.
Further, a consciousness cannot merely be conscious of itself, as
Descartes implied. To be a consciousness, it must be conscious of
something external to itself. Only after it is conscious of something
external can it identify itself. Like a car motor that generates
electricity for it's own use, it needs to be kick-started by something
outside of it. It needs existence.
Copyright © 2001 by Jeff Landauer and Joseph Rowlands
andy-k
> There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
> for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe.
"Consciousness" is a word we learn the meaning of by being trained in its
use. The most basic use of this word pertains to an organism's state of
reactivity to its environment -- i.e. we learn how to use the word
"conscious" as contrasted with the word "unconscious", and may even say that
a person is "drifting in and out of consciousness". There is no absence of
objective evidence for consciousness in this case. But you will no doubt
argue that this is not the only use of the word, and that you are referring
to a different use of the word. It is at this juncture that you get into
difficulty -- you postulate a new 'thing' and tag it onto a word that has a
set of valid existing uses, thereby seeming to confer respectability upon
that new 'thing'. Try giving it a name of its own -- one that won't get
confused with any other existing uses of words -- and you'll find that your
new word is meaningless. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain
silent." (Wittgenstein. Also see his "beetle in the box" argument.)
> Yet consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that
I'm not convinced that the new 'thing' that you have appended to the list of
valid uses for the word 'consciousness' exists. In fact, William James makes
the case perfectly lucidly in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?"
Sir Frederick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Try self deceit and hubris, or try expanding your idea of something
such that subjective experiences are manifest along with
space-time and matter-energy. There are other ways out of your
dilemma.
Try this :
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
>NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
>Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
>
>I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an
>inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to
>bolster human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
>
>If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness
>just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed "mysterian" philosophers-from Colin McGinn to the Pope-who bow down before the
>apparent miracle and declare that it's impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in a material brain, are
>responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe.
>
>Can I prove it? It's difficult to prove any adaptationist account of why humans experience things the way they do. But here there
>is an added catch. The Catch-22 is that, just to the extent that Nature has succeeded in putting consciousness beyond the reach of
>rational explanation, she must have undermined the very possibility of showing that this is what she's done.
>
>But nothing's perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem-and even be-impossible for us to explain how a brain process
>could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give
>rise to the impression of having this quality. (Consider: we could never explain why 2 + 2 = 5, but we might relatively easily be
>able to explain why someone should be under the illusion that 2 + 2 = 5).
>
>Do I want to prove it? That's a difficult one. If the belief that consciousness is a mystery is a source of human hope, there may
>be a real danger that exposing the trick could send us all to hell.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
*************************
Phrase of the week :
Why do ducks have webbed feet?
To stamp out fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet?
To stamp out burning ducks.
:-))))Snort!)
**************************************
a niece of the Oak Lady
consciousness, which always seem to concern the diverse content of
sensation (phenomena, self, body, thought, memory, language,
intelligence, volition, cosmos, etc). As explaining perception itself
of these qualities and events, the deepest enigma, would be swirling
round and round like a dog chasing its tail, futilely trying to
describe it as this or that supposed private or public content of
perception, including whatever postulation itself is advocated. Much
like having to manipulate the word-symbol for "perception" rather than
the process of change itself, the reference to it as a "process of
change" in turn being just another case of having to use perceptual
content as a symbol for perception.
Immortalist
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
> for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe. Yet
> consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that - which shows
> that the rule "We should only believe in the existence of something
> when there is objective evidence for it " is wrong, as we have just
> found a counterexample.
>
Can you provide objective evidence for anything, to bigin with,let
alone this brain process theory we call consciousness.
THE PROBABILITY INSTINCT
It looks as if Kant, who thought our minds structure our perceptions,
was right. Probability was built into our minds. Our minds, the
electrochemical symphony that our narrowly evolved neural ganglia play,
impose an infrastructure on our thinking. The mind imposes a background
of time and space and causal connectedness. Scientists have never seen
a "causality" in the wild. They have seen, and they predict, only
space-time events that follow space-time events. Apples on the tree,
then apples in the air, then apples on the ground. Equations and
correlations have replaced causes, just as science has largely replaced
philosophy and religion as a theory of things. No causal germ in one
event unfolds into another event. But the mind, as eighteenth-century
philosopher David Hume observed, makes it seem so and inserts the
causal links in the event chain.
Probability seems to be part of the same mental infrastructure. It
forms part of our mental background or viewing screen along with time
and space and causality and similarity and the topological notions of
continuity and connectedness. We see probability everywhere because it
lies in our glasses.
I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or
Jungian archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our
perceptions and memories and most of all our expectations. Probability
gives structure to our competing causal predictions about how the
future will unfold in the next instant or day or season or millennium.
Probability ranks or weights the future alternatives. Our expectations
then blend or average these future alternatives into a single
probability-weighted average. The probability weights do not exist
outside our minds. They have no physical reality but have a powerful
psychological reality rooted in our neural mi-crostructure. Hume also
thought that we make up probability as we go and use it to fill in gaps
in our mind schemes or world views: "Though there be no such thing as
chance in the world, our ignorance of the real cause of any event has
the same influence on the understanding and begets a like species of
belief."
This probability instinct seems to cut across cultures and may cut
across species. Besides the probability-laden psychology of scientists
and most nonscientists, the widespread gambling and games of chance in
primitive and modern cultures suggest that probability "reasoning" may
be a cultural constant like hero worship or fertility rituals or incest
and adultery taboos. A cultural constant suggests a biological
substrate, and that requires an evolutionary history.
Ranking future alternatives can help pass on genes. Those who could so
rank may have eaten those who could not. It allows us to bet before we
act and improve the outcome of acting. That forward-looking ability has
supreme survival value in biological evolution, the genetic variation
and selection in the last few million years that has finely sculpted
our brains and minds, and in the prior evolution that sculpted the
brains and minds of our mammalian ancestors in the last 220 million
years. Natural selection filters out organisms as they cross the fuzzy
line from the present to the future. Natural selection favors brain
mechanisms that help an organism make its next move in a changing and
dangerous world. These forward-looking brain mechanisms may run deep in
the structure of mammalian and even reptilian brains. Future studies
may find that the brains of chimps and apes and lesser-brained mammals
house a forward-looking probability instinct. At the other extreme we
should not be surprised that scientists have exalted probability
ranking into their grand organizing principle of maximum probability.
Scientists follow their probability instincts as their hominid
forefathers followed theirs. Scientists just know more math.
Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
Bart Kosko
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/078688021X/
Dianelos Georgoudis
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz wrote:
> Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> > There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> > is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> > the best explanation.
>
> Descartes nonsense. Consciousness is a state of mind able to identify.
I am sorry, but I don't understand what objective evidence you
suggest is there for which the existence of consciousness is the best
explanation.
> http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_Consciousness.html
I am not sure I disagree with any of that. In fact I agree that the
concept of "content-less conscious experience" is meaningless;
conscious experience implies being conscious of something.
Still I don't see the relevance of all that to my original argument.
My original argument is very concise:
1. There is no objective evidence for which the existence of other
peoples' consciousness is the best explanation. Do you agree? If not
can you present such objective evidence?
2. Nonetheless virtually all reasonable people strongly believe that
other peoples' consciousness exists (for example I assume you believe
that - the exception to the rule would be solipsists but it is
debatable whether their stance is reasonable).
3. Which shows that virtually all reasonable people find that the
objectivity criterion cannot be reasonably applied in all cases. Which
means that people of intellectual integrity should stop claiming that
it can and that it should. As is the case with any other tool
objectivity too is useful in some areas and useless in others. Do you
agree?
Here is a good example of what I am talking about:
The complexity of living organisms is objective evidence (because
anybody can independently observe it). For a long time this complexity
was considered objective evidence for the existence of God, because the
existence of God was then the best explanation available for these
objective observations. Darwin found a better explanation (namely the
theory of evolution) so now the complexity of living organisms is not
anymore considered objective evidence for the existence of God.
Similarly, the complexity of human behavior is objective evidence. For
a long time this complexity was considered objective evidence for the
existence of other peoples' consciousness, because the existence of
other peoples' consciousness was then the best explanation available
for these objective observations. Modern science (cognitive science,
neurophysiology, and so on) has found a better explanation (namely the
structure of the brains of people and the physical processes that
happen there) so now the complexity of peoples' behavior is not anymore
considered objective evidence for the existence of consciousness.
So far so good. The problem is that in the former case the upholders of
objectivity claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for
the existence of God reasonable people should not believe in the
existence of God. But in the latter case most of the same people do
*not* claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for the
existence of other peoples' consciousness reasonable people should not
believe in the existence of other peoples' consciousness. So my
argument is a) That virtually all people make selective use of
objectivity, and b) That objectivity cannot in fact cover all
reasonable beliefs (and that's why almost everybody applies it
selectively).
Am I hereby living open the door for the possibility of a reasonable
belief in the existence of God? Yes I am. And I think that only a
solipsist who denies the existence of other peoples' consciousness can
coherently object to my argument.
Dianelos Georgoudis
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> > There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> > is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> > the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
> > for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe.
>
> "Consciousness" is a word we learn the meaning of by being trained in its
> use. The most basic use of this word pertains to an organism's state of
> reactivity to its environment -- i.e. we learn how to use the word
> "conscious" as contrasted with the word "unconscious", and may even say that
> a person is "drifting in and out of consciousness". There is no absence of
> objective evidence for consciousness in this case. But you will no doubt
> argue that this is not the only use of the word, and that you are referring
> to a different use of the word. It is at this juncture that you get into
> difficulty -- you postulate a new 'thing' and tag it onto a word that has a
> set of valid existing uses, thereby seeming to confer respectability upon
> that new 'thing'. Try giving it a name of its own -- one that won't get
> confused with any other existing uses of words -- and you'll find that your
> new word is meaningless. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain
> silent." (Wittgenstein. Also see his "beetle in the box" argument.)
First of all "consciousness" is not a new word. It's a very old word,
and certainly much older than "neurophysiology" (1258 CE versus 1985 CE
respectively). In its guise of the Greek word "pneuma" the concept
exists for thousands of years. One must be very simpleminded indeed in
order not to know that word.
Secondly it's very easy to speak of conscious experience (consciousness
itself simply denotes our capacity of having conscious experience) and
everybody does so all the time. A few days ago I was walking with my
two years old daughter barefoot on the beach. In order to clean her
feet before putting her shoes back on I grabbed her in my arms and
swung her over the water with her feet in it, at which she immediately
exclaimed "cold - cold". She was of course expressing her knowledge of
her conscious experience of cold water - and certainly not her
knowledge of neurophysical processes happening in her brain, or, let me
see how you put it, her organism's state of reactivity to it
environment.
Thirdly, everybody knows what conscious experience is, and everybody
knows that everybody knows that. Even to express one's doubt about what
conscious experience is sounds weird because this doubt itself
represents a conscious experience. So when people ask for the precise
definition of consciousness as if they had doubts about what the
concept means it frankly smacks of a diversion tactic. Why not engage
with the problem? There is nothing that a freethinker fears to lose by
following their thoughts where they lead. In respect to consciousness,
reason appears to lead one to the conclusion that both objectivity and
materialism do not work as well as many people believe. So what? We can
outgrow them. These are not religious dogmas.
Having said all that, it's true that trying to think of a definition
is always a good exercise. Here is one definition of conscious
experience I find pretty good: Conscious experience is that knowledge
that is not contingent on anything else. So, most pieces of knowledge A
are contingent (i.e. are based on) some other piece of knowledge B,
which in turn are contingent on C, etc. There must be some place Z
where this chain stops (otherwise we would have circular explanations -
as an infinite regress in our thinking is not possible). So the place
where all these chains ultimately stop is conscious experience. Think
about it: Everything you know goes back to some conscious experience of
yours. You cannot know anything without knowing about conscious
experience.
> > Yet consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that
>
> I'm not convinced that the new 'thing' that you have appended to the list of
> valid uses for the word 'consciousness' exists. In fact, William James makes
> the case perfectly lucidly in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?"
What do you think? Consciousness denotes the capacity of having
conscious experiences, right? (That's why we say that people are
conscious beings and stones are not). So, do you doubt about the
existence of your own consciousness? Because that is tantamount to
doubting about your capacity of having conscious experiences, when
doubting itself is a conscious experience in the first place.
andy-k
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Etymology:
"Consciousness" derives from Latin conscientia which primarily means moral
conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that
is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by
writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness
has of the deed of someone else. In Christian theology, conscience stands
for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered
and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas
Aquinas describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and
moral knowledge to our own actions [1]. René Descartes has been said to be
the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to
fit this traditional meaning, and, as a consequence, the translators of his
writings in other languages like French and English coined new words in
order to denote merely psychological consciousness. These are, for instance,
conscience, and Bewusstsein [2]. However, it has also been argued that John
Locke was in fact the first one to use the modern meaning of consciousness
in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, although it remains closely
intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only
for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal
identity - my self - goes as far as my consciousness extends itself). The
modern sense of "consciousness" was therefore first found not in Descartes'
work - who sometimes used the word in a modern sense, but did not
distinguish it as much as would Locke do -, but in Locke's text. The modern
sense of the word (consciousness associated to the idea of personal
identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself) was
therefore introduced by Locke; but the word "conscience" itself was coined
by Pierre Costes, French translator of Locke. Henceforth, the modern sense
first appeared in Locke's works, but the word itself first appeared in the
French language [3].
> Secondly it's very easy to speak of conscious experience (consciousness
> itself simply denotes our capacity of having conscious experience) and
> everybody does so all the time. A few days ago I was walking with my
> two years old daughter barefoot on the beach. In order to clean her
> feet before putting her shoes back on I grabbed her in my arms and
> swung her over the water with her feet in it, at which she immediately
> exclaimed "cold - cold". She was of course expressing her knowledge of
> her conscious experience of cold water - and certainly not her
> knowledge of neurophysical processes happening in her brain, or, let me
> see how you put it, her organism's state of reactivity to it
> environment.
Yes indeed -- we speak of consciousness as though we know what it is. In
some uses of the word, we do indeed know what it is -- the example I gave
holds good here. When an anesthetist in the pursuit of her daily work talks
about consciousness, she isn't using the word in the same manner as
philosophers use the word. The word also has a use in common speech that is
equivalent to "having knowledge of" -- i.e. I may say "I'm conscious of that
fact" and mean "I already knew that". There are other uses of the word too,
but the one that is under scrutiny here is the philosophical use of the
word. As we learn language, we are introduced to the many-faceted word
"consciousness" in our every-day speech -- even a young child is aware of
the use of that word as pertaining to what I called "reactivity to the
environment", and may pretend to be "unconscious" when playing. Later in
life we become more adept at abstraction, and the word may then take on its
philosophical use. This is a "new thing" that then gets lumped in with all
the other uses of the word, as I said in my previous post.
> Thirdly, everybody knows what conscious experience is, and everybody
> knows that everybody knows that. Even to express one's doubt about what
> conscious experience is sounds weird because this doubt itself
> represents a conscious experience. So when people ask for the precise
> definition of consciousness as if they had doubts about what the
> concept means it frankly smacks of a diversion tactic. Why not engage
> with the problem? There is nothing that a freethinker fears to lose by
> following their thoughts where they lead. In respect to consciousness,
> reason appears to lead one to the conclusion that both objectivity and
> materialism do not work as well as many people believe. So what? We can
> outgrow them. These are not religious dogmas.
I don't doubt that most people think they know what consciousness is (in the
abstract philosophical sense under scrutiny here), but I would argue that
this is a default condition that we enter once we become adept at
abstraction. Furthermore, that most people never get beyond that default
condition and see that condition for the error that it is.
> Having said all that, it's true that trying to think of a definition
> is always a good exercise. Here is one definition of conscious
> experience I find pretty good: Conscious experience is that knowledge
> that is not contingent on anything else. So, most pieces of knowledge A
> are contingent (i.e. are based on) some other piece of knowledge B,
> which in turn are contingent on C, etc. There must be some place Z
> where this chain stops (otherwise we would have circular explanations -
> as an infinite regress in our thinking is not possible). So the place
> where all these chains ultimately stop is conscious experience. Think
> about it: Everything you know goes back to some conscious experience of
> yours. You cannot know anything without knowing about conscious
> experience.
I disagree. Knowing about conscious experience is knowing about an
abstraction, and an abstraction that has no practical utility whatsoever.
Prior to the age at which they become adept at abstraction, children know
many things, even though they have not yet abstracted the philosophical
notion of consciousness. I would even go so far as to say that all animals
know things (i.e. possess data regarding their environment), regardless of
the inability of most species to indulge in high-level abstractions at all.
>> > Yet consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that
>>
>> I'm not convinced that the new 'thing' that you have appended to the list
>> of valid uses for the word 'consciousness' exists. In fact, William James
>> makes the case perfectly lucidly in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?"
>
> What do you think? Consciousness denotes the capacity of having
> conscious experiences, right? (That's why we say that people are
> conscious beings and stones are not). So, do you doubt about the
> existence of your own consciousness? Because that is tantamount to
> doubting about your capacity of having conscious experiences, when
> doubting itself is a conscious experience in the first place.
I think that such arguments are specious, and we fail to recognize that fact
as long as we are convinced that we know what this abstract 'thing' called
consciousness is (i.e. we remain in the default condition). To quote
Wittgenstein again, we are "bewitched by language".
Dianelos Georgoudis
I am not sure what you mean here. My argument is really simple.
Consider and answer for yourself the following three questions:
1. Should I only believe in the existence of something when I know of
objective evidence for it (i.e. some observation that can be
independently verified and for which this something is the best
available explanation)?
2. Do I believe in the existence of other peoples' consciousness?
3. Do I know of any objective evidence for which the existence of other
peoples' consciousness is the best explanation?
These are basically yes or no questions, and my argument simply is that
not all combinations of answers are logically possible. For example if
you answer question 3 with "No" - as you probably must because modern
science (especially cognitive science and neurophysiology) has shown
pretty clearly that the best explanation for all objectively observable
human behavior is the physical processes that take place in peoples'
brains - then you can't coherently answer both questions 1 and 2 with
"Yes" but must answer "No" to at least one of them. In other words you
must choose between letting go of objectivity or else become a
solipsist.
> Try this :
> http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
>
> >NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
> >Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
> >
> >I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an
> >inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to
> >bolster human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
> >
> >If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness
> >just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed "mysterian" philosophers-from Colin McGinn to the Pope-who bow down before the
> >apparent miracle and declare that it's impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in a material brain, are
> >responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe.
> >
> >Can I prove it? It's difficult to prove any adaptationist account of why humans experience things the way they do. But here there
> >is an added catch. The Catch-22 is that, just to the extent that Nature has succeeded in putting consciousness beyond the reach of
> >rational explanation, she must have undermined the very possibility of showing that this is what she's done.
> >
> >But nothing's perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem-and even be-impossible for us to explain how a brain process
> >could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give
> >rise to the impression of having this quality. (Consider: we could never explain why 2 + 2 = 5, but we might relatively easily be
> >able to explain why someone should be under the illusion that 2 + 2 = 5).
> >
> >Do I want to prove it? That's a difficult one. If the belief that consciousness is a mystery is a source of human hope, there may
> >be a real danger that exposing the trick could send us all to hell.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, human consciousness a "conjuring trick" designed by natural
selection in order to fool us into thinking we are something special
and bolster our "self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase
the value we each place on our own and others' lives." Does this make
any sense at all? I see nothing here but aping the language used to
describe some people who still deny evolution (i.e. that they want to
feel self-important, etc).
First of all, does Humphrey imagine that Homo Sapiens primates walking
the savannas 100 thousand years ago placed special value in their lives
because their knowledge that they were conscious beings (as contrasted,
say, to stones) bolstered their "self-confidence" and
"self-importance"? Is he for real? Does he really think that this is
how our prehistoric ancestors thought or that this kind of thinking
imparted some kind of evolutionary advantage to them ("gee I am a
conscious being, therefore I am especially important, therefore I
should look well after myself")?
Secondly, what about cats? I suppose Humphrey would agree that they too
are conscious beings. Is that too an evolutionary trick for "bolstering
cats' self-confidence and self-importance"?
Thirdly, let's assume that there is some as yet unknown evolutionary
advantage for making brains produce consciousness in Homo Sapiens.
Would natural selection be able to actually predict that a few hundred
thousand years hence some materialist philosophers would start thinking
about how the brain manages to do that, and so natural selection would
preempt this situation and make it difficult for them to solve the Hard
Problem of consciousness - because, presumably, if they managed to
solve it their sense "self-confidence" and "self-importance" would
suffer? I have to repeat this because I want to be sure about what he
is saying: "Natural selection designed human brains to be conscious
in such a way that when mind-body philosophers would arrive at the
scene at the end of the 20th century they would find it difficult to
understand how brains did it. And that's why the problem of
consciousness appears to be so hard: Nature meant it to be hard".
Speaking of ad-hoc.
Fourthly, let's not forget that biology and neurophysiology are natural
sciences: They take into account only objective evidence and they only
discuss hypotheses necessary for explaining that evidence. People who
feign scientific-speak to explain consciousness should first make
consciousness an object of scientific investigation by showing what
objective evidence justifies its existence.
Finally, did you catch the last phrases? Does Humphrey want to prove
his idea? Not really, because by doing so he presumably would undermine
our self-confidence. Gee - thanks - what a scientific thing to say.
I suppose if Humphrey was Darwin's friend he would had advised him not
to publish his book on evolution, for the same reason. Speaking of sour
grapes.
Anyway, thanks for the link, there are some good pieces in it. Did you
note the piece by another psychologist, Harvard's Daniel Gilbert?
Start of quote---
In the not too distant future, we will be able to construct artificial
systems that give every appearance of consciousness-systems that act
like us in every way. These systems will talk, walk, wink, lie, and
appear distressed by close elections. They will swear up and down that
they are conscious and they will demand their civil rights. But we will
have no way to know whether their behavior is more than a clever
trick-more than the pecking of a pigeon that has been trained to type
"I am, I am!"
We take each other's consciousness on faith because we must, but after
two thousand years of worrying about this issue, no one has ever
devised a definitive test of its existence. Most cognitive scientists
believe that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the
complex interaction of decidedly nonconscious parts (neurons), but even
when we finally understand the nature of that complex interaction, we
still won't be able to prove that it produces the phenomenon in
question. And yet, I haven't the slightest doubt that everyone I know
has an inner life, a subjective experience, a sense of self, that is
very much like mine.
What do I believe is true but cannot prove? The answer is: You!
End of quote---
Sounds similar to what I am saying, no? What do we believe is true even
at the absence of objective evidence? Other peoples' consciousness -
that's what.
And have you noticed Dennett's piece? He claims that any biological
organism that has not acquired *human* language is not really conscious
(anthropocentrism anybody?). This includes - he says in so many words -
human babies and all animals:
Start of quote---
This assertion is shocking to many people, who fear that it would
demote animals and pre-linguistic children from moral protection, but
this would not follow. Whose pain is the pain occurring in the newborn
infant? There is not yet anybody whose pain it is, but that fact would
not license us to inflict painful stimuli on babies or animals any more
than we are licensed to abuse the living bodies of people in comas who
are definitely not conscious.
End of quote---
What do you think of that? The argument at the end is clearly
fallacious. In fact surgeons do cut the bodies of people under general
anesthesia because there is nobody there to feel pain. So a clear
implication of Dennett's thesis is that surgeons would be equally
justified to cut the bodies of pre-linguistic children and animals
without using anesthesia because there is nobody there to feel the pain
either. After all that's the point of anesthesia: to avoid pain - but
if in the first palce there is nobody there to feel pain in the case of
animals and children then why use it?
I personally find it remarkable how materialists slowly sink into
absurdness, and the more stringent and the older the materialist the
more absurd their utterances seem to become. I think any neutral
observer would conclude that materialism has gone seriously awry, and
that there is time to rethink our assumptions.
Craig Franck
> mikeg...@xtra.co.nz wrote:
>> Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
>> > There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
>> > is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
>> > the best explanation.
>>
>> Descartes nonsense. Consciousness is a state of mind able to identify.
>
> I am sorry, but I don't understand what objective evidence you
> suggest is there for which the existence of consciousness is the best
> explanation.
Part of the problem is the word "consciousness" has a number of
distinct meanings. But I don't see how the existence of "awareness"
can be disputed, even if it is just a statement about information that
is applied to yourself and others.
> I am not sure I disagree with any of that. In fact I agree that the
> concept of "content-less conscious experience" is meaningless;
> conscious experience implies being conscious of something.
>
> Still I don't see the relevance of all that to my original argument.
> My original argument is very concise:
>
> 1. There is no objective evidence for which the existence of other
> peoples' consciousness is the best explanation. Do you agree? If not
> can you present such objective evidence?
That other people are conscious is an inference, a valid one IMO.
True, it is just a sample of one, but it appears our brains are hard
wired for social interaction. We don't have access to most of our
own mental states, but believing in them is the simplest explanation
that explains the most.
> Similarly, the complexity of human behavior is objective evidence. For
> a long time this complexity was considered objective evidence for the
> existence of other peoples' consciousness, because the existence of
> other peoples' consciousness was then the best explanation available
> for these objective observations. Modern science (cognitive science,
> neurophysiology, and so on) has found a better explanation (namely the
> structure of the brains of people and the physical processes that
> happen there) so now the complexity of peoples' behavior is not anymore
> considered objective evidence for the existence of consciousness.
I see your point, but folk psychology evolved to explain the
complexities of human experience. The structure of consciousness
as it's experienced is what these psychological terms refer to.
I see no reason why the structure of our physical brains should
resemble our subjective psychological experiences.
> So far so good. The problem is that in the former case the upholders of
> objectivity claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for
> the existence of God reasonable people should not believe in the
> existence of God. But in the latter case most of the same people do
> *not* claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for the
> existence of other peoples' consciousness reasonable people should not
> believe in the existence of other peoples' consciousness. So my
> argument is a) That virtually all people make selective use of
> objectivity, and b) That objectivity cannot in fact cover all
> reasonable beliefs (and that's why almost everybody applies it
> selectively).
The point is, I believe, that consciousness statements function
well as vehicles of explanation and understanding, while statements
about God are not nearly as useful.
> Am I hereby living open the door for the possibility of a reasonable
> belief in the existence of God? Yes I am. And I think that only a
> solipsist who denies the existence of other peoples' consciousness can
> coherently object to my argument.
The problem with solipsists are they are being logically inconsistent
when they throw out the external world and other people's minds,
but allow their own previous mental states to stand. A consistent
solipsist would only believe in the immediate present.
--
Craig Franck
craig....@verizon.net
Cortland, NY
Robert J. Kolker
> So far so good. The problem is that in the former case the upholders of
> objectivity claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for
> the existence of God reasonable people should not believe in the
> existence of God. But in the latter case most of the same people do
> *not* claim that as there is absolutely no objective evidence for the
> existence of other peoples' consciousness reasonable people should not
> believe in the existence of other peoples' consciousness. So my
> argument is a) That virtually all people make selective use of
> objectivity, and b) That objectivity cannot in fact cover all
> reasonable beliefs (and that's why almost everybody applies it
> selectively).
>
> Am I hereby living open the door for the possibility of a reasonable
> belief in the existence of God? Yes I am. And I think that only a
> solipsist who denies the existence of other peoples' consciousness can
> coherently object to my argument.
While one cannot factually prove other people have minds, one cannot
factually prove it either. One can only attest to his own properties to
himself. If other people do not have minds, quoting "proofs" will not
convince them. How can you prove Pythagoras Theorem to a sackful of
anvils? And if other people do have minds, they don't need "proofs". In
short, it is a waste of time.
No matter. Never mind.
Bob Kolke
Robert J. Kolker
> End of quote---
>
> What do you think of that? The argument at the end is clearly
> fallacious. In fact surgeons do cut the bodies of people under general
> anesthesia because there is nobody there to feel pain. So a clear
> implication of Dennett's thesis is that surgeons would be equally
> justified to cut the bodies of pre-linguistic children and animals
> without using anesthesia because there is nobody there to feel the pain
> either. After all that's the point of anesthesia: to avoid pain - but
> if in the first palce there is nobody there to feel pain in the case of
> animals and children then why use it?
Dennett's thesis is that there is no homunculus sitting in a plush seat
in row one of Descarte's Theatre. Pain is felt, but not by some Little
Man sitting in one's head.
Bob Kolker
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> So a clear
>> implication of Dennett's thesis is that surgeons would be equally
>> justified to cut the bodies of pre-linguistic children and animals
>> without using anesthesia because there is nobody there to feel the pain
>> either.
Physicians once experimented with curare on children. It rendered them
immobile yet they were conscious. The physicians operated on the
children. Fucking butchers.
>Dennett's thesis is that there is no homunculus sitting in a plush seat
>in row one of Descarte's Theatre. Pain is felt, but not by some Little
>Man sitting in one's head.
Straw man.
--
"First and last, it's a question of money. Those men who own the
earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort
of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the
fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized
for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never
organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing
justice, not the slightest in the world."
--Clarence Darrow
faute de mieux
he was really compounding the situation by replacing the lone
"Cartesian Theater" with a "Cineplex". Instead of a lone "homunculus",
or "Master Judge", the "judges" are now all over the place. Although
this expands the workroom in a needed way to allow more details of
internal operations than Descartes' mysterious singularity, it doesn't
provide much more insight into how any particular "microtaking"
does-what-it-does than the ambiguous "homunculus" of older philosophy
did-what-it-did.
start quote .... "All the work that was dimly imagined to be done in
the Cartesian Theater has to be done somewhere, and no doubt it is
distributed around in the brain. This work is largely a matter of
responding to the "given" by taking it -- by responding to it with one
interpretive judgment or another.... We suggest that the judgmental
tasks are fragmented into many distributed moments of microtaking."
[Dennett & Kinsbourne, "Behavioral and Brain Sciences", 1992] .... end
Ultimately, he acknowledges that the microtakings do interact and
evolvingly add-up to a coherent narrative, so that he hasn't so much
eliminated the concept of a "Theatre" in the general sense, so much as
--again-- given it internal workings covering a wider territory of
conjucting and disjuncting activity.
start quote .... "The creation of conscious experience is not a batch
process but a continuous one. The microtakings have to interact. A
microtaking, as a sort of judgment or decision, cannot just be
inscribed in the brain in isolation; it has to have its consequences --
for guiding action and modulating further microjudgments made "in its
light," creating larger fragments of what we called narrative. ... This
interaction of microtakings, however it is accomplished in particular
cases, has the effect that a modicum of coherence is maintained, with
discrepant elements dropping out of contention, and without the
assistance of a Master Judge. Because there is no Master Judge, there
is no further process of being-appreciated-in consciousness, so the
question of exactly when a particular element was consciously (as
opposed to unconsciously) taken admits no nonarbitrary answer."
[Dennett & Kinsbourne, "Behavioral and Brain Sciences", 1992] .... end
Dianelos Georgoudis
a niece of the Oak Lady wrote:
> It's good that we spend so much time on the ambiguous meanings of
> consciousness, which always seem to concern the diverse content of
> sensation (phenomena, self, body, thought, memory, language,
> intelligence, volition, cosmos, etc). As explaining perception itself
> of these qualities and events, the deepest enigma, would be swirling
> round and round like a dog chasing its tail, futilely trying to
> describe it as this or that supposed private or public content of
> perception, including whatever postulation itself is advocated. Much
> like having to manipulate the word-symbol for "perception" rather than
> the process of change itself, the reference to it as a "process of
> change" in turn being just another case of having to use perceptual
> content as a symbol for perception.
I think that the concept of "consciousness" is not ambiguous at all,
and that's why virtually everybody immediately agrees with the
statement "all people are conscious beings", virtually everybody can
intelligently discuss the issue about whether an intelligent computer
would be conscious, and so on. In fact I observe much more consistency
in peoples' use of the concept of "consciousness" than in their use of
many other common concepts, including the concept of "existence". It's
true that "conscious" can be used as synonymous to "awake" and some
people find it a smart move to try to confuse the issue by claiming
this meaning, but that can easily be clarified.
The most practical definition of "consciousness" I know is this:
"Consciousness denotes the capacity of having conscious experience, and
conscious experience is how it feels every second of our lives at least
when we are awake." Of course I define "consciousness" ultimately using
the concept of "feeling" but nobody can really feign ignorance about
what "feeling" means.
Dianelos Georgoudis
Immortalist wrote:
> Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> > There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> > is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> > the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
> > for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe. Yet
> > consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that - which shows
> > that the rule "We should only believe in the existence of something
> > when there is objective evidence for it " is wrong, as we have just
> > found a counterexample.
> >
>
> Can you provide objective evidence for anything, to bigin with,let
> alone this brain process theory we call consciousness.
Of course I can provide objective evidence for a great many things. For
example objective evidence for the existence of electrons are phenomena
such as lightning, magnets attracting iron, and why burning logs give
off light, because the best explanation we have for these phenomena
requires the hypothesis that electrons exist. Therefore the belief that
electrons exist is objectively justified. Another example: Objective
evidence for the bending of spacetime by mass are gravitational
phenomena such as the falling of apples or the movement of the planets
in the night sky, because the best explanation we have for these
phenomena requires the hypothesis that mass bends spacetime. Therefore
the belief that mass bends spacetime is objectively justified. A final
example: Objective evidence for biological evolution are our
observations of the complexity of biological organisms, because the
best explanation we have for that complexity requires the hypothesis of
biological evolution. Therefore the belief that biological evolution
took place is objectively justified.
Observe that in all three examples above there is not only one
explanation available; for example in the case of gravity we also have
the older theory of Newton, which does not require the bending of
spacetime of course, but only the production of gravitational force
fields. In the case of biological complexity the supernatural creation
of the plant and animal kingdoms by a Biblical god is another
explanation of sorts. So what counts here is which is the *best*
explanation. And we can in most cases easily and objectively ascertain
than by testing which explanation has the greater predictive power.
That is I think how objectivity works - let me know if you disagree in
some particular. Incidentally what works works, and the fact that
objectivity works so splendidly well in the natural sciences (whose job
is to explain all objective observations aka physical phenomena)
implies that strict objectivity must always be upheld when answering
questions about objective observations, namely those observations that
anybody can independently validate, at least in principle. Personal
conscious experience is not objective evidence because other people
cannot validate it, so conscious experience is not a matter for
scientific investigation, so materialism's failures for accounting for
it are not a failure of science but of materialism alone.
Now, peoples' behavior in all its complexity is objective evidence and
therefore is a matter of scientific investigation. That objective
evidence is best explained by the structure of our brain and the
physical processes that take place in it. So no bit of human behavior
is objective evidence for the existence of consciousness (not even how
we speak about consciousness) because there are better explanations,
and therefore no scientific "consciousness hypothesis" is needed.
That's why I claim that after the findings of cognitive science and
neurophysiology there is no objective evidence for the existence of
consciousness, and one's belief in the existence of consciousness is
not objectively justified. Yet, we all continue to believe without a
shred of doubt that our own personal consciousness exists, and almost
without a shred of doubt that everybody else's consciousness exists.
Which proves that we don't always apply objectivity when deciding which
beliefs to hold - and that it is clearly unreasonable to do so beyond
science's subject matter.
Bob
<dian...@tecapro.com> wrote:
>virtually everybody can
>intelligently discuss the issue about whether an intelligent computer
>would be conscious
I disagree. The question of strong AI is very complex. To show that
classical computers cannot be conscious requires arguments about
Godel's Theorem, Uncomputable Numbers, Game Theory, etc.
Penrose is one of the proponents of classical computers not being
conscious. He takes 2 books to outline his program. They are not the
sort of thing that "virtually everybody" can relate to.
Bob
<dian...@tecapro.com> wrote:
>Of course I can provide objective evidence for a great many things. For
>example objective evidence for the existence of electrons are phenomena
>such as lightning, magnets attracting iron, and why burning logs give
>off light, because the best explanation we have for these phenomena
>requires the hypothesis that electrons exist. Therefore the belief that
>electrons exist is objectively justified.
Spoken like the Idealist you have always been. I am beginning to
become convinced that in the main the only people who understand hard
Realism are physicists.
Descriptions are not the justification for physical entities. Accurate
predictions are. The reason is because accurate predictions require
the existence of physical laws embedded in the essence of physical
entities. Descriptions can be just about anything you want, but laws
must be what they are because if they are different the world would be
different.
The reason physicists accept the objective existence of electrons is
not because they make good descriptions or even good models but
because physicists can make accurate predictions about them.
Without those accurate predictions, entities are ideological, not
scientific - like psychology is ideological, not scientific.
andy-k
>
> The most practical definition of "consciousness" I know is this:
> "Consciousness denotes the capacity of having conscious
> experience, and conscious experience is how it feels every
> second of our lives at least when we are awake."
That definition reduces to: "Consciousness denotes the capacity of having a
'how it feels' every second of our lives at least when we are awake." It is
pretty much in line with Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness as the
"what it's like to be ...".
Dianelos Georgoudis
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> >
> > The most practical definition of "consciousness" I know is this:
> > "Consciousness denotes the capacity of having conscious
> > experience, and conscious experience is how it feels every
> > second of our lives at least when we are awake."
>
> That definition reduces to: "Consciousness denotes the capacity of having a
> 'how it feels' every second of our lives at least when we are awake."
Or rather: "Consciousness denotes the capacity of feeling something
every second of our lives at least when we are awake."
> It is
> pretty much in line with Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness as the
> "what it's like to be ...".
What consciousness means is pretty obvious, and normal children by the
age of 10 use that concept consistently; for example they display a
clear understanding of the idea "My baby brother hurts when I hit him,
but my drums don't hurt when I hit them." There is no question that all
normal grownups understand what consciousness means. So when somebody
starts arguing that the concept of consciousness is vague and asks for
a precise definition of it frankly I wonder whether they have tried so
hard to find a way to fit consciousness within a materialist worldview
that they managed to confuse themselves about what consciousness means
in the first place, or whether they still know the obvious meaning of
consciousness and are trying diversionary tactics to muddle the issue
and avoid confronting the fact that consciousness does represent a hard
problem for the materialist paradigm of reality.
Dianelos Georgoudis
Bob wrote:
> On 22 May 2006 09:18:43 -0700, "Dianelos Georgoudis"
> <dian...@tecapro.com> wrote:
>
> >Of course I can provide objective evidence for a great many things. For
> >example objective evidence for the existence of electrons are phenomena
> >such as lightning, magnets attracting iron, and why burning logs give
> >off light, because the best explanation we have for these phenomena
> >requires the hypothesis that electrons exist. Therefore the belief that
> >electrons exist is objectively justified.
>
> Spoken like the Idealist you have always been. I am beginning to
> become convinced that in the main the only people who understand hard
> Realism are physicists.
And you are a scientific realist I think. I always wondered about the
following: If no objective independent physical reality out there
exists at all, but just the spirit God directly feeding us all
conscious experiences we have, how would that affect the work of
physicists? I mean by definition absolutely nothing in the objective
evidence they use would change, right? But if it wouldn't affect their
work one way or the other, why should they care whether there is an
objective independent physical reality out there in the first place?
> Descriptions are not the justification for physical entities. Accurate
> predictions are.
Right, and here is what I wrote in the part you snipped: "So what
counts here is which is the *best* explanation. And we can in most
cases easily and objectively ascertain than by testing which
explanation has the greater predictive power."
> The reason is because accurate predictions require
> the existence of physical laws embedded in the essence of physical
> entities. Descriptions can be just about anything you want, but laws
> must be what they are because if they are different the world would be
> different.
Well, can you find one set of equations that describe both
gravitational and quantum phenomena? Or a description of how to
calculate the value of all fundamental constants? What theoretical
physicists do is to try to find descriptive patterns in the physical
phenomena we observe.
> The reason physicists accept the objective existence of electrons is
> not because they make good descriptions or even good models but
> because physicists can make accurate predictions about them.
All good descriptions and good models have predictive power, so I think
this issue is moot. If you think that good descriptions or models do
not always have predictive power can you give a counterexample?
> Without those accurate predictions, entities are ideological, not
> scientific - like psychology is ideological, not scientific.
Well, the equations of physics are full of the number pi. Would you say
that the number pi is an ideological or a scientific entity?
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
>
> I am sorry, but I don't understand what objective evidence you
> suggest is there for which the existence of consciousness is the best
> explanation.
And the fact you are using your conscious state to seek an explanation
of your conscious state isn't helping you any to understand that
existence *kick starts* your state of consciouness?
> 1. There is no objective evidence for which the existence of other
> peoples' consciousness is the best explanation. Do you agree?
Rephrase please, because I honestly have no idea what you are trying to
say.
>
> 3. Which shows that virtually all reasonable people find that the
> objectivity criterion cannot be reasonably applied in all cases.
Objective means independent and regardless of consciousness, thats
epistemology, you follow the rules of non-contradictory identification
and integration to determine what exists independent of consciousness,
to answer we cant be objective without being conscious is metaphysics,
its called *dropping context* changing the subject from epistemology to
metaphysics. Which is where I believe your confusion lies.
> Which
> means that people of intellectual integrity should stop claiming that
> it can and that it should. As is the case with any other tool
> objectivity too is useful in some areas and useless in others. Do you
> agree?
No, it doesn't make sense, eg is that an objective or subjective
observation?
> Here is a good example of what I am talking about:
>
> The complexity of living organisms is objective evidence (because
> anybody can independently observe it). For a long time this complexity
> was considered objective evidence for the existence of God,
NO it wasn't *objective at all*. What is objective doesn't change with
time. Man doesn't determine objectivity, existence does. Man identifies
reality man identifies existence, man identifies that which is
objective real exists through the use of *reason* sensory evidence and
the applictaion of logic, he doesn't invent it or change it, mystics
aside of course.
What is objective today WAS objective before and is objective in the
future, thats because man has NOTHING to do with making things
objective, (mystics aside again of course) thats why it is said, to be
objective means to be, or to exist independent of the man's mind.
Faulty identification means nothing more than faulty identification, it
usually arrises from the ofetn deliberate refusal to identifiy and
eliminate contradiction.
> Am I hereby living open the door for the possibility of a reasonable
> belief in the existence of God? Yes I am.
Yes well !! Fence sitter. Agnositc, that's a position far less tenable
than the mystic's.
Michael Gordge
andy-k
>
> What consciousness means is pretty obvious, and normal children by the
> age of 10 use that concept consistently; for example they display a
> clear understanding of the idea "My baby brother hurts when I hit him,
> but my drums don't hurt when I hit them."
That amounts to nothing more than the claim that "My baby brother exhibits
pain behavior when I hit him, but my drums don't exhibit pain behavior when
I hit them."
> There is no question that all normal grownups understand what
> consciousness means. So when somebody starts arguing that the concept of
> consciousness is vague and asks for a precise definition of it frankly I
> wonder whether they have tried so hard to find a way to fit consciousness
> within a materialist worldview that they managed to confuse themselves
> about what consciousness means in the first place, or whether they still
> know the obvious meaning of consciousness and are trying diversionary
> tactics to muddle the issue and avoid confronting the fact that
> consciousness does represent a hard problem for the materialist paradigm
> of reality.
Try this then:
The word "consciousness" denotes a conceptual distinction between the
conscious and the non-conscious. Taking this distinction as our starting
point (because language makes it so), the following positions present
themselves:
1. the conscious and the non-conscious are distinct and separate domains
(substance dualism). How do they interact?
2. the conscious domain emerged from the non-conscious. How?
3. the non-conscious domain emerged from the conscious. How?
4. the distinction is a conceptual error. This can take two forms:
4.1. there is no conscious domain, only a non-conscious domain. This no
longer fits the bill as far as the concept of consciousness is concerned.
4.2. there is no non-conscious domain, only a conscious domain. This is
anti-realism -- an irrefutable metaphysical postulate. But now what
distinction does the word "consciousness" denote? There is none, so the word
has become meaningless.
Dianelos Georgoudis
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> >
> > What consciousness means is pretty obvious, and normal children by the
> > age of 10 use that concept consistently; for example they display a
> > clear understanding of the idea "My baby brother hurts when I hit him,
> > but my drums don't hurt when I hit them."
>
> That amounts to nothing more than the claim that "My baby brother exhibits
> pain behavior when I hit him, but my drums don't exhibit pain behavior when
> I hit them."
You are suggesting that behavior determines the presence of
consciousness, correct? But above you suggest knowledge that you don't
actually have unless you use hidden assumptions. So suppose you didn't
know that the baby brother is a conscious being and that the drum
isn't. You hit the former and it cries out loud, you hit the latter and
it cries out loud. How do you decide which behavior demonstrates
consciousness without resorting to hidden assumptions, subjective
criteria, or anthropocentricity?
The problem of consciousness always goes back to the fact that there is
no objective evidence for its existence. In the case of the baby
brother what best explains the objective evidence of its crying out
loud are some particular physical processes in his body. In the case of
the drums what best explains the objective evidence of its crying out
loud are other physical processes in its body. In either case the
hypothesis of consciousness is not needed. That's the problem. From a
scientific point of view consciousness simply does not exist.
If there were objective evidence for the existence of consciousness, do
you think that materialist philosophers would have been breaking their
heads trying to explain consciousness? They would simply sit
comfortably back waiting for science to solve that riddle too, the way
they are waiting for science to solve other difficult problems, such as
how life started on Earth, etc, but in all these cases there is
objective evidence for the problem that science is asked to solve. In
the case of consciousness the BIG problem for materialist philosophers
is that it is not a scientific problem for science to solve. In fact
the more science finds out about how our brain explains our behavior
(including how we speak about our own consciousness) the less tenable
the existence of consciousness becomes for an upholder of materialist
objectivity. So it's a very uncomfortable position for materialists
philosophers to be: They must either try to find a way themselves to
explain the existence of consciousness, or they must rather
embarrassingly argue that consciousness does not exist, or they must
find some ad-hoc way out, such as claiming that there are fundamental
limits in human intelligence and that explains why consciousness will
remain for even unexplained, or that human consciousness is mysterious
because it is based on equal mysterious quantum processes that happen
in our brain, and so on.
andy-k
> andy-k wrote:
>> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
>> >
>> > What consciousness means is pretty obvious, and normal children by the
>> > age of 10 use that concept consistently; for example they display a
>> > clear understanding of the idea "My baby brother hurts when I hit him,
>> > but my drums don't hurt when I hit them."
>>
>> That amounts to nothing more than the claim that "My baby brother
>> exhibits pain behavior when I hit him, but my drums don't exhibit pain
>> behavior when I hit them."
>
> You are suggesting that behavior determines the presence of
> consciousness, correct?
No. I'm suggesting that the scenario has nothing to do with consciousness,
and everything to do with behavior.
<snip>
> The problem of consciousness always goes back to the fact that there is
> no objective evidence for its existence. In the case of the baby
> brother what best explains the objective evidence of its crying out
> loud are some particular physical processes in his body. In the case of
> the drums what best explains the objective evidence of its crying out
> loud are other physical processes in its body. In either case the
> hypothesis of consciousness is not needed. That's the problem. From a
> scientific point of view consciousness simply does not exist.
You seem to agree. I would add to your analysis that from a certain
philosophical point of view too, consciousness simply does not exist.
> If there were objective evidence for the existence of consciousness, do
> you think that materialist philosophers would have been breaking their
> heads trying to explain consciousness? They would simply sit
> comfortably back waiting for science to solve that riddle too, the way
> they are waiting for science to solve other difficult problems, such as
> how life started on Earth, etc, but in all these cases there is
> objective evidence for the problem that science is asked to solve. In
> the case of consciousness the BIG problem for materialist philosophers
> is that it is not a scientific problem for science to solve. In fact
> the more science finds out about how our brain explains our behavior
> (including how we speak about our own consciousness) the less tenable
> the existence of consciousness becomes for an upholder of materialist
> objectivity. So it's a very uncomfortable position for materialists
> philosophers to be: They must either try to find a way themselves to
> explain the existence of consciousness, or they must rather
> embarrassingly argue that consciousness does not exist, or they must
> find some ad-hoc way out, such as claiming that there are fundamental
> limits in human intelligence and that explains why consciousness will
> remain for even unexplained, or that human consciousness is mysterious
> because it is based on equal mysterious quantum processes that happen
> in our brain, and so on.
This is consistent with the second part of my previous post.
Materialist philosophers are "breaking their heads" (as you put it)
trying to explain what is at root nothing more than a conceptual error.
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
>, at which she immediately
> exclaimed "cold - cold".
And if she had said *hot - hot* you would have pointed out the
contradiction to her.
Knowledge is contextual and hierarchical, ALL of man's knowledge is
gained through and ONLY through *reason*.
Reason is the faculty of man which identifies without contradiction the
material of his senses, the use of man's senses eyes ears nose feel
touch and non-contradictory identification and integration of the
information from his senses.
Your daughter was no doubt taught the feeling or experience of cold
previously, eg by dipping her hand in both cold and warm water one
after another to help her understand the difference.
> She was of course expressing her knowledge of
> her conscious experience of cold water -
Nope, she was expressing what had been repeated to her before.
> ...In respect to consciousness,
> reason appears to lead one to the conclusion that both objectivity and
> materialism do not work as well as many people believe. So what?
The problem is NOT what man senses, the problem IS the, and often its
deliberate, failure to put ALL of his information through the filter of
logic. Logic is an art or process a tool of man's mind, its the tool
man uses to indentify the contradictions and integrate the results into
his previous knowledge.
> We can
> outgrow them. These are not religious dogmas.
Religious dogmas are the result of the failure to indentify and
eliminate contradictions in man's ideas.
> ...... You cannot know anything without knowing about conscious
> experience.
Existence is independent of and preceeds consciousness. Consciouness is
the state of mind able to identify that which already exists. You cant
be conscious of nothing.
>
> What do you think?
To *think* requires *reason* and I haven't seen too much of that coming
from your posts so far.
> Consciousness denotes the capacity of having
> conscious experiences, right?
You cant be conscious of nothing.
> (That's why we say that people are
> conscious beings and stones are not).
Who says that? You can only speak for you.
> So, do you doubt about the
> existence of your own consciousness?
That would of course require a contradiction, you must be conscious to
doubt. Contradictions in reality do not exist because what is real is
real, when faced with a contradiction check your premises because one
of them is wrong.
And it looks like you have accidentally stumbled across the
contradiction, so a little pat on the back.
> Because that is tantamount to
> doubting about your capacity of having conscious experiences, when
> doubting itself is a conscious experience in the first place.
You might like to have a crack at finding the contradiction is this
nonsense you posted earlier.
**(And it makes you think what subjective evidence
there is for the existence of other peoples' consciousness.)**
Have you got a dictionary? Check out the meaning of evidence and
subjective.
Its subjective OR its evidence - subjective evidence IS an oxymoron.
MIchael Gordge
Dianelos Georgoudis
Ah, but here is the point. Science speaks about scientific facts that
can be ascertained using the scientific method - and it is in this
context that science says - coherently - that consciousness simply does
not exist. Philosophy's business is to use reason and test assumptions
about all facets of our knowledge. In this context to affirm that
consciousness simply does not exist is obviously wrong - see bellow.
> > If there were objective evidence for the existence of consciousness, do
> > you think that materialist philosophers would have been breaking their
> > heads trying to explain consciousness? They would simply sit
> > comfortably back waiting for science to solve that riddle too, the way
> > they are waiting for science to solve other difficult problems, such as
> > how life started on Earth, etc, but in all these cases there is
> > objective evidence for the problem that science is asked to solve. In
> > the case of consciousness the BIG problem for materialist philosophers
> > is that it is not a scientific problem for science to solve. In fact
> > the more science finds out about how our brain explains our behavior
> > (including how we speak about our own consciousness) the less tenable
> > the existence of consciousness becomes for an upholder of materialist
> > objectivity. So it's a very uncomfortable position for materialists
> > philosophers to be: They must either try to find a way themselves to
> > explain the existence of consciousness, or they must rather
> > embarrassingly argue that consciousness does not exist, or they must
> > find some ad-hoc way out, such as claiming that there are fundamental
> > limits in human intelligence and that explains why consciousness will
> > remain for even unexplained, or that human consciousness is mysterious
> > because it is based on equal mysterious quantum processes that happen
> > in our brain, and so on.
>
> This is consistent with the second part of my previous post.
> Materialist philosophers are "breaking their heads" (as you put it)
> trying to explain what is at root nothing more than a conceptual error.
Well, I suppose this is a third ad-hoc way out of the materialist
problem. (Please observe that consciousness is not a problem in the
idealist paradigm of reality.) But all materialist positions can be
easily argued against:
In the end of the day, after all the complicated arguments, long words
many of which freshly coined, maybe suggestions about conceptual or
category errors, or suggestions about the intrinsic mystery of quantum
mechanics, or suggestions about fundamental limits to human
intelligence, the materialist philosopher must take an ontological
stance vis a vis consciousness. There are 3 possibilities:
1. I believe consciousness exists.
2. I believe consciousness does not exist.
3. I have my doubts and cannot make up my mind.
According to the meaning of "consciousness" that everybody uses
statements 2 and 3 are immediately seen to be wrong, because just by
making them the materialist philosopher is affirming their own
consciousness - as the concepts of belief and doubt only make sense in
the context of a conscious being. This is known since Descartes. So
reason requires that those materialist philosophers who find themselves
taking the second or third stance recognize that they are in error and
go back to check on their assumptions or to check where they redefined
"consciousness".
So, once we all agree that consciousness does (obviously) exist the
next step is to check if there is any objective evidence for which the
existence of consciousness is the best explanation. According to our
current state of scientific knowledge there isn't, because all human
behavior is best explained by the structure of the human brain and the
physical processes that happen in it. Now, it's logically possible that
some objective observation will be made in the future that cannot be
thus explained, but this is exceedingly unlikely. So the safe
assumption is that there is no objective evidence for the existence of
consciousness and that therefore consciousness is not an object of
scientific investigation.
So here is the fundamental argument against materialism: If
consciousness exists but cannot be investigated by science then there
is at least one thing (namely consciousness) that is neither physical
and neither can be explained on materialist grounds (because if it were
then it could be investigated by science). Therefore materialism is
false. Of course, materialist philosophers know of this argument and
that is why to try to explain consciousness on materialist grounds (or
at least make the problem go away) is a life-and-death matter for them.
But I see no way out of the simple argument I outlined here and which
works independently of any possible materialist argument no matter how
complicated or opaque. My simple argument basically boils down to:
Either present some objective evidence for the existence of
consciousness or shut up.
And that materialism must shut up in the end is a good and liberating
realization to make: there are things that exist and are important and
of which we know a lot and which nonetheless cannot be reasoned about
on the objective materialist grounds that science uses and that
materialism claims is the only reasonable thing to do. If you think
about it you'll see that this realization should have been obvious all
the time. Of course there is a lot of knowledge that is outside of
science, including ethics, esthetics, politics, and such mundane and
very important intellectual issues as whom to marry, or even about
whether to right now write posts to usenet or go play with one's two
years old daughter; I know as much science as the next person but I
don't see how this last question is one for science to answer. So there
are many many questions that are not for science to answer - and that's
why we still have philosophy :-)
Science cannot reach all that interests us, and that's why science does
not describe the whole of reality. More concretely, science discovers
explicatory patterns in the objectively observable phenomena we
experience - which it turns out is a very useful enterprise - but
science stays happily silent about any other non objectively observable
aspect of our experience, including the quality of our conscious
experiences, i.e. how it is to experience anything we experience, and
even the very fact that we experience, i.e. the fact that we are
conscious beings. But these matters are eminently real and (even though
science is silent about them) a questioning mind is bound to try to
explain them. Thank God.
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> thus explained, but this is exceedingly unlikely. So the safe
> assumption is that there is no objective evidence for the existence of
> consciousness
To deny your consciouness exists requires a contradiction because,
denial requires a conscious mind, you cant be conscious of nothing,
therefore the above statement is objectively determined as false.
Therefore the faulty premise renders your entire argument as
nonsensical piffle, darn.
Michael Gordge
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Bob wrote:
> Spoken like the Idealist you have always been. I am beginning to
> become convinced that in the main the only people who understand hard
> Realism are physicists.
Sheeeeeeeeeesh hey Bob, some delinquent bone-head is using your name. I
mean farcanal Bob, who the fuck would have accused you of that? Sue the
bastard Bob.
Michael Gordge
andy-k
> andy-k wrote:
>> Materialist philosophers are "breaking their heads" (as you put it)
>> trying to explain what is at root nothing more than a conceptual error.
>
> Well, I suppose this is a third ad-hoc way out of the materialist
> problem. (Please observe that consciousness is not a problem in the
> idealist paradigm of reality.)
The concept of consciousness is only meaningful if it demarks two domains --
i.e. if there is a non-conscious domain. In the idealist paradigm of reality
there is no non-conscious domain, so the word "consciousness" fails to
denote any conceptual boundary and is therefore rendered meaningless. Thus
consciousness is indeed a problem in the idealist paradigm -- it delineates
nothing and is therefore a conceptual error. Furthermore, it's an error that
misleads us into philosophically problematic hypotheses like substance
dualism and materialistic monism.
Bob
>Bob wrote:
Would you stop posting when you are stoned out of your gourd.
a niece of the Oak Lady
I don't feel that's necessarily the case, if/when consciousness is
intended as "apprehension, perception, awareness, etc". In Berkeley's
immaterialism there are minds receiving phenomenal events that are
reflexively taken to be a material cosmos, so that --even though the
"observers" and the perceptual events delivered to them are both ideas
maintained by God's thoughtfulness, there is still that action of minds
being conscious of what is transmitted to them by the "divine Matrix"
(in today's pop lingo).
A similar circumstance may apply to Kant, which is why some refer to
his T-idealism as a type of "epistemological dualism": minds are
conscious of their phenomenal constructions or spatiotemporal
interpretations of the rest of reality, but any intrinsic nature of
that reality remains unknown or uncertain because of a mind's own
innate methods of organizing data. It's all one realm, but because of a
mind's formal systems of processing, a dualism (even pluralism) of
knowledge emerges: the conditioned consciousness of minds trying to
perceive beyond themselves and the unconditioned "consciousness" of
things in themselves. In today's lingo it seems to have been revamped
as that familiar Nagal-ism: "what it is like to be" that organism,
thing, or event itself, which might be different than the way in which
the person or mind extrinsically or functionally models it.
I
andy-k
>>
>> The concept of consciousness is only meaningful if it demarks two
>> domains -- i.e. if there is a non-conscious domain. In the idealist
>> paradigm of reality there is no non-conscious domain, so the word
>> "consciousness" fails to denote any conceptual boundary and is therefore
>> rendered meaningless. Thus consciousness is indeed a problem in the
>> idealist paradigm -- it delineates nothing and is therefore a conceptual
>> error. Furthermore, it's an error that misleads us into philosophically
>> problematic hypotheses like substance dualism and materialistic monism.
>
> I don't feel that's necessarily the case, if/when consciousness is
> intended as "apprehension, perception, awareness, etc". In Berkeley's
> immaterialism there are minds receiving phenomenal events that are
> reflexively taken to be a material cosmos, so that --even though the
> "observers" and the perceptual events delivered to them are both ideas
> maintained by God's thoughtfulness, there is still that action of minds
> being conscious of what is transmitted to them by the "divine Matrix"
> (in today's pop lingo).
In Berkeley's immaterialism isn't "the mind of God" also conscious? Just as
materialistic monism has only one substance (non-conscious matter), so
idealistic monism has only one substance (consciousness mind), but what does
it mean to say that there is only one substance? What is it that makes it a
"substance" in this case?
> A similar circumstance may apply to Kant, which is why some refer to
> his T-idealism as a type of "epistemological dualism": minds are
> conscious of their phenomenal constructions or spatiotemporal
> interpretations of the rest of reality, but any intrinsic nature of
> that reality remains unknown or uncertain because of a mind's own
> innate methods of organizing data. It's all one realm, but because of a
> mind's formal systems of processing, a dualism (even pluralism) of
> knowledge emerges: the conditioned consciousness of minds trying to
> perceive beyond themselves and the unconditioned "consciousness" of
> things in themselves. In today's lingo it seems to have been revamped
> as that familiar Nagal-ism: "what it is like to be" that organism,
> thing, or event itself, which might be different than the way in which
> the person or mind extrinsically or functionally models it.
I can't say anything about Kant -- I don't understand him as a primary
reference, and when I try to understand him from secondary sources I just
get confused by Kant scholars arguing amongst themselves. I don't know why
Kant calls his thesis idealism when he himself writes a refutation of
idealism. The word seems very slippery to me.
Robert J. Kolker
>
> The reason physicists accept the objective existence of electrons is
> not because they make good descriptions or even good models but
> because physicists can make accurate predictions about them.
What physicsts really predict are the results of observations made under
specified circumstance. The physicists predict what the dial reading
will be when specified measurements are made under specified conditions.
No one has ever observed an electron (they are too small to see). People
have inferred that existence of electrons from the effects that
electrons are assumed to produce. Speaking charitably, the most that
anyone has ever perceived are the -effects- of electron (or other atomic
and subatomic objects and processes). Science is very much about
positing hypothetical cause for things observed. The causes may be quite
unperceivable. Can you perceive an exchange of virtual photons? I can't.
You tend to confuse the model with the reality, the map for the
territory and the word for the object. An understandable error, but an
error non-the-less.
The business of phystics is to make hypothesis which explain what has
been seen and predict what has not yet been seen. The figure of merit is
the agreement between prediction and observation. It is experiment,
observation and measurement which keeps physics honest and from turning
into sky-blue speculative nonsense.
There are secondary figures of merit. One is underdetermination. That
means you predict a lot using a little. Think of this as a kind of
return on investment. All things being equal the theory that explains
the most with the least is the winner. Another figure of merit is
unification. That means relating seemingly different things by a single
cause or principle. Isaac Newton unified terrestrial gravitation with
celestial gravitation. An apple falls from the tree the way it does in
the same way that the moon falls around the earth. It is the same
process at work. It just looks different. This is one of Aristotle's
errors. He split the celestial from the terrestrial. There is only one
reality.
Neither you nor I have ever seen an electron, or a quark, or a proton
and certainly not a neutrino. If they are what they are supposed to be
they will go right through our retinas, nonstop.
Bob Kolker
mikeg...@xtra.co.nz
Bob wrote:
>
> Would you stop posting when you are stoned out of your gourd.
Gosh thats so rude and so untrue Bob, I can count the puffs I've had in
my entire life on a hand and with a few fingers missing. I did it once
because a mate said it would cure my headache instantly, he did not
lie, a headache cured without manufactured drugs has to be good for you
surely?
Bob, look, if its not a stoned and totaly befuddled mind that tells
people so arrogantly that they cant be certain of even their love for
their family, then what the fuck is it?
Michael Gordge
Robert J. Kolker
>
>
> Spoken like the Idealist you have always been. I am beginning to
> become convinced that in the main the only people who understand hard
> Realism are physicists.
You mean spoken like an empiricist and a pragmatist. An idealist is one
who believes that ideas (in the abstract) are the real reality and that
impressions and perceptions are faulty shadows thereof. Plato is the
idealist. It is you who are the idealist. You think there is a First
Cause Out There when there is not a whiff of empirical evidence to
support the belief. You would be right at home in Plato's Republic.
I beleive what I detect with my senses is caused by stuff outside my
inner brain which produces the illusion of consciousness. There is an
Out There out there which causes what I feel and sense In Here.
There are perfectly good reasons for thinking electrons exist:
1. Their existence explains and predicts a good deal.
2. No alternative explanation or hypothetical cause explains what is
observed nearly so well.
There are bad reasons for thinking electrons exist:
1. Their existence is an apriori necessity embedded in logic. It is not
so. No logical principle requires the existence of electrons or any
other physical object. Logic applies to propositions, not physical reality.
2. You think you have seen or sensed them. You haven't. You may have
felt your hair standing up when combing it or seen sparks on a dry
evening but attributing these phenomena to electrons is a hypothesis,
not a fact. All you have really experienced was seeing the sparks,
hearing the crackle or feeling your hair standing up. Electrons are a
handy dandy explanation for what you have experienced.
Keep on mind people used to believe that caloric, phlogiston and aether
really existed too. But they don't. So don't be one hundred percent sure
about electrons. Maybe it is strings that are the "ultimate" reality.
Bob Kolker
a niece of the Oak Lady
andy-k wrote:
> "a niece of the Oak Lady" wrote:
> > andy-k wrote:
> >>
> >> The concept of consciousness is only meaningful if it demarks two
> >> domains -- i.e. if there is a non-conscious domain. In the idealist
> >> paradigm of reality there is no non-conscious domain, so the word
> >> "consciousness" fails to denote any conceptual boundary and is therefore
> >> rendered meaningless. Thus consciousness is indeed a problem in the
> >> idealist paradigm -- it delineates nothing and is therefore a conceptual
> >> error. Furthermore, it's an error that misleads us into philosophically
> >> problematic hypotheses like substance dualism and materialistic monism.
> >
> > I don't feel that's necessarily the case, if/when consciousness is
> > intended as "apprehension, perception, awareness, etc". In Berkeley's
> > immaterialism there are minds receiving phenomenal events that are
> > reflexively taken to be a material cosmos, so that --even though the
> > "observers" and the perceptual events delivered to them are both ideas
> > maintained by God's thoughtfulness, there is still that action of minds
> > being conscious of what is transmitted to them by the "divine Matrix"
> > (in today's pop lingo).
>
> In Berkeley's immaterialism isn't "the mind of God" also conscious? Just as
> materialistic monism has only one substance (non-conscious matter), so
> idealistic monism has only one substance (consciousness mind), but what does
> it mean to say that there is only one substance? What is it that makes it a
> "substance" in this case?
>
One philosophical definition of consciousness is: "The power of the
mind, whether rational or not, to be aware of acts, sensations, or
emotions." It doesn't equate to substance, but the ability of the mind
to apprehend either ideas or materialistic dynamics (adding here an
equally banal definition of general idealism: "the belief that reality
is made up of ideas only and not of material objects"). We could, of
course, dredge up other philosophical definitions for consciousness,
but this would only illustrate how authorities have argued and do argue
about what a generalized meaning for "consciousness" should be. And
therefore, there is no certainty that consciousness -- or whatever term
an author used in earlier times as a synonym for it -- could be
eliminated from idealism, as it may correlate (in a specific doctrine)
to a capacity, action, or relationship instead of a primal, pervading
essence of that reality.
I
andy-k
Yes, of course there are many variant definitions of the word
"consciousness", and of course this muddies the water. Whitehead defines
consciousness as the capacity to apprehend what is not -- i.e.
possibilities as well as actualities. According to his Process Philosophy we
(consciously!) abstract ideas like 'mind' and 'matter' and fallaciously
ascribe to them what he refers to as "misplace concreteness". It is in the
sense of the word "consciousness" being *itself* ascribed misplaced
concreteness that I say that it is a conceptual error.
Anthony G. Rubino
andy-k wrote:
>
Re: objectivity found wanting?
Group: alt.philosophy Date: Wed, May 24, 2006, 5:57am (EDT+4) From:
spam.free@last (andy-k)
Tony, philosopher
http://www.geocities.com/trisector/
So many misconceptions, so little time.
Anthony G. Rubino
andy-k wrote:
>
>Yes, of course there are many variant
>definitions of the word "consciousness",
>and of course this muddies the water.
>Whitehead defines consciousness as the >capacity to apprehend what is
not -- i.e.
>possibilities as well as actualities.
>According to his Process Philosophy we
>(consciously!) abstract ideas like 'mind'
>and 'matter' and fallaciously ascribe to
>them what he refers to as "misplace
>concreteness". It is in the sense of the
>word "consciousness" being *itself*
>ascribed misplaced concreteness that I
>say that it is a conceptual error.
>
definition. It is true that consciousness considered in concrete terms
is misplaced concreteness for the simple reason that the nature of
consciousness is not concrete. If it were there could be no distinction
between any thought or feeling, and what it represents, or refers to,
which would lead to the silly conclusion that thoughts cannot represent
anything.
A process processes something. The thinking process processes thoughts
that refer to something. A computer processes representations of
thoughts that are meaningless to the computer. The altered
representations that a computer produces become meaningful only when
they are abstracted by someone who is conscious.
Anthony G. Rubino
andy-k wrote:
>
>In Berkeley's immaterialism isn't "the
>mind of God" also conscious? Just as
>materialistic monism has only one
>substance (non-conscious matter), so
>idealistic monism has only one
>substance (consciousness mind), but
>what does it mean to say that there is
>only one substance? What is it that
>makes it a "substance" in this case?
>
his distinction between God's Ideas, and our ideas. God's creates an
idea of a tree that is material and objective in the sense that anyone
who observes it can create an idea of that tree directly. When we create
an idea of a tree, our idea of that tree is personal and no one else can
observe our idea of that tree directly. Language is an indirect way of
communicating our idea to others.
Dianelos Georgoudis
Idealism is simply the refusal to make the materialist assumption. The
materialist assumption is that there is a material universe out there
in which we exist and which somehow causes our conscious experiences.
According to idealism reality is exhausted by the space of conscious
experience, and knowledge is exhausted by the discovery of patterns in
our conscious experiences in that space. At first idealism appears to
be untenable, but this impression is quickly dispelled when you realize
that you can take any scientific book (or engineering book for that
matter) read it sentence by sentence and make sense of every one of
them, without the need of the materialist assumption. So the pieces of
objective evidence that science uses are necessarily bits of conscious
experience, the scientific theories are (mathematically expressed)
patterns found in these bits (and which therefore have predictive
power), and experimental verification are conscious acts that help us
test whether a pattern is real or illusory by checking to see whether
its predictions are validated in our experience of the experiment's
results. What does not make sense from the idealist perspective is
scientific realism and its project of describing how material reality
really is. Significantly, idealism explains why this project has proven
to be much more unsuccessful, messy, self-contradictory and
un-objective than anybody would have thought only 80 years ago (see for
example the quantum mechanics interpretation debacle): it tries to
describe something that does not exist.
Consider the advantages of idealism:
1. Idealism is completely compatible with science, engineering, and our
everyday need to avoid bumping into walls. After all, walls themselves
may not be real, but the easy to discover pattern present in one's
experience, namely that if one tries to walk through a wall it hurts,
is real, because it's pattern really present in the space of
conscious experience that comprises all reality - and is present in
that part of that space which you and I perceive and that's why
knowledge about wall-patterns is useful knowledge for us. Not all bits
of conscious experience I perceive can be perceived by you too; these
bits of conscious experience are called "subjective" bits of conscious
experience. That particular pattern, namely that we people have this
apparently private access to small areas of the space of consciousness,
is explained by a broader pattern. But I am wildly digressing here. On,
with idealism's advantages:
2. Idealism avoids the hard problems of materialism. Significantly,
beyond the problem of having to describe how material reality is,
idealism avoids the hard problem of consciousness. The reason that this
problem does not present itself in idealism is that while materialism
assumes that reality basically consists of a space of material things
in which consciousness must somehow made to fit, in idealism reality
consists of a space of conscious experiences and apples (as well as
numbers, physical laws, mathematical laws, ethics, esthetics, and
conscious subjects) are nothing more than stable patterns in that space
of conscious experience, and all are real in this sense. So all
knowledge consists of finding these patterns, and there are no problems
beyond the task of finding them. (One more problem that idealism avoids
is the unstable reality of materialism's existents: the existence of
gravitational force fields was latter substituted by the existence of
curved space which may substituted by something entirely different in
the future; but for idealism both gravitational force fields and curved
space happily co-exist as real things representing real co-existing
patterns found in our observations of gravitational phenomena.)
3. Idealism establishes a coherent conceptual framework capable of
integrating all fields of knowledge and all methodologies of thought.
For example, physics is understood as studying the most superficial
patterns we discover in the space of conscious experience, mathematics
is about deeper patterns present there, ethics about the patterns we
discover in the interaction between willing and quality of experience,
and so on.
4. Idealism makes sense of religion. Faith is understood as the
intuitive view that reality is coherent, i.e. that the whole of
conscious experience (which includes our personal whole of conscious
experience) is not haphazard but follows an internal logic. In other
words faith denotes the expectation that the structure of hierarchical
patterns that conforms knowledge ends in one overarching pattern that
subsumes and explains all others - and is itself by logical necessity
part of no other pattern and therefore admits of no more explanation.
This overarching pattern can be found and when found is compatible to
the nature of God as described by the great monotheistic religions and
can reasonably therefore be named "God".
5. Idealism's view of reality is not only the most problem-free,
productive, and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately also the most
esthetically satisfying presenting us with the view of a marvelously
beautiful reality. (Which fact I am sure some people will interpret as
"wishful thinking" - but I would like to point out to them that
they do not equally say that the beauty, say, of Laetitia Casta is
wishful thinking, so their argument is not consistent.)
As far as historical development goes, even though I am not
particularly knowledgeable in this, I think that since Plato there has
been a clear movement towards "pure" idealism. So, Kant, for
example, considered that there is an external material world that
causes our conscious experiences but one of which we can know nothing
at all - so Kant was an epistemological idealist but not an
ontological one; that's a difficult stance to hold which possibly
explains why he is so difficult to understand. Berkeley took a huge
step in the right direction, but I believe he still thought of a
dualistic reality consisting of non-material subjects and their
non-material conscious experiences. Also I think Berkeley's
philosophy fails to absolve God of arbitrary "Here the buck stops"
signs. After all if "to be is to be perceived", and God perceives
everybody else - who perceives God so that God can be? But maybe I
misunderstand him because I have not yet have read him directly, and as
idealism can be easily misunderstood my second hand knowledge of his
philosophy may be mistaken. Incidentally my view is that God, exactly
like you or I, is a pattern found in the space of conscious experience
and that the difference between God and us is only quantitative in the
sense that we are small patterns whereas God is the overarching pattern
that covers all reality - and that is why we say that God is the
"creator" of reality. And the religious phrase "coming closer to
God" denotes the freedom we have of changing the pattern of conscious
experiences that is us into a pattern that better matches that
overarching pattern that is God. In any case I think that my view of
pure idealism is the one that touches rock bottom, and if idealism
works it will work in this pure form.
Dianelos Georgoudis
a niece of the Oak Lady wrote:
> andy-k wrote:
> > In Berkeley's immaterialism isn't "the mind of God" also conscious? Just as
> > materialistic monism has only one substance (non-conscious matter), so
> > idealistic monism has only one substance (consciousness mind), but what does
> > it mean to say that there is only one substance? What is it that makes it a
> > "substance" in this case?
> >
>
> One philosophical definition of consciousness is: "The power of the
> mind, whether rational or not, to be aware of acts, sensations, or
> emotions." It doesn't equate to substance, but the ability of the mind
> to apprehend either ideas or materialistic dynamics (adding here an
> equally banal definition of general idealism: "the belief that reality
> is made up of ideas only and not of material objects"). We could, of
> course, dredge up other philosophical definitions for consciousness,
> but this would only illustrate how authorities have argued and do argue
> about what a generalized meaning for "consciousness" should be.
There are indeed many different definitions of "consciousness". I have
proposed two different definitions myself: "Consciousness is the
capacity of having conscious experiences, and conscious experience is
how it feels every single second of our life, at least when we are
awake", and "Consciousness is where all chains of contingent pieces of
knowledge end". Definitions are there to delimit a concept; and it is
often the case that there are many definitions around of the same
concept, most of them working pretty well. Consider for example all the
different definitions of what a human being is, starting with "humans
are the bipedal mammals". Another might be "humans are the mammals
with the funniest distribution of hair".
In any case, the fact that there are many different and also difficult
to be seen as compatible definitions of consciousness does not imply
that people have a vague notion about what consciousness means. This
evidence can be best explained by pointing out that people device
definitions in relation to the context in which they are using them,
and also, of course, people device definitions in a way that is
strongly (sometimes absurdly) influenced by their assumptions about
reality, i.e. by their ontology. For example some strict physicalists
(aka naive materialists) use the following syllogism:
1. Only physical things exist.
2. Consciousness exists.
3. Therefore consciousness is a physical thing.
4. Of all physical things we know of what best fits with our intuitive
notion of consciousness are the physical processes that happen in the
brains of people.
5. Therefore the best definition of consciousness is "consciousness is
a particular physical process that happens in the brains of people".
I think we all have a perfectly clear notion of what consciousness is,
because we are all conscious beings in the first place and one cannot
be a conscious being and have a vague notion of what consciousness is -
as far as one has the intellectual capacity of having notions of
course, which all normal grownup do have. In any case, there is plenty
of evidence that people do have a clear understanding of what
consciousness means: for example the fact that even 10 year olds
display a clear understanding of the statement "people are conscious
beings but stones are not" or of the statement "when I hit my baby
brother he hurts, but when I hit my drums they don't - even though both
make plenty of noise when I do that", and that virtually all normal
adults can coherently and effectively disagree when discussing the
question about whether an intelligent computer (a computer that passes
the Turing test) would be actually conscious. The only cases I know of
grownups who managed to get confused about the meaning of consciousness
are those materialist philosophers who have tried so hard and for so
long to fit consciousness within their paradigm of reality that they
start doubting what consciousness means. If you visualize yourself
fitting a square peg into a round hole for too long you end up
imagining that the square peg is round - because it must be in order to
fit.
Dianelos Georgoudis
Robert J. Kolker wrote:
> Bob wrote:
> >
> > The reason physicists accept the objective existence of electrons is
> > not because they make good descriptions or even good models but
> > because physicists can make accurate predictions about them.
>
> What physicsts really predict are the results of observations made under
> specified circumstance. The physicists predict what the dial reading
> will be when specified measurements are made under specified conditions.
>
> No one has ever observed an electron (they are too small to see). People
> have inferred that existence of electrons from the effects that
> electrons are assumed to produce. Speaking charitably, the most that
> anyone has ever perceived are the -effects- of electron (or other atomic
> and subatomic objects and processes). Science is very much about
> positing hypothetical cause for things observed. The causes may be quite
> unperceivable. Can you perceive an exchange of virtual photons? I can't.
>
> You tend to confuse the model with the reality, the map for the
> territory and the word for the object. An understandable error, but an
> error non-the-less.
Right. Like thinking that because the most successful theory of
electrical phenomena (and many other classes of phenomena besides),
namely quantum electrodynamics, models an electron emitted at point A
and later detected at point B as passing through all points of the
universe it means that this electron did in fact pass through all
points of the universe. Or, simply, that electrons are real in some way
that is independent of their status as parts of a successful scientific
model that describes phenomena - phenomena, I might add, that are
nothing else but particular conscious experiences we have, such as
seeing apples fall or planets move in the night sky as well as
observing the results of any scientific experiment we device.
> The business of phystics is to make hypothesis which explain what has
> been seen and predict what has not yet been seen. The figure of merit is
> the agreement between prediction and observation. It is experiment,
> observation and measurement which keeps physics honest and from turning
> into sky-blue speculative nonsense.
Such as the individually rather fantastic and mutually contradictory
descriptions that so-called scientific realists present about how
physical reality really is, beyond and above science's descriptive
models of phenomena (see, for example, the various interpretations of
quantum mechanics, with individual adherents dogmatically claiming that
theirs is the only true view, even though all interpretations are
equally compatible with QM's mathematical formalism and therefore with
its predictions of phenomena).
> There are secondary figures of merit. One is underdetermination. That
> means you predict a lot using a little. Think of this as a kind of
> return on investment. All things being equal the theory that explains
> the most with the least is the winner.
That's another way to state Occam's razor.
> Another figure of merit is
> unification. That means relating seemingly different things by a single
> cause or principle. Isaac Newton unified terrestrial gravitation with
> celestial gravitation. An apple falls from the tree the way it does in
> the same way that the moon falls around the earth. It is the same
> process at work. [snip]
Yes, and there is merit in that because not only is a unified
description more intellectually satisfying, but also (and mainly)
because we have empirically found out that unified theories tend to
have more descriptive/predictive power than the previous theories taken
together, i.e. unified theories tend to describe or predict phenomena
we didn't even know about before. See for example how general
relativity designed to unify gravitational and inertia phenomena ended
up predicting an as yet unknown phenomenon, namely that light does not
travel in straight lines but is bend by the presence of mass. That this
phenomenon is not predicted by the theory that best describes all other
phenomena of light (namely QED) is seen by physicists as evidence that
there must be a deeper theory that unifies these theories. When that
deeper theory is found it's a fair bet that we shall find out about
phenomena we don't yet have observed, and it will be quite reasonable
to believe that these phenomena are real even before we manage to
create the experimental conditions necessary for their observation.
I have a hidden motive for arguing the above: to point out that it is
in fact sometimes reasonable to hold beliefs about future experiences
even though one has not yet experienced them - as long as this reason
rests on the great explanatory power of a theory that explains our
actual experiences and which predicts these future ones. Now suppose
there is a theory that not only unifies physical phenomena, but unifies
absolutely all the bits and pieces of our conscious experience. If such
a theory exists it is quite probable that it will make some interesting
predictions of that as yet unknown kind. For example it's conceivable
that a unified theory that explains the whole of our current conscious
experience might predict that we shall not stop having conscious
experience after death.
> It just looks different. This is one of Aristotle's
> errors. He split the celestial from the terrestrial. There is only one
> reality.
.. by definition. The open question is whether the various parts of
reality form a coherent whole. And physicists are increasingly
successful in their project of showing that at least all physical
phenomena can be understood coherently.
andy-k
> Idealism is simply the refusal to make the materialist assumption. The
> materialist assumption is that there is a material universe out there
> in which we exist and which somehow causes our conscious experiences.
> According to idealism reality is exhausted by the space of conscious
> experience, and knowledge is exhausted by the discovery of patterns in
> our conscious experiences in that space.
The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since the
concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual error.
<snip>
> Consider the advantages of idealism:
All the advantages you cite are a result not of idealism but of the refusal
to make the materialist assumption, but since that is your definition of
idealism, you are in a strange sense being consistent. However, your appeal
to consciousness, which makes you think that you're espousing idealism, is
an unnecessary complication. Once it is understood that the
materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none of these problems arise
anyway.
Dianelos Georgoudis
Robert J. Kolker wrote:
> Bob wrote:
> >
> >
> > Spoken like the Idealist you have always been. I am beginning to
> > become convinced that in the main the only people who understand hard
> > Realism are physicists.
>
> You mean spoken like an empiricist and a pragmatist. An idealist is one
> who believes that ideas (in the abstract) are the real reality and that
> impressions and perceptions are faulty shadows thereof. Plato is the
> idealist.
Well, I would say that Plato was one of the first idealists in Western
thought, but his was a rough sketch of idealism. If Plato participated
in this thread I would tell him: "Look, it's true that all horses we
directly experience are imperfect in comparison to our idea of a horse,
but this is only because our idea of a horse is a pattern found in (and
defined by) our direct experience of all these horses. This particular
horse we directly perceive and the idea of the horse have the same
ontological status and place in reality: they are both patterns we
detect in the space of our conscious experience, the former being a
more superficial pattern and the latter a deeper one (i.e. a pattern of
patterns). So there are not fundamentally different, for they are both
in the end patterns."
I do agree that idealism is eminently empirical: after all it says that
only conscious experience is real and that therefore all knowledge must
be built on conscious experience. And I agree that idealism is
eminently pragmatical, because it refuses to make the materialist
assumption, namely that there is something real behind our conscious
experience causing it, simply because no matter how intuitively obvious
that assumption at first appears and how many people hold it, it turns
out that you lose nothing and win a lot by refusing to make it - which
is an eminently pragmatical stance.
> I beleive what I detect with my senses is caused by stuff outside my
> inner brain which produces the illusion of consciousness.
Hmm, I think that "illusion of consciousness" does not make sense,
because the concept of "illusion" presupposes the reality of
consciousness, in other words without the reality of consciousness the
concept of "illusion" is meaningless.
> There is an
> Out There out there which causes what I feel and sense In Here.
Ah, that's the materialist assumption. So can you say what you would
actually lose if you refused to make it?
[snip rest of post with which I agree]
ozah...@yahoo.com
evidence that
a need for an evidence exists ?
But, if not only an evidence is a wrong but also the perceptions, where
is then the new dilema, ... for to catch ... at .
For example, We can consider a primitive as a objectivity and, ofcourse
dilemized,
why not to force at so constructed language to proclamate the
PARADIGMA.
You are invited to kill the AUTOR of such a paradigma as recurvity is
at His opinion,
as these unplugged publication (http://360.yahoo.com/ozahariev) are of
intrest to
physical universe of Yours.
Regards & (The Rest Is At Your ...)
Ognian Zahariev
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
> There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there
> is no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is
> the best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required
> for understanding any of our observations of the physical universe. Yet
> consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that - which shows
> that the rule "We should only believe in the existence of something
> when there is objective evidence for it " is wrong, as we have just
> found a counterexample.
>
> If one should relax this rule and say "We should only believe in the
> existence of something when it is directly perceived or when there is
> objective evidence for it" then one can justify the existence of
> consciousness by pointing out that one's own consciousness is directly
> perceived, therefore it exists, and therefore consciousness in general
> exists also. But what about the existence of other peoples'
> consciousness? We don't perceive it directly and neither is there
> objective evidence of it. Yet we know other peoples' consciousness
> exists also - we are practically certain about that. So this form of
> the rule doesn't work either.
>
> How about: "We should only believe in the existence of something when
> it is directly perceived or when there is evidence for it."? That's I
> think the rule that rational thought should follow. But it's not
> objective anymore. (And it makes you think what subjective evidence
> there is for the existence of other peoples' consciousness.)
>
> In short what I am claiming here is that objectivity directly leads to
> the solipsistic view that one is the only conscious being there is.
> Objectivity and non-solipsism are logically exclusive.
Dianelos Georgoudis
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> > Idealism is simply the refusal to make the materialist assumption. The
> > materialist assumption is that there is a material universe out there
> > in which we exist and which somehow causes our conscious experiences.
> > According to idealism reality is exhausted by the space of conscious
> > experience, and knowledge is exhausted by the discovery of patterns in
> > our conscious experiences in that space.
>
> The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since the
> concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual error.
Which is?
> <snip>
> > Consider the advantages of idealism:
>
> All the advantages you cite are a result not of idealism but of the refusal
> to make the materialist assumption, but since that is your definition of
> idealism, you are in a strange sense being consistent.
Well my ontology is characterized by the recognition of the reality of
conscious experience and by the rejection of the materialist
assumption. As far as I can see it is fairly compatible with any
definition of idealism I know of, and is awfully close to Berkeley's
subjective idealism, so naming my ontology "idealism" is I think
warranted.
> However, your appeal
> to consciousness, which makes you think that you're espousing idealism, is
> an unnecessary complication. Once it is understood that the
> materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none of these problems arise
> anyway.
I don't understand. If (my version of) idealism has advantages compared
to materialism then there is a real distinction between the two, so
what do you mean when you say that this distinction is "invalid"?
Or if you imply that there is a different idea that also avoids
materialism's problems and which does not appeal to consciousness, what
is it? I am rather curious :-)
andy-k
> andy-k wrote:
>> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
>> > Idealism is simply the refusal to make the materialist assumption. The
>> > materialist assumption is that there is a material universe out there
>> > in which we exist and which somehow causes our conscious experiences.
>> > According to idealism reality is exhausted by the space of conscious
>> > experience, and knowledge is exhausted by the discovery of patterns in
>> > our conscious experiences in that space.
>>
>> The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since the
>> concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual error.
>
> Which is?
Consciousness as the substance of mind.
<snip>
>> However, your appeal to consciousness, which makes you think that you're
>> espousing idealism, is an unnecessary complication. Once it is understood
>> that the materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none of these
>> problems arise anyway.
>
> I don't understand. If (my version of) idealism has advantages compared
> to materialism then there is a real distinction between the two, so
> what do you mean when you say that this distinction is "invalid"?
The concept of consciousness as the substance of mind also invokes matter as
the substance of body -- i.e. we end up with substance dualism. A rejection
of one half of this arrangement (i.e. materialistic monism or idealistic
monism) renders the consciousness/non-consciousness distinction meaningless,
since either choice becomes a concept without complement -- that is to say
no concept at all.
> Or if you imply that there is a different idea that also avoids
> materialism's problems and which does not appeal to consciousness, what
> is it? I am rather curious :-)
If we can extricate ourselves from the default concept of consciousness as
the substance of mind, and understand that this is a conceptual error, then
we aren't railroaded into the bullshit metaphysics of materialism vs..
idealism.
Robert J. Kolker
>
>
> Ah, that's the materialist assumption. So can you say what you would
> actually lose if you refused to make it?
Indeed. If Out There is real, than my In Here experience is not mere
illusion and hallucination. I would prefer my sense of being and
existence not be reduced to raving lunacy. I am quite aware that radical
solopsism cannot be logically vanquished, but I do not believe it for a
mircrosecond. I would rather be glued to an external cause than be an
inmate of an insane asylum of my own making. That is a preference, not
an a apriori necessity.
Bob Kolker
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>Neither you nor I have ever seen an electron, or a quark, or a proton
>and certainly not a neutrino. If they are what they are supposed to be
>they will go right through our retinas, nonstop.
How utterly Positivist of you.
You and Popper will have fun together.
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>the illusion of consciousness.
Your consciousness is an illusion? How do you know?
>2. You think you have seen or sensed them.
This is the kind of stuff you hear from non-scientists.
If you took the full physics curriculum from high school thru your
Ph.D. you would have gained the experience needed to see that
statements such as the ones you have been making are utter nonsense.
There is an object that can be characterized by mass, charge, spin,
etc. which we call an electron. This object is found in a large number
of situations in the physical world.
The fact that it is invisible is irrelevant to productive physicists
because they know how to deal with the electron on their terms.
The fact that you require it to be visible to deal with it shows you
do not understand physics.
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>If Out There is real, than my In Here experience is not mere
>illusion and hallucination.
You just said in the previous post:
"I beleive (sic) what I detect with my senses is caused by stuff
outside my inner brain which produces the illusion of consciousness."
Which is it? Is your consciousness an illusion or not?
Robert J. Kolker
>
>
> How utterly Positivist of you.
You mean how utterly exact and factual of me. I pay attention to details
while you go looking for you First Cause. Details, details. God and the
Devil are in the details.
Bob Kolker
Robert J. Kolker
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 08:46:09 -0500, "Robert J. Kolker"
> <now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>
>
>>If Out There is real, than my In Here experience is not mere
>>illusion and hallucination.
>
>
> You just said in the previous post:
>
> "I beleive (sic) what I detect with my senses is caused by stuff
> outside my inner brain which produces the illusion of consciousness."
>
> Which is it? Is your consciousness an illusion or not?
Consciousness is subjective. I cannot observe it anywhere but in my own
head. So as a -generality- consciousness is a subjective illusion. As a
-particularity- I experience consciousness very vividly. I know the
difference between what is In Here and Out There. Apparently you don't.
Now tell me how you would detect a mind in a body you do not own. I
really would like to here what you have to say.
Bob Kolker
a niece of the Oak Lady
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
>The only cases I know of grownups who managed to
> get confused about the meaning of consciousness
> are those materialist philosophers who have tried
> so hard and for so long to fit consciousness
> within their paradigm of reality that they start
> doubting what consciousness means. If you
> visualize yourself fitting a square peg into a
> round hole for too long you end up imagining that
> the square peg is round - because it must be in
> order to fit.
Materialism is another term that often leaves me initially wondering
what the speaker or author intends by it in those specific cases (much
like consciousness). There are those who do truly seem to mean classic
mechanistic materialism or the older (pre-Dennett) definition of
Cartesian materialism (stripped from the original substance dualism);
some may mean dialectical materialism; but others like the so-called
"neo-Russellians" can intend "materialism" as a reference to a neutral
ontology that leaves the question of "substance" open; yet others seem
to use it as a synonym for naturalism (which traditionally has no ontic
commitment apart from declaring that there is only "one realm", no
supernatural); and then there are yet more who seem to either use it as
an ontological version of realism or even confuse materialism and
realism as being the same (the latter being on the epistemological
side). Finally, there those who seem to mean "physical" by their use of
"material", but the former, in a stricter environment, should be
reserved for physics (as biological refers to biology) rather than
employed as reference to certain metaphysical doctrines. Ah, well,
their intended meaning usually surfaces somewhere in the discourse or
essay (usually!).
I
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> How utterly Positivist of you.
>You mean how utterly exact and factual of me. I pay attention to details
But you ignore the inferences when you can't find prove it with
experiment and falsifiability.
If you had been Pauli, you would have rejected the possibility that a
neutrino existed - until someone found it experimentally.
BTW, how do you falsify a neutrino?
Popper talks a big line, but it is all psychobabble.
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> Which is it? Is your consciousness an illusion or not?
>Consciousness is subjective. I cannot observe it anywhere but in my own
>head. So as a -generality- consciousness is a subjective illusion. As a
>-particularity- I experience consciousness very vividly.
This is a perfect example of a vague theory.
Johnny robbed a home because he was from a poor neighborhood. Opps. he
was actually from a rich neignborhood. Then Johnny robbed a home
because he was from a rich neighborhood.
You have an answer for everything, even the contradictory opposite.
Feynman would have just loved to know you.
>I know the difference between what is In Here and Out There.
Straw man.
This has nothing to do with your claim that consciousness is an
illusion and that consciousness is not an illusion.
> Apparently you don't.
Psychobabble.
You don't know jack shit about what I know or don't know about your
simplistic notions of subjective and objective.
>Now tell me how you would detect a mind in a body you do not own. I
>really would like to here what you have to say.
Straw man.
This has nothing to do with your claim that consciousness is an
illusion and that consciousness is not an illusion.
Bob
<gv...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Materialism is another term that often leaves me initially wondering
>what the speaker or author intends by it in those specific cases (much
>like consciousness). There are those who do truly seem to mean classic
>mechanistic materialism or the older (pre-Dennett) definition of
>Cartesian materialism (stripped from the original substance dualism);
>some may mean dialectical materialism; but others like the so-called
>"neo-Russellians" can intend "materialism" as a reference to a neutral
>ontology that leaves the question of "substance" open; yet others seem
>to use it as a synonym for naturalism (which traditionally has no ontic
>commitment apart from declaring that there is only "one realm", no
>supernatural); and then there are yet more who seem to either use it as
>an ontological version of realism or even confuse materialism and
>realism as being the same (the latter being on the epistemological
>side). Finally, there those who seem to mean "physical" by their use of
>"material", but the former, in a stricter environment, should be
>reserved for physics (as biological refers to biology) rather than
>employed as reference to certain metaphysical doctrines. Ah, well,
>their intended meaning usually surfaces somewhere in the discourse or
>essay (usually!).
Materialism is an ideology, not a science, and therefore can mean
anything you want it to mean because it is constructed from vague
theories.
Material/physical, on the other hand, are scientific concepts.
Physical means it is part of the Universe.
It is the purpose of Physics to understand the physical Universe.
Robert J. Kolker
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 10:02:22 -0500, "Robert J. Kolker"
> <now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>How utterly Positivist of you.
>
>
>>You mean how utterly exact and factual of me. I pay attention to details
>
>
> But you ignore the inferences when you can't find prove it with
> experiment and falsifiability.
As long as the inferences can be tested I do not ignore them.
>
> If you had been Pauli, you would have rejected the possibility that a
> neutrino existed - until someone found it experimentally.
No. I would have hypothesized the particle and using its hypothetical
properties designed an experiment to find it.
Bob Kolker
Robert J. Kolker
>
> Straw man.
>
> This has nothing to do with your claim that consciousness is an
> illusion and that consciousness is not an illusion.
My consciousness is not an illusion, because I experience it. Your
consciousness is. I have no way to establish that you are conscious. How
do I know you are not just an elaborate automaton with no consciousness?
If you can suggest an objective method of establishing consciousness in
a body you do not own, I am all ears to hear it.
The existence of consciousness is not capable of being verified
intersubjectively. We can both agree that we saw a flash of light, but
we cannot both agree that you are conscious. I have no way of knowing if
you are.
This is why I tend to ignore philosphical discourse which invokes
consciousness. It is not subject to empirical testing.
Bob Kolker
Dianelos Georgoudis
Robert J. Kolker wrote:
> Bob wrote:
> >
> > Straw man.
> >
> > This has nothing to do with your claim that consciousness is an
> > illusion and that consciousness is not an illusion.
>
> My consciousness is not an illusion, because I experience it. Your
> consciousness is. I have no way to establish that you are conscious. How
> do I know you are not just an elaborate automaton with no consciousness?
>
> If you can suggest an objective method of establishing consciousness in
> a body you do not own, I am all ears to hear it.
You won't hear it. Simply because there isn't any objective evidence
for which the existence of consciousness is the best explanation. This
is an objective fact even though apparently very few people know about
this (you are one). I suppose this objective fact should be taught at
school, alongside the fact that there no objective evidence for which
the best explanation is the existence of God.
> The existence of consciousness is not capable of being verified
> intersubjectively. We can both agree that we saw a flash of light, but
> we cannot both agree that you are conscious. I have no way of knowing if
> you are.
>
> This is why I tend to ignore philosphical discourse which invokes
> consciousness. It is not subject to empirical testing.
And yet it exists. (to paraphrase Galileo :-)
Which shows that there must be something wrong with objectivity as a
methodology for deciding what exists and what doesn't. Which nicely
brings us back to the initial post in this thread and the idea that
objectivity is found wanting.
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>As long as the inferences can be tested I do not ignore them.
What if the inferences cannot be tested experimentally?
>> If you had been Pauli, you would have rejected the possibility that a
>> neutrino existed - until someone found it experimentally.
>No. I would have hypothesized the particle and using its hypothetical
>properties designed an experiment to find it.
So why not do that with the Supreme Being?
Bob
<now...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> This has nothing to do with your claim that consciousness is an
>> illusion and that consciousness is not an illusion.
>My consciousness is not an illusion, because I experience it.
But you said earlier that your consciousness was an illusion. Are you
retracting your earlier statement?
>Your
>consciousness is. I have no way to establish that you are conscious. How
>do I know you are not just an elaborate automaton with no consciousness?
Penrose claims there are ways to beat the Turing Test.
http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/penrose/
This lecture is based on his first two books.
>If you can suggest an objective method of establishing consciousness in
>a body you do not own, I am all ears to hear it.
Listen to that Penrose lecture.
>The existence of consciousness is not capable of being verified
>intersubjectively. We can both agree that we saw a flash of light, but
>we cannot both agree that you are conscious. I have no way of knowing if
>you are.
Penrose claims you can infer it.
>This is why I tend to ignore philosphical discourse which invokes
>consciousness. It is not subject to empirical testing.
Neither are a lot of things in physics that physicists nevertheless
accept as existant.
Your Positivism will serve you well as far as classical physics is
concerned but it is not going to serve you well when it comes to
quantum mechanics. There are too many things in QM that cannot and
never will be tested empirically for a long time to come.
While the physicists were waiting for the discovery of the neutrino
experimentally, their "hypothesis", as you call it, was crucial in
understanding nuclear physics.
Here is a brief history:
+++
1931 - A hypothetical particle is predicted by the theorist Wolfgang
Pauli. Pauli based his prediction on the fact that energy and momentum
did not appear to be conserved in certain radioactive decays. Pauli
suggested that this missing energy might be carried off, unseen, by a
neutral particle which was escaping detection.
1934 - Enrico Fermi develops a comprehensive theory of radioactive
decays, including Pauli's hypothetical particle, which Fermi coins the
neutrino (Italian: "little neutral one"). With inclusion of the
neutrino, Fermi's theory accurately explains many experimentally
observed results.
1959 - Discovery of a particle fitting the expected characteristics of
the neutrino is announced by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines (a founding
member of Super-Kamiokande; UCI professor emeritus and recipient of
the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the
discovery). This neutrino is later determined to be the partner of the
electron.
+++
We built the atomic bomb and ended the Pacific War with "hypothetical"
particle.
That alone should be enough to put any Postivist to shame.
Dianelos Georgoudis
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> > andy-k wrote:
> >> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> >> > Idealism is simply the refusal to make the materialist assumption. The
> >> > materialist assumption is that there is a material universe out there
> >> > in which we exist and which somehow causes our conscious experiences.
> >> > According to idealism reality is exhausted by the space of conscious
> >> > experience, and knowledge is exhausted by the discovery of patterns in
> >> > our conscious experiences in that space.
> >>
> >> The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since the
> >> concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual error.
> >
> > Which is?
>
> Consciousness as the substance of mind.
But this is not the concept of consciousness I use (in fact for me
"mind" and "consciousness" are exact synonyms). So, I suppose my
materialist/idealist distinction is valid.
> <snip>
> >> However, your appeal to consciousness, which makes you think that you're
> >> espousing idealism, is an unnecessary complication. Once it is understood
> >> that the materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none of these
> >> problems arise anyway.
> >
> > I don't understand. If (my version of) idealism has advantages compared
> > to materialism then there is a real distinction between the two, so
> > what do you mean when you say that this distinction is "invalid"?
>
> The concept of consciousness as the substance of mind also invokes matter as
> the substance of body -- i.e. we end up with substance dualism. A rejection
> of one half of this arrangement (i.e. materialistic monism or idealistic
> monism) renders the consciousness/non-consciousness distinction meaningless,
> since either choice becomes a concept without complement -- that is to say
> no concept at all.
I am not rejecting the materialist assumption as incoherent, but as
useless. Neither in any case does idealism depend on materialism making
sense. I think you see a duality somewhere that I don't see. But maybe
I don't understand what you are saying. You don't doubt the reality of
your own conscious experiences, right? So the thesis that conscious
experience is all that is real cannot be meaningless, can it?
> > Or if you imply that there is a different idea that also avoids
> > materialism's problems and which does not appeal to consciousness, what
> > is it? I am rather curious :-)
>
> If we can extricate ourselves from the default concept of consciousness as
> the substance of mind, and understand that this is a conceptual error, then
> we aren't railroaded into the bullshit metaphysics of materialism vs..
> idealism.
So, what non-bullshit ontology are you proposing? What is real?
andy-k
> andy-k wrote:
>> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since
>> >> the concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual
>> >> error.
>> >
>> > Which is?
>>
>> Consciousness as the substance of mind.
>
> But this is not the concept of consciousness I use (in fact for me
> "mind" and "consciousness" are exact synonyms). So, I suppose my
> materialist/idealist distinction is valid.
Then the concept of "mind" to which you refer is only valid when contrasted
with something else that is "non-mind". If your version of idealism is to
claim that there is no "non-mind" then once again the concept has no
complement, and so is no concept at all.
>> >> However, your appeal to consciousness, which makes you think that
>> >> you're espousing idealism, is an unnecessary complication. Once it is
>> >> understood that the materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none
>> >> of these problems arise anyway.
>> >
>> > I don't understand. If (my version of) idealism has advantages compared
>> > to materialism then there is a real distinction between the two, so
>> > what do you mean when you say that this distinction is "invalid"?
>>
>> The concept of consciousness as the substance of mind also invokes matter
>> as the substance of body -- i.e. we end up with substance dualism. A
>> rejection of one half of this arrangement (i.e. materialistic monism or
>> idealistic monism) renders the consciousness/non-consciousness
>> distinction meaningless, since either choice becomes a concept without
>> complement -- that is to say no concept at all.
>
> I am not rejecting the materialist assumption as incoherent, but as
> useless. Neither in any case does idealism depend on materialism making
> sense. I think you see a duality somewhere that I don't see. But maybe
> I don't understand what you are saying. You don't doubt the reality of
> your own conscious experiences, right? So the thesis that conscious
> experience is all that is real cannot be meaningless, can it?
There are data, where data are inhomogeneities that exhibit a certain degree
of order. Doubt is an aspect of that data. We are inclined to talk about
"data of consciousness" or "data of experience" or "data of mind", as though
the extra word qualifies the data in some respect. The extra word only
qualifies the data if an ontological stance has already been insidiously
assumed -- a stance that entertains the claim that there is something that
stands in contrast to "consciousness" or "experience" or "mind". Only then
does it give the appearance of making sense to talk about the
materialism/idealism distinction -- because that distinction has already
been insidiously assumed!
>> > Or if you imply that there is a different idea that also avoids
>> > materialism's problems and which does not appeal to consciousness, what
>> > is it? I am rather curious :-)
>>
>> If we can extricate ourselves from the default concept of consciousness
>> as the substance of mind, and understand that this is a conceptual error,
>> then we aren't railroaded into the bullshit metaphysics of materialism
>> vs. idealism.
>
> So, what non-bullshit ontology are you proposing? What is real?
You have to think hard about how you're using the word 'real' here. This is
a word that has many valid uses in normal everyday language -- e.g. I prefer
"real cream" in my coffee to that vegetable-oil "artificial cream". Once
again, when we become adept at abstraction we are inclined to impose a new
"philosophical" use of the word onto all of its everyday uses. We trip so
lightly into la-la land that we don't even notice.
Dianelos Georgoudis
a niece of the Oak Lady wrote:
Yes, but all of these flavors of materialism make the same basic
assumption: that there is an objective, independent, external reality
which causes our conscious experience. In other words this assumption
makes conscious experience contingent on an external reality, i.e. on a
reality beyond conscious experience itself. That is the assumption that
subjective idealism (as I understand it) rejects.
So, how exactly this external reality is supposed to be is irrelevant
to my definition of subjective idealism, even though I notice that most
if not all ontologies you describe above assume that this external
reality is basically materialistic at least in the sense that it can be
described using materialistic language.
Dianelos Georgoudis
---
andy-k wrote:
> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> > andy-k wrote:
> >> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
> >> > andy-k wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> The materialist/idealist distinction is invalid to begin with, since
> >> >> the concept of consciousness upon which it is founded is a conceptual
> >> >> error.
> >> >
> >> > Which is?
> >>
> >> Consciousness as the substance of mind.
> >
> > But this is not the concept of consciousness I use (in fact for me
> > "mind" and "consciousness" are exact synonyms). So, I suppose my
> > materialist/idealist distinction is valid.
>
> Then the concept of "mind" to which you refer is only valid when contrasted
> with something else that is "non-mind". If your version of idealism is to
> claim that there is no "non-mind" then once again the concept has no
> complement, and so is no concept at all.
You are saying that the concept of mind only makes sense if one can
also make sense of the concept of no-mind. Well, the point is that most
people not only make sense of no-mind but actually believe it's there,
so in order to speak coherently with them one must explain to them why
what their concept of no-mind refers to is not there at all. I mean, in
order to speak with people one must understand and coherently use their
concepts, mustn't one? Except, of course, for Zen, which may be a
marvelous way of communication but is not apt for usenet I am afraid.
> >> >> However, your appeal to consciousness, which makes you think that
> >> >> you're espousing idealism, is an unnecessary complication. Once it is
> >> >> understood that the materialist/idealist distinction is invalid, none
> >> >> of these problems arise anyway.
> >> >
> >> > I don't understand. If (my version of) idealism has advantages compared
> >> > to materialism then there is a real distinction between the two, so
> >> > what do you mean when you say that this distinction is "invalid"?
> >>
> >> The concept of consciousness as the substance of mind also invokes matter
> >> as the substance of body -- i.e. we end up with substance dualism. A
> >> rejection of one half of this arrangement (i.e. materialistic monism or
> >> idealistic monism) renders the consciousness/non-consciousness
> >> distinction meaningless, since either choice becomes a concept without
> >> complement -- that is to say no concept at all.
> >
> > I am not rejecting the materialist assumption as incoherent, but as
> > useless. Neither in any case does idealism depend on materialism making
> > sense. I think you see a duality somewhere that I don't see. But maybe
> > I don't understand what you are saying. You don't doubt the reality of
> > your own conscious experiences, right? So the thesis that conscious
> > experience is all that is real cannot be meaningless, can it?
>
> There are data, where data are inhomogeneities that exhibit a certain degree
> of order.
Exactly right.
> Doubt is an aspect of that data. We are inclined to talk about
> "data of consciousness" or "data of experience" or "data of mind", as though
> the extra word qualifies the data in some respect.
Well by "conscious experience" I mean that which you refer by "data"
without any further qualifications.
> The extra word only
> qualifies the data if an ontological stance has already been insidiously
> assumed -- a stance that entertains the claim that there is something that
> stands in contrast to "consciousness" or "experience" or "mind".
Yes, because all people have a materialistic model of an external
material world by the age they are three, so to speak of consciousness
always creates a tension with that deep-seated and practically
hard-wired model of reality. But I would think that to explicitly
reject that model (i.e. explain that one should refuse to make the
materialist assumption, no matter how natural and obvious it appears)
goes into the same direction you are going, and I think is a more
effective way to communicate with people.
> Only then
> does it give the appearance of making sense to talk about the
> materialism/idealism distinction -- because that distinction has already
> been insidiously assumed!
But there is distinction, not a distinction of the style "take one step
left towards idealism and not one step right towards materialism" but a
distinction of the style "stay where you are and do not take one step
towards materialism". In don't see why this kind of language must be
less effective than your "don't make a distinction between subject and
object" type of language. Leaving the matter of which is the best
descriptive language, it appears to me that if two ontologies are
functionally the same, in the sense that two people using different
language arrive at the same conclusions, then the two ontologies are
identical. This is the pragmatical stance, and is of course an
eminently practical one. Now, the contrary is not true, namely the fact
that two people do not arrive at the same conclusions does not imply
that they are using different ontologies, but only that one or both of
them have committed an error somewhere or have not gone far enough. Of
course if they could agree on one language it will be easier to discuss
these differences.
> >> > Or if you imply that there is a different idea that also avoids
> >> > materialism's problems and which does not appeal to consciousness, what
> >> > is it? I am rather curious :-)
> >>
> >> If we can extricate ourselves from the default concept of consciousness
> >> as the substance of mind, and understand that this is a conceptual error,
> >> then we aren't railroaded into the bullshit metaphysics of materialism
> >> vs. idealism.
> >
> > So, what non-bullshit ontology are you proposing? What is real?
>
> You have to think hard about how you're using the word 'real' here. This is
> a word that has many valid uses in normal everyday language -- e.g. I prefer
> "real cream" in my coffee to that vegetable-oil "artificial cream". Once
> again, when we become adept at abstraction we are inclined to impose a new
> "philosophical" use of the word onto all of its everyday uses. We trip so
> lightly into la-la land that we don't even notice.
I know exactly what you mean.
So what is your ontology? Above you gave a positive description I find
exactly mirrors mine: "There are data, where data are inhomogeneities
that exhibit a certain degree of order". If that it? Because if it is,
I am interested to know whether you notice a fundamental underlying
coherence in that data. In other words whether you notice that the data
that coalesce into little pools of order which in turn coalesce into
larger pools of order display the clear tendency (or meta-order if you
like) of coalescing into one single pool. Incidentally that pool that
in the West is described by God-type language and in the East is
described by Karma-type language, demonstrating a Western propensity to
center on goals and an Eastern propensity to center on means.
a niece of the Oak Lady
Materialism does seem to imply that its mind-independent entities and
behaviors are at least the cause of self or subjective consciousness,
what Dennett calls "strong-consciousness". But not necessarily always
experience in general, what he calls "weak-consciousness", where events
do not belong to a "subject".
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html#dennett
Going by other sources, Dennett's "materialism" may actually be a form
of externalized phenomenalism or just a neutral explanatory approach.
But there's inconsistency about where he's coming from; he delivers
negative comments about "greedy reductionism" in one instance (sounding
like a non-reductive materialist, or emergentist) but then disparages
the use of "sky-hooks" for "cranes" in another work (sounding like a
reductive materialist). He also favors evolution as the fundamental
paradigm of reality (the "universal acid" that eats into all sciences),
and seems to not be bothered by an infinite regression of "causes"
(like universes and their unique laws evolving from former universes,
perpetually).
At any rate, I guess I've become a little less hasty about judging what
materialists are proclaiming than in the past, simply because so many
of them are metaphysically evasive even in light of their swinging that
term "materialism" around.
I
andy-k
> andy-k wrote:
>> "Dianelos Georgoudis" wrote:
>> >
>> > But this is not the concept of consciousness I use (in fact for me
>> > "mind" and "consciousness" are exact synonyms). So, I suppose my
>> > materialist/idealist distinction is valid.
>>
>> Then the concept of "mind" to which you refer is only valid when
>> contrasted with something else that is "non-mind". If your version of
>> idealism is to claim that there is no "non-mind" then once again the
>> concept has no complement, and so is no concept at all.
>
> You are saying that the concept of mind only makes sense if one can
> also make sense of the concept of no-mind. Well, the point is that most
> people not only make sense of no-mind but actually believe it's there,
> so in order to speak coherently with them one must explain to them why
> what their concept of no-mind refers to is not there at all. I mean, in
> order to speak with people one must understand and coherently use their
> concepts, mustn't one? Except, of course, for Zen, which may be a
> marvelous way of communication but is not apt for usenet I am afraid.
Rejecting materialism is different from subscribing to idealism.
>> > I am not rejecting the materialist assumption as incoherent, but as
>> > useless. Neither in any case does idealism depend on materialism making
>> > sense. I think you see a duality somewhere that I don't see. But maybe
>> > I don't understand what you are saying. You don't doubt the reality of
>> > your own conscious experiences, right? So the thesis that conscious
>> > experience is all that is real cannot be meaningless, can it?
>>
>> There are data, where data are inhomogeneities that exhibit a certain
>> degree of order.
>
> Exactly right.
>
>> Doubt is an aspect of that data. We are inclined to talk about
>> "data of consciousness" or "data of experience" or "data of mind", as
>> though the extra word qualifies the data in some respect.
>
> Well by "conscious experience" I mean that which you refer by "data"
> without any further qualifications.
Then you are obfuscating the issue by adopting an unnecessary convention
that panders to adherents of the very position you wish to repudiate, laying
yourself open to philosophically idiotic criticisms.
>> The extra word only qualifies the data if an ontological stance has
>> already been insidiously assumed -- a stance that entertains the claim
>> that there is something that stands in contrast to "consciousness" or
>> "experience" or "mind".
>
> Yes, because all people have a materialistic model of an external
> material world by the age they are three, so to speak of consciousness
> always creates a tension with that deep-seated and practically
> hard-wired model of reality. But I would think that to explicitly
> reject that model (i.e. explain that one should refuse to make the
> materialist assumption, no matter how natural and obvious it appears)
> goes into the same direction you are going, and I think is a more
> effective way to communicate with people.
You may reject that model without subscribing to the contrasting model
(which is equally invalid).
>> Only then does it give the appearance of making sense to talk about the
>> materialism/idealism distinction -- because that distinction has already
>> been insidiously assumed!
>
> But there is distinction, not a distinction of the style "take one step
> left towards idealism and not one step right towards materialism" but a
> distinction of the style "stay where you are and do not take one step
> towards materialism".
"Stay where you are and do not take one step towards materialism" is equally
"stay where you are and do not take one step towards idealism".
> In don't see why this kind of language must be less effective than your
> "don't make a distinction between subject and object" type of language.
I haven't mentioned the distinction between subject and object. Yet.
<snip>
>> > So, what non-bullshit ontology are you proposing? What is real?
>>
>> You have to think hard about how you're using the word 'real' here. This
>> is a word that has many valid uses in normal everyday language -- e.g. I
>> prefer "real cream" in my coffee to that vegetable-oil "artificial
>> cream". Once again, when we become adept at abstraction we are inclined
>> to impose a new "philosophical" use of the word onto all of its everyday
>> uses. We trip so lightly into la-la land that we don't even notice.
>
> I know exactly what you mean.
>
> So what is your ontology? Above you gave a positive description I find
> exactly mirrors mine: "There are data, where data are inhomogeneities
> that exhibit a certain degree of order". If that it? Because if it is,
> I am interested to know whether you notice a fundamental underlying
> coherence in that data. In other words whether you notice that the data
> that coalesce into little pools of order which in turn coalesce into
> larger pools of order display the clear tendency (or meta-order if you
> like) of coalescing into one single pool.
I'm inclined to regard separativity as a consequence of data processing --
i.e. the brain categorizes incoming data into discrete 'things' (including
distinct organisms that have brains that categorize incoming data). Once we
have spatially distinct 'things' then we also have interactions between
them -- i.e. temporally distinct events. Reductionism, determinism, and
mechanism would seem to follow in the wake of this separativity, and have
utility within that limited domain wherein the separate organism must
survive and reproduce.
Furthermore, that this separativity is a matter of convention alone -- i.e.
that the separate 'things' we perceive have no underlying substance or
essence. I'm alluding here to another perspective wherein the wholeness
unfolds (as long as we don't conceive the wholeness as another such
'thing'), and the unfolding wholeness is perceived (from the perspective of
the separate organism) as a multiplicity of distinct things in causal
interaction. In short, then, everything causes, and is caused by, everything
else, and all these conventions lean upon each other for mutual support.
(nB. The question "what determines the way the wholeness unfolds?" would
seem to be a consequence of regarding the wholeness as another such
'thing'.)
andy-k
> Then you are obfuscating the issue by adopting an unnecessary convention
> that panders to adherents of the very position you wish to repudiate,
> laying yourself open to philosophically idiotic criticisms.
-- i.e. criticisms made by materialists against idealists.
jillar...@webtv.net
QUOTE:
There is no objective evidence of consciousness. In other words there is
no objective observation for which the existence of consciousness is the
best explanation. So the consciousness hypothesis is not required for
understanding any of our observations of the physical universe. Yet
consciousness exists - we are absolutely certain of that - which shows
that the rule [1] "We should only believe in the existence of something
when there is objective evidence for it " is wrong, as we have just
found a counterexample.
If one should relax this rule and say [2] "We should only believe in the
existence of something when it is directly perceived or when there is
objective evidence for it" then one can justify the existence of
consciousness by pointing out that one's own consciousness is directly
perceived, therefore it exists, and therefore consciousness in general
exists also.
But what about the existence of other peoples' consciousness? We don't
perceive it directly and neither is there objective evidence of it. Yet
we know other peoples' consciousness exists also - we are practically
certain about that. So this form of the rule doesn't work either. How
about: [3] "We should only believe in the existence of something when it
is directly perceived or when there is evidence for it."? That's I think
the rule that rational thought should follow. But it's not objective
anymore. (And it makes you think what subjective evidence there is for
the existence of other peoples' consciousness.)
In short what I am claiming here is that objectivity directly leads to
the solipsistic view that one is the only conscious being there is.
Objectivity and non-solipsism are logically exclusive.
END QUOTE:
REPLY: Hello DG, I have numbered your rules in order to make comments
which are not intended to be contentious.
PART 1:
Textually, there is a problem in the logic for the reader. A concession
is made to solipism after directing the reader toward broadening rule
#1, which was stated like an axiom- "objective evidence" IS a given
admission entailed to an act of observation. So observation IS what we
do. I agree it IS and most people will agree that observation is
constituted- that is takes place, it happens. After such textual
rendering it might be a mistake to expect an audience to surrender it or
make it specific to only internalism. Because intuition- across the
human and animal spectrum- is a greater coincidence to externalism than
to internalism. And the humans group in ways which, unlike the animals,
externally add moral, legal, and social conducts of normativity over the
individual that constitute intentionality first over consciousness and
intuition, both which animals share with humans on a lessor degree.
Specifically, here is the alogical textual problem:
"So the consciousness hypothesis is not required for understanding any
of our observations of the physical universe. Yet consciousness exists"
1] There is no consciousness hypothesis.
2] observation IS.
3] understanding observations must be correlated to externalism because
it is not correlated to internalsm due to dream states which lead to
uncorrelations.
[2] [observation-being] is intentionality. Intentional content is
correlated to physical reductions- for humans and animals, dispositional
states with language referenced to behavior- mainly for humans, and
constitutional predictions of an "I" being- for humans. Note: animals
have a lower constitutional prediction level which prevents them from
entering into scientific knowledge for the group. They have a similar
sense knowledge for naive prediction like humans. In that sense, they
have consciousness as we have consciosness, and they have intuition like
we have intuition. The difference is how much greater it is in humans-
Plato's major thesis about the triparte nature of humans- being anima,
emotion, and understanding. A lessor form had a prediction on an animal
level- a dog can intuitively catch a ball. A higher form had a
scientific prediction by a human- a human can intuitively catch time
with a sun dial. Both intuitions are subsequent to basic
intentionalities. Therefore a dog and a human have diferent levels of
intentionality. Both are in the world. Both are external exhibitors of
perhaps consciousness.
[3] [Understanding] is human and qualified hetero-phenomenological
content because internalism is cojoined with self-deception, which
requires the ability to search for a self and be deceived solely in that
realm outside the group. Plato taught that ethics was the way out of
internalism. Basic hetero-pheneomenological pursuits shown in his
dialogues made alterations develop within his texts- the ethos of a
group that itself can change must have a changing GOOD. In his
"Republic" he changes the ethics of the GOOD from one of anarchy to one
of state governments. His talks on Ethics always lead to externalisms,
the group, as the dialogues themselves were at parties and taking place
in front of an silent audience. The individual was pulled from
self-dedeptive internalism by ethos- group FORMs of anarchy, state law,
morality, and knowledge AIMED at the GROUP. This makes Plato an opposite
thinker from someone like Descartes, who remanied stuck in dreams and
internalism. And Foucault who continued the internalistic error by
rejecting Heidegger's world "I". Foucault thought that the "I" was only
fully present in a dream state where no group rules existed to constrain
it. That is wrong. The "I" comes about in the world. Even Wittgensten
thought that the "I" hovered between two major paradigms given by the
LEM- a mistake, he said, in thinking on our part, which he concluded to
be "unspeakable", but there in the middle.
Heidegger saw it too. He said it was "transparnt" in the world, but IN
the world. The former being concerned with logica, the latter concern
with classical extention of pragmata for world being.
REPLY PART 2
As for rule #2 in the text title wanting objectivity, it conveys an
underestimation in view of these three intentional states- reductions,
dispositions, and intentionalities. The textual problem disharbors
affirmation of intentionality:
"So the consciousness hypothesis is not required for understanding any
of our observations of the physical universe."
The affirmation sould be: Intentionality IS required for understanding
our observations. Because intentionality IS what manifests the other-
the hetero-genera which lead to knowledge and science.
Textual rule #2 is incorrect: Consciousness cannot be perceived in and
of itself because that is an inconcrugence of intentionality. There are
NO phenomenological attentions to "consciousness" itself. It cannot be a
bracket of observation. Rule #2 must be thrown out.
The existential-phenomenologist(s) in search of knowledge and science
have
given by definition, the meaning that to be conscious of something other
than itself, is that which is intentional. Can animals have
intentionality? Do machines? Do humans perceive their own consciousness?
All answers are NO. This is tied to understanding- again that hovering
state which Wittgenstein and Heidegger move around in the neutral ground
between a reductive-dispsitional paradigm of thinking.
So intentionality manifests physical correlations and dispositional
correlations. It does not manifest the "I". But no one denies the "I".
The "I" has been moved around by every major thinker but it has never
been jettisoned reasonably.
Existential-phenomenoloical [intentional] content leads to externalism-
physical and dispositional content that is heterogeneous. Hence,
Dennet's hetero-phenomenology. If intentionality denies conscious
perception of consciousness and no major philosopher can affirm it nor
deny it, intentionality IS, and said, or unsaid- constituted.
A few words about intuition. It is a cognitive faculty that is TOO
coincidental to externalism and less coincidental to internalism. Even
in animals- perhaps because of we are linked in that likeness. It is not
a cognitive affirmation of consciousness. It is related to
intentionality in a way which cannot help us to transcend intentionality
itself.
What examples of "directly" perceived cognitions of "consciousness" are
there?
None.
Intentionality then, is the starting point. So now begins science- a
search for the MORE than LESS coincidental correlations of
intentionality including the MOST coincidental correlations of HARD
science. The point of departure is:
A: There is intentionality and there is intuitive manifestation of
externalism beyond coincidence.
Dianelos Georgoudis
So digital cameras have weak-consciousness, right? What about a piece
of rusting iron? It too in some real sense processes information and
reacts to its environment. So the "weak consciousness" idea does not
look particular useful, and it's a good idea to keep calling
consciousness consciousness. Frankly I think that Dennett with his
belief that unless you have human-like language you cannot be somebody
who feels pain has gone over the curve into the la-la land.
I find that one can better understand people by reading between the
lines. Much of modern philosophy is a psychological reaction to seeing
Darwin trump one of the most hallowed and convincing arguments for the
existence of God, as well as modern science succeed beyond anybody's
dreams in explaining phenomena without requiring the God hypothesis. So
deep down most modern philosophers want to make sure they will not
stray too far from science's methodology and language. See how
proudly Dennett in his piece above affirms "I am happy to give animals
and small children 'the benefit of the doubt' for moral purposes, but
not for scientific purposes." He imagines himself doing science, no
matter the fact that consciousness, conscious subjects, and conscious
experiences are all scientific non-issues, as there is no objective
evidence that justifies their existence as a valid scientific
hypotheses in the first place.
> Going by other sources, Dennett's "materialism" may actually be a form
> of externalized phenomenalism or just a neutral explanatory approach.
> But there's inconsistency about where he's coming from; he delivers
> negative comments about "greedy reductionism" in one instance (sounding
> like a non-reductive materialist, or emergentist) but then disparages
> the use of "sky-hooks" for "cranes" in another work (sounding like a
> reductive materialist). He also favors evolution as the fundamental
> paradigm of reality (the "universal acid" that eats into all sciences),
> and seems to not be bothered by an infinite regression of "causes"
> (like universes and their unique laws evolving from former universes,
> perpetually).
You are referring to the anthropic principle and the theistic
"fine-tuning of the universe" argument. That's a funny situation
because it's based on a misunderstanding of science, by both theists
and atheists. They think that science describes physical reality and
explains our observation of it. It is a demonstrable fact is that
science only describes phenomena; there is no scientific explanation of
phenomena beyond the predictive power implicit in their descriptions.
And science certainly does not describe the physical reality most
theists and atheists assume is there, as can be shown by pointing out
that if physical reality did not exist at all and our conscious
experiences were caused by some other means science would not notice
anything being amiss. In fact the most precise scientific theory there
is (QED) makes it profusely clear that when we shoot a photon (or an
electron or a bullet) at point A we can predict with great precision
with what probability we shall observe that photon (or electron or
bullet) at point B, but that nothing at all can be said about what
happened in between. So, science's job is only to describe phenomena in
the most precise and efficient way possible, be it the falling of
apples, the movement of planes in the sky, the complexity and
variability of the species, or human behavior. But virtually all
theists and atheists think that science's job is to explain why
things are the way they are in the physical reality they assume is
there.
So theists ask for an explanation for the specific values that the
fundamental constants of nature have, because these values seem to be
fine-tuned for the evolution of life - implying that the best
explanation is God. Atheists in turn find that this is a meaningful
argument and try to invalidate it by proposing models of physical
reality that would explain these values. There is much debating going
on, with both sides pulling at sciences shirts, theists arguing with
some justification that many of the cosmologies proposed are not
contingent on objective evidence but ad-hoc creations designed to
invalidate their fine-tuning argument, and in any case only succeed in
transforming the necessary fine-tuning on one level to a necessary
fine-tuning on another level. For example any process that would
produce an infinite number of universes each randomly starting with its
own set of constants would require a lot of fine-tuning itself. My view
is that both sides are wrong because they assume that the values of
these physical constants have a reality beyond the fact that they are
found useful in our formulas for describing phenomena such as we
observe them. It's the phenomena we observe that imply these values,
and not these values that imply the phenomena we observe. (I wrote
above that the situation is funny, because materialistic atheists by
believing that there is a physical reality that is being described by
science, have given theists a good argument for the existence of a
supernatural designer.)
> At any rate, I guess I've become a little less hasty about judging what
> materialists are proclaiming than in the past, simply because so many
> of them are metaphysically evasive even in light of their swinging that
> term "materialism" around.
Yeah, well, as far as I am concerned materialism is a full-fledged
modern mythology. The vast majority of people believe (actually are
certain) that the materialistic view of reality is necessary for
science (it isn't: if no material reality exists and God directly feeds
us all our experience it would make no difference to science), that
materialism is objective (it isn't; e.g. it offers no way to decide
whether anything really exists and not only exists as a conceptual
abstraction), that materialism gives us a pretty clear idea of how
physical reality is (it doesn't: see the various QM interpretations,
the simulation argument, the Matrix movie, and the idea that the
universe is a two-dimensional hologram), that materialism in general
works (it doesn't; there is not one piece of useful knowledge that
came out of materialism), and that if there are still some
materialistic problems they are slowly being ironed out (they aren't:
on the contrary the depth and breadth of materialism's problems and
internal disagreements are growing). So, by pointing out that the vast
majority of people holds a series of basic beliefs about materialism
that are all factually wrong, I am justified to claim that materialism
is a mythological belief. Somebody should write a book about this.
a niece of the Oak Lady
>He imagines himself doing science, no matter
> the fact that consciousness, conscious subjects,
> and conscious experiences are all scientific
> non-issues, as there is no objective evidence
> that justifies their existence as a valid scientific
> hypotheses in the first place.
Since there are psychological and clinical disciplines, mental states
can't be a non-issue in science when "objective evidence" supports them
having a correlation to the brain and body (alteration of perception
and cognitive abilities coincide with the intake of certain chemical
compounds or coincide with damage to nerve tissue). I could suggest
that "experience is only engaging in a deceptive storyline that the
brain causes mental-states", but of what public utility or usefulness
is that view compared to the latter? In addition, it raises the
question of how experience -- as an inter-subjective whole -- would be
maintaining the consistency of all its deceptive storylines without any
intelligence; or what the motive is if it is guided by intelligence
(i.e., God) to create the deceptive appearance of an external brain
being concomitant to or being the causation of consciousness.
>The vast majority of people believe (actually are
> certain) that the materialistic view of reality is
> necessary for science (it isn't: if no material
> reality exists and God directly feeds us all our
> experience it would make no difference to
> science),
Yes, early natural science especially (which largely shunned theorizing
and only catalogued regularities) would be viable even in a solipsist's
paradigm. But IMO, scientific anti-realism is no more a default
position today than scientific realism; if science had one at all it
might be critical realism of one venue or another. (Since circumstances
that exist independently of human minds need not be dependent upon a
substance metaphysic like classic materialism, the supposed either/or
ontic choice of idealism and materialism can be left undecided or
discarded, as in traditional naturalism or even Ayn Rand's atheistic
cult (link follows); that's why I've shifted talk of "external" to the
epistemic side: realism vs anti-realism).
http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/MONISM.htm
But this, of course, doesn't stop either the realists or the
anti-realists from trying to portray themselves in biased fashion as
being the default stance in science. Take the case below of E. O.
Wilson doing just that with the former:
"The simplest and most thoroughly verifiable answer has been provided
by the natural sciences, and most particularly the borderland
disciplines of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Outside
our heads there is freestanding reality. Only lunatics and a sprinkling
of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is
a reconstruction of reality based on sensory input and the
self-assembly of symbol-based concepts."
http://www.naturalism.org/OffSite_Stored_Pages/WQ-WILSON.htm
And likewise the anti-realists, which Robert P. Crease defines here:
"Such counter arguments led to the development of so-called antirealist
positions. Empiricists are antirealists who argue that the purpose of
scientific theories is not to correspond with some basic structure of
the world, but to organize data. Constructivists stress the extent to
which concepts and theories are socially constructed - much like the
rules of a game - rather than discovered in nature. Operationalists say
that reality can be attributed only to observable elements by virtue of
operations that can be performed on them. Instrumentalists hold that
concepts and theories are tools to be evaluated for their usefulness
rather than truth value. The most significant challenge to realist
positions is to account for non-trivial theory change. The biggest
challenge for antirealist positions is to explain the stunning success
of science, why some theories are so hard to change or abandon, and why
we have such little control over which theories seem right."
>So, science's job is only to describe phenomena
> in the most precise and efficient way possible,
> be it the falling of apples, the movement of
> planes in the sky, the complexity and variability
> of the species, or human behavior. But virtually
> all theists and atheists think that science's job is
> to explain why things are the way they are in the
> physical reality they assume is there.
I feel that the (generalized) anti-realist view on theories that have
even tested well is simply one of the multiple interpretations that are
debated in the philosophy of science, rather than being the default.
While I don't agree with the opinion (below) that early natural science
was "not science" because it primarily dealt with the discovery,
classification, and description of regularities rather than explaining
them deeply, I somewhat agree with the rest. Scientific realism is a
tentative position (particles might turn out to be superstrings
someday), but I don't feel this eliminates that there could be patterns
independent of my own mind that the "noumenal"-theorizing is trying to
get a handle on over the span of its gradual revisions.
Joe Faith: "The problem with [the empiricist] definition of cause is
that it doesn't give us a way of looking beneath the surface
appearances of events, to their underlying reality. Marx once noted
that if the world worked just as it appeared to, then there would be no
need for science. Only when we understand the processes going on
beneath the surface can we understand how the situation can change."
(from "Dennet, Materialism, and Empiricism")
My feeling about classic idealism is that it is not impossible, but
only "not practical" in a public utility sense of "getting things done"
(because of the deceptions that experience supports like an external
brain causing consciousness and etc), yet classic idealism may have
practical use in the personal or private sense.
I
Dianelos Georgoudis
a niece of the Oak Lady wrote:
>
> >He imagines himself doing science, no matter
> > the fact that consciousness, conscious subjects,
> > and conscious experiences are all scientific
> > non-issues, as there is no objective evidence
> > that justifies their existence as a valid scientific
> > hypotheses in the first place.
>
> Since there are psychological and clinical disciplines, mental states
> can't be a non-issue in science when "objective evidence" supports them
> having a correlation to the brain and body (alteration of perception
> and cognitive abilities coincide with the intake of certain chemical
> compounds or coincide with damage to nerve tissue). I could suggest
> that "experience is only engaging in a deceptive storyline that the
> brain causes mental-states", but of what public utility or usefulness
> is that view compared to the latter? In addition, it raises the
> question of how experience -- as an inter-subjective whole -- would be
> maintaining the consistency of all its deceptive storylines without any
> intelligence; or what the motive is if it is guided by intelligence
> (i.e., God) to create the deceptive appearance of an external brain
> being concomitant to or being the causation of consciousness.
As for the first question there are two important examples of utility:
One to stop wasting time discussing how physical reality really is
(more about this later), and two to stop wasting time discussing how
the brain produces consciousness. You see nobody doubts that the brain
produces conscious experience; after all an apple tree too produces
conscious experience every time we look at it, and in a sense we are
always looking at the innards of our brain. The question is what
produces our capacity of looking in the first place, and to think that
our brain necessarily produces that capacity is clearly wrong, because
there are models of reality completely consistent with objective data
in which our brain is not even real (see for example the simulation
argument, or the view of an external God directly producing our
conscious experience at the absence of any material reality -
incidentally the latter is a realist view).
As for the second question I fail to understand its meaning. If we
accept that reality is exhausted by the space of conscious experience,
then there is nothing behind that space (be it only some
"intelligence") causing or coordinating these conscious experiences,
including the experiences that lead us to believe we have a brain with
particular brain-processes happening in it, etc. Conscious experience
is as it is, and one thing we find out very early on is that it
intelligible: we can find useful patterns in it. One of these patterns
we discover in reality is that we can explain all physical phenomena
(including, for example, the behavior of other people) on purely
naturalistic grounds (in the case of human behavior on account of human
brains). This one is a particularly broad pattern that is there in the
space of conscious experience.
Knowledge and understanding refer to nothing more than detecting
patterns in our field of actual conscious experience, simply because if
they did refer to something else we would have not way to know about
them. Also, all patterns, e.g. "apples fall", are strictly descriptive.
"Why?" questions can and are answered by pointing out some feature
in a pattern (i.e. a smaller pattern in it) or by pointing out that
some pattern forms part of a larger one. Take for example this rather
obvious pattern of numbers: "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ..." Should somebody ask
"Why does the 6 come after the 5?" the answer would be "Because the 6,
like all other numbers in this sequence, is equal the one before it
plus 1". Or if a child should ask "Why is it that this ball falls
when I leave it free in the air?" a possible answer would be
"Because all heavy things fall when you let them free in the air";
a more sophisticated answer centered on Newton's mechanics would be
nothing more but a more precise description of a broader range of
phenomena, namely gravitational phenomena. So "why?" questions
describe the kind of pattern we are looking for, and the respective
answers refer to the patterns we do find. Sounds trivial, but I think
it's important to note that there is nothing more to explaining than
describing, and that the deepest and more general description is
considered the best explanation.
> >The vast majority of people believe (actually are
> > certain) that the materialistic view of reality is
> > necessary for science (it isn't: if no material
> > reality exists and God directly feeds us all our
> > experience it would make no difference to
> > science),
>
> Yes, early natural science especially (which largely shunned theorizing
> and only catalogued regularities) would be viable even in a solipsist's
> paradigm. But IMO, scientific anti-realism is no more a default
> position today than scientific realism; if science had one at all it
> might be critical realism of one venue or another. (Since circumstances
> that exist independently of human minds need not be dependent upon a
> substance metaphysic like classic materialism, the supposed either/or
> ontic choice of idealism and materialism can be left undecided or
> discarded, as in traditional naturalism or even Ayn Rand's atheistic
> cult (link follows); that's why I've shifted talk of "external" to the
> epistemic side: realism vs anti-realism).
> http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/MONISM.htm
I agree. The basic question is realism vs anti-realism, rather than
idealism vs materialism versus objectivism etc. (Incidentally I find
the word "arealism" fits better then "anti-realism", because in
the same way that atheism rejects as unnecessary the hypothesis of a
supernatural reality behind physical reality, arealism rejects as
unnecessary the hypothesis of a physical reality behind consciousness.
But as "anti-realism" is the current coin, let's use it.) It is
true that you can be a realist without being a materialist (for example
you can be a objectivist as explained in the article you quote, or you
can believe that God directly creates our conscious experiences). On
the other hand you cannot be an anti-realist without being an idealist,
so maybe "anti-realism" is a superfluous word because it reflects
the ontological side (as "idealism" reflects the epistemological
side) of the same philosophical understanding. I always thought that
epistemology is more fundamental than ontology because epistemology is
about how to acquire knowledge whereas ontology represents some
knowledge thus acquired. So the first question is idealism/anti-realism
versus realism and any of the combinations of epistemology/ontology it
entails.
Incidentally I read the article above, and I was struck with the
plethora of false things it claims that idealism implies: "material
objects are some sort of condensed spirit", "man is a bodiless
ghost", "reality is a spiritual dimension transcending and
controlling the world of nature", idealism advocates "consciousness
without existence"(!), "knowledge (of true reality) derives not
from sense perception or from reasoning based on it, but from an
otherworldly source, such as revelations or the equivalent",
"Essential to all versions of the creed [of idealism] - and to
countless kindred movements - is the belief in the supernatural".
(I suppose the latter bit is a logical implication of the fact that
Berkeley was a bishop.) These are all strawmen. I was also struck by
the suggestion that the "popular version of idealism is religion",
because I think it is an objective fact that the vast majority of
religious people are realists and not anti-realists. Similar strawmen
are used against materialism. It is not true that "materialism does
not accept ALL of reality - only the material part of it." In fact,
except for what is now called by many "naive materialism",
materialism does accept the existence of both material and non-material
things but insists that the latter can be explained on materialistic
principles (i.e. reduced to materialistic things). And a lot of factual
errors here too, like that "[Consciousness] is a biological datum
open to observation, conceptualization, and scientific study" - if
so I would like to ask the author of this article to find out, simply
through observation, whether, say, amoebas are conscious beings, i.e.
have the capacity of having conscious experiences.
Incidentally the word "science" is used no less than 8 times in
that article in the context that what the article says is scientific
and that the opposing views are unscientific. Of course I use
"science" a lot myself, but only to point out that those who use
science to shore up their ontological views misunderstand what science
does and what scientific knowledge says.
> But this, of course, doesn't stop either the realists or the
> anti-realists from trying to portray themselves in biased fashion as
> being the default stance in science.
But what science actually does in an objective fact: science describes
phenomena by cataloguing them and discovering patterns in them,
which it mainly represents as mathematical abstractions. On the other
hand it's also true that most people (including scientists) are
scientific realists, who believe that, based on scientific knowledge,
it is possible to describe the physical reality that is causing our
observations of phenomena one way or other (maybe as Wilson bellow says
by "reconstructing" reality within our brains).
> Take the case below of E. O.
> Wilson doing just that with the former:
>
> "The simplest and most thoroughly verifiable answer has been provided
> by the natural sciences, and most particularly the borderland
> disciplines of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Outside
> our heads there is freestanding reality. Only lunatics and a sprinkling
> of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is
> a reconstruction of reality based on sensory input and the
> self-assembly of symbol-based concepts."
> http://www.naturalism.org/OffSite_Stored_Pages/WQ-WILSON.htm
Well, comparing opposing views with the views held by some lunatics or
pointing out that only a sprinkling of people hold these views are not
proper philosophical arguments.1. By sensing the need to use such
arguments Wilson only evidences how weak his own position is.
> And likewise the anti-realists, which Robert P. Crease defines here:
> "Such counter arguments led to the development of so-called antirealist
> positions. Empiricists are antirealists who argue that the purpose of
> scientific theories is not to correspond with some basic structure of
> the world, but to organize data. Constructivists stress the extent to
> which concepts and theories are socially constructed - much like the
> rules of a game - rather than discovered in nature. Operationalists say
> that reality can be attributed only to observable elements by virtue of
> operations that can be performed on them. Instrumentalists hold that
> concepts and theories are tools to be evaluated for their usefulness
> rather than truth value. The most significant challenge to realist
> positions is to account for non-trivial theory change. The biggest
> challenge for antirealist positions is to explain the stunning success
> of science, why some theories are so hard to change or abandon, and why
> we have such little control over which theories seem right."
Just a moment. Isn't it the other way around? Science is indeed a
stunning success, but science, demonstrably, describes phenomena and
not physical reality. On the other hand those who tried to describe
physical reality itself (using for that purpose scientific knowledge)
have met with stunning failure.
Also, Crease says that we are to measure the value of concepts and
theories by their truth value and not by their usefulness. How does he
suggest we measure that truth value if we exclude usefulness criteria?
After all even the most basic rules of logic are justified by the fact
that they have been empirically found to be useful.
> >So, science's job is only to describe phenomena
> > in the most precise and efficient way possible,
> > be it the falling of apples, the movement of
> > planes in the sky, the complexity and variability
> > of the species, or human behavior. But virtually
> > all theists and atheists think that science's job is
> > to explain why things are the way they are in the
> > physical reality they assume is there.
>
> I feel that the (generalized) anti-realist view on theories that have
> even tested well is simply one of the multiple interpretations that are
> debated in the philosophy of science, rather than being the default.
> While I don't agree with the opinion (below) that early natural science
> was "not science" because it primarily dealt with the discovery,
> classification, and description of regularities rather than explaining
> them deeply, I somewhat agree with the rest. Scientific realism is a
> tentative position (particles might turn out to be superstrings
> someday), but I don't feel this eliminates that there could be patterns
> independent of my own mind that the "noumenal"-theorizing is trying to
> get a handle on over the span of its gradual revisions.
OK, so let's discuss scientific realism. In the late 17th century
Newton found a mathematical description of, say, how apples fall, by
explaining that the mass of the Earth produces an attractive
gravitational force which in turn accelerates the apple downwards. It
would sound weird if an idealist living in Newton's time would claim
that the concepts of "mass" and "force" had meaning only within
Newton's mathematical formulas, and it's not "really" a
gravitational force accelerating the apple downwards, but it's only
"as if" there were a gravitational force doing that. So at that
time one could reasonably believe that science describes physical
reality, while conceding that the anti-realist view is not actually
irrational but is certainly pretty impractical. Let's fast-forward a
few centuries later to the beginning of the 20th century. Now the best
theory we have to describe the falling of apples is general relativity,
in which gravitational forces do not exist at all. The downward
acceleration of the apple is now caused by the geometry of spacetime.
Might it be that the apple falls "as if" spacetime had a particular
geometry? Certainly not, would Einstein answer, spacetime is really
curved and that's why the apple falls like it does (Einstein was of
course a scientific realist). But now the first problems for scientific
realism become already apparent: first the 17th century idealist was
right after all and apples fall "as if" there were really a
gravitational force, and secondly general relativity is only a
refinement of Newton's mechanics as far as describing phenomena goes,
but it completely transforms the description of physical reality. But
let's fast-forward some 50 more years and study quantum
electrodynamics (QED), the scientific theory that has been
experimentally validated with greater precision than any other, and in
that sense is the truest physical theory. That theory's mathematics
say that when we shoot a photon (or electron, or bullet) from point A
and we later detect it at point B that photon (or electron, or bullet)
has taken all possible trajectories through *all* points of the
universe at arbitrary speeds (and in order to find out with what
probability the photon - or electron or bullet - will hit B we must add
them all up). Here, suddenly, nobody is a scientific realist anymore.
Nobody claims that when one shoots a bullet that a little later hits a
beer can the material particles that constitute that bullet have
traveled through all points in the universe in the meantime. Now it's
only "as if" they had done that. But what goes for the goose should
go for the gander. It appears that the realists' position is
basically this: when the physicists' math says something that is
consistent with how I imagine physical reality then that math describes
how physical reality is, but when I don't like what the math says
then it only describes an algorithm for making predictions with no
direct connection to reality. Of course realists sense there is a
problem here and that's why they say that quantum mechanics is deeply
"mysterious". But in fact there is nothing mysterious to quantum
mechanics as a scientific discipline: it precisely describes and
predicts an enormous range of phenomena and that's why it is
considered the most successful discipline of physics. In fact when
Einstein pointed out some quantum mechanical predictions that appeared
to be absurd from a realist's point of view (see the ERP paradox) it
turned out that these "absurd" quantum mechanical predictions were
experimentally confirmed a few decades later.
What I find remarkable is that people insist in holding a realist view
of science (i.e. that science describes physical reality) when a) as a
matter objective fact this is not what science does, at least not
directly, and b) those who tried to interpret scientific results in
order to describe how physical reality really is have met with abject
failure. It's really quite remarkable how much inertia ideas have,
all objective evidence notwithstanding - and failure to succeed is
objective evidence, and having people who use the same methodology of
thought and the same data arrive to contradictory results is additional
objective evidence. Some realists to whom I have pointed out how the
various descriptions of reality have become increasingly disparate and
fantastic and the disagreements between scientific realists
increasingly deep have only expressed their faith that it will all be
solved in the end. That's the same kind of faith that motivates many
religious people to hope that in the end objective evidence for the
existence of God will be found. I goes against the grain. (Incidentally
in this thread I tried to argue not that objectivity is wrong but that
it is incomplete; I accept that all propositions justified on objective
evidence are justified in reason, but I do not accept that only
propositions justified on objective evidence are justified in reason.)
> Joe Faith: "The problem with [the empiricist] definition of cause is
> that it doesn't give us a way of looking beneath the surface
> appearances of events, to their underlying reality. Marx once noted
> that if the world worked just as it appeared to, then there would be no
> need for science. Only when we understand the processes going on
> beneath the surface can we understand how the situation can change."
> (from "Dennet, Materialism, and Empiricism")
Ah, but when Faith says "looking beneath the surface of appearances
of events to their underlying reality" he is quite obviously begging
the question. The question is "What if there isn't any underlying
reality beneath the surface of appearances?" or "What do we lose by
refusing to assume that there must be something beneath the surface of
appearances?" Because we certainly gain a lot by refusing to make
this assumption - for example the need to describe what that
something is and how it manages to produce appearances in the first
place (i.e. the problem of consciousness).
And of course science is very much needed. Any toddler can easily
discover the pattern that one cannot walk through walls - but it's
much more difficult and requires team-work and lots of math to discover
the deeper patterns present in the field of our conscious experience
such as, say, aerodynamics, and, as we have empirically found out, such
patterns can often be put to good use and help us, for example, build
airplanes which allow us to experience being transported quickly
between London and New York. So we do need scientists to look for such
patterns and to think about how to use them in order to build useful
stuff. What we don't need is having them waste their time thinking
about how physical reality really is.
> My feeling about classic idealism is that it is not impossible, but
> only "not practical" in a public utility sense of "getting things done"
> (because of the deceptions that experience supports like an external
> brain causing consciousness and etc), yet classic idealism may have
> practical use in the personal or private sense.
I find this line of reasoning familiar because I too believe that all
methodologies of thought are about practical usefulness. So give me an
example where idealism/anti-realism is not practical in the public
utility sense of getting things done.
Robert J. Kolker
>
>
> So why not do that with the Supreme Being?
No. YOU design and execute an experiment to find the Supreme Being. Then
submit your findings to a peer reviewed journal and wait for
coroberation, just like any other scientific finding. When all this is
done, please write. You think there is a Supreme Being. The burden of
corroberation is on YOU. Extraordinary things require extraordinary
explanations and extraordinary evidence. Pray to gather your materials
(make sure that the experiments can be reproduced) and let us know the
results.
Here is an example: If you say you saw water running downhill, I would
have to trouble taking you at your word, because I have seen water run
downhill too. If you claim you saw water running uphill I would need to
be convinced by some strong evidence. Your claim of a Supreme Being is
analagous to claiming water can run uphill (with no pump or tide
gravitator anywwhere in sight). In the absence of evidence I would think
you are mistaken (if I am charitable) or a humbug or a crazy person (if
I am not charitable). In any case, the burden of proof is on YOU.
I hope you understand why I remain skeptical. As things stand I am more
inclined to believe Dark Matter and Dark Energy exists than a Supreme
Being. I am inclined to believe that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses had
dealings with an Alien Visitor to our planet than with a Supreme Being.
These elder folks would have confused technological razzle dazzle with
miracles and godlike doings.
Bob Kolker
Robert J. Kolker
>
> 1934 - Enrico Fermi develops a comprehensive theory of radioactive
> decays, including Pauli's hypothetical particle, which Fermi coins the
> neutrino (Italian: "little neutral one"). With inclusion of the
> neutrino, Fermi's theory accurately explains many experimentally
> observed results.
>
> 1959 - Discovery of a particle fitting the expected characteristics of
> the neutrino is announced by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines (a founding
> member of Super-Kamiokande; UCI professor emeritus and recipient of
> the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the
> discovery). This neutrino is later determined to be the partner of the
> electron.
> +++
>
> We built the atomic bomb and ended the Pacific War with "hypothetical"
> particle.
Ultimately, neutrinos were detected. A hypothesis may need some time and
technical development to be corroberated. Pauli's motive in
hypothesizing the particle was to preserve conservations and symmetry (a
perfectly respectable reason). Look, Einstein produced his theory of
electrodynamics (known as special relativity) to get rid of the
asymmetry implicit in the Lorentz Force Law. The Lorentz Force Law gave
correct predictions but required a distinction of motions not inherent
in the phenomena. Einstein made this very point in the first page of his
1905 paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies. Dirac postulated
anti-particles for reasons of symmetry and completeness. It turns out he
was right. It took over a year to find an anti-electron, but it was
found. One need not have a direct observation to postulate an unseen
cause or object. Saving the appearences is a perfectly good reason
provided it is ultimately redeemed by observables. Kepler's ellipses, an
artifact of observation, a curve fit if you will, was ultimately
redeemed by a verifiable force law as given by Newton.
No one would have taken Einstein seriously if, after a long time, there
was not experimental corroberation of his theory. In the absence of
evidence it would have gone the way of caloric and phlogiston.
>
> That alone should be enough to put any Postivist to shame.
I agree. Positivism is an over simplification of how scientific theory
making is done. It is a denial of hypothesis abduction and a futile
attempt to make science purely inductive. John Stuart Mill failed to do
this, Francis Bacon failded to do this and so did the Vienna Cirlce. One
can abduce hypothetical causes, themsleves not directly observable, as
long as the hypothesis implies something that is directly observable and
testable. Neutrinos fit that very well. E.G., Kamiokonde. There it is.
Neutrinos were finally detected. In the absence of such detection, at
best neutrinos would have been accepted as an ad hoc assumption to save
the appearences. Right up there with a Ptolemaic epicycle.
Positivism is too simple minded and misses a great deal. However any
scientific theory has to come to grips with reality in an empirically
observable fashion. That is what separates science from metaphysical
bullshit.
Bob Kolker (the other Bob).
Robert J. Kolker
>
> Straw man.
Anything you disagree with is a Staw Man. How convenient. And when it is
not a straw man it is Pontificating.
Can you not accept, after all the evidence is in, that Aristotle was a
fuck-up?
Bob Kolker
ozah...@yahoo.com
for the
next, but if the next is also of a type, so this means that the
particle is to
measure. And a good reason to Cannonical Forms Is A 'the next Lisp for
to introduce is the energy enforced by us. That is the reason why at
1978
there was a great spectacolus for the observers who actually was there.
> When I discover an intresting new friend, this means for both of us something.
For example my profesor at University - G.Gargov, likes to talk to us,
for so
many thing related at/to this intresting Cantor's theory.