For Mike Huckabee.
Collins is a good choice for any candidate who thinks sucking up to a religious constituency is more important than getting the best advice about science. For anyone who actually wants advice about science, I recommend RPM.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Ken, maybe my prose is usually bad (I just chop it out verbatim and I tend to string along clauses, I admit it.) It is older, 19th century style, and younger readers are less attuned to that. But people do tend to find difficulty in what they don’t want to agree with. Some things are pretty simple, like TM (“blithering idiot”) disingenuously saying it was “irrelevant” for me to talk about “memory” to critique his thought experiment, when memory and related processes were the core of that very experiment. In any case, there are certain key concepts that you can find and appreciate, so here’s a very fundamental one again:
I ask you, what is it about “pain” that makes analgesia worthy having, if just signal processing?
(It is at the least compatible with monism – ever hear of “neutral monism”
This is a definition of compatible with which I was not previously familiar.
A physicalist monist isn’t a neutral monist (Spinoza) any more than he is a subjective monist (Berkeley).
It is older, 19th century style
That would be style in the “not” mode, and an insult to everybody in the 19th century.
I ask you, what is it about “pain” that makes analgesia worthy having, if just signal processing?
Because that signal is disruptive to my system’s homeostasis, and unless I address those signals by fixing the problem, and availing myself of analgesia, i’m not going to be functioning at my best. It doesn’t mean that “pain” is some magic essential ineffable magic word for you to wield like a club over here.
Yours is every bit as stupid a question as the way you try to characterize people who reject the notion that the universe is a vast conspiracy on their behalf up thread, fool:
after all who cares if a “speck of carbon” in a vast impersonal blah blah extinguishes himself, it’s arrogant to think we’re important etc. ad nauseum in the nearly literal sense.
If I’m not magic and only a Mayfly in contrast with the scale and scope of the universe, then I may as well just shoot myself (“don’t worry, I’ll be quite humane”)? How does that follow?
This discussion is starting to remind me of why classical introspectionism was rejected as an appropriate method for studying human behavior (namely consciousness) back in the late 1800s.
So, for the time being, I’m done with this conversation and leave it up to the consciousness geniuses to solve this mouse-runing-on-a-treadmill problem.
Do the paintings that Esref draw’s count as subjective experience, or, qualia?
They count as paintings, dimwit.
“Pointed out”?! Unless your blogger friend blew the interpretation, Dennett really is incompetent in some way at least, and not just an ideologue. Here’s the quote and I will expose his error, highlighted with my own asterisks:
But as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the property dualist seems committed to something even more absurd: the conclusion that we cannot even think about our mental states, or at least about our qualia! For if your beliefs–including your belief that you have qualia–are physical states of your brain, and *qualia can have no effects on anything physical*, then whether you have qualia has nothing to do with whether you believe that you have them.
That is a gross misunderstanding of the very definition of property dualism. The whole point of property dualism is that the *same thing* (such as the brain processes that produce behavior, including talking about qualia etc.) manifests different properties depending on how it is encountered, studied, measured, and especially if they are the processes constituting the very identity of the entity instead of what comes to the entity when it gathers data about processes outside of itself. Thus the same thing “doesn’t seem to be” the same thing in these different contexts. Maybe that’s a good use we can put “seeming” to, but understand that the relative properties are thought to be fully real, but really like that in a *relative* way (rather than being just a conceptual delusion etc.) So since the process is physical, it can of course have effects on the physical, including stimulating our talking about it. What is literally qualitative “for us” has some property that makes sense as the generator of our saying that (well, some of us!)
Yet we don’t find literally qualitative character when we study brains with electrodes etc. That’s because the latter generate data types and possible interpretative schemes relative to what those methods are instead. IOW, it’s “right under our noses.” Most of us don’t realize they are the “same thing” (denotatively – as in taking away one would always take away the other) but not “the same” in traits.
Regardless of whether one accepts that interpretation or not, it is inexcusable to think that PD *implies* that qualia can’t have effects on the physical. That is confusing relative traits with the literally separable “entities” that are put forth in literal old-fashioned dualism. IOW, the entities of traditional dualism are like two different rods of different stuff, the relative rods of PD are (rough analogy of course!) like the different lengths in Lorentz contraction.
Finally, there is an interesting parallel to imagining zombies versus “people with real feelings” (and can you really not imagine that as an essential distinction?) It resembles the difference most of us feel there is between “real worlds” of “real matter” and the model Platonic worlds that a hard-line modal realist says are fully equivalent to the former. A non-modal-realist would think of “non-existent” model worlds as being like the “zombies” of philosophy of mind, lacking that certain difference that no structure description can give. Real worlds are like real consciousness to anyone who isn’t into hard MR.
A modal realist can use most of the same arguments against “real worlds” that you guys use against “real consciousness.” The main similarity is the idea that we don’t need more than information itself to define something. A modal realist can argue that you can’t explain the *ineffable* something that is the essence of “really existing” versus just being a mathematical model etc. As I said before, there is no logical way to do that, since logic is a formal system and only deals with the structural relationships. Therefore, the modal realist is right – unless you grant something more to “existing” than purely logical distinctions like those we make between quadratic and cubic equations.
It is so ironic that you would find yourself in similar predicament to me, pleading to someone who cannot or will not accept the distinction you are trying to make in similar vein to how I would make it. You might say “But look, here we are, we know we’re here” and similar to any normal person’s pleadings about real feelings etc. The rejection (in principle, apart from how a given thinker would do it) follows the same pattern of the doubters, the same perversity “in the face of the given.” I myself at least am consistent about it, since I reject both challenges. I reject the challenge to the specialness and realness of consciousness apart from information structures, and I reject the challenge to the specialness of “material existence” apart from the “logical existence” of descriptive structures. As a property dualist, it is sensible for me to affirm the special and logic-transcending “realness” of both together as different aspects of the same thing.
Re: They count as paintings, dimwit.
**You’ll make an amazing teacher one day.
Because that signal is disruptive to my system’s homeostasis, and unless I address those signals by fixing the problem, and availing myself of analgesia, i’m not going to be functioning at my best. It doesn’t mean that “pain” is some magic essential ineffable magic word for you to wield like a club over here.
That is incredible, that you can think only of it in terms of “functioning” ability and not it being what it is, to avoid directly. That’s what I and Chalmers and almost anyone who reflected on it means by “denial.” Pain (why the “scare quotes” Ken around something that’s part of our lives?) is not a magic ineffable *word* it’s a magic ineffable *something* or we wouldn’t need to care so much.
And your toss up of moldy oldy argument fodder is irrelevant to the point. You guys made put-down remarks implying that we aren’t important, if you meant in context about the universe and not “as such” then OK I misunderstood so let it go already. BTW I am not the most turgid writer of philosophy out there.
BTW TJ about “introspection” being discarded – introspection is really what we do all the time, since the world is represented to us by our own processes – our brains can’t put real coffee cups and trees inside of themselves. Tough luck.
You started with the ordinary case that inverting one’s visual spectrum would be noticed because of *memory* associations etc., and then imagine a very contrived experiment
Neil, you’re dumber than dirt and more dishonest than Bush and Slick Willie combined. The “ordinary case” of inverting one’s visual spectrum is a “very contrived experiment” — a rather common thought experiment. In the classic version, all the memory traces and emotional associations are inverted too, so that the subject is completely unaware that anything changed. Separating these two aspects of the change is an instance of a standard philosophical device for understanding the issue by teasing out hidden assumptions. Honest philosophers of mind don’t raise idiotic complaints about thought experiments being “contrived” — especially qualiaphiles and other anti-physicalists, since they are the ones who invented these intuition pumps in the first place.
I ask you, what is it about “pain” that makes analgesia worthy having, if just signal processing?
Analgesia makes it possible to think clearly about things other than the pain. Pain is actually an excellent example, the characteristics of which you qualiaphiles all willfully ignore. The evolutionarily crafted function of pain is to demand attention, the effect of pain is to demand attention, and the qualitative nature of pain is demand for attention; analgesics take away that demand, thereby taking away the essence of pain.
You’ll make an amazing teacher one day.
Pay me what it would be worth to try to educate a cretin like you and I might take it on. But my comment actually was quite instructive, if you were receptive to being educated.
Pain (why the “scare quotes” Ken around something that’s part of our lives?) is not a magic ineffable *word*
But “pain” is a word, and that’s what he was referring to, and that’s why he put quotes (not scare quotes) around it, moron.
it’s a magic ineffable *something* or we wouldn’t need to care so much
No, it is neither magic nor ineffable, and it doesn’t take being magic or ineffable to be something we need to care about, cretin.
Re:BTW TJ about “introspection” being discarded – introspection is really what we do all the time, since the world is represented to us by our own processes – our brains can’t put real coffee cups and trees inside of themselves. Tough luck.
**Oddly, that is why I think dualism is at work–because you can’t actually fit coffee cups and trees inside the brain. So when a person is able to draw paintings and create other works of art, just exactly where does the brain store such things? Is the storage system similar to that of a computer? Is it just merely a result of synapses firing in particular ways?
My issue is specifically how those memories are stored in particular that is the issue. It has something to do with various regions of the brain talking to each other, but as far as I know, no one has solved the specifics of this riddle.
They are nothing like zombies, since philosophical zombies are self-contradictory, possible worlds aren’t.
And to stimulate identical behaviour to humans, zombies would have to have it too, making it a distinction without a difference.
TM, it figures that you would pick on the least important part of my critique of the experiment (about it being contrived) and not the important part (that if accepted, it doesn’t prove what Denyitt thinks it does anyway.) It is contrived in the sense that we can’t do it and so don’t have actual data to interpret – look, *I* don’t mind doing thought experiments, but I wanted to tweak all the scientism types who think it’s meaningless if we can’t really do it etc, they’re the ones who think that not me. It was a sly hypocrisy jab, sorry you didn’t get it. Go rag on logical positivists if you want to.
Maybe Ken meant the word, but I meant the actual experience itself – I should have not put that in quotes either, but context made my reference clear. Demand for attention could be ignored if there wasn’t something intrinsic about it worth avoiding. And is not nausea qualitatively different from itchy feelings etc? The evolution of it in comparison to its qualitative nature is just the way it hashes out in the property dualism, of course they’re going to be consistent. But pain (as is) wouldn’t be something worth being afraid of, anymore than having data shown on a chart, if just signal processing and not more.
Analgesics make it different, it is not the same subject but contaminated, that does not get rid of the implications of what it is like without them. At some point, if people won’t admit something at the ground level, we can’t go any further with that.
especially qualiaphiles and other anti-physicalists,
Again, a misunderstanding of what property dualism is saying, unless by “physicalism” you mean the silly idea that measurements and models are more than makeshift relative ways to get an indirect handle on something not really given directly by them. But if you only mean that there is just that process and not some separable other entity as well, I can accept that per se.
philosophical zombies are self-contradictory, possible worlds aren’t.
No they aren’t a *self*-contradictory concept, because they are denied to have “subjective experiences” – if you want to think that has no meaning apart from physical processes and their definition, you can argue it. But you can’t claim that is a given to throw up as an alleged internal contradiction per se. Sure we couldn’t tell the difference by outside investigation, that is the very stipulated trait. But again that does not *mean* there couldn’t be a real difference of another kind. And see my example upthread of wanting to be a p-Z for awhile to see application to personal utility.
Above all, *I* don’t believe that Zombies are really possible either since I am a property dualist, hence the process must manifest the subjective traits albeit in a relative way. You may be confusing what I believe in with my comparison of other people’s ideas, or send-up (reductio) of their contradictions, etc. What I meant was, modal realists reject the supposed difference between real worlds and model worlds for reasons similar to the argument used against zombies – that there isn’t a special “esse” that can distinguish the two. To a modal realist, there is not meaning to even one “substance” to be distinguished from platonic forms. To the physicalist critiquing zombies, it is not credible (with good cause) for there to be an *additional* substance to make a non-zombie distinct from a zombie.
But since I myself am a property dualist, the “esse” for mind is a matter of relative character not two “substances.” Zombies are for me just an intuition pump to get people to consider the relative difference in properties. Unlike modal realists, I take the neutral monist base reality to not merely be a platonic form. That isn’t much easier for me to justify than for anyone else who doesn’t want to accept MR, but I think it has to do with things like true quantum randomness not being able to model with mathematical structures (which must be deterministic since they are logical systems), the qualia of conscious experience etc.
The question implies that “signal processing” is in some way not “real”.
Hm.
Perhaps the problem is that the phrase “signal processing” is too divorced from the actual sensation. Yet that phrase is just a simplification of a description of the actual neural cascade, which description would itself require a long, long book full of chemicals with very long names interacting with each other. And of course this book of chemical reactions would just be an abstraction of the actual chemicals and their reactions.
So given all that, the wording seems to imply that well, the simplification of an abstraction isn’t the real thing. And no, I suppose it isn’t.
Continuing on: I suppose that the particular neural cascade called pain is instinctively negative. However, precisely because we all experience it (with certain notable exceptions), we can refer to it by a common word. Describing the signal processing is just a way of analyzing the event better.
PAIN: DO NOT WANT. I CAN HAS AN… ANA…
I CAN HAS PAINKILLA?
Or, I suppose, to sum up, pain is the neural chain that occurs; the signal that is processed. If the neural cascade could be replicated in the brain of anyone, the sensation would be the same. Or as near as can be replicated, anyway.
Otherwise, as Ken Cope put it, it’s homunculi all the way down.
I still don’t get property dualism. If the whole is different from the sum of its parts, then the whole is different from the sum of its parts? I can has tautology?
ONTOLOGY CAT IS WATCHING YOU OBFUSCATE.
Phantom Limb Pain is one phenomenon that suggests that pain doesn’t simply boil down to interacting chemicals. Especially considering that persons with this condition often don’t respond to conventional treatments (e.g., analgesics). In fact, virtual reality technology (which allows people to pretend that they have their missing limb) is being used to help those who have this unusual condition get rid of their pain.
This may or may not be relevant to whatever major issue is being discussed here, but from my own education background, the ideas implicit to monism are likely not a perspective psychotherapists would appreciate, since their focus is on psychogical manifestations, and not the physical manifestations (although this is a primary assumption of psychiatrists concerning mental disorders).
Mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, SAD) can be treated with various forms of medication. However, such treatment is based on the biomedical model of therapy, which has the same underlying assumption as monism–that the mind essentially boils down to brain processes. But, there are many forms of psychotherapies (e.g., humanistic, RET, cognitive, and psychoanalysis) that are likely to have dualism as an implicit assumption–psychological manifestations are primary, physiological manifestations are secondary. So perhaps the disagreement boils down to the usefulness of various levels of explanation for various phenomena.
The evidence that suggests that a distinction exists between physical and psychological processes, is data indicating that treatment of mood disorders such as depression are more effective when both biomedical and various forms of psychotherapy are used (i.e., so called biopsychosocial models of therapy).
Phantom Limb Pain is one phenomenon that suggests that pain doesn’t simply boil down to interacting chemicals
Unless, of course, you destroy the proprioceptive (like pain, another negative feedback system) system by overdosing on pyridoxine, a B vitamin, and find yourself living like Oliver Sacks’ patient, Christina, the Disembodied Lady:
Cutting back on the vitamin B megadoses got the health nuts’ sense of self back. Google it.
Stuff and nonsense.
Phantom limb pain doesn’t mean that the brain is supernatural; it’s means that the brain is complicated and misfiring.
The brain is nevertheless indeed still made of interacting chemicals.
The hell?
Psychotherapy does not mean that the brain is supernatural.
There is no ‘real’ mind body ‘problem’. Without the body,hence the brain you have no mind. The only ‘problem’ is figuring out how the neurons connect, fire, and work in such a manner. This is a science problem.
We’re just out of the caves there fella. It took us nearly 2000 years to go to the freaking moon and thats as far as we have gotten. 2000 year from if humanity exists we’ll be way further ahead. That is assuming the religious nutters don’t toss us 3000 years backwards.
No answer now doesn’t mean no answer ever. While you mindlessly spew nearly indecipherable babble here real scientists are actually working on this material.
Mr.Cope dealt with this quite nicely. You seem to have a limited understanding of neuroscience and it’s complexity. Phantom pain is also a recorded memory. It is stored in the brain the administration of other material can remove this aspect. Why is this so hard to understand and appreciate? We are the sum of our parts, it’s a marvelous machine. One we barely understand. Many of these questions will seem I think superstitous to future generations as they equip themselves with more complete knowledge of our neurological state.
You call Skinner a crank and side with heddle as mentioned above, a real crank. Methinks you are to deluded and confused to take seriously in a discussion. Onecan only wonder what woo you will embrace in your time on the planet.
I just had to endure a semester of a witless Marin County artiste prattling on about “gestalt” this, and left-brain right-brain that, as if it had squat to do with learning how to draw (I was to help ease non-artists into tackling perspective drawing).
The way she handwaved that shit around as if by using the words people would think she knew what she was talking about, she may as well have been selling Tarot Cards, Astrology, or I Ching. I have no more respect for anybody who rejects the role of the body when trying to understand mental pathologies.
By the way Tony, is that your material in post #505? It doesn’t read like your typical addled non-sequitur.
By my definition, supernatural means ‘not yet understood’ or ‘pushing boundaries of understanding’. It does not mean ‘woo’. As an example, I presume that if a person in the 1400s were transported to now, most of what has been accomplished would look like woo. I’d imagine the same thing if it were possible to transport ourselves 500 years into the future.
I’m not disputing that the brain results from interacting chemicals. What I find very interesting is the use of virtual technology, to construct a visual representation of a person’s missing arm, to create an illusion that their missing arm exists, that subsequently makes it possible for a person to remove the sensation of pain from a non-existent arm.
If a person were operating solely from a monistic view, I’d assume an inability to predict other ‘supernatural’ phenomena such as the Global Consciousness Project which undoubtedly will trigger the predictable woo reaction, rather than a “Hmm. Well that’s new to me. I wonder how one can explain that?” (Which is typically my response to unusual things, rather than it’s magic).
There’s really no need to learn anything else then, if we’re just ultimately interacting brain chemicals. Something seems fundamentally wrong with that, as it’s much like saying that Einstein’s ability to produce relativity theory is just hand-brain-eye coordination.
By my definition, supernatural means ‘not yet understood’ or ‘pushing boundaries of understanding’. It does not mean ‘woo’.
Use agreed upon definitions of language, you demented fuckwit.
if we’re just ultimately interacting brain chemicals.
Brain chemicals interacting with the environment in an entirely unique and individual way that can never be identical to anybody else’s interaction with their unique environment. Stop with the ludicrous false dichotomies–are you only using your brain to cool mucus? Gods, if I learned I’d written anything so fucking stupid–no, I’d better not put ideas into the head of anybody so insanely credulous as to spout the nonsense you have here.
Do us all a favor, TJ. Before you post anything so incredibly stupid as what you have tonight, try and grow a brain. Perhaps you can rent, or lease.
I will do as I please. Thanks.
You have just told everybody that it is pointless and futile to try to parse anything you write, TJ, as you reserve private definitions of common words to share, or not, as you please.
it figures that you would pick on the least important part of my critique of the experiment
What I picked out is your bad faith; and as I noted, the rest just shows what a fool you are. Here’s a clue: if you call Dennett a charlatan and a prevaricator, you deserve nothing better than being beat on the head with a 2×4.
BTW, Neil, you stupid fucking lying moron, I picked out the core of your so-called critique; it is you who point to my noting the dishonesty of your “contrived” bullshit (along with the “deceitfully or incompetently” crap) while ignoring the rest of my response.
The notion of an inverted “spectrum” (a misnomer) is supposed to be an anti-physicalist, or at least anti-functionalist argument. But like zombies, it fails miserably because it’s circular, incorporating its conclusion as an assumption. The functionalist view is that so-called “qualia” are purely relational, having no attributes other than their relationships to other elements of conceptual and perceptual space. If that’s true, then it’s meaningless to talk about “inverting” the entire space. The original spectrum inversion thought experiment of John Locke had one waking up the next day with all the hues inverted but no difference in their brain (or the rest of the world). But one can’t know that the hues have been inverted if one’s associated memories are correspondingly inverted. And simply imagining that the hues might be inverted from what they were yesterday, despite not having any evidence of it, is simply imagining that functionalism is false; that’s no argument against functionalism, which is what’s called for since functionalism is the default-by-Ockham position.
Imagine a left-right inversion scenario, in which everything that was to your left (including the left side of your body) is now on your right, and v.v., and the words “left” and “right”, and all their equivalents in other languages, and any other mental associations, have been inverted. What you’re imagining is actually no change at all; the same is true of “spectrum” inversion. And if you reject leftness and rightness as “qualia” like hues … well, you’re rejecting an opportunity to gain considerable insight and let go of faulty intuitions.
If you think that accepting *property* dualism means you can’t be a physicalist/monist in denotative terms, you don’t understand what PD is despite having “better arguments” than I gave. (It is at the least compatible with monism – ever hear of “neutral monism”? – even if your notion of “physicalism” is based on a misguided naive realist treatment of our empirical encounter with matter rather than its denotative exclusivity per se.)
Neil, you stupid fucking moron … I said that, being a physicalist, I am a monist; I did not say that one cannot be a monist without being a physicalist — there’s no more “fundamental error” than such a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.
My “notion of ‘physicalism'” is based on the proper usage of the word; physicalism is monistic, period. People claiming that there are forms of physicalism that are dualistic are abusing one or both words.
You are, of course, correct on that point, Tony; it is your prerogative to do as you please. The question is whether you want to be taken seriously, and by whom.
There are many fora where you can freely bandy about terms like “quantum” or your own private definition of “supernatural”, and no one will ever challenge you on it. But you are posting here, so one assumes you want to be taken seriously by scientists and science-sympathetic laypeople.
If that is the case, then you can’t just go making up your own arbitrary definitions for words–it shuts down communication between people. If, as I suspect, forging interpersonal connections is a value you care about, you might want to consider the ramifications of shutting down communication in that way.
As someone who works with complementary and alternative medical (CAM) practitioners who are coming to scientific education very late in the game, I can perhaps be more temperate in my language to you than Ken and truth machine, although I agree with the points they are making. If I were to get as frustrated as they clearly are with making the same basic and well-evidenced points over and over, I couldn’t work with the population I do, so perhaps explaining this in a more patient way will work. Or not–as you pointed out, it is indeed your prerogative to do as you please, including using terms in ways that deprecate communication. We shall see how it turns out.
I am sympathetic to your concern about prematurely shutting down inquiry, but that is not what is occurring here. The concern of shutting down inquiry, whether or not it is premature, is not an issue of monism vs. dualism; it is a question of what can and cannot be studied scientifically, and blurring the line between those two categories with an idiosyncratic definition of “supernatural” does not promote scientific inquiry. If you, as you claim, are really using the term “supernatural” so that this sentence makes sense: “Before the 19th century, evolution was supernatural”, then we all might as well pack it in now, because this discussion will go nowhere really fast. As I said, there are plenty of other fora where your use of terms like that, and especially “quantum”, will be accepted uncritically.
But if you want to comment on, and be taken seriously on, a scientific forum such as Pharyngula, you have to be willing to promote communication by not insisting on making up idiosyncratic definitions for words that already share a widely-used common meaning. If you’re willing to participate in such a dialog, there are a lot of interesting discussions we can have, such as how mind-body dualism puts you on the side of Descartes, or other such issues. But we can’t do that if you’re going to make up your own definitions and insist the rest of the world adopt them.
There is a Zen Buddhist adage about not confusing the moon with the finger used to point it out. If you want to talk about the moon, we can do so, and we can also examine the fingers we are using–whether or not they are pointing in the right direction, etc. But if you consistently confuse the finger with the moon it points to, there is no real possibility of discussion to be had.
To echo thalarctos….
There are ways to discuss the problem of consciousness without bringing dualism into the discussion. You could talk about holism vs. reductionism. You could be even less fancy and discuss top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to analysis. But using “supernatural” and “dualism” (and other words and phrases) in an idiosyncratic way that confuses, makes you sound like a kook or a crank.
If you want to communicate with others, either use words in a standard way, or clarify what you mean before you use the term, and explain why that’s better than preexisting synonyms. And if it’s not better, expect to be called on it.
If all you care about is talking to yourself, then by all means do as you please.
PS: Yes, using mirrors and other virtual limb creations to treat phantom limb pain is interesting — but the physical bottom-up explanation of that it results from the action of mirror neurons. Again, this does not support dualism; it implies a suprising yet nevertheless completely physical connection between different parts of the brain.
Ok,
Thanks for being patient thalarctos. It’s much easier understanding things when swear words are not interspliced between important points of a discussion. Doing so actually puts the brain in a defensive mode and prevents understanding from happening. Also, this doesn’t really give the impression that one is witnessing a scholarly discussion. If any layperson is reading Pharyngula (I include myself as a layperson on this particular topic because my time has not been focused specifically on the mind-body problem), I’d suggest removal of swear words or any form of comments that don’t actually address the issues, since this it is not indicative of appropriate scholarly communication (unless you’re drunk and at a bar maybe). If TM or anyone else continues to do this, I’m ending this discussion right here. For a reference point for what I consider to be scholarly interaction (or at least the kind I’m used to), see Dave Munger’s Cognitive Daily. (My irritation usually comes out in the form of sarcasm that’s probably not easily detected by the literal minded).
Anyways, let me ask this question. There has been some research on so called near-death experiences (NDE
s) that indicate people are capable of reporting conscious experiences in the absence of measurable brain activity. Namely, that after being declared brain dead (measured by EEG activity), upon resuscitation, some patients have indicated a capacity to remember experiences that occured during brain death.
IF, there is no alternative explanation for this data, do you think this might be suggestive of dualism?
If you look back at the conversation, nowhere did I use the word supernatural until after comment #507.
If TM or anyone else continues to do this, I’m ending this discussion right here.
Promises, promises.
Oh, BTW, would you like a translation of what I meant by repeating that word in my own special idiom? You’d better be seated on the fainting couch, with smelling salts at hand. It would make a sailor blush, to hear such a phrase.
Hm, “no alternative explanation” assumes its own conclusion.
I’m looking specifically at the phrase “absence of measurable brain activity”. Current tools to measure brain activity in the surgery patients that NDEs occur in are superficial and non-invasive; I would rather suspect that more thorough and/or invasive measurements would indeed detect weak activity.
There’s a surgeon who has a computer monitor displaying images towards the ceiling at the top of a file cabinet, in the hopes that someone who experiences an NDE will be able to float up and report back what the image is on awakening. So far, no dice.
Well, this isn’t really a scholarly discussion, although there happen to be some scholars here. Your bar discussion analogy is a more appropriate comparison to the comments section of a blog post. And tastes differ–Ken and truth machine almost always make me laugh, as does Great White Wonder, who I haven’t seen in a while. But I take your point that not everyone reacts to them in the same way as I do.
In the way that you posed the question, I would answer that, from a classical logic point of view, I would have to say “yes”. In other words, NOT(MONISM) ==> (NOT-MONISM) .
But I would also say that that assertion is “trivially true”, meaning that as the question is posed, it is not particularly interesting or useful or meaningful, although it does satisfy an elementary logical form.
What *would* begin to make it interesting or useful or meaningful is to explore the assumptions couched in your question. Owlmirror has touched on some of them, besides pointing out that the question is phrased problematically.
I would begin with the assumptions couched in the phrase “no alternative explanation”. For that to be true, you would have to:
1) disprove any possible biochemical explanation, including emergent effects arising from interactions. From a research design point of view, it would verge on an intractable number of possible combinations, even assuming that you could get IRB approval to almost kill your treatment group and then bring them back for an interview. Anything less than an RCT (randomized controlled trial), like the experiments of nature you are referring to, can never establish causality; the best they can do is be suggestive. So already, the absolute certainty your question requires is weakened by the nature of your data.
2) In addition to eliminating biochemical explanations, the absolute certainty of your question means that you need to rule out any possible material explanation which we do not yet know of, but may discover in future. So not only are you in the unenviable position of “proving a negative”, you have to prove all possible negatives in the future as well. Again, an unenviable position.
3) As Owlmirror points out, your absolute certainty requires that you must have perfect measuring instruments. It is not enough to say that the brain activity is undetectable by current methods of measurement; you must demonstrate that no future way of measuring will ever be capable of detecting activity either. Otherwise, the “no activity” may be an artifact of measurement error, rather than an actual lack of activity, and we are back to possible alternative explanations.
So at the very high-level, abstract point of view of the assumptions couched in your question, it’s easy to get agreement to it, as it is phrased. But the interesting material emerges as you dig into the assumptions couched in the question, and when you do so, you begin to see how intractable the problems posed by your position are.
Owlmirror, Thalarctos,
Your responses are an astounding display of patience and assumption unpacking. I probably shouldn’t post under the influence of deadline procrastination and loratadine, although I think the best I would have been able to muster was not posting.
It looks like TJ acts like he wants to learn, but he insists on whipping out the woo for us to ooh and aah at, and is petulant about how everybody but Obfuscatory Neil rejects it. That’s gotta be some painful cognitive dissonance. But there is a responsibility to at least make an effort to vaguely acquaint oneself with the current scientific consensus. Dragging in and laying at our feet every shiny Dancing Wu Li Mouse that he’s pounced on, that should just about wrap it up for the evils of scientism, is not behavior that will endear TJ to most folks here. I am a woo apostate myself. Woo is a hard habit to shake. Mainlining woo makes it easy to feel like whatever you feel like is right. Glomming onto woo is not a good way to avoid fooling yourself. Learning why people reject woo, and bad arguments (including some of the arguments I make) takes a lot of work, and nobody can do that for anybody else.
I think Zen, by way of Alan Watts and one of his personal students (from whom I took a philosophy of religion course in 1975), is what first got me working my way out of woo, particularly the story of the dog and finger and the Moon. Watts got me hungry for Sagan and Dawkins. If all I can do is cling to my cherished conceptions of the way I want the world to be, all oozing comfy woo, those conceptions are going to prevent me from finding out the way things are. I may never find out the way things really are, but if the answer is in Nasrudin’s purse, science has the better flashlight. I also find that a modicum of boot to the head is most efficacious.
delurk/
In Neil’s own words:
But since qualia are ineffable there isn’t any way to write notes to yourself explaining how to compare them later if you forget what to [c]all them
This suggests, to me, that the subject has no more access to the supposed special properties of qualia than an objective investigator. And if no one has the ability to discern, or “write notes” about, these properties, what justification is there for giving them privileged status or proposing them at all? It seems all the teeth-gnashing over the mind-body “problem” boils down to a truism: You’re not me.
/delurk
I’m surprised that no one has contested this repeated assertion since SW in #78, understandable fatigue perhaps, but: damn, what reactionary nonsense. Those are results of science, not failures.
OK (Devil’s advocate role once again–alot more fun):
@524: Yes. Those are the same points I thought of too while reviewing that experiment. Also, if one rules out methodological issues and biochemical explanations, another alternative hypothesis could have something to do with the known connections (e.g., sympathethic nerve fibers) between brain and body. Perhaps the brain maps to the body, just like the body maps to the brain in the guise of the somatosensory cortex. This might be an appropriate explanation since participants eyes are closed, and it’s not immediately clear how participants could report specific visual information with their eyes closed.
It would be interesting to conduct a study to see if one could report the identity of objects with eyes closed; but I guess the Esref Armagan reference already takes care of that issue.
Anyways, thinking out loud here (and playing the much more fun devil’s advocate position).
@525, 1975 eh. I was still in diapers then.
If that’s you under the influence of deadline procrastination and loratadine, I’ll take that over most people stone cold sober :). I’ve enjoyed your comments for a couple of years now, and I would be disappointed if you felt the need to hold back in any way.
That’s quite possibly what is going on; I’m still agnostic on TJ (Neil, on the other hand, has made his position quite clear; I think you described it most aptly). I agree with what you said about woo, with one small addition. There are some people who are married to it, and nothing you say will ever have any effect–“alties”, I’ve seen them called elsewhere.
There are other people who fall into woo faute de mieux–because they really never had anything else–and sometimes, if you’re willing to step through things with them slowly and patiently, they’re interested in following along, and will make a genuine effort to learn. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s a joy.
And, of course, complicating matters are the ones you described, who act as though they want to learn, but really down deep don’t want to. They can be big time sinks, so I usually give people a reasonable chance, and then–if they’re still playing games after a couple of tries–just cut my losses and move on to someone else who is genuinely interested.
I agree, although some people missed out on that early on, because the grownups around them neither knew enough or cared enough to provide it. So I will usually walk through it with someone who seems interested in learning, because it really is hard to do it yourself. And that’s usually when you can tell if they’re truly interested, or just bs-ing it.
The funny thing about woo is that a lot of the impulses behind it are good, but they get messed up because people never got the proper tools the first time around. Pointing out to students who deplore their idea of Cartesian dualism just how they are unconsciously replicating the same thing, or engaging someone in the intense awesomeness of ecological science can be a real “aha!” moment for some people who’ve fallen into woo for lack of a better alternative. As for the hard-core alties, I don’t waste my time anymore.
heh–that’s excellent!
If TM or anyone else continues to do this, I’m ending this discussion right here.
Promise?
Fuck off, you useless cretin.
Anyways, let me ask this question. There has been some research on so called near-death experiences (NDE
s) that indicate people are capable of reporting conscious experiences in the absence of measurable brain activity. Namely, that after being declared brain dead (measured by EEG activity), upon resuscitation, some patients have indicated a capacity to remember experiences that occured during brain death.
IF, there is no alternative explanation for this data, do you think this might be suggestive of dualism?
How could there possibly not be an alternative explanation? The most obvious alternative explanations are that you are mischaracterizing the results, that the researchers mischaracterized their results, that the researchers used crappy methodology … nothing could be less “scholarly” than to ignore all the published criticism of these NDE experiments and to employ the sort of absurd argumentum ad ignorantiam that you have displayed here. You might as well talk about “some research” that indicates that people have seen ghosts.
BTW this discussion has moved into a better, less trollish mode lately (to large extent since Tripe Machine got off for awhile, what a foaming and foul-mouthed troll – and that’s a “student of philosophy”! I will be kind enough to suggest he *can* do better …) and I’m glad to see that. I will also try to write better. My stringing together of clauses with lots of parenthetical phrases etc. did make my writing hard to understand. That was my fault, and I can’t blame everyone else for having trouble getting my points (but not about all of them!)
Neil >> I ask you, what is it about “pain” that makes analgesia worthy having, if just signal processing?
OM > The question implies that “signal processing” is in some way not “real”.
> Hm.
No, it implies that signal processing is real but just doesn’t have the nature of feelings about it, “the way it feels.” If signals are mathematical structures (or equivalent to) and rearrangements of like elements, how could they form into the sorts of experiences like nausea, tingly feelings, pleasure and pain etc? That is why there really is a mind-body problem, despite false notions to the contrary.
Someone upthread said that modeling nausea would be a mere engineering problem, and they were wrong. If you try to design a chess-playing program, you don’t have to check any actual player you can just study the game and figure out how to produce that behavior. But to design a nausea circuit or as part of larger, how could you *imagine* how to do it? You have to “cheat” by copying something from inside the human brain etc. That is constructing by imitation, not by logical deduction and prediction. The trouble is, you are trying to simulate a subjective feel, not just producing words or complaints as such.
> pain is the neural chain that occurs;
It can be however, once we accept property dualism (that the properties of things are relative to how they are accessed), something TM and many others can’t appreciate and gets a hissy fit about. For example, including the pathetic foul-mouthed opening which does not promote the desired image (I assume?) of fine, rational-skeptic minds here:
Neil, you stupid fucking moron … I said that, being a physicalist, I am a monist; I did not say that one cannot be a monist without being a physicalist — there’s no more “fundamental error” than such a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.
My “notion of ‘physicalism'” is based on the proper usage of the word; physicalism is monistic, period. People claiming that there are forms of physicalism that are dualistic are abusing one or both words.
I never implied that’s what you meant or made that fallacy (especially since I mostly posed it as questions.) What I was getting at: you can be a physicalist and a “property dualist” at the same time. You ought to know better than to lift off the first connotation from a phrase, because it needs explanation. Despite the name, *property* “dualism” *is* monism because it says that the same thing has different properties (not different “substances”) depending upon how accessed. IOW, they are relative properties.
You can imagine therefore that “matter-energy” has different properties, including subjective ones inside brains etc, in that way. That deserves to be called a flavor of physicalism IMHO since you don’t believe in non-material stuff. Rather, you believe that matter-energy has the relative properties.
A better term might be “property relativism” and that takes away the “stigma” of the misleading term “dualism.” PR is a *subtype* of monism. Earlier, TM claimed to understand what “property dualism” was, so I don’t get this latest confusion.
Finally, this big complaint about “woo” sounds like what they call “legislating reality.” You think the universe just shouldn’t be magically “weird” I suppose (how can we know what to expect anyway a priori?), but we *already* know that it is weird (quantum mechanics, troubles with renormalization and localization of energy in GR, dark energy, etc.) In fact, many physicists refer to our universe as “preposterous” because it challenges our notions of plausibility. You can pretend that you just object to things like that for which we don’t have evidence, but if that was so: why so intent on rejecting the offer of existing examples, like the nature of conscious experience?
PS: As a final irony, consider that “existing” as a general concept is “ineffable” in that it can’t be explained in more fundamental terms. Max Tegmark might ask, can you explain what makes “real universes” different from “mathematical structures” (without using conscious experience, heh?)
Well, agree or not, don’t pretend that the above writing was all that hard to understand. It often was before, but that complaint need not be a crutch for the disagreeable reader.
Also, OM:
I still don’t get property dualism. If the whole is different from the sum of its parts, then the whole is different from the sum of its parts? I can has tautology?
I think the whole/parts issue is relevant, and it is good to recognize that TWIDFTSOIPs. That might “set up” property dualism to work its magic. But property dualism (let’s call it “property relativism” to avoid needlessly pissing off wary physicalists) ultimately concentrates on “how” the properties are accessed, that’s the “relative” part. Hence, the “way it feels” is relatively real to the processing entity in which the signals occur. But any attempt to find that “as such” by outside means just reflects back the spin, shall we say, of the way you are investigating it.
Since scientists like using those external methods, for good practical reasons, that leads to the pointless (to me) argument about real feelings versus data processing. With PR it can be both ways. Shouldn’t that at least be appealing in some sense, even if not yet convincing?
I should know better by now, but I keep forgetting to format double paragraphs properly in HTML. Here is TM’s full quote as it should have been inserted above (and God forbid that I’m just trying to remind people of how he addresses us, of course!):
Neil, you stupid fucking moron … I said that, being a physicalist, I am a monist; I did not say that one cannot be a monist without being a physicalist — there’s no more “fundamental error” than such a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.
My “notion of ‘physicalism'” is based on the proper usage of the word; physicalism is monistic, period. People claiming that there are forms of physicalism that are dualistic are abusing one or both words.
First stinky,
Regarding your claim that no mathematical structure can describe fundamental randomness, try telling that to anyone who works in any field of physics (or chemistry or biology, for that matter) that uses quantum mechanics. I’m certainly nonplussed by the assertion, since I seem to have memories of using math to describe it, but maybe I’m just a Boltzmann brain and that’s all an illusion. And if you’re referring to Lumo’s argument that it can’t be described mathematically because no math can determine the observed outcome, I’ll give you a cookie for spotting the contradiction.
Then windy:
I’m surprised that no one has contested this repeated assertion since SW in #78, understandable fatigue perhaps, but: damn, what reactionary nonsense. Those are results of science, not failures.
You are both mistaken and confused about this. First, sure there is a form of mathematics used in QM. Yet it simply gives the probabilities of distribution, but not the actual pattern that is the outcome of a given experiment. The latter is what science cannot predict, even in principle per accepted theory. That is clearly what I referred to earlier. Cute phrases to describe it like “well, it happens acausally” or “for no reason” may or may not be apt, but they don’t change that implication in any case. Yes it is a result of science in the sense of being revealed to be such, but still also a failure since now we are rather sure we can’t find this out. (Or do you want to keep moving goalposts back so you never have to admit “failure” – in which case it means nothing anyway.)
BTW, I’ll imagine giving anyone a cookie if he/she can tell me what contradiction was supposedly in Lumo’s argument. The thread BTW is at http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/12/john-conway-70th-birthday.html, and comments starting with mine at http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/2104593853321095868/
To avoid seeming to contradict myself: I wrote
If signals are mathematical structures (or equivalent to) and rearrangements of like elements, how could they form into the sorts of experiences like nausea, tingly feelings, pleasure and pain etc? That is why there really is a mind-body problem, despite false notions to the contrary.
and then later said that PD/PR could solve the problem. OK, what that means is: first of all, actual brains aren’t just the mathematical model of information but a real “something” (unless you believe in modal realism. I don’t, I just said that the difference is ineffable at heart but also involves non-modelable behavior like quantum randomness. Math only shows the overall probabilities of those outcomes, not the actual patterns.) That real something can have relative properties depending on how they are accessed. Maybe math can get some handle on that, but it is not equipped to describe qualitative differences for example any more than it is to produce true randomness versus pseudorandomness.
There is a mind-body “problem” at first glance, unless you accept property relativism. If you don’t, you either have to (for non-relative physicalism) play nutty-sounding denial games about the way feelings are for us, or (for traditional literal dualism) you have to worry about interaction problems etc.
BTW I remind again that PD/PR is a form of monism despite the misleading common name. It subsumes together and in effect “co-opts” the typical properties claimed for matter and mind. If you want to just call the whole shebang “the material world” anyway, that’s fine with me since it’s ultimately just a denotative gesture. It’s the connotations of it that PR is trying to enlarge.
TM shrieked forth, with my interpolated commentary:
What I picked out [about the qualia inversion experiment] is your bad faith [no I just mentioned it as a possible problem per positivistic consistency, I couldn’t care less about it being a thought experiment silly]; and as I noted, the rest just shows what a fool you are. [No rebuttal of course.] Here’s a clue: if you call Dennett a charlatan and a prevaricator, you deserve nothing better than being beat on the head with a 2×4. [If I was a zombie it “wouldn’t really hurt” anyway, how am I to imagine the way it would feel?]
I do think he’s sloppy, but remember what Ken says about this joint – we talk trash and it isn’t formal, right? And look at what you say! Early in Dennet’s Consciousness Explained e.g., he made a factual error about hallucinations. He said solid-seeming, object-like hallucinations were very rare, hard to come by etc. That is false. Such hallucinations are easily produced with 10 mg of piperidyl benzilate hallucinogens in the well-known anticholinergic class like JB-318 and JB-336 (which had a brief street vogue under the nickname “LBJ”) and especially the terrifying military hallucinogen BZ. Try some, trash machine. It could hardly make your rotten disposition any worse, and you may end up appreciating the vivid reality of “mental imagery.”
If Dennet doesn’t do his neuropharmacological homework, I have to wonder. BTW it is ironic to note that BF Skinner was once regarded as a great “thinker” as well (well, he himself denied that thinking was real – don’t blame me for the quotes) within psychology. Now, most cognitive psychologists consider him a crank as I did even back then. I know, I read Dennett’s “Skinning Skinner” – how ironic. So maybe someday (God willing) Dennett will in turn be regarding widely as a crank. I can’t wait for “Destroying Dennett” – perhaps I should write it myself.
BTW, Neil, you stupid fucking lying moron, I picked out the core of your so-called critique; it is you who point to my noting the dishonesty of your “contrived” bullshit (along with the “deceitfully or incompetently” crap [#484]) while ignoring the rest of my response.
But you are the one who said earlier, with my bolding:
If you woke up tomorrow and your visual spectrum were inverted, but the rest of your cognitive space weren’t respectively inverted, it would seem very wrong because you would have the wrong memory and emotion associations — the sky would look alarming, like blood.
It could be fixed so as not to seem wrong by changing all those associations [which are mediated of course by memory in the broad sense] ; fix them all, and nothing would seem wrong at all.
then wrote in complaint to me:
What have you said? I peered into that shit and found no pony. Above you blabber about “the memory being taken away”, but that has no relevance to what I wrote, it just reveals how incapable you are of reasoning about these issues.
Look, I don’t care anymore whether you are consistent about memory and that thought experiment. Maybe you have a bad memory! They say irritable people have more trouble remembering. But memory is again central to your latest argument”
The functionalist view is that so-called “qualia” are purely relational, having no attributes other than their relationships to other elements of conceptual and perceptual space. If that’s true, then it’s meaningless to talk about “inverting” the entire space. The original spectrum inversion thought experiment of John Locke had one waking up the next day with all the hues inverted but no difference in their brain (or the rest of the world). But one can’t know that the hues have been inverted if one’s associated memories are correspondingly inverted.
Well, of course inverting one’s memories would take away the ability to remember whatever constituted the difference between the sensations, so that hardly shows rebuttal of the idea that the difference is qualitative or whatever it is claimed to be – it is an empty demonstration. And if one’s memories aren’t taken away, then what about the difference *are* being remembered? You can say it’s because of “associations” like fearfulness, but what evidence is there for that? That sounds lie an ad-hoc contrivance, and such things are so malleable and wishy washy with little effect on ability to recognize colors.
Also, as I said we can do the experiment of switching cone outputs in one half of your retina/s and not the other, then you can compare the dissonant sensations directly without needing memory. One point too: if all we could sense is relationships, then we couldn’t even tell the difference between green with red polka dots and red with green polka dots etc. And it it’s about “associations”, how is that supposed to work into the detailed configuration of many colors, when “associations” are felt at a general level? What, there is a complex “picture” with pieces of fear and memories of nice plants etc. in it like a mosaic?
The irony is, in neural terms there has to be some *actual* and non-relative difference in the “signal code” that distinguishes cone emissions so that we *are* able to remember the differences (in those cases where memory has not been altered.) You might be tempted to say, so there’s then no “need” (that idiotic phrase) for qualia. However, that is the nature of what appears to us, but there need be no contradiction if one accepts property “dualism.” As I explained, PD or better as “property relativism” is really a form of monism. Maybe analytical “philosophy” got you too attuned to the literal insinuations of words. After all, the ironically anti-scientific post-modernist Witlesstein once wrote, “Language tells us what things are.”
And simply imagining that the hues might be inverted from what they were yesterday, despite not having any evidence of it, [but of course we could switch cone neurons, silly – and then color “sensations” would have to be switched! In fact, that is the only *scientifically* plausible scenario in neurology, whether you agree with the additional qualitative character as experienced or not!] is simply imagining that functionalism is false; that’s no argument against functionalism, which is what’s called for since functionalism is the default-by-Ockham position.
Ockham, the Medieval philosopher (ahemmm) – tell me why I should believe that is most reasonable way to assume about the world. BTW property relativism is not multiplying “entities” anyway, unless you hate Lorentz contraction because you think lots of relative rods-in-one is icky.
Imagine a left-right inversion scenario, in which everything that was to your left (including the left side of your body) is now on your right, and v.v., and the words “left” and “right”, and all their equivalents in other languages, and any other mental associations, have been inverted. What you’re imagining is actually no change at all; the same is true of “spectrum” inversion. And if you reject leftness and rightness as “qualia” like hues … well, you’re rejecting an opportunity to gain considerable insight and let go of faulty intuitions.
I already said why that shows nothing. And re from another commenter upthread, not being able to describe qualia just means, well they can’t be described, not that they can’t be like that. Can you describe “time” in more fundamental terms? It’s almost like asking, “what is matter made of” (I mean even whatever particles, “matter” itself.) If every definition or idea needed further explaining etc, there would be an infinite regression. You hope the listeners gets the point. If some points aren’t gotten at the ground floor, no more can be done.
Here’s an interesting irony about “handness.” It ironically *is* a peculiar qualia like difference (sort of.) If we did actually bring the mirror-reversed and the regular world together, we could indeed tell the difference. They would not match up anymore. Sure, each is a known transformation of the other. Yet there is no way to *describe* RH or LH things separately, each one is “ineffable.” For example, Gardner IIRC writes that without an actual physical example like Co60 decay, it would be impossible to tell people on other planets which was a right hand and a left hand. You could use base elements to describe shapes etc, but not right and left. You couldn’t tell them anything to guarantee that a statue of a hand would come across a teleporter as RH or LH. If you don’t believe me, try describing either absolutely.
(Thanks for reminding me of this objective example of “ineffability.”)
Well, agree or not, don’t pretend that the above writing was all that hard to understand.
As ever with anything from Obfuscatory Neil, to the extent that it was understandable, it was not worth reading.
You couldn’t tell them anything to guarantee that a statue of a hand would come across a teleporter as RH or LH. If you don’t believe me, try describing either absolutely.
I know it’s a lot of fun back there in the 19th century, Neil, you fatuous blowhard, but in wide use these days are things called coordinate systems. I know, you may find your beautiful mind oppressed by the cartesian coordinate system, but these days, they come in 3 dimensions plus time. Imagine a body in the anatomical position, erect, palms facing forward. Using a Y axis as the vertical, positive Y would be superior, negative inferior. The positive Z axis would be anterior, the negative Z axis posterior. The left hand’s thumb would be pointing in the direction of positive X, the right hand’s thumb would be pointing in negative X. There is no mistaking a left hand for a right one.
We don’t have infinite regresses because we adopt conventions, standards. Eschew them at our own risk.
Actually, I recognize the thought experiment being referred to here – the premise is that you’re communicating with some alien party in trying to set up a standard of physical co-ordinates, and part of the premise is that you can neither transmit a physical example directly, nor use a polarized signal.
Given those constraints, how would you define left and right (other than as being directions that are opposite) such that the receiving party would have no way of being confused?
As I recall, it’s trickier than it sounds.
Which is not to say that that I agree that it’s an “ineffable” problem. I think the constraints are excessive for all communications that we are ever likely to engage in.
Did you read what I actually wrote? The whole thing, I mean? “Signal processing” is a simplification of an abstraction; the “real thing” is a massive and complex biochemical interaction.
The complexity of the reaction is what makes it difficult to understand and model, but it certainly isn’t impossible. Or at least, not theoretically so.
Again, we have 6 billion+ examples of human brains. The very universality of sensation and perception strongly implies that sensation and perception can indeed be abstracted out and modeled in electical circuits.
Nonsense. The map may not be the territory, but for any model, the greater its accuracy, the closer it becomes to being a copy of the territory.
It may be extraordinarily difficult to create an exact copy of a specific human mind, but creating an arbitrarily close approximation of a subcomponent of a general human mind is just a matter of engineering.
Now that’s just ridiculous. The “something from inside the human brain” is exactly what we want to simulate. Why shouldn’t we copy whatever circuits would be needed to do so? How is it cheating? What rules are being broken?
You’re just confused here. What are you, a Platonist who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty by actually doing anything? In the real world, model-building and experimentation are perfectly valid methods of achieving understanding.
What magic? You say things like that, and your entire argument runs off the rails and into the weeds.
I am glad to see that you are using more accessible language, but I’m still unclear on your point – if any.
EXCUSE ME, WTF ARE YOU TRYIN TO SAY?
Yet there is no way to *describe* RH or LH things separately, each one is “ineffable.” If you don’t believe me, try describing either absolutely.
No, shit-for-brains, the rational conclusion about “left” and “right” is not that they are “ineffable”, but that they aren’t intrinsic attributes at all, and thus can only defined relatively. There is certainly nothing “ineffable” about the fact that the first letter of “ineffable” or any other word of English is to the left of the second letter. John Locke’s “spectrum inversion” thought experiment applied to left and right would have us waking up tomorrow with everything that had been on the left being on the right but with no physical change in the world. The logical absurdity of such a notion in the case of left and right effectively rebuts Locke’s argument in re the “spectrum” — anyone not firmly in the grips of an ideology should be able to grasp that. And acknowledging that “left” and “right” are the same sort of thing as “qualia” effectively rebuts the whole notion of qualia as intrinsic attributes, for anyone with a modicum of sense.
Owlmirror:
Actually, I recognize the thought experiment being referred to here – the premise is that you’re communicating with some alien party in trying to set up a standard of physical co-ordinates
No, I didn’t “refer” to a thought experiment, I offered one, and in the one I offered transmissions of samples, polarized signals, and such play no role. But indeed, in the communication problem you mention, the same basic issue applies …
Given those constraints, how would you define left and right (other than as being directions that are opposite) such that the receiving party would have no way of being confused?
As I recall, it’s trickier than it sounds.
Not just trickier, but impossible in my scenario, because there’s no more of such a thing as “the leftness of left” than “the redness of red”. Neither is an intrinsic attribute; both consist of nothing more than informational relationships within the brain.
If signals are mathematical structures (or equivalent to) and rearrangements of like elements, how could they form into the sorts of experiences like nausea, tingly feelings, pleasure and pain etc?
This is the sort of question that intellectually dishonest morons ask, like when TJ asked “How is it possible to articulate the presumably non-exist phenomena of qualia, if they don’t exist?” It’s not anyone else’s burden to explain how this or that is possible, the burden is on those who think something isn’t possible to prove it. To do so you would first have to have a clue as to what “feelings” are, and it does no good to blather “ineffable!” over and over again, especially when science has made considerable progress in explaining and modeling “feelings”, and scientifically educated philosophers of mind have made considerable progress in explaining how the goings on in the brain manifest themselves as the contents of consciousness. Your supposed zombie equivalent, if hit with a 2×4, would scream “Fuck, that hurts!” just as you would, and there would be detailed causal explanation, at various levels of description, of exactly why the zombie says that, just as there would be for you, and psychologists could talk about “affect” and the resulting “hostility” and “anger” that the zombie would “feel”, but the square quotes no more apply to the zombie than to you. The whole notion of zombies as creatures that physically identical to us and act exactly like us but have no mental states is deeply, deeply intellectually dishonest and effectively insane. So called “property dualism”, the notion that mental states are some sort of “add on” to the physical world, something not reducible to the physical, is a desperate attempt to hold on to an intuition that is contradicted by all logic and evidence.
“But to design a nausea circuit or as part of larger, how could you *imagine* how to do it? You have to “cheat” by copying something from inside the human brain etc.”
Now that’s just ridiculous. The “something from inside the human brain” is exactly what we want to simulate. Why shouldn’t we copy whatever circuits would be needed to do so? How is it cheating? What rules are being broken?
It’s ridiculous in a more important way. We also have trouble imagining how DNA develops bodies; we would no doubt have trouble imagining how various alien technologies work, and as in so many sci-fi movies and series (e.g., Stargate) we would need to copy it without understanding it. There has been all sorts of technology that people could not have *imagined* how it works before the supporting science had been developed; so fucking what? That we don’t currently exactly understand how nausea works (although plenty of people can imagine it, even if Neil is too stupid to be able to) doesn’t mean that we never will — once we have a much better understanding of how the brain works then we will understand precisely how nausea works and will be able to independently design mechanisms that produce nausea — certainly there is no reason to think otherwise. Of course, it helps to pay some attention to what nausea is — “a feeling of sickness in the stomach characterized by an urge to vomit” — and not just declare it “ineffable”. The same applies to more abstract definitions, such as “strong aversion; disgust” — all of which can be broken down into behaviors and behavioral dispositions. Of course, morons like Neil will insist that there’s more to “feelings” than that, but it’s just question-begging bleating, and stupid and vile claims that those who understand the nature of “feelings” are “prevaricating” about their own experience.
it is good to recognize that TWIDFTSOIPs.
Of course TWIDFTSOIPs, because “the sum” doesn’t capture the relationships among the parts. Houses aren’t just the sum of a bunch of planks and nails and plumbing and such, but the attributes that houses have but planks, nails, plumbing, etc. do not have are not “magic”, moron. People point out that TWIDFTSOIPs and talk about “emergence” as if this was some great discovery, whereas it’s just a sign that they haven’t discovered their own stupidity, since TWIDFTSOIPs is an utterly trivial observation that any child who has taken something apart but can’t figure out how to put back together has felt the full force of.
Ken, owlmirror is getting the point. You guys sometimes try so hard to work up that I can’t be making sense (well evidenced by the hollow putdowns) that you miss perfectly good points. Just look at how TM screws up what I say even when he apparently thinks he gets the point.) There is no way to tell the other civilization which handness of coordinate system you want them to set up. Martin Gardner (a hero to many of you, right?) fully explains and supports this in The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and Time-Reversed Worlds, so don’t blame me, silly. For a guy who does computer programming … you can try harder.
Owlmirror, Since the brain is not really a crisp formal “circuit” (is there a rigorous definition BTW? Just asking.) it isn’t at all clear that we could model it that way. What if the differences, whatever they are, are relevant? How do you know in advance? It can’t be presumed due to convenience or ideology (which have far more influence than I bet you realize on scientific and philosophical thinking.) And the point about whether you can deduce how to build a nausea circuit from a priori considerations is absolutely critical to the concept of whether it is understandable or not in functional terms. I’ll just let you think about that for awhile instead of pounding the same drum again.
“How accessed” means, in the case of experience, whether you are attempting to describe your own experience or whether you are taking measurements (which are after all, interactions) and then trying to interpret them in various ways. If you can’t appreciate the fundamental issue of “how things feel to you” versus what we can find out in various other ways, what more can I do for you? You guys have to make some effort to appreciate things. A listener has to do that. Resisting insight as an argumentative ploy may give an impression you are preventing someone from winning an argument. But what good does it do you if you really want to appreciate what’s going on?
However, I’m going to quit ragging on you guys if you just don’t appreciate the idea of qualitative experience, etc. I will rag on those who insist it is not like that, who rag on those who do think it is, etc. I figure it’s just a matter of thinking style, and I never meant it was really like a politician lying about what he knows is false. Note, I did not invent the phrase “feigning anesthesia”, it is a staple of criticism of behaviorism etc. I pick on Dennett because he said he wasn’t going to do that, and effectively did anyway. (If you deny the subjective *character* of experience as “qualiphiles” aka normal people describe it, then there is no point in calling the process “experience.” Experience by definition means how it is for us, taking our judgment seriously albeit if not as infallible.
Maybe it’s like how some mathematicians are “constructivists” because they can’t believe that infinity is real, etc. Check up on that. I am not one, I am a Platonist at heart (a fuzzy Platonist who thinks it isn’t all cut and dried though.) Maybe functionalism in psychology is sort of like constructivism in math, interesting to look into.
TM, I’ve made the point well enough about Dennett’s near-worthless thought experiment (and again, it’s not worthless *because* it’s a TE, but because it just plain sucks, OK?) But one more thing: just proposing an ostensible analogy (like, handness to color sensation qualia) does not make it a worthy analogy. It is up to you to prove that the one case reflects and impacts on the other, versus your presumption:
And acknowledging that “left” and “right” are the same sort of thing as “qualia” effectively rebuts the whole notion of qualia as intrinsic attributes, for anyone with a modicum of sense.
But of course they aren’t the same sort of thing, despite my making a comparison (you know, comparing things doesn’t mean they are “the same” but only need share one common trait, right?) Qualitative difference is about non-structural essential difference in kind, “flavor” if you will, whereas handness is about configuration. That’s about as opposite in character as it gets. I don’t see that much logical connection even at some higher level.
BTW, Gardner’s experiment shows that being able to communicate the handness of the coordinate system is indeed impossible, making that “ineffable” by definition. The other factors about it don’t change that part of the issue. IOW, there can be more than one type of ineffable thing.
What’s weird is that TM keeps referring to behavioral dispositions. If sensations are really about brain processes why all the emphasis on “behavior” or even such dispositions? Even if you didn’t accept a peculiar “extra property” it is still internal and need not defined in those terms.
The same applies to more abstract definitions, such as “strong aversion; disgust” — all of which can be broken down into behaviors and behavioral dispositions. [prove it] Of course, morons like Neil [and almost every human being who isn’t a functionalist hack, rather; >99% of the human race] will insist that there’s more to “feelings” than that, but it’s just question-begging bleating, and stupid and vile claims [you’re one to complain about “vile” anything!] that those who understand the nature of “feelings” are “prevaricating” about their own experience.
Actually, I said those who *don’t* understand the nature of their feelings are prevaricating – but I guess that depends on what you believe, and I accept it could be an unfair charge. As for prevaricating, why the “scare quotes” around the word “feelings”? Some anesthesia-feigning dismissive spin there?
What you may still not get is what we “start with” as a given. The percepts are the evidence from which other things are granted, not vice versa. OK, let me ask you a real important question: Are you a naive realist like Gilbert Ryle who thinks that the world is “given” for us instead of being masked behind an internal representation?
Martin Gardner, from the additional final chapter of his revised, corrected, and updated The New Ambidextrous Universe:
There has been all sorts of technology that people could not have *imagined* how it works before the supporting science had been developed; so fucking what?
But the point is, how it works to produce *what*. If you mean how to produce what to act like, I don’t care. That isn’t what I or any speaker of “ordinary language” means by “nausea.” (For all Wittgenstein’s hits against private languages in formal terms, he openly admitted that “What more difference [between behavior and the feeling itself] could there be?” [translation approx.] That’s what I hope owlmirror et al can finally get, the subjective nature of feelings as opposed to external descriptions of behavior, signals, etc. If you can’t, maybe you just can’t. It is very PC to assume that everyone must be able to “get” everything so we can be “fair.”
The issue with PD/PR is there being a “way it feels” that is something for us, and not shown to other ways of study (a bit like, you have to actually move past something to get the Lorentz contraction.] Explain anything you want as long as you don’t deny the characterization that almost every human being, not just some subset of philosophers, says is true about feelings. I am in the majority with 99% or so of the human race on this. They can be wrong, but so can you.
You are confused about p-zombies too. Proponents of PD do not believe it really is possible to make a human body etc. that does not have consciousness. But that does not mean we think the properties ascribed by normal people are not real, or that the properties are describable in terms of external relationships. We believe that they are relative to being the observer’s own state. By definition of course that cannot be observed externally. That doesn’t make it meaningless or anything similar (support your definition of “meaningful” against challenge), it’s just tough luck for anyone who thinks the universe owes them (!) common access to everything. After all the bitching about the anthropic principle, I would think you guys would be suspicious of contrived pressure on the universe to conform to ideology or convenience.
The idea of PZs (heh) is again, an intuition pump to direct you to appreciate the difference between physical properties and experiential properties. If dualism is true, they could (essentially by definition) literally be separated. (And BTW whatever “undesirable” implications that had, would again be our tough luck and no grounds for doubt. It is only actual contradiction to knowledge, not convenience problems, that show us what’s true or not.) If PD is true, separating the aspects would be sort of like pulling all the Lorentz contractions out of something – not very easy I suppose.
But think on this. You talk about nausea and the feelings (which you keep putting in quotes, showing your disdain) the person hit with the 2 X 4 by someone with a vile disposition as follows:
The same applies to more abstract definitions, such as “strong aversion; disgust” — all of which can be broken down into behaviors and behavioral dispositions. Of course, morons like Neil will insist that there’s more to “feelings” than that, but it’s just question-begging bleating,…
Well, can you seriously tell me that mere dispositions about how to act are worth being afraid of, something to avoid? Why? If just that and not “more”, don’t worry that you will have a propensity to yell and scream, so what? This is where we see if someone has an open mind or must harden against the epistemic ground floor for ideological reasons. I sure as hell don’t have such reasons to describe feelings in the way almost every human being who isn’t certain philosophical hard-liners does. Sometimes I wish it weren’t so, sometimes I’m glad it is.
but the attributes that houses have but planks, nails, plumbing, etc. do not have are not “magic”, moron.
They aren’t, but if the brain can have attributes that the neurons don’t, that detracts from a priori doubt about qualitative relative character. You don’t see the difference between the straw man “having to have” argument, and the realistic “can therefore have” argument? With the latter we then look for good examples, ignoring the pointless examples of absence you provide. (You should know how logic works.) BTW I don’t call being qualitative really “magic,” since it’s how things really are for almost everyone ;-) I can use metaphors like anyone else.)
Speaking of “question begging” – I suppose you realize that we do have to have some premises to begin with, to avoid regression of proof and definition? You know, the old GOTG problem? I am stating along with Locke and Berkeley that our perceptions are that premise. The alternative is childish naive realism, which is ironically “folk epistemology” – I can’t imagine a complainer about “folk psychology” falling for it, I hope you don’t.
It’s not anyone else’s burden to explain how this or that is possible, the burden is on those who think something isn’t possible to prove it.
No, that is false as a general principle and you should know better. In advance of any particular reasons one way or the other, something may be possible or not. It’s about the particulars of the claim itself. If I said, “It is possible to raise rocks with my sheer intention”, you think you have to prove that I can’t? Huh? Skeptics are always saying, “The burden of proof is on the claimant” [that something exists, is possible, etc.], what happened here? Wrong ox being gored?
BTW if red is not intrinsic (qualitative or not), how do we recognize it when our memories work? You can’t really tell me we use emotions and other indirect associations to effectively see color, instead of direct interpretation of signals/qualia however you want to imagine them. Each color has to code with its own specific signal pattern etc. to be *identified* itself, to hell with “relationships.” Why the post-modernist diversion away from rational neurology, of all the damnably ironic things? To run interference?
Ken, I already said we’d have to send to, or direct the aliens to examples like Co60. Sure, and that isn’t the point. The point is how to describe *without* using examples. You can describe shapes (when parity is not at issue) with matrices, or curves with equations, etc, without having to send examples. But you couldn’t tell them how to find “left” without an actual sample, since any description would be mirror-reversible. Even a pattern of dots to make an image wouldn’t work, since you don’t know which way they are going to hold the result! Trust me, and Martin fully meant just what I said.
BTW “truth machine” agrees with me on that, even if he spins other, misguided fancies thereof. Be careful now, he may call you a “blithering idiot” again.
Trust me, and Martin fully meant just what I said.
IOW, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.”
Um. Red is intrinsic to a particular specific functioning set of eyes and brain: The cone cells of the eye respond to a particular electromagnetic frequency; the section of visual cortex that processes colour responds to signals from that particular type of cone cell. Hence recognition and memory: red will always appear red as long as that set of neurons is firing in the same way.
However, the neural circuitry need not be set up in that particular way; red is not intrinsic if the circuitry changes. Hence colour blindness of various types. In animals other than humans, the red cones might not respond to that exact same frequency. Now that I think of it, I vaguely recall reading that even in humans, the red cone cells do not respond to exactly the same frequencies.
Some women (might) have tetrachromatism; rather than the redundant gene for red photopigment being turned off (as is normal), they are born with two different types of red cone cells, and thus perceive slightly different gradations of red than most people do.
Oliver Sacks writes of a case where an artist suffered damage to his visual cortex in a car accident. While his eyes were undamaged, he no longer saw any color whatsoever; he had (and I think still has) complete achromatopia (or achromatopsia, as I see it’s also spelled). And some people are simply born that way; Sacks has another book that discusses a population where the condition is congenital.
Anyway, my point is that the experience of red is tied to the biology of the brain and eye. Change the brain and/or eye, change the experience.
Ken Cope posted the exact quote from Martin Gardner that I found after doing a bit of searching. Oh, well.
I note that the “Ozma problem” is indeed fundamentally a 19th century one, or even an 18th century one: It was apparently first articulated by Immanuel Kant.
Since the universe is now known to be asymmetrical at a fundamental level, Kant’s “can’t” must be recanted, and the problem canned, except, I suppose, for those who speak in sophists’ cant, or for liturgical cantors.
I agree with Owlmirror when he said that the constraints were too high. We may as well shout at each other from our respective planets for all the good communication is going to do–we wouldn’t even be able to send a fax. With all its faults, the movie version of Contact with its dissection of signals showed the scope of the problem; they used the corners of a cube to line up documents dimensionally. If we aren’t permitted to get to a description of basic math, with the number line, let alone coordinate systems, I don’t see how there can be any communications medium at all.
Martin Gardner (a hero to many of you, right?) fully explains and supports this in The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and Time-Reversed Worlds, so don’t blame me, silly. For a guy who does computer programming … you can try harder.
Gardner is an honest person, who revises and corrects earlier statements or positions when he has better information.
I am not a computer programmer, I am an animator. Even though Gardner writes about mathematics, he is not a mathematician. Gardner calls himself a fideist, one who believes because he fucking well feels like it, and knows that there is no rational basis for his belief. Gardner is also a Mysterian, which shows that he’s got his fingers crossed when he calls himself a fideist, because so long as consciousness can be regarded as being made of unexplainium, then his religious belief is not entirely without a vaguely rationalistic prop. Gardner is also a founding member of the International Wizard of Oz Club, with which I am also affiliated, as an avid collector of Oziana and first edition Oz books.
Gardner may have been drawn to the problem of handedness due to the lore of the first published Oz map, in the end papers of 1914’s Tik Tok of Oz. Illustrator John R. Neill, relying on the glass magic lantern slide Baum used in his traveling show, Radiologue and Fairy Plays, ignored handedness, and the map was sent to the publisher with the yellow Winkie Country on the right, and the blue Munchkin country on the left. The publishers added a compass rose, swapping East with West. This intriqued Heinlein enough that he placed Oz on a planet with a retrograde axial rotation in his Number of the Beast (which Neil should perhaps adopt as holy writ–a vehicle is geared up to let its occupants visit any alternative universe, including one in which Oz exists). When I met Frank Drake, I had him sign a copy of Ozma of Oz.
Showing of your mind reading talents again? I didn’t repeat Stinky’s argument, I offered a different one.
It’s not a failure of the scientific method if it discovers something (provisionally) true about the universe, moron. A failure would be if science consistently delivers wrong results or is inferior to a “different way of knowing”.
There he’s simply talking about the problems with hidden variable theories. He doesn’t discuss whether he considers that a failure of mathematics. When Stinky disagreed with you about describing QM with mathematics, I’m sure that he/she wasn’t implying that hidden variable theories must be true.
There have been ideas on how to reconcile QM and probability, but you might not like the results. (I’m not saying that I “believe” David Deutsch’s interpretation, but it’s not my call to make anyway)
My previous phrasing of the Ozma problem was inexact. As originally posed, it was this:
Once phrased like this, we can see how artificial a restriction it is. Consider: If we are ever in communication with any intelligent species in our universe, it will most likely be in the Local Group of galaxies (and most likely within our own Milky Way galaxy). Within that volume of space, there absolutely must be some specific stellar structure (including the Milky Way galaxy itself – if necessary, we can involve the Magellanic Clouds) that is asymmetrical, and which we can both observe.
Even outside that volume, it seems highly likely that there will be something that we could point to as an unambiguous asymmetrical reference. Hm. Maybe even the cosmic background radiation…
Still pondering some other points.
Ken, owlmirror is getting the point.
Neil once again demonstrates that he is dumber than dirt. Ken, Owlmirror and I all agree on the basic points: left/right can be communicated to anyone who shares a common reference point in regard to “handedness” (rotational direction in a polar coordinate system) — such as neutrinos within our universe. This isn’t relevant to the “philosophical” discussion and doesn’t show that left/right or red/blue are “ineffable”. As I pointed out, my thought experiment is not the “Ozma” experiment; in my thought experiment, there are no common “handedness” reference points between the two worlds (before left/right are reversed and after); in my thought experiment, neutrinos switch along with everything else … leaving everything exactly as it was, no detectable change, a distinction without a difference. And the story is exactly the same in the so-called “spectrum inversion” thought experiment — which isn’t about the spectrum, but about the human perceptual color space which, as Owlmirror notes, is a function of human biology.
BTW if red is not intrinsic (qualitative or not), how do we recognize it when our memories work?
We recognize things by re-cognizing them; duh. If the location of a treasure is not “intrinsic”, but can only be found by following a sequences of relative movements, how can anyone ever find the treasure again? Gee, what a tough problem.
You can’t really tell me we use emotions and other indirect associations to effectively see color
I’m sorry for having insulted dirt. I never said anything about using emotions to “see color”, I wrote about what the supposedly “ineffable” “redness of red” actually consists of.
instead of direct interpretation of signals/qualia however you want to imagine them.
I suppose this way of putting things make sense if you think there
is a little homucular you inside your brain busy interpreting things, but this image is clearly wrong, as Dennett has gotten all but the stupidest folks to pay lip service to — as they keep committing the error. Dennett characterizes this as the Hard Question “And then what happens?” — after the light has hit the retina and signals have been transmitted from neuron to neuron throughout the brain, then what happens to allow seeing, or interpretation, etc. The answer of course is that there is no “and then what”, no handing off of some processed signal to some other entity to make use of it. Whatever consciousness is, it must be part of the ongoing process, not something separate.
Once phrased like this, we can see how artificial a restriction it is.
What are you concerned with this? We have already gone astray due to your unfortunate claim that my thought experiment referred to this Ozma thing that differs from the point of my thought experiment precisely in that there are common landmarks by which two directional spaces can be registered to each other. This was the point of my original discussion of “spectrum inversion”; if all of the reference points are switched, the switched and unswitched spaces are indistinguishable, and thus the point of the thought experiment, which is to show that some change (in “qualia”) could occur despite no physical change, is refuted.
The cone cells of the eye respond to a particular electromagnetic frequency
Uh, no. The three types of cone cells have three different frequency response curves — that is, the amplitude of the signal they produce for different frequencies follows more or less a bell curve. The three curves overlap, and we are able to distinguish any wavelength falling within the scope of the three curves.
I vaguely recall reading that even in humans, the red cone cells do not respond to exactly the same frequencies.
So are you saying that you think that the same photosensitive molecule acts differently in different humans?
Neil B. wrote:
Um, since the signals from the cones are not processed as such but through color-opponent coding neurons, color vision is ALL ABOUT relationships. This also creates (additional) complications for spectrum inversion thought experiments.
The (fallible) constancy of color experience is, afaik, made possible by loads of brute computing in the visual system. Ironically, without that unconscious processing the mysterians would find it a lot more difficult to sustain their hard-ons for ineffable-indivisible qualia.
The reason why the nervous system has evolved different experience-‘tags’ for primary hues should not ultimately be more mysterious in the light of evolution than why the tags for pleasure and pain or for bitter and sweet sensations should be different. The former are simply more arbitrary from our current point of view, which makes them seem “ineffable” to some.
t.m. wrote:
There are slightly different variants of the same opsin molecule, at least for reds and possibly for others as well (which is why the existence of tetrachromat females is suspected, I don’t know if it has been confirmed yet)
My phrase “thought experiment being referred to” has been misconstrued — Neil referred to [Martin] Gardner and the problem of communicating left and right in the real world to hypothetical aliens (although my memory of the context was a bit hazy, as can be seen in the wording). I focused on this, especially since Ken Cope did not seem to recognize it in the post immediately following Neil’s.
I acknowledge that the Ozma problem is not the same as the thought experiment revolving around experiencing left and right.
In addition, cone type distribution varies from retina to retina. In searching for information on how this might affect color vision, I found these:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10975363
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12044743
Which suggests that variation in color perception does exist, I think.
Delurking again.
Of course variation exists in color perception. Some forms of color-blindness are quite common. Maybe you meant normal or non-pathological color perception.
The entire discussion of left/right is a rabbit hole in the context. It serves only to debunk the spectrum inversion concept as the hokum it is. tm was just pointing out that either all associations are inverted too in which case it’s meaningless, or the non-arbitrary character of the associations will become obvious.
Doug Hofstadter, in his new one, I am a Strange Loop, convincingly debunks the idea also. He begins with the idea of inverting sound, so that the ‘qualia’ of high notes goes with low notes and vice versa, and points out that it obviously wouldn’t work for basic physical reasons. Keep extending the concept out like this and you quickly see that qualophiles (mysterians, crypto-dualists) fixate on the color spectrum because it’s the only example that isn’t absurd on its face. It’s still absurd, of course, but they get mileage out of it by appealing to the supposedly arbitrary character of color percepts. But they only seem arbitrary to us, who use colors frivolously and live in a highly artificially-colored environment. Try telling a monkey that just spotted a tiger in the grass or a cluster of berries in a tree that color perception is arbitrary.
I think windy made the same point re: evolution of perceptual systems, but there it is more explicitly.
Well, yes.
MY PERCEPTUAL INVERSION. LET ME SHOW IT YOU.
My phrase “thought experiment being referred to” has been misconstrued — Neil referred to [Martin] Gardner and the problem of communicating left and right in the real world to hypothetical aliens (although my memory of the context was a bit hazy, as can be seen in the wording)
No, it has not been misconstrued. I wrote about a left-right inversion thought experiment in #516; in #541 you wrote, quite incorrectly, “Actually, I recognize the thought experiment being referred to here”. No, you recognized Martin Gardner’s communication problem that Neil mentioned, which was also irrelevant, but we expect that from him.
I acknowledge that the Ozma problem is not the same as the thought experiment revolving around experiencing left and right.
It’s not a thought experiment at all, it’s a problem to which one is supposed to find a solution. See CJO’s comments on the matter.
There are slightly different variants of the same opsin molecule, at least for reds and possibly for others as well
Ah; thanks.
Try telling a monkey that just spotted a tiger in the grass
Or, more aptly, a snake.
In addition, cone type distribution varies from retina to retina.
In addition? Windy’s statement had a bearing on your claim that “the red cone cells do not respond to exactly the same frequencies”; yours does not. Please do try to follow along.
Which suggests that variation in color perception does exist, I think.
Uh, no one said otherwise.
There shouldn’t be more confusion about the Ozma experiment after I clearly explained that the core logical problem was how to describe inherently mirror asymmetric entities *if* you don’t have examples (or aren’t allowed to as a TE) to show or point to. That’s likely what “is not to be” in Gardner’s proviso is supposed to mean, not to see if there *was* an example of an entity with handness that could be pointed to. Of course having such an example makes it easy and fatuous. Regardless of any plucked phrase, his surrounding discussion of description versus examples makes this clear. So can a left or right hand be described so as to model which is intended? No.
No need to doubt “lying eyes”, just read more than the part that tells you want you want to hear.
Sure, Ken
If we aren’t permitted to get to a description of basic math, with the number line, let alone coordinate systems, I don’t see how there can be any communications medium at all.
In this TE, the whole point is that coordinate systems always come in two handness flavors. You can’t set one up by telling someone what to do unless you have an example of something, anything, with handness. You can talk about x and y and z and the number line etc, all of it all you want, and not communicate either a RH or LH coordinate system by itself. This is all fully accepted.
TM, you can continue to ply irrelevant analogies like the ones about treasure and handness, but if color perception is just the relative relationships, then we would indeed not be able to notice that we were again looking at 650 nm light instead of 420 nm light etc. You can use sloppy phrases like re-cognize (I would say, we just remember each distinct sensation itself, why not?) but if that relational idea was true, then it would not matter what isolated spectrum rotation was presented to us – there would be no way to distinguish red field and green spots from green field and red spots. If I can’t recognize that it’s “red” again inside the spots, it’s just “field with unlike spots.”
But one of you already got the hang of it. Windy just didn’t realize the implications of his statement, actually rather well put, and how well it fit in with qualitative and ineffable color sensations etc:
The reason why the nervous system has evolved different experience-‘tags’ for primary hues should not ultimately be more mysterious in the light of evolution than why the tags for pleasure and pain or for bitter and sweet sensations should be different. The former are simply more arbitrary from our current point of view, which makes them seem “ineffable” to some.
Great, I should have thought to use “tags” myself. That’s what the color sensations are, “tags” for regions of the spectrum. There are three basic “tags”. There is nothing about them logically related to the frequencies themselves, we can imagine the same “tags” being applied to X-rays, UV, and IR if that was more useful. IOW, they *are* arbitrary, and it is confusion for someone to say,
Try telling a monkey that just spotted a tiger in the grass or a cluster of berries in a tree that color perception is arbitrary.
The issue is that the choice of which “tags” should apply to given regions of the spectrum is arbitrary. It is not whether having such perception at all is arbitrary or not. The tags are the particular ways that these different kinds of light look to us, the “look” of red, green, blue etc which are clearly distinct in kind and not merely a structure of relation. I use color names here on out for the sensations, the tags, themselves. They are “qualitative” because green is not a more or less intense form of red, etc. That is the basic definition of “qualitative” – not made by more or less of another thing, when neither thing is characterized by it’s parts. Since color sensations are not like patterns of stippling, but continuous to our awareness, that definition applies. They are “ineffable” because you can’t describe them. That is the definition of ineffable – if you say they aren’t then you should describe them to prove that wrong. The whole description reviled as “qualiphilia” etc. is actually the most reasonable way to talk about what sensations are like, given actual criteria like that.
I don’t know why I should even have to keep point out that proposing an analogy like handness (about configurations of things with parts) to color sensations (continua which can’t be converted into each other by logical description, unless you can convince me directly) is utterly vacuous and proves nothing, nor does any experiment in which memory etc, is taken away and then one pretends that being unable to remember proves there was nothing to remember, etc. It’s just rubbish, TM never defends from my take-downs but just keeps saying that it must be so over and over again.
For owlmirror to consider again:
red will always appear red as long as that set of neurons is firing in the same way.
If the first “red” actually meant ca 650 nm radiation (use specs for light when you mean light) then what did you mean by “appear red” – you mean, the *appearance* that red light has, or causes in you, true? The “appearance” of it is the visual sensation, the quale. If your neurons were altered so they fired in the way typically associated with 530 nm light but in the presence of 650 nm light, then red light “would look green”. Do it all around, and *This is the spectrum inversion experiment* Regardless even of whether you consider the experiences “weird” or “really qualitative” or magical or god knows what instead of just “signal processing”, the point is actually the same anyway.
*IOW: for the sake or argument accept that it’s all just “signal processing” and we just interpret it as uniform qualia – then the spectrum inversion shifts the signal patterns that tag the frequencies. It shifts them to a new correspondence. TM is wrong anyway, regardless of whether signals have additional special properties.
Let’s have a table for signals and light (most sensitive):
440 nm: -.-.-.
530 nm ””’
650 nm ~~~~~
Then after a “spectrum inversion” we have e.g.:
440 nm: ~~~~~
530 nm -.-.-.
650 nm ””’
There is of course an absolute difference between the signals, even though the relative relationships are the same. I say that we experience not just such “signals” but the qualitative feelings that correspond in terms of property dualism (property relativism.) You may not agree with that. But the curious thing is, we both should agree at least that TM is wrong: we agree that there are real differences between the tags, we just may not agree of what traits those differences involve. (See, I hope you’ll realize you are more like McCain among Republicans and make Rush and Coulter despise you for collaborating with Democrats.)
Anyway, my point is that the experience of red is tied to the biology of the brain and eye. Change the brain and/or eye, change the experience.
Of course it is. Change the “experience”, IOW the quale usually produced by 650 nm will not be anymore in some cases etc. The whole idea of sensations is their being something separate from (maybe related, don’t have to be) the stimulus properties, that “tag” it. Again, since more of one tag doesn’t make for another “tag”, they are by definition “qualitative”, and since you can’t describe them (try?) they are “ineffable.”
Still doesn’t get it:
The answer of course is that there is no “and then what”, no handing off of some processed signal to some other entity to make use of it. Whatever consciousness is, it must be part of the ongoing process, not something separate.
In property dualism C does not have to be “something” separate anyway, some “other entity” to use what the brain does. The same process has relatively different properties. Obviously there is something going on inside you that allows you to describe for example the image on your retina when it is not the same shape as the object being imaged (e.g. media distortion) or you wouldn’t be able to talk about it. Dennett still gets contaminated by Gilbert Ryle’s (his teacher, apple and tree) naive realist, ordinary language, post modern diversion which is ironically not in tune with neurology. It’s a semantics game about what “seeing” means in language etc.
Finally,
A failure would be if science consistently delivers wrong results or is inferior to a “different way of knowing”.
Maybe. But I am not a “moron” because I used ordinary meanings of words like “fail” after all that bitching up there about Humpty Dumpty. Science did “fail” (be unable to, OK wise guy?) to find a way to predict individual particle decays. That doesn’t imply that “science” failed as a whole.
But if there’s one thing science can’t explain, maybe that’s precedent for another, like being able to explain consciousness. If science doesn’t deliver wrong results, that would help. But if you don’t allow subjective experience to constitute “an experiment”, then science is inferior to regarding the nature of consciousness from one’s own point of view. The latter would then be a “different way of knowing.” (Don’t forget that we only know what science found through our perceptions anyway.) To the extent property “dualism” is true, the relative condition must be met for the relative property to be found.
In the midst of another steaming pile from Neil, we find this:
What the fuck are you doing, asshole? You place the bit in italics as if you’re quoting somebody then add, “Sure, Ken” as if it were me. I said nothing remotely like that. Nobody said anything like that. What do you think you’re doing?
“her” (I could make a joke about self-described Victorians and assumptions here, but let’s skip it :)
It’s not that I don’t realize the implications, ‘arbitrary’ does not imply what you think it does. Are 2×4 boards logically related to the sensation of pain? What is it about glucose that logically necessitates the sensation of sweet? Viewing them as adaptations, you see how strange it is to frame the question this way.
Let’s have a table for signals and light (most sensitive):
440 nm: -.-.-.
530 nm ””’
650 nm ~~~~~
Then after a “spectrum inversion” we have e.g.:
That’s not how color vision works. We experience four unique hues due to color-opponent coding, so it’s not so simple as switching three cables around. If human biology can explain why we experience X qualitative sensations, why is it forever barred from looking further into why those sensations are what they are? In any case the sensations aren’t completely arbitrary, since they at least have to be different. Perhaps they evolved for optimal contrast in whatever ancient primate they evolved in.
but if color perception is just the relative relationships, then we would indeed not be able to notice that we were again looking at 650 nm light instead of 420 nm light etc.
Once again Neil demonstrates his being dumber than dirt. I said that “the redness of red” is just a matter of informational relationships in the brain; I didn’t say that color perception is just a matter of informational relationships in the brain — it of course depends on external features such as objects being observed and the light striking them. Duh. A qualiaphile like Neil is the last person who should be propagating this confusion, since we employ all sorts of technologies that can distinguish between those wavelengths, but presumably our equipment doesn’t experience qualia (whereas a (reductive) physicalist recognizes that physical mechanisms are involved in both brains and human-created tools).
As for why we notice “again” — how we can compare an experience to a previous one — is of course that the same signals are propagated into the brain, this time traversing already strengthened cerebral pathways. That Neil thinks that “re-cognition” is vague is simply because he’s too stupid and ignorant to grasp the obvious point.
As usual, there is a steady stream of stupid in Neil’s fulsome post, and as usual I’m not going to waste my time responding to all of it.
@windy
That’s not how color vision works.
Not only does Neil confuse the spectrum with color perception after I have made the point over and over again that they aren’t the same thing, but he is utterly clueless about “spectrum inversion” which, as I have pointed out, is a misnomer. The philosopher’s notion (originated by John Locke) of “spectrum (sic) inversion” is the idea that the qualia are inverted, with no change to the physical world. Talking about changing spectrum-signal relationships gets it completely and utterly wrong.
In any case the sensations aren’t completely arbitrary, since they at least have to be different.
Not only that, but they form a color space. Note that two points that are close together in this color space, as matter of mathematical relationship, are perceived to be similar as a matter of human perception — because, indeed, this is a scientifically derived map of human color perception. The biology of the human visual system is the determinant of the geometry of the map. As for how these colors “seem” to us, that is determined by their relative place in the map and by other relationships in the brain, such as what emotions are invoked by the colors and what objects are associated with them. To think that there is something else, some “redness of red” that is above and beyond all these physical relationships is the qualia claim, and it is this additional attribute of color that is supposedly switched in the (John Locke’s) “spectrum inversion” thought experiment without changing anything physical. That Neil talks about inverting an association of wavelengths with signals, and that he thinks that property dualists don’t believe that zombies are possible (“You are confused about p-zombies too. Proponents of PD do not believe it really is possible to make a human body etc. that does not have consciousness” — talk about confused! PD entails that that there is a possible world (other than ours!) that such human bodies — zombie bodies — inhabit; sheesh. And without such a possibility, there would be no need for PD), indicates that he has an even poorer understanding of the philosophical issues than I had supposed. His drivel is so confused that it doesn’t even make a decent foil for presenting a correct view.
We experience four unique hues due to color-opponent coding
Note that Neil referred to “three tags”. I wonder which of red, green, blue, and yellow he was omitting? Was he prevaricating about his own experience, or is he just another ignorant “philosopher” who thinks that scientific knowledge has no bearing on answering philosophical questions? A relevant and illustrative example about the latter is the brilliant fool Hillary Putnam (who gets things wrong in really deep ways) once upon a time claiming that “nothing is both red and green” is “true as a consequence of the rules of the language”. Odd that he failed to notice that it’s true of red and green (or blue and yellow) in a way that it is not true of red and blue, red and yellow, green and blue, or green and yellow. This question of why things cannot be both red and green all over was considered to be a knotty philosophical problem — for which some philosophers invented the absurdity of “synthetic necessary truths” and went to great lengths to defend the notion — until the development of the opponent-process model of color vision. And now, people have apparently even experienced the sensation of something being both red and green all over under special conditions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process#Reddish_green_and_yellowish_blue) — so much for “a consequence of the rules of the language”, among other analytical claims by philosophers that have and will continue to fall as we gain more evidence, especially of how human perception and cognition work.
It would be interesting to see what could be achieved by some electrodes in the relevant brain areas, but using an eye tracker is of course more ethical…
Neil manages to “prove” that human color vision as we currently understand it is impossible:
But all your brain gets from your retina wrt colour is a relation, as far as we know (“red minus green”). How this enables distinguishing red-on-green from green-on-red can be left as an exercise for lurkers ;)
Ken, you recently said
> In the midst of another steaming pile from Neil,
> we find this:
>> No need to doubt “lying eyes”,
>> just read more than the part that tells you
>> [what] you want to hear.
>> Sure, Ken
> What the fuck are you doing, asshole? You place the bit in italics as if you’re quoting somebody then add, “Sure, Ken” as if it were me. I said nothing remotely like that. Nobody said anything like that. What do you think you’re
> doing?
OK, I meant not to put italics there, and didn’t finish the rest of what I meant to say there, but you are still wrong to say you or no one said anything remotely like that. The important part was in quotes. Earlier you said:
IOW, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.”
Posted by: Ken Cope | January 30, 2008 1:59 PM
Huh? You couldn’t even remember that? Hmmm, maybe the “steaming pile” is between your ears? You are as bad about misremembering what you said as TM it seems. Was he right after all, to call you a “blithering idiot”? I want to think not, really, but it all depends on what I see.
In the Neiliverse,
No need to doubt “lying eyes”, just read more than the part that tells you want you want to hear.
is a direct quote of:
IOW, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.”
Neil, there is no end to your incompetence.
Maybe. But I am not a “moron” because I used ordinary meanings of words like “fail” after all that bitching up there about Humpty Dumpty. Science did “fail” (be unable to, OK wise guy?) to find a way to predict individual particle decays. That doesn’t imply that “science” failed as a whole.
But if there’s one thing science can’t explain, maybe that’s precedent for another, like being able to explain consciousness.
Science failed to predict the winning lottery ticket number, so Neil is right to reject it. Aren’t you supposed to be playing in traffic, somewhere, or running with scissors, Neil?
In the interests of clarity, “But if there’s one thing science can’t explain, maybe that’s precedent for another, like being able to explain consciousness.” is a line I was quoting from Neil. If I were in Neil mode, I’d deny to the death that I’d made any error whatsoever.
“Good Lord” Ken do you have to indulge shamelessly like this?
> Look at this:
> In the Neiliverse,
>> No need to doubt “lying eyes”,
>> just read more than the part that
>> tells you want you want to hear.
> is a direct quote of:
>> IOW, “Who are you going to believe,
>> me or your lying eyes.”
> Neil, there is no end to your incompetence.
I never said or implied it was a direct quote, I said I had dropped in an inappropriate HTML tag and forgot to finish the rest. You had claimed re reference to “lying eyes” that “I said nothing remotely like that. Nobody said anything like that.” Well, you did say “lying eyes” before that, so I noted that. Even though you were right that the whole thing was not a quote, the rest of your complaint was therefore wrong.
Can you just get that, and let this go and move on already? Why do you make it easy to believe TM’s potty-mouthed insults? I would rather believe you are just being a troll like the fishy one. If so it is just boorish and makes you look silly with no humor to justify the effort.
Science failed to predict the winning lottery ticket number, so Neil is right to reject it.
Endless straw man and red herring rubbish. The first part that I said made sense by itself. If science fails to do certain things, well that’s what it can’t do. I never said/implied I could reject “it” if that means science in general, you just PTOOYA. Why do you try so hard to live up to that “blithering idiot” charge? I don’t want TM to get any satisfaction that he made a good call even once.
Neil, “moving on” will consist of you shutting your festering gob, so there’ll be no more of your epic nonsense to refute.
It’s really not funny any more, Neil, your drivel would be embarrassing to anybody else.
There’s a lot of confusion here about color vision, and how many fundamental colors there are.
There is some truth to the statement from Ms. Windy:
We experience four unique hues due to color-opponent coding, so it’s not so simple as switching three cables around.
Yes, yellow doesn’t look like a mix of red and green, but green and blue mixes look like mixes. (BTW, how do you know that yellow doesn’t look like such a mix, but blue-green does? Introspection? OK by me. Please don’t tell me, Skinner like, that you needed to hear someone else tell you!) But the initial output is still as three types of signals from each of three types of cones, switch those and of course that would switch experiences of red, green, blue, and by indirect extension yellow also etc. That doesn’t change the essential logic of color perception, as I explain more below. The existence of an opponent system is after-processing of the signals from three kinds of cones. We are trichromats, look it up in Wikipedia:
Perception of color is achieved in mammals through color receptors containing pigments with different spectral sensitivities. In most primates closely related to humans there are three types of color receptors (known as cone cells). This confers trichromatic color vision, so these primates, like humans, are known as trichromats. Many other primates and other mammals are dichromats, and many mammals have little or no color vision.
Furthermore, the signals from those cones are “arbitrary” in relation to light frequencies unless you believe that the blue-coded ones are a faster rate of fire than red etc.: they sure don’t need to be – what the heck did you think I meant by “arbitrary tags”? The properties of the “states” even after opposition processing is still arbitrary (probably more so) compared to actual nm of light. OK, you can think of the “tags” as being the states created *after* further processing rather than raw output from cones, it is irrelevant to the logical problems about qualia, ineffable, memory and associations, etc. The properties of the tags are arbitrary once there’s a suitable pick of what to be tagged. Arbitrary is not referring to which properties they tag, those are relevant of course – that is the clear ordinary meaning of arbitrary. Less wasted time would come from more careful reading.
If human biology can explain why we experience X qualitative sensations, why is it forever barred from looking further into why those sensations are what they are?
As I’ve said before, I don’t care what you try to explain as long as “explain” isn’t really a euphemism or subterfuge for recharacterizing such as to deny the experiential character (as does TM.) As long as you are trying to explain why we really do have qualitative sensations instead of denying that they are such, knock yourself out. Just remember that the way we study something colors (so to speak!) the sort of data we get, so experience is something relative only to the experiencer. Also, I am absolutely not “just another ignorant “philosopher” who thinks that scientific knowledge has no bearing on answering philosophical questions.” Of course scientific knowledge has bearing on answering philosophical questions, it’s just that philosophy (done well, not by ideologues) has bearing on scientific questions, in particular the framing of the issues that allows them to get off the ground and their limitations and implications to be appreciated.
There is no reason to confuse the opposition-processing of the RGB signals from the retina with TM’s earlier rants about color sensations being merely relational in nature. Opposition coding is similar to how color TV works, with red-green signals etc. Sure, so what. There is still a difference between what one color codes as versus what another color codes as. If I started with e.g. from cones:
R: 70
G: 40
B: 20
Then the R-G would be 30 for example. But if we rotated the cone signals up one, the R-G process would give 20 instead – that’s what your brain would process as “different” in the spectrum inversion experiment instead of the change from 70 to 40, so what, it’s the same logical point. Whether opposition is used to process signals or not is irrelevant to my critique of TM’s earlier muddy claims. Opposition processing is a middle-managment red herring with no relevance to the question of qualitative sensations, the philosophical implications of various versions of spectrum inversion experiments, etc.
TM said awhile back:
But I wasn’t talking about similes, I was talking about the real thing — “the redness of red” does not, I suggest, have any intrinsic attribute above and beyond its informational relationships within the brain. If you woke up tomorrow and your visual spectrum were inverted, but the rest of your cognitive space weren’t respectively inverted, it would seem very wrong because you would have the wrong memory and emotion associations — the sky would look alarming, like blood. It could be fixed so as not to seem wrong by changing all those associations; fix them all, and nothing would seem wrong at all. That implies that that’s all those “qualia” actually are.
Well, first of all if the “informational relationships” normally caused by blue light did not end up constituting a definite state that was different from the state normally caused by red light, then as I said we wouldn’t be able to recognize each color separately. The sky could only have those associations and look alarming if there was something for you about “red” as one distinct state/experience that could become associated to begin with with that tag, with other feelings being associated with “blue” instead.Whatever in us controls the talking about color needs each distinct state so we can recognize each color in turn, in isolation if need be. For a state to be comprised of relationships doesn’t keep it from being a distinct thing in itself compared to other relationships (polka dot pattern is not checkerboard, etc.) Maybe you shouldn’t throw about loose “wooish” talk like “informational relationships” that aren’t clearly defined, at least by you here. Note that the important thing is that you would notice the inversion in the first version of the experiment, IOW you would have the “wrong memory association”, the sky “would look alarming, like blood” – That is because the signal normally generated by red light is now being generated by blue light, regardless of whether after-processed by opponent processing or not. We should all be able to agree on that.
You have no basis however for your complaint that those definite physical/informational states cannot *also* be relatively as “intrinsic redness of red” because of ideological objections to experiential properties (qualitative, ineffable) that aren’t what is directly observed physically. That inversion experiment phase II, with the alterations of memory and association, prove no such thing. Such an experiment is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdem. But since genuinely qualitative sensations wouldn’t be remembered any better than “mere data relationships” or anything else if your memory and associations were taken away, the experiment proves nothing at all. If you can’t demonstrate that there’s an adveserse affect on one thing but not other things, no distinction has been made. I told you that over and over, and your evasion is you can’t be bothered or whatever.
Well, I already said I don’t give a damn about it being brain processes, I have said over and over that as a PDist I am not objecting to that. Whether there’s something about it that’s “qualitative” in our experience is a matter of how we experience it, that is relative to us and not even in principle shown otherwise by reference to neural study once one appreciates the point of PD. Thinking that the experiential properties should be shown to instruments other than the brain having the process is roughly (in abstract logical principle) like saying that you shouldn’t have to move past something to have Lorentz contraction. You keep harping about how Locke’s initial experiment was to switch w/o “any physical change”, well that isn’t the point. Dennett’s example (one of them at least) did involve switching the cone outputs, as have other versions. Those are the ones I am interested in, because I am a PDist and not a literal dualist. Did it occur to you that if someone is talking about a different version of a given experiment, that just maybe they meant to refer to a different version on purpose?
Also, you are utterly mistaken about PD. Here’s a relevant and accurate quote from Wikipedia:
Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that while the world is constituted of just one kind of substance – the physical kind – there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions) adhere in some physical substances (namely brains).
Substance dualism, on the other hand, is the view that there exist two kinds of substance: physical and non-physical (the mind), and subsequently also two kinds of properties which adhere in those respective substances. The term property dualism however generally refers only to those positions which assert the existence of only physical substances.
How the hell do you get the idea that a person believing in one substance with relatively different properties could believe in real zombies? Here is what you said, absurd in the light of the above explanation:
PD entails that that there is a possible world (other than ours!) that such human bodies — zombie bodies — inhabit; sheesh.
Of course not, goddamit! If someone believes in only one substance with relatively different properties, then there’s no way to think there’s a world of “matter” that just doesn’t produce mental experience – the latter is for substance dualists to believe in! Nor is there any way to have the same brain process but different experiential qualities relative to it! The whole idea is, the properties *are relative* to how they are accessed! As Romney said to McCain, it is not the job of the critic to explain the opponent’s positions, it is the job of the speaker to explain his own positions. BTW, when you say how the colors “seem” to us, what do you mean by “seem” anyway?
I can’t help any of you if you can’t make your own points clear or understand someone else’s. I know I’m not perfect and admitted it but at this point there isn’t much excuse left for continued obstinacy.
PS: You are right that Hillary Putnam is a fool, worse in many ways than Dennett and Wittgenstein.
Ken, there’s a bit of culture clash here, no need to take it hard. As a Victorian intellectual, I cannot elegantly parse what you moderns refer to as “snark” and “being a troll.” I am used to thinking of a “snark” as the inconceivable creature in “The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)” by Lewis Carroll, and a “troll” as fearsome member of a mythical anthropomorphic race from Norse mythology. I’m sure you understand.
Ken, there’s a bit of culture clash here, no need to take it hard. As a Victorian intellectual, I cannot elegantly parse what you moderns refer to as “snark” and “being a troll.” I am used to thinking of a “snark” as the inconceivable creature in “The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)” by Lewis Carroll, and a “troll” as a fearsome member of a mythical anthropomorphic race from Norse mythology. I’m sure you understand.
Neil, you are a joke that stopped being funny weeks ago. You continually misconstrue and ignore multiple corrections of your fatuous nonsense. You are a fool, being mocked here by tag team, because no matter what ludicrously inane and wrong statement you make in one post, you’ll manage to top it with something even more foolish in the next one. The only person impressed at all with what you spew here is you. Piss off.
“But if there’s one thing science can’t explain, maybe that’s precedent for another, like being able to explain consciousness.”
And, if there’s one thing science can’t explain, maybe Neil is a moron, and maybe there are aliens on the way here from Aldebaran to snuff him out for his sins against reason. There is no end to the things that may be true.
In any case, as windy pointed out, QM is a result of science, did not failure of science. And science’s being unable to find a way to predict individual particle decays is no more a failure than science being unable to find a way to go faster than the speed of light. People who aren’t dumber than dirt are able to to comprehend this, and to comprehend that the stunning success of QM does not have the sort of implications for consciousness that Neil wishes it did.
There’s a lot of confusion here about color vision
Since Neil is demonstrably dumber than dirt, his judgment about confusions is useless, and the drivel that he continues to write on the subject just reinforces that.
Of course not, goddamit! If someone believes in only one substance with relatively different properties, then there’s no way to think there’s a world of “matter” that just doesn’t produce mental experience – the latter is for substance dualists to believe in!
Neil is so so so fucking stupid and ignorant. David Chalmers, the banner carrier of zombiephiles, is not a substance dualist, Bob Kirk who invented p-zombies was never a substance dualist, virtually none of the analytic philosophers who debate p-zombies are substance dualists; substance dualism is considered to be a thoroughly dead position in philosophy.
As a Victorian intellectual, I cannot elegantly parse what you moderns refer to as “snark” and “being a troll.”
Lewis Carroll, not being dumber than dirt, and being quite capable of appreciating that words can play multiple roles, wouldn’t have had any problem doing so.
recharacterizing such as to deny the experiential character (as does TM.) As long as you are trying to explain why we really do have qualitative sensations instead of denying that they are such, knock yourself out
Fuck yourself in the ass, you lying moron. I have never denied any such thing, nor has Dennett, as the quote I provided earlier proves. Your claim to the contrary is just a matter of you being too fucking stupid to understand the argument, and too fucking intellectually dishonest to see your own pathetic question begging. Dennett affirms that we have conscious experience, but he denies that conscious experience has the attributes that people like you think it has. You can disagree with Dennett, but insisting that he denies what he doesn’t is just bad faith jackassery. And insisting that he must be denying it because he denyies of subjective experience what you claim are its essential properties is both question begging and an invalid application of Leibniz’s Law in an intensional context. That’s way over your head, but a classic example that a “Victorian intellectual” who isn’t dumber than dirt should be able to understand is that “Oedipus denied fucking his mother” does not imply “Oedipus denied fucking his wife”.
As for “trying to explain”, people like Dennett and I try to explain why we are the way we are and why our conscious experience is as it is. To insist that people aren’t trying to explain consciousness unless they assume that conscious experience has the attributes that you claim it does (even after providing arguments that it doesn’t have those attributes) is bad faith question begging assholery. And it’s particularly stupid to be an asshole in that way when none of the other remaining participants in this thread — me, Ken, windy, CJO, Owlmirror — accept your view of the nature of conscious experience.
I can’t help any of you if you can’t make your own points clear or understand someone else’s. I know I’m not perfect and admitted it but at this point there isn’t much excuse left for continued obstinacy.
Oh the irony.
One final point for tonight about Neil’s lack of perfection and obstinacy: the first google entry for zombies+”property dualism” is
http://www.springerlink.com/content/8lr2335344255316/
Likewise, in Ned Block’s http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/MaxBlackclean.pdf which “is aimed at elaborating and rebutting the Property Dualism Argument (or rather a family of Property Dualism Arguments)”, we find “The dualist supposes that the conceivability of zombies justifies the claim that there is a possible world in which there is a zombie, and that leads by a familiar route to dualism.”. Block is of course referring to property dualism, not substance dualism, because the former is what the paper is about (and because no one in Ned Block’s audience takes substance dualism seriously).
One can go on and on with these citations that show that the zombie argument is related to property dualism (of the sort David Chalmers entertains), not substance dualism. Neil is blatantly wrong about this as he is blatantly wrong about so many things, and his obstinate “Of course not, goddamit!” is just par for his course.
Actually, I needed someone to tell me what yellow, blue, red, green, and so on meant. I didn’t get these concepts from some Platonic sphere.
And you would fuck up that person’s color vision but good. There is no mystery of “how could we tell” in this thought experiment. If you simply want to say that there could be variation in experienced colours, the existence of colourblind people is quite sufficient for your purposes, but also already known to everyone, so your point is kind of lost.
Trying to lecture us about things we already know is so cute (or it would be coming from a ten-year-old).
It’s an *example* of a relational process producing more than sufficient information to distinguish millions of hues. This by output from only three cones sorted into two data streams, producing four unique hues (you didn’t quite grasp how that works yet, apparently). How much more powerful might the “merely relational” process involving billions of neurons in your brain be, then?
No relevance? Other than explaining how many indivisible ‘qualia’ we experience and why some of those ‘qualia’ can be mixed and some don’t?
Thanks so ever much for telling me how my own example of ‘tags’ can be used. This is rich considering you initially misunderstood it. Yes, I was talking about the experiences produced by the brain, not the signals from the cones, and no, they are not at all interchangeable in the same way or ‘irrelevant to the logical problem of qualia’.
Shit, I don’t know why I bother. Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Neil. In the Preacher sense of the term.
Quiz!
Can you tell which extract was written by a Victorian intellectual?
1.
2.
He [Chalmers} asserts that these concepts show that the facts about consciousness, such as experience or qualia, are really further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts. He claims that they are the hard part of the mind-body issue. He also claims that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the world like mass, charge, etc.
They are facts about the world, a fundamental feature. If like mass, charge etc. then a real p-zombie cannot actually be constructed or materially exist. The zombie exercise, as I said way before, is a conceptual tool, and intuition pump, and not an idea like maybe we could actually build stuff that didn’t have a gravitational field if we knew how. In the case of PZs the trait is only subjectively knowable. The Wikipedia article on PZs well states:
Chalmers is arguing only for logical possibility, and he maintains that this is all that his argument requires. He states: “Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature.”[3]
So Chalmers in effect says the people made of real matter likely cannot really be PZs, which is essentially the point I made about PD. IOW, the mental traits cannot be “pulled out” like a soul, they are intrinsic but relative to how accessed. Sure, it’s a subtle difference, I can forgive people for getting confused. Critics often don’t get the point either since there are different kinds of PD. (The damage done to looking like decent human beings from constant potty-mouthed trash talk like virulent deathmetal tweens can never be undone however. Good lord, TM or windy, what if your students or colleagues ever saw that filth? They wouldn’t have to be “Victorian intellectuals” like the author of the first quote to raise an eyebrow I’m sure. But I have a suggestion – exercise some “agency”, what I unabashedly call “free will” – maybe I can now get everyone left here foaming over that issue too! Weeee – and just stop it, like some people just stop drinking or drugs.)
BTW my argument is not based on record of humanity, has no interference with science due to the property dualist aspect. A person can’t have a true conception of what goes on inside the brain they carry inside their own skull without assessing their subjective experience.
Here’s a nice irony about your favorite true Victorian intellectual from my favorite encyclopedia:
Other forms of dualism
…
3) Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley.[32] It consists in the view that mental phenomena are causally ineffectual. Physical events can cause other physical events and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epiphenomena) of the physical world.[29] This view has been defended most strongly in recent times by Frank Jackson.[33]
Epiphenominalism is very much equivalent to property dualism, since the mental properties are in some sense a result of the physical activity (the only step needed to complete the process is to appreciate that they are relative properties.) Good for THH for not taking a route based on denial of the clear and vivid nature of our experiences (e.g., that they are qualitative in nature, whereas no physical trait given outwardly is truly qualitative.)
Hey Ken, it’s great to have a tag team to sharpen my claws on for awhile. Don’t be so sure a real debate referee would think they were doing better. This will all come in handy in future rebuttals or articles etc. BTW I can’t imagine you’d be rooting for someone who called you a “blithering idiot” just in case you had forgotten that.
Neil bloviates:
Hey Ken, it’s great to have a tag team to sharpen my claws on for awhile. Don’t be so sure a real debate referee would think they were doing better. This will all come in handy in future rebuttals or articles etc. BTW I can’t imagine you’d be rooting for someone who called you a “blithering idiot” just in case you had forgotten that.
Neil, you odious cyst, you couldn’t possibly have claws, only flaccid little stumps at the end of your paws, just as it’s impossible for you to sharpen a wit you don’t possess. Truth Machine speaks for me, and he was right to call me a blithering idiot once, because I let you score a single debating point against me. Neil, you are such an abysmally stupid asshat that it could only have been an act of blithering idiocy that would make it look like you were right and I was wrong about anything, until Truth Machine subjected himself to analyzing the content of your endless streams of verbal projectile vomit.
This is not debate, this is just cleaning up after the mess you make here every day. Do everybody a favor and slink off and die, instead of just smelling like something that did.
LOL, Ken – I think Neil will have to class you as one of us potty-mouths now!
—-
And? They are neither shrinking violets nor blithering idiots.
Huxley was wrong about many things, but at least he was able to express himself intelligently and coherently.
Another spectacular crash and burn. If mental events like qualia have no effect on physical events, how do you explain yourself blithering on about them? It’s perhaps understandable that Huxley would err in the opposite direction from Cartesian dualism – what’s your excuse?
Ken I’m just teasing you, no need to get all worked up about it. Nobody is making any of us come here to see any of this. I thought you remembered Icthyic’s lesson and got my mythological hint above, how could you (or anyone else) not imagine that I might want to play too? But you still don’t have any reason to root for TM anyway for serious reasons, see for example below.
As for epiphenominalism, windy you still miss the point (typical errors from critics, even faux great thinkers like Dennett get mixed up as I already explained some earlier.) Sure there is a physical process that corresponds to the experience of color sensations being qualitative, of course there has to be consistency with our (people who aren’t scientism-driven reductive physicalists combined with the better philosophers like David Chalmers) being stimulated to talk about them that way. The property dualist part (as an advance over epiphenomenalism) is about those *properties* (not to be confused with the corresponding and consistent process associated with their description) being accessible in that form only to the experiencing entity and not external instruments. Note it is the properties, not the process, that is relative to the means of access. The correspondence has to be consistent, that is sometimes called psychophysical isomorphism. No contradiction at all about being able to talk about the process, and subjective properties of the same process not shown directly to the external observer.
Like I said, Dennett started off his own version of the TE by switching cone outputs, that would still create a different color spectrum regardless of just what type of after-processing occurred. Whether there are three or four distinct color sensation bases is petty compared to the issue of the absolute worthlessness of taking away memories and associations doing anything to prove a point as I mercilessly explained before. OK, fine, you said “Yes, I was talking about the experiences produced by the brain, not the signals from the cones,…” Great, then are the experiences “qualitative” or do you say they aren’t? That’s the essential question. They aren’t just “relationships” since the issue is, what is it that the relationships are about. I mean, as experienced.
Actually, I needed someone to tell me what yellow, blue, red, green, and so on meant. I didn’t get these concepts from some Platonic sphere.
Don’t start sounding like the “brilliant fool” (aptly called) Hillary Putnam and other analytical philosophers. You needed someone to tell you the arbitrary color names in English, which is not even a fact about either light or sensations. I was hoping you could appreciate their experiential character as being qualia, ineffable etc. (Well if you think they aren’t, then describe them etc.)
And you would fuck up that person’s color vision but good.
Sure, and remember that TM was saying that it really isn’t an inherently different situation in principle since there really isn’t a “redness of red” etc. It’s hard to know what he’s really getting at since he changes his tune around, as see below. But can you imagine the light from red objects “looking green” in the sense of being a different quale? That “qualitative” is the best way to label the difference between the way red and green look to us, aside from the way brain processes may be described in other contexts? That the sensations are not describable since it isn’t like stippling for us, as I said before? If you can, and resist the blandishments of the pointless further phase of changing memories and associations (and then you can’t remember which is which, duh!) maybe you can get that point and not think it’s to disagree with. Really, go to scores of comment posts, how many hours, just to deny that sensations are “qualitative”? Whatever the hell for?
But you still don’t have any reason to root for TM anyway for serious reasons, see for example below.
Unlike you, Neil, Truth Machine is not a lying sack of shit who can’t be trusted to properly state the time of day. You are an utter incompetent, unable to honestly represent anybody’s position on anything, especially your own.
Your performance on this thread would shame anybody else, but you are too stupid to notice. You’re as welcome here as Mr. Creosote. Oh, right, you’re too fucking brain dead to understand who I’m talking about, because you have this stupid fucking affectation of being some pompous Victorian twit. Here, you putrid vat of slime, this is all you have contributed to the discussion.
Are you proud?
how could you (or anyone else) not imagine that I might want to play too?
You wanna play? Go start your own goddamn blog instead of hijacking somebody else’s, you demented fucking parasite.
Ken said, “Truth Machine is not a lying sack of shit.” Hey, I can prove (again) that you are wrong!
TM, I’m calling a major foul on this one, and it calls into question whether anyone can be sure of what you are trying to say.
You allege:
NB wrote
>> … recharacterizing such as to deny the experiential character (as does TM.)
>> As long as you are trying to explain why we really do have qualitative sensations
>> instead of denying that they are such, knock yourself out.
[“that they are such” clearly means their being that way, not whether they exist at all or not.]
Truth machine, the dignified would-be professional philosopher wrote:
> Fuck yourself in the ass, you lying moron. I have never denied any such thing,
> nor has Dennett, as the quote I provided earlier proves.
Well first of all, you should realize that providing a quote can’t prove that you or et al never denied something, since it can’t reference all the other things you said. I don’t have time to try to compare all of your various contradictory statements (I already showed you that your own memory ironically failed about whether “memory” was relevant to the spectrum inversion experiment. Maybe someone did that experiment to you? Enjoy having red look like green etc. and not being able to remember the way it used to be … It’s funny how the statement describing that condition seems rather logically coherent after all.) In any case, you did deny that sensations were qualitative, and Dennett has said the same thing almost word for word:
Suppose that there were no qualia with ineffable properties, that there were only relative sensory spaces and psychological assocations of color with objects and emotions (e.g., red: blood, ripe apples, alarm; blue: sky, water, calm). What then would color perception be like? I suggest that it would be just like it is.
Posted by: truth machine | January 24, 2008 5:10 PM
Saying that taking qualia away would leave perception the same is denying that sensations are qualitative, since “qualia” means sensations with qualitative character. I am not sure then what in the world you mean, maybe it’s the cognitive dissonance of realizing that the sensations really are qualitative while being under ideological pressure to believe that they aren’t. Again, why all this frothing trouble just to deny that sensations are qualitative? Is that so scary? I didn’t hijack the thread about that anyway, you yourself Ken asked me if I was also a fan of Penrose and quantum woo about minds or etc., and I said something, then you guys got on a jag about zombies and etc. Hey, you guys and gals could have agreed with me all along after that and saved all this trouble.
He states: “Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature.”[3]
So Chalmers in effect says the people made of real matter likely cannot really be PZs, which is essentially the point I made about PD.
No, you stupid fucking clueless moron, Chalmers thinks that the laws of nature of our world — what Chalmers calls the psycho-physical laws, are such that consciousness arises, but the laws of nature of zombie world are different. As citations I offered show, Chalmers believes that zombies are logically possible — that’s the whole point of zombies — not that they are nomologically possible — possible in our world. And Chalmers offers up a form of property dualism as one way to account for the difference between our world and the physically identical (but not psycho-physically identical) zombie world.
You are ignorant of the philosophical positions, too stupid to grasp them when they are explained to you, and too dishonest to admit a plain contradiction between what you wrote about only substance dualists believing that zombies are (logically, moron) possible and the clear evidence that property dualists (of Chalmers’s sort) believe that zombies are possible.
But hey, I’m simply repeating myself, as are you.
TM, I’m calling a major foul on this one, and it calls into question whether anyone can be sure of what you are trying to say.
Of course a fucking moron like yourself can’t be sure what I’m trying to say, but anyone not dumber than dirt can be sure that you got it wrong, as usual.
BTW I can’t imagine you’d be rooting for someone who called you a “blithering idiot” just in case you had forgotten that.
This displays as well as anything the level of Neil’s intellect. Even though Ken agrees with my substantive claims, Neil can’t imagine why Ken would root for me, just because I called Ken a name more than three weeks and 400 posts ago.
If mental events like qualia have no effect on physical events, how do you explain yourself blithering on about them?
Of course this gets us back to Chalmers’s “paradox of phenomenal judgment” mentioned in my cite back in #390 of Larry Hauser’s review of Robert Kirk’s book, which we can count on Neil to either never have read or not comprehended. Neil is so far out of his league that he can’t even comprehend the problem when it is pointed out to him, and he is so far beyond intellectual honesty that he first tells us that “Epiphenominalism is very much equivalent to property dualism”, but then in his attempt to demonstrate that you didn’t get some point about that, refers to “The property dualist part (as an advance over epiphenomenalism)”. The subsequent drivel he spewed on this subject is very much like that second quote in your quiz, yet he has the arrogance to talk of Dennett as a “faux great thinker” who gets “mixed up” as Neil “already explained some earlier”. It seems that Neil is the sort “Victorian intellectual” who thinks that the value of “The Hunting of the Snark” is as a model of clear explanation to be adopted for his own rhetoric.
their experiential character as being qualia, ineffable etc. (Well if you think they aren’t, then describe them etc.)
Their description has been given, by the color map I cited above (it’s an accurate description because, as I noted, points close together geometrically in the map are recognized as being experientially similar), by the emotions we associate with them, by which objects the terms apply to … generally, by the full set of our behavioral dispositions. If that leaves something out, say what it is … oops, you say you can’t — that’s the whole point, you say, it’s ineffable. But this is readily recognized as question begging. Even if you’re right that something is being left out, you will never be able to demonstrate it, from which one can conclude that the “explanations” offered up, such as property dualism, panprotopsychism, Chalmers’ “bridging laws”, etc. are pointless as they can never achieve anything and never be demonstrated correct (or which one is correct). Meanwhile, as people like Bob Kirk and Frank Jackson give up on the anti-physicalist arguments they invented, as explanations for the power of the intuition that there’s “something else” such as Dennett’s “zombic hunch”, Minsky’s “society of mind”, and Metzinger’s self-referential modeling are offered, and as science provides more and more evidence of the nature of the working brain that undermines intuitions of what consciousness is like (such as Libet’s “action potential precedes conscious choice” experiments and the demonstrations of change blindness that reveal a much stronger effect than Dennett’s cautious prediction on the last page of Consciousness Explained of such effects when using eye trackers) … the notion of there being “something else”, Chalmer’s “additional explanandum”, will be abandoned as an intellectually viable position just as vitalism and substance dualism were abandoned. Of course, there will always be fools and ignoramuses who will cling to their Victorian notions.
Truth machine, the dignified would-be professional philosopher
I’ve never claimed to be “dignified”, whatever the fuck that means (wearing bow ties and having a stick up your ass, perhaps? Or will a beard like Dennett’s do?), nor a professional philosopher or “would-be” professional philosopher, you stupid fuck. But I could well be one despite my colorful expressions of contempt for you, you stupid fucking worm.
Says someone who sounds like Dennett threatened to take his pacifier away.
Maybe the difference between epiphenomenalism and property dualism is (to Neil) one of those ineffable qualities, since he can’t describe it without contradicting himself.
As ineffable as Neil’s capacity to read, write, reason, or get a fucking clue.
TM et al,
I think you substitute the abstract concept of an arrangement for the elements inside an actual arrangement. It is possible to refer to something like “a 4X4 matrix with all the elements different from each other.” But that doesn’t mean matrices in that category don’t really have specific numbers in those positions. That would be like cutting out everything “under” the platonic ideals – as if there weren’t real sample triangles, just “triangle.” The color space contains real particular sensations, it isn’t just a relational entity (and whether color sensations are founded in “informational relationships in the brain” is not to be confused with that.) A given pattern of relationships would still be a distinct thing compared to another pattern of relationships, in similar vein to various distinct wallpaper designs.
I have to wonder why you use phrases like “points close together geometrically in the map are recognized as being experientially similar” if you don’t think subjective experience is a real “world” in effect over and above what is outwardly knowable to happen inside the brain. What do *you* mean by “experientially” in reference to “similar” here? I know what I and ordinary speakers of language mean: some color sensations being more similar than others as subjectively given (and not accessible to the outside in principle.) There are distinct sensations for any one to be similar or dissimilar to.
The color sensations are “ineffable” because any one of them is not describable except as a mixture of some sensory primary which is not describable, and “qualitative” because the way they are and differ is not the way stippling is. You confuse describability of individual sensations with being able to talk about the pattern the sensations form in relation to each other. I heard a big deal here about there being four primary color sensations not three (since yellow “doesn’t look like” – something to ponder – a mix of red and green even though it can be caused by adding those corresponding frequencies.) Well – there aren’t any primaries at all in light, so you can think of what sort of unanalyzable experience is associated with each of them.
BTW “ineffable” in this context means that *any given* sensation itself can’t be described (none of you has yet done that), not that discussing the issues or higher-level statements like why “ineffable” itself is a proper choice (like right here) aren’t possible. That is appreciated in philosophy.
Again, “by the emotions we associate with them, by which objects the terms apply to …” With “them” – that means one set of emotions and one name for the sensation caused by 650 nm light, another set … for the sensations caused by 570 nm light, etc. If there was just a relative platonic like matrix, there wouldn’t even be “red” to have one set of emotions associated with it, “yellow” to have another set and so on (not that anyone has provided much evidence that emotions or dispositions other than the defining ability to name itself, associated with colors are very important to our being able to identify them, have they?) Even if you thought only of brain processes, each of those would still be distinct processes, not just a relational issue (regardless of not being so crisply differentiated, there would still be something more or less characteristic for red, another for yellow, etc.) All one has to “add” then is there being an experienced quality to each color sensation, not just distinct (enough) brain states for each one.
Again, taking away memories and associations wouldn’t make that no longer true. It couldn’t give any reason to think that in principle. All it takes away is the ability to compare from one time to another, so what – the relevant insight is what sort of property and what the sensations are like now anyway, not which actual frequencies they used to match up with or what we used to call them. The latter is irrelevant to their nature. The Dennett canard is a worthless thought experiment, it shows nothing at all. He is the Skinner of his day – BFS was also once lauded as the one who would figure out why we did what we did, only later to have e.g. Dennett of all people write “Skinning Skinner.” About as few people now take behaviorism seriously as do substance dualism.
But this is readily recognized as question begging. Even if you’re right that something is being left out, you will never be able to demonstrate it, from which one can conclude that the “explanations” offered up, such as property dualism, panprotopsychism, Chalmers’ “bridging laws”, etc. are pointless as they can never achieve anything and never be demonstrated correct (or which one is correct)
As I said before about question begging, all arguments require something to get off the ground or there’d be an infinite regress. Like it or not, there has to be a begged question (assumption, data, given) to start off with. Unless a person is a naive realist, they appreciate that perception is any person’s epistemological ground floor. I don’t even think it is coherent to ask about demonstrating the sensations being the way they are, since the experiences are what any demonstration of anything else would be mediated by. Yes we do have logical abilities to consider what we don’t sense (like appreciating Cantor’s diagonal argument), but the way the universe is, as opposed to internally logical truths, is given through experience. What a lot of you reductivists do, is to reference the “seeming to be” of sensations as if that were itself a proper given, and then complain that we shouldn’t assume sensations really are whatever from that. I deny there is a “seeming” or “intuitions about consciousness” standing in front of our experiences as the front-line given. I think those are themselves just clumsy ways of talking about sensations and thoughts, which are the front-line givens as Locke and Berkeley rightly appreciated.
I suspect that you think in the manner of a naive realist (don’t appreciate that the “scene” that appears when you open your eyes is really not things out there, but your own imagery, etc.), am I right?
PS: Dennett hasn’t succeeded in taking away much of anything from anybody, as his wretched TEs etc. attest. He and others have made some decent critique of concepts of free will, which is a radically different issue than the nature of perception. I think you people are afraid of qualia, not me of it being taken away (a category mistake of misunderstanding access and the relativity of properties, to think that could even be done in principle by more neurological findings.) Speaking of that, I still want a good answer to the question: if there’s nothing extra, just information relationships etc. why is pain really worth being afraid of? That disconnect doesn’t credibly tie in.
NB: “So Chalmers in effect says the people made of real matter likely cannot really be PZs, which is essentially the point I made about PD.”
TM: “No, you stupid fucking clueless moron, Chalmers thinks that the laws of nature of our world — what Chalmers calls the psycho-physical laws, are such that consciousness arises, but the laws of nature of zombie world are different.”
But what I said and what you say Chalmers said are the same once logically understood – that our world, “real matter” (versus hypothetical other forms) mandates conscious experience if a human is constructed – IOW, we can’t make a person with carbon and neurons etc. that talks about C but is not really conscious. A zombie world is a *world* with different properties than ours, not a being that could actually exist in our world but with the mind/soul just not “put in” (i.e., if substance dualism applied to *our* world – which I hope not, since I don’t want to worry who is conscious and who isn’t, or have arguments made like Descartes against sympathy for animals, etc.)
As citations I offered show, Chalmers believes that zombies are logically possible — that’s the whole point of zombies– not that they are nomologically possible — possible in our world.
Right, in another world as he said. But in our world, they aren’t, which is what I said, and is a consequence of property dualism applied to our world (the default referent is “our world” unless mentioned otherwise.) In our world, zombies aren’t possible because the brain processes have to be found to have the traditional subjective character, given the “access” of occurring inside the being describing the experience, just as I said. In “another world”, you can get almost anything you want by stipulative fiat, unless an inherently contradictory description.
And Chalmers offers up a form of property dualism as one way to account for the difference between our world and the physically identical (but not psycho-physically identical) zombie world.
Be careful, the PD per se isn’t the dualism between our world and that one, it is the relative nature of physical/mental properties in our world. Chalmers is imagining PD not applying to that world, because in true PD there would by definition be a dualism (both extant) of properties and therefore no zombies.
You are ignorant of the philosophical positions, too stupid to grasp them when they are explained to you, and too dishonest to admit a plain contradiction between what you wrote about only substance dualists believing that zombies are (logically, moron) possible and the clear evidence that property dualists (of Chalmers’s sort) believe that zombies are possible.
No, you don’t read me carefully. I write too much, sure, but if you don’t have time then don’t bother to address it. Again, I said that only substance dualists could believe that zombies were literally possible (to be made of real matter that we know and have here, i.e. “matter” unless otherwise specified) since PDists, referring to *our world* (the default unless speaker asserts to mean a given model universe/s) believe that the mental properties are real but relative, and no more able to be pulled out of material beings than are Lorentz contractions. Of course they are “logically possible” if you believe there’s any distinction to be made at all (like saying, we can logically separate gravitation from other properties of matter and imagine G = 0 for a model world.) But I never denied they were logically possible, you didn’t read carefully because you don’t want to.
BTW, property dualism is equivalent to the sort of epiphenominalism in which the physical process is the template for the nature of the experience and how it will be described, but the extra properties produced are the “how it feels” to the experiencer. In either viewpoint it is the material process that determines that the experience will be a certain way, not there being an independent mental process that would have trouble “getting the word out” through the brain. It is more elegant and assuring of the correspondence to imagine the properties as being “relative” than to think in terms of “produced by.” That is the advantage of thinking in terms of PD.
There are other cases of essentially equivalent (but perhaps subtly different) ideas in which one is a better way to make the same point. An example, roughly, is saying that Lorentz contractions show that “length is relative and not an absolute” instead of saying that “motion causes things to shrink.” The latter even suggests that the contraction is absolute and asymmetrical, which it isn’t. (And epiphenominalism implies one thing “producing” another, instead of it just being the same thing under different types of access as does PD. But both deny that the mental qualities could be yanked out leaving a physical shell, hence their practical “equivalence.”)
Neil, the clueless fucking moron wrote:
No, you don’t read me carefully.
And nobody ever will. Because by now, everybody knows that it is a fucking waste of time.
Neil is so fucking stupid. As I have tried to helpfully point out to him before, the more fulsome he is, the less inclined people will be to read him, and it has now reached not at all.
Ok, I’ll admit that, being the compulsive sort I am, I have now read through Neil’s drivel. But it’s so full of stupid — the same sorts of stupid that has repeatedly been responded to — that it would be major task to address all its errors … a quite pointless task when the only person who could benefit from it is too stupid to be able to.
Ok, just one shot, because I kind of like the idea of Neil wasting his time typing out those long responses:
But what I said and what you say Chalmers said are the same once logically understood – that our world, “real matter” (versus hypothetical other forms) mandates conscious experience if a human is constructed – IOW, we can’t make a person with carbon and neurons etc. that talks about C but is not really conscious.
No, you stupid fucking clueless moron, the matter of zombie world is not a “hypothetical other form”, it’s the exact same matter, and the exact same physical laws apply to it. That’s essential to Chalmers’ zombie argument against physicalism. Chalmers’ view is that we can “make a person with carbon and neurons etc. that talks about C but is not really conscious” if the non-physical elements of the governing natural laws are not in place — and the only reason for him to think that such elements are in place is that he personally is conscious, and since he thinks consciousness is non-physical, there must be non-physical laws in his view. In Chalmers’ version of property dualism, the dual properties are add-ons that are removable by removing the “bridging laws” (non-physical laws) that govern them. It’s not substance dualism because there’s no mental substance different in nature from physical substance, it’s property dualism because there are mental properties different in nature from physical properties. It’s not about “access”; these properties are ontologically distinct from physical properties — that’s what makes the view metaphysically dualistic.
Actually, I think Neil has something to teach us about how the brain works. In the same way as Sacks’ patients.
I feel the need to delurk and comment.
I have been reading this tread since the beginning and I have to say that I don’t bother to read what Neil writes anymore.
Reading the responses to him is much more interesting and amusing.
Thanks to all those willing to keep it up.
Here’s a brilliant nugget of Neil’s immense stupidity:
As I said before about question begging, all arguments require something to get off the ground or there’d be an infinite regress. Like it or not, there has to be a begged question (assumption, data, given) to start off with.
Good grief, he doesn’t even know what begging the question means. No, you stupid fucking dolt, it is not necessary to assume the conclusion of the argument you are making in order to get off the ground.
“In Chalmers’ version of property dualism, …” OK, a good way to reference that idea. Chalmer’s version (or at least, his way of framing the issues) is not the most apt and paradigmatic version of PD. If the laws of any kind are different for a given stuff, it should have it’s own name or at least subscript to ID it. I have every right to mean matter as it really is (all laws of all kinds) when I just say, “matter.” I don’t think it even could be just the same stuff but with those other laws, because I believe in the access-based version of PD, as indicated in Wikipedia:
Non-reductive physicalism is the predominant contemporary form of property dualism according to which mental properties are in some sense identical with neurobiological properties, but are not reducible to them.
I don’t consider “in some sense identical” to be best put in terms of some laws that could be different leaving all the other, outwardly observable ones the same. My own view is that the same process, “as is”, will entail conscious experience as a relative access issue, as do many others.
No, you stupid fucking dolt, it is not necessary to assume the conclusion of the argument you are making in order to get off the ground.
Again, you didn’t even understand what I wrote. If I write too much for you, why humiliate yourself by getting it wrong? Of course I know what BTQ is, so let’s take a look at how that fits in with the definition from that link:
An argument is a form of reasoning whereby one gives a reason or reasons in support of some claim. The reasons are called premises and the claim one tries to support with them is called the conclusion.
If one’s premises entail one’s conclusion, and one’s premises are questionable, one is said to beg the question.
What I clearly said is, you have to have *some basis* for getting started – that is the premise/s. I didn’t say or imply, or practiced, that you assume the *conclusion* of the argument you are making. The conclusion would of course be something else. In the case of sensations being qualitative, their being qualitative is not the *conclusion* of an argument, it is the premise to any other argument about them. I can hardly even imagine something else that I could infer that from. I sure wouldn’t infer it from (most) people talking about it that way, so what if they do? If I didn’t appreciate it myself directly, that would be the last thing I would consider convincing. However, your inversion with memory loss ironically supplies a supporting case.
BTW I wonder, since a non-“qualiaphile” doesn’t believe that sensations are qualitative, then do they not even “seem” qualitative for him or her? After all, if “seeming” is some concept of what things are like … Maybe Jaron Lanier is on to something. I would define a “qualiaphile” as any candid reporter who understands the ideas involved.
You may not agree with it being a valid premise, but that judgment call is not something you can just declare a logical flaw of an argument’s structure. Once one understands the indirect nature of empirical knowledge, it can be appreciated that the nature of sensations are a primary given to any candid reporter who understands the concepts. If I asked for proof that such and such “data” exists to begin with, some reference to experience will have to be made.
Again, I wonder, are you a “naive realist”? Why or why not?
There are some arguments though that do lend credence to that idea by reasoning from other initial assumptions. One example is the hilariously inadvertent consequences of Dennett’s/your memory/associations being removed after switching the color sensations (“spectrum inversion” – and note that you needed a meaning of “spectrum inversion” to even frame the initial act, didn’t you?) You folk think the inability to know whether the color sensations were switched shows that they aren’t really qualitative, are just relations, etc. But I already explained why just talking about “relations” in abstraction was an empty claim. But here’s the real kicker, as I mentioned before: we can’t hide the switching of anything that *can* be described. We could use the descriptions to find that the elements of the array had been rearranged, of course. But color sensations are not like stippling, about which you could say e.g. “The dotted pattern used to match up with 650 nm light, but now it matches the 530 nm light, trading places with the zig-zag pattern.” So since no one can describe the fundamental color sensations (AFAWK, or will you do it here?), there is no way to use those descriptions to re-match the sensations to their original spectral stimuli. Sweet!
I have been reading this tread since the beginning and I have to say that I don’t bother to read what Neil writes anymore.
Reading the responses to him is much more interesting and amusing.
Hmmm, is “tread” a Freudian slip, spurge? You are often right about the “amusing” angle there, which is sad and nothing I really enjoy. Some have suggested I stop bothering to post, and maybe they are right: I think it is a form of cruelty, but not fundamentally for the reasons any of you here consider most apt.
Neil blusters flaccidly at Truth Machine:
What’s not to get about what Asshat Neil wrote?
Neil, as you have demonstrated with every post that you are incapable of stating your own or anybody else’s position about anything, including Chalmers’, Dennett’s, or that of any participant in this thread, with any consistency or accuracy whatsoever, why humiliate yourself by continuing to be so tragically inept?
It would be hilarious that Neil thinks he is devastating us with his…whatever the fuck it is he thinks he’s doing here, but by now, I can’t help but think that he’s just plain batshit crazy, toys in the attic, truly gone fishing.
A pzombie must have taken his ineffable marbles away.
As an Elizabethan philosopher, I am going to argue that sensations are caused by the movement of the four Humours in the Body, and these are qualitative since more of one Humour does not make another type of Humour. Verily, it would be in all of you guys’ best interest to agree with me now and save yourself the trouble.
Good morrow, Elizabethan Philosopher Windy. One so airy in her pronouncements must be sanguine in her humour, so inflammatory remarks would be ill-advised. Are you familiar with the work of the restless chemist Sir Sydney Fudd, from the little Phlegmish village of Gotterdam?
Why, dost thou divine a downfall, Sir Ken?
Of course, leaving out my full quote: “As I said before about question begging, all arguments require something to get off the ground or there’d be an infinite regress. Like it or not, there has to be a begged question (assumption, data, given) to start off with.” The left off part, in italics, being exactly of course the explanation of the fully reasonable and consistent insinuation of the first part – that there needs to be a premises, data to get started with etc. Most people understand the use of ironic reference to make a point in philosophy, given it being followed by the direct literal explanation. OK, so I should have said ‘has to be a “begged question” (assumption, data, … ‘), big deal. I can imagine that TM might get confused – he put forth as literal my teasing of you about the “blithering idiot” put down, wrote like he didn’t realize my “dignified …” reference was sarcastic, etc. But Ken, really, as a snarker type/artiste etc. you should and can appreciate sarcastic figures of speech used for illustration.
One more bit about Chalmers: He thinks our universe does have the “bridging laws” that make C possible, regardless of whether a different universe could lack them. It is then reasonable to say as I did, we cannot literally *build* a zombie under his assumptions – “we” in this world not another one, and “build” meaning just that, make one right here out of what is really here not meaning “conceive of” or “conceive of a world just like ours except for that being different.”
BTW, in case anyone thought (but there’s no thinking put to me anymore) that the problem of knowing about sensations was, we shouldn’t “trust our intuitions about consciousness” , that won’t work out. There is no more reason to consider what my intuitions consist of or to take them as more directly given than my perceptions and what they are like. If someone says, we have such and such “intuitions about consciousness but maybe they aren’t true”, I am going to ask why should we believe we have those intuitions – maybe we infer them from second-order intuitions and so on ad infinitum?
“Arguing with zombies¹ is generally futile, of course.”
– Jaron Lanier
¹ Now you zombies who can’t appreciate sarcastic/illustrative figures of speech, please note that JL is referring to people who think we really are like what qualiaphiles/mysterians say zombies are like, rather than “zombies” qua philosophical zombies themselves – I hope that wasn’t too many clauses to swallow whole.
Why, dost thou divine a downfall, Sir Ken?
Thou do clearly divine the thrust of my prediction, based as it is upon Fudd’s First Law of Opposition, which states, “If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.”
Neil, a luddy duddy, a jabbernow, and a mooncalf, despite our having urged him not to be one of those, has invoked the choleric Jaron Lanier, which you’d know, if you’d ever watched Lanier’s prodigious Dim Sum consumption vacate the surrounding tables at a Sausalito dining establishment from sheer revulsion, requires a sturdy forklift, just for the seafood and pastry encrusted dreadlocks.
Neil is pushing it, but he ignores Teslacle’s Deviant to Fudd’s Law at his peril.
Neil, who wouldn’t recognize sarcasm if it was a two by four shoved up his nose, let alone know how to artfully employ it, exudes all the personal charm of an infected anal fistula with these words:
The plea of “sarcasm” is not a get out of jail free card for being called on one’s bullshit, and trying to worm out by claiming the words you used were meant to be interpreted in a manner opposite to that in which anybody in their right mind would interpret them.
Again, you didn’t even understand what I wrote.
I understand that you’re a stupid fucking dolt who doesn’t understand what “begging the question” means even when it is explained to you. Going back and repeating your moronic misunderstanding of the phrase doesn’t change anything. Begging the question is a fallacy, dipshit; it isn’t “necessary” for anything. Begging the question is not the same as making an assumption or taking something as a given. I am the one who referred to question begging; you are the one who embarrassed yourself (as if that were still possible) by misunderstanding what I meant, you cretin.
“In Chalmers’ version of property dualism, …” OK, a good way to reference that idea. Chalmer’s version (or at least, his way of framing the issues) is not the most apt and paradigmatic version of PD.
You stupid stupid stupid fucking dolt. You wrote If someone believes in only one substance with relatively different properties, then there’s no way to think there’s a world of ‘matter’ that just doesn’t produce mental experience – the latter is for substance dualists to believe in!
As I have repeatedly pointed out, Chalmers is a property dualist of just that sort — it is Chalmers’ view that I have been talking about. Complaining that he’s not the right sort of property dualist doesn’t change the fact that you were wrong in your claim, as you have been wrong about so much.
Of course, you have now turned on Chalmers, while previously referring to “the better philosophers like David Chalmers”. You know better than Chalmers, better than Dennett, better than everyone despite you’re being demonstrably clueless. Of course you would align yourself with Jaron Lanier who is one of the most despicable human beings I have ever encountered.
JL is referring to people who think we really are like what qualiaphiles/mysterians say zombies are like
No, moron, he is referring to people who he, like you, thinks that characterizes because he, like you, is too dense and too intellectually dishonest to understand their arguments and to understand how wrong he is.
wrote like he didn’t realize my “dignified …” reference was sarcastic, etc.
The levels of stupidity and intellectual dishonesty Neil reaches still continue to amaze. Nothing I wrote was as if Neil wasn’t sarcastically contrasting my use of colorful language with the supposed behavior of a “dignified would-be professional philosopher”. My response of course recognized that, and refuted it — one can use the language I use and still be a professional philosopher, and even be “dignified”, no matter what some stupid fucking “Victorian” cretin like Neil thinks.
he put forth as literal my teasing of you about the “blithering idiot” put down
Here’s an even deeper level of stupid. Of course I “put forth as literal” Neil’s saying “I can’t imagine” — because that gave me yet another opportunity to bash the shit out of Neil. But he’s apparently actually dumb enough to think that I literally meant that he literally couldn’t imagine Ken having any reason to root for me. Of course I think he can imagine it. I think perhaps he even did imagine it, and simply lied about not understanding why Ken roots for me. But honestly, it’s impossible to tell with Neil, who is both incredibly dishonest and incredibly stupid, which of the two explains his statement.
Chalmers is certainly one of the better sorts of philosophers, but not perfect in consistently getting a clear central theme across. It can show that his strongest position descriptions are more like classic property dualism than the complainers here think. I take my cue on what he usually means from his classic article in Scientific American, “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience”. I quote the important excerpt here with my own comments in [ ].
philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/chalmersphil1.pdf
I suggest that the primary psychophysical laws may centrally involve the concept of information. …
We can also find information embodied in conscious experience. The pattern of color patches in a visual field, for example, can be seen as analogous to that of the pixels covering a display screen. Intriguingly, it turns out that we find the same information states embedded in conscious experience and in underlying physical processes in the brain. The three-dimensional encoding of color spaces, for example, suggests that the information state in a color experience [he means the experience of a given color, not just the bare platonic existence of a set of unequal elements, per as I noted earlier.] corresponds directly to an information state in the brain. We might even regard the two states as distinct aspects of a single information state, which is simultaneously embodied in both physical processing and conscious experience.
A natural hypothesis ensues. Perhaps information, or at least some information, has two basic aspects: a physical one and an experiential one. This hypothesis has the status of a fundamental principle that might underlie the relation between physical processes and experience. Wherever we find conscious experience, it exists as one aspect of an information state, the other aspect of which is embedded in a physical process in the brain. This proposal needs to be fleshed out to make a satisfying theory. But it fits nicely with the principles mentioned earlier — systems with the same organization will embody the same information, for example — and it could explain numerous features of our conscious experience.
It’s pretty clear Chalmers is saying, given the process we get the conscious experience due to two aspects of information processing (basically, “outer” and “inner”.) He doesn’t mention it, but it is reasonable to suppose that another universe working like ours would also have to express conscious experience *like* ours. Then Chalmers uses the dancing qualia (replacement of neurons by silicon chips) as a reductio of the idea that the experience could be different despite equivalent physical action, not as an example of such. I don’t completely agree with him, since I think it is more than just the information structure – about the nature of the world, but still not a separable trait as in true dualism.
This direct explanation closely following traditional PD is more important than the confused musings that come from the zombie experiment, which is more an intuition pump than a real proposal – how could it be that serious, if something about “information” is what expresses the conscious experience? Information would be working in any world physically like ours in the outward way. A logically possible world is not to be confused with what we can build from what I and most people just call “matter”, clearly meaning just this stuff right here. If someone wants e.g. to imagine a sort of matter that does not gravitate (G = 0) then they shouldn’t presume that a person referring just to “matter” meant to include such as that.
The plea of “sarcasm” is not a get out of jail free card for being called on one’s bullshit, …
It isn’t an automatic GOOJF card, but it sure is for someone who put exactly what he meant in parentheses right after the phrase in question. That would be the very same clear explanation that was excised by you in the nefarious practice of “quoting out of context.” Honorable debtors don’t do that on purpose. We can charitably assume QOOC once in a while is only human. But to go on using and defending it even after exposure is like being a zombie (of the kind who does act differently from normal people.)
Chalmers is certainly one of the better sorts of philosophers, but not perfect in consistently getting a clear central theme across.
As opposed to you, I suppose, you stupid fucking dumber than dirt cretin. The fact is that Chalmers is, unlike you, a bright guy, but has committed himself to an absurd position that is rejected by almost everyone else in his field (while embraced by lots of lay dufuses like you).
It isn’t an automatic GOOJF card, but it sure is for someone who put exactly what he meant in parentheses right after the phrase in question.
This is beyond clueless. As I have said, I referred to question begging; by that I meant a fallacy of circular reasoning. Nothing you put in parentheses anywhere changes the fact that you stupidly misconstrued what I meant and blathered on about assumptions and givens.
Honorable debtors don’t do that on purpose.
You’re quite the one to talk about “honorable”, you pathetically dishonest piece of scum.
As for sarcasm, none surpasses Neil’s self-deprecating humor, titling his blog “tyrannogenius” in recognition of his being a pinhead.
You’re not even wrong, as they say.
We realize that we are forming representations of things “really out there.” But we don’t see that representation. Seeing means forming a representation via visible wavelenghth radiation.
If someone wants e.g. to imagine a sort of matter that does not gravitate
I’ve explained repeatedly to this intellectually dishonest moron who has no comprehension of the logic of possible worlds and the zombie thought experiment that the matter of zombie world is ex hypothesi exactly the same as the matter of our world (and so are the physical laws). What Chalmers claims is missing in that world is not gravitation or any other physical property or law, it’s consciousness, which Chalmers thinks of as a non-physical property, and thus can be missing despite nothing else being missing (other than the governing non-physical laws that Chalmers conceives of), including all the information processing. The moron asks how could it be that serious, if something about “information” is what expresses the conscious experience, but Chalmers takes it very seriously; the zombie argument is key to his position. Even the moron can see that there is something absurd about Chalmers’s view, and yet he insists that Chalmers is “one of the better sorts of philosophers”, even though Chalmers’s thinking about consciousness is thoroughly muddled and has distracted a lot of people who could have been doing something better with their time.
Methinks Neil must be a great eater of beef.
Would that be, perchance, an a prioni assumption, windy?
>> JL is referring to people who think we really are like what qualiaphiles/mysterians say zombies are like
> No, moron, he is referring to people who he, like you, thinks that characterizes because he, like you, is too dense and too intellectually dishonest to understand their arguments and to understand how wrong he is.
——-
Dennet wrote directly in Consciousness Explained that he thinks we really are the sort of “zombies” that Chalmers et al formulated (i.e. w/o qualia, etc.):
There is another way to address the possibility of zombies, and in some regards I think it is more satisfying. Are zombies possible? They’re not just possible, they’re actual! We’re all zombiesª. Nobody is conscious – not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenominalism! I can’t prove that no such sort of consciousness exist. I also cannot prove that gremlins don’t exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it.
p. 406 of paperback.
Then he has this ironic note, directly pertinent to my complaint about being quoted out of context:
ª It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!
Well, who knows what he thinks people would imagine he meant by just the infamous and much-quoted phrase “We’re all zombies”. In any case, he clearly said that he thinks real people don’t have the qualia, something ineffably special in the Cartesian theater etc. that are the basis of Chalmers’ concept of p-zombies. It’s vividly right there in the context of the paragraph and the whole sorry book. IOW, he thinks real people are what Chalmers et al imagine zombies to be, lacking some special inner show of ineffable qualia etc. That’s just what I said Lanier meant.
BTW I note that Dennett didn’t put “property dualism” in his index, but did put “epiphenominalism”. Although the latter has equivalent effects (same material construct produces same experience, with no way to pull away the mental aspect) to PD, PD is easier to defend because it doesn’t involve something produced by something else. In PD the mind is the same process as observed in the brain by external means, it just can’t be accessed to have subjective properties from the outside. Dennett must evade that since it is too appealing (like an ultraconservative must rattle the specter of socialism as red herring to divert from the appeal of ordinary mixed economies.)
Speaking of Jaron: it is pitiful for trollishly sputtering folk to demean him for petty foibles like eating too much when he is a founder of virtual reality and a man of many accomplishments. (Ken, you owe him a lot! Really.) In 2005 Lanier was selected as one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines, and the Encyclopedia Britannica includes him in its list of history’s 300 or so greatest inventors. Dennett by contrast has AFAIK done nothing of use to the world except obfuscate the subject of consciousness with badly posed boners such as his misleading version of the spectrum inversion experiment as discussed here.
We realize that we are forming representations of things “really out there.” But we don’t see that representation. Seeing means forming a representation via visible wavelength radiation.
Sure, we don’t “see” it by definition of “see”, but the representation is what we are more directly, “more intimately” acquainted with rather than the external scene. If you put a warped glass between your eyes and a circle, what appears directly as your visual experience is an irregular shape. Once you realize that this imagine is your primary datum, then you appreciate the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley. Some philosophers like the execrable Gilbert Ryle didn’t get this, and had a childish sense of the world being shown to them as such. That is “folk epistemology.”
“… even though Chalmers’s thinking about consciousness is thoroughly muddled…” maybe it is a bit muddled because it evolved from the original zombie example into being a different take about inner and outer aspects of information. I made that point from direct quotes. BTW, the matter of the zombie universe is not literally “identical.” to ours. The physical ones (defined by non-subjective experiments) are the same, but some of the laws (the psychophysical ones) are different. Therefore it counts as “different” overall.
And about “Nothing you put in parentheses anywhere changes the fact that you stupidly misconstrued what I meant and blathered on about assumptions and givens.” – uh, I wasn’t misconstruing what you meant, I was making my own point about the need to get a line of reasoning started somewhere. I called it question begging to be sarcastic, clearly indicated. Just diverting about me doesn’t make it OK for someone else to quote out of context.
Ok, just one shot, because I kind of like the idea of Neil wasting his time typing out those long responses:
It was a waste of my and your time, and I can tell you one big reason. Do you realize that ranting on and on with spittle-flecked drek and filth just makes you look gross and pathetic? That it is the very definition of a jerk, of an asshole? You have become a disgusting freak. Sure, I exposed you and Dennett’s ineffectual thought experiment, but normal thinkers don’t go to pieces when someone tries or succeeds in doing that. I tried normal communication attempts for awhile to see if the rest here would start acting like normal humans, but the endless flow of excrement kept on and on. Ken and I have the fortitude to put our real names up here, whatever our faults. Would you, “truth machine”? Or, do you think the prospect of anyone remotely self-respecting ever reading this disgusting filth and knowing who you are would be an ultimate humiliation?
FUCK YOU VERY MUCH, ASSHOLE.
Jaron Lanier is a worthless, stupid, talentless, lardass poser with fucking termites in his hair. He had fuckall to do with virtual reality other than to attach himself to it like the worthless bloated parasite he is. I don’t owe Jaron Lanier the piss it would take to put him out if he was on fire, Neil, you piece of worthless shit.
You, Neil, for all intents and purposes waltzing around here with a used pisspot upended on your head as if it were the Pope’s Hat, don’t have the wit to address any of Truth Machine’s detailed evaluation of your fatuous bloviatings, yet you think that putting some sort of realistic looking name after your posts makes you better than TM? Die.
I must say every time I see Ken’s name on the comment side I come over and read his comment. I am never disappointed, really really funny and kudos for dealing with NeilB’s bloviations over and over again.
Dennet wrote directly in Consciousness Explained that he thinks we really are the sort of “zombies” that Chalmers et al formulated (i.e. w/o qualia, etc.):
No, that’s not of the sort that Chalmers et al formulated, moron, because Chalmers’ formulation doesn’t apply to us — Chalmers’s zombies lack the sort of consciousness we have, whatever that is, whereas Dennett’s zombies are only missing a sort of consciousness we don’t have but that confused people like Chalmers think we have. But you have demonstrated repeatedly this sort of subjunctive thinking is utterly beyond your capabilities to comprehend.
uh, I wasn’t misconstruing what you meant, I was making my own point
You’re such a fucking lying piece of shit. If you were making your own point, it would be a complete non sequitur and would be even more stupid of you to insert it where you did.
It was a waste of my and your time, and I can tell you one big reason. Do you realize that ranting on and on with spittle-flecked drek and filth just makes you look gross and pathetic?
If that were so, then why is it that it is you who everyone considers pathetic, whereas people root for me? I’ll tell you in simple terms, Neil boy — ad hominem is a fallacy of irrelevance. All the “filth” I send your deserved way doesn’t have any bearing on the substance, you pathetic little worm.
I exposed you and Dennett’s ineffectual thought experiment
You exposed nothing, you understand nothing, and even if you did you’re incapable of communicating it. Even, asshole, if, you stupid fuck, I insert, cretin, obscenities every few fucking words, I’m still 10 fucking times clearer than the piece of “Victorian” shit you are.
Thanks JimC, but I’m yet another member of the TM fan club here.
Methinks Neil must be a great eater of beef.
Beef? From this great distance? As too many would aver, ’tis only cabbage.
#643: Perchance I should have compared him to a Christian.
“… even though Chalmers’s thinking about consciousness is thoroughly muddled…” maybe it is a bit muddled because it evolved from the original zombie example into being a different take about inner and outer aspects of information.
It’s thoroughly muddled because Chalmers thinks that consciousness doesn’t supervene on the physical … which is true iff zombies are logically possible. It’s not an “example”, it’s a thought experiment intended to demonstrate that zombies are logically possible, and Chalmers still thinks it’s valid. If he didn’t, he would have to abandon his dualism (and recall his book), as Bob Kirk did.
Ken and I have the fortitude to put our real names up here, whatever our faults. Would you, “truth machine”? Or, do you think the prospect of anyone remotely self-respecting ever reading this disgusting filth and knowing who you are would be an ultimate humiliation?
Mommy, mommy, somebody on the internet is anonymous! Mommy, mommy, he uses bad words!
Did someone say “pathetic”?
A Christian? Not the brandy? Perhaps you meant, the Shake a speare brothers!
Finally, Neil’s witless beef against Dennett, me, Windy, Ken, CJO, et. al. is akin to complaining that those who deny the existence of élan vital are denying the fact that they are alive.
The implications of your materialism frighten and confuse me!
>> Dennet wrote directly in Consciousness Explained that he thinks we really are the sort of “zombies” that Chalmers et al formulated (i.e. w/o qualia, etc.):
—
> No, that’s not of the sort that Chalmers et al formulated, moron, because Chalmers’ formulation doesn’t apply to us —
[the point is whether Dennett thinks we are *like* the sort Chalmers formulated per Chalmers’ *description* of what Chalmers thinks they lack – and Dennet says that is indeed what we lack]
Chalmers’s zombies lack the sort of consciousness we have, whatever that is, whereas Dennett’s zombies are only missing a sort of consciousness we don’t have but that confused people like Chalmers think we have.
—
Nope, mixed up again TM. It is meaningless to say that Chalmers’ zombies lack “the sort of consciousness we have, whatever that is” – Chalmers’ distinction only makes sense in the context of his idea of C being special, qualitative, etc. If someone believes in string theory and says, “I imagine a universe not based on strings like ours is, I call the zombie universe” – the meaning of that zombie universe is not, “lacking whatever really is the ultimate building block of our universe” but rather, “lacking ‘strings’, which I believe are real and some folks don’t.” It still has that meaning even if we find out that strings aren’t real. If they aren’t real, it means our universe should have been called such a “zombie universe” all along, the proponent just didn’t realize it due to his mistaken beliefs.
That is to say,an idea proposal includes what someone believes about the world, not just ideas of altering the real world “whatever is really the case.” If we didn’t have a special subjective experience that wasn’t describable in material terms, there wouldn’t be any distinction to make and *no way* for beings to lack the sort of “consciousness” that Dennett thinks we really have – because the latter sort of C is just the workings of outwardly observable processes anyway. And, since Dennett specifically says we really are like the zombies *as imagined* by Chalmers (act like people but no qualitative experiences etc.), that settles what he meant and shows that Lanier was right on target. I know, too complicated for the midget tag team to figure out. Better to cover over with a spray of scatology in lieu of competent philosophy.
Neil B: Do you realize that ranting on and on with spittle-flecked drek and filth just makes you look gross and pathetic?
—
TM: If that were so, then why is it that it is you who everyone considers pathetic, whereas people root for me? I’ll tell you in simple terms, Neil boy — ad hominem is a fallacy of irrelevance. All the “filth” I send your deserved way doesn’t have any bearing on the substance, you pathetic little worm.
—–
Well, let me venture a wild guess: “everyone” considers me pathetic but “people” root for you for the same reason that commenters to redstate.com or little green footballs root for the dittohead against any liberals: it is exactly what would happen to you if you posted there, don’t you think? It is just a selection effect of who is attracted to that particular comment thread. Does this have to be like shooting fish (more like squids) in a barrel for me?
As for your confused suspicion of ad hominem, er no, I wouldn’t and clearly didn’t imply that your filth impacted on the substance of your claims. I was just expressing how creepy it was as such, direclty. You don’t reply with worthwhile substance anyway. I give rebuttals to your spectrum experiment and you keep repeating the same points, and evading my critique by whining that you can’t take the time to wade through it all etc. (yeah, a lot of stuff but you should have to read Hegel.)
It’s no big deal about names versus handles, just saying that people tend to think more of those who put real names on the line.
The situation here is like people at a party, looking at someone who is bellowing and cursing at someone he doesn’t agree with (let’s say, it’s an ultraconservative Michael Savage fan ranting to a liberal that “liberalism is a mental disorder” etc.) The onlookers stare, and normal ones think: what a gross jerk, has he been drinking too much? etc. When they realize this is an ideological wingnut, no more explanation is needed – but the revulsion remains. Other dittoheads in the crowd of course cheer the boorish lout on because they like what they hear. So what.
— one can use the language I use and still be a professional philosopher, and even be “dignified”, no matter what some stupid fucking “Victorian” cretin like Neil thinks.
You can use such trashy language so much and still be a professional philosopher (although a rather weird one), but no, you cannot be “dignified.”
Neil, you really don’t understand that here, with your nonsensical bullshit about philosophy as if it trumped science, you are the equivalent of, in your words, the Michael Savage fan ranting to a liberal that “liberalism is a mental disorder” etc.) The onlookers stare, and normal ones think: what a gross jerk, has he been drinking too much? etc.
Your spastically made and utterly unsupportable claims that BIG C Consciousness is a fundamental force of the universe places you solidly in the kook category. Your inability to express yourself better than a run of the mill net.kook deserves nothing better than pointing and laughing. You have produced nothing here worth dignifying with civility, you arrant, obnoxious, clueless prat.
Take your whinging about Jaron Lanier. You’ve been taken in by his grift. That anybody who was contributing anything of value to the field could see through his grift in the mid-eighties, while fools with their money whose greed he had learned to incite, and just plain fools like you ate it up with a spoon, just underlines that you’re another clueless mark who deserves the sting. That childish need for bullshit fairy tales to be true, to the extent that you are incapable of grasping reason when it’s spoonfed to you, makes people want to slap you until bored. Yet, you are compelled to blather on and on in such a way that makes it apparent to everybody but you, that you don’t know fuckall about what you’re talking about.
Carry on.
It is meaningless
Only if you can’t comprehend the English language, moron …
but no, you cannot be “dignified.”
… and you obviously don’t.
If someone believes in string theory and says, “I imagine a universe not based on strings like ours is, I call the zombie universe” – the meaning of that zombie universe is not, “lacking whatever really is the ultimate building block of our universe” but rather, “lacking ‘strings’, which I believe are real and some folks don’t.”
No, you stupid fucking moron, the inhabitants of zombie world ex hypothesi lack consciousness, whatever that is. If it only lacked something that Chalmers thinks is real but some folks don’t, then the thought experiment would be pointless since the goal is to show to other folks that Chalmers’s view is correct and theirs is not. To assert up front that the consciousness of our world is explained according to Chalmers’s view, a la string theory explaining the force of gravity, is to beg the question — a concept that, like so many, you have demonstrated that you are too stupid to comprehend.
As for your confused suspicion of ad hominem, er no, I wouldn’t and clearly didn’t imply that your filth impacted on the substance of your claims. I was just expressing how creepy it was as such, direclty. You don’t reply with worthwhile substance anyway….The situation here is like people at a party, looking at someone who is bellowing and cursing at someone he doesn’t agree with (let’s say, it’s an ultraconservative Michael Savage fan ranting to a liberal that “liberalism is a mental disorder” etc.) The onlookers stare, and normal ones think: what a gross jerk, has he been drinking too much?
As direct a contradiction as one could have. “There’s no substance, only bellowing and cursing”, lies Neil, over and over again.
I give rebuttals to your spectrum experiment and you keep repeating the same points
You rebutted nothing, rather you keep repeating the same stupid claim.
and evading my critique by whining that you can’t take the time to wade through it all etc.
That’s me not repeating the same points, you lying sack of shit; I’ve left most of your fulsome repetitions of the same uncomprehending BS unanswered because it was already answered, by myself and others like CJO.
In Neil’s tiny little Platonic mind, a Nobel prize winner in his tuxedo bowing before the queen of Denmark isn’t dignified if, the day before, he kicked the dog and swore at it. For him decorum, like hue, is an intrinsic property.
And if Neil simply means that I am not “dignified” here and now … well, there’s no virtue in it.
So who’s the equivalent of these “onlookers” here? All the lurkers who support you in e-mail?
Hey, I got to spend 1.5 hours with that grand prevaricator Dan Dennett today as he lied his way through an explanation of how determinism doesn’t imply inevitability and therefore isn’t incompatible with free will. If only all those folks had known what a fraud he is, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been applauding when he was introduced as our most distinguished living philosopher … suckers!
#657: Wow, I bet that was like listening to a bum raving on the street for 1.5 hours. I’m not jealous at all.
Did you buy him a drink afterwards and get him to tell you about inevitable Nazis?
Ouch, I had almost forgotten about that creep. I missed the reception; I’ll have to ask those who attended what beans Dennett spilled after imbibing.
Hey TM,
The philosophy of mind is definitely not my line but this thread has sparked a bit of an interest.
The closest I have come to learning anything about it was a cognitive psychology class I took a million years ago.
I don’t recall learning about anything ineffable. I did enjoy the class.
I can pretty well sniff out BS but it would be nice to get some grounding. Can you recommend a couple of books for a layman to read?
Thanks
It has been interesting reading this thread but hopefully it will die soon.
Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: An Introduction or, if you’re in a hurry or on a tight budget, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Your spastically made and utterly unsupportable claims that BIG C Consciousness is a fundamental force of the universe
I don’t think it’s a fundamental force of the universe and didn’t say it way. If you and others get confused by references to gravity and string theory just used as abstract analogies, I can’t help that. Per property dualism I think C is the same neurological process any brain scientist would be referring to regardless of his or her theories about consciousness. The difference from reductive physicalism is that the *properties* that normal people (like it or not) consider C have, such as the qualitative way that different colors look, are considered real and relative to the way they are accessed (i.e., from the inside.) If that special nature of consciousness is just a fairy tale, then why is pain something really worth being afraid of? If it was just information, it wouldn’t be. That’s one of the things that anesthesia-feigners have to do, live in a phony way – complain about fairy tales but live like it’s really true. The issue has no comparison to creationism, God, etc, since C is the very medium by which other things are known.
As for Jaron, OK, just maybe you’re right – but can you show that isn’t just a flaky theory like LaRouche’s about the British and such? If you can link to something convincing, I’ll take a look. Who did he rip off, in what way was it fake?
windy, I’m not the only one who thought that TM was disgusting. He burned off Tulse, who was just trying to make points and learn things. Then Tony Jeremiah rightly complained about the scummy talk, right or wrong on the issues as may be. Remember I said, *normal* people are disgusted by such trash.
And yes, I did blow off the stupid inversion experiment with specific rebuttals. I got one reply from CJO which I countered.
For spurge, here’s a review of one of Chalmer’s books, titled, ‘Bridge Out’ on the Road to a Theory of Consciousness The entire monash site contains a large chunk of material for the mosh pit, especially the symposium full of responses to Penrose’s bullshit.
I can’t remember which pharyngula comments thread in which I found this, but the phrase is apt: Fractal Wrongness
In his most recent post, Neil provided an entire first paragraph of fractal wrongness, and, consistent with the sum of his contribution to this entire thread, not worth anybody’s time to bother with taking seriously.
Take a look at my resume, linked from my name below. Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg signed deals with Baby Bells on the back of my monitor at Imagineering in the early nineties, where throwing money at a problem was easy. We hired consultants like Danny Hillis and Marvin Minsky. It wasn’t the first company I worked that sported a Jaron Lanier dartboard. I don’t even want to know what you think you’re talking about with Lyndon Larouche. Jaron Lanier is a dreadlocked celebutard famous for being Jaron Lanier, who will tell you at great length about how much of a genius he is. Have you ever had to suffer through being in the same room with him? You ask who he ripped off? Anybody who gave him a penny. He happened to be in some good places at the right time, and incited greed at a time when any talentless bullshitter could. He bragged about the VPL in “VPL Research” standing for “Visible Panty Line” just to show his contempt for his investors. You, moron, are a classic mark. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Fuck off. You’re incapable of constructing any sort of consistent position about anything, so you whinge about the language employed in pointing it out.
Posting whatever came out of the planchette when you wanked on your Ouija board is not the same thing as a rebuttal.
“Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that while the world is constituted of just one kind of substance – the physical kind – there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.”
This is a claim that mental properties are ontologically distinct from physical properties. Neil’s drivel about C is the same neurological process any brain scientist would be referring to regardless of his or her theories about consciousness and the *properties* that normal people (like it or not) consider C have, such as the qualitative way that different colors look, are considered real and relative to the way they are accessed (i.e., from the inside.) is indeed wrong at every level, compounding his own misconceptions about property dualism with the confusions inherent in property dualism. Property dualists do not consider C to be a neurological process — that’s identity theory. And it’s gobbledegook to say that “the properties … are … relative to the way they are accessed”. What are they properties of, that is being accessed from the inside, and accessed by what? Is there some “neurological process” (consciousness) that has real properties of redness, greenness, etc., accessed by … some (conscious?) inner entity? What about these “colors” that “look” some way, when accessed from inside — where do we find these things, colors, that have these looks from the inside? Are colors neurological processes? Are the looks properties of colors, or of consciousness? Dennett’s dissertation, “Content and Consciousness”, made a point of distinguishing the two, a point that is still largely ignored.
Neil can bleat on and on about people like myself or Dennett not being “normal” because we supposedly deny having subjective experience, but that is not at all what we are saying. What we are saying is that people like Neil are utterly (fractally) confused and muddled, as seen with their incredibly sloppy and lazy use of language and concepts, tossing referentless or multi-referenced pronouns around as if it simply didn’t matter what these supposed “properties” are properties of, as long as one can stake a claim of believing in them. Unless one is careful and accurate in characterizing consciousness and its content, one will forever be confused — but then, that’s no problem in the eyes of mysterians who don’t really want understandable explanations.
I think that many of the confusions of even “better philosophers” stem from old and widespread errors in philosophy dealing with such things as the ontology of properties … confusions that can be dissolved by taking advantage of the computational perspective, something that was not available to us until recently. Perhaps we should introduce courses on relational databases, object oriented programming, and AI into the philosophy curriculum (and put a moratorium on the words “metaphor” and “real”).
I got one reply from CJO which I countered.
CJO wrote
Neil’s “counter” was #568, a typical example of his muddled gobbledegook. Neil can say over and over that he “did blow off the stupid inversion experiment with specific rebuttals”, but its just hot air; rather than “rebutting”, he cluelessly talks right past the point, often confirming it without even realizing it. The fact remains that the left/right TE is a minimal analog of Locke’s original spectrum inversion TE that illustrates what’s wrong with the latter. Neil doesn’t understand Locke’s TE or its history and role in philosophy of mind. The funny thing is that in all his talk of what he thinks property dualism isn’t, and his talk of “arbitrary tags” and the inability to distinguish between left and right without an example to point to, he is rejecting Lockean anti-functionalism and agreeing with the point of my TE — or he would be if his conceptions were logically coherent.
Thanks Ken and TM.
I will be adding more books to my ever growing stack.
Tulse and TJ weren’t “onlookers”, they were participants in the debate. Self-confessed lurkers like CJO and spurge clearly have had the ability to appreciate TM’s arguments despite his vocabulary, like most normal, intelligent people. But I guess you classify anyone like them as one of the “midget tag team” and continue to imagine hordes of sympathetic “onlookers”.
If someone only had relative (per your def.) experiences, would that mean that he’s not conscious?
So did I lie when I talked about “the sun rising” this morning? Am I a heliocentrism-feigner? Nobody in the discussion is disputing that “normal people” (who, typically, have not thought deeply about philosophy of mind, recent neuroscience, etc.) can be induced to espouse a kind of ‘folk-dualism’ when confronted with a TE like spectrum-inversion or p.zombies as a party trick. The question is, why is this instructive at all, much less conclusive in a discussion that ideally should take such seeming as a starting point, not the answer?
Really the argument is circular. You’re taking as a given that there’s something important about consciousness that we can only find out by canvassing “normal people’s” experiences of it –the very thing you wish to prove. This ‘circling the wagons’ (ha!) around a supposed –but ultimately unexamined– “Hard Problem” is an impediment to those, like Dennett, who would examine the assumption, find it wanting, and look in all earnestness for other ways to approach the problem. Like it or not yourself, “normal people” can be, and are, just wrong about their experiences, when it comes to a rigorous accounting of the properties those experiences do and do not have.
More about pain as “just information” later, if I get a minute.
Why are bad words worth getting upset about, when they are “just information relationships etc.”? Or is “fuck” a quale?
Tulse and TJ weren’t “onlookers”, they were participants in the debate.
In any case, there is no evidence whatsoever that Tulse’s loss of interest in the thread had anything to do with me or how I write, or that Tulse finds me disgusting … that’s just a typical example of Neil’s dishonesty. As for TJ, he repeatedly proved himself an idiot, and left after foolishly saying that he was “ending this discussion right here” (nice solipsism) if anyone failed to meet his standards of “appropriate scholarly communication”. He handed me his chain and begged me to yank it so of course I obliged, as he had to know I would — unless he is the complete moron that he seems to be.
Remember I said, *normal* people are disgusted by such trash.
And how is “normal” defined, other than as being “disgusted by such trash”? In fact, such a reaction is quite neurotic, so it’s not a norm one should aspire to. Myself, I’m revulsed by the bad faith of fucking assholes like you.
Why are bad words worth getting upset about, when they are “just information relationships etc.”? Or is “fuck” a quale?
Perhaps Neil has some sort of synesthesia, so when he sees the words “stupid fucking moron” he smells something very unpleasant and has a gag reflex.
Then again, he may just have an extremely muddled conceptual framework that is exacerbated by a high level of intellectual dishonesty that blocks careful and critical examination of it.
Thanks Ken and TM.
I will be adding more books to my ever growing stack.
There’s a lifetime’s supply of reading material at http://consc.net/online, David Chalmers’ compilation of on-line papers about consciousness.
Say what you will about Chalmers and his arguments, but he does provide useful context for the state of the discussion by his compendium of links to the essential papers and essays from across the spectrum.
There are plenty of good things to say about Chalmers, and that’s one of them.
P.S. Somewhere in that list is Chalmers’ response to Mulhauser — which of course I don’t think rescues his thesis from Mulhouser’s criticisms.
I should have included another link to the psyche site’s Symposium on Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind In which 9 authors respond to Penrose and his assault on computationalism using quantum microtubules. There is also a link to a response from Penrose.
Two more dead tree collections of essays include Searle’s The Mystery of Consciousness and The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. I think I’ll add Lem’s Cyberiad to my reading stack.
Here’s why it is true, that Dennett et al think that people really are like what Chalmers says zombies are like. I’ll grant for the point that Chalmers defines zombies as lacking consciousness, “whatever it is [ostensive definition]” – IOW, it is the state ordinary people are in when awake. But Chalmers has an idea of what the characteristics of that state are, and so he *thinks* zombies lack *those* characteristics. Dennett thinks actual consciousness lacks those same traits, so he thinks ordinary people don’t have them. Therefore, Dennett thinks people really are *like* what Chalmers thinks zombies are *like.* Hence there is no contradiction in Lanier’s statement to that effect. It is correct, since the meaning of “believe to be like” is based on believed traits. It is not based on the ostensive definition of the name (“the state people are in when awake”) or on what the traits actually are. This is as close to a syllogistic proof as there can be for such a point, so will someone be honest enough to accept this?
and continue to imagine hordes of sympathetic “onlookers”.
Windy, you’re rather damn dull. My point was that TM’s behavior was the sort that people at a party would react to that way, not that there really were onlookers here who were thinking that. That should have been clear. You might indulge in complaining, like lots of others here, that I am obtuse. Maybe sometimes, but I shouldn’t have to spoon-feed every implication and connotation. Furthermore, it isn’t a matter of whether someone can appreciate the arguments despite the foul language, I am talking about the language itself as a separate issue.
More unfolding intellectual sloppiness:
Why are bad words worth getting upset about, when they are “just information relationships etc.”? Or is “fuck” a quale?
But it’s stupid to ask me rhetorically why they’re worth getting “upset” about (no, disgusted, such people aren’t worth getting upset over) when I don’t think what goes on in minds are just informational relationships. If you think that’s all it is, then maybe it makes sense for you not to care.
Umm, TM, maybe Tulse is too polite to tell you what he thinks, but most people would be disgusted somewhat by the quotes below. No big deal, they aren’t worse than typical trollish ragging at for example right-wing sites where Ann Coulter and Mike Savage (and their way of talking about people they disagree with) are admired, but the point holds. I am not surprised that you take a thin reed (no specific evidence of him not liking you, as by direct statements) and spin a brassy pretension of a plausible supposition being “dishonesty” etc.
OTOH, people like Tulse are rather clueless, and downright pathetic when they silly stuff like that Dennett is “simply confused,
by very sophisticated thinkers who don’t suffer from the evident disabilities of folks like Tulse, Tony, and Neil.
If Tulse can’t handle such blatantly obvious issues, it’s pointless to debate the more complex ones with him.
Tulse, quoted: So Eliza necessarily has conscious experiences when “she” asks you how you are feeling? A Nintendog necessarily has conscious experiences when it complains you haven’t fed it?
No, moron, because Eliza and Nintendog do not display extensive internally consistent detailed reports about conscious experience, and are not physically equivalent to ourselves, whom we know have conscious experiences.
BTW, what do you mean by, “we know have conscious experiences” – meaning, what? How do you know we know, and what is it we know? Just the ostension is pointless.
Ken, WTF? I am open minded enough to say, OK, maybe Lanier did appropriate some stuff and all I want is some evidence. But you blow off asking the honest skeptical question as some sort of hoity toity “fractal wrongness” – in what way is there an “error” in getting down to asking the question, after all your complaining about my being taken in by JL etc?
Ken: In his most recent post, Neil provided an entire first paragraph of fractal wrongness, and, consistent with the sum of his contribution to this entire thread, not worth anybody’s time to bother with taking seriously.
Quoting Neil: As for Jaron, OK, just maybe you’re right – but can you show that isn’t just a flaky theory like LaRouche’s about the British and such? If you can link to something convincing, I’ll take a look. Who did he rip off, in what way was it fake?
I am open minded enough for your brains to have fallen out long ago. Yes, everybody can tell. Why should I bother to try to explain in words that even Neil can understand what I meant about what I said about Jaron Lanier. Suffice to say, the real world is not the one so beautifully art directed in Mondo 2000, let alone Wired.
Thank you for demonstrating even more fractal wrongness. I’d like to ask who does your breathing for you, Neil, as you’re obviously too stupid to handle the task on your own.
Neil is, usual, mind numbingly stupid; a pity that he couldn’t comprehend Windy’s excellent point, and compounds that failure to equate disgust with caring. And rather than displaying his immense intellectual dishonesty by supposing he can speak for Tulse, he should just read #219, which is quite explicit.
Bad editing there; make that
Neil is, as usual, mind numbingly stupid; a pity that he couldn’t comprehend Windy’s excellent point, and compounds that failure by equating disgust with caring.
Yes, I was indeed being a bit dull; from your statement “The SITUATION HERE IS LIKE people at a party…” I should have guessed that you meant that the situation here is not at all like people at a party; or perhaps that it’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike an argument at a party? You’re right, I should have remembered that you are a demonstrated liar.
Or perhaps we are not that stupid, but are trying to point out that you are mistaken about what informational relationships can achieve? Your claim is the equivalent of the “if living things are just bags of chemicals, why should we care about them” nonsense we get from creationists.
Neil has a party in his head, where he imagines holding forth like some Truman Capote before his adoring — but entirely imaginary — fans.
CJO: First up, I have read and reflected on arguments like Dennett’s for years. I don’t just blow them off in some instinctive way, although most of my objection is based on reflection on “what it’s like” to be conscious and not just the specific philosophical failures of such objections to so-called Mysterianism. These arguments just don’t work as best I can tell. The critique isn’t like evolution, which I must accept because of the remains of past life, the progression in geologic time, the reasonable assumption that creatures were born other creatures and therefore had to evolve over time. Saying the brain just doesn’t seem up to carrying peculiar-seeming properties doesn’t work because of the epistemic misframing of the issue (more about which later.)
Consider for example the spectrum inversion thought experiment deployed by DD, similar to what TM was pounding out here (not the same as Locke’s original version, OK, but that isn’t the point – DD’s version is the point I have been referring to, and his did start with physical switching of retinal outputs.) I really just don’t think this TE gets anywhere. First you switch cone cables so that signals from 530 nm light go to/do what signals from 650 nm light used to do and vice versa, etc. Then you take away memory and you take away associations/dispositions. The person can’t remember/ “can’t tell” that the color sensations have been switched relative to the light inputs they used to correlate with. Supposedly this implies that there isn’t an intrinsic “redness of red,” the color sensations are just in effect a relational structure, but I argue it does no such thing. First, more important than whether the sensations match up with previous freqs. or previous “dispositions” is that they look different from each other now. As I told TM, just because for example you can imagine an abstraction like a matrix with “all four elements different” doesn’t not show that elements of real matrices don’t have actual values. Ironic for him to think that way when he is often complaining about Platonism (in between bouts of irritable scatological froth – you can’t find that admirable.) I don’t see why I couldn’t appreciate the difference in the case of sensations being qualitative instead of numbers, that the difference is between something that is “one way to be” and the other “another way to be” etc, instead of only the abstraction “two things different from each other” being real. You can maybe say you just don’t scan the idea of “qualitative,” but I don’t see any reason to discard my appreciation of it based on your or others’ “argument from incredulity.”
As for arguments in thread, I see many logical fallacies and little to be convinced by. TM insists that mirror symmetry inversion is an analogy to the spectrum inversion. But you can’t just pick something and claim it is a good analogy, the similarity is in effect you are trying to prove. Mirror inversion involves the specific traits of coordinate systems and there being two non-interchangeable (by rotations in the same dimensional space) sets of coordinate configurations. I can e.g. invert the sign of any one axis and turn a set of points (like the shape of a hand) into its mirror image. This is of course relative, whether I switch the coordinate system or switch the points around inside a presumptively unchanged coordinate system. TM seizes on this to deny inherent quality etc, but there is no reason to accept this analogy. The thing switched is a set of specified relative points, transformed in a way that happens to display that relativity – so what? Again, posing a presumptive analogy doesn’t make it valid. Posing it doesn’t make it like color sensation, which is experienced as a uniform “something” that we don’t find parts or numbers attached to (aside from what is going on in the brain.) Talk about “begging the question” …
As for what is inside the brain in neurological terms, well, wouldn’t the brain have particular states of activity corresponding to each color sensation? That means, “intrinsic” and not just an element of a relation that could be interchanged with the other patters: pattern-ness like redness in effect. Otherwise, how would we be able to remember, name, and have associations etc. with respect to particular colors in our undamaged state (not having the TE operation done to us.) It’s suspect to me that the TE argument invokes an abstract relational situation that doesn’t even correspond to what we expect from neurology. Sure, the patterns making up such states aren’t literally “qualitative” and that’s why we need to consider property dualism (more about later.) BTW, property dualism and other concepts like identity theory overlap in their various versions. It is silly for someone to deny similarity because another writer uses one name to refer to tenets that are often part of a view having another name.
Finally, I keep hearing about “begging the question” but you realize that all claims would be BTQ and circular arguments if we didn’t have something to prove other things with, if we didn’t have a “given” to get off the ground with, etc. You apparently don’t want to accept conscious experience as one of those, but anyone who isn’t a naïve realist (are you one?) appreciates that our perception is like a mask between us and the world. If you told me you drove suchandsuch car, and I said “How do you know you drive such and such car? ” I’m sure you’d think that perverse. That’s what many comments I see here remind me of. If there was something else more “given” to me that I was “inferring” the nature of my perception from, that’s what I’d talk about. I can’t think of anything I could infer it from in principle.
Part of the problem is abuse of the term “seeming.” It originally meant, actual markers (“It seems like it will rain soon”) or misleading percepts (“It seems warm in here, but it isn’t [I have a sensation of warmth in a cold room]) A lot of that was stoked by naïve realists like Gilbert Ryle, with their obfuscatory talk of how objects viewed through e.g. distorting media “seemed to be” another shape, but “that doesn’t mean there really is something of that shape.” Well, there is of course such a shape on the retina/s. That is what your brain uses, “looks at” in effect despite what ordinary language clods get entangled in. If there wasn’t something like a “homunculus” in some sense, we couldn’t even talk about what was really in front of us – the brain needs to “view” what the retinas report in order to describe things. Naïve realists think, that the image which pops up to your awareness when you open your eyes and vanishes when you close them, really is the world of objects (heh, what about light?) in front of you. Note that Dennett was a student of Ryle. OLP runs interference for reductionism, because it keeps people from appreciating their epistemic enclosure inside their own perceptions. It is ironic, that much of the cover for attack on so-called “folk psychology” comes from the childish “folk epistemology” of NR. Anyway, abstruse concepts of qualitative, ineffability, etc. are hardly “folk” in nature, but thinking the world is shown directly to you sure is.
OK TM, but Tulse does say you’re a “pain in the ass” – not so bad, but you did get unusually (?) unhinged in this particular thread. If I got your goat (and that of others) too much here then I indulged more than I should have. You do come up with some clever stuff (I mean, as in funny.) The following from the thread about Muslim practices is fun despite being to me much of a non sequitur:
NB: So I hope more here will admit that some conservative critics of multiculturalism etc. have a point when the warn us about spreading of Islam and its influence.
TM: “I hope more here will admit that devil worshippers, Nazis, and serial murderers have a point when they warn about running red lights”.
Posted by: truth machine | February 10, 2008 9:24 PM
BTW, an “arbitrary tag” means one that could have been used for any part of the spectrum – arbitrary with respect to the thing it represents. It doesn’t mean one that is intrinsically relative itself compared to the other tags (has no identity or “nature” of its own.) For example, numbers 1,2,3 could be used for R,G,B light or in some other sequence. But they are still particular numbers, not just parts of an abstract relationship. Switching them leaves something inherently different than before.
As for property dualism, that means thinking there’s one process involved (not something that could be pulled away leaving the other intact), but the experiential properties are not findable by external means. The same “thing” does the activity, but the properties are relative. You don’t refer to the properties as “being” the thing, so sure it isn’t good to say consciousness “is” the brain process. But that doesn’t imply equivalence to substance dualism, the literally separable processes.
Ken, I was supposed to be aware, despite no prevalent evidence and my not hanging out with him like you insiders (I googled for bad things and found precious little), that JL is creepy or whatever? As if it were stuff about GWB? I at least bothered to wonder if it could be true.
Windy: Alright, you weren’t dumb, but you don’t get something about how one frames a conception the facts of which aren’t assured. If someone says, conceiving of a situation as including X doesn’t have to mean there really was X, that has a legitimate albeit strained conventional interpretation. It expresses that I don’t know for a fact whether there really were such people (the “normal people” who would find TM’s blather disgusting, which I can accept isn’t really worth caring about in the end. But anyone who says you can be dignified despite kicking your dog, – huh? Is that the sort of “class” that you earlier seemed to care about?) There may or may not have been such “normal people” watching. So, my expression of the concept didn’t have to mean (imply) there must be actual examples of those, it referenced the part I could see directly.
The typically spastically incoherent Neil sputtered,
Jaron Lanier was only ever an insider to outsiders. As for GWB: WTF? Don’t answer, it’ll be even more FW from NB, so, STFU.
So much muddle.
Abandoning the homonculus as a valid concept does not entail naive realism. I hesitate to join in the mudslinging (not because it “disgusts” me, but because it’s not my style), but it really is rather obtuse to keep trying to tar us with that brush. I, too, have been thinking about these issues for many years.
The representation formed in the brain does not need to be “used” (per se), “viewed” or “looked at.” When attention shifts and we update the representation with finer-grained detail from a set of objects that subtend our visual field or a new set of objects, the new data really does come from “out there.” Eye-tracker experiments are conclusive on this. Detail in the perceptual field that “seems” continuously represented is not. As saccades move the focus about and as we voluntarily train attention on some details, it is simply not the case that those details were a part of the representation that some internal agent (homunculus) needs to then in turn train its internal attention on. Those details are updated into the representation in real time based on incoming data to the retinas and on through the cascade of visual perception. The data is “shared around” in a massively parallel way and there is no clear line to be drawn where it is “raw” on one side and on the other side it is “processed” or “being viewed.” The processing begins at the retina and continues down the optic nerve and throughout the CNS.
But again you’re off on a tangent. You’ll come back with “but why does any of that processing need to ‘seem’ or ‘be like’ anything? It’s just information.” That’s your real dilemma –the big, scary ‘Hard Problem’– and I hope someday you will see that your conceptual confusion about what is going on inside your head is the source of the elevated status you give this question. At that time, maybe you will see that it is not ideology or perversity that has led Dennett et al to judge progress against other criteria than the wishful thinking of those who seem unable or unwilling to let go of dualism.
We can see Neil’s patent hypocrisy when he claims “there is of course such a shape on the retina/s” — what one might call “naive retinal realism”. If only Neil had the faintest idea of how the visual system works, or paid the slightest attention to his actual visual experience, he wouldn’t blather such nonsense. He seems to think that “the image that pops up to your awareness” (a notion that he ascribes to those who deny that there is such a thing) is etched on the retina and then represented by the brain to the “homunculus” — located who knows where. Has the Victorian fool even heard of saccades or the fovea? How does he suppose we determine the shapes of circles and ellipses that are too large to even fit in the visual field, if he thinks that the brain is “viewing” the retina? How does he suppose that we distinguish circles from ellipses, when they both form an elliptical “shape on the retina/s”? (That plural is enough to blow his naive retinal realism out of the water.)
“but why does any of that processing need to ‘seem’ or ‘be like’ anything? It’s just information.”
Society of Mind — it’s a story we tell ourselves.
Great: now apply that line of reasoning to the “homunculus” :)