Somebody is going to have to declare Jerry Coyne an official member of the “New Atheist” club and send him the fancy hat and instructions for the secret handshake. He has a substantial piece in The New Republic that is both a review of two recent books by theistic scientists, Karl Giberson (who really detests me) and Ken Miller, and a definite warning shot across the bows of those who believe science and religion can be reconciled.
First, let’s consider the reviews of the two books — they’re less interesting, not because they’re poorly done, but because Coyne’s opinion is almost identical to mine. The main point is that both books shine when they’re taking on the misconceptions of the creationists, but are weak and unconvincing whenever they move on to religious apologetics.
Giberson and Miller are thoughtful men of good will. Reading them, you get a sense of conviction and sincerity absent from the writings of many creationists, who blatantly deny the most obvious facts about nature in the cause of their faith. Both of their books are worth reading: Giberson for the history of the creation/ evolution debate, and Miller for his lucid arguments against intelligent design. Yet in the end they fail to achieve their longed-for union between faith and evolution. And they fail for the same reason that people always fail: a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.
Although Giberson and Miller see themselves as opponents of creationism, in devising a compatibility between science and religion they finally converge with their opponents. In fact, they exhibit at least three of the four distinguishing traits of creationists: belief in God, the intervention of God in nature, and a special role for God in the evolution of humans. They may even show the fourth trait, a belief in irreducible complexity, by proposing that a soul could not have evolved, but was inserted by God.
That last paragraph in particular sounds like Larry Moran, who puts the theistic evolutionists on the same non-science side as the creationists. It’s going to grate on the authors, I’m sure, because both have clearly been strongly outspoken against creationism, and I don’t doubt the sincerity or honesty of either in their repudiation of creationism in any of its Intelligent Design, young earth, or old earth flavors, but they are both pushing a different flavor, a kind of weak tea flavored brand of theistic babble that is notable only its reliance on a diffuse vagueness instead of strong claims about the nature of the universe. They are equivalent in being equally unsupportable. They are equivalent in requiring their proponents to walk away from evidence and rigor in order to suggest that a peculiar entity was critical in creating the universe, life, and humanity — while at the same time, Miller and Giberson at least declaim the importance of scientific thinking honestly (the creationists who are a real problem also declaim the importance of science dishonestly, as they are doing their best to consciously undermine it.)
I also thought their unfortunate praise for superstitious dogma was the key flaw in both books — and their attempts to pin the blame for creationism on secularism instead of religion was disingenuous at best. The same could be said for another author with excellent scientific credentials, Francis Collins, who was even more outrageous in the way his logic lapsed whenever he introduced his deity into the discussion.
Criticizing an unfortunate turn in their books is one thing, but Coyne wins his New Atheist oak leaf cluster for taking it one step further, and making the case that religion and science are antagonistic. Readers here will know that this is also a view I share, and that I also think this pattern of trotting out yet more scientists who go to church is growing old. It does not argue that science and religion are compatible at all — all the coincidence of these ideas in single individuals tells us is that human beings are entirely capable of holding mutually incompatible ideas in their heads at the same time. The question is not whether a person is capable of swiveling between the church pew and the lab bench, but whether religion can tolerate scientific scrutiny, and whether science can thrive under dogma. I say the answer is no. Coyne agrees.
It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. Without good cause, Giberson and Miller pick and choose what they believe. At least the young-earth creationists are consistent, for they embrace supernatural causation across the board. With his usual flair, the physicist Richard Feynman characterized this difference: “Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” With religion, there is just no way to know if you are fooling yourself.
So the most important conflict—the one ignored by Giberson and Miller—is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science—every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason—only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful—those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths—fall into the “incompatible” category.
Coyne is admitting something that most of the scientists I’ve talked to (and I’ll openly confess that that is definitely a biased sample) agree on: we don’t believe, and we find no virtue in faith. At the same time, we’re struggling with an under- and mis-educated population that believes faith is far more important than reason. So what most scientists do is keep as quiet as possible about it all, or fall under the spell of ‘framing’…that is, lying about their position. That is changing.
This disharmony is a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious. After all, we want our grants funded by the government, and our schoolchildren exposed to real science instead of creationism. Liberal religious people have been important allies in our struggle against creationism, and it is not pleasant to alienate them by declaring how we feel. This is why, as a tactical matter, groups such as the National Academy of Sciences claim that religion and science do not conflict. But their main evidence—the existence of religious scientists—is wearing thin as scientists grow ever more vociferous about their lack of faith. Now Darwin Year is upon us, and we can expect more books like those by Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works.
There is a way to make it stop, though…at least I believe it will work. And that is to stop hiding the facts, and show people that secular reasoning works and is far superior to faith-based delusions. Science will not and cannot adopt religious thinking without being destroyed, but citizens can learn about the power of secular reasoning, and become stronger and better people for it. That’s where our attention should be focused, not on trying to reconcile science with its antithesis, but on getting everyone to think.
I do have one quibble with the article. In it, Coyne defines four common traits of all creationists.
But regardless of their views, all creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God’s image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called “irreducible complexity.” This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God.
This is true for the vast majority of creationists, but it isn’t quite universal. I know a few atheist creationists, and they are just as incoherent as the necessary conflict between the two terms in that phrase implies. They do exist, however. There is a subset of creationists who are more like radical denialists: they reject evolution because the majority of scientists accept it, or in some cases because they are so egotistical that they reject anything they didn’t think of first, or because they have some other wild hypothesis that they have seized upon, or because, frankly, they’re nuts. Coyne’s generalization may be accurate in 99% of all cases, and is certainly true for the leadership of the creationist movements in the US, but saying “all” opens up the idea to trivial refutation when the DI makes a sweep of the local insane asylums or trots out David Berlinski to pontificate supinely.
SC, OM
I don’t ignore it (clearly I have not ignored the statement: science and religion are incompatible. Far from it.) I treat it for what is is: a philosophical opinion, like a religious belief, or a political stand. Not a statement of fact. You may certainly hold to the opinion that they are incompatible. I may hold that they are harmonious. Neither of us can prove it.
Didn’t I already answer? In my opinion, yes.
Sorry Patricia, I let myself get pissed off, while I was busy pointing and laughing. I’ll try harder to follow my own advice. Calvinists just squick me out–they put me in mind of the Brother Cavil model of Cylon, and my favorite scene–his most recent one with Lucy Lawless.
Nice link Ken! ;o)
If anyone actually wants bible contradictions for Heddle the Ass to chew on I’ll be happy to bash out a pile of them.
Nah. Those are just like Soduko puzzles for heddle. (by which I do not mean that he more or less easily “solves” them to an objective standard, just that he finds the activity merely diverting, and not troublesome.)
Cope,
Not doing stem cell research is a moral choice. If that is what you mean by incompatible, if the fact that someone chooses for religious reasons not to engage in certain types of basic research and that means religion and science are incompatible, then by the same reasoning liberal politics and science are incompatible. Because I personally know scientists who have refused to work on basic research in nuclear weapons science for moral reasons. They work on something else, instead. No different from a Christian opting out of stem-cell research. If one case demonstrates incompatibility, then so does the other.
CJO
No, antagonistic, according to PZ.
Sven,
OK, I have to think about what you mean by manipulative. But surely we agree that plate tectonics has been experimentally tested.
Sastra,
I don’t know.
I agree Ken, the basic doctrines of Calvinism make me want to pound my head against the wall like Dobbie the house elf.
Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. It’s supposed to be shortened to TULIP, but I’d say FUNDIE. This must be embarrassing to those of you that actually are scientists.
more sacks here
How are you defining “experiment”? Does your definition include all manner of systematic empirical investigation and analysis? If not, it leaves out much of archaeology, anthropology, epidemiology,…
You had answered partially. So now you’re acknowledging that a fundamental conflict can exist between principles in the absence of evident effects. You didn’t say in that case, before coming to that conclusion, “Well, show me the evidence. Show me where gay people are being denied their rights on the ground. Do an experiment showing that you can tell who’s gay and who isn’t by the way people are treated in the workplace. Then I’ll believe their rights are being violated.”
But of course that hypothetical was merely for the sake of argument. In that case it would be very difficult to show the violation in action. In the case at hand, there’s also a great deal of evidence of their incompatibility, even if some individuals can work around it. Sociologists and historians find evidence using a number of methods, and there’s much evidence of this conflict/violation in the world. Nonprofessionals evaluate such evidence all the time. We keep pointing you to it, but you keep denying it exists.
What if I said “I have no problem with the Iraq war because there were WMDs found, and anyway only three people have died as a result”? Are all claims of equal value if neither side can perform a controlled “experiment”? The relative value of methods of data collection, of evidence, of methods of analysis in non-experimental investigation cannot be assessed, according to you, so it’s a free-for-all? I sincerely doubt you live your life like that.
inductive reasoning is one of the backbones of the scientific method.So the scientific method is invalid? Facilis
The problem is, you don’t know shit about logic, or you would know what “invalid” means when applied to a type of argument: it means it does not guarantee that if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. Now, suppose we have observed in numerous cases that our observations and experiments are compatible with some hypothesised law of physics, which has the form of a universal generalisation, as such hypothesized laws do. However many observations and experiments we have done, it is invalid (although of course not necessarily false) to conclude that the hypothesized law is true. All we can say is that all the evidence we have been able to gather is compatible with it. This is why, at least in the case of universal generalisations, science does not make claims to have proved its conclusions. Induction is a useful way of generating hypotheses – that is its place in the scientiifc method – but it never proves them. Got it now, shit-for-brains? (Don’t bother, I know the answer to that is “No”.)
Completely wrong. The scientific method is hypothetico-deductive: you make up a hypothesis (by induction, dreaming, throwing dice, or whatever you like), deduce predictions from it, and then look if the predictions are wrong. If they are, the hypothesis is falsified, and you have to repeat the whole process.
Experiments are not necessary for science. Repeatable observations are. If you can arrange an experiment, great, because that (in the ideal case) allows you to observe one specific thing while everything else is controlled, as often as you like and whenever you like. That’s convenient. It’s not, however, necessary. Consider how exact a science astrophysics is, and how little of it can be experimented on.
Not doing stem cell research is a moral choice.
Not being permitted to do stem cell research because a Republican administration, in order to appeal to a science-hostile, religious voting bloc, has blocked federal funding for it, is a cynical and immoral choice, i.e., a religious one, to be redundant, which removes the choice to do federally funded stem cell research from any American scientist, Christian or otherwise.
Because I personally know scientists who have refused to work on basic research in nuclear weapons science for moral reasons. They work on something else, instead. No different from a Christian opting out of stem-cell research. If one case demonstrates incompatibility, then so does the other.
Thanks for ceding the point, heddle. The professed basis of those moral claims is (frequently, but not always) religious, so even though heddle offers a disjunctive claim, (their reasons are either moral, or religious) a moral opposition does not exclude a religious antagonism to science.
From Hypatia to Giordano Bruno, from Galileo to Darwin, who feared to publish for fear of the personal consequences of the predictable religious response, religion and science have always been cordial best buds. Learning is hostile to religion. Seminaries turn out an appreciable number of apostates, who reject religion the more they learn about it. When faith is the last justification for a belief, it is definitionally outside and apart from science–unjustified belief is formally shunned by any scientist. So, it must have been reason, logic and experimental evidence that convinced heddle that God had supernaturally intervened in his life and personally invited him to tiptoe through the TULIP, because heddle’s judgment with respect to religious epiphanies, as opposed to self-indulgent brain-farts, is that of a scientist. See? No incompatibility at all.
And while we’re on the subject, they’re certainly not the gold standard in the social sciences. In fact, I don’t know or know of any sociologist who performs experiments these days. It’s really strange, then, to read heddle suggesting a sort of experiment (whose design is deeply flawed and which wouldn’t really answer the question at hand – it’s really just an odd, odd suggestion) as the only acceptable way to investigate this problem.
Amen.
…otherwise we’d have to kick out of the science club such disciplines as astronomy, paleontology, much of geology, a lot of biology prior to the 20th century, etc. etc. etc.
Tulse,
They all do experiments. In Astronomy, for example, I measure and analyze spectra.
So we are stumbling on a semantic problem, the definition of “experiment.” I thought so. For me, an experiment must involve directed manipulation of an independent variable together with control of other, potentially confounding or modifying variables.
This seems to be the usual meaning.
Neil B:
Actually in that thread almost a year ago(!) I reminded you (not that testily in that particular post) about OPPONENT PROCESSING. There are not really four “primary colors” but opponent processing creates four unique signals out of the three wavelength-groups detected by the cones. The reason we don’t see reddish greens is that the information is coded as ‘red minus green’!
Ironically, you replied something about opponent processing being a “middle management red herring” with no relevance to the perception of unique colors. Since then your views appear to have evolved to appreciate opponent processing at least to the extent of getting the number of unique hues right.
WTF? That yellow is perceived as unique is just due to the kludgy coding process in our nervous system. Maybe we would perceive even more “unmixed” colors if we had additional opponent channels, but it’s still just lossy compression of the original three signals. To become true tetrachromats we’d have to add a fourth cone (and the necessary wiring).
Jadehawk:
I’m sure that learning plays a role but that’s probably not all, if you consider the opponent system. But apparently our (or all primates’) visual cortex has ‘hue maps’ with neurons for a lot more different hues than three or four, including ‘aqua’, so maybe that’s why it’s not perceived as a mixture.
In Astronomy, for example, I measure and analyze spectra.
The point being made is that experiments are a subset of systematic empirical observation; i.e. every such observation is not an example of an experiment as that term is commonly understood. Are you saying that the two are always synonomous?
heddle, to respond to an earlier comment, if I may;
Fixed that for you. It certainly leaves the door open, though.
Creation scientists. ID’ers. Paranormal investigators. Anti-vaccers. Climate change “skeptics”.
All people dedicated to injecting bullshit they feel to be true, deep down in their squishy places, into the realm of reason.
They’re certainly informed by them, or they ought to be. And since I, personally, try my best not to fool myself at all hours of the day, I am in fact a scientist 24/7, as far as that goes.
The observation that women are considered persons under the law, and as such have the right to dictate how their internal organs are used?
It is true that political viewpoints are ultimately derived from what one values, as opposed to one’s perceptions about matters of fact (ie. science). That’s a long way from being “incompatible” with science, though. If my stated values include doing no unnecessary harm to human beings, then I certainly need to know what policies will or will not have that effect, and that is a matter for science to resolve.
windy,
Would you mind giving me a quick summary of Neil’s position on the subject of consciousness and major arguments (especially how the color perception issue fits in)? I’ve read various exchanges with him, and I can never quite figure out what he’s getting at. If you have a chance. Thanks.
CJO,
No, my Ph.D. was in theoretical nuclear physics. I switched later to experimental, passing through accelerator physics along the way. I know quite well that some science is not experimental. I also know that if nuclear physics never made contact with experiment it would at some point cease to be considered science. The same is true throughout the sciences. The field must make contact with experiment.
Sven,
You may be right. So I am using experiment this way: measurements made to confirm, refute, or guide the theoretical side of the discipline. So I consider Astronomy an experimental (and theoretical) science. The theories on red-shift, for example, are confirmed by the observations (experiments) on spectra.
SC,
not Windy, but…
Neil strikes me as a classic crypto-dualist (or in Dennett’s terms, a Cartesian Materialist). He singles out Dennett and the Churchlands for particular scorn. He esteems the work of Chalmers, I think, but won’t honestly characterize the debates surrounding Chalmers’ ideas (which Chalmers himself mostly does). He invariably misrepresents materialist hypotheses about consciousness, and “naive realist” is his favorite term of abuse. He couches his stance in so much pseudo-philosophical bafflegab, and has such a tenuous grasp of recent neuroscience and its relevance to issues in Philosophy of mind, that I doubt it’s worth your while to sincerely engage.
He mostly seems to enjoy baiting those he calls “robo-geeks.”
Re the discussion about color perception and its role as intuition pump to appreciate “qualia”: the whole idea is to get that the experience itself is qualitative and not representable as “data” or math structures. It could, as accident of history, had various possible ways of being done by that isn’t the key point. Sure there’s a neurological correlate, it’s the relative nature of reality that there’s the way those processes are observed in various external ways, versus how they are “to” the system in which they occur. So there is a “kludgy” process in there, that for us is a “quality” that is not like a mixture. Ultimately one either accepts and admits to qualia or denies them, as part of epistemic ground I can’t show you except by your ably (IMHO) interpreting what you already have.
Notably, and ironically, the strict logical view of things doesn’t even allow “substance” at all, much less two of them. (People make fun of my always bringing up modal realism, go ahead, but their logical critique is really unmeetable on rigorous grounds.) It doesn’t allow “real flowing time” either, nor true indeterminism (since math is of course a deterministic system.) A strictly AI-computational process cannot make a judgment that it is a “real mind in a real material world” instead of a platonic simulation, or in a world with “real time” instead of just a block universe (look that up) which is worse than brain in a vat IMHO. I call it the brain as a “fact” (platonic simulation) instead of a “substantive” brain.
PS, Windy, tx for keeping it mature this time … ;-) BTW may I ask what you do? I can’t even give a simple answer to that, maybe you can.
Heddle, if your definition of experiment covers _all observation_, then all you need to do is work out in what observable respect a universe without a god would differ from a universe with one, and that would solve the whole problem empirically. So, what does your god do that wouldn’t happen without it?
heddle,
I wasn’t necessarily talking about the theory/experiment divide (which, it seems to me, is more clearly delineated in physics than in most disciplines).
I just think that ‘experiment’ denotes a subset of systematic observation, and measuring and analyzing stellar spectra, for instance, falls outside of that subset.
Like Sven, I have always used the term “experiment” to denote observations involving the actual manipulation of variables, as opposed to observation without manipulation. We do both kinds of studies in psychology, and both kinds of data are useful, but it is also useful to distinguish between the kinds of studies.
Is heddle a native Spanish speaker? What’s with this definition?
Which demolishes the silly wall heddle’s built up to keep all other forms of evidence out of consideration. Even if we were to accept heddle’s claim that only social effects – practical effects on people’s ability to do good science – are relevant to the question of whether science and religion are incompatible or antagonistic, he would still have to allow social-scientific and historical evidence he’s been excluding. heddle loses again.
the whole idea is to get that the experience itself is qualitative and not representable as “data” or math structures. – Neil Bee
The notion that mathematics cannot express what is qualitative is laughable.
Ultimately one either accepts and admits to qualia or denies them
No, rather one shows (following Dennett) that the concept of qualia does no explanatory work, and hence should be dropped.
A strictly AI-computational process cannot make a judgment that it is a “real mind in a real material world” instead of a platonic simulation, or in a world with “real time” instead of just a block universe
Of course it could; it just couldn’t be justifiably certain it was right – just as we can’t.
CJO,
Maybe by some precise definition as Sven proposed, but I am using it in way to include things like measuring (and analyzing) stellar spectra. Those scientists would, I believe, not object to the title “experimental Astronomer.” It is true, I concede, that you are not necessarily manipulating an independent variable (but possibly you are). Nevertheless you are making observations to test theories.
Stephen Wells,
I gave one example–a universe without a beginning. There are esoteric cosmologies without a beginning to time. According to scripture, there was a beginning to the universe. Other than that I’m not sure what you are getting at.
Thanks, CJO!
Heddle, I’m getting at this simple point: either there’s something which differentiates universe-with-god from universe-without, or there isn’t. If your god makes any difference, point out the difference.
How so? How does a formal system, for example, represent the subjective experience of pain?
Dennett is pretty much an eliminativist not just about qualia, but subjectivity in general, which seems darned nigh incoherent.
Stephen Wells,
Nothing observational that I know of. (If I did, I’d apply for a Templeton grant.) Unless you happened to be somewhere when a miracle occurred. It would all be metaphysical or speculation–and you’d agree with none of it.
heddle@#409:
Well, I wouldn’t either.
Of course, I’m a monist, so as far as I’m concerned, both “miracle” and “supernatural” are vacuous terms. But I do read fantasy with different magical systems, and I can cast my mind back to when I had vague and incoherent notions of what I later learned would be called dualist notions of things like “spirit”, “soul”, and of course, “God”.
That having been said, why would it not be correct to call regeneration a miracle in the same sense as walking on water?
It is not as flashy, or obvious to all viewers in the same way, but regardless, it is still an (alleged) action, by God, that has a direct causal effect on the physical world. As a dualist, you would presumably argue that it was your soul that was changed, but that just moves the cause back one degree; at some point, the change in your soul would have had an effect on your physical brain which would not otherwise have happened. At the very least, a theoretically perfect lie detector that scans the brain would detect differing responses to you saying “Yes, I believe in Christianity” (or whatever) before and after this event.
Which reminds me: Can you confirm that you would characterize the event has having been sudden? That is, was it the case that the previous sermon you went to you would have been definite in your not believing, or would you have characterized yourself as an agnostic on the way to being convinced?
A few more questions:
Do you recall what the sermon was about when you had that moment?
Was your wife with you at every one of these sermons?
Were you making friends with other members of the congregation at the time? If yes, would you characterize these friendships as being strong ones?
[Yes, I’m being nosy — but I’m trying to understand “regeneration” as both a subjective event and as something that might be analyzable. I have a hypothesis which is somewhat more complicated than “temporal lobe seizure” in and of itself…]
heddle@#457:
Would you consider verification of oscillating universes or a self-causing universe to be sufficiently equivalent to the steady-state model?
Hm. Did you read the quote by Tertullian above @#402? Would you agree or disagree with the final bolded sentences, which as best I can tell, reject the compartmentilization that you hold to? (“palmary”, as it turns out, is an archaic term meaning “preeminent; superior; principal; “)
Excellent! Human pride is stronger than God! Please, keep on blaspheming.
And you’ve succeeded admirably at showing that presuppositionalist reasoning fails. Good job! Keep it up!
And all you’ve done is show the inherent hypocrisy in presuppositionalist reasoning. Oh, bravo!
For the sane people, I am reminded of this:
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_031.htm
Facilis is not a 10th-level apologist, but he sure does have a rhetorical hammer.
Oh, and there’s also this; a sequel of sorts:
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_059.html
P-Zombie: What’s your business in the Kingdom of Qualia
Kimiko: Just passing through, admiring the immaterial sensations.
P-Zombie: Lies! We can smell the physicalism on you from here!
(and so on)
Owlmirror,
It is supernatural. But I don’t know that it could be witnessed. Walking on water could be observed.
Depends on the details. Oscillating models, probably. self-causing models, probably not–for they must be pregnant with something, even if it is a quantum fluctuation.
That is possible. Although the change may not have been instantaneous –or maybe it was. It was like a realization. Nevertheless I agree that a lie detector test could observe the effect.
I do. It was about the repentant thief crucified with Jesus.
That particular day she was not. She was not even on the same continent.
No. I had some friends in that congregation but I am not very gregarious. Especially in that church, which was full of people with tremendous biblical knowledge (and I was a neophyte) and seemingly perfect kids (and my son is autistic and, at that time, a handful.) I generally kept to myself by choice.
No. I am more (if not hard-core) Augustinian (the original Calvinist, if you don’t count Jesus and Paul). I assume you are aware of his statement regarding believers making fools of themselves pretending to know science. I agree.
Heddle, if god doesn’t make any observable difference in the universe, it ain’t there.
Yet you claim that a god acted directly to change your mind.
Hmmm.
In a nutshell, I understand him to say that subjective experience is an illusion. If that’s the case, then that seems a) eliminativist and b) incoherent (since illusions are subjective experiences).
Then you’re misunderstanding him, Tulse. From my link @431:
If god’s power is so awesome, I wonder why there aren’t battles being fought in Ethiopia to seize the Ark of the Covenant? When I last read about it in 2007, it could still smite entire armies and crumble city walls. That would be pretty observable.
From Dennett’s Quining Qualia:
Bolding mine; italics in original
Incidentally, the “subjective experience of pain” is not a unitary phenomenon: there is a specific condition, pain asymbolia, in which pain is perceived but does not cause suffering.
Let me ask both you and Neil Bee: how would the world be observably different if there were no qualia?
Neil Bee,
It is very possible I’m misunderstanding you (since I have trouble making heads or tails of your word salads) but are you saying all math is deterministic? Have you ever heard of Probability theory ?
SC:
In addition to what CJO and Neil himself said, I think his point is that color sensations are arbitrary and there’s nothing about a particular EM wavelength that logically requires the experience of a particular color. I’d guess that most people agree with him on this point, but not on his next logical leap, that the arbitrariness of color sensations somehow shows that they can’t arise from “just information”.
And how arbitrary are color sensations really? Arbitrary if you mean they could have been different, but not arbitrary in the sense of any signal at all. Aren’t the following sensations:
(red),(yellow),(blue)
more similar to each other than:
(red),(fart noise),(being tickled)?
Neil
I’m not sure what this means. But you asked among other things “how many fundamental sensations are there” – at least for color vision that’s clearly a neurological question, so the details and history of the visual system are not just irrelevant plumbing.
Evolutionary genetics, and related stuff.
CJO, I take Consciousness Explained to be a long argument precisely about why subjective experience is an illusion, as I said in #541. Isn’t that what the rejection of the Cartesian Theater is all about?
Measurement instruments can reflect patient self-reporting of pain, on a scale from 1-10 or 1-100 for example, as an ordinal[1] value, one that can be ranked in order.
Of course, since the self-reported experience is subjective, you can’t compare one person’s “6” to another “6”–the formal system only goes so far.
From the FAQ at GraphPad:
[1] Stevens SS. On the Theory of Scales of Measurement. Science. 1946 Jun 7;103(2684):677-680.
SC:
In that case, I’ll leave you with the last word. I had fun, and I look forward to commenting more regularly around here. Tonight, though, is for jailbreaking an iPhone.
Oh, and CJO – thanks for clearing up Dennett’s beliefs. I didn’t see the rejection of qualia in that post of Novella’s that was linked to, but I figured Wikipedia knew what it was talking about.
And one could build a robot that, in response to damage, uttered such verbal reports. Heck, one could wire up a Furby to utter such reports. That doesn’t mean you’ve represented the subjective experience of pain, merely the report of pain.
More Dennett, not denying subjective consciousness, rather what he regards as naive conceptions of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Drafts_Model
After a hard night’s wanking on the autocerebroscope, who cleans up the cinemuck left behind by the homunculus in the Cartesian theater?
Yes, and I said as much. You asked how a formal system could represent the subjective experience of pain, and my answer is that you can formalize the self-reports of that subjective experience as ordinal values–that’s as close as you get.
I take Consciousness Explained to be a long argument precisely about why subjective experience is an illusion, as I said in #541. Isn’t that what the rejection of the Cartesian Theater is all about?
I’m not sure how many ways there are to explain. I even let the man speak for himself in my #544, with a link to an essay that goes into qualia as a concept at some depth.
But regarding the Cartesian Theater, the idea is not that conscious experience doesn’t exist, it’s that there’s no single organ or center of consciousness in the brain, no one place and time where it “all comes together”; conscious experience is the product of the simultaneous functions of a great many unconscious subsystems (within subsystems, etc.) creating a representation in as close to real-time as possible of the surroundings as well as the self based on the flow of sensory data through the system.
Just to be more concrete, I’ll use a specific example . The model Dennett encapsulates with the term Cartesian Theater supposes a ‘central meaner’ for whose judgement a representation of the outside world is projected as a unitary ‘sensory field.’ So in special circumstances, such as the ‘blind spot’ where our kludgy optic nerve exits the retina, this view would say that some part of the visual system is responsible for ‘filling in’ the missing information since we don’t notice the blind spot under normal circumstances. But the fact is, there is never any ‘incomplete’ image to be ‘filled in’. Or, if you like, the image that we seem to see in our heads as a visual field is never complete; if ‘filling in’ goes on, then the whole thing is ‘filled in’ by the visual system. We don’t notice the blind spot because there are no receptors there: no part of the CNS has ever wondered, in its unconscious networked subsystems, what information ‘should be’ coming from there.
Dennett treats this and many other examples in the book, but my point is simply that he illusion Dennett seeks to dispel is what he views as a faulty and naive characterization of subjective experience, not the thing itself. I’ve responded at length because I’m just baffled that people, having apparently read Consciousness Explained, will continue to repeat this assertion of the de facto absurdity of Dennett’s views. Disputing a given characterization of a phenomenon does not entail denying the reality of that phenomenon.
CJO, thanks for the clarification. It has been about a decade since I read Consciousness Explained, and I clearly took (or remembered) the wrong message from it. I obviously have some reading to do, as my impression appears to have been illusory (so to speak!).
my impression appears to have been illusory (so to speak!)
It’s a fairly honest mistake, considering how often people misrepresent Dennett’s position, even after being called on it and corrected multiple times (cough NB cough).
I was surprised to see even Christof Koch in the otherwise excellent Quest for Consciousness do this:
In Consciousness Explained, [Dennett] argues that consciousness as most people conceive of it is an elaborate illusion…
Having dental pain is about expressing, or wanting to express, certain behaviors: To stop chewing on that side of the mouth, to run away and hide until the pain has subsided, to grimace, and so on. These “reactive dispositions”, as he calls them, are real. But not the badness of the pain, according to Dennett. That elusive feeling doesn’t exist.
[Koch commenting on Dennett’s view:] Given the centrality of subjective feelings to everyday life, it would require extraordinary factual evidence before concluding that qualia and feelings are illusory.
Thanks to CJO, windy, and Ken for providing the information. I haven’t yet finished the piece CJO linked to above, but I’ve found it enlightening. I also appreciated that Gotchaye was willing to argue the matter in relatively plain language – part of the reason I had avoided discussions on the subject in the past was that they seemed so terminology-laden. So thanks, all!
Belatedly, about the color perception issue: clearly there is an asymmetry in the handling of the human three color inputs (the cone cells roughly coding for what we call red, green, and blue.) Hence if there is an “opposition” of red-green that explains why we don’t experience a shade like that, that is an asymmetry since we do experience blue-green and blue-red (we don’t call it that, but the mixture looks like that.) As for the qualitative nature of the perception: it is not the mere fact that the representations are arbitrary that makes them special, it is “how they look to us”. By definition that is a subjective property and I can only hope you will appreciate that trait.
Others: None of those distinctions in math are truly qualitative, you are using the word in a looser way. In the context, we mean some essential trait that is not structural, not about parts or arrangements – IOW, “indescribable” although that is an imperfect way to put it. Some of you aren’t going to like this but – it doesn’t have to be, that everyone intelligent is going to be able to “get” every foundational concept. That would be a “PC” type concept, not something necessarily true. In some peoples’ case it would be this sort of ultimate “qualitative” nature, for me maybe something I don’t get in essence that you do.
Math: No, math really is deterministic. Probability math deals with chance by telling us the chances, the overall proportions of outcomes, not by generating actual examples of same – see?
This is dumb: No, rather one shows (following Dennett) that the concept of qualia does no explanatory work, and hence should be dropped. Our first priority is characterization, “explanation” is a tougher nut and not always available. It would be their being like that that needed explanation, not them to explain something else. Can you prove the philosophical claim that all that matters is “explanatory work”, itself a metaphysical conceit that’s part of a school of thought and not a “fact.”? And BTW, the concept of a universe that exists independently, instead of a structure of empirical givens (a la Berkeley) doesn’t really do explanatory work eiter, ultimately, does it?
Actually I don’t agree with qualia not being explanatory since it does allow us to talk easily of the way in which (sensations here!) yellow looks unlike red and green in a way different from how the mix of blue and green actually “looks like” blue-green mix. BTW, the modal realists say the whole idea of substance; material, mental, whatever, does no explanatory work. So are you a modal realist?
Dennett: The reason his supporters can pretend that he doesn’t really deny conscious experience is that he says different things in different places, and they don’t all add up. One place he’ll say he won’t deny it and it’s real, another place he’ll say (of subjective content, the phenomenology) “there isn’t any.” Yes I did read his book, that’s why I do know how much he cheated. He goes way beyond just denying a central place for experience. As for Chalmers, sure I know he’s controversial in the same way that Paul Krugman is controversial because of all those conservative hacks.
BTW I think highly of Pinker, he is maybe not a mysterian but far more honest and less an ideological crank than Dennett (maybe like George Will v. Charles Krauthammer…)
That reminds me of naive realism (did that person presuming to explain my views know what it is?): Naive realists are so dumb, they think that the percepts formed when you open your eyes or even look through a telescope literally are the outside objects. How they hell they can experience a field of view with microscopic life in it, going in and out of focus, and still think that I don’t know. (Think: what is it that turns fuzzy when your eyes are out of focus? This is an IQ test that analytical philosophers flunk.)
Ok, here’s a good way to stimulate thought:
Windy asks:
Aren’t the following sensations:
(red),(yellow),(blue)
more similar to each other than:
(red),(fart noise),(being tickled)?
OK, good, now in what way are they “more similar” or different? That’s to get you confronting the subjective idea of quality. And BTW it even does have a technically apt use, since it means you find such things “different” but can’t identify a difference in terms of structures or patterns (like ripples or numbers) as they are for you. Hence, a difference of “essence”.
Word salad? I type very fast, I envy those who can compose well under the circumstances – maybe being 53 and in the wrong generation is part of it.
No, you’re moving the goalposts.
Qualititative mathematics has a long and distinguished history in modeling, statistics, and other domains; the fact that you’re unaware of it, and unwilling to grant the point, is irrelevant.
In addition to the use of qualitative mathematics in categories of variables I referred to above, there are tons of other references; only a few of which I include below. I would include links, but then ScienceBlogs would gag on them; if you’re truly interested, it’s a short Google search away.
[1] Spaces of ambivalence: Qualitative mathematics in the modelling of complex fluid phenomena/Espacios de ambivalencia: matemáticas cualitativas en la modelización de fenómenos fluidos complejos. Author: Rudolph, Lee. Source: Estudios de Psicología, Volume 27, Number 1, March 2006 , pp. 67-83(17)/ Publisher: Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje
Abstract:
[2] Wednesday, June 6, 2007: 8:00 AM-9:45 AM. Special Session – Qualitative Mathematics in Aquatic Ecology. Organizer: Desiree D. Tullos
* The Paradox of the Plankton: Community Structure Promotes Blooms. Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, Ph.D., Peter M. Eldridge, PhD, Phil A. Rossignol, PhD
* Qualitative Models of Published Studies of Community Interactions: How Well Do They Agree? Hiram Li, Geoff Hosack, Philippe Rossignol
* Qualitative Reasoning about Food Webs: Exploring Alternative Representations. Tim Nuttle, Ph.D.
* A Qualitative Assessment of the Relative Effects of Bycatch Reduction, Fisheries and Hypoxia on Coastal Nekton Communities in the Gulf of Mexico. Donald M. Baltz, Ph.D, Hiram W. Li, Ph.D, Philippe A. Rossignol, PhD, Edward J. Chesney, Ph.D, Theodore S. Switzer, Ph.D
* Modeling the Response of Benthic Communities to Nutrient Enrichment in a Coastal Embayment Using Qualitative Mathematics. Geoffrey R. Hosack, Keith R. Hayes, Jeffrey M. Dambacher
* Dam logic: Qualitative reasoning simulations of benthic macroinvertebrate responses to dam removal scenarios. Desiree Tullos, Ph.D.
* Beginning to see the whole picture: Reciprocal predator-prey interactions in riparian zones of the Oregon Coast Range. Judy Li, Hang K. Luh, Holly Ober, Amanda Robillard, Sharmila Premdas, Paula Graff, Nicolas Romero, Stephanie Hart, David Hibbs, Steven Perakis, John Hayes, Robert Gresswell
Better not google “stochastic calculus”, then; your head would probably explode.
That reminds me of naive realism (did that person presuming to explain my views know what it is?):
It’s an artless term of abuse that describes no one’s actual views.
Naive realists are so dumb, they think that the percepts formed when you open your eyes or even look through a telescope literally are the outside objects.
Nobody thinks that. How could a “percept” be an “outside object”? It (our sensorium) is a more or less accurate representation of outside objects, though. What is your disagreement with that characterization? Talking about telescopes and microscopes is an utterly obvious red herring. Those prosthetic devices are in principle no different that the glasses I’m wearing to correct for myopia.
How they hell they can experience a field of view with microscopic life in it, going in and out of focus, and still think that I don’t know. (Think: what is it that turns fuzzy when your eyes are out of focus? This is an IQ test that analytical philosophers flunk.)
There are a lot of reasons why my vision might be out of focus, and just your use of “eyes” in your trivial “IQ test” suggests that you’re not dealing with the issues. As truth machine said, you’re the one who’s naive: you’re a “naive retinal realist.” Let’s take my myopia. When I take off my glasses, what is it that turns fuzzy? How does this condition differ from the condition I presume you’re talking about, when I let my eyes cross or go “lazy” to produce the “eyes out of focus” effect?
Your problem, Neil, beside arrogance and generally ineffective communication skills, is that you’re arguing against the ridiculous position you wish your opponents were espousing, not the one they actually hold.
No, I don’t see. Let’s take a look at how math, specifically probability, is used in two system:
(1) Deterministic systems – Let’s taking flipping a coin in a classical system. Now if we had complete information (e.g, the angular velocity of the coin after it left your hand, composition and exact shape of the coin, air pressure, etc.) then we could, in principle, tell you whether it lands heads or tails. However, we usually don’t have that knowledge so the best we can do is say with 50% certainty (or that 50% of the time, depending on that school of thought you subscribe to) that it will land heads/tails.
(2) Non-deterministic systems- Now take quantum mechanics. Let’s say you have a particle with a half life of T. At time t=0, you have all the information you can have on the particle. Even with that information you can only say that there is a 50% chance that the particle will decay within time t=T.
From what I gather you seem to think that math can only be applied to (1) but not (2). However that’s not the case.
Perhaps I have misunderstood your arguments. Quite frankly, I find your writing difficult to read, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Please write clearer and define your terms properly.
Thalarctos, thanks for the refs. Actually it would be ironically better for math to be able to deal with “quality”, since that would make the latter more respectable to some people …. I confess I haven’t checked it out yet, but I’m nearly willing to be that means using the math to represent the qualitative differences, not to describe the qualities directly – am I right? IOW, it would represent the three primary colors, talk about mixes and maybe how similar or different, but not distinguish that set of three “qualia” from another isomorphic set. Could it tell us what made the red different from green in our experience, actually “describe” the experience?
As for math, you guys still don’t get the difference between representing probability outcomes on average, or inputting actual examples; versus generating literally different results from the same starting machinery (the meaning of genuine indeterminism.) The latter can’t be done. The example of QM is good, because we have two “identical” particles, and one pops off after awhile and the other one does so later. How can that be, if they’re “identical”? If there was a clockwork process inside them, we could watch it in principle and see the leading up to the decay, and both would particles would have to decay after the same interval. Note that it isn’t a loose issue of whether math can be “applied” to such things (I already said how it could be), but whether it can generate such things out of itself. You can generate a string of random looking numbers out of say sqrt(2) but they are the same ones every time, that’s what I mean by saying that math is deterministic.
CJO, you must not have had philosophy courses in the 70s or earlier. “Naive realism” is the given, “official” term for a philosophical viewpoint not an insult I just made up. I know they think that because I slogged through the writings of idiots like Gilbert Ryle and know he claimed just that (unless his writing is even more confusing “than mine”, or Dennett’s about what he really meant.) And sure, a percept could not be an outside object, that’s how the rest of us know the NRs are wrong. I said: they confuse the percept and think they are beholding the objects directly, instead of being witnesses to the imagery formed out of retinal signals. It’s somewhat like a person who thinks a TV set is a window, not a screen. BTW, the way Dennett bitches about the Cartesian theater he seems almost that dumb himself, unless he just means the experiencer isn’t a “simple” center – I’m OK with that.
And no, I am not a retinal realist, I know damn well our retinal images have better detail all across than we have in our representation (foveal detail), that our retinas process the raw image to sharpen, remove some effect of chromatic aberration, send signals to form those arbitrary color sensations that I’ve been writing about for days, etc. Don’t think I am such just because some idiot in a previous thread accused me of being one.
Sure there are different reasons for the subjective image to be fuzzy, I meant that when confronted with such an image, only a person not fit for philosophy would say “that really is a paramecium, it just ‘seems to be’ big and fuzzy.” The analytical philosophers ply the NR racket by using “seeming” language as a smoke screen, to divert attention from the critical question “OK, what does that ‘seeming’ situation consist of? CJO, you can’t fool me about naive realists because I have read so much of their drivel with great dismay. OK, so what does turn fuzzy when you take your glasses off? Your retinal image gets more fuzzy, but your “mental image” of the world – the one that naive realists think just is that stuff out there – gets fuzzy. Even if you don’t believe in something weird between our ears, that’s still an image in some sense – even Dennett used the term “logical space” – and it is still our most direct empirical given. Naive realists are incompetent and wrong. OK?
My writing – yes it is difficult, but jumping in and out of threads I don’t know if I can compose something like an edited book would be. My Flesch–Kincaid scale tends very high, sorry. You’d have to know some of the background on all these controversies in any case.
Neil Bee,
Didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up and found this:
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt/com.editcentral.EC/EC.html
I did a quick test using people from this thread. I took samples of two people I thought I were effective communicators, Sastra and SC, OM (both Molly winners), and two people who I thought were less than effective communicators (you weren’t one of them Neil). Sastra and SC,OM consistently outscored the other two.
I also took results from The Bad Writing Contest . Most of them actually managed to get a negative Flesch reading ease score!
This may prove useful.
Ugh. SIWOTI syndrome… so tempting… so primal… must. resist.
You’re welcome.
Math deals with “quality” all the time, as does the entire field of qualitative research. “quality” != “qualia” in the sense you are using it.
You are munging two things together; distinguishing things from each other disjunctively *is* distinguishing isomorphic sets (better, graphs, so that we can qualitatively describe not only entities by nodes, but relationships among those entities by vertices) but we may or may not get to that) from each other, and it certainly can describe what makes red different from green.
No problem so far, but when you add “in our experience”, you add a confound that it cannot–by definition–do. But it’s not like you can do so, either. “In our experience” is a hard boundary for mathematical descriptions of quality, but your invocation of qualia does nothing to resolve the issue; like “goddidit”, it just kicks the can down the road.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That was genuinely funny, Neil! Thanks for the laugh.
What if I roll a pair of dice, and for each number generated, count down the string of sqrt(2) that many more numbers and take the number in that position for my new string? Are you saying those will be the same ones every time? Or are you saying that’s not using mathematics?
I think CJO nailed it:
If I read you correctly–and I will grant that may not be the case, because I, too, am finding it such a hard slog–I think you would like it if we were all arguing ridiculous, easily-debunked, simplistic mathematical positions.
I think you would like for there to have been no qualitative math, because then you could make what you feel to be a strong case that math needs qualia to fill that gap. The fact that there already *is* qualitative math, and it does just fine without the need for qualia is, I think, the issue for you, and at the root of your resistance to the idea that qualitative math exists and is a part of several productive sub-disciplines.
Hmmm – are you claiming the math can actually describe a single quale, not just the relational matrix? You and others keep saying “it can …” but you won’t actually give a demonstration of doing so. That’s because you don’t understand the different contexts and meanings of “qualitative” – and BTW there are different meanings of a given word, and the differences matter – just look at numbered dictionary definitions. You, like your moronic potty-mouthed predecessor “Truth Machine” are the one munging it up: you think apparently (you never made clear how to get to the description of the quales themselves so I have to guess) that talking about the structural relationship – like having three primaries A, B, C, and their mixtures, is equivalent to describing the A or B etc. individually. You never accomplished that, explained how it would work, etc., and just repeated the always empty claims of your sort that it can be done, or only the structuralism of it matters, whatever. Fuck it, show me or shut up asshole.
This is pathetic: “What if I roll a pair of dice, and for each number generated, count down the string of sqrt(2) that many more numbers and take the number in that position for my new string? Are you saying those will be the same ones every time? Or are you saying that’s not using mathematics?” Uh, you cretinous puke, that is cheating by using an actual physical process and not the mathematics itself! The math can’t generate the randomness, it is utterly deterministic.
As for this self-serving delusion:
Your problem, Neil, beside arrogance and generally ineffective communication skills, is that you’re arguing against the ridiculous position you wish your opponents were espousing, not the one they actually hold.
NO, what you sophomoric hacks really do say is fully awful as is. And I certainly don’t wish the positions were so ridiculous, I think it’s scandalous that they are and such a waste of time when I could be engaging some good thinkers (sometimes I do here BTW, but this crowd lately isn’t them.)
Only recently people have started to do stuff like derive the properties of water from first principles. And that’s a mixture of identical molecules! Your whining that people should be able to produce you a mathematical derivation of a complex mental representation in an organism’s nervous system, before you’ll even consider the possibility, is beyond pathetic.
Neil B: I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains.
pharyngula: You’re that smart?
Neil B: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
pharyngula: Yes.
Neil B: Morons.
pharyngula: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Neil B: Wait till I get going!
[pause]
Neil B: Where was I?
Let me guess, you never find yourself in the finals for Teacher of the Year, do you?
However, that tantrum does, in a perverse way, clarify your position in a way your ponderous writing wasn’t able to communicate.
Now let’s see you refute stochastic calculus.
A quote from Koch’s book…
Thalarctos, griping about a tantrum is a good dodge I suppose for failing to produce what I asked for. No substance from you or Ken can be expected it seems. Ken, a humbleness troll, thinks that putting up silly doggerel against presumed effete intellectual snobs makes up for not having a real argument. My criticism of the dice-rolling experiment stands. As for stochastic calculus: it operates upon random processes already given, it still does not produce them. Maybe you aren’t up to appreciating the difference.
Windy: You still don’t get the point about the nature of subjective experience, not as patterns in brains but as how it feels to us. Deriving “properties” in the scientific context (like for water) means explaining its behavior. It isn’t enough to explain behavior to explain in the case of the nature of experience. Maybe you don’t understand the meaning of “qualitative” in the philosophy of mind. It means a structureless, irreducible essence. By definition, the quale itself does not consist of a structure of pattern. In our subjective experience (whatever parallel process goes on in the brain) it is unstructured, or we’d be able to describe it. Sometimes people like you and Ken deny that our experience is or can be like that, which is a different position from saying it is like that but can be explained.
Neil B @524:
Neil B @574:
I’m up to appreciating that you’ve drifted from representing qualitative processes to mathematically generating randomness, and that you’ve been using qualitative and subjective as interchangeable.
We get it, you’re a mysterian – care to clarify why you think this relates to the compatibility of science and religion?
And John Morales trumps Neil B… again.
E.V. you have no idea, and Morales totally blew it. You just like what he said because I’m in the “enemy tribe”, you can’t assess it. He doesn’t even understand (or pretends not to, as disingenuous way to needle a subthreader he doesn’t agree with) the natural innovation and drift that happens in threads as tangential topics come up and are argued about. Both randomness and qualitative nature have come up in the discussion, I don’t think they’re the same and any “drift” is just part of the flow of the argument as people come up with different examples and rebuttals to make their points – can’t you get that? And no, qualitative and subjective are not interchangeable, although the former is one gateway to understanding the latter. When I see sloppy muddles of attempted characterizations like that, I know someone is just building up hunches and impressions and not really trying. And note, neither of you nor my critics actually came up with any of the supporting argument or proof I asked for, they either blow-harded about it, or offered examples that any competent philosopher would immediately recognize as faulty (such as the pathetic attempt to circumvent the determinism of mathematics itself, by using a physical process!)
Mysterianism: I am somewhat of a mysterian, but I don’t even claim that consciousness and the nature of experience (especially its qualitative aspect) cannot be explained. I say: go ahead and explain whatever you want, just don’t lie about it, like pretending we don’t have qualitative inner phenomenology. And if you don’t (like weasel Dennett, who says one place he won’t deny it and then does so elsewhere, etc.) think we do, why is pain something to be afraid of? Would you prove you mettle and devotion to the reductionist cause by letting yourself be exposed to very unpleasant sensations for a few hours, with no permanent harm, basking in your rational certitude that it’s “just a bunch of information processing”? I bet.
PS: I mean Morales blew any “trumping me” if that’s what he was trying to do as E.V. implies, maybe he wasn’t. Scanning over your previous posts John, I see many decent questions and points, so I’m just denying you accomplished any “rebuttal.” It’s no put-down of your average. OK – I know you don’t have all day to peruse my often clunky blasts here, and as I thrash on the cuff I am not always clear, indeed (but I can write well given time and editing, as I know from “real customers” who need to have it!) It just took me aback that you seemed oblivious to the frequent and mostly accepted appearance of branched-off subtopics – kind of like mutation and natural selection, no? Now really though, meditate upon why you do or don’t like certain experiences, don’t buy into AI crap without a fight.
Neil B.,
Please:
1) Explain what you mean by saying mathematics is “deterministic”. Mathematics is not an event or process, so I do not see what can be meant by calling it either “deterministic” or “non-deterministic”, although it can perfectly well describe processes of both kinds.
2) Produce examples of the dishonesty you claim Dennett shows.
3) Respond to my query above (or point me to your response if I’ve missed it) as to what observable difference it would make if we did not have “qualia”.
It means a structureless, irreducible essence. By definition, the quale itself does not consist of a structure of pattern. In our subjective experience (whatever parallel process goes on in the brain) it is unstructured, or we’d be able to describe it. Sometimes people like you and Ken deny that our experience is or can be like that
I most certainly deny that our subjective experience (actually, the “subjective” is unnecessary here) is unstructured, or indescribable. We describe experiences all the time. Colours, for example, certainly have structure: hue, brightness and saturation for a start (although these do not capture all the colour distinctions we can make). We also describe colours in terms of what they resemble or remind us of – which may be other things of the same or similar colour, or sounds, emotions, etc. We can also compare the colour discriminations we can make, and the judgements of similarity we make, with those of others.
Briefly and out of my memories is all I have time for, so
1. You can make a process out of a “thing” in math by taking things in sequence. Hence, to *simulate* “random numbers” that would come over a period of time you could pick say sqrt. 2 and use the digits in sequence instead of imagining them just sitting there “all at once.” It is deterministic because there isn’t something like sqrt (some number) that is not forced to produce a set sequence from the workings out of the process you use to derive the result – and it’s the same every time. There’s no math operation to get 1528734 … one time and 41112365… a second time unless *you* cheat by going to another number to take the root of, etc.
My suggestion: talk to computer programmers and ask them about the deterministic nature of answers from computer programs, and how “random number generators” work,”pseudorandom”, reseeding, etc. Ask about the need to use a physical source for true random numbers (not to be confused with the physical substrate of the computer being a framework for the deterministic, purely mathematical calculations.)
2. I’m not going to dig to find the pages but Dennett said early on in CE that he wouldn’t “feign anesthesia” and deny we had experiences, then later said about phenomenology, “there [maybe with “just”] isn’t any.” Those are real quotes.
Again, relying on me isn’t good enough and you would have to read up on phenomenology and the significance thereof to appreciate why I consider that contradictory.
3. Sure we describe color sensations with hue and chroma etc., but it is describing them to start with, not their use in turn to describe mixtures, that is the problem. I can appreciate describing as mix of R + G or G + B, but now what if I am asked to explain in what way B differs from G? That is the essence of the “quality” problem. To avoid regression, some qualities have to be just “given” but then we can’t “describe” them. I don’t see a problem with such being essentially to our experience, I am impressed over and over with the way the “look” of red or green is like that, but some people (usually AI types who want everything cut and dried into numbers or things they can grasp their way) despise the concept – to me it’s a prejudice, a lack of mature acceptance of things just being what they are.
BTW note well that I did not originate any of this, look up “qualia” and “the hard problem” etc. I am defending Chalmers and others in this, not presenting a theory of my own. Even my writings about “God” are mostly an exegesis and defense of what Paul Davies wrote about in The Mind of God. This term “God” is used very loosely by him, me, and non-religious-based “philosophical theologians” as a place-holder for whatever uncontingent thing the universe is contingent on, should such exist – it may be mind-like (Platonic?) but still a far cry from the tradition-based “sky fairy” that many complain about here. BTW they are wrong about the alleged semantic need to adhere to original religious use and implications, because specialists borrow extant terms for looser or more precise use all the time. It is easier than making up whole new words. And BTW I don’t blame anyone for just not believing in what we have no evidence for, I just want to be more daring.
Finally, I’m glad to be coming out of flu or whatever it was and of being so sloshed on phenergan and such. I should have stayed away from here for awhile but just couldn’t resist the occasional urge to needle the denizens. I hate to support their sniping, but under the circumstances I likely did pump out a good bit of rubbish …
We’re doing it right now, by voluntarily returning to read your mendacious nonsense.
Uh Windy, silly and so touchy (but not “feely” too, I gather?) girl, “mendacious” is supposed to mean given to lying. Get it, that means saying something the speaker knows isn’t true. It isn’t something you say to someone who espouses opinions you don’t agree with or even who proposes scary experiments to prove philosophical points. BTW some of the famous pharmacology experimenters voluntarily, without prodding, took things like LSD because they wanted to know what it was like. But you know damn well that challenge is to make a point, to embarrass tiny little arm-chair robo-geeks who prattle about information in the brain as if we didn’t have deeper concerns afoot.
I’m confident windy knows what mendacious means.
It’s being applied to you for wilful purblindness, most appropriately in my opinion.
“Slow in understanding or discernment” – uh, aren’t you the folks having so much trouble understanding and/or applying concepts like qualitative, deterministic, etc? If what you really don’t like is my being argumentative, tenacious, or scrappy (like so many of you) just call me a bitch or something but don’t pretend I don’t understand you and your points, that is the farthest possible from the truth.
Yawn, what a pretentious pseudo-intellectual bore.
Me? More amused and exasperated. Whereas you appear to be suffering from mood swings. What happened to Neil Bee?
Look, we reject your premise that these qualia and feelings or whatever you want to call them can’t arise from “a bunch of information processing”. It has not been demonstrated either way. So when you keep parroting the “information processing” strawman at us, it makes you look either dishonest or obtuse. You wouldn’t conclude that if something is “just molecules” it must be worthless, I hope?
Me? More amused and exasperated. Whereas you appear to be suffering from mood swings. What happened to Neil Bee?
Look, we reject your premise that these qualia and feelings or whatever you want to call them can’t arise from “a bunch of information processing”. It has not been demonstrated either way. So when you keep parroting the “information processing” strawman at us, it makes you look either dishonest or obtuse. You wouldn’t conclude that if something is “just molecules” it must be worthless, I hope?
Sorry for the late reply to heddle #240:
If you are talking about Darius I, the Behistun inscription is chock full of (self)-references (and was the clue to deciphering cuneiforms in the first place!). If you are talking about “Darius the Mede”, that’s the problem, isn’t it?
And as for Cyrus adopting the name Darius, unlikely considering the “Cyrus cylinder”.
Windy, the argument isn’t ultimately about whether or not whatever happens in our brains can make the sensations to be qualitative. I guess it has to, if they are like that! I am not denying those actual, real neural process can manifest such features, only that they can’t be modeled or described by information processing concepts (which are abstract models that fall short of being real things.) The more critical issue is whether a thinker will admit that our experiences are like that, in advance of trying to explain how they can get that way. People like Dennett don’t say, “Oh yes it is possible for being qualitative to come from physical yadda yadda inside us instead of requiring supernatural intervention to be that way.” Instead, he says “No, they aren’t like that because there’s no way for signals running around to literally be that way” (simplified argument.) So *he’s* the one saying our brain processes can’t cause actual qualitative experience, not us “property dualists” like David Chalmers who say it can, because of the universe’s relative aspects.
See, I realize how confusing this mad dance about consciousness is, but I have studied enough quotes from the majors to know what they think. It is filled with ironies and you have to be clear just what distinction someone is making: is or isn’t, versus can or can’t be explained in such and such way, etc.
Oh, Neil Bee is my Typepad identity, which I dropped when it wasn’t required any longer here.