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Zeb Haradon wrote:
> > Great, so tell us how. > Until then, I favor Chalmers over Dennett. There is a quote I like which > really sums up the situation on consciousness: > > "At the present time the status of physicalism [your view] is similar to > that which the > hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a > pre-Socratic > philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it > might be > true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a > physical > event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'." - > Thomas Nagel >
I take it that the quote above is from Nagel's famous piece "What is it like to be a bat?"
I like the response to Nagel by Douglas Hofstader in "What is it like to bat a bee?" in _The Mind's I_ (p. 406):
> > Qualia are REAL. This is undeniable. They are not a hypothesis used to > explain a phenomena - they are a phenomena which make themselves immediately > accessible to whoever experiences them. They are the fact which other > hypothesi must explain. I suspect (strongly) that they are intimately tied > to, or are caused by, or perhaps just "are" physical phenomena, in the sense > that holograms are light. People who deny their existence remind me of the > Mr. Spock stereotyped scientist portrayed on tv who will put forth some > argument like "love doesn't really exist, it's simply a series of > biochemical reactions", I wonder at what kind of weird motivation he has in > denying the plainly obvious, or trying to language around a clearly evident > fact.
My turn to quote from Chalmers on page 215 of _The Conscious Mind_:
I did not argue *for* physicalism (another failure of reason is that an argument against something must, necessarily be an argument for something else), I am pointing out that any theory that has no data, and is untestable, shares the same status as superstition. Some superstitions turn out to be true. However, given all the non-testable things out there to believe in, and that I cannot find a way to break the symmetry, I choose to wait for data to believe in any.
-Ken
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<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> Zeb Haradon wrote:
I take it that the quote above is from Nagel's famous piece "What is it like to be a bat?"
Great, so tell us how.
Until then, I favor Chalmers over Dennett. There is a quote I like which
really sums up the situation on consciousness:"At the present time the status of physicalism [your view] is similar to
that which the
hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a
pre-Socratic
philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it
might be
true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a
physical
event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'." -
Thomas Nagel
I like the response to Nagel by Douglas Hofstader in "What is it like to bat a bee?" in _The Mind's I_ (p. 406):
-- The image conjured up by the phrase "What is it like to be X"? is
-- so seductive and tempting ... Our minds are so flexible, so willing
to
-- accept this notion, this idea that there is "something it is line
to be a bat."
-- Furthermore, we also willingly buy the idea that there are certain
things
-- that it is "like something to be" -- "be-able things," or "BATs"
for short
-- -- such as bats, cows, people; and other things for which this doesn't
hold
-- -- such as balls, steaks, galaxies (even though a galaxy may contain
innu-
-- merable be-able things). What is the criterion for "BAT-itude"?
--
-- In philosophical literature, many phrases
have been used to try to
-- evoke the right flavors for what being sentient really is ("being
sentient"
-- is one of them). Two old terms are "soul" and "amima."
These days, an
-- "in" word is "intentionality." There is the old standby, "consciousness."
-- Then there is "being a subject," "having an inner life," "having
exprei-
-- ence," "having point of view," having "perceptual aboutness" or
" "per-
-- sonhood" or a "self" or "free will." In some people's eyes,
"having a
-- mind," "being intelligent," and just plain old "thinking" have the
right
-- flavors. In Searle's article ("Minds, Brains, and Programs"),
the contrast was
-- drawn between "form" (hollow and mechanical) and "content" (alive
and
-- intentional); the words "syntactic" and "semantic" (or "meaningless"
and
-- "meaningful") were also used to characterize this distinction.
All of the terms in
-- this huge showcase are nearly synonymous. They all have to
do with the
-- object in question: "Is this object a BAT, or not?" But is
there really some
-- thing to which they refer?
My turn to quote from Chalmers on page 215 of _The Conscious Mind_:
Qualia are REAL. This is undeniable. They are not a hypothesis used to
explain a phenomena - they are a phenomena which make themselves immediately
accessible to whoever experiences them. They are the fact which other
hypothesi must explain. I suspect (strongly) that they are intimately tied
to, or are caused by, or perhaps just "are" physical phenomena, in the sense
that holograms are light. People who deny their existence remind me of the
Mr. Spock stereotyped scientist portrayed on tv who will put forth some
argument like "love doesn't really exist, it's simply a series of
biochemical reactions", I wonder at what kind of weird motivation he has in
denying the plainly obvious, or trying to language around a clearly evident
fact.
-- All this metaphysical grandeur is well and good, one might reply,
but how
-- does it cash out in practice? In particular, how can we discover
the psycho-
-- physical laws that will constitute a theory of consciousness?
After all, there
-- is an enormous problem for a theory of consciousness that does not
confront
-- a theory of physics: the lack of data. Because consciousness
is not directly
-- observable in experimental contexts, we cannot simply run experiments
mea-
-- suring the experiences that are associated with various physical
processes,
-- thereby confirming and disconfirming various psychophysical hypotheses.
-- Indeed, it might seem that the untestability of any theory
of consciousness
-- that we might put forward would relegate such theories to the status
of
-- pseudoscience.
I did not argue *for* physicalism (another failure of reason is that an argument against something must, necessarily be an argument for something else), I am pointing out that any theory that has no data, and is untestable, shares the same status as superstition. Some superstitions turn out to be true. However, given all the non-testable things out there to believe in, and that I cannot find a way to break the symmetry, I choose to wait for data to believe in any.
-Ken
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