Originally Posted by
Interesting Ian 
:
But our behaviour is not only supposed to be reducible, but also our consciousness and everything we ever experience. In other words by looking at all the intricate interactions of my brain, one should in principle be able to derive what I am experiencing even if you have never had that experience yourself.
69dodge
I don't see how this could work, though.
By "derive", do you mean "have the experience now for the first time"? Or what? I mean, if I somehow cause myself to have the experience, then I've had it; if not, not.
Consider the clockwork clock example again. Once you have completely and totally understood all the properties of its component parts, then you can in principle understand why the clock does what it does. So by "derive" we are starting from a complete and total knowledge of the component parts of the clock and the physical laws dictating how these component parts interact with the other component parts. Once we understand all that, then we understand why the clock operates as it does.
That is what I mean by "
derive". Not a
logical derive, but a derive meaning that once we know all the physical laws governing the properties, and hence interactions of the component parts, we know why the clock does what it does. That is to say its behaviour is inevitable given the properties of the component parts.
According to the reductive materialist exactly the same sort of reasoning should apply to human beings. Everything that we do is derived from the interactions of the ultimate components of our brains.
That is to say everything we
do i.e the totality of our behaviour.
But what about our consciousness?
Now you believe that particular brain states
fix mental states. That is to say that consciousness is wholly generated by the brain, and ones particular mental state is wholly fixed by ones brain state. Ones brainstate, in turn, is simply the result of physical laws playing out.
But this is the crucial point . . .
Even if this is so, nevertheless we cannot derive our consciousness from the component parts of the brain.
All we would be doing is to say that when the brain is in a particular state, a specific particular mental state occurs.
Going back to the analogy of the clockwork clock; that's like saying that we know that what the clock does is due to its component parts interacting with each other (because, for eg, it always says 12 noon for a particular specific internal state of the clock),
but we cannot understand why this particular internal state leads to it saying 12 noon. All we are left doing is discovering, on a piecemeal basis, what particular time it says for a
specific internal state of the clock. But we have no idea of
why it says the time it does apart from mapping out these correlations.
Now if we were to conclude that even though consciousness is created by the brain, we are unable to
derive this consciousness, and all we can do in fact is to map out the correlations i.e when a brain is in a particular state, some specific mental state inevitably occurs, then we have given up on
reductive materialism (and indeed on the idea that science completely describes reality (because it misses out consciousness)).
To repeat: if brain states
fix mental states, but these mental states are "unexpected" given the interactions of the ultimate parts of the brain, then we have given up on
reductionist materialism.
What you would then be saying is that brains create minds/consciousness, but the way it does this is not something which can be understood,
in principle, by an exhaustive knowledge of the brain's ultimate components and their interactions.
In short you would be espousing non-reductive materialism, or epiphenomenalism (I would argue they're the same).
I guess I'm a non-reductive materialist, then.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
It's bad in the sense that you're giving up on the idea that science can wholly explain all things in terms of the ultimate physical entities.
It's good in that you're facing up to reality.
