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The relationship between science and materialism

davidsmith73 said:
Not quite what I said. I said the existence of experience is impervious to doubt. I happen to think that the concept of "I" may be still be an illusion.
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Why is it impervious to doubt?

(Your original comments were to my comment about hammegk's expression of his faith - which was not about experience but about the "I that thinks it is thinking" we seem to be onto a quite different point now.)
 
Darat said:
You've lost me.

I can't see what other language (in principle) you can use then what I did to communicate to another person that I have experienced "red".

All you can do is ask me "Do you see red when I zap your brain?". I can answer yes or no, you can then show me a piece of red card and ask me "Do you see red when I put this card in front of you?" I can answer yes or no. You can then ask me "Was the experience of red the same?" I can answer yes or no, if I answer yes then we can conclude that I experienced the same thing from different stimulus.
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But Kevin must have had something in mind when he experiences red when he refers to someone else experiencing it. I'm sure he doesn't define it in that instance to be his physical behaviour of telling someone else he is seeing red for example. Would you?
 
Darat said:
Glad you agree.
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With the position I've maintained now for some years? LOL. :)

Feel free to defend your own beliefs.
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I only wonder what you believe. Obviously nothing you'd care to expose to the light of day.

No matter; *I* have faith *you* think, and, thought exists remains a 100% certainty.
 
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davidsmith73 said:
But Kevin must have had something in mind when he experiences red when he refers to someone else experiencing it. I'm sure he doesn't define it in that instance to be his physical behaviour of telling someone else he is seeing red for example. Would you?
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How else can it be defined and communicated? (That's a very serious and genuine question.)

The only other way of doing it that I can think of is by some form of "scan" of the brain and seeing if the same area of the brain responds in the same manner under both stimulus; that I suppose would remove the need to have to ask someone but still at some point someone has had to say "I'm experiencing red" to make that initial link.

Just thought I suppose it is possible that we could develop our knowledge to such an extent that we can predict from a first principles bases what we should see in a brain when someone is experiencing red.
 
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Darat said:
The only other way of doing it that I can think of is by some form of "scan" of the brain and seeing if the same area of the brain responds in the same manner under both stimulus; that I suppose would remove the need to have to ask someone but still at some point someone has had to say "I'm experiencing red" to make that initial link.
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Actually, that need not work at all. We know, for instance, that the same "red" can be the result of a single wavelength or the mixture of many different possible combinations, as transduced by the three photopic pigments in the retina. There is no a priori reason to think that these reds would give rise to the same cortex readings. They may, but there is no reason they have to.

I have to go to class now, and other crap later, but I really would like to explore this topic in depth (perhaps on another thread). It is a really nice one for demonstrating assumptions in philosophical views...
 
Mercutio said:
Actually, that need not work at all. We know, for instance, that the same "red" can be the result of a single wavelength or the mixture of many different possible combinations, as transduced by the three photopic pigments in the retina. There is no a priori reason to think that these reds would give rise to the same cortex readings. They may, but there is no reason they have to.
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I agree there isn't (at least at the moment) any reason they have to.

Mercutio said:
I have to go to class now, and other crap later, but I really would like to explore this topic in depth (perhaps on another thread). It is a really nice one for demonstrating assumptions in philosophical views...
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Might be a good idea. Now you run off and make sure you are indoctrinating your students in scientism and materialism!
 
Mercutio said:
Actually, that need not work at all. We know, for instance, that the same "red" can be the result of a single wavelength or the mixture of many different possible combinations, as transduced by the three photopic pigments in the retina. There is no a priori reason to think that these reds would give rise to the same cortex readings. They may, but there is no reason they have to.

I have to go to class now, and other crap later, but I really would like to explore this topic in depth (perhaps on another thread). It is a really nice one for demonstrating assumptions in philosophical views...
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Surely there is. If the receptors in the eye, as a whole, respond in the same ways to a variety of inputs the cortex will not be able to distinguish between the different scenarios.

Or does your a priori not include knowledge of the mechanisms of the eye?

Start the new thread, this sounds interesting. :D
 
davidsmith73 said:
I am interested in this whole debate because I would like to get closer to the "truth". If quality/feeling/experience cannot be explained using relational descriptions then so be it. To me, that says something profound about the nature of reality. I don't want to be fooled by redefining quality as something it is not so that practical uses emerge from it. However if you accept this, investigating consciousness is still a worthwhile endevour because there are aspects of consciousness that are relational, for example, memory or learning. But here, you will only discover relational truths. I don't think you can say anything about qualitative truths by such means. The philosophical game at hand is how to account for one in terms of the other. I believe but cannot prove that it may be possible to define the foundation of reality as qualitative and then explain how quantitative reality emerges from that. After all, all knowledge of physical reality comes from experience.
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I'm interested in the same. We have different ways of approaching it, but I think our interests coincide, at least. I'm not entirely sure that we are re-defining quality to be something that it is not. We couldn't really define it before, so I'm not sure what it is in that system. I have a better "feel" for it as a feeling and I think we might be able to make head-way investigating what feelings are by examining nervous systems and how they function. We are at baby stages now, so I think it is premature to conclude that such investigations will be fruitless. We have no idea what kinds of information/relations can be accounted for by the ongoing loops of neuron communications. It is very clear that simple ways of seeing how neurons connect will get us nowhere, but that is not the whole story. It isn't even a tiny fraction of the story. Ultimately this is an entire body process.



I don't think you are addressing the issue. I was trying to pose a hypothetical scenario b) where there are physical process that are not ontologically equal to an experience in the sense of scenario a). Can I assume that you think scenario b) is actually possible ? Perhaps I could suggest a different example. What about a simple chemical reaction for b)? How do you account for the difference now?
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I thought I was closer to the issue with the second part of that post. I was simply trying to get across the problems of discussing the cerebellum in the first part. In scenario "b" there is a different sort of experience. The cerebellum is not the cerebrum. But that does not mean that there is no feeling involved in cerebellar processing. Different areas of the brain do different things, yes. In fact, that is one of the arguments against simplistic ways of viewing our mental lives -- that all of our mental life constitutes a "whole" with no "parts". If that were the case, it would be impossible for us to lop off various functions. But we can. As I think we all agree, if we change brain we change "mind". There is a clear relationship that is indisputable. The dispute concerns only the causal relation between the observed correlation. I don't pretend to know the precise causal relation. I am interested in how certain neural structures play into those observed correlations -- how the game is played, how the brain does it if it is the underlying cause. Whether or not that is only a correlation and not cuasation, so what? If we can do something to fix brain problems then we have something.

A simple chemical reaction can explain nothing. It is too simple for the complex issues accounting for our experiences. Whether or not neural activity can account for our experiences is, I think, still open for debate and not disproved. It may require radical reconceptualizations on all our parts and a huge amount of work, but the jury is still out on that one. When it comes to subjectivity -- as I tried to get Geoff to do -- there are several different issues in the definition of that word. We only started on trying to ge a handle on it before the discussion turned back into a pissing match and he wouldn't follow the line that we had started. I think one aspect of the problem is fairly easy -- the viewpoint issue -- since the experiencing occurs in our heads. That is a viewpoint in itself. We also know that no external description fully captures an action, so the action itself also provides a type of viewpoint. There are much harder issues about subjectivity, however, and I think it is worth looking into them to discover what we might or might not be able to discover by investigation, questioning our underlying assumptions, and questioning our very definitions.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I've never heard of absolute idealism. Where is the dualism in it? Is it different from ordinary old idealism?

~~ Paul
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Yes. And it's closely related to neutral monism, which is why neutral monism has a link at the bottom. I think the biggest problem is that he called it "idealism" at all. It is also not at all far from the more philosophical branches of Hinduism and Buddhism. And it is quite definately not dualistic. Where I say "Being", you might as well substitute "Absolute". It means pretty much the same thing. However, I'd also say that my position is not absolute idealism. There have been a number of developments since then, both in science and philosophy, which mean that whilst we need to keep some of Hegel's ideas, we also need to adapt them.
 
Jekyll said:
Surely there is. If the receptors in the eye, as a whole, respond in the same ways to a variety of inputs the cortex will not be able to distinguish between the different scenarios.

Or does your a priori not include knowledge of the mechanisms of the eye?

Start the new thread, this sounds interesting. :D
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Just briefly--the new thread will wait for a bit-- even with knowledge of the retina (because not all color processing occurs at the retinal level), what we have is

X and Y and Z stimuli (a single wavelength, say, and two different combinations of two or more wavelengths) are each called "red" by the viewer, despite their very different physical compositions. We know that they don't have to be responded to the same at the retinal level in order for them to have the same label. There are X, Y, and Z different signals coming out through the optic nerve. My point is that it remains, at this point in the process, an empirical question whether those three stimuli elicit activity in the same part of the brain, or whether three or more different areas (or combinations of areas) would each suffice in order to have the viewer say "that is red".

Don't worry--it's not a major point. It was merely a counter-assertion to the possibility of measuring brain activity as a definitive guide to what was seen. (Indeed, another counterexample can be seen in the difference between auditory nerve reading and behavioral measures in manatees, both attempting to find the limits of their hearing range. Turns out that the behavioral measures were more sensitive than actually reading the neural activity!)
 
davidsmith73 said:
Well yes. I can see it all the time. What do you mean by instance? Do you mean the experience or a definition of redness? If you mean the definition then I suppose not because a definition must be relational. The existential nature of the experience is something else. Lets say you inspect the contents of your experience. You notice that you are seeing a square of redness. If you focus on the physical dimensions of the square, you are no longer focussing on the qualitative nature of redness are you?
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I'll try to put it another way. I don't think any human being has ever experienced redness without any relational qualifiers attached. They always saw some degree, size, shape, shade, transparency and so on of redness.

What do you mean by "red" when you say splotch of red?
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Sorry if it sounds circular, but since we're playing here with the assumption that we can induce a splotch of red with an electrode then in that world, the best definition would be "that colour you see when your brain is zapped just there". In that world everyone would agree that this is the same colour as you see on Darat's red pieces of cardboard.

In what sense is it a linguistic distinction?
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Like I said, I don't think purely qualitative sense data, with no quantitative content, even exists. I'd welcome a counterexample. So talking about it as a seperate thing makes no sense, because we would be talking about something that does not exist, and any philosophical conclusions we come to would only apply to worlds where such things did exist.

Edited to remove redundant redundancy.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
I'll try to put it another way. I don't think any human being has ever experienced redness without any relational qualifiers attached. They always saw some degree, size, shape, shade, transparency and so on of redness.

Sorry if it sounds circular, but since we're playing here with the assumption that we can induce a splotch of red with an electrode then in that world, the best definition would be "that colour you see when your brain is zapped just there". In that world everyone would agree that this is the same colour as you see on Darat's red pieces of cardboard.
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I agree. Whatever red you have identified for you the first time, that is the thing you will identify with "red". You don't even need an electrode. You can often induce your eyes to record color simply by rubbing your eyeballs. Suppose there were a person who was blind because they had no pupils, but everything else about their eyes worked perfectly. They would still see red when they rubbed their eyeballs, but instead of calling it "apple red" they'd think of it as something like "eyeball-rubbing red" because that's what they'd associate it with. Yet the actual nerve signal of "red" sent to the brain would be about the same as the nerve signal sent to the brain of an eyeball-rubbing person who had perfectly functioning vision. It would not matter that the pupil-blinded person had never actually seen a red object.
 
I think I can add something here. Because of past conversation on the subject of red, I've spent some time trying to conjure up "redness" in my mind. I haven't been able to do a very good job. When I imagine red things, all I see is a shade of gray that I have tagged as "red." It feels red because I have many associations with it, such as the word red, tomatoes, blood, the American flag, etc. The same goes for other colors, too.

On the other hand, I believe I have dreamt in color. I also believe that actual redness has appeared in my mind when I haven't been trying to produce it on purpose.

This supports what Kevin and Tricky are saying.

~~ Paul
 
Tricky said:
Suppose there were a person who was blind because they had no pupils, but everything else about their eyes worked perfectly. They would still see red when they rubbed their eyeballs, but instead of calling it "apple red" they'd think of it as something like "eyeball-rubbing red" because that's what they'd associate it with. Yet the actual nerve signal of "red" sent to the brain would be about the same as the nerve signal sent to the brain of an eyeball-rubbing person who had perfectly functioning vision. It would not matter that the pupil-blinded person had never actually seen a red object.
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I think it may be trickier (:D) than this. It's possible that certain neural net training would not have occurred in the pupil-blind person, and so the signals reaching the visual cortex would not map to colors in any meaningful way. This is the same issue that occurs with Mary in the black & white room.

The question is: Do we learn to see color?

~~ Paul
 
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