My take on why indeed the study of consciousness may not be as simple

[Malerin]

Malerin:
Subjective experience as a necessary condition for any information violates the reductionism contained in physicalism/materialism.

If you think so then you probably don't understand Physicalism or Materialism or reductionism.

Possibly, I never took philo of mind. Can you give a reductionist example of some information that requires subjective experience to be understood? Information, for example, that an unconscious computer (or P-Zombie), no matter how advanced, could not possibly understand.

 

[Malerin]

1. A->B
2. B->(C->D)
3. (C->D)->(F->E)
4. F
5. G
6. ~E
7. ~ (F->E)
8. ~A

So this appears to be how your formalisation pans out to me, would you agree, Malerin?

I don't know. I haven't done a formal proof in 20 years. What I presented earlier was an informal argument, where I tried to make the premises and conclusion obvious. I'd forgotten formal arguments are expressed in symbolic logic.

 

[RandFan]

Do you believe mental states are identical to brain states? For example, would the mental state of Joe being in pain be identical to some physical brain state of Joe's?

I don't know. Mind is what the brain does. Flight is what planes do. I personally don't have enough to information to categorically state that mental states are identical to brain states. I know that for every mental state there is a corresponding brain state.

If not, then in what way is the mental state of pain different than the correpsonding brain state?

If there is a difference then A.) I don't know what it is. B.) I don't know if anyone knows.

If they are identical, do you agree we can gain knowledge of Joe's pain brain state without actually making our own brains match Joe's particular brain state (e.g., by running high-tech brain scans while Joe is in pain)? If we can gain knowledge of brain states without actually experiencing the brain state in question, and mental states are identical to brain states, then we can gain knowledge of mental states without experiencing the brain state in question.

We can gain knowledge. But that knowledge won't stimulate the area of the brain necessary to experiencing Joe's pain (see post #1455). IOW: Our knowledge will by necessity be incomplete.

 

[PixyMisa]

I would tend to agree, that is why I ultimately trust my senses. Especially when it comes to solidity although there is no justification to stop at the sense of touch.

Your senses are not reliable. Don't trust them.

Like Randfan, I think you are referring to the common sense proof of solidity and construing this as proof of a physical state/process.

Not even remotely. I merely offer it as a rule of thumb.

A physical process/state is very much dependent on the mind.

Not at all.

A rainbow being an obvious example.

Absurd. A rainbow is a straightforward physical phenomenon. Minds are irrelevant.

The fact that we can sense a rainbow does not make it a solid thing.

Whoever said that a rainbow was a "solid thing"?

There is no such thing as an unseen rainbow.

Sorry, but this is just drivel. A rainbow is defined by the physical processes involved, not by whether there is anyone there to see it.

However we do refer to rainbows in physics and have defined them conceptually.

Yeah, how about that.

I do not see the difference between a rainbow and a chair in this regards.

Neither do I.

 

[Robin]

I don't know. I haven't done a formal proof in 20 years. What I presented earlier was an informal argument, where I tried to make the premises and conclusion obvious. I'd forgotten formal arguments are expressed in symbolic logic.

Well you said it was a formal argument.

As I said, it does not matter if they are not expressed in symbols, as long as it could be expressed in symbols, ie the terminology is consistent throughout.

In any case, about premiss 6 - will Mary be surprised at the fact that red is different from anything she has hitherto experienced?

 

[PixyMisa]

Malerin:
Subjective experience as a necessary condition for any information violates the reductionism contained in physicalism/materialism.

Possibly, I never took philo of mind. Can you give a reductionist example of some information that requires subjective experience to be understood? Information, for example, that an unconscious computer (or P-Zombie), no matter how advanced, could not possibly understand.

First thing you have to remember is that the subjective is a subset of the objective, not something distinct and separate.

Let's say I have a computer program and I want it to print out details of its internal state when it receives a specific command. That information is the subjective experience of the program. To print it, the program requires access to that subjective experience, i.e. it must be conscious (at least part of the time).

And that's it. That's all there is to consciousness.

 

[Malerin]

Well you said it was a formal argument.

As I said, it does not matter if they are not expressed in symbols, as long as it could be expressed in symbols, ie the terminology is consistent throughout.

In any case, about premiss 6 - will Mary be surprised at the fact that red is different from anything she has hitherto experienced?

Yes, I believe Mary will be very surprised.

 

[Robin]

Can you give a reductionist example of some information that requires subjective experience to be understood? Information, for example, that an unconscious computer (or P-Zombie), no matter how advanced, could not possibly understand.

I don't understand the question. What is a "reductionist example of some information"?

Do you mean something like "how a peach tastes"?

 

[yy2bggggs]

Do you believe mental states are identical to brain states? For example, would the mental state of Joe being in pain be identical to some physical brain state of Joe's?

What's more relevant is that physicalism would assert this. Whether or not any particular person believes it isn't so relevant--so long as this is your argument against physicalism.

If they are identical, do you agree we can gain knowledge of Joe's pain brain state without actually making our own brains match Joe's particular brain state (e.g., by running high-tech brain scans while Joe is in pain)?

Under physicalism, yes. But don't confuse knowledge about a thing with the thing in itself.

If we can gain knowledge of brain states without actually experiecing the brain state in question, and mental states are identical to brain states, then we can gain knowledge of mental states without experiencing the brain state in question.

But what you are trying to show is that there is a non-physical difference between Mary experiencing red and Mary not experiencing red. To show this, you need to have a Mary that experiences red, and one that doesn't, and you need to show that these distinct states are physically indistinguishable.

But if S₁ is the brain state associated with seeing red, then by preventing Mary from seeing red, you're keeping Mary from ever having this brain state. In your attempt to make Mary physically indistinguishable though, you have Mary learn "everything" there is to know about seeing red, but you restrict her from actually doing so. But don't confuse knowledge about a thing with the thing in itself. When Mary learns about seeing red in this sense, her brain hasn't actually been put into S₁--it's a different state, S₂. No matter how much more theoretical knowledge you cram in, with the restriction that Mary never actually see red, you're not going to have a Mary with the actual brain state of S₁--you're only going to refine S₂.

This is because, under physicalism, Mary doesn't have brain state S₁ unless she experiences red--and Mary doesn't experience red unless she has brain state S₁.

So long as S₁ never occurs, S₁ never occurred. So whenever you're ready to actually introduce this new mental state of seeing red, you're going to necessarily create a new brain state--S₁.

In doing so, your Mary-that-sees-red is physically distinguishable from Mary-that-doesn't-see-red.

But you seem to smell this already, even though you haven't connected it all of the way yet. Your mind-wipe scenario dances around this by having Mary actually have S₁, but forget about it. That's fine, but here you're focusing on memory rather than active experience, and it's the same problem over again. You now have a class of Mary's that is R₁--Mary's that remember seeing red. But you knock Mary's brain out of this state with the mind-wipe. So now her brain is in a different class of states--R₂. Then you introduce Mary to red, and (in this case) you remove the red stimulus. Now Mary's back into the R₁ class of brain states. No problem--there's still a physical distinction.

Furthermore, consider the doppleganger-Mary in my previous example. That Mary was arbitrarily put into brain state R₁ without ever having brain state S₁. But the alleged absurdity boils away with this--this Mary thinks she has seen red before, even if she didn't, because she had a false memory of her being in brain state S₁ implanted into her head.

The common denominator in all of these cases is that you're creating what you believe to be a mental distinction, and are just saying that there's no physical distinction. The obvious counter is simply physicalism taken seriously in the first place--if you have your mental distinction, there would be a corresponding physical one.

 

[Robin]

Well you said it was a formal argument.

As I said, it does not matter if they are not expressed in symbols, as long as it could be expressed in symbols, ie the terminology is consistent throughout.

In any case, about premiss 6 - will Mary be surprised at the fact that red is different from anything she has hitherto experienced?

Yes, I believe Mary will be very surprised.

Very suprised at the fact that she experiences something new when she experiences colour?

That is a novel take on the argument, I have not come across that one before.

So in other words you are saying that Mary is not even aware that there is a mental state of seeing red, that she believes it to be no different to seeing grey.

In other words that Mary does not know she is in the B&W room.

Or that Mary, knowing everything about colour vision, would predict that people could not tell a black and white television set from a colour one.

 

[PixyMisa]

But there are two significant transformations here, not one. And surrounding them, there are three different Mary's, not two.

Mary₁ is ignorant of color.
Transformation₁₂ has Mary₁ learn everything there is to learn about color, with a restriction.
Mary₂ has "complete" physical knowledge.
Transformation₂₃ releases the restriction, and has Mary₂ see red.
Mary₃ knows more than Mary₂.

What you are doing, which is legitimate, is assuming that Mary₂ really does have complete knowledge, and arguing that Mary₃ shouldn't be learning anything new.

Right.

What I'm doing is assuming that the transformation₁₂ really does restrict Mary's brain from seeing red, and showing that Mary₂ doesn't have complete knowledge.

Right.

In particular, the restriction has a meta-level to it. Mary₂ is learning about things without actually doing them (that's the restriction). She's a cognitive scientist, so she is learning, in transformation₁₂, what a brain does when it is exposed to color. But learning what a brain does when it is exposed to color isn't the same thing as having your brain do that thing.

It can be, at least in principle. The same is not true, even in principle, for flight, which is why it's a bad analogy.

In transformation₂₃, the new thing Mary learns is a result of her brain actually doing that thing. This is different from her learning what a brain does when it does that thing in the same way that you flying is different than your learning what happens to a person that flies.

No. The brain can produce a subjective experience that matches what would result from a particular objective experience without ever undergoing that objective experience.

That's not true in any sense for flight.

While it certainly bears repeating that the premise of Mary's Room is a physical impossibility, the analogy is still no good.

 

[PixyMisa]

Yes, I believe Mary will be very surprised.

Why?

Remember that granted the premise - Mary knows everything there is to know about the physical process of perceiving colour - Mary is no longer even human. She's some sort of superintelligent infallible robot.

Why would she be surprised at seeing colour, when you have already stipulated that she knows everything about seeing colour?

 

[yy2bggggs]

No. The brain can produce a subjective experience that matches what would result from a particular objective experience without ever undergoing that objective experience.

Sure, but not under the imagined rules used to draw the conclusion in the thought experiment. There's a pretty clear divide in those rules between theoretical knowledge and experiential knowledge--in fact, the argument not only relies on this difference, but uses it in the setup. And per the rules, you should necessarily be able to gain experiential knowledge (or at least everything "physical" about said knowledge) by getting a complete enough set of theoretical knowledge--if those aren't the rules, the argument fails to establish anything (without experimental support, which it doesn't purport to use).

ETA: Which gets back to what I said earlier--you're merely starting at a different place.

 

[PixyMisa]

Sure, but not under the imagined rules used to draw the conclusion in the thought experiment.

The argument is inconsistent in that respect.

There's a pretty clear divide in those rules between theoretical knowledge and experiential knowledge--in fact, the argument not only relies on this difference, but uses it in the setup.

No such divide exists in principle. There is a divide in practice. The argument conflates principle and practice, hence the inconsistency.

And per the rules, you should necessarily be able to gain experiential knowledge (or at least everything "physical" about said knowledge) by getting a complete enough set of theoretical knowledge--if those aren't the rules, the argument fails to establish anything (without experimental support, which it doesn't purport to use).

Sure. So by knowing everything it is possible to know about flying, you would have the experience of flying. But you wouldn't actually fly.

It is perfectly possible to experience flying without physically flying, and that is precisely what would happen. (Notwithstanding that the argument postulates a physical impossibility in the "know everything there is to know".)

ETA: Which gets back to what I said earlier--you're merely starting at a different place.

No, that's only part of it. Your analogy doesn't work regardless.

 

[Robin]

Since Malerin is equating reductionism with Materialism and Physicalism, maybe we can have a quick quiz question:

Name the philosopher who introduced the concept of reductionism (not necessarily the term) and the work in which it was introduced​

Anyone can play. UndercoverElephant if you are still around.

 

[Robin]

Why?

Remember that granted the premise - Mary knows everything there is to know about the physical process of perceiving colour - Mary is no longer even human. She's some sort of superintelligent infallible robot.

Why would she be surprised at seeing colour, when you have already stipulated that she knows everything about seeing colour?

But even if she were just a normal human with a lot of knowledge in the subject she would still be expecting a new experience.

It would be absurd to say she understood anything at all about colour vision and was not expecting a new experience.

 

[PixyMisa]

Well, yes, that too.

 

[Malerin]

Very suprised at the fact that she experiences something new when she experiences colour?

No, not surprised that the experience "seeing red" is real. She already knew that was real from studying the physical process of seeing colors. Her surprise would be one of "Wow, I knew people could do this, but I had no idea it was like this". Perhaps "astonished" or "amazed" would be a better word, but surprise fits- she finds herself experiencing something she knew was possible, but had never experienced before.

How do you think she would react upon being shown a red object for the first time?

 

[Robin]

No, not surprised that the experience "seeing red" is real. She already knew that was real from studying the physical process of seeing colors. Her surprise would be one of "Wow, I knew people could do this, but I had no idea it was like this".

But she already knew that she had no idea what it was like.

Here is the premiss in question:

6. Mary learns of a new mental state associated with perceving red.​

Which is incorrect since we have established that she already knew of the mental state, she just hadn't experienced it yet.

BTW do you have any guesses about the reductionism question?

 

[Robin]

Since Malerin is equating reductionism with Materialism and Physicalism, maybe we can have a quick quiz question:

Name the philosopher who introduced the concept of reductionism (not necessarily the term) and the work in which it was introduced​

Anyone can play. UndercoverElephant if you are still around.

For reference, let me give a definition from WVO Quine:

reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience​

Reductionism in Materialism is quite similar, referring to the ways in which scientific theories can be demonstrated equivalent by trans-theoretic identities.