How do we know that places like Narnia do not exist?

[Correa Neto]

Well, to be pedantic X could be non-physical, be created by the physical, yet continue to exist without the physical.

But it is certainly possible for something to be non-physical, yet be wholly ontologically dependent on the physical for its existence, yes.

As qualia, for example?

 

[Belz...]

A physical process is a physical chain of cause and effect. Consciousness amounts to more than a chain of cause and effect eg when I get up to get a pint of blackcurrent squash there is, in addition to my behaviour and processes occurring in my brain etc, a feeling of thirst.

It doesn't follow that it's not a physical process just because you feel something. You're just giving way to much credit to your perceptions.

As I keep saying, simply because the physical generates X, this does not entail that X is physical.

Can you name one example ? And, if so, what do you mean by physical ?

As far as I'm concerned anything and everything composed of particles is, by definition, physical. How can a physical object generate something that is NOT a physical object ?

If God as an infinite consciousness created (i.e brought into being) the Universe, would it entail the Universe is consciousness?

I'm not sure this makes sense, as the words "god", "infinite" and "consciousness" are murky at best in this context.

I'll be explaining all this on my forthcoming website. Stay tuned.

Would you please not say this in every single post ?

I don't understand why it isn't dualism. In fact any non-reductive materialist position seems to entail epiphenomenalism so far as I am able to understand these things. But epiphenomenalism is incoherent because we know with certainty that we must have free will.

Are you saying that we have free will ? You mean actual free will ? Unless you posit some spiritual element, I don't see how this is possible.

Science only provides information. The "substance" of the world seems be be provided by our perceptual qualia, but my raw experience of greenness, or the smell of a fart etc, doesn't appear to be able to be derived from information.

Doesn't "appear" ? To whom ? From THIS poster's point of view, it DOES.

Note the scientific story is all about information including all the activity in ones brain. But the actual raw experience of greenness -- which the physical activity terminates in -- does not seem to be.

That's nonsensical. Obviously, although the colour "green" does not exist per se, the experience of it does.

I refer you to waht is known as "the knowledge argument" i.e the argument that qualia cannot be derived from information by considering a neuroscientist (mary) who has been brought up in a black and white room the entirety of her life and who knows absolutely everthing about colour vision. Yet it is argued she would not know what it is like to experience greenness, and on her first time ever of going out of the room, only then would she know what it is like to experience greenness (or any other colour).

What the HELL are you saying ? What is this story ?

Thus materialism is refuted.

Hmf... hp... ha....Haah....HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

Ah! Thanks, man. Good stuff.

 

[Interesting Ian]

As qualia, for example?

It's certainly possible yes.

 

[Correa Neto]

It's certainly possible yes.

So, if qualia may be created by and completely dependent from physical processes, terminating when these processes end, how can they be so important for dualisms and other -isms?

Unless, of course, one could somehow prove they continue to exist after the end of the processes that created them, it would be a different matter (pun intended). Any lines of reasoning on this path?

 

[MRC_Hans]

Now we get to the vexed problem of what is meant by "physical". Is what I directly experience physical? Or is the physical simply information and nothing more? But then what about the substantiality of the world??

No, the physical is physical. It consists of some combination of matter and energy, within time-space. It contains information, but information is an abstract concept (except in information theory, where is is a very concise, but not necessarily useful concept).

Science only provides information.

Correct. Information about the physical.

The "substance" of the world seems be be provided by our perceptual qualia, but my raw experience of greenness, or the smell of a fart etc, doesn't appear to be able to be derived from information.

Yes, it does. It is exactly that: Information.

Thus we have a certain wavelength of electromagnetic light being reflected from an object, entering our eyes, initiating certain appropriate physical activitiy in the brain, then eventually I experience seeing greenness.

No, what you describe is the perception. The qualia is the experience; the placing of the perception in a class of similar perceptions, which you happen to call green.

Note the scientific story is all about information including all the activity in ones brain. But the actual raw experience of greenness -- which the physical activity terminates in -- does not seem to be.

Why not?

I refer you to waht is known as "the knowledge argument" i.e the argument that qualia cannot be derived from information by considering a neuroscientist (mary) who has been brought up in a black and white room the entirety of her life and who knows absolutely everthing about colour vision. Yet it is argued she would not know what it is like to experience greenness, and on her first time ever of going out of the room, only then would she know what it is like to experience greenness (or any other colour).

Only then does she aquire the experience. Only then is the actual effect of the sensory input recorded in her memeory. Only then does the information she has about color attain meaning (= a reference frame to the actual world).

Thus materialism is refuted.

Quite the contrary; thus materialism is confirmed: If materialism was not true, the actual perception would not be needed to give the information about color vision meaning.

Hans

 

[aggle-rithm]

As I keep saying, simply because the physical generates X, this does not entail that X is physical.

If God as an infinite consciousness created (i.e brought into being) the Universe, would it entail the Universe is consciousness?

I'll be explaining all this on my forthcoming website. Stay tuned.

If a man built a doghouse, would it entail the doghouse is a man?

No, but it IS physical. As is anything else the man builds and/or interacts with.

You can say I'm missing the point, but that would entail the existence of a point.

PS, looking forward to your website. Seriously.

 

[PixyMisa]

I refer you to waht is known as "the knowledge argument" i.e the argument that qualia cannot be derived from information by considering a neuroscientist (mary) who has been brought up in a black and white room the entirety of her life and who knows absolutely everthing about colour vision. Yet it is argued she would not know what it is like to experience greenness, and on her first time ever of going out of the room, only then would she know what it is like to experience greenness (or any other colour). Thus materialism is refuted.

When you see the demon, boys and girls, I want you to jump out and yell "DEMON!"

Can you do that?

It's not immediately obvious, given Ian's statement of the "knowledge argument", so I'll fill in the gaps. Mary has lived all her life in a black and white environment, but has studied physics and chemistry and biology and neuroscience and psychology until she knows everything there is to know about colour.

Fine, for a thought experiment.

However, although she knows everything there is to know about colour (from a materialist perspective), the first time she sees a red rose (or a green rose, from Ian's perspective), she is astonished because she has never known the experience of seeing colour before. Even though she knew everything there is to know about colour.

This is the point where you all yell DEMON!

If she knows everything there is to know about colour, then she knows what it is like to experience seeing colour. If she doesn't know what it's like to experience seeing colour, she doesn't know everything there is to know about colour.

Yes, it's those pesky immaterial-by-definition quales again.

 

[Tricky]

When you see the demon, boys and girls, I want you to jump out and yell "DEMON!"

Can you do that?

It's not immediately obvious, given Ian's statement of the "knowledge argument", so I'll fill in the gaps. Mary has lived all her life in a black and white environment, but has studied physics and chemistry and biology and neuroscience and psychology until she knows everything there is to know about colour.

Fine, for a thought experiment.

However, although she knows everything there is to know about colour (from a materialist perspective), the first time she sees a red rose (or a green rose, from Ian's perspective), she is astonished because she has never known the experience of seeing colour before. Even though she knew everything there is to know about colour.

This is the point where you all yell DEMON!

If she knows everything there is to know about colour, then she knows what it is like to experience seeing colour. If she doesn't know what it's like to experience seeing colour, she doesn't know everything there is to know about colour.

Yes, it's those pesky immaterial-by-definition quales again.

Excellent! Here's your lizard.

 

[69dodge]

Mary has lived all her life in a black and white environment, but has studied physics and chemistry and biology and neuroscience and psychology until she knows everything there is to know about colour. [...] [But i]f she doesn't know what it's like to experience seeing colour, she doesn't know everything there is to know about colour.

Right. But she knows everything that those sciences say about the physical brain processes that supposedly "are" the seeing of color. So, if there's something else to know about color, then apparently those physical brain processes "aren't" the seeing of color. Or else those sciences are incomplete.

What would a complete science of seeing color be like? Could it possibly be explained in a black-and-white textbook? Other sciences can be.

 

[PixyMisa]

What would a complete science of seeing color be like? Could it possibly be explained in a black-and-white textbook? Other sciences can be.

If materialism is true, a complete science of seeing colour would explain the nature of the experience of seeing colour. And yes, it could be explained in a black-and-white textbook.

 

[Tricky]

What would a complete science of seeing color be like? Could it possibly be explained in a black-and-white textbook? Other sciences can be.

I don't think that is true. In biology, for example, you can't perfectly describe an organism with a black-and-white picture, or any number of words.

 

[PixyMisa]

I don't think that is true. In biology, for example, you can't perfectly describe an organism with a black-and-white picture, or any number of words.

Well, I think he was just trying to avoid circularity; you can use colour in a biology textbook (you don't have to, but it's by far the easiest way of providing the information), but if you have to use colour in the Big Book of Everything There Is To know About Colour to explain the concept of colour, then it doesn't work terribly well. But since you don't, this isn't a problem.

 

[69dodge]

A biology textbook can describe in black and white everything there is to describe about an organism. It can't describe in black and white how the organism looks to us, but how it looks to us is not really something about the organism per se but rather about our experience of seeing it.

Which gets us back to the question of whether there can be a textbook about the science of seeing color that doesn't, in the end, have to contain a green-colored page and simply say, "See that? That's green."

PixyMisa says there can be. I don't see how. But ok, let me ask this: Do you think the science described in such a textbook could be pretty close to our current theories, just with more details about the structure and functioning of the brain than we know now? Or will it need to contain some fundamentally new principles?

I really can't imagine someone who hasn't ever seen red or green for herself being able to tell you which was which on seeing them for the first time in her life, even after reading as detailed a black-and-white science book as could be desired.

Here's an excerpt from the Feynman Lectures on Physics that seems relevant (volume 2, page 20-11):

While I'm on this subject [imagination in science --69dodge] I want to talk about whether it will ever be possible to imagine beauty that we can't see. It is an interesting question. When we look at a rainbow, it looks beautiful to us. Everybody says, "Ooh, a rainbow." (You see how scientific I am. I am afraid to say something is beautiful unless I have an experimental way of defining it.) But how would we describe a rainbow if we were blind? We are blind when we measure the infrared reflection coefficient of sodium chloride, or when we talk about the frequency of the waves that are coming from some galaxy that we can't see---we make a diagram, we make a plot. For instance, for the rainbow, such a plot would be the intensity of radiation vs. wavelength measured with a spectrophotometer for each direction in the sky. Generally, such measurements would give a curve that was rather flat. Then some day, someone would discover that for certain conditions of the weather, and at certain angles in the sky, the spectrum of intensity as a function of wavelength would behave strangely; it would have a bump. As the angle of the instrument was varied only a little bit, the maximum of the bump would move from one wavelength to another. Then one day the physical review of the blind men [sic; I assume he means "Physical Review of the blind men," i.e., the journal --69dodge] might publish a technical article with the title "The Intensity of Radiation as a Function of Angle under Certain Conditions of the Weather." In this article there might appear a graph such as the one in Fig. 20-5. The author would perhaps remark that at the larger angles there was more radiation at long wavelengths, whereas for the smaller angles the maximum in the radiation came at shorter wavelengths. (From our point of view, we would say that the light at 40 degrees is predominantly green and the light at 42 degrees is predominantly red.)

[Fig. 20-5. The intensity of electromagnetic waves as a function of wavelength for three angles (measured from the direction opposite the sun), observed only with certain meteorological conditions.]

Now do we find the graph of Fig. 20-5 beautiful? It contains much more detail than we apprehend when we look at a rainbow, because our eyes cannot see the exact details in the shape of a spectrum. The eye, however, finds the rainbow beautiful. Do we have enough imagination to see in the spectral curves the same beauty we see when we look directly at the rainbow? I don't know.

But suppose I have a graph of the reflection coefficient of a sodium chloride crystal as a function of wavelength in the infrared, and also as a function of angle. I would have a representation of how it would look to my eyes if they could see in the infrared---pehaps some glowing, shiny "green," mixed with reflections from the surface in a "metallic red." That would be a beautiful thing, but I don't know whether I can ever look at a graph of the reflection coefficient of NaCl measured with some instrument and say that it has the same beauty.

 

[PixyMisa]

Which gets us back to the question of whether there can be a textbook about the science of seeing color that doesn't, in the end, have to contain a green-colored page and simply say, "See that? That's green."

PixyMisa says there can be. I don't see how. But ok, let me ask this: Do you think the science described in such a textbook could be pretty close to our current theories, just with more details about the structure and functioning of the brain than we know now? Or will it need to contain some fundamentally new principles?

No new principles. Just vastly more detail, in both theory and information. It would be utterly impractical; no-one could ever learn it all.

I really can't imagine someone who hasn't ever seen red or green for herself being able to tell you which was which on seeing them for the first time in her life, even after reading as detailed a black-and-white science book as could be desired.

What if I said that the book was thirty billion pages long? And that you would have to have a cell-level brain scan done, and then spend a century doing calculations on a supercomputer, followed by three hundred years of additional study before you understood what the experience of seeing red felt like?

The point is not that it is something that can realistically be achieved; the point is that if Mary knows everything there is to know about colour under materialism, then one of the things she knows is how it feels to experience seeing a particular colour. You can't get from there to a falsification of materialism, because the so-called quale of redness is, under materialism, just another part of that "everything there is to know".

Saying that this quale is not part of the materialist "everything there is to know about colour" is to define qualia as immaterial, which invalidates the argumentum ad absurdum. You can't get away from Berkeley's Demon. In any thought experiment that seeks to falsify materialism, there he is, laughing at you.

 

[69dodge]

What if I said that the book was thirty billion pages long? And that you would have to have a cell-level brain scan done, and then spend a century doing calculations on a supercomputer, followed by three hundred years of additional study before you understood what the experience of seeing red felt like?

I still don't see it. A long calculation involves more numbers than a short calculation, but it's still just numbers. How seeing green could emerge from numbers---even lots and lots of numbers---is beyond me.

The point is not that it is something that can realistically be achieved; the point is that if Mary knows everything there is to know about colour under materialism, then one of the things she knows is how it feels to experience seeing a particular colour. You can't get from there to a falsification of materialism, because the so-called quale of redness is, under materialism, just another part of that "everything there is to know".

Saying that this quale is not part of the materialist "everything there is to know about colour" is to define qualia as immaterial, which invalidates the argumentum ad absurdum.

I understand what you're saying, I think, but defining qualia as material is no better than defining them as immaterial, really. It's just assuming what you want to prove. It doesn't help us understand anything.

Fine, let's say that the story about Mary in the black and white room doesn't prove that I couldn't learn from a book what seeing green is like. Why should I believe that in principle I could, if I can't imagine how I could? Since in practice I can't learn it from a book, are we actually disagreeing about anything?

 

[PixyMisa]

I still don't see it. A long calculation involves more numbers than a short calculation, but it's still just numbers. How seeing green could emerge from numbers---even lots and lots of numbers---is beyond me.

Yes, but that's just because you haven't read the book. It describes how to consciously transform existing mental states into other mental states, based on detailed knowledge of an individual's brain function. If you start by looking a black square on a white background and precisely follow this series of steps, you end up with a mental image of a green square on a red background, even if you have never seend red or green in your life.

Or maybe not. I don't know. It's only necessarily possible in materialism, not in the real world, which is far more limiting.

I understand what you're saying, I think, but defining qualia as material is no better than defining them as immaterial, really. It's just assuming what you want to prove. It doesn't help us understand anything.

Sure. I've said a number of times that the concept of qualia is unnecessary at best at incoherent at worst. My only point here is that you can't falsify materialism like that. It just doesn't work. If you think you've succeeded, you've missed spotting the Demon.

Fine, let's say that the story about Mary in the black and white room doesn't prove that I couldn't learn from a book what seeing green is like.

Right. It assumes its conclusion, and so doesn't prove anything at all.

Why should I believe that in principle I could, if I can't imagine how I could?

Because if materialism is true, all mental states reduce to brain states. All you need to do is recreate the appropriate parts of the brain state. The Big Book of Everything There Is To Know About Colour explains how to do this.

Since in practice I can't learn it from a book, are we actually disagreeing about anything?

Well, what's essential here is that the Knowledge Argument is worthless. If you got that point, the fact that you consider the Big Book to be impossible doesn't matter. For any practical considerations, I agree with you. But the Knowledge Argument assumes the existence of the Big Book, so it has to deal with the consequences - which it does not do.

 

[Wheezebucket]

I'll only agree to move to Narnia if I can be one of those talking animals. Preferably one of the wolves with New York accents.

 

[Taffer]

Do we have some scientific theory that is able to predict which subjective experience results from which brain processes?

Yes.

 

[Taffer]

A physical process is a physical chain of cause and effect. Consciousness amounts to more than a chain of cause and effect eg when I get up to get a pint of blackcurrent squash there is, in addition to my behaviour and processes occurring in my brain etc, a feeling of thirst.

So what on earth are people talking about??

Ghost in the machine.

 

[Taffer]

It bothers me to say that consciousness is a bunch of brain processes. I'd rather say that consciousness is a name given to the experiential results of a bunch of brain processes. However, that sounds rather dualistic and thus misleading.

But now I feel as a nit picker wandering in a field of nits, so I shall shut the hell up.

~~ Paul

I hear you, Paul. Perhaps it would be better to say that consciousness is the interpretation by the brain of physical processes within other parts of the brain? Just like the colour purple is the brain's interpretation of a specific wavelength.