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Materealism and morality

JetLeg said:
(And again-> I am not claiming that there is no causal link between the brain and the mind. The evidence shows that. What I am saying is because I don't understand _how_ the link proceeds from non private phenomena to private phenomena, I am ready to call it a cause, but not an "emergent property", I denounce the analogy of flight&running as the mind. )
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Well, I am willing to say that I don't understand the link between non-private and private either, except to say that "the nature of my existence seems to require privateness." But yes, I am willing to go along with you on the "I don't understand" part.

However, I can't follow you on the "I rule out emergent property" part. I don't understand how you can make any declarations of fact about something you don't understand.
 
L The Detective said:
Well, maybe you're right. However, it just occurs to me that "private" things apart from "experiences" can exist, so maybe it's more direct for you to simply talk about "experiences," rather than "privateness." Does "private" to you mean "we can't experience it," or "we can't know it?" If you mean "we can't experience it," then what you're really talking about is experiences, right? If you mean "we can't know it," then technically a P-Zombie's inner workings are private, because we can never know if it is a P-Zombie, so in that sense it has information that we can never know.

I mean, I agree with you that experiences are by their nature private, but is it really the "privateness" that is bothering you, and not the fact that you have experiences in the first place? Is it really just about the fact that you have information that others supposedly can't know?
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Again, I'm not fond of using the term "private" when we're talking about subjective experience because it leads to confusion like the last few exchanges on this page.

When JL says that a p-zombie is not private, what that really means is that there is no subjective experience. The only way we can know this from the outside is because it's stipulated as part of thought experiment.

One of my objections is that if you use "private" to mean that others can't know whether they can discern that subjective experience from the outside, then the p-zombie is indeed "private". That is, even if you stipulate that there is no subjective experience going on, we can't know that from the outside.

(In other words, if you reject correlations of various brain scans with self-reporting of subjective experience, then you've also got to reject any other way of fathoming whether or not someone has subjective experience. If you're going to play at solipsism, it's a problem for dualism at least as much as it is for neuroscience.)

Again--what if you use a vulcan mind-meld on a p-zombie and sensed a mind with subjective experience that you could share? The fact is, the person doing the probe still only has his own subjective experience and can't possibly know for certain that what he experienced is the same as what the person he melded with experienced.

In the real world. . .neuroscience has found undeniable evidence of the correlation between mind and brain activity and structures. At the very least, dualism is not necessary (that is, it's not parsimonious to create entities when there's no need to). At the worst, it's an idea that has exactly no empirical evidence to support it.
 
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L The Detective said:
However, I can't follow you on the "I rule out emergent property" part. I don't understand how you can make any declarations of fact about something you don't understand.
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Well said!

Yes, it's a big problem when JL makes pronouncements on what does and doesn't happen even though he has admitted to ignorance wrt much of biology and neuroscience in particular.

On the other thread he recently started, he said that there are no measurable changes in the brain caused by mental functioning, even though we've shown that in fact there are.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Again, I'm not fond of using the term "private" when we're talking about subjective experience because it leads to confusion like the last few exchanges on this page.
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Yeah yeah, I know. But I find the word "subjective" a bit confusing, too. It seems like a different thing to talk about subjective experiences, than it is to talk about subjective opinions.

JoeTheJuggler said:
When JL says that a p-zombie is not private, what that really means is that there is no subjective experience. The only way we can know this from the outside is because it's stipulated as part of thought experiment.
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Right. I just think that what we're really talking about here has more to do with the "experience" part than the "subjective" part. If we were all P-Zombies, then we'd all be talking about this, but none of us would be "experiencing" it. It's the fact that we are experiencing it which is the cause for these questions, not the fact that these experiences are by their nature subjective... right? Or maybe I'm just completely wrong.
 
L The Detective said:
Yeah yeah, I know. But I find the word "subjective" a bit confusing, too. It seems like a different thing to talk about subjective experiences, than it is to talk about subjective opinions.
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They're related.

I'd say use the typical model of communication. Person A has some idea in his mind. This idea itself is not accessible to someone else. So A encodes the idea in some form and puts it out in the environment in some way. Person B gets this signal (which might now be mixed with "noise" from the environment) and decodes it. He now has an idea in his mind.

The point is, B cannot know for sure that his idea is the equivalent of A's.

That stuff I used to wonder about as a kid--do other people see orange in the environment the same way I see orange?--addresses the same issue.

I understand how "privacy" overlaps this idea of subjectivity, but I think it adds another issue with the p-zombie stuff. Not only is the subjective experience private, but so is knowing whether or not the p-zombie even has subjective experience.



Right. I just think that what we're really talking about here has more to do with the "experience" part than the "subjective" part. If we were all P-Zombies, then we'd all be talking about this, but none of us would be "experiencing" it. It's the fact that we are experiencing it which is the cause for these questions, not the fact that these experiences are by their nature subjective... right? Or maybe I'm just completely wrong.
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I get what you mean. I think you're right that any "experience" implies "subjective experience". That's sort of what I asked about the planarian (either on this thread or the other recent JL thread). That it has eyespots and the neural hardware to process visual input and that it behaves as if it were aware of light, makes me think that the planarian has experience or subjective experience. Is that the same thing as "mind"? I think it depends on how many mental processes you require before something rises to the threshold of "mind". I have no problem assuming that many animals (other primates, for example) have minds and subjective experience. How far down the continuum that goes, I can't say. (I used to wonder what the "subjective experience" of one of those tiny insects you see flying in an endless spiral in the summer time might be like! Frankly, I can conceive of that--non-lingual awareness based on compound eyes and relatively little else--more readily than I can a disembodied mind.)
 
RandFan said:
More importantly, if we do posit a homunculus and Cartesian theater, it doesn't explain how the homunculus perceives. It's a recursive problem. That fact was the most important turning point in my abandoning dualism.
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And you've made a fine addition to our ranks. Your check's in the mail, by the way. ;)
 
RandFan said:
There was a time when it was believed that flight was "mystical". That's a very important point you need to keep reminding yourself. Flight was for a long time a great mystery. Many great minds could not solve it.

And Da Vinci tried to think what interactions between wing, wind and feathers would logically lead to flight and he couldn't do it.

I'll repeat my earlier contention, questions are never answers. That Da Vinci couldn't understand the dynamics of flight enough to explain flight didn't justify positing angels to lift birds into the air.

More importantly, if we do posit a homunculus and Cartesian theater, it doesn't explain how the homunculus perceives. It's a recursive problem. That fact was the most important turning point in my abandoning dualism.

I can't imagine how a spirit (soul) could lead to private phenomena and I doubt you can either. You are holding the non-physical explanation for private phenomena to a lower standard. That's not reasonable.
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My position is pretty subtle, look back through the pages if you want (the topic switched to the one we are discussing about page 3-4). (I am tired of this thread, sorry). I definitely don't posit anything magic/supernatural, and I don't think it is an implication/presupposition of my position.

Actually all I am saying is that the mind is caused by the brain, but it is not an emergent property, or a higher-view, or a proccess of it. Just an effect.
 
JetLeg said:
Actually all I am saying is that the mind is caused by the brain, but it is not an emergent property, or a higher-view, or a proccess of it. Just an effect.
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I'm not sure that what you're saying is actually meaningful. I'm reminded of a line from an old Woody Allen film -- "I'm not scared of death; I'm just frightened of it."
 
drkitten said:
I'm not sure that what you're saying is actually meaningful. I'm reminded of a line from an old Woody Allen film -- "I'm not scared of death; I'm just frightened of it."
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Well, when you clap your hands, is the sound that they make an emergent property? Is it a "higher-view" of the hands?



Doesn't the line say "I'm not scared of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens"?


By the way, is it possible to prolong a sound? Lets say that I want a sound not to fade for a very large time. Is there a way to do it? Is the only way an area that creates echo acoustics? Do you how much time can a sound persist in a surround with great echo?
 
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