Materialists......

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I guess so. Delusion is just a severe version of an incorrect belief. A zombie is like an android. If you had an android fitted with two front-mounted cameras for eyes, you could probably create some sort of visual illusion which was capable of fooling the android into believing it was looking at something which it wasn't actually looking at. Put it into, say, a flight simulator, and ask it where it is and it will tell you it is sitting in the cockpit of a 747, 10 miles above London. That sounds very much like it is deluded, regardless of the fact that it is entirely without a mind.

And the same can probably be said for every other aspect of inner experience. What exactly does that leave for "mind" to do?

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Occam makes short work of this.

Only if you're willing to lump absolutely everything into either "physical" or "mind," without any justification whatsoever for doing so.

~~ Paul

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Highlights of the Nagel paper

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving.pdf

Intuitions based on the first-person perspective can easily mislead us about what is and is not conceivable. This point is usually made in support of familiar reductionist positions on the mind-body problem, but I believe it can be detached from that approach. It seems to me that the powerful appearance of contingency in the relation between the functioning of the physical organism and the conscious mind -- an appearance that depends directly or indirectly on the firstperson perspective -- must be an illusion. But the denial of this contingency should not take theform of a reductionist account of consciousness of the usual type, whereby the logical gap between the mental and the physical is closed by conceptual analysis -- in effect, by analyzing the mental in terms of the physical (however elaborately this is done -- and I count functionalism as such a theory, along with the topic-neutral causal role analyses of mental concepts from which it descends).

In other words, I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won_t go through my reasons
for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails -- simply in virtue of our mental concepts -- that the system is conscious.

So I want to propose an alternative. In our present situation, when no one has a plausible answer to the mind-body problem, all we can really do is to try to develop various alternatives one of which may prove in the long run to be an ancestor of a credible solution. This is a plea for the project of searching for a solution that takes conscious points of view as logically irreducible to, but nevertheless necessarily connected with, the physical properties of the organisms whose points of view they are. Consciousness should be recognized as a conceptually irreducible aspect of reality that is necessarily connected with other equally irreducible aspects -- as electromagnetic fields are irreducible to but necessarily connected with the behavior of charged particles and gravitational fields with the behavior of masses, and vice versa. But the task of conceiving how a necessary connection might hold between the subjective and the physical cannot be accomplished by applying analogies from within physical science. This is a new ballgame. Yet I believe it is not irrational to hope that some day, long after we are all dead, people will be able to observe the operation of the brain and say, with true understanding, "That's what the experience of tasting chocolate looks like from the outside."

--------------------

My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible
conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed.

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The causal argument for identification may make us believe that it is true, but it doesn't help us to understand it, and in my view, we really shouldn't believe it unless we can understand it.

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We do not at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective and physical features could both be essential aspects of a single entity or process.

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This does seem to call for some revision in our way of conceiving of mind, or matter, or both. The difficulty is to do this without denying what is in front of your nose. What we need is not a reductionist or eliminative revision but an expansionist one.

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We cannot regard pure supervenience as the end of the story because that would require the physical to necessitate the mental without there being any answer to the question how it does so. But there must be a how, and our task is to understand it.

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There is no hidden verbal contradiction in the description of a zombie -- even if in reality a zombie is logically impossible.

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Obviously we cannot will a new conceptual framework into existence. It has to result from trying to think, in light of the evidence, about the subject we want to understand, and devising concepts that do better justice to it than the ones we have. Considered as a form of revisionism rather than analysis, the physicalist-functionalist movement in philosophy of mind might be thought to have had a similar aim, but I believe it has failed because it is too conservative: It has tried to reinterpret mental concepts so as to make them tractable parts of the framework of physical science. What is needed instead is a search for something more unfamiliar, something which starts from the conceptual unintelligibility, in its present form, of the subjective-objective link.

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What will be the point of view, so to speak, of such a theory? If we could arrive at it, it would render transparent the relation between mental and physical, not directly, but through the transparency of their common relation to something that is not merely either of them.

-------------------------

To summarize: The conjecture is essentially this: that even though no transparent and direct explanatory connection is possible between the physiological and the phenomenological, but only an empirically established extensional correlation, we may hope and ought to try as part of a scientific theory of mind to form a third conception that does directly entail both the mental and the physical, and through which their actual necessary connection with one another can therefore become transparent to us. Such a conception will have to be created; we won't just find it lying around.

 

[Mercutio]

Not this many: **
Not this many: ***
This many:*

Thank you for repeating the part that was insufficient last time.

That sounds like a credible explanation.

That is not what I asked. I asked what you meant by it. Of course it sounds credible; sadly, not all things that sound credible are.

That would also be a credible explanation, and does not contradict the first one.

No. See, this one is not credible, although it may very well sound credible. This one is falsifiable, and indeed has been falsified by experimental and clinical work. The "unity of experience" is an illusion; we report being aware of far more than we actually are aware of. We regularly are not conscious of things that influence our actions. We may damage one part of a multiple-processing system and lose one aspect of an experience we would have sworn was a singly processed phenomenon.

You could, if you wanted, take this "perceived self" as bedrock, essentially denying the multiple processing as artificial, latching onto "but it is still "me" who is perceiving this multiply processed consciousness"...in essence, that is what Interesting Ian did, sometimes quite well. But of course, that is a denial without teeth; there is no reason to suspect that the "me" who perceives this multiply processed consciousness is itself unitary at all, and every reason to suspect otherwise.

No. Even if I was called a different name by everyone person I met, I would be no closer to having two fleeting jumbles.

The "different name" bit is trivial, compared with how everything in your environment has treated you as a unitary thing. This is essentially the first option rephrased. (BTW, since you have not been raised with the experience of having been treated differently by each person, I am not certain we can trust your testimony as to what you "would be" experiencing. The experience of being you is inextricably tied to your personal history; if it had been absolutely inconsistent, random...how do you learn a language at all, let alone the other things that make up who you are?)


Please try again. Why do you say there is only one jumble? Your own reasons, please, not your comments on the reasons I advanced as possible reasons you might have said it. I am losing hope here that your comment was meaningful.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Pretty hard to do, when you insist that your definitions are the only ones that can stand.....

Well you are welcome to try to prove that I'm wrong......

Your understanding on eliminative materialism has been challenged several times in this thread alone.....

Only by people who don't understand it at all.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Oh, oh, let me try.

Mind: An ancient and flawed concept created to explain how people are capable of experience, and developed by people that lacked both the base knowledge and the tools to gather the appropriate information to adequetly define such a concept. The term, however, has persisted despite its flaws. It is now used in the realm of science as a convenient way to refer to how the brain processes and perceived signals from a variety of sensory organs and its own internal processes, and in the realm of philosophy it is used as a convenient means for deploying the equivocation fallacy to sustain an argument for no apparent reason.

This is eliminativism. You are claiming the word "mind" doesn't really mean anything and that it is a mere placeholder for "brain processes". There is no logical case against eliminativism. It's just silly, IMO, that's all.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Or it's a definition that makes mind equivalent to something physical.

~~ Paul

Then just call it "something physical" and stop using silly woo-woo terms like "mind".

 

[UndercoverElephant]

And the same can probably be said for every other aspect of inner experience. What exactly does that leave for "mind" to do?

~~ Paul

Be.

 

[Mercutio]

It's just silly, IMO, that's all.

Does it count as an argument if I say that "neutral monism" is silly?

Not saying that, just asking. Don't I have to give reasons why I think it is silly, and why another option is less silly? You say there are no logical arguments against eliminative materialism (or eliminative idealism, for that matter, I would think)...why, then, "silly"?

 

[Mercutio]

Be.

Do? Be. Do? Be. Do?


At least it made sense when Sinatra said it.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Only if you're willing to lump absolutely everything into either "physical" or "mind," without any justification whatsoever for doing so.

~~ Paul

Eh? So you want tertiarism?

(I just googled "tertiarism" and it's a word for the third stage of syphillis.)

Are you claiming reality manifests in a tripartite way rather than dualistically?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Please try again. Why do you say there is only one jumble?

Because there are not two of them. You can ask me this question 100 more times and you will get exactly the same answer. Sorry if you don't like it.

I have two legs and five salivary glands. I only have one mind.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Does it count as an argument if I say that "neutral monism" is silly?

Sure, if you can convince other people it is silly. It's not a deductive proof of anything, but if it convinces other people not to to believe it, then it's an argument.

Not saying that, just asking. Don't I have to give reasons why I think it is silly, and why another option is less silly?

Sure. I've done that loads of times, though - and hammegk does it continually.

You say there are no logical arguments against eliminative materialism (or eliminative idealism, for that matter, I would think)...why, then, "silly"?

Because it involves denying your own mind exists. If you can't see why that is silly, then I am not likely to be able to convince you it is silly.

 

[Mercutio]

Because there are not two of them. You can ask me this question 100 more times and you will get exactly the same answer. Sorry if you don't like it.

I have two legs and five salivary glands. I only have one mind.

Thank you. You cannot defend your claim; it is merely asserted. That is enough.

I am of two minds about this. I have half a mind to go into detail about how silly the concept of mind is to begin with, but with a one-track mind trying to be open-minded, I think I might just lose my mind if...


Never mind.

 

[Mercutio]

Because it involves denying your own mind exists. If you can't see why that is silly, then I am not likely to be able to convince you it is silly.

Does accepting a heliocentric model of the solar system mean "denying that sunsets exist"? That which appears to be A, when viewed from another perspective, may be seen to be B. Eliminativism does not deny any of your experience at all; it merely eliminates the incoherency of dualism. You seem desparate for a mind to exist no matter what.

If we start from scratch, we are not "denying a mind exists"; rather, we are examining our experience, and not making up entities that are not needed. If we cannot do without "mind", then that will become obvious in our examination. If, however, we can get along just fine without it, we are not "denying" it, we are simply recognising that there is no need for it.

And if there is no need, why insist upon it? If you can't see why that is silly, then I am not likely to be able to convince you it is silly.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Then just call it "something physical" and stop using silly woo-woo terms like "mind".

I have agreed to do so, given that the woos have permanently tainted it.

~~ Paul

 

[nescafe]

Well you are welcome to try to prove that I'm wrong......

How, when we cannot even agree in a definition for "mind"? I do not accept your definitions (mainly because of the GIGO principle w.r.t using logic to analyze purely subjective experiences), and you do not accept my tenative definitions because they boil down to "placeholder for thing we all apparently have but do not yet have a non-circular or non-tautological definition for".

Only by people who don't understand it at all.

You keep saying this. When asked to prove it, you say that

• science has not described subjective experience in terms of brain processes. No one here disagrees with that statement, as far as I know.
• science is not capable of ever describing subjective experience in terms of brain process. Several people disagree with you here, and when pressed you retreat to language games and arguments from incredulity.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

[that leaves the mind to] Be.

No, because, as you said, the mind is only the sum of its objects of perception.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Are you claiming reality manifests in a tripartite way rather than dualistically?

Yes, I think we have physical things, mental things, and the quantum vacuum. I'm still not sure about fruitcake.

~~ Paul

 

[nescafe]

Yes, I think we have physical things, mental things, and the quantum vacuum. I'm still not sure about fruitcake.

~~ Paul

Fruitcake? I am sure it has something to do with dark matter.