I don't believe I've provided an argument on consciousness. I only tried to explain BDZ's position on it.
Okay.
That perspective isn't really a confusion of parameter with function except within a given definition of what consciousness is. Change the definition and you change the parameter/function relationship. He is simply using a different definition. I think there is some utility in that approach.
Perhaps so. But you have to provide the definition. As we've seen with Martillo, who is now arguing about the existence of cheese, if you don't define your terms, you can't make any coherent statements.
In fact, behaviorists view things in much the same way. The separation between 'person' and 'environment' is not concrete when we discuss such interactions. We create strict boundaries so that we can discuss them, but we shouldn't reify those boundaries if this impairs understanding of behavior within a system.
The boundaries are real. The brain is an information processing system. The world is not.
We -- you and I -- are not really saying different things. I think the only difference between us is that you have more confidence in our ability to explain the world than I have. I have full confidence that we can explain consciousness, and it also pisses me off when folks come in and try to say that such explanations are theoretically impossible. That's why I tried to stay out of this conversation.
Agreed. That is indeed the thing that annoys me most in this sort of discussion - people who argue that because we do not yet have a comprehensive, functional theory of consciousness, that there cannot be one. The people who argue this point are usually ignorant of the vast advances that have been made in neuroscience over the last few decades.
Then you, more than most, should be able to appreciate that there may be vistas that we cannot reach, working in an area that is hard to conceptualize.
Well, no, I disagree entirely here. I routinely solve problems where I am entirely unable to visualise the problem space. As I was saying to Soapy Sam, I break down the problem into simpler components, into things I can visualise or conceptualise, and then reassemble the components into a solution. I have worked for twenty years on systems too complicated for anyone to hold the whole in their mind, and yet, those systems do get built, and for the most part, work.
Godel's Theorem is a real limit, but its application is quite specific.
Again, there is nothing woo here. We would simply be ignorant of these aspects of reality (if they exist -- and we could only speculate and not argue that they do). There is no way to offer proof of such things, only speculate on them. Is this consequential? Well, obviously not. Really, such speculation is a waste of time, but it might also be true.
But there is no
evidence of such. They aren't in the same category as, say, leprechauns, in that they don't of necessity contradict what we already know. But they are the "Unknown of the Gaps".
Well, of course it is -- that is why it isn't really a problem. But it is the case that Mary's internal sensation of seeing 'red' is new information.
No, that's not quite right.
The lie is in the original proposition that she can know everything about seeing red without actually having that experience.
Sort of, but sort of not.
You can - in principle - understand the experience of seeing red without a photon of the appropriate wavelength ever impinging upon your retina. If Mary knew
everything about vision, the knowledge of that experience would be included.
It does depend on what you mean by "see". If you are talking about visual perception from the retina onwards, then the problem is that the information is incomplete. If you are, instead, talking about the internal experience of seeing, then if Mary knows everything, she has already seen the colour red.
Bait and switch seems to be a favorite in philosophy of mind.
For immaterialist or dualist philosophy, yes. Sadly.
There are experiences that we are simply not capable of. We can think about them, we can conjecture, but we can't get to them. There are simply things that we cannot know.
Like what? Doesn't need to be specific, but a category of things.
I can't think of anything that isn't inherently contradictory. Who wrote "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Ah, Thomas Nagel, thanks Google. I can't know what it's like to be, say, a grain of sand, because grains of sand have no awareness. They're not, as Nagel put it, be-able things. BATs, as it were.
But other than that?
Yes, then we agree on that.
We are talking about different things here. There is nothing woo about the Mary problem.
Well, some people do ascribe woo to it, but as you said, it's really just a bait and switch.
We can understand what is happening in a subjective experince, but we cannot share that experience -- even if we create conditions to mimic the same internal 'hormonal' environment that constitutes part of what we call 'feelings' (in part, because we are not the same substrate as the person having the experience, so interaction issues would dictate a difference). We can understand those process to the level of Mary understanding 'seeing red' while still in her white and black room (leaving aside the obvious neurological reality that she could never see color in the first place given that weird scenario). We can describe an amazing number of things. But we cannot know everything. I think you probably agree with this.
We cannot know everything, and for a very simple reason: Even if the "everything" we are talking about is just everything about the physical Universe, the representation of that information would necessarily be larger than the Universe itself. Which is problematic.
But I disagree to a large extent about the ability to share experiences. Experiences are just information, and information is substrate neutral. You don't run into fundamental problems until you start nitpicking with questions like "Can my mind remember experiencing your experience the same way that your mind remembers experiencing it?" Now, this requires
extensive messing about with brain structure; it's easy with computers, a lot harder with people. But not impossible.
Yes, and there may be strangenesses that we cannot conceptualize in our limitations. Agin, they would be inconsequential because we couldn't know them, but they might be there. They would simply have no impact on us whatsoever. And, yes, I know this is pure speculation.
Sorry, that still makes no sense. Do these strangenesses affect the behaviour of these things? If so, then we can observe the behaviour, and conceptualise those observations. If not, then I argue that the strangeness cannot be meaningfully said to exist.
Of course it's not an argument. It isn't meant as one. It is a caution about our limitations.
Yes, that's true. A better response would be that we aren't required to imagine it, because we can observe it.
Yes, but a full explanation of the universe would amount to a formal system -- the axioms being the underlying physical constants that determine what is out there.
Given Quantum Mechanics, it's not clear that this is true either.
I'm afraid I do not share you confidence in our abilities to arrive at final explanations.
It depends on what you mean by "final". There are some questions that are not meaningful, such as questions about the interior structure of a black hole. (Black holes don't have interior structures.)
But I don't see any limits, apart from the purely physical.
There is much that we can explain. Consciousness is going to be one of those things -- I am almost certain of that -- since it arises from the workings of matter/energy, which is theoretically explainable at the level we see in our daily lives.
Agreed.
