The Hard Problem of Gravity

[blobru]

Damn, it's Dinsdale, not Dimsdale. No wonder it threw off Nick.

Yep that's the one, old Spiny Norman hisself.

Though the 'n' looks like an 'm' to a wobbly hedgehog.



I'm talking qualia here, folks!

 

[Dancing David]

Hehe. I think you're wandering in the same conceptual neighborhood that I am. It is true that all of the elements of our composition are in constant flux. Our bodies metabolize their molecular components in a ceaseless flow and our thoughts and emotions are also in constant shift and flow. Even their more elementary components are like nothing more than ripples and eddies in a pond. The very components of those elements are also just patterns of flux, and so on down the reductive chain.

My contention is that what we call the 'self', while merely a transitory flux, is the organizing whole of all of those components. The AHB was not wrong, per se. I think his point was to illustrate that nothing has a permanent substantial basis; all is change and flux -- even the 'self'

Okay sure, what is this 'organising whole', nice concept. Kindly point to it. Do you mean the body?

 

[Dancing David]

If, however, there were some reliable model of exactly what processes produce the specific qualities of our sense impressions then we would have a more solid epistemic basis for not only determining which subjects are conscious but how those subjects may experience the world.

Prithee dear sir, what makes you think one is lacking?


We know why and how people develop perceptiond from sensations ata crude level. Do you mean, why do I see red and not crosshatching that denotes the color red?

 

[PixyMisa]

Are you claiming that philosophies derived from drug-induced states are inherently flawed?

Inherently, no. Invariably, yes.

Drugs don't add anything. They just scramble what wits you normally have.

Just to check you're not drifting towards dualism here, Pixy.

What? How is dualism involved here?

I occasionally have to pull up over-zealous Jrefers for asserting dualism with notions like psycho-somatic healing.

What?

 

[AkuManiMani]

Intelligible/unintelligible ?

Sorry, that was a typo. I meant to say "unintelligible" >_<

As a software developer of some experience, I can tell you that this is way off the mark - a category error. If there is any simile to be drawn, it is between thoughts and feelings and the variables and object instances in computer memory. If anything, the software itself would be more akin to the way the neurons are 'wired up'. These kinds of analogy make me uncomfortable - like the old 'telephone exchange' or 'internet' analogies, they are too easy, too trite, and potentially very misleading. The brain may be a Turing machine, but it doesn't necessarily bear direct functional comparison with a computer.

I guess you're right. One should be careful when tossing out such loose analogies. The point I was attempting to get at is that thoughts and feelings must have some intelligible pattern(s) than can be identified and decoded in some way.

Fair enough, but I refer you to my previous (unaddressed) questions - What are the scientific questions you want answered that are not answerable by the kind of scientific approach I outlined above (i.e. detailed investigation of the information processing involved)? What do you suppose an answer or answers to those questions might look like?

My entire case has been that qualia are a viable concept and that they can be understood using the scientific approach. The only reason why this debate has carried on so long is because many here who strongly reject the concept -- I suspect -- for ideological reasons. On the upside, the discussion has given me an opportunity to further develop some of my metaphysical ideas

 

[AkuManiMani]

Okay sure, what is this 'organising whole', nice concept. Kindly point to it. Do you mean the body?

I mean the organizational process(es) that maintains the structural and functional integrity of the body and eventually ceases after the body dies.

Prithee dear sir, what makes you think one is lacking?


We know why and how people develop perceptiond from sensations ata crude level. Do you mean, why do I see red and not crosshatching that denotes the color red?

I mean why we perceive informational input at all, and how specific subjective qualities of such perceptions come to be. There must be some kind of physical/metaphysical principle of how and why qualitative experince arises.

 

[westprog]

Most of human discourse presumes that inanimate objects have a gender.

No, it doesn't.

Most of human discourse prior to 400 years ago presumed that the Earth was flat.

No, it didn't.

Most of human discourse presumes the existence of spirits and gods.

No, it doesn't.

What is your point?

My point is that human discourse deals in great measure with subjective experience - something that implies qualia.

A Frenchman is not implying that his car has a vagina and ovaries, and that his bike has a penis and testicles. That isn't how language works. He is implying that he has thoughts, feelings and experiences, which he tries to communicate to other French people.

 

[westprog]

As a software developer of some experience, I can tell you that this is way off the mark - a category error. If there is any simile to be drawn, it is between thoughts and feelings and the variables and object instances in computer memory. If anything, the software itself would be more akin to the way the neurons are 'wired up'. These kinds of analogy make me uncomfortable - like the old 'telephone exchange' or 'internet' analogies, they are too easy, too trite, and potentially very misleading. The brain may be a Turing machine, but it doesn't necessarily bear direct functional comparison with a computer.

Software is a term which is freely used, but what is actually implied? The algorithmic concept in the mind of the programmer? The text in a programming language? The compiled code produced by that text? The actual executing program on a particular machine? These are all separate things, and the connection between them is not clear and not obvious. Using something as an analogy, even in an informal way, when the thing being compared is ill-defined, is dangerous. The brain-hardware/thought-software idea has muddied the waters more than it's explained anything.

 

[Dancing David]

My entire case has been that qualia are a viable concept and that they can be understood using the scientific approach. The only reason why this debate has carried on so long is because many here who strongly reject the concept -- I suspect -- for ideological reasons.

You keep spinning that makes me loose respect for you.


Why do people who study the brain function need to use your terms?

What wrong with the word perception?


I asked this earlier in the thread and here you are still promoting it.

On the upside, the discussion has given me an opportunity to further develop some of my metaphysical ideas

Your insistence on bragging about your alleged debate skills and word skills is becoming very annoying and makes you look like the 'neener neener' type. Try to debate the ideas rather than guessing, spinning and bragging. I thought you had some interesting ideas, now I think you have ego intoxication.

Later.

 

[Dancing David]

I mean the organizational process(es) that maintains the structural and functional integrity of the body and eventually ceases after the body dies.

You have gotten vaguer in your defintion, seemingly, is that not the wrong way to go in a derfintion?

So you are saying cell walls are the 'self'? Or that the chemical processes are the 'self' ? Or that what is the 'self'?

I agains asked you to point to something, you have pointed to a larger area and said 'over there'.

(I am not trying to be rude, I am rhetorical, and not very good at it.)

It seems that your concept still lacks definition.

I mean why we perceive informational input at all, and how specific subjective qualities of such perceptions come to be.

Do you want an answer? I have some possibilities. Eyes spots help things move to environments that have light or avoid environments that have light, etc...

There must be some kind of physical/metaphysical principle of how and why qualitative experince arises.

There 'must', why?
I do not expect reality to meet my expectations.

 

[Almo]

I do not believe we currently can explain the behavior of objects being affected by gravity. There are a number of qualities exhibited by such objects, such as "falling," that defy a full mathematical description.

Thus I advocate the notion of a "Hard Problem of Gravity,", or "HPG," that must be solved if we are to eventually grasp the full nature of gravity.

Among the notions supported by the HPG is the philosophical "gombie" or "gravitational zombie," an object that behaves exactly as if it is being acted upon by gravity yet is not being acted upon by gravity.

The HPG is particularly startling because it implies that everything we drop might actually be a p-gombie instead of a non-p-gombie. In fact, if you have gone skydiving, or jumped from a diving board, or even walked upright, you might be a p-gombie!

P.S. If the local university in your area is hiring post-docs in philosophy, please let me know, I am currently unemployed.

I never peeked into this thread before, so forgive me if I don't read all 77 pages.

But it looks like this goes the route of a semantics argument. If I have a cat, and I leave out a saucer of milk overnight, and the milk is gone in the morning, I don't conclude that the laws of evaporation are messed up.

Gravity as a theory works very well, as far as I'm aware. Whether the mechanism of gravity is explained is another issue. But it doesn't change that falling objects do so because of gravity. We just don't know exactly how that works. When we find out, we just say that we have an explanation, not that it's an entirely different force.

 

[westprog]

There 'must', why?

Phenomena having explanations? There are three levels. Whether the explanations exist. Whether it's possible in principle to discover what the explanations are. And whether we have, in fact, found the explanation.

In the case of consciousness, I would say "I don't know, I don't know, and no". The Strong AI answer seems to be "No, no, and yes".

I do not expect reality to meet my expectations.

The insistence that the reality of consciousness must match metaphysical preferences is at the heart of this debate.

 

[Dancing David]

Sorry, I am slow. What does that mean?



As a pragmatist, I don't think there is an issue.

 

[rocketdodger]

My point is that human discourse deals in great measure with subjective experience - something that implies qualia.

Oh, it does? Why, then, has probably 95% of the population never even heard of the term "qualia?"

The "something that implies qualia" part of your statement is what you think, not the rest of humanity.

HPC opponents don't deny subjective experience, they just deny that it "implies qualia."

A Frenchman is not implying that his car has a vagina and ovaries, and that his bike has a penis and testicles. That isn't how language works. He is implying that he has thoughts, feelings and experiences, which he tries to communicate to other French people.

Likewise, his language regarding those thoughts, feelings, and experiences do not necessarily imply "qualia."

How often do you hear "qualia" mentioned in artistic literature, hmmm? Has it ever been mentioned outside of a philosophical context?

 

[Dancing David]

Which begs the question does a quale have a penis or a vagina?

 

[AkuManiMani]

My entire case has been that qualia are a viable concept and that they can be understood using the scientific approach. The only reason why this debate has carried on so long is because many here who strongly reject the concept -- I suspect -- for ideological reasons.

You keep spinning that makes me loose respect for you.


Why do people who study the brain function need to use your terms?

What wrong with the word perception?


I asked this earlier in the thread and here you are still promoting it.

There's nothing wrong with the word perception, and I never said there was anything wrong with the word perception. I simply choose to use the term 'quale' because I think that, semantically, its the more appropriate term. Our perceptions are necessarily qualitative and the word 'qualia' seems more than an apt way of communicating this. I'm not going to stop using the term be cause it causes some people have it on their list of taboo terms.

On the upside, the discussion has given me an opportunity to further develop some of my metaphysical ideas

Your insistence on bragging about your alleged debate skills and word skills is becoming very annoying and makes you look like the 'neener neener' type. Try to debate the ideas rather than guessing, spinning and bragging. I thought you had some interesting ideas, now I think you have ego intoxication.

Later.

Wow. Way to take a 'thank you' and construe it as an insult. I was just saying that the debate and your criticisms have been very helpful -- how in the world can you even remotely consider that bragging about my word skills? I know a lot of my ideas are a bit rough around the edges which is why I come to this forum for your feedback. Instead of being insulted, why don't you simply take it for what it is: a compliment -_-

 

[AkuManiMani]

I mean the organizational process(es) that maintains the structural and functional integrity of the body and eventually ceases after the body dies.

You have gotten vaguer in your definition, seemingly, is that not the wrong way to go in a definition?

So you are saying cell walls are the 'self'? Or that the chemical processes are the 'self' ? Or that what is the 'self'?

I agains asked you to point to something, you have pointed to a larger area and said 'over there'.

(I am not trying to be rude, I am rhetorical, and not very good at it.)

It seems that your concept still lacks definition.

I've been giving the issue a lot of thought and been reading up on a lot of materials since we first started discussion this issue a while ago. For the most part, I've been going down the list of candidates in my mind. I don't think I have any definite candidate for 'self' or 'organizing process' but I think I go down the list of candidates I think can be disqualified.

Cell walls and membranes must be actively maintained so I think we can rule that out as a primary organizing factor. All of the chemical processes of the body seem to be actively pushed away from thermodynamic equilibrium so it doesn't seem that strait forward chemistry, IAOI, can be invoked as the organizing process.

Right now, DNA seems the reigning candidate as the organizing factor in contemporary biology but, after personally giving it some thought, it appears that this one doesn't cut it either. DNA itself doesn't do anything; its just a chemical string that the machinery of the cell selectively reads and translates into amino acid strings. There is nothing in the DNA molecule itself that explicitly codes for, or dictates, morphology. This is even more clear in multicellular organisms where all of the cells contain the same genes yet develop and function in radically different ways.

I think I mentioned earlier in the thread that I've recently been reading up on a field called biosemiotics. Basic idea is that what separates living systems from inanimate ones is that they are all semiotic -- they are systems of signs, codes, and meanings that direct every level of biological processes. In this scheme, a distinction is drawn between catalyzed chemical reactions and coded chemical reactions. I'm not quite certain if the ideas of the biosemiotic discipline will be a sufficient explanation but it seems that if there is to be a more complete understanding of the organizational process of life semiosis may be a crucial part of it.

What is the 'self'? How does it work? Beats me. All I know is that there must be some unitary process that allows a single microscopic cell to not only function, but unfold into a complex community of cells that considers itself a singular entity. I got some vague guesses as to what the 'self' might be, but I don't know enough to bring them to ground, atm.

I mean why we perceive informational input at all, and how specific subjective qualities of such perceptions come to be.

Do you want an answer? I have some possibilities. Eyes spots help things move to environments that have light or avoid environments that have light, etc...

For a long time I used to think that that would be a sufficient explanation. Then I realized that, as of now, what we have is a crude explanation of the mechanisms of stimulus/response but not of the subjective perceptions of stimuli as qualities [what I've been calling 'qualia']

There must be some kind of physical/metaphysical principle of how and why qualitative experince arises.

There 'must', why?
I do not expect reality to meet my expectations.

I don't see how anything could occur or operate w/o some reason or understandable mechanism for doing so. Contrary to the impression I might have given some people in this thread, I do not believe in magic

 

[westprog]

Oh, it does? Why, then, has probably 95% of the population never even heard of the term "qualia?"

The "something that implies qualia" part of your statement is what you think, not the rest of humanity.

HPC opponents don't deny subjective experience, they just deny that it "implies qualia."

"Qualia" is subjective experience. If subjective experience is accepted, then denying qualia is just playing word games.

Likewise, his language regarding those thoughts, feelings, and experiences do not necessarily imply "qualia."

It's impossible to discuss thoughts, feelings or experiences without implying qualia. That's what qualia are.

How often do you hear "qualia" mentioned in artistic literature, hmmm? Has it ever been mentioned outside of a philosophical context?

Well, no, because the term was specifically created as something that isn't used outside of a philosophical context, so that philosophers can discuss things without the baggage carried by other terms. We're having a philosophical discussion here, so we're using philosophical jargon.

The word "qualia" means nothing to the ordinary individual. The ordinary individual doesn't need to know what qualia are to say "I saw the dog" or "I felt hapoy when I saw the dog" or "I remember how happy I was when I saw the dog". All these statements relate to thoughts, feelings and experiences - so they are all discourse about qualia.

It's quite possible to have another set of statements - "A dog crossed my field of vision", or "I laughed when the dog crossed my field of vision" or "It was June 3rd when I laughed when the dog crossed my field of vision". These statements could apply to a robot and don't imply qualia.

A lot of people working with computers use language that implies qualia, but they don't mean it any more than they think their cars hate them or the photocopier is stupid.

 

[westprog]

Sorry, I am slow. What does that mean?



As a pragmatist, I don't think there is an issue.

What does what mean?

 

[rocketdodger]

The word "qualia" means nothing to the ordinary individual. The ordinary individual doesn't need to know what qualia are to say "I saw the dog" or "I felt hapoy when I saw the dog" or "I remember how happy I was when I saw the dog". All these statements relate to thoughts, feelings and experiences - so they are all discourse about qualia.

It's quite possible to have another set of statements - "A dog crossed my field of vision", or "I laughed when the dog crossed my field of vision" or "It was June 3rd when I laughed when the dog crossed my field of vision". These statements could apply to a robot and don't imply qualia.

A lot of people working with computers use language that implies qualia, but they don't mean it any more than they think their cars hate them or the photocopier is stupid.

Everything you state here is merely an opinion, and furthermore, it originates from your prior conviction that human subjective experience is magical.

You have no idea what other people mean when they say their cars hate them or their photocopier is stupid.

I, in fact, have become rather attached to the female character I am working on right now. I am perfectly aware that when she looks at me, on screen, I was the one who wrote the code, and I perfectly understand how that code works, memory word by memory word. Yet, when something goes wrong, and I ask "wtf is she doing now?" I really mean it in the anthropomorphic sense. In fact, my coworkers tell me they enjoy it when I throw expletives in the form of degrading female terms her way.

So don't presume to think you know what anyone else means, because you don't, and all your assertions to the contrary amount to nothing but childish games.