nothing exciting..

two posts ago, I recapped what is perhaps the ultimate summary of phil mind. That was the “Diet Qualia” comments I had. Why should anyone hold out for a “bridge law”, or something that can really explain qualia?

 The best answer I can give is that there is probably bound to be an explanation. But I don’t have a very high view of explanations. Language can describe experience, but not irrespective of everyone bringing their experience to the table first. What equations and formulas can intuitively do today may not be what they can in a hundred years. I suppose what I need is some kind of fairly clear — to the extent that this isn’t a self-defeating project — example of how, historically, a clear analysis was only acheivable by certain shared assumptions, or experiential starting points of the time. I realize that this is where my previous continental wanderings might come in, but I’m not looking for a cheap victory.

 Anyway, what I’m thinking will happen is that, at some point, certain basic building blocks will become “intuitive”, and that from there, an understanding of qualia will be built. I predict this will happen around 2075. Like millenialists, that’s not so far as to be unmeaningful, but probably enough outside of my lifetime that I can’t be proven wrong.

The Fan

It’s pretty hot and stuffy lately so I’ve got one of those big stand up fans blowing on me at night. It’s pretty loud but I’m a deep sleeper so it doesn’t really bother me that much. Lately I’ve been waking up up two or three times during the night for a minute or so. Somehow, I have it in my mind to attend to the noise of that fan as soon as I wake. I wake up, and for the space of some undetermined amount of time I hear nothing but I know there is a fan there making noise and I know that I’m awake. And then after this small amount of time, I’ll hear the fan. I swear if fades in, but I need to pay closer attention to be sure about that.

Qualia: A rip off Post

I just barely got a password going again to access my account. That’s how lazy I can be. Pete’s blog, Brain Hammer led me to this post on splintered mind:

Splintered

I could just comment over there, but since I can’t think of anything to say and I feel I need to write a post, I’ll just respond here. I liked this post a lot. If I’m unpacking it right, here’s the issue:

You’ve got qualia, full-blown non-physical perceptions that can be inverted and so on independent of the physical world.

You’ve got zero-qualia, the Dennett kind which are psychological judgements we make about ‘experience’ which leads us to believe there is full-blown qualia.

Then you’ve got this weird critter, diet qualia. This, he argues, is the physicalist compromise. The “what-it’s-like” qualia. Now, as I understand Nagel, this “what-it’s like” stuff, difficult as it may be for us to comprehend, could one day become tractable via bridge laws.

But just what are diet qualia, anyway? How are they different from zero qualia?

One (non) answer is that it’s a placeholder. Dualism seems too rash and elimitivism seems to harsh, so there’s got to be a physical explanation. Diet qualia: it don’t put on pounds (multiply entities) yet keeps all the great taste you’ve grown to love drinking classic!

We won’t know how diet qualia can be something other that subjective raw feels, because we don’t have that first bridge law yet.

Pete

Possibility and Monsters

I keep wanting to think that David Chalmers, in a brilliant insight (zombie argument), figured out precisely what’s wrong with modal logic instead of proving anything about consciousness. But without being able to make that stick, perhaps he did indeed disprove physicalism. I just came across this post from last year on Reality Conditions discussion “possibility”.

Dennett is cited saying,

Smiling demons, cow-sharks, Blockheads, and Swampmen are all, some philosophers think, logically possible, even if they are not nomologically possible, and these philosophers think this is important. I do not.

And there is some discussion on how science would be skeptical of distinquishing between metaphysical and nomological necessity.

I’d like to say that logical possibility, as entailed by conceivability doesn’t see far enough down the road and what might at first seem logically possible might not be once more facts are on the table. But what other thought roads besides zombies and swampmen might such a position seal off?

What about the Flying Speghetti Monster? Surely he isn’t nomologically possible. Are we inclined to say that in some circumstances, depending on what our point is, we can rely on mere logical possibility? In this case, we might backpedal and say that we can make the same point with Russell’s teapot which isn’t quite so fanciful. But is Russell’s teapot nomologically possible? It seems physically possible, but even given the contingency of the laws of nature, it probably isn’t (or wasn’t) since it had to get into orbit by real, physical means.

But to back off further would amount to destroying the thought experiment as the whole point is to trade credulity on conceivability. Even in a reductio ad absurdum, we must bank on the possibility of our wacky scenario.

And what about innocent counterfactuals? Yes, I could have spared the two Hell’s Angels bikers in the bar last night, but I was really mad about their opinions on dual-sports. My brain had to be in the state it was. The more facts revealed on the incident, when understood all the way through, pretty much lock the events of last night into exactly what they were.

In everyday scenarios we back off on counterfactuals all the time. Yeah, the guy didn’t have to thrust the knife for the 15th time - ohhh, he wasn’t on his medications? And we also, depending on our vested interests, can be either extraordinarily sympathetic to or skeptical of logical possibilities.

I don’t know what the answer is, just throwing it out.

Lowering The Bar Pt. 2

I’ve been alcohol free for over a week and have had a couple good nights sleep so I wanted to reformulate my argument against qualia presented in my last post. Now I’m left without excuse if it totally sucks.

My assumptions, since definitions can vary, are that qualia are apprehended through pure introspection and that they are indubitable.

The one-sentence encpsulation of my argument is this: If it is reasonable that we can lower the bar for Mary, if there is a what-it’s-like qualitative experience more slippery to reduce than seeing red, then nothing is needed beyond physical and psychological explanations for consciousness.

What I’m saying is kind of bone-headed in the sense that it’s merely a trivial denial of my assumptions that qualia are indubitable. It seems to me, that to be indubitable is like being invincible. You can’t be anymore indestructable than industructable, and you can’t be more sure than 100% certain. So all qualia should be equally indubitable as a spectrum of indubitability appears to be a mere self-contradiction. So we should be able to introspect, and list without hesitation exactly what we know indubitably from introspection. There should be no sensible way to talk about lowering the bar.

The common examples of qualia are seeing red or pain. How could anyone deny pain? But how could anyone deny any other experience? Anything that qualifies as qualia should be immediatly and transparently apprehended as such. If there are mental entities which we can’t quite place in the correct psychological/phenomenal baskets then it would seem that psychology can give us all the results needed.

So as an example, from SEP,

Galen Strawson has recently claimed (1994) that there are such things as the experience of understanding a sentence, the experience of suddenly thinking of something, of suddenly remembering something, and so on. Moreover, in his view, experiences of these sorts are not reducible to associated sensory experiences and/or images.

Anyone reading this can settle the matter within themselves trivially by merely introspecting and clearly identifying “remembering” as indubitable experience or not every bit as easily and transparently as classifying seeing red or digesting a hamburger. If there is any hesitation, “Well, maybe there is something it’s like to remember but then again…” then this is to secretly admit that there is a spectrum of mental events where some seem, in a psychological sense, to be more qualitatively real than others, contradicting the necessary condition of indubitability. And skepticism sets in immediatly after “seeing red” which could simply be more intuitively tricky.

Lowering the bar for Mary

To respond to Enigman, yes, where anger ends and irritation begins is something I’m interested in for what-it’s-like in addition to seeing red. I didn’t spell out the intent of my last post. I wrote it a few hangovers ago, but I think my intent was to lower the bar for Mary. It might be the case that Mary intuitively fails because her brain is wired so precisely for color perception that there is no conceivable way to compensate for it through her other abilities. In other words, knowing red might be such a radically good knowledge the way we know red, that it appears to be irreducible when compared with other things that we know. Kind of like, Captain Picard apears so powerful to the natives that the cheif mistakenly makes an ontological distinction between Picard and his own people.

So yeah, red is the obvious example to use, to make physicalism appear intuitively silly. But I’d like to reverse the project. Let’s lower the bar drastically and find the minimal cases that constitute what-it’s-like and see if it makes sense if that could be reduced.

What my trick is supposed to be, and I may be up in the night on this, is that all matters of phenomenal consciousness should be equally irreducible in an intuitive way. And if it begins making sense that we could lower the bar and introduce cases where maybe it’s phenomenal or maybe it isn’t, then we’re already admitting defeat to physicalism.

Is Modal Logic - Lame?

By this question, I don’t mean so much the ontological commitment - modal realism ect., but just merely, working out problems by adding up the sum total of a bunch of formally stated premesis, especially with modal qualifiers.

I’m all for tightening up arguments and precision. I know…

But I just can’t force myself to study the subject very deeply.  I’ve studied logic with quantification and all that abit, and it’s a little bit interesting in its own right, but here’s the thing. How many philosophy oriented deductive arguments past two or three steps have made a serious difference - or contribution for that matter?

It seems to me that it’s rare to even get agreement on problems that are stated with two or three premesis.  And that’s just standard quantification. Now add in “possibly” and so on, and how many formally stated arguments out there past three steps are generally agreed upon as being true?

Robert Lanza Discovers Idealism

See this article in The American Scholar.

A stem cell researcher has discovered the novel idea that the world in whole or in part is a mental construct. Anticipating Immanuel Kant a few hundred years after the fact, Lanza suggests that the mind creates the spacio-temperal world where the rest of reality plays out.

In regard to Lanza’s fascination with Zeno’s Paradox, granted, biology majors wouldn’t necessarily study Aristotle, but aren’t they required to take at least a semester of business calculus?

And quantum mechanics isn’t so mystical these days. The controversial observer-relative “collapse of the wave function” found in the copenhegan interpretation of quantum mechanics isn’t nearly as fashionable to physicists today as it was thirty years ago. Interpretations of QM are the realm of metaphysics, not squarely laboratory and mathematical science.

However, more importantly than the fact that Lanza fails to slay his beast, his arrow doesn’t even release in the right direction. Paraphrasing Chalmers, he sets up his objective:

These theories reflect some of the important work that is occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience

As a solution he offers:

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects.

In other words, like Kant, Lanza skirts physicalism and wanders the terrain of functionalism. Chalmers would no doubt have to ask him, “After you’ve delineated the function of the ‘mind’ generating spacio-temperal relationships, where is the conscious experience?” So for all of the gap theorists out there, it looks like consciousness, unfortunately, is still a mystery.

String Theory, Postmodernism, Market Efficiency

I’ve been having fun reading Not Even Wrong and following up on its links the past few days. String Theory - yeah ok, I tried to follow an introduction to gauge theory this afternoon and realize this is a topic I’ll be ignorant on until Clark gets rich from selling chocolate and does some laymans’ level write-ups on his blog - is apparently in a crisis. Or at least some physicists, Woit and Smolin in particular, say in books they’ve written. Smolin’s book on this topic draws on Kuhn and Feyarabend’s philosophy of science. Smolin is also the father of an alternative to String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity. Other physicists, notably Lubos Motl are very angry about this dissent and accuse the apostates in harsh words of all kinds of heresy including “postmodernism” and “communism”. Well, the main points I gather from the skeptic’s case is that string theory is only becoming more complicated without having solved any real problems and little chances of making experimental predictions in the future. “Not even wrong” I take it disputes String Theory on Popper’s grounds of falsifiability. Smolin also apparently tries to draw this criteria out, it’s said that LQM is falsifiable whereas String Theory isn’t.

If I understand Smolin, he believes science is in a crisis mode (Kuhn) and that there exists a need for new perspectives (Feyerabend) in order to make progress. The establishment is steeped in bureaucracy and resistance to alternative ideas. Now, what Feyerabend meant by “Anything Goes” is that historical examples of scientific acheivments border on relativism if our guiding light is simplistic formulations of “scientific method”. The demarcation problem according to him, remains an intractable one. What constitutes good and bad science is difficult to determine past a certain, blurry point. For instance, Feyerabend’s famous alternative to the enlightenment account of the Galileo event puts Galileo in the position of being “anti-science” rather than the shallow champion of Occam’s Razor.

I see a close resemblance in Feyerabend’s idea to the Efficient Market Hypothesis of Chicago-school economics. This theory essentially states that there is no way to beat the Stock Market average by skill because the information about public companies is too easily available to be valuable. No-arbitrage assumptions are at least the hope for those who believe in capitalism. As an example, if a stock follows a predictable trend, then it can’t be a money making one, because if it were, plenty of market players would be there to buy or sell as needed, biding the price, and destroying the trend. In a way, philosophers of science are “trend watching”, looking for past performance as an indicator for future results. There may be be some historical themes in science, just as there are in financial markets. In retrospect, we have some excellent ideas as to what happened to bring about our current situation. But to use that information in a way that would “beat the market” in the future (predict which theory is right in a profitable way, well beyond current expectations), is very, very hard. So future history might tell us whether today’s science needed more valley crossers than hill climbers (Smolin), but if the “market of ideas” in science approximates efficiency, it would be very difficult to make this prediction today - or to make this prediction better than others who are making forecasts by choosing graduate programs and offering grants.

The Chicago school does not believe in price bubbles. In other words, to them, the 2000-2001 Stock Market tumble wasn’t predictable. Price to earnings ratios and other fundamentals being “out of whack” wasn’t news to anyone who mattered. Similarily, the fact that string theory is “unfalsifiable” doesn’t appear to be news to any string theorists. Philosophers of science assessing the situation by the “fundamentals” have no more certainty than trend watchers for one-upping their peers. It may be that falsifiability for instance, proves the Achilles Hill for String Theory but it may prove to be the case that it becomes falsifiable or that a future science doesn’t follow today’s rules as we’d hope.

So whether science is really in a crisis remains to be seen. Certainly it seems to their credit that Woit and Smolin are cautious skeptics, each acknowledging their voice respectively as one of many. And they may prove to be right.

Dennett and Seeming

On my other blog and I noted a couple of times frustration with Dennett’s rejection of qualia because of his use of the word “seem”. He’ll say that some kind of ‘experience’ seems a particular way, but it really isn’t that way based on some kind of cognitive science experiments. But since qualia are one dimensional, it doesn’t matter how that seeming matches up with reality, it just matters that something ’seems’ that way at all.

Funny enough, in The Conscious Mind, Chalmers notes this confusion in Dennett’s writing at the bottom of page 190. Paraphrased* he says that Dennett’s use of the word “seems”, “balances on the knife’s edge between phenomenal and psychological consciousness”. But Chalmers insists his usage is completely psychological. He seems to thinks the persuasiveness of Dennett’s argument is captured in an equivocation between the two senses of the word. Explaining how things seem in psychological consciousness is uninteresting (philosophically) to chalmers. And he feels proceeding as Dennett does merely begs the philosophical questions.

I’ll go so far as to share Chalmers’ frustration with Dennett but I think Dennett realizes that he’s not answering the philosophical questions the way his colleagues might want him to. In fact, might it not be begging the questions in the other direction to insist that there is a way those things ’seem’ phenomenologically? Afterall, Chalmers’ main argument, his zombie argument, doesn’t tell us anything about what particular phenomenal experiences exist. Only that it’s logically possible for the set of the phenomenal to not exist in a physically identical world. That doesn’t guarantee us that every quale Chalmers considers a quale is in fact one.

Chalmers brings in a bizarre discussion about his twin zombie world where he’s sitting at his desk writting a book about phenomenal consciousness but where no phenomenal consciousness exists. So, all that stuff in chapter one about bright red apples and intense smells on a spring day Chalmers discusses could have been produced psychologically by his zombie twin. I admit this is given in an abstract discussion on what’s logically possible, however, what I wonder is whether or not it’s possible, in some way, for the contents of chapter 1 to have been produced in part by Chalmers’ psychological consciousness without directly reflecting what’s going on in Chalmers’ phenomenologically.

If it is, then on a per case basis, whether something seemed a particular way qualitatively or psychologically is up for grabs. It’s consistent with Chalmers’ zombie argument that qualia exist but not every nuance of ever report be qualia inspired. And if such cases existed, then coming at it from Dennett’s angle would be worthwhile, and an ultimately an inductive case about qualia generally could be made.

Granted, Chalmers writes his book to those who “take conscious seriously”, so I’d think Dennett doesn’t qualify from the outset from Chalmers’ perspective. His book is geared more to those who think qualia are reducible rather than nonexistent. If it’s not agreed from that outset that there is a phenomenal world, then the zombie argument is a nonstarter. So all Chalmers and Dennett can do probably is beg questions against each other from accross the divide.

I haven’t yet decided who I think will win out.

*unfortunately my circumstances right now make it difficult for me to have books by a computer in order to give exact citations from them.