Some Aspects

Main points I’m trying to work out in my understanding of mind:

1) How physicalism overcomes qualia theoretically. My intuition leads me in the directions of a) New Science b) Language and semiotics. In other words, a or b or combination will bridge the gap.

2) What is or isn’t qualia? I’m not shooting for elimitivism, but I’m interested in how informational complexity might play a strong role in what we think of as experience (while keeping the door closed for intelligent design).

3) All three of these points being related, what is the relation between tacit and propositional knowledge? Thought experiments strike me as absurd that gap between absolute metaphysical knowledge of bicycle riding and actually riding a bike.

Bats - The Weaker Case

Chalmers’ Zombie argument is the most surgically precise rejection of physicalism. Other thought experiments leading up to this one, aren’t necessarily exhausted by it. And it is in fact, wrong to assume that the target has remained exactly constant.

 If there is something it is like to be a bat, we can’t infer physicalism is false outright.  There are ontological, epistemic, and semantic aspects of the problem of qualia which have to be taken into account. Nagel had a problem it seems with science explaining everything, but held to a layered view of the physical world and his aim seems to me to be epistemic. The layers, epistemically isolated, but not necessarily ontologically. Nagel believed there could be “bridge laws” which translate the layers into each other.

So it would seem that the verdict on whether we can know what it’s like to be a bat isn’t exhausted in this thought exercise.

What makes You You?

One popular thought experiment, usually to explore the possibilities of functionalism, is to replace one neuron with a “functionally equivalent” silicon part and note that it wouldn’t change phenomenal experience. So the question then is, if you keep doing that, and replace all neurons with silicon, what happens?

The possibilities seem to be, you, phenomenally in every way remain the same, a zombie, or a “Sixth Day” you. Let’s take another spin on this thought experiment. What about replacing all neurons with exact physical replica neurons?* Is it still you? Does it matter how fast these neurons are replaced? What if neurons are replaced one by one sequentially, a real neuron is killed, and another one replaced, within a matter of seconds? What about two neurons at a time? A hundred? What about destroying all of them and replacing them within planck time constraints? What about everything in the last sentence, plus re-materializing ten feet away?

If we think that wouldn’t make a difference, then it should be the case that an atom for atom exact replica of you could be created and you’d have two phenomenal experiences simultaneously. If that’s absurd, then it seems YOU are tied to your specific neurons. There might be some. or a lot of truth to the folk wisdom that neuron longevity and development constancy plays a part in continuity of experience. It might be that over the course of many years, depending on what neuroscience discovers, that you are your own Sixth-Day you.

*I’m ignoring quantum interpretations of consciousness. Physicists can inform better here, but I believe there are entanglement issues which might hold an impossibly high standard to making true exact replicas.

Kim on Qualia

I stumbled accross this blog the other day. Looks like one of Kim’s former students posts here and Jaegwon Kim himself is responding. So it’s been fun to read. I hadn’t got into Kim’s latest position on physicalism yet. David Chalmers a few months ago delighted in Kim’s rejection of physicalism on his blog but I wasn’t sure what that entailed.

Kim’s rejection appears to be (from one or two blog entries I’m reading) weaker than Chalmers’. Kim holds that qualia aren’t reducible but he thinks that there are relations between qualia that are. Dr. Kim argues:

But I don’t see any obvious inconsistency in the claim that although X and Y are each physically irreducible, that X stands in R to Y is physically reducible.

Interesting position huh? His reviewers on the blog claim this position doesn’t make any sense. They say something along the lines that if we get burned, we feel pain, we react to the pain, therefore pain plays a causal role. Kim prefers an example with less going than in the above, a simple scenario where we can’t discern the difference between two quale, q1 and q2 - the colors of two lemons - and that this indescernibility is functionalizable (reducible) even if q1 and q2 aren’t.

My Theory

I wouldn’t normally consider myself qualified to have a theory on matters others far more capable than me have explored in minutia. But given the controversial nature of the subject matter, for better or worse, I’m left with my own abilities and by exploring one path rather than another implies I’ve taken a position. So this section will be to update, revise, and work out either my beliefs on mind or my gut feelings.

knowledge?

Last night I covered a big section of “The Conscious Mind” talking about various conceptions of and response to Mary’s Room. The best responses in Chalmer’s estimation are the ability responses. Mary didn’t have new knowledge upon seeing red for the first time, she just had another ability. I follow this response to an extent. But I think it gets to a deeper issue, that knowledge and abilities are closely tied together and even the coldest scientific theories don’t represent the world in itself but as constructed by brains and as ran as programs within brains which ‘contain’ the knowledge rather than lists of propositions on paper.

In other words, one reason why it’s hard to respond to this knowledge argument is it assumes an impossible ideal, that a person can have absolute propositional knowledge of everything - that there is a such thing in principle as perfect representation.

Naturalism

“Naturalism” is another one of those tricky words. I don’t think it’s nearly as an important a notion as “physicalism” for the philosophy of mind, but it does come up and I mentioned it in passing in the last post. It’s possible, apparently, to be a naturalist without being a physicalist. I’m thinking of course of David Chalmers here who claims that mind is something fundamental to the way the universe is, like a fundamental law of physics, but something yet different.

Why Zombies?

The subject has come up in a couple blog discussions I’ve been in recently - and a few months ago I visited many more blogs discussing zombies - on whats core to the issue of zombies. Why on earth do we care about what’s logically possible, rather than what’s actually possible? I’ve waffled on this one myself to be honest. And I plan about talking about it in more detail in the future.

But the point I want to make clear in this post, is that for those who buy into zombie and inverted spectrum arguments against physicalism, the goal posts they’re aiming for aren’t something they’ve conjured up on their own that no one but they believe in, but rather they’re working off of the standard definition of physicalism the way physicalists themsleves have defined it:

(1) Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff any world which is a physical duplicate of w is a duplicate of w simpliciter.

Again, the reasoning for holding a position of physicalism framed in modal terms is an issue for a later discussion. I’m just pointing out that this is how physicalists themselves typically define their position. So David Chalmers looks for the minimal violation. Physicalism holds that it’s not logically possible for two worlds to be physically identical in every respect and vary in any other way. Chalmers says that he’s found a case where it is logically possible for two worlds to be physically identical in every respect and vary in this one particular way - the existence of mind - hence physicalism is refuted.

Physicalism

One of the interesting things about the philosophy of mind is that the object of study, the human mind, is so troublingly complex and mysterious that it’s the one corner of the intellectual world where perfectly serious naturalists are tempted in the direction of dualism, or rather, the rejection of physicalism. Dualism is the belief that there are either multiple things, or properties, that constitute the world. Physicalism is the belief that everything ultimately is constituted of one kind of thing, loosely, the stuff physicists study.

It would be fascinating, baring the remote possibility some religion or another happens to be the way things are, the universe seriously can’t ultimately be understood entirely in terms of physics.

From the outset, for those who are new to studying these issues, a couple things need to be set straight with regards to physicalism. A friend of mine once said, “Everything is physics, but physics isn’t everything”. Physicalists understand that there is beauty in the world, they aren’t trying to rain on anybody’s parade by turning everything into equations - even if that’s ultimately possible. Beauty, politics, and economies are understood at a higher level than subatomic particles. But ultimately they depend on the physical - in fact, they are entirely constrained by the physical.

In mind, the language to broadly talk about the physical isn’t in terms of reductionism but a dependence relationship - supervenience. If A supervenes on B, then no changes can be made in B without resulting in a Change in A, and usually vice versa. So in other words, even though we don’t have an account of how the beauty of a sculpture reduces to particles zipping around in a vacuum, we know that the beauty is constrained by those particles. We have a hard time imagining how two identical works of art in every way, including cultural context and history, could differ in their beauty. So while there are many high level features of the world that are inexplicable in terms of reductive physics, we still can see how to retain a minimal statement of physicalism in a dependency relationship.

But some philosophers, without religious convinction, belive that the mind escapes being a mere high level property and ultimately isn’t something that supervenes on the physical world. Philosophers who reject this view, which is probably most of them in the end, would I think admit that understanding the mental in terms of the physical isn’t a straightforward victory.

Hello world!

I’ve decided to start a new blog here and quit paying 5$ a month for Tripod’s dinasour.  There are a lot of reasons why my blog probably sucks, but without question, even if I were to fix all my personal failings, the load time for the main page and worse, to leave comments stop me right out of the gate.

I’d been visiting Jeff’s really cool blog, “Minds, Meanings, and Morals” and was impressed by how easy it was to use. I don’t have time to transfer posts and kind of want a fesh start anyway, so I’ll just leave “Man of the World” up and even slower after converting it to a free account.