03:05
@Dcleve There is a touch of irony here between your argument and the one you say Blackmore is making: they both can be fairly paraphrased as "I must be right, because all the alternatives are wrong." The history of human knowledge has plenty of examples of this, perhaps starting with Zeno's arguments against motion (the original illusionist, maybe?)
In reality, no-one, from any -ism, has presented an effective explanation of consciousness. If there was an explanation for consciousness in a way that required immaterial souls, then the success of that explanation would be reason to take seriously the proposition that there are immaterial souls, but we are a long way from that point...
In a similar move, Goff insists that panpsychism should be accepted, as it is the most parsimonious explanation of consciousness, but until he can offer some idea what he means when he claims consciousness is fundamental and electrons are conscious, it isn't even in the running.
With regard to the alleged failure of reductionism, the arguments have the problem that they are, in a sense, too powerful. If reductionism is untenable, then the reduction of chemistry to atomic physics, which is a mainstay of contemporary knowledge, must be... I don't know, an illusion, perhaps? It looks as though quantum mechanics applied to atoms does an excellent job of explaining chemistry, but it is actually incoherent? As a champion of the scientific method, what do you make of that?
2 hours later…
05:02
@AmeetSharma "You said that there is no pain qualia for the illusionist." I wouldn't use "is" with a plural like "qualia", but apart from that, yes.
@AmeetSharma "And to be clear, this is what illusionism says is happening. We have behaviors but no feeling." No. It says we have no qualia. The feeling is the behavior, or an aspect of it.
@AmeetSharma "So the illusionist is saying... the thing I want to get rid of... the "pain feeling" does not exist in the first place." No. The illusionist says it is the behavior or an aspect of it, or maybe a way of summarizing it, or a form of shorthand for it. And if the illusionist tried to get rid of the pain feeling he would try to stop the pain behaviors without wasting time thinking about qualia. Thus he would look at the medical literature, and science, and his own experience and
say to himself, according to science and medicine, which treatment for agonizing toothache (as set of behaviors, since qualia are unobservable) has worked well in the past (with this kind of tooth decay problem, e.g. the tooth is abnormally positioned making it difficult to remove safely, or whatever) in similar cases (similar observables) and he would then reason that since you are human, and similar in other ways (he might do tests to verify that you are not different, e.g. check for allergies
and so on) he would then reason that pulling out the tooth in a particular way lead to the patient saying there was no pain now, and being observed to be able to sleep, and not be moaning or screaming anymore.
@AmeetSharma The traditional way of thinking would be to say that the cases of patients saying they were in agony, and not sleeping, and screaming indicated the presence of pain qualia and that the successful treatment recorded in the literature resulted in those behaviors stopping, form which we can infer that the pain qualia vanished. So the traditionalist reasons that if the same treatment is used by him with this similar looking case, who therefore, it can be inferred, has the same sort of
pain qualia, and for the same reason, that treatment should stop the pain behaviors from which the presence of pain qualia was inferred, and then one can infer that the pain qualia have vanished, which means success.
05:51
@AmeetSharma Besides adding nothing, inferring qualia for each case in the literature, and also the case in front of the dentist is logically invalid. The scientist discredits himself by talking like that, and he will likely waste time looking for qualia, and trying to explain qualia, which is as much of a waste of time as looking for and trying to explain the "life force".
@AmeetSharma Consider a biologist designing a procedure for euthanizing a particular type of laboratory rat, say. A hundred years ago he might have talked about how observation of the heart's cessation of beating for a certain time, perhaps together with some other observables, allowed one to infer that the life force had left the rat, and as a result the rat was dead, and one could therefore be sure that the heart would not start beating again on its own. The "life force" concept doesn't do
any work. It's a waste of time, and a logically invalid step to infer its existence, because no such thing has ever been detected. Today, a biologist would just say that if the heart stops beating for a certain time, we can infer that the rat is dead, and that the heart therefore would not start beating again on its own. Indeed, he might simplify it even further, and just say that if the heart stops for a certain time, one can be sure it won't start beating again on its own. This is because
"dead" doesn't imply anything beyond positions of atoms, and consequent probability of the heart (or brain in a realistic scenario) spontaneously resuming activity. Again, its a matter of definition what "dead" means. I think in real life it's defined as 24h of no brain activity for legal death of a human.
It's a matter of definition which of the two successor ships is the Ship of Theseus. Choice definition would likely depend on pragmatic considerations. Whichever definition was convenient would be used, and indeed, in law their might be one definition, while in science another is used, and among sailors, another, and perhaps yet another would be used among ship owners, and still another used by priests and theologians, all in the one language and society and nation.
3 hours later…
08:54
@AmeetSharma And so when looking at one of the successor ships, it's a matter of definition whether it is the Ship of Theseus. Likewise it's a matter of definition whether a group of atoms is alive, and whether a living human being is conscious. There's no pearl of identity of the Ship of Theseus, no pearl of life ("life force") of living matter, and no pearl of consciousness ("qualia" or "phenomenal conciousness") of a living human being.
3 hours later…
12:14
12:36
@Dcleve "Functionally, I agree with you and the delusionists that yes one can do science and functional processing without qualia. However, this is not accepted by most physicalist philosophers, as a version of Identity Theory, that consciousness is identical with processing algorithms, is the dominant "physicalist" view."
15:02
@AmeetSharma "Unless someone thinks there is scientific evidence, there is nothing to discuss here. If they do, then there is nothing else to discuss here but that evidence." Really? Scientism ins a PHILOSOPHY forum? Philosophy has been the point of the spear in refuting scientism. Philosophic knowledge is a prerequisite to science knowledge, refuting scientism before it even gets started.
Popper, our best definer of the boundaries of science, held that there was not even a line between science and either informal empiricism, or philosophy -- they just blend into each other, and science is simply a refinement of philosophic thinking within a bounded problem set and methodology.
But even given the above, I CITED science evidence, as that is most of what Blackmore cites in her book, and both Kahneman and Eagleman are exclusively reporting on science data about consciousness. Additionally, the first and fourth sections of Augustine's compilation are entirely referencing science data, and my final argument vs. Augustine turned the scientific Inference to Best Explanation reasoning process back upon him.
Meanwhile. DELUSIONISM is not a science theory, and there is precious little evidence, or testing of the claim undertaken by delusionists. You are actively engaged in an extensive dialog with a Delusionist advocate, where his primary activity is to provide rationalizations and plausibility arguments for a delusionist POV, no science whatsoever. So -- is there nothing to discuss with Matthew?
3 hours later…
17:56
@ARaybould -- the concept that one has multiple possible explanations for a phenomenon, but that one should discard the ones that have falsified test cases, until one gets down to only one, is standard practice in multiple activities, such as failure investigations, chemical analyses, etc. It is generally considered to be SOP in evluating science hypotheses as well. Your objection is -- surprising.
As I pointed out, i took this hypothesis thru what I considered to be the most substantive critiques I could find: Blackmore's consciousness lab test data set, supplemented by Eagleman's; and two highly rated explicit critiques of dualism and an afterlife. It is certainly possible to have overlooked some critical problems as these four sets of challenges may not be fully inclusive, but I at least have not found more substantive challenges to evaluate. If you have some to suggest, please do.
@ARaybould -- Goff and multiple other panpsychists supposition that elementary particles are conscious is, as you noted, unevidenced. Chalmer's version of this argument is that a) reductionism is necessarily true, b) but consciousness does not reduce to matter, c) so consciousness must be an independent reduction term. Chalmers argument has several problems. One is the failure of universal reduction in science, losing him point a).
The second is that he does not have any mechanism to develop consciousness in animals -- one must invoke EMERGENCE to do so, and he has excluded that with a). The third is that his coupling of consciousness to matter is unjustified, other than as an ad hoc assumption. Further problems come with his presumption of causal closure of the physical, when it is blatantly obvious that consciousness is causal. I don't think Goff has any strengths to overcome these problems with Chalmers.
@ARaybould "With regard to the alleged failure of reductionism, the arguments have the problem that they are, in a sense, too powerful." Philosophy of science has not rejected reductionism as a VERY useful tool. What has been rejected is the principle of UNIVERSAL reductionism. The other alternative frameworks, of emergence, pluralism, holism, and process science, are each less frequently useful than reduction.
BUT -- there are cases where each of the alternatives should be used instead of reduction. This is a methodology of doing science that uses a pragmatic toolkit of pluralist approaches. That most of physics reduces to either QM or relativity, and about half of chemistry reduces to QM, remains a significant success of the reductionist paradigm. But UNIVERSAL reductionism has been abandoned as unachievable
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