03:55
@Dcleve It doesn't take much to be accused of scientism around here! All it takes, apparently, is this: firstly, point out that, when it comes to refuting the proposition 'science has been unable to detect souls', the only sort of response that is going to settle the matter if to show that science has been able to detect souls; ...
secondly, point out that only if there was a sufficiently worked-out explanation for consciousness that required souls would it refute Matthew's proposition. If this is what scientism is, then it is a pretty rational stance!
Seeing as you have chosen to invoke Einstein's thought experiments, I will point out that nothing he said (or, at least, allowed to leak into his publications) went against the principles of argumentation that underlie these observations.
Furthermore, the fate of the EPR paper demonstrates how what seems to be an unavoidable conclusion from a thought experiment can be overthrown by empirical evidence that was not even conceived of at the time.
It would be a mistake to assume, from my position in this little spat, that I am broadly in agreement with Matthew: I don't think his attempts to dismiss phenomenal experience manage to explain it away, and I certainly don't think the question of whether you are a Christian has any business being in this discussion.
In particular, it is disingenuous to say that I "declared only science evidence was ever worth talking about" either literally or after my clarification, and regardless of what Matthew has said, I have never said, and do not hold, that "only published journal articles on science theories are worth consideration", and I do think our subjective experiences are important.
(An approximate summary of what I suspect is closing in on an explanation of consciousness is Jaegwon Kim's positions, but without the worry over inverted spectra.)
To be fair, you have, this time around, offered substantive responses to my earlier points, and I respect that. After due consideration, however, I feel strongly that they miss their target:
In the section beginning "Meanwhile THIs objection:" you start your response with "empiricism NEVER provides a 'necessity' argument..." Indeed, but this is beside the point. Hypotheses have postulates without which they fail (e.g. for Newtonian cosmology, they include that there is gravity and that it obeys an inverse-square law.)
If, in the successful explanation of consciousness ( whenever and whatever it turns out to be), immaterial souls do not appear in that way, then this explanation cannot be construed as evidence for immaterial souls. This point neither entails nor is predicated on radical skepticism.
I willingly admit that your argument for the testability of ensoulment dualism is rather clever, in its own way: it is essentially that, as some philosophers think dualism can be refuted, this shows it must be testable.
Perhaps the weakest (though still adequate) objection to this argument is that it is an ad hominem one (in the non-pejorative sense of that term.) Furthermore, it is one where the philosophers you are using to make this argument are, you insist, completely wrong about dualism! Of course, if they are wrong about dualism, then there is no reason to think that the implication to falsifiability holds.
Nor are their objections to dualism entirely empirical. Thought experiments do not give us empirical evidence: as I wrote above, the fate of the EPR paper demonstrates how what seems to be an unavoidable conclusion from a thought experiment can be overthrown by empirical evidence that was not even conceived of at the time.
This argument equivocates over what 'testable' and 'falsifiable' mean. When used as terms of art in the philosophy and practice of science, they are referring specifically to something I mentioned above: hypotheses having postulates without which they fail, and which are empirically testable. If you are willing to explain what these are in the case of three-world dualism, I'm all ears.
Finally: "I savaged ARaybould..." I think the word you are looking for is 'gummed' as your responses have been toothless!
@MatthewChristopherBartsh When you say "you certainly wouldn't be comparing qualia" you are begging the question. If you were to say "you are comparing one illusion with another" we would not be making any epistemic progress, as you have not explained what the illusion is. On the other hand, if you are not saying that, we have something that we all seem to do all the time (compare current experiences with memories) that does not seem to have been explained from an illusionist perspective.
04:49
@ARaybould It seems "scientism" has two main meanings, the first being the belief that science is most reliable way to gain knowledge, and the second being excessive enthusiasm about science. I'm not sure in which of these two senses, if either @Dcleve is using the word. I would agree that scientism in the first sense is a pretty rational stance. By definition scientism in the second sense is something bad, though it's not clear to me how one could be excessively enthusiastic about science in
today's world, where so much stupidity and misery and death is the result of insufficient enthusiasm for science.
I say "in today's world" but of course insufficient of enthusiasm about science has been a (the?) major cause of misery on this planet ever since science was invented.
The amount of ingratitude of people regarding science and scientists is something I find astounding, as well as despicable. Especially reprehensible in my opinion is the ingratitude towards medical researchers including those who work for large pharmaceutical companies that leads to claims that "big pharma" is some sort of enemy (while the good guys are supposedly the one's who are selling "health foods", vitamin pills, dietary supplements and so on, and making a fortune doing it in many cases.)
Of course, in many cases, it is precisely those who are making money from pseudoscience that bad mouth scientists, and even science itself, publicly. To dismiss science as a whole is like dismissing rationality as a whole. It's absurd, and yet one sees it all the time. I highly recommend Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for insights into how messed up a large part of academia (more or less all of the humanities and so called soft sciences) is
and in how it is thanks mainly to willful ignorance of human biology, and even hostility to parts of it, despite these parts of biology being well established. Basically, there's this myth, that is normally credited to that Rousseau guy from around the time of the French Revolution (which he probably helped cause with that myth). And this myth is that people are born as blank slates in effect. Pinker shows that this is BS, and how nearly everyone believes it, BS for bs, not "blank slate".
Another Pinker book is "The better angels of our nature", which is about how rates of violence have been declining all over the world, for all of history, and are still declining rapidly. He also explains why most people don't know this, and indeed think the world is getting more violent (the media). Pinker also looks at possible reasons for this remarkable, "core" if you like, trend, and part of the reason for the decline of violence during the last five hundred years is the rise of science.
2 hours later…
06:54
@MatthewChristopherBartsh, @ARaybould "conscious experience seems to be the way humans learn about an outside world" True, but that would still be the case even if there were no qualia. So qualia are not needed to explain it.
So if there is no qualia, there is no first-person experience right? How can consciousness exist without first-person experience? Why would you even call this consciousness?
So if there is no qualia, there is no first-person experience right? How can consciousness exist without first-person experience? Why would you even call this consciousness?
@It's not that only third person observable data should ever be considered, it is that only third person observable data is data. Consider what you want, but it isn't data if it is a conclusion based on introspection.
You still haven't answered how you are getting this third person data without first person experience. So you read a journal... this is according to you... not a private-first person experience... so do you mean all other conscious beings are seeing what you're seeing while you're reading it? Are are you seeing that you are really not seeing anything and the information is g…
You still haven't answered how you are getting this third person data without first person experience. So you read a journal... this is according to you... not a private-first person experience... so do you mean all other conscious beings are seeing what you're seeing while you're reading it? Are are you seeing that you are really not seeing anything and the information is g…
4 hours later…
11:28
@AmeetSharma "True, but that would still be the case even if there were no qualia. So qualia are not needed to explain it." Did you forget to put this is quotes? As it is, it looks like you are saying this yourself. But I remember saying this in this thread, and I don't believe you would take my words and repeat them verbatim without giving me credit.
@AmeetSharma "So if there is no qualia, there is no first-person experience right? How can consciousness exist without first-person experience? Why would you even call this consciousness?" I think that illusionism says that there is no first-person experience in addition to third-person observables. There is simply experience, which for the subject is first-person experience, and for others is third person experience. Thus all there really is for you with say a toothache is the decaying the tooth
your moaning in pain, and payment of a fortune to a surgeon to remove the the abnormally positioned tooth, say. And that's exactly the same as what your pain is for third parties. In addition, there is your claim that the pain has qualia, and all the details of what you say, and how you say it, but that also is for you in reality no different than it is for third parties. The only thing that is purely subjective are the "qualia" themselves, and they do not exist. They are only claimed to
exist by you. They are in that sense delusions, like someone thinking a woman was really cut in two and put back together without a drop of blood being spilled. It never happened. It was only claimed to have happened. And sincerely.
@ARaybould " I certainly don't think the question of whether you are a Christian has any business being in this discussion." A reasonable point of view. In my defense, @Dcleve has claimed to believe in immaterial souls, and mentioned "Augustine" without clarifying who he was referring to, although Googling around it seems that Saint Augustine is who was being referred to. Frequently using ALL CAPS LIKE THIS also has no place in this discussion and is something I associate with religious fanatics.
Also, @Dcleve addressed me as "Michael" and possibly also "Michal", and has admitted that, but has not apologized yet, although he claims it was a mistake. "Michael" is an "angel" Christians seem to talk about a lot. Compared to that, asking him whether he is a Christian seems relatively harmless.
"I do think our subjective experiences are important.
" So do I. I am just saying that they are not scientific data and the data here is the utterance containing the claim to be having a subjective experience, and the claims about that "experience".
" So do I. I am just saying that they are not scientific data and the data here is the utterance containing the claim to be having a subjective experience, and the claims about that "experience".
@ARaybould "regardless of what Matthew has said, I have never said, and do not hold, that "only published journal articles on science theories are worth consideration"" I also do not hold that. It's just that if there are no published journal articles about a theory, then it strongly suggests that science does not say that that theory is falsifiable.
12:13
@MatthewChristopherBartsh for all the science we have, the average life expectancy (if you have survived childhood) wasn't that much better than in the paleolithic. And for this we polluted the planet.
Attacks on Big Pharma aren't attacks on science. I mean, it's just regarded as an immoral business because of IP. People don't get the medicine they need, not because of any real shortage, but because $$$.
Attacks on Big Pharma aren't attacks on science. I mean, it's just regarded as an immoral business because of IP. People don't get the medicine they need, not because of any real shortage, but because $$$.
12:50
@ARaybould "Jaegwon Kim's positions," Would you care to summarize what you understand to be his positions?
@ARaybould "Thought experiments do not give us empirical evidence: as I wrote above, the fate of the EPR paper demonstrates how what seems to be an unavoidable conclusion from a thought experiment can be overthrown by empirical evidence that was not even conceived of at the time." Good point.
@ARaybould "something that we all seem to do all the time (compare current experiences with memories) that does not seem to have been explained from an illusionist perspective." I think illusionism is in its infancy. It isn't complete yet, and won't be until a scientific explanation of the details of the alleged illusion have, if they ever are, worked out. That could happen sooner than one might expect with the help of AI. Perhaps there will soon be AI's who claim to be conscious, and for the
exact same reasons we do. I mean claim to have phenomenal consciousness. Careless of me. The AI may have the exact same illusion as a healthy human does.
@ARaybould "We know that the third is false. By your reasoning, this is a falsifiable prediction of the other two - yet we now also know that these are also false!" Good thinking.
@AmeetSharma "You still haven't answered how you are getting this third person data without first person experience. So you read a journal... this is according to you... not a private-first person experience... so do you mean all other conscious beings are seeing what you're seeing while you're reading it?" I don't see what the problem is. As long as we agree on what the articles say, and which journal each one is in, and so on, whether we are human, robot, or a assortment of each, we can still do
science. And nonscientists can read and discuss the articles, too, whether human or not. I don't see why you think the absence or presence of qualia make any difference to this.
@AmeetSharma And don't forget that one of the things Chalmers and Dennett agree on it that zombies, as Chalmers describes them, would have thoughts. They would be no third party detectable difference between zombies and humans. They would even claim, you may recall, to have qualia. They would be as sure as humans that they are not zombies. And, obviously, they would be just as capable as humans at doing science (you see any difference) as Chalmers himself would presumably agree.
13:29
@viuser " the average life expectancy (if you have survived childhood) wasn't that much better than in the paleolithic." Citation?
@viuser "Attacks on Big Pharma aren't attacks on science. I mean, it's just regarded as an immoral business because of IP. People don't get the medicine they need, not because of any real shortage, but because $$$." What about those claims that I hear so often that it's impossible to find out the truth about how useless or even harmful Big Pharma drugs are because even doctors won't tell you the truth about them? That implies that science is broken insofar as you can't get the truth about Big
14:20
@MatthewChristopherBartsh What I wrote here about my relationship to Kim's views is rather more complicated than I suggested: I think some form of functionalism, properly construed, is promising, and in Kim's work, it is more than just his problem with inverted spectra that I think need to (and can be) fixed up.
"I don't see what the problem is. As long as we agree on what the articles say, and which journal each one is in, and so on, whether we are human, robot, or a assortment of each, we can still do
science. And nonscientists can read and discuss the articles, too, whether human or not. I don't see why you think the absence or presence of qualia make any difference to this."
But how do you know about journals or robots or anything without first-person experience? Robots as I understand them to be defined, cannot read or know anything. They will behave in a way similar to humans if they are pro…
science. And nonscientists can read and discuss the articles, too, whether human or not. I don't see why you think the absence or presence of qualia make any difference to this."
But how do you know about journals or robots or anything without first-person experience? Robots as I understand them to be defined, cannot read or know anything. They will behave in a way similar to humans if they are pro…
@MatthewChristopherBartsh For more on why I think inverted qualia are not a problem, see here: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63352820#63352820
14:49
@AmeetSharma I need to look for it. All I could come up with so far is page thirteen of chapter one of the printed book (page 26 of 213 of the PDF linked to) researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Dennett/publication/…
Dennett writes: "David Chalmers, identifier of the Hard Problem, would agree
with me , I think . He would classify the topic question as one of
the "easy problems "-one of the problems that doesfind its solu-
tion in terms of computational models of control mechanisms .
It follow s from what he calls the principle of organizational
invariance .12"
with me , I think . He would classify the topic question as one of
the "easy problems "-one of the problems that doesfind its solu-
tion in terms of computational models of control mechanisms .
It follow s from what he calls the principle of organizational
invariance .12"
15:30
In my defense, @Dcleve has claimed to believe in immaterial souls, and mentioned
@MatthewChristopherBartsh wrote: ""Augustine" without clarifying who he was referring to, although Googling around it seems that Saint Augustine is who was being referred to. Frequently using ALL CAPS LIKE THIS also has no place in this discussion and is something I associate with religious fanatics.' LOL. Keith Augustine is the primary editor of the book The Myth of an Afterlife, and author of the two most important chapters, 1 and 10.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh wrote: ""Augustine" without clarifying who he was referring to, although Googling around it seems that Saint Augustine is who was being referred to. Frequently using ALL CAPS LIKE THIS also has no place in this discussion and is something I associate with religious fanatics.' LOL. Keith Augustine is the primary editor of the book The Myth of an Afterlife, and author of the two most important chapters, 1 and 10.
15:47
Capitalizing words within a sentence is a method of partially compensations for one of the numerous disadvantages of text vs speaking. It is well known that internet communications much more regularly lead to misunderstandings of the intentions and tone of a message than the spoken word. The addition of smiley faces, and of emphasis, to text partially compensate for those shortfalls. I urge you to overcome your personal associations, and benefit from the increase in communication clarity.
16:26
@ARaybould -- My objections to your comments have been threefold. 1) Your post continues to be an assertion of scientism, 2) I already satisfied the "supporting evidence" criteria, and 3) Matthew has a burden of justification for every claim he makes, which you are denying.
For 1) scientism, by my understanding of the term, is the belief, or claim, or in this case simply assumption, that the only source of evidence that we have about our world is scientific evidence. The belief in scientism leads to the dismissal of any but "scientific" evidnece, which is what I percieved your post to do.
I consider scientism to be definitively refuted by the simple question of what category of knowledge the claim of scientism to be true falls within. It is EPISTEMOLOGY, a branch of philosophy, and is a prerequisite to scientism claims. Further, even the characterization of what science even IS, is a branch of philosophy, and is a further prerequisite. Having non-scientific knowledge as prerequisites to science, refutes scientism.
Karl Popper further did not draw any definitive lines between science and either informal empiricism, or philosophy. His position is that one cannot do so, as science is emergent from both. Science is just a refinement of the methodology of informal empiricism, and sciences are only emergent from philosophy once one understands a field and how to investigate it well enough for it to become its own stand alone subject area of thought.
Therefore, as cognitive science has not yet fully emerged from philosophy of mind, much of the relevant work that is done to evaluate theories of consciousness is within the realm of philosophy, and much of the evidence comes from informal empiricism, not science journal articles.
For 2) I provided significant evidence in the citations of experiments AND thought problems in my reviews of Blackmore's Very Short Introduction, of Musolino's The Soul Fallacy, and of Augustine's The Myth of an Afterlife. The innuendo that I had not already provided both an explicit model, nor run it up against potentially refuting test cases, is an astonishingly false innuendo.
17:05
For 3) ALL claims carry burdens of support. I readily agree that my claim that spiritual dualism is a credible model for consciousness, and satisfies all test cases, unlike any physicalist model, is a claim that I am obligated to provide justification for.
However, likewise, any claim that physicalism is true, is necessarily true, or has no refuting test cases, needs to be justified by anyone who makes that claim. Likewise with any claim to have solved the hard or ven the easy problems of consciousness, or in this case a claim about the lack of any evidence for souls.
For his claim @MatthewChristopherBartsh is obligated to show that he has done an at least moderately exhaustive search for plausible sources of such evidence, and that his due diligence has failed to uncover any.
And any such search would quickly discover that basically all humans become dualists in their late toddlerhood/early-childhood, and this is an entirely reasonable informal empiricism inference from the dramatic utility of theories of mind, and intentionality/agency.
And the uniformity of our doing so, impels we are evolutionarily primed to reach this conclusion. And as there is a selective advantage to having TRUE theories about our universe, this is moderately strong evolutionary evidence for dualism to be true. His failure to do even basic due diligence research before making a false assertion, is blatant.
Your defense of him, by denying any burden of justification for his claims, is epistemologically indefensible.
@ARaybould -- your claim that my demonstration of refutability, by citing philosophers who provide what they consider to be refuting test cases somehow DOESN'T show refutability because their refutations fail to hit their mark (and therefore they are confused about dualism), is a gross misrepresentation of the dialog I have with these references.
Blackmore offers two primary refutations of dualist theories of consciousness. First, she holds that physicalism is so well demonstrated, that dualism simply cannot be true. She made this particular claim most explicitly in her autobiography. If it were true, it would be an effective refutation of dualism from the outset, and is not in any way a confusion about dualism.
I provided, in the links I have offered, support from multiple respected contemporary near-physicalists that physicalism CANNOT be true, given what we know about causation (Kim), consciousness (Blackmore), and physics/science (Stoljar). I did not link to my own further due diligence to challenge the "conservation of energy refutes dualism" of Dennett and most of Augustine's contributors, but DID cite how Augustine himself admits physicists reject this.
17:47
Blackmore's second refutation was that consciousness cannot be unitary, and unity is a key assumption of most (she presumes all) dualism. Blackmore is correct that Hasker, Swinburne, and Moreland, three of the most philosophically substantive dualists today, all hold by unity of sul, and her data refutes what to them is a central assumption of dualism.
Her shortfalls are is mistaking the evidence FOR physicalism, and too narrow an understanding of the dualist Research Programme. Note that Popperian falsifiability is only a first approximation to how we do science, and Lakatos Research Programme approach to science is the further refinement: bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Lakatos.html
Kim's objection is not mistaken about dualism -- dualism MUST provide a means of distinguishing which world 2 entity is causal on a world 1 object, he is only mistaken that location is the ONLY means to do so. Dualist theories must develop a distinguishment property, and this is a demand for added complexity that the Programme needs to accept.
Augustine's section 1 contributors cite multiple refutations to two other popular dualist models -- the "drone operator metaphor" (our consciousness is entirely offboard, and brain damage only affect the "drone" of our body), and the "filter" hypothesis that we are always conscious of EVERYTHING in the universe, and our brain and senses just helps us focus on important stuff, while filtering out the noise of everything else.
These are CHALLENGING data for dualism, and to address it, I offer a partial assistance model for consciousness. This is a significant complexity to a dualist model, and if physicalism were not suffering from even more need for caveats, then Augustine's section 1 could be a strong argument for dualism going regressive/kluged. But a kluged model always beats one that has yet to be shown to be patchable at all.
These test cases constrain the viable options within a dualist Research Programme, and are therefore explicitly test cases, and serve to refute variants of dualism. Under Lakatos' model, this the most one can ever get from test cases.
If you missed my link to my review of Augustine, here it is again: amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10Z02T2ZEYPFY/…
Interactive dualism makes a LOT of predictions. Among the most overt: one shoudl be able to distinguish a clear difference between living things and non-living. And consciousness is causal. And consciousness IS causal. And we can readily distinguish between macadam and the plants growing beside it, and between a living groundhog beside the road, and a dead one on it. The living things have agency, the dead or inert ones do not.
18:44
@ARaybould in this prior discussion, chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63352820#63352820 I do not actually endorse Kim's particular views about the thought problems that he considers to have been effective in demonstrating to philosophers that functionalism is false. I cite Kim because HE declared that these thought problems have won the day among philosophers of mind, and that functionalism has been abandoned because of them.
My view on functionalism is that it could have been true, but that IF it were true, then we would be zombies based on evolutionary principles. We can and DO do functions unconsciously all the time, often the same functions we do consciously. Based on variance, and selection among variants based on causal benefit, any accidental correlation of our conscious thoughts with our functional behavior would have drifted radically out of sync du to evolutionary variation.
That we instead have a tuned and effective consciousness, is only explainable by explicit causation for consciousness, independent of any physical or functional substrate. i had made this point in the linked discussion, but your final replies did not address my point, but instead just Kim's argument.
@AmeetSharma also if you are interested, this book is an outstanding summary of how difficult both the easy and hard problems have proven to be for the AI and neural researchers of the last 4 decades: amazon.com/Shadow-Consciousness-Little-Less-Wrong/dp/1507869177/…
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