From: Ken Clements (Ken@InnovationOnDmnd.com)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 00:02:04 MST
Zeb Haradon wrote:
>
> Great, so tell us how.
> Until then, I favor Chalmers over Dennett. There is a quote I like which
> really sums up the situation on consciousness:
>
> "At the present time the status of physicalism [your view] is similar to
> that which the
> hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a
> pre-Socratic
> philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it
> might be
> true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a
> physical
> event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'." -
> Thomas Nagel
>
I take it that the quote above is from Nagel's famous piece "What is it like to
be a bat?"
I like the response to Nagel by Douglas Hofstader in "What is it like to bat a
bee?" in _The Mind's I_ (p. 406):
-- The image conjured up by the phrase "What is it like to be X"? is
-- so seductive and tempting ... Our minds are so flexible, so willing to
-- accept this notion, this idea that there is "something it is line to be a
bat."
-- Furthermore, we also willingly buy the idea that there are certain things
-- that it is "like something to be" -- "be-able things," or "BATs" for short
-- -- such as bats, cows, people; and other things for which this doesn't hold
-- -- such as balls, steaks, galaxies (even though a galaxy may contain innu-
-- merable be-able things). What is the criterion for "BAT-itude"?
--
-- In philosophical literature, many phrases have been used to try to
-- evoke the right flavors for what being sentient really is ("being sentient"
-- is one of them). Two old terms are "soul" and "amima." These days, an
-- "in" word is "intentionality." There is the old standby, "consciousness."
-- Then there is "being a subject," "having an inner life," "having exprei-
-- ence," "having point of view," having "perceptual aboutness" or " "per-
-- sonhood" or a "self" or "free will." In some people's eyes, "having a
-- mind," "being intelligent," and just plain old "thinking" have the right
-- flavors. In Searle's article ("Minds, Brains, and Programs"), the contrast
was
-- drawn between "form" (hollow and mechanical) and "content" (alive and
-- intentional); the words "syntactic" and "semantic" (or "meaningless" and
-- "meaningful") were also used to characterize this distinction. All of the
terms in
-- this huge showcase are nearly synonymous. They all have to do with the
-- object in question: "Is this object a BAT, or not?" But is there really some
-- thing to which they refer?
>
> Qualia are REAL. This is undeniable. They are not a hypothesis used to
> explain a phenomena - they are a phenomena which make themselves immediately
> accessible to whoever experiences them. They are the fact which other
> hypothesi must explain. I suspect (strongly) that they are intimately tied
> to, or are caused by, or perhaps just "are" physical phenomena, in the sense
> that holograms are light. People who deny their existence remind me of the
> Mr. Spock stereotyped scientist portrayed on tv who will put forth some
> argument like "love doesn't really exist, it's simply a series of
> biochemical reactions", I wonder at what kind of weird motivation he has in
> denying the plainly obvious, or trying to language around a clearly evident
> fact.
My turn to quote from Chalmers on page 215 of _The Conscious Mind_:
-- All this metaphysical grandeur is well and good, one might reply, but how
-- does it cash out in practice? In particular, how can we discover the psycho-
-- physical laws that will constitute a theory of consciousness? After all,
there
-- is an enormous problem for a theory of consciousness that does not confront
-- a theory of physics: the lack of data. Because consciousness is not directly
-- observable in experimental contexts, we cannot simply run experiments mea-
-- suring the experiences that are associated with various physical processes,
-- thereby confirming and disconfirming various psychophysical hypotheses.
-- Indeed, it might seem that the untestability of any theory of consciousness
-- that we might put forward would relegate such theories to the status of
-- pseudoscience.
I did not argue *for* physicalism (another failure of reason is that an argument
against something must, necessarily be an argument for something else), I am
pointing out that any theory that has no data, and is untestable, shares the
same status as superstition. Some superstitions turn out to be true. However,
given all the non-testable things out there to believe in, and that I cannot
find a way to break the symmetry, I choose to wait for data to believe in any.
-Ken
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