board77

Axordil wrote:

And why not? What about consciousness makes it different? The only thing I see that makes it different from any other purely material phenomenon/epiphenomenon is that unlike something like, say, lightning, or erosion, or continental drift, there's good reason to believe it's fairly recent in origin, certainly in the form we enjoy it now. Which of course points to Dennett's Eureka moment--if consciousness didn't exist, or not fully, in lower animals, but it exists fully for us, then it must have come about from something that happened in between, that is, evolutionary development, and thus must be purely physical in nature.

You call that a "Eureka" moment?? That's a total non sequitur if I've ever heard one. Ever read anything by John Searle? As I said above, there are many things that are not per se scientific "objects" of study. You don't seem to be grasping my point here. I have said that I have no objection to "consciousness or something like it" being studied from an empirical point of view. But you are asking for a reason why we can't just assume consciousness is purely and entirely physical and empirical in nature. You act as if the burden for this proof rests on me and that we should assume that it is physical and material unless I can give a good reason otherwise. But there is a much deeper issue at stake here. The burden of proof (as far as consciousness goes) would rest with me if the empirical-scientific method had a monopoly on understanding in general. But it doesn't, so the reality called "consciousness" doesn't necessarily fall comprehension-wise under that domain alone. It does undoubtedly fall under that domain in part since it is reasonable that there is a physical counterpart or correlate or component to consciousness (such as that for every 'feeling' or 'thought' which is experienced 'subjectively' there can be matched a relatively predictable region of activated neurons in the brain or whatever, but this does not mean that consciousness itself is reducible or identical with those neuronal activities themselves).

Why do things like "lightning" fall comprehension-wise solely under science then? Are there some things that do? I think yes, there are at least some that fall nearly under it, or under it for all intents and purposes, but they do only because they are "objects-for-science" to begin with. Let me explain. Unlike love, consciousness, life, being, etc., the term "lightning" refers to an already isolated, scientific-ready "phenomena". The pure phenomena, however, is just "that jagged flash of light over in the sky" or something like that. It is whatever it is. However, when you talk about "a static electricity discharge from a cloud with such-and-such pressure gradient etc." or whatever, then you are talking about an object already entirely within and accessible to the scientific domain. It's the pure phenomena already "filtered" through a particular (scientific) method.

Same with consciousness in a sense, though here the example is more pronounced. Consciousness only "becomes" a purely physical object(s) (neurons and brain activity) when some pure phenomena (for consciousness this is a difficult one, but we might say whatever sense we have of our own awareness or of another's awareness as a similar being to our self) gets objectified-for-science. It gets readied-for-science because there must undergo a process in which the pure phenomena of "consciousness" becomes an isolatable and testable object for science. It becomes this and is not necessarily this to begin with because the scientific method cannot say anything about the phenomenal origin of the objects which it studies. Science just takes the objects and studies them.

Just for fun ...

http://xkcd.com/32/

Jnyusa wrote:

Just for fun ...

http://xkcd.com/32/

It's far from a non sequitur. It's a moment of knot-cutting worthy of Alexander. The problem with philosophy, if I may generalize (and why the hell not, everyone else here is) is that it tends to operate under the assumption that since ideas are unchanging, the things they refer to are as well. Tain't so.

What Dennett brought to bear on the problem was the simple fact that consciousness, being dependent on a brain, could not possibly have existed before brains, almost certainly not before complex brains, and probably not fully before brains capable of developing abstract language.

I don't think there's a spin that can be put on that. If a physical change brought about consciousness, then consciousness must be inherently physical.

There are issues that are best addressed by pure philosophy, but this one has slid over into the pile of things that empiricism is more helpful with, along with other formerly mysterious phenomena and epiphenomena. Remember, 300 years ago, lightning was NOT "an already isolated, scientific-ready "phenomena"." It was mysterious, as mysterious as any aspect of consciousness, more so even because consciousness was understood to be an aspect of the immaterial and immortal soul. Hmm. Maybe ideas change too.

What we're watching is the rear-guard action of human exceptionalism.

Iavas--

One cavaet on determinism. There is a certain element of chance, not so great as people might imagine, but still present. Take for example the fact that our eyes dart around a lot very quickly (and effectively randomly) to build the visual image we perceive. If our eyes happen to be darting on one direction when something appears in the other, an event could transpire that might not if our eyes were darting in the direction of the object.

That sounds trivial until you think about the object being a semi.

What Dennett brought to bear on the problem was the simple fact that consciousness, being dependent on a brain, could not possibly have existed before brains, almost certainly not before complex brains, and probably not fully before brains capable of developing abstract language.

I don't think there's a spin that can be put on that. If a physical change brought about consciousness, then consciousness must be inherently physical.


So this Dennett person's great realization was that since consciousness is obviously entirely physical then it must obviously be entirely physical? Umm, call me unimpressed.

yovargas--
The alternative is that consciousness isn't dependent on a brain, which is not only unfalsifiable but imperceivable for us. If disembodied consciousness could exist, how would we know?

Axordil wrote:

It's far from a non sequitur. It's a moment of knot-cutting worthy of Alexander. The problem with philosophy, if I may generalize (and why the hell not, everyone else here is) is that it tends to operate under the assumption that since ideas are unchanging, the things they refer to are as well.

Um, ok. That’s where Heidegger and the “postmodernists” come in for one.

Axordil wrote:

What Dennett brought to bear on the problem was the simple fact that consciousness, being dependent on a brain, could not possibly have existed before brains, almost certainly not before complex brains, and probably not fully before brains capable of developing abstract language.

But it is not valid to assume that consciousness is dependent on brains. One can only say that wherever there is consciousness for humans there is a human brain. It’s only factual correlation, not generalized dependence.

Axordil wrote:

I don't think there's a spin that can be put on that. If a physical change brought about consciousness, then consciousness must be inherently physical.

A physical change did not “bring about” consciousness. At most we can say that along with the advent of consciousness there was a physical change. It’s correlation between, to put it in Cartesian terms, the res extensa and res cogitans. But there is no basis for a substantiative reduction of one to the other.

Axordil wrote:

There are issues that are best addressed by pure philosophy, but this one has slid over into the pile of things that empiricism is more helpful with, along with other formerly mysterious phenomena and epiphenomena. Remember, 300 years ago, lightning was NOT "an already isolated, scientific-ready "phenomena"." It was mysterious, as mysterious as any aspect of consciousness, more so even because consciousness was understood to be an aspect of the immaterial and immortal soul.

And lightning still is that mysterious phenomena. The only difference is that now it is also an object ready for science. But the phenomena are still there and still valid and real just as they ever were. Pre-modern explanations may have been either pseudo-scientific, or mythic, poetic, romantic, etc.

Axordil wrote:

What we're watching is the rear-guard action of human exceptionalism.

Yes, I am exceptional. Not humanity, no. I never said humanity. But this, this is more exceptional than anything that exists or ever could exist.

Look, I’m just not very interested in having a discussion with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the relevance of the entire course of the history of philosophy to our contemporary situation and who chooses not to respond to the specific issues I raise in my posts.

yovargas wrote:

What Dennett brought to bear on the problem was the simple fact that consciousness, being dependent on a brain, could not possibly have existed before brains, almost certainly not before complex brains, and probably not fully before brains capable of developing abstract language.

I don't think there's a spin that can be put on that. If a physical change brought about consciousness, then consciousness must be inherently physical.

As I said above, there is nothing to say that consciousness is “dependent” on a brain. There is only a factual correlation between the two. This argument constitutes a confusion between the order of history and the order of formal causality. Just because consciousness follows on and is correlated with brains historically does not imply that consciousness is primarily or inherently physical. It only means that, physically and historically speaking, brains do in fact seem to be necessary for consciousness to manifest physically. But it does not mean that consciousness IS this physicality in any essential way.

In other words, it does appear to be historically and physically dependent on brains, but consciousness is not necessarily therefore dependent in itself on brains in the sense of being reducible to brains. It is only "dependent" insofar as the orders of material and efficient causalities are concerned, but not insofar as the formal causal structure of "nature" is concerned for instance.

That kinda reminds me of that old thinking along the lines of, hey, when you leave a piece of meat out for a while, maggots start coming out. That must mean maggots come from old meat...
(I'm not sure if I'm remembering that old legend right but regardless the logic sounds awfully similar to me.)

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Look, I’m just not very interested in having a discussion with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the relevance of the entire course of the history of philosophy to our contemporary situation and who chooses not to respond to the specific issues I raise in my posts.

I acknowledge it has relevance. I just refuse to acknowledge it has supremacy. The problem with the kind of philosophical discussion you are asking for is that it is almost guaranteed to get everyone involved exactly nowhere. That's philosophy as job security for philosophy majors, and I, for my part, am not very interested in having a discussion of that sort, although goodness knows they need all the help they can get in that area.

Sure, there may be aspects of anything that aren't empirically observable in any way, shape or form. Why should I care about them? Why should anyone? Especially in light of the fact that I do care about those aspects which ARE apprehensible in some meaningful way...which is to say, in ways that can be meaningfully shared between people. Empiricism provides a stable, productive, and hypothetically objective (until you introduce people ) framework for sharing information about reality, so I don't see why I should be faulted for preferring it to more obtuse, less useful alternatives when it's at all appropriate. 100 years ago I couldn't possibly have had a meaningful discussion about consciousness as a function of brain activity, and it wouldn't have been. Now, it is.

ETA before I forget: BTW, it occurs to me that I haven't seen an alternative non-theistic framework for consciousness offered here. I didn't go with Dennett's because I liked it, I went with it because he was more persuasive than Searle or Chalmers or that ilk. Can you persuade me that there's a better model?

yovargas--

That was the theory of spontaneous generation, which was pretty easily disproved when someone bothered to put the meat in a sealed container and then look for maggots.

Think of the material universe as a sealed container.

Now, try to avoid creeping claustrophobia.

yovargas wrote:

That kinda reminds me of that old thinking along the lines of, hey, when you leave a piece of meat out for a while, maggots start coming out. That must mean maggots come from old meat...
(I'm not sure if I'm remembering that old legend right but regardless the logic sounds awfully similar to me.)

You mean Axordil's argument reminds you of that, or mine does?

In the case with spontaneous generation, though, the theorizing took place entirely within the realm of the empirical as far as I know. So assuming that maggots came from old meat is to theorize against the now accepted empirical view that maggots come from eggs laid in the meat by flies or whatever. But I don't think my argument is trying to claim that the scientific "explanation" of consciousness is wrong. I'm not trying to butt heads straight across with the idea that consciousness or something seemingly like it can be studied empirically. I'm just saying this method doesn't exhaust the idea of consciousness.

My argument doesn't change the role or utility of science at all. It doesn't really touch empirical science. It only broadens the horizon of our interpretative, knowledge-oriented, and meaning-based lives. I'm not even trying to pin consciousness down or derive a model for it. I'm opening the gates for different forms of understanding. We can understand the "mind" in poetry, and this is an understanding over which science has no priority for instance. Understanding can come through art which does not come in science. It is an analogous dispersion of the term "understanding" in some way.

Essentially, what we today call empirical science just does what it does. What does it do? It just observes and models and tests models until a sufficient mental picture is formed which seems about right insofar as the ability to predict and control is concerned. Now what is Axordil saying? A giant leap! That our understanding of consciousness is somehow bound and closed up within this very narrow process of empirical poking and prodding. But wherever did this leap come from?

jadeval wrote:

Essentially, what we today call empirical science just does what it does. What does it do? It just observes and models and tests models until a sufficient mental picture is formed which seems about right insofar as the ability to predict and control is concerned. Now what is Axordil saying? A giant leap! That our understanding of consciousness is somehow bound and closed up within this very narrow process of empirical poking and prodding. But wherever did this leap come from?

Maybe it came from what is SIMPLE and OBVIOUS. That consciousness is a by-product of evolution, a developed trait that has allowed the human species to almost completely conquere its environment. Where is the leap. To be self-aware is to be the most well-equipped species on the planet. What is there to fear about this that makes abstract, ultimately meaningless pondering attractive?

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Look, I’m just not very interested in having a discussion with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the relevance of the entire course of the history of philosophy to our contemporary situation

Nothing you've said has convinced me that it's relevant. Maybe it's worth talking about for the sake of human curiosity and completeness, but ultimately giving nothing of value to understanding how the universe works.

For example just look at this:

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As I said above, there is nothing to say that consciousness is “dependent” on a brain. There is only a factual correlation between the two. This argument constitutes a confusion between the order of history and the order of formal causality. Just because consciousness follows on and is correlated with brains historically does not imply that consciousness is primarily or inherently physical. It only means that, physically and historically speaking, brains do in fact seem to be necessary for consciousness to manifest physically. But it does not mean that consciousness IS this physicality in any essential way.

In other words, it does appear to be historically and physically dependent on brains, but consciousness is not necessarily therefore dependent in itself on brains in the sense of being reducible to brains. It is only "dependent" insofar as the orders of material and efficient causalities are concerned, but not insofar as the formal causal structure of "nature" is concerned for instance.

This seems to basically concede the argument, but then twists and squirms to make the tiny grey area where ALL science can be labelled "working theories" to be of some huge significance.

"Well yeah it looks as if the earth orbits the sun due to gravity, but there's always a chance that it's those pesky faeries pushing it around."

Quote:

Just because consciousness follows on and is correlated with brains historically does not imply that consciousness is primarily or inherently physical. It only means that, physically and historically speaking, brains do in fact seem to be necessary for consciousness to manifest physically.

BTW, I don't really disagree with your argument here, although I would say it's a fair inference to make. But of course, inference is an empirical kinda thing.

I am not trying to prove anything logically. Being a good empiricist, I know my limits. I'm assembling a case for a model.

Quote:

Essentially, what we today call empirical science just does what it does. What does it do? It just observes and models and tests models until a sufficient mental picture is formed which seems about right insofar as the ability to predict and control is concerned. Now what is Axordil saying? A giant leap! That our understanding of consciousness is somehow bound and closed up within this very narrow process of empirical poking and prodding.

That's fair. But the crux of the statement is the word "understanding". I am willing to concede (and I think my past posts in other discussions pretty much bear this out) that there may be aspects to consciousness, or to pretty much anything, that are not apprehensible through empirical means. I just don't think it's likely that one can usefully communicate them. Empirical truth may be limited, but it can be shared. Non-empirical truth--what I would call "revealed" truth in other contexts--can't be without forcing it into an empirical model.

Ax and Iavas,

Sorry you guys, but the more you post the more I disagree!

We never actually reach the discussion of what alternate frameworks look like because you keep relegating it to faeries and denying it has value, without being willing to hear what it is. So far we have not gotten beyond the point of repeating endlessly that empiricism is the only legitimate form knowledge, and that is just not accurate.

Our hypothesis are formed and tested according to a reductionist principle, but the theory that instructs us which questions to ask and which hypotheses to form was not arrived at by empirical method. The theory of Natural Selection was not parsed by Darwin from preceding, less-resolute theories; it is far more effectively understood as a philosophical leap from one organizing principle to another.

Empiricism does not invent itself out of the raw material of observation. It proceeds from some starting point, some organizing principle, and the principle arises from ideation that is NOT reducible to observable events. Again, the theory of Natural Selection is not a statement about observable events, it is a statement about the organizing principle which governs the observable events. We do not observe natural selection taking place, we do not test for whether a particular species is 'evolved,' whatever the heck that would mean. We ask whether this organizing principle is sufficient to explain the material observations we have, or whether the material observations defies that explanation. The process of comparing the observed event to the explanation is empirical but the explanation itself is not.

It seems to me that there is a tendency to gather any old kind of material observation under the rubric of empiricism, but I don't understand empiricism nearly so broadly as that. "Observation of the material world" as an explanation of how we know seems to me tautological in this context. Yes, of course, all our ideas originate in this interaction with the material world. That is the IS-NESS of the world for us (gee, there's a word I thought I'd never use again), and there is no other way for us to be in the world in order to have theories about it.

It's not as if there were some other starting point that we could choose but then decide not to choose, acting, sort of, as if we could stand outside of our own brains and tell them to be different from what they are, but we do this only when we are being very unwise, whereas the wise accept the world that presents itself to them. People who are in world but believe in some supreme being who is outside the world are starting from the same material observation condition that we are starting from, they are simply choosing a different organizing principle for their experience, and they are using a different language to describe it. They did not, you know, manage to actually escape for awhile and then come back to tell us what they found. Hey, guess what I saw out there when I was stripped of all my physicality and sense perception and the universe as we know it did not exist. They may talk about their experience that way, as out-of-body, but that is a kind of explanation that we usually reject as solipsistic, and that does not mean that it is non-empirical but that it fails the rules of logic.

Empiricism is not allowed to fail the rules of logic either, and therefore it cannot, by definition, precede logic into the arena of thought. It MUST follow from a statement of a universal which is fundamentally non-empirical.

Excuse me for double posting but I don't seem able to stop myself on this topic

There is also this tendency to view empiricism as self-evidently modern, and all other ways of gathering knowledge as self-evidently more primitive. I don't think this is accurate either. If empiricism is the comparison of explanation to observable event, even the most primitive, mythologically-oriented systems employ empiricism. (I don't know, even, how humankind could have survived as a species if we were not empiricists, because we are woefully underclad when it comes to other kinds of armor.)

There is this great story about the Hopi Indians ... oh gosh, I wish I could remember in which book I read this ... some anthropology textbook decades ago ... anyway the story is about the Hopi experience with Christian missionaries. Prior to the arrival of the missionaries, the Hopi prayed to the kachinas. They prayed for all the benefits humans usually pray to their gods for, and living in the SW US as they did, the big thing the kachinas had to do was make it rain. So the missionaries, in their effort to sell Jesus to the Hopi claimed that Jesus could make it rain, too. The Hopi converted and prayed to Jesus and sure enough, the first year Jesus made rain. The second year he did not. The third year he did not. And the Hopi said, this Jesus explanation doesn't work; we're going back to the Kachina explanation, and when they went back to the Kachinas, the Kachinas rewarded them by giving back the rain.

Now ... I submit that the Hopi are good empiricists. What we have that they did not have is not a better method but better math. We would be able to plot a secular trend and say mathematically whether there were a significant difference between Jesus and the Kachinas, whereas they had to fly by the seat of their pants.

If we want to define Science as something more than empiricism, something different from what the Hopi were doing, the point of departure can't be in the comparison of explanation to observable event because the Hopi did that too. The point of departure is a differing belief about the nature of the explanation. Science proceeds from the assumption that organizing principles are intrinsic to the systems they govern, not imposed upon those systems from without. The Hopi thought that the organizing principle was imposed from without, so it made perfect sense for them to conduct a critical test between two competing hypotheses within that framework: Jesus versus the Kachinas. We would proceed differently, not because we are better empiricists but because we would look for a different kind of organizing principle based on our philosophical understanding of the world. We would look to the rotation of the earth and it's relation to meteorology or something like this. We would look for something intrinsic to the system. We may or may not find it right away, but we do not give up looking for our butterfly effect, or whatever, and decide suddenly, well, it must be Jesus after all, because we are every bit as committed to our belief in intrinsic explanations as they were to their belief in extrinsic explanations. Both approaches are mythical in the strict sense. They are beliefs that precede observation and attempt to organize observation into a coherent framework.

That it is more fruitful to believe in intrinsic explanations in the long run I have no doubt. But it is conceptually effective and clarifying to distinguish between the explanation, the observation, and the comparison of observation to explanation, in the same way that it is conceptually effective and clarifying to talk about the scaffold as something different from the bricks it is being used to lay.

typo

But what is the ultimate point of saying there is more than one scaffold? If one has a philosophical scaffold there is no point debating with you - because anything goes in your world.

I can understand why certain people might be drawn toward discussions like your last two posts, but it seems that on a practical level it's a big waste of time, unlike empiricism.

So the objection to determinism seems to be that from a different scaffold it might not be so - yet it's a scaffold that noone can ever use.

Iavas wrote:

But what is the ultimate point of saying there is more than one scaffold? If one has a philosophical scaffold there is no point debating with you - because anything goes in your world.

No, not everything goes. That is the whole point.

Jadeval (and myself) is/are not arguing that scientific mythology and ... Hopi mythology, let's say ... are equal in their effectiveness. We are saying that empiricism as such does not constitute the scaffold, and if you want to know what goes and what doesn't go within empiricism you have to examine the scaffold.

We are not, for example, permitted to induct directly. We have to deduct in the inductive direction, as Popper put it. Why is that? The reason is not at all empirical; it is philosophic. And we did not always believe that it had to be done that way. The scaffold that is science has changed over time and may change again if we decide that we are beset with logical inconsistencies.

It does not do to assert blindly that empiricism is 'better than everything else' and therefore does not bear examination. That very position is non-scientific and ultimately self-defeating.

From my scientific perspective that mostly comes across as a load of nonsense of no practical value. Call me uneducated in philosophy if you will (glad to be so). I'm pretty sure I could have got through a lifetime in astrophysical research without needing to know I was "deducting in the inductive direction".

Do we really have students spending years on this stuff instead of doing some real science?

If this is all part of the argument against determinism, it's exceedingly unconvincing.

Jnyusa wrote:

It seems to me that there is a tendency to gather any old kind of material observation under the rubric of empiricism, but I don't understand empiricism nearly so broadly as that. "Observation of the material world" as an explanation of how we know seems to me tautological in this context. Yes, of course, all our ideas originate in this interaction with the material world. That is the IS-NESS of the world for us (gee, there's a word I thought I'd never use again), and there is no other way for us to be in the world in order to have theories about it.

Related to this, we could ask “what does ‘material’ mean?”

Jnyusa wrote:

If we want to define Science as something more than empiricism, something different from what the Hopi were doing, the point of departure can't be in the comparison of explanation to observable event because the Hopi did that too. The point of departure is a differing belief about the nature of the explanation. Science proceeds from the assumption that organizing principles are intrinsic to the systems they govern, not imposed upon those systems from without. The Hopi thought that the organizing principle was imposed from without, so it made perfect sense for them to conduct a critical test between two competing hypotheses within that framework: Jesus versus the Kachinas. We would proceed differently, not because we are better empiricists but because we would look for a different kind of organizing principle based on our philosophical understanding of the world. We would look to the rotation of the earth and it's relation to meteorology or something like this. We would look for something intrinsic to the system. We may or may not find it right away, but we do not give up looking for our butterfly effect, or whatever, and decide suddenly, well, it must be Jesus after all, because we are every bit as committed to our belief in intrinsic explanations as they were to their belief in extrinsic explanations. Both approaches are mythical in the strict sense. They are beliefs that precede observation and attempt to organize observation into a coherent framework.

hmm... interesting, I’ve never heard it explained quite this way. I’ll have to think about it. Modern physics, for example, is a combination of Descartes’ rationalism and Bacon’s empiricism since there is the idea that abstract conceptual-mathematical models can represent physical phenomena. There is the a priori rationalism of Descartes saying that we might as well assume that the res extensa can be mapped to a rational-mathematical model. Without rationalism, empiricism would be nothing more than tabulations of data. I kept thinking of this while reading your posts and I wonder what the connection is.

Jnyusa wrote:

Jadeval (and myself) is/are not arguing that scientific mythology and ... Hopi mythology, let's say ... are equal in their effectiveness. We are saying that empiricism as such does not constitute the scaffold, and if you want to know what goes and what doesn't go within empiricism you have to examine the scaffold.

Yes, in other words, as I would put it, there are different types of “effectiveness” at work here. When someone says “but empiricism alone is effective in explanation” we must say “well, it depends on what you mean by ‘effective’”.

Jnyusa wrote:

We are not, for example, permitted to induct directly. We have to deduct in the inductive direction, as Popper put it. Why is that? The reason is not at all empirical; it is philosophic. And we did not always believe that it had to be done that way. The scaffold that is science has changed over time and may change again if we decide that we are beset with logical inconsistencies.

It does not do to assert blindly that empiricism is 'better than everything else' and therefore does not bear examination. That very position is non-scientific and ultimately self-defeating.

Yes. Strictly speaking, we could call “empiricism” the view that sees knowledge as deriving from sense perception alone. And if you follow it blindly all the way through you ironically get something like Berkeley’s idealism. If all knowledge is sensory in nature then there are no organizing principles (as you put it) because even these organizing principles must ultimately be sensory particulars (not principles). Principles, by their very nature, cannot be strictly empirical.

Mankind has tabulated phenomenal occurrences since the dawn of time, whether it’s writing down astronomical positions or simply a mental note that “the sun goes in such-and-such a kind of path each day”. That’s empirical. What he had not really done extensively until perhaps the Renaissance is to try and find some abstract conceptual models to pair up with these observations (e.g. the Cartesian plane as a principle for describing position). It’s these abstract models and systems of principles which allow science to really build on previous developments. Our naked empirical abilities alone are simply too feeble.