board77

LalaithUrwen wrote:

Thanks for equating my belief in God to faeries spreading dew on flowers.

In terms of what they do for you, the two are manifestly not the same, and I would never trivialize someone's religious convictions so in that kind of discussion. But we're not discussing faith in that context. We're talking about consciousness, which I believe evidence suggests strongly is a purely physical phenomenon--and one introduction of nonfalsifiable elements to explain a physical phenomenon is pretty much the same as another. I could have used Thor and thunder, or Zeus and lightning bolts, or Chac and rain, and made the same point.

Conversely, simply because one needn't presuppose God to exist to make consciousness possible doesn't mean God doesn't exist. It just decouples that question from the issue of consciousness, as the discovery of electricity decoupled it from the issue of lightning.

[possibly horrible analogy alert]

You know how when I push the buttons on my keyboard, stuff happens to the color on my monitor? Defining "consciousness" the way you're doing, Ax, feels kind of like defining "color" as "the stuff that happens when I push buttons on my keyboard".

[/possibly horrible analogy alert]


Ugh...I know there must be better words to express why your explanation just doesn't work...

Replace "color" with "World of Warcraft" and the analogy improves.

Jnyusa wrote:

Correct me if you think me wrong, but I believe the simplest place to begin is with the foundational premise of Phenomenology:

There is no "inner" and "outer," no "observing subject" and "observed object." There is only "the phenomenon," which participates both subject and object in an inseparable and unique experience.

Yes, good.

Jnyusa wrote:

But I don't think most scientists would hold that position today. This is not just a matter of replacing determinism with stochasticism but a matter of understanding that paradigms (theories, simply) are temporary frameworks erected for the purpose of prediction and control

Kuhnian... I like.

Jnyusa wrote:

The caveat I understand Jadeval to be offering is that we can't objectively evaluate consciousness because we have to use consciousness to evaluate it.

I agree.

Jnyusa wrote:

What I question, in Jadeval's discussion, is whether any scientist really questions this today. When I was being trained in the philosophy of science ... crikey, almost forty years ago ... this was already presented as an unarguable principle. I can't think of any colleagues of mine who would argue that we are attaining "objective" knowledge in the sense that this was meant by the Realists of the 19th century. Revised attitudes would be near-universal mainly among physical scientists, I would guess, because they spend more time studying methodology than social scientists do, but I'm in a social science (economics) and I don't see much of the kind of confusion being discussed here plaguing colleagues in related s.s. fields. (Mileage varies from prof to prof, of course.)

First, my accusation is not necessarily leveled against those working in the highest realms of quantum theory or particle physics or anything. I don’t consider it my job to worry too much about those guys. Mainly, I think the mistaken conception is popular in nature. Second, if you were trained in the philosophy of science and methodology then, as you know, that is a discipline with a very different atmosphere than straight physics or chemistry and especially biology. I might venture to guess than most physicists haven’t really bothered much with the likes of Kuhn for instance. That stuff tends to reach even the hard sciences much later than the humanities or social sciences.

I think you may be right. But I’m not sure I ever accused academia per se of anything. The original topic of the thread was “mass oriented knowledge…” and I talked about magazine articles and such. I did mention scientists and medicine in general. I suppose it depends on whether you look at the popular-academic spectrum from the top down or bottom up.

Jnyusa wrote:

Nor would anyone I know argue that all phenomena are material. What they would argue rather is that empirical methods can only be applied to phenomena that are material. They may or may not believe that all phenomena are material, but this is a belief and not a scientific claim. We can't make such a claim, as scientists, for the reason Jadeval described above - it presumes an objective evaluation of consciousness that is not within our grasp.

Yes, well, tell that to Iavas.

Jnyusa wrote:

This brings me to the question of your very first post, Jadeval, asking whether media saturation of the collective mind with pseudo-science is THE blinder of modernity. I don't know that it's the only blinder, but I would agree that it is an important one, as long as we remember that the purpose of the mass media is not really to inform the public but to sell itself to the public. The media has long made hay from exaggeration and misrepresentation, and it's treatment of science is no different, in my opinion. Social science is vulnerable because everyone's favorite topic is "me," and telling the collective "me" how to "get what I want most - love, success, happiness" -- that's going to sell issues. Whether these are accurate representations of the actual research being done is questionable, but also of no importance to the people selling the magazine or to the people buying it. (Just my opinion, of course.)

I agree. The social sciences like psychology and sociology attain particularly bad representations in popular media. But I’m not entirely sure the target audience really doesn’t take all this babble seriously. It affects peoples’ arguments and the way they think they know about certain issues. I’m not merely talking about the latest issue of Time or Newsweek and the cover stories on love or romance. I’m also talking about much deeper issues that could be brought up and analyzed under, say, a Foucauldian perspective. I guess I’m not sure whether the old ways are really being propagated or whether they are being slowly eliminated/transcended in the popular culture.

Axordil wrote:

Thus when we have to employ consciousness to posit things about consciousness, that's merely recursive, not invalid.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this. My view is not an absolute one. But I would go on to say that, in addition to consciousness not being an empirical-physical object of study and partly because of it, we have to realize that any “recursive” investigation of consciousness will not fall theory-wise into the domain of the scientific method.

Axordil wrote:

Which brings me back around to the original issue. As you say, in context the research is valid. As you get away from that context it becomes less valid...but never becomes untrue, only inappropriately used. And as time goes by, the understanding of the mess of genetics, epigenetics, hormones, conditioning via evolutionary prepared feedback loops and constrained conscious fretting that is human behavior is going to tend to the physical, because going in any other direction is pretty much a waste of time.

I think statements like this constitute a thrusting of material-empirical thinking onto the rest of thinking. You say that there are misapplications of science, and I agree that the truth of scientific theories is dependent on the context of their applications, but I believe the transgression may be already unwittingly made with statements like this.

Axordil wrote:

Consciousness is inherently recursive when you talk about anything above the firing of neurons.

That's what I mean by a bottoms-up approach. Look at what the brain is doing and see what that produces, as opposed to defining and backing up and defining recursively in search of something that doesn't recurse. It's not that you can't take the longer, epistemological approach, but it's tiresome and forces you to start making up words like qualia.

In a way, what I am saying is that the “firing of neurons” is actually at the “top” not the “bottom”. What I mean is that any explanation of consciousness as neurons (or sensation as purely physiological) IS bound up with and within the phenomenological (see Jnyusa’s first post).

I still think Axordil is not thinking in a philosophical way. Rather, he seems to be admitting philosophy as “valid” but then going on to say that empirical science is actually more fundamental than philosophy. I think the reverse is the case.

yovargas wrote:

Have you seen Speilberg's A.I.? Let's say some future scientist person creates a machine that looks a whole lot like a human kid and behaves a whole lot like a human kid. The machine kid acts like it wants things, feels things, makes independent choices, sets goals, seeks out solutions, ect. But is it truly conscious and emotional or is it merely a machine extremely good at mimicking human behavior? I believe the question pertinent to this thread is - can science truly answer that question?

This issue seems at the very least peripherally related. I’m not sure science as we know it by and large today can answer that question, or if it ever can. I’m not aware of developments in areas like irreducible complexity and the (according to some) emerging integral-oriented “sciences”. But I do not believe that empirical science as a reductive discipline can answer that question.

yovargas wrote:

eta - Here's a similar thought from another angle. It is generally believed that animals like cats or apes or hippos are self-aware. But simple life forms like bacteria aren't believed to be aware of their own existence. I also doubt that they are....but can you prove it?

I wouldn’t think so, but then again what does “self-aware” mean? If it applies to humans and then apes, why not down the spectrum in degrees more or less?

Axordil wrote:

The fundamental question is of course, why should consciousness alone of all phenomenon associated with life be singled out as requiring some sort of non-empirical explanation? Other than the fact that WE have it and we have a pretty consistent track record when it comes to privileging anything human...

It’s not by any means. We could go so far as to say that literally anything and everything that requires a word or linguistic utterance is, first of all, within the realm of philosophy. Love, freedom, consciousness, thinking, truth, life, being, salvation, redemption, enlightenment, feeling, anger, sadness, materiality, matter, mind, spirit, soul, suffering, etc. are all philosophical before anything else. They simply cannot be otherwise because science simply isn’t in the business of knowing or determining what these things mean or how they are translated insofar as the “physical” is concerned. This is why I say that the “scientific” versions of these terms are analogues of their general “meaning”. They are not, however, in a position to free-flow within the language as a whole like the terms per se are.

Axordil wrote:

The bottom line, though, is that consciousness is just a name we give to the collection of things that happen in our brains.

I disagree. This is a particular and I believe overly narrow philosophical POV at work. It ignores the entire mind-body problem of the last 600 years as well as nearly all 20th century continental and large chunks of analytic philosophy.

Axordil wrote:

I prefer to think of it as a reframing. One might as well say that Copernicus "copped out" on figuring out how epicycles work by saying they didn't exist.

It’s an overreaching. You’re reducing phenomenal consciousness to material phenomena. That’s the point your missing... that, like all “things”, consciousness too is phenomenal and not necessarily epiphenomenal. It requires a philosophical argument to conclude that consciousness is epiphenomenal (i.e. not a real phenomena but a behavioral manifestation of a real phenomena and reducible to this latter).

Axordil wrote:

Of course there are, but when it comes to cuckoo clocks, and the cogs are there, why should we suppose there ARE anything but cogs at work? Ockham's Razor sez it's generally not a good idea to invent unnecessary explanations.

You should not assume that there are only cogs at work because your methodology might be inadvertently limiting the criteria for valid conclusions. This is what the deconstructive trends in the philosophy of science were all about, and which Jnyusa stated so optimistically were behind us... evidently not.

What happens with a given method (e.g. the scientific method) is the setup of a specific criteria for what constitutes valid theories or end-points of knowledge. As a result, assumptions are understandably made which rule out certain starting-points to the knowledge which would result in theories or explanations or interpretations which aren’t within the realm of testable, scientific theories. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t other methodologies. I had quite the involved discussion with Apostasy in Manwe on this precise issue (beginning on around page 40 of the Intelligent Design thread).

yovargas wrote:

You know how when I push the buttons on my keyboard, stuff happens to the color on my monitor? Defining "consciousness" the way you're doing, Ax, feels kind of like defining "color" as "the stuff that happens when I push buttons on my keyboard".

I agree. Color or Warcraft, simple or complex, phenomena are phenomena and Axordil must argue why he believes that they are reducible. The color green is the color green first of all, not so many nanometers of wavelength. It IS so many nanometers of wavelength, but not per se. That is, so many nanometers of wavelength is the result of an objectifying observation which is seen to correlate with the phenomena as phenomena, but one must entrench one’s self in a single corner of a seemingly hopeless tangle of issues in order to claim that one can operate within a generalized reductionistic view of reality.

I understood almost all of that!!!

Quote:

It ignores the entire mind-body problem of the last 600 years as well as nearly all 20th century continental and large chunks of analytic philosophy.

I would say dismiss, rather than ignore, because I no longer recognize the validity of the "problem" or really, the utility of those chunks of analytic philosophy. Much of it strikes me frankly now as inventing ghosts to chase, and important only in a historical sense, a la Thomism. It wouldn't be the first time in human history a lot of smart people spent hundreds of years going down what turned out to be a dead end.

Quote:

Love, freedom, consciousness, thinking, truth, life, being, salvation, redemption, enlightenment, feeling, anger, sadness, materiality, matter, mind, spirit, soul, suffering, etc. are all philosophical before anything else.

I would say, since they're all words, they are all linguistic first.

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I still think Axordil is not thinking in a philosophical way.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Seriously, though, I am not thinking in a particular philosophical way; more on that presently.

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It requires a philosophical argument to conclude that consciousness is epiphenomenal (i.e. not a real phenomena but a behavioral manifestation of a real phenomena and reducible to this latter).

Absolutely. But it also requires an empirical destination, as it were. If neuroscience hadn't gotten to the point where so much of what we call consciousness can be pinpointed to specific brain activities, there would be little point in making the leap.

I have in essence made a decision based on philosophical argument that has led me away from purely philosophical argument.

Quote:

You should not assume that there are only cogs at work because your methodology might be inadvertently limiting the criteria for valid conclusions.

If by "my methodology" you mean excluding unfalsifiables, you're right, and I don't apologize for it. If you mean something else, such as unknown or currently undetected material causes, that's different. But as I noted earlier, I think the science is to the point where supposing unknown material OR unknowable non-material causes for consciousness is less and less necessary. Time will tell. While a Kuhnian shift that would enable/force a search for "non-cog" solutions is always a possibility (this is science, after all) I simply don't think it likely.

Quote:

The color green is the color green first of all

Is it? The name and the thing are not the same, after all.

River wrote:

Jny, when people talk about biological structures my thoughts immediately turn to large molecules, not necessarily large assortments of large molecules. You'll find symmetry in macromolecules, but not necessarily fractals. Furthermore, the behavior of molecules themselves is not an either-or deal. When you do chemistry or biochemistry, you might think that you're throwing stuff in a tube and getting back your product because that's how it works: input = output. In truth, you're at the mercy of probability. The trick is to create the conditions that make your desired outcome the most likely one. Anyone who's taken a lab course can tell you that this is not as trivial as it sounds, even when your experiment is "cookbook".

River, I’m ashamed to admit that my knowledge of molecular biology and organic chemistry is a big fat zero.

Of the teeny-tiny bit that I’ve read about these things, all that sticks in my mind is that they are now considered to be nonlinear systems. My understanding of math theory (also hopelessly limited) is that nonlinear system are furthermore now treated as different in origin from linear systems. That is a leap from my (ancient) reductionist training that all equations can be reduced to a linear equation in one variable.

So my sense is that the behavior of biological systems (or, as you say, large molecules) needs to be handled as if open-ended until we understand better what is going on. I am deeply impressed by the biologists who are taking on this issue, even if in standard piecemeal fashion. It is fascinating to me and I wish I had more time to read about it.

Jadeval wrote:

The social sciences like psychology and sociology attain particularly bad representations in popular media. But I’m not entirely sure the target audience really doesn’t take all this babble seriously.

Well, I think they do take the babble seriously, insofar as they take anything seriously. What’s the difference, in the average mind, between Dr. Phil and Bigfoot?

Evidence the fact that whenever the media (as estate) is challenged, they fall back on the explanation, “It’s only entertainment!” Someone commits suicide after taking Dr. Phil’s advice? Hey, he’s only entertainment; not intended to substitute for real therapy.

... Artistic license. Don’t try this at home. Not for children under the age of 3. Some assembly required. Batteries not included ...

These ubiquitous disclaimers converge on a single message: What We Are Showing You Is Not Real, Can’t Really Be Used This Way, Should Not Be Taken Too Seriously.

Yet, the things they show are presented to us in a manner that suggests we should believe them to be real, usable, and serious. What we are expected to do, in fact, is to pretend to believe in them for the duration of the message, without actually placing the onus of reality on the conveyer of the message.

When the media is clogged with such pseudo-real messages, how can we expect people to distinguish between legitimate social theory and a Bigfoot sighting, much less distinguish between a phenomenon and an epiphenomenon? Each person (imo) takes all info indiscriminately with that grain of salt whose diameter they personally can swallow.

But I’m talking now about the kind of information contained in daytime TV, or late night TV, or in the magazines at the supermarket check-out line. The arguments expressed in this thread fall into a different category, imo.

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I’m also talking about much deeper issues that could be brought up and analyzed under, say, a Foucauldian perspective.

The media is the last estate that would want a Foucauldian perspective turned on itself, don’t you think? Isn’t the media the main conveyance of institutional thought in our world?

Perhaps the question should be: How do we get people to process their world critically?

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I guess I’m not sure whether the old ways are really being propagated or whether they are being slowly eliminated/transcended in the popular culture.

I don’t know what you mean by “the old ways.” Could you give an example?

Quote:

I still think Axordil is not thinking in a philosophical way. Rather, he seems to be admitting philosophy as “valid” but then going on to say that empirical science is actually more fundamental than philosophy. I think the reverse is the case.

I understood Ax a little bit differently, given the posts to which he was responding.

Empirical science is not more fundamental than philosophy, but it is self-contained and should not be embedded somewhere in an epistemological argument about non-empirical things.

Either you adopt the empirical method, and that is your starting point, and you concede then that you have access only to material manifestations of ‘reality,’ OR you adopt a metaphysical proposition as your starting point, and concede that you then have access only to the tools of logic. What many people try to do is to adopt a metaphysical proposition and then suggest that empirical evidence might be found in support of it ... perhaps because they have been schooled that the scientific method is the one right way to go about supporting hypotheses? (Does this lead back to your assertion in your first post?)

The poster child for this mish-mash is Intelligent Design, I think. That kind of idea could only emerge from a society saturated at its least-informed level with pseudo-science. You do not prove the existence of god or even the possibility of the existence of god by proving that carbon dating is stochastic, but there is a conviction in the popular mind that a preponderance of such empirical claims will eventually add up to a metaphysical proposition.

Quote:

You should not assume that there are only cogs at work because your methodology might be inadvertently limiting the criteria for valid conclusions. This is what the deconstructive trends in the philosophy of science were all about, and which Jnyusa stated so optimistically were behind us... evidently not.

Allow me to rephrase my assessment less optimistically. I think that most scientists do realize today that there are boundaries around what they can claim to ‘know’ and that these boundaries are methodological.

But although we allow always for the existence of the missing variable, we do not actually go hunting for all possible missing variables. The rule of parsimony forbids that. The way we double check a model for omissions is by examining the error terms. Do they suggest in a systematic way that a particular kind of missing variable is in play? So, even when we hunt for the hitherto unacknowledged, we do so in a reductionist way.

It is one thing to accept at a philosophical level that there might be more than cogs at work, something else to go looking for not-a-cog to stick in the model. Most of us do the former; none of us do the latter.

I would agree with Ax wholeheartedly that we adopt this approach because every other approach is a waste of time ... GIVEN THAT we are empiricists. If we were philosophers it would be a different story.

[Cross-posted with Ax on that topic.]

The color green is an interesting example, because color perception was one of the examples trotted out by Idealists for half a century. If there can be something like a critical test in epistemology, surely the discovery that light is a wave and color is a frequency offered a critical test for the claims of Idealists and Realists. On this point at least we can be satisfied that people who claim to see the color green are not merely using the same agreed-upon word to describe an unverifiable perception that might be different for each of them. What could formerly be shown to be internally self-consistent is shown now to be externally definable as well.

But the word ‘green’ is richer linguistically than the definition of a particular frequency of light, and I think that this is where the linguistic phenomenological approach is more instructive than Realism could ever be. I do not cause an object to reflect a certain frequency simply by saying it is green ... it is not in that sense that the word creates the world ... but I infuse the word ‘green’ with metaphorical meanings as a social phenomenon, and those meanings are then backwards-bestowed upon objects described by that color and actually change the perception of others as to the meaning and significance of the objects. The word is understood to be an organizing principle and in this sense both ‘ideal’ and mutable. The mutability of phenomena in response to the way we represent them linguistically is a far more interesting problem, in my opinion, than the original question, “Do you see what I see?”

Jn

I feel like I should state my own view on this matter which is simply that, well, of course all things are "natural" or "materialistic". But that is hardly any different than saying "Existance exists." There is no "supernatural" - if it exists, it's part of nature and therefore entirely natural. That's true even if every religion ever turns out to be right about everything (which would be a bit of a mess ). My main objection to what Ax and Iavas are saying is a simple and practical one which really amounts to little more (atm) than a gut feeling that scientists are missing a huge chunk of the picture in regards to things like life, thought, emotions, ect. I'm hoping perhaps interesting discussions like this will turn a long-held "gut feeling" into something I can more properly express. But more than the sense that we don't quite get it yet is the sense that on some of these issues, we might not ever be able to "get" it. Which brings me to this comment:

Ax wrote:

Thus when we have to employ consciousness to posit things about consciousness, that's merely recursive, not invalid.

I'm not entirely sure what you were getting at here but I was pondering it...my only experience with recursion I can recall came from my Computer Science major. Applying those ideas to the problem of defining words leads me to think that, yes, recursion IS invalid. A recursive function is only defined if you can provide some way to get out of your loop. Otherwise your function never spits out an answer and remains undefined. Thus, your couple versions of "consciousness is consciousness" definitions are invalid. Nothing can talk about it except itself. If the only thing that look at it is itself, how can it be externally studied?

I don't really have much to say now that a more learned person with similar views is here (Ax). Though I would like to know if he agrees with my premise that our future decisions are theoretically determinable?

jadeval wrote:

Jnyusa wrote:

Nor would anyone I know argue that all phenomena are material. What they would argue rather is that empirical methods can only be applied to phenomena that are material. They may or may not believe that all phenomena are material, but this is a belief and not a scientific claim. We can't make such a claim, as scientists, for the reason Jadeval described above - it presumes an objective evaluation of consciousness that is not within our grasp.

Yes, well, tell that to Iavas.

I don't have a problem with the above.

Quote:

The color green is the color green first of all, not so many nanometers of wavelength. It IS so many nanometers of wavelength, but not per se.

No, it is a wavelength first, and the properties of the word green come purely from the effect that materials that reflect at this wavelength have on the quality of human life.

Quote:

Though I would like to know if he agrees with my premise that our future decisions are theoretically determinable?

Theoretically, sure, but in order to determine them with precision you would have to know everything up to and including the moment you made them, so as to simulate the actual formation of the grounds of the decision in question at that precise moment. In other words, you would have to do what you have to do anyway, live the life that leads up to the decision. So it's one of those theoretically-only thought experiments for me.

I also think it's important not to let determinism get in the way of believing that one has some control over one's life, though. It's one instance where thinking too hard about it can mess one up.

Quote:

A recursive function is only defined if you can provide some way to get out of your loop. Otherwise your function never spits out an answer and remains undefined.

That's a limitation of the system, though, not the recursion. An infinite series can certainly have a finite value (if it's convergent).

Axordil wrote:

Quote:

Though I would like to know if he agrees with my premise that our future decisions are theoretically determinable?

Theoretically, sure, but in order to determine them with precision you would have to know everything up to and including the moment you made them, so as to simulate the actual formation of the grounds of the decision in question at that precise moment. In other words, you would have to do what you have to do anyway, live the life that leads up to the decision. So it's one of those theoretically-only thought experiments for me.

I also think it's important not to let determinism get in the way of believing that one has some control over one's life, though. It's one instance where thinking too hard about it can mess one up.

But theoretically is enough here - it means that the road is layed out before us, whether we can see it or not.

And I think I'm safe. It's already determined that I'll continue to do my best to control my life

Iavas wrote:

No, it is a wavelength first, and the properties of the word green come purely from the effect that materials that reflect at this wavelength have on the quality of human life.

Iavas, I think what Jadeval was getting at was that when we discuss the color green, there is first of all the human being experiencing something which they call the color green. There is first of all this phenomenon - the color green - involving observer and world in an inseparable way.

From that point on we can ask reductionist questions about it (or non-reductionist questions about it) and one of the answers we get to a particular line of questioning is: light wave having a certain frequency.

The scientific explanation is a subset and a consequent of the phenomenon, not the other way around.

Jnyusa wrote:

Well, I think they do take the babble seriously, insofar as they take anything seriously. What’s the difference, in the average mind, between Dr. Phil and Bigfoot?

Yes, I agree that the babble is often taken seriously. Or, to put it more accurately, people are not stupid and so DO realize on some level that media is largely entertainment. But psychologically it’s a difficult thing not to act on that entertainment in one way or another, thus blurring the line between reality and entertainment.

In the average mind, I think the difference between Dr. Phil and Bigfoot is... well, either nothing or much depending. It’s much insofar as people unfortunately consider Dr. Phil far more seriously than Bigfoot (whereas I’m not sure he should be taken that much more seriously). It’s nothing insofar as the line between what’s real and what’s not is blurred.

Jnyusa wrote:

Yet, the things they show are presented to us in a manner that suggests we should believe them to be real, usable, and serious. What we are expected to do, in fact, is to pretend to believe in them for the duration of the message, without actually placing the onus of reality on the conveyer of the message.

Yes, that reality becomes our reality for a time. But then when it extends beyond “for a time” I suppose it has the potential to do one of two things: either introduce us to new realities or lock us blindly into fewer ones. But when you have a source of information so pervasive and ideologically uniform as the media, I think the latter is more the case.

Jnyusa wrote:

But I’m talking now about the kind of information contained in daytime TV, or late night TV, or in the magazines at the supermarket check-out line. The arguments expressed in this thread fall into a different category, imo.

I think they might be related though. This all got started because my original post complained about how such articles (love and romance were two examples of popular subjects of these articles) often make the mistake of assuming that otherwise valid empirical-scientific knowledge translates straightforwardly and naively into moral-ethical imperatives. Bound up with such mistakes is the tendency to treat issues like “love” or “romance” in purely material or reductionistic terms (i.e. treating love as chemical interactions, or alternatively as purely psychological). Now Iavas came in and essentially stated that everything is material so “what’s the problem”? So this was my battle, to argue against Iavas’ blind materialism/reductionism and hence argue that many of these articles are mistaken in taking that route, the route which talks about “love” and “romance” using physiological, psychological, neurological, or other scientific knowledge but without acknowledging that such issues occupy a wider meaning and activity in our actual lives and perception. In not acknowledging this, I believe the popular media often makes unjustified leaps from the material findings directly into human ethical issues.

Examine the chemicals and the psychiatric evidence all you want. It's valid in itself. But my complaint is that people don't think well enough when it comes to answering the question "how does this scientific knowledge translate into life?" My compaint is that people all too often assume that that translation into ethical (or epistemological) terms is relatively striaghtforward.

Jnyusa wrote:

I would agree with Ax wholeheartedly that we adopt this approach because every other approach is a waste of time ... GIVEN THAT we are empiricists. If we were philosophers it would be a different story.

As I understand him, however, Axordil does not add this caveat to his views. As I understand it, you are essentially saying that, so long as we are scientists or so long as we are doing science, other approaches are a waste of time? That’s the same thing as saying “given that we are empiricists” because, well, we aren’t all empiricists except when we’re doing science or being a scientist. I agree with this because, well, of course other approaches are invalid according to a certain approach which rules them out a priori.

But it seems that Axordil is stating that other approaches are invalid in themselves, that is, insofar as ANY and ALL understanding is considered.

Jnyusa wrote:

The mutability of phenomena in response to the way we represent them linguistically is a far more interesting problem, in my opinion, than the original question, “Do you see what I see?”

Yes, if I understand you correctly, I agree. I wasn’t trying to get at some old idealism-realism issue about whether the “external object” is the “same” for all of us. That problem is banished under phenomenology’s dissolution of the problem of inner and outer anyway. But Axordil seems to want to say that things like consciousness are epiphenomenal and hence ignores the degree to which such things are phenomenological, linguistic, and construct-oriented to begin with.

Axordil wrote:

If by "my methodology" you mean excluding unfalsifiables, you're right, and I don't apologize for it. If you mean something else, such as unknown or currently undetected material causes, that's different. But as I noted earlier, I think the science is to the point where supposing unknown material OR unknowable non-material causes for consciousness is less and less necessary.

Ah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s what the popular form of intelligent design is about, yes. But I’m talking about NOT reducing consciousness to the sum of it’s neuronal parts, for instance. I’m not talking about offering alternate theories for certain material things which rely on non-material causes for their formulation. To deny this kind of thing (which I agree with you and Jnyusa is pseudo-science) is NOT to affirm a materialism or reductionism of all understanding to scientific understanding.


I had this same discussion with Apostasy. What I said there, and what is my point here, is that when you say things like some of the things you seem to be saying, you are actually ruling out other methodologies on the basis of the criteria given you by the scientific one. It’s an entirely circular process where the reasoning is essentially that since science has a material utility like no other methodology, no other methodology can lay claim to knowledge or understanding. I agree that other methods can’t lay claim to produce scientific knowledge, but knowledge in general is another thing. In my discussion with Apostasy, I wrote the following:

jadeval (from Manwe discussion) wrote:

So this is the point: the statement "the scientific method is the only valid method" is self-contradictory because you can't make such a claim about a method from within a method. If the claim is made, then one can only go blindly ahead onto this particular methodological path without any possibility of evaluating of the claim.

Steps:
1) choose scientific method as only valid method
2) now let's evaluate the adequacy of this method to understanding in general
3) but we have no basis for such evaluation except the method we've limited ourselves to
4) therefore we cannot really evaluate
5) therefore we are simply stuck with this method without any real possibility of thinking about why we should be stuck with it

yovargas wrote:

But more than the sense that we don't quite get it yet is the sense that on some of these issues, we might not ever be able to "get" it.

yes, this is not a matter of how much science has progressed. It is a methodological issue where we realize that science has a certain method, and that this method obviously doesn't cover the entire domain of our understanding of reality.

Take an issue like "consciousness" and there you are trying to talk about reality. Now of course there is nothing to say that everything about consciousness can be understood from within science. No matter how far science progresses, consciousness as such will always remain a general phenomena. We may one day arrive at a complete or near-complete material understanding of the brain and how brain activities are correlated with behavior, for instance. But even if this mapping process is fully completed, we still won't know what consciousness IS. Why? Well a simple way to put it is that no one ever said what consciousness was to begin with. Therefore how do we know that science is even studying consciousness or whether it ever will?

You see what's happening here. People are claiming a priori that "consciousness" refers to neurons and then saying that therefore science studies consciousness. And THEN the conclusion is that one day science will or at least theoretically could come to understand consciousness because it will understand neurons. It's saying absolutely nothing. It's just saying that scientists study neurons so one day they might understand neurons. In other words, the claim that "consciousness is within the domain of scientific study" is present in the very assumption of the argument to begin with. It's completely circular.

Scientists just start studying the brain and maybe one day they'll finish studying it. But where's consciousness? Nowhere to be found! But consciousness is clearly REAL. Why? Because this is consciousness here. It should be obvious that someone cannot take a specific method and tell me that, from the POV of that method, this consciousness right here is actually NOT what it JUST IS. It's not even a matter of uncovering a seeming reality for a true one (i.e. uncovering consciousness as mere brain activity). It's a matter of switching methodologies and then trying to claim that, from the POV of one method which does have good utilitarian effects (science), such-and-such a method should be the one. But, as with any method, the methodological assumptions determine a priori what shall be valid and what shall not.

Quote:

In other words, the claim that "consciousness is within the domain of scientific study" is present in the very assumption of the argument to begin with. It's completely circular.

It's not circular, it's axiomatic: the province of empiricism is the empirical, the material universe and how it clicks. The complicating factor is that what we can access empirically now is larger than it was in times pass, so more and more knowledge has become subject to empirical scrutiny, not just philosophical speculation. That includes the brain.

Given that, so far as anyone alive knows, a brain is required for consciousness, to thus choose that as the target of the empirical study of consciousness is not overreaching. The question then becomes, what, if anything, cannot be explained about consciousness non-materially or non-empirically?

This of course assumes one has an idea --not necessarily THE idea--of what consciousness is, and here what you imply is undefined--"no one ever said what consciousness was to begin with"--I believe is merely ill-defined. For one thing, it's probably not even a single epiphenomenon (or if you will, phenomenon) but a collection of them, and a flexible one at that: are we conscious when we sleep? When we're in a trance? When we're drugged? When we've suffered brain damage?

Then again, understanding doesn't require that you define the thing correctly to begin with. If that were the case, we couldn't have studied electricity before we understood quantum mechanics. Part of the empirical methodology allows for, even demands, refined understanding and definition of the object of study as more information becomes available on it--and that includes consciousness. I submit that the last century has seen a convergence in perception and cognitive studies on one hand and neurological ones on the other that has refined what, indeed, we mean by consciousness. It is better defined now that it has been in human history.

That doesn't mean it's fully defined, any more than any topic of empirical study is ever fully defined. It also doesn't mean there aren't rival notions of what it is floating around. We have not yet reached the stage of Kuhnian "normal science" here. But it's coming.

Axordil wrote:

Given that, so far as anyone alive knows, a brain is required for consciousness, to thus choose that as the target of the empirical study of consciousness is not overreaching. The question then becomes, what, if anything, cannot be explained about consciousness non-materially or non-empirically?

I agree that empirically it is fine and good to proceed in terms of neurons or brains or whatever. That's not the point though. I'm not talking about what to study empirically.

Your last sentence is more to the point. The answer is, perhaps among other things, "what consciousness IS". For that is not a scientific or empirical issue.

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.

Quote:

What about consciousness makes it different? The only thing I see that makes it different from any other purely material phenomenon/epiphenomenon is that..it's fairly recent in origin

Well, that and that it is completely and utterly unlike any phenomenon we have observed anywhere.

I spent the past hour reading that thread on Manwe and realized, I think for the first time, how extensive is the tendency to deify science!

Odd that I never noticed it before. But most of the on-line discussions about Creationism in which I've participated have involved explaining what the scientific method is (so few people actually learn this in school) and defending the notion of confidence without certainty.

Jadeval wrote:

But it seems that Axordil is stating that other approaches are invalid in themselves, that is, insofar as ANY and ALL understanding is considered.

If that is what Ax is arguing, then I would not agree with him. The methodological provenance of science is traceable and contains as many exclusions as inclusions. I view our methods as being very narrow and, because they are narrow, very efficient ... very utilitarian, as you put it on TORC. I do not agree, for example, with what TheWagner said on TORC, that all critical thought is scientific thought and if it is not scientific then it is unsupportable belief, unless one defines 'scientific' so broadly as to include all of mathematics and symbolic logic and who knows what other fields of critical analysis ... grammar and syntax perhaps? That is not the usual meaning of the word 'science' in my understanding. Science usually refers to empiricism, and empiricism does not constitute an epistemology in and of itself ... or, rather, it is properly viewed, I guess, as a subset of Aristotelian epistemology, with some tweaking to get around the problem of induction.

I'd like to go back to Jewel's post a few pages ago, about the Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man." I think that the need for a philosophical approach might be easier to understand with regard to defining "man" than in defining "consciousness." For one thing, consciousness has a specific, finite locus, and because most people think about consciousness in terms of the content of their own conscious minds, it is difficult to explain why examining the content of the locus would not necessarily explain the phenomenon.

Although a "man" also has a locus, the very fact that a question can be posed about the status of Data indicates that the content of the locus does not exhaust the phenomenon. The locus of Data is not organic and therefore not a "man." Empirically there is no question here, unless our taxonomies are rendered meaningless.

But more than locus is implied by the word "man." There is the significance of the locus within the social system (legal, formal, functional, relationship-wise) and there is the potential and the purpose of the locus within the larger human endeavor, and there is the self-definition that all other "men" apply to themselves, which includes non-empirical concepts of selfhood and self-determination. There are things which "men" do not wish to become, for example, enslavers. This self-definition is every bit as defining as the observable presence of an opposable thumb. One could not exhaust what it means to be a man to a man without reference to these states which do not, in fact, yield to reductionism. I cannot deconstruct "autonomy." It is a property of the whole system and not a chunk of tissue within a locus. I can survey for its affects and its correlates but of itself it is a first principle beyond which I cannot reduce.

Ultimately, the case for Data rests upon all these principles which have to be ignored by science because they do not have material analogs (I like that description, btw) but have a great deal of meaning within social philosophy and, ultimately I would think, within ontology.

This is not to say that we cannot use the social sciences to find streams of material and efficient causation operating within social systems, but that such findings would only describe how parts of the system operate. To explain why the totality of the system is as it is, one needs a theory of man that overarches all the disciplines employed to study him. To arrive at such totality is my understanding of the purpose of philosophy, and empiricism by itself cannot substitute for this.

Apologies in advance for dragging pieces of the Manwe discussion over here, but you posted something over there, Jadeval, which caused my ears to prick up.

Jadeval wrote:

Now if scientists claim (as I believe Jacques Monod does) that science, by its very nature, is the denial of certain forms of causality not accessible to the scientific method (such as formal or final causality), then I believe it has impinged on philosophy. Science only filters out certain forms of causes accordingly as its method tells it that those forms are not important for its own methodological purposes.

I haven't read Jacques Monod, but I made this very argument in a Ph.D. seminar once and was roundly blasted by my co-prof and by the graduate students as well. They all insisted that science permits final causes.

(Formal cause is murkier, I think. One can argue, I think, that the method itself constitutes formal cause by determining what aspect of the phenomenon can be brought into view, much as the lens on a camera causes one to see a particular vista and not some other. ("What we examine is not Nature but Nature exposed to our method of questioning" - Heisenberg paraphrase). This is not different, I think, from the architect's drawing that allows the house to be a house and not some other structure that could be made from the same bricks and by the same means and to serve a similar purpose ... barn, for example. This, however, is not something built into the model; it is the model.)

My students, I think, confused 'end result' with 'final cause.' They confused the 'y' in the equation with the purpose of the equation, whereas I tried to explain that the 'y' cannot have purpose, as such, without destroying the premise of falsification, which is to compare the events of interest to events presumed random. If the 'y' is a purpose, it cannot by definition be potentially random. I was more surprised by the objection of my co-prof, though he is admittedly not an empiricist. He wished to separate the job of model-building from the job of hypothesizing. There can be final causes built into an hypothesis even if one cannot technically cast them into an equation.

Can one have an hypothesis without a model?

I don't think so ... but it seemed to me that that is sort of what TheWagner was arguing, too, on TORC. Scientific hypotheses are more than the models by which they are tested.

My instinct tells me that this position springs from an emotional desire to have science answer sets of questions that it truly is not designed to answer. Because ...? Because, as Ax has posted here several times, when what you've got is a hammer you want everything to be a nail. Anyway, when I read your comment about Monod, I was silently nodding my head. I think that science by its nature, by the very specific method we currently employ, does preclude purposiveness. Not that we deny that purpose can exist and be the cause of things, but we deny it can be studied using this method.