On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:13 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Generally I don't think that what we experience is necessarily caused >> by physical systems. I think that sometimes physical systems assume >> configurations that "shadow", or represent, our conscious experience. >> But they don't CAUSE our conscious experience. >> > > So if we could track the functions of the brain at a fine enough scale, > we'd see physical events that didn't have physical causes (ones that > were caused by mental events?). >
No, no, no. I'm not saying that at all. Ultimately I'm saying that if there is a physical world, it's irrelevant to consciousness. Consciousness is information. Physical systems can be interpreted as representing, or "storing", information, but that act of "storage" isn't what gives rise to conscious experience. > > You're aware of course that the same things were said about the > physio/chemical bases of life. > You mentioned that point before, as I recall. Dennett made a similar argument against Chalmers, to which Chalmers had what I thought was an effective response: ------- http://consc.net/papers/moving.html Perhaps the most common strategy for a type-A materialist is to deflate the "hard problem" by using analogies to other domains, where talk of such a problem would be misguided. Thus Dennett imagines a vitalist arguing about the hard problem of "life", or a neuroscientist arguing about the hard problem of "perception". Similarly, Paul Churchland (1996) imagines a nineteenth century philosopher worrying about the hard problem of "light", and Patricia Churchland brings up an analogy involving "heat". In all these cases, we are to suppose, someone might once have thought that more needed explaining than structure and function; but in each case, science has proved them wrong. So perhaps the argument about consciousness is no better. This sort of argument cannot bear much weight, however. Pointing out that analogous arguments do not work in other domains is no news: the whole point of anti-reductionist arguments about consciousness is that there is a disanalogy between the problem of consciousness and problems in other domains. As for the claim that analogous arguments in such domains might once have been plausible, this strikes me as something of a convenient myth: in the other domains, it is more or less obvious that structure and function are what need explaining, at least once any experiential aspects are left aside, and one would be hard pressed to find a substantial body of people who ever argued otherwise. When it comes to the problem of life, for example, it is just obvious that what needs explaining is structure and function: How does a living system self-organize? How does it adapt to its environment? How does it reproduce? Even the vitalists recognized this central point: their driving question was always "How could a mere physical system perform these complex functions?", not "Why are these functions accompanied by life?" It is no accident that Dennett's version of a vitalist is "imaginary". There is no distinct "hard problem" of life, and there never was one, even for vitalists. In general, when faced with the challenge "explain X", we need to ask: what are the phenomena in the vicinity of X that need explaining, and how might we explain them? In the case of life, what cries out for explanation are such phenomena as reproduction, adaptation, metabolism, self-sustenance, and so on: all complex functions. There is not even a plausible candidate for a further sort of property of life that needs explaining (leaving aside consciousness itself), and indeed there never was. In the case of consciousness, on the other hand, the manifest phenomena that need explaining are such things as discrimination, reportability, integration (the functions), and experience. So this analogy does not even get off the ground. ------ >> Though it DOES seem plausible/obvious to me that a physical system >> going through a sequence of these representations is what produces >> human behavior. > > So you're saying that a sequence of physical representations is enough > to produce behavior. Right, observed behavior. What I'm saying here is that it seems obvious to me that mechanistic computation is sufficient to explain observed human behavior. If that was the only thing that needed explaining, we'd be done. Mission accomplished. BUT...there's subjective experience that also needs explained, and this is actually the first question that needs answered. All other answers are suspect until subjective experience has been explained. > And there must be conscious experience associated > with behavior. Well, here's where it gets tricky. Conscious experience is associated with information. But how information is tied to physical systems is a different question. Any physical systems can be interpreted as representing all sorts of things (again, back to Putnam and Searle, one-time pads, Maudlin's Olympia example, Bruno's movie graph argument, rocks implementing every FSA, Stathis's birds and trees, and triviality attacks on functionalism). > That seems to me to imply that physical representations > are enough to produce consciousness. The problem is that physical "representations" are everywhere. The problem is coming up with a non-arbitrary way of deciding when a physical system represents something that's conscious and when it doesn't. Physical systems are too representationally promiscuous! Which leads me to abandon physicalism/materialism for idealism. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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