John Mikes wrote:
Congrats, Colin,
very interesting ideas. Some time ago I learned from you a principle
that forms an intensive part of my 'worldview': the 'mini-solipsism'
i.e. the individual views everybody has about the world - differently,
as formulated for himself from fragments received from 'reality and
indiviually colored to one's personal background and mental-built.
Now I have some remarks - not argumentative mostly (except for the
'Science of Quale') on that beautifully crafted (short!) writing that
reaped the award.
Here it goes:
Colin Hales was named a 'winner' in the contest for 5 best and
published his 1500-word max. contest-text - Psyche, Volume 16,
number 1 (see pdf).
Here are some responses - as far as I could understand his ideas (?).
(C.H. text: full line, JMresp.: indented and Italics)
----------
--"Qualia are the qualities of experience."--
Footnote:
2
------See (Tye, 2008). The word can be used when generally drawing
attention to subjective qualities of visual experience, olfactory
experience, gustatory experience, auditory experience, touch
experience (including haptic/pressure, temperature and so forth),
motion proprioception, situational emotions, primordial emotions
(thirst, hunger, etc., associated with homeostasis (Denton, 2005)),
plus imagined and pathologically originated versions of all of these.
A popular phrase is that “it is like something” to be in receipt of
qualia (Chalmers, 1996). Coined by (Lewis, 1929), there has been a
semantic battle for decades over the word, which is falling into
disuse when technical specificity is an issue. -----
/ Looks to me as a R.Rosen's 'modeling relation'-al simulacron/.
Q1: “What kind of experiences are qualia?”
The experiences are -qualities- encountered from a first person
perspective.
There is nothing else to a first person perspective.
This we attribute to the action of our brain: A century of physiology
tells us that all experience is - g e n e r a t e d - in the cranial
central nervous system (CNS).
/(???)Is there some mechanism proposed, or is it only
'attribution'?/
Yes.. i even said that at the start of the essay!
This is knowledge of the kind... "/whatever it is, it is generated in
and delivered by the action of what we observe to be 'brain material' in
very localised places based on the specifics of the modality/." The
context of this knowledge is one of the complete brain embedded in an
environment (embedded in the universe) and embodied. That is as far as
you go in 'discovering a correlate'... you say... whatever it is, it is
highly correlated with "that stuff' doing 'that behaviour' and when you
stop it behaving that way, it stops. It becomes 'attributed' in the
sense that we are in a unique evidentiary circumstance...the boundary
condition in the essay... where we encounter the only place in science
where hearsay is accepted as scientific evidence.
/ /
It is interesting to realize the brain is in excess of 99.9999999999%
space, depending on how you compute spatial occupancy by electrons and
nucleons.
In essence, there is nothing left to describe in a brain except the
space it inhabits.
The dominant feature of the brain's operation is therefore actually
the spatially
expressed electric and magnetic fields, not the particulate components
(atoms). Pointing out brain chemistry therefore almost completely
misses the brain!
/That can be translated into: we don't know _A LOT_ about the
functional (vs: tissue)
brain, i.e. mentality, how to describe it & its functions and
the 'mental' in general.
My formulation instead of '(brain)-GENERATED': a '(brain)-HANDLED /
/ (as in a tool in 'procedure' we did not discover so far).
Also missing: an explanatory explanation about those mystical
"spatially expressed(?) <electric and magnetic fields> (names?) -
" WHAT they are and how do they work" in such <mind-generational>
mood? -- /
/ As Homunculi, or just Deus Ex Machina? (in Physics?)
/----------------------------------------
/ *_Then there is "Quale Science"?_*
As said above (C.H.),/ *'qualia are experiences', nothing more.*/ /
/ --- However...
An experience is a personal adaptation of SOMETHING(?) (- part of the
'reality' which we cannot describe in our 'human' terms). We "get it"
from the unlimited 'reality' (as assumed) into our limited
capabilities as far as our human mind did interpret, adapt, formulate
- as much as it could (of it) - into our personalised <solipsism>
(C.H.), i.e. everybody's personalised worldview - restsricted to our
individual genetic build-up, personal capabilities and past
experience-infested (individual) memory-load - and who knows (today)
what else does play in./
/Accordingly I find it futile at best, to speak about 'science' of
qualia. Individually different items are hard to combine into 'a'
scientific paradigm. /
John M
I don't share your pessimism in this. There is a quale science to be
had. It's not the science we do now and it's not phenomenology. It's the
other side of the framework in the 'Dual Aspect Science' paper I wrote.
That was not something that I could address in the essay. All I wanted
to draw people's attention to was the anomalous behavioural state
currently occupied by science. I continue to chip away at that edifice ....
Thanks for the feedback.
cheers
colin
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