Thanks for quoting the Chalmers piece because I didn't have it to hand and was relying on memory. But on rereading it I still believe that my way of formulating the paradox has teeth. Although Chalmers admits in this passage that consciousness looks explanatorily irrelevant to phenomenal judgement on a functional basis, but not necessarily causally irrelevant, one must appreciate that he is hedging his bets, or better reserving his arguments, for a later appeal to psycho-physical causation. And remember too that I agree with him that the relation of acquaintance entails that we cannot coherently accede to any such irrelevance, whether or not we deem it explanatory or causal. If this were not the case there would be no paradox, since there would be nothing to explain but function.
But of course he must still elucidate the psycho-physical principles he seeks, in order to build a bridge from the relation of acquaintance to that of function and I don't think even he would claim to have achieved that beyond some speculative ideas on the role of information. So building such a bridge is a necessity for any theory before we can concede that it has eluded the jaws of the POPJ. I would certainly be interested to hear how your theory tackles this problem, if in fact we've now succeeded in establishing just what it is. David On Sunday, February 2, 2014 7:43:33 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: > > On 2 February 2014 19:48, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote: > > What do you mean by "laying claim to conscious phenomena"? In what way >> does a brain or body lay claim to conscious phenomena? > > > Let me restate it then. Bodies, insofar as they are the manifestations > with which we interact (own brains and bodies included) *appear* to be the > source of any utterance (or thought, in our own case) whatsoever. > I don't see bodies as manifestations with which we interact. I see them as the back end view of all interactions. They aren't the source of anything except reverberating consequences. > This includes, therefore, *utterances and thoughts that lay claim to > conscious phenomena*, > It just means that you are ruling out immaterial perspectives from the start. Given the reality of experience and the reality of the appearance of bodies in that experience, you choose the reality of the appearances - the contents of the experience, over existential primacy of experience itself. To understand my hypothesis you would have to pivot 180 degrees on that and see bodies as a product of nested perception (not just human or biological perception, but perception beneath the alpha and beyond the omega of all functions and forms). > as for example I am exemplifying in this very statement. Even if we take > the view that it is we who are putting this construction on those > manifestations, > That is not my view. You're talking about human experience, but I'm talking about primodial pansensitivity. In my view, all human beings could be erased from the universe and it would not change anything. Experience would continue as usual. > we can't ignore the fact that the causally-closed rules they appear to > follow, at whatever scale, do not entail any aspect of consciousness to > explain these utterances. > This is the most common mistake that I run into: The conflating of human consciousness with the principle of sense makes a solipsistic straw man of idealism. I talk about it here if you are interested: http://multisenserealism.com/about/the-matter-of-objects-and-the-idea-of-subjects/ The bottom line is Berkeley's point: How would you know what entails consciousness and what doesn't? Since nothing can be experienced without consciousness, it is an absolutely unscientific act of faith to presume substances independent of all aesthetic receptivity. The idea of a material body which is not associated with any experience of detection whatsoever makes the detection of bodies completely superfluous, and makes any description of them indiscernible from nothingness. > Therefore, a fortiori, it must seem inexplicable how these utterances > could make reference to phenomena which are completely absent from, and > redundant in, their causal schema. > Sure, if you start from an erroneous premise, then it is not surprising that the result is ultimately absurd. If you start with bodies that don't need consciousness, and the sole value of functionalism, then consciousness cannot make sense. What is ignored of course is that 'function' is an expectation of consciousness, so that unconscious bodies have no capacity to discern the difference between function and non-function (or any other difference for that matter). > > Chalmers lays all this out quite explicitly in TCM and I think he may even > have coined the rubric POPJ. > Yes, but Chalmers coined it as an attack on modal accounts of consciousness. He says: "Chapter 5: *The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment*. On my position, even if > consciousness cannot be physically explained, behavior and functioning can > be. So it seems that consciousness is explanatorily (although perhaps not > causally) irrelevant to behavior. In particular it is explanatorily > irrelevant to claims such as "I am conscious" and related phenomenal > judgments (where judgments are defined in functional terms). I call this > the "paradox of phenomenal judgment". I argue that this paradox is > counterintuitive but poses no fatal flaws. I address the objections that it > implies that we are unable to know about, refer to, or remember our > phenomenal states. I argue that these objections rest on causal theories of > knowledge and of reference that we have independent reason to reject in the > phenomenal case. Knowledge of and reference to phenomenal states is based > on something tighter than a causal relation; it is based on a relation of > acquaintance. I discuss the content of phenomenal beliefs and the > constitutive relation between experience and phenomenal belief." What he is saying, in my view, is clearly that acquaintance (sensory-motive participation, aesthetic realism, direct perception) is more fundamental than causality from algorithmic causes (logical representations, programs, abstract processing, etc). > He doesn't deviate, at least until his discussion of "information", from a > canonical account of physical phenomena but it is important to see that it > makes no essential difference to his argument whatever ultimate ontological > basis we choose to assume. Hence in terms of a sensory-motive theory we are > still confronted by the manifestation of a closed physical necessitation > schema on which the stabilisation of our experience utterly relies. > *OUR* sensory context relies on a lower level context which appears to us (from our perceptual niche) as bodies, cells, molecules, etc. but that in no way means that those appearances do not in fact rely on an even lower (and higher) level context of felt rhythms, attractions and repulsions, proto-semantic tropes, etc. These are all good questions, and I'm glad you are asking them, but you are assuming that I have not been thinking about these issues already. If you are interested, I would tell you that I've been thinking of almost nothing but these issues for up to ten years now, and issues like these for probably 25 years before that. > This schema makes no appeal whatsoever to any category of sense > That's because you assume that there can be categories outside of sense. Again, if there could be, then sense would be redundant and there would be no communication at all. > but nonetheless suffices completely to account for all bodily utterances > laying claim to sensory appreciation. But of course we cannot believe this > and hence we have the paradox. > > As Brent has remarked, it is still possible to hold on to the hope that > the physical appearances, however much they appear to be exhaustive and > causally closed, still conceal some truly unexpected nomological > necessitation that will suffice to account for conscious phenomena, > although the analogies he gives generally tend to elimination of the entire > category. Chalmers spends a good deal of effort in TCM to show why he > thinks that hope must be indefinitely deferred, unless completely novel > "psycho-physical laws" can be discovered. There is little consensus on > this, to say the least, but many people can't see how psycho-physical laws > would constitute an adequate account of consciousness any more obviously > than physical ones. > The psycho-physical laws that Chalmers rightly anticipates are to be found in what I call sense. They aren't laws though, because laws require sense to operate. Laws have to make sense, don't they? There has to be some way to detect their influence through sensation or they are indistinguishable from nothing, right? > > I hope it is now clear what I mean by bodies laying claim to conscious > phenomena. It is essentially the same argument deployed by Chalmers in TCM. > It is clear that you don't completely understand Chalmers position or mine. Craig > David > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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