Nick -
Dude! At the risk of irritating "the People" even further:
I *have* had the experiences you talk about. Which is why I am prone
to accept your theories despite my direct/personal/learned experience
being somewhat different.
I remember way too distinctly early experiences about the the
self-other duality. I remember being puzzled by the few other people
in my life (two parents one, sibling and *very* occasional
other-adults) and how they were "different" than me.
I remember doing "experiments" in regards to the difference between
myself and the world around me. This was long before my experiences
with "deciding to get up" vs "getting up".
I am still fully caught up in the illusion of my "self" being distinct
(qualitatively) from all "other" but my intellect likes the idea of a
more "relativistic" experience.
- Steve
Dear Russell 1
Russell 2 has always been
with us. In fact, he is in Australia, where you are about to go!
The People are going to be
Really Angry with us: I
can't find anything to disagree with about what you said. So I, too,
have been worrying about the homunculus.... or the mindunculus.
If we have been agreeing all
along, they will KILL us. We better find something to disagree about
quick.
Surely you disagree with
this: I see the world; part of what falls within my field
of view is my own body and its actions. From what I see, I construct
(in childhood, with the help of my hypocritical parents) the
distinction between an inner and an outer world, a world in which I can
"be" good, while "doing" ill. This subdivision is enormously
convenient to my body's survival in a society, so it endures, and may
even have evolved. .
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
-----
Original Message -----
Sent:
6/19/2009 12:08:48 PM
Subject:
[FRIAM] Fwd: (Subjective) experience
I'll admit that I'm now getting lost in all the
words. (It's also distressing that yet another Russell has shown up.)
Here's a bit of an exchange Nick and I had privately. He suggested
(and I fully agree) that we should continue it on the list. Nick asked
me to respond to his earlier comment about Unicorns. So I said,
Regarding unicorns,
you raise an interesting issue. You said, I understand what you mean when you
talk of unicorns; that doesn't make me a sneaky believer
in unicorns, does it?
I'm not so sure that works with first person
statements (subjective experience, qualia). How could anyone know what
qualia are without experiencing them? It's like saying I know what you
mean by the taste of chocolate even though I've never tasted it and
don't even believe that there is taste such as what you call chocolate.
In that case, how could you possibly claim to understand
what I mean by the taste of chocolate.
You've probably heard the famous thought experiment
of Mary the color-blind scientist.She knew all there is to know about
color; she could predict what! anyone would say about color by
examining the patterns of photons that entered their eyes (and perhaps
the firings in their brains as those photon hits were processed). But
she herself saw the world in black and white. Then miraculously, she
gained color vision. She has (let's assume) no new knowledge as a
result of her new color vision -- since she knew all there was to know
about color and color vision already. All she has are new experiences
of color -- subjective experiences of color. Has anything changed for
her? My answer is "yes." Is yours "no"?
Nick responded.
She doesn't have a new
experience Of COLOR. She sees a colored world. The world is now from
her point of view a colored world. My mary is seeing the colored world
directly; your mary is seeing a color experience. It's the intrusion
of the cartesian theatre that I find distressing. At least. CF
Wittgenstein.
My response.
I'm not promoting a Cartesian Theater perspective since I take a
Cartesian Theater to imply a homunculus, i.e., an internal being
(construct) that is standing back from the "performance/exhibit"
ongoing in the Cartesian Theater and observing it. That clearly leads
to an infinite regress: How does the homunculus itself work? Does it
have it's own Cartesian Theater? Etc.
I would also say that it's MY Mary that is seeing the world directly,
that she has an immediate subjective experience of the world, which is
what I mean ! by subjective experience. If there were a homunculus, it
would be seeing a color presentation being presented in the Cartesian
Theater.
Perhaps this has just been a big misunderstanding. When my Mary sees a
colored world, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that she is having
an experience of color and that (tautologically) she didn't have that
experience prior to being able to experience color. You seem to want to
reject putting it in those terms. I don't understand your objection to
that way of speaking.
Also, to get back to my question about Mary. I say that something has
changed for her (and I would refer to what has changed as (part
of) her subjective experience). I gather that you agree that something
has changed. How would you characterize the change that's occurred. And
recall, we are stipulating that there is no behavioral difference
between Mary before and after she gained the ability to see a colored
world.
I'm now a! nswering my own question and thinking that you will ask
whether there is a neuronal difference. I'll agree that there is and
that her way of processing color has changed. If we took brain scans
her brain would be functioning differently. So from that perspective
you could argue (and I would agree) that there is an externally
observable difference. This brings us to the notion of supervenience.
We both agree that there are neuronal differences. I claim that
subjective experience supervenes over neuronal phenomena. You say that
neuronal phenomena are all there are(?). If that's your position (and
perhaps it isn't since I seem to be putting words in your mouth by
trying to answer the question from what I take to be your position),
it's very much a reductionist perspective. You are denying the reality
of higher level constructs because you can reduce them to lower level
phenomena. I say (and that's what my "Reductionist blind spot" was
about) that the ability to reduce things to lower level phenomena
doesn't eliminate the reality of th! e higher level phenomena. In a
word processor, words as entities are real even though there is nothing
in the computer except bits.
But I want to bring this back to ethics. We would agree that pain has
neurologically observable features. But it seems to me that such
observations cannot lead to ethical imperatives unless one associates
them with the (subjective) experience of pain. But I've probably put
too much into this post already.
-- Russ
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