dmb said:
His [Chalmers'] dualism says that consciousness is a separate ontological
category and cannot be reduced to physical processes. Because his
anti-reductionism is being asserted against physicalist positions in the
philosophy of mind, this criticism is very helpful to the MOQ.
Krimel replied:
Seriously? A separate ontological category for mind? And another category for
physical processes? You mean like matter? Mind and matter as separate
ontological categories? This helps the MoQ? How? ...So the bugbear of
reductionism trumps the bugbear of SOM?
dmb says:
Yea, seriously.
Even in the Weakipedia article (that's a joke, not a spelling error) we see
that Chalmers rejects Cartesian dualism to some extent. Clearly, better sources
would be needed to parse the subtleties and find out exactly how far he goes in
his rejection of Cartesian dualism. Since we find this in the most basic
descriptions of his view, it is not at all clear that he's a SOMer. That same
article also describes Chalmers' position as one that would qualify, by your
standards, as anti-scientific romanticism. He entertains a qualified
panpsychism, it says. Uh, oh! Is somebody singing Kumbaya? Seriously, though.
Here's just a few lines from the article. Both of these points just happen to
be contained in less than one paragraph:
"Chalmers argues that ... qualia and sentience are not fully explained by
physical properties alone. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a
fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible)
physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms
"psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with
which types of qualia. However, he rejects Cartesian-style interactive dualism
in which the mind has the power to alter the behavior of the brain, suggesting
instead that the physical world is "causally closed" so that physical events
only have physical causes, so that for example human behavior could be
explained entirely in terms of the functions of the physical brain. He further
speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him
to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified
panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Though Chalmers maintains a formal
agnosticism on the issue, even conceding the viability of panpsychism places
him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries."
And just so you can get a little taste of "panprotopsychism", chew on this
little bit-o-wiki, where even the criticism is illuminating.
Panexperientialism, panprotoexperientialism, and panprotopsychism
Panexperientialism or panprotopsychism are related concepts. Alfred North
Whitehead incorporated a scientific worldview into the development of his
philosophical system similar to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. His ideas were
a significant development of the idea of panpsychism, also known as
panexperientialism, due to Whitehead’s emphasis on experience, though the term
itself was first applied to Whitehead's philosophy by David Ray Griffin many
years later. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the
universe are occasions of experience, which can be collected into groups
creating something as complex as a human being. This experience is not
consciousness; there is no mind-body duality under this system as mind is seen
as a very developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist
and, while his philosophy resembles the concept of monads first proposed by
Leibniz, Whitehead’s occasions of experience are interrelated with every other
occasion of experience that has ever occurred. He embraced panentheism with God
encompassing all occasions of experience, transcending them. Whitehead believed
that the occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even
smaller than subatomic particles.
Criticism
A criticism is that it can be demonstrated that the only properties shared by
all qualia are that they are not precisely describable, and thus are of
indeterminate meaning within any philosophy which relies upon precise
definition. This has been something of a blow to panpsychism in general, since
some of the same problems seem to be present in panpsychism in that it tends to
presuppose a definition for mentality without describing it in any real detail.
The panpsychist answers both these challenges in the same way: we already know
what qualia are through direct, introspective apprehension; and we likewise
know what conscious mentality is by virtue of being conscious. For someone like
Alfred North Whitehead, third-person description takes second place to the
intimate connection between every entity and every other which is, he says, the
very fabric of reality. To take a mere description as having primary reality is
to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
One response is to separate the phenomenal, non-cognitive aspects of
consciousness — particularly qualia, the essence of the hard problem of
consciousness — from cognition. Thus panpsychism is transformed into
panexperientialism. However, this strategy of division generates problems of
its own: what is going on causally in the head of someone who is
thinking—cognitively of course—about their qualia?
dmb continues:
One response, they say, is to make a distinction between the non-cognitive
aspects of consciousness, the essence of the hard problem, from cognition. C
'mon. You don't see how that resembles the distinction between pre-conceptual
experience and definable concepts? You don't see how that relates to the
distinction between dynamic and static? Notice that we're also in the area of
process philosophy and recall that Sneddon's master's thesis compares Pirsig
and Whitehead. Notice also that the criticism centers around the fact that
qualia are not given to precise definition and then recall that Pirsig says the
same thing about Quality, except of course he does not let that fact stop him.
He acknowledges the paradoxical nature of building a metaphysics around an
undefined term and then proceeds anyway. James's radical empiricism is centered
around pure experience, which is also prior to our conceptual categories and is
therefore undefinable for the same reasons that DQ is undefinable.
Gents, there is some real philosophical meat in all this. And I'd be happy to
discuss it in a reasonable manner. Or you can build more straw men and
otherwise continue to fish from the stream of snark, in which case you're on
your own.
Whatever.
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