Thanks for responding, I quoted Strawson on Eddington and used that exact quote here:
Consciousness, Death, Existentialism etc. (Link corrected.. my post starts with "I don't think this has anything to do with science" )
" Eight slithy toves gyre and gimble in the oxygen wabe; seven in
nitrogen..."
My comment was that I love the analogy, the post in general was trying to get at how a description of a thing is not the thing itself, the word "phenomenology" is, as you say, just a symbol.
Not the "ding an sich"
you accuse me (or at least that's how i've taken it) of thinking that this symbol somehow encapsulates what we're talking about, instead of it being some sort of placeholder. It's frustrating as obviously I haven't explained my position well enough, and at the same time hilarious.
Here's one more quote for the pile.
"what makes the universe fly?"
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Originally Posted by John Wheeler
Paper in white the floor of the room, and rule it off in one-foot squares. Down on one's hands and knees, write in the first square a set of equations conceived as able to govern the physics of the universe. Think more overnight. Next day put a better set of equations into square two. Invite one's most respected colleagues to contribute to other squares. At the end of these labors, one has worked oneself out into the doorway. Stand up, look back on all those equations, some perhaps more hopeful than others, raise one's finger commandingly, and give the order "Fly!" Not one of those equations will put on wings, take off, or fly. Yet the universe "flies".
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I'm not sure if any scientist that thinks the equations of physics are anything but inert.
"dent ya limey bastard, whats necessary and sufficient for redness?"
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Originally Posted by Mr. Blonde
I can agree with this statement in terms of thought, or a priori knowledge. How do you believe they are perceiving this redness, if not through some form of sensory data? What implications does that have for your worldview?
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I don't know if we perceive things at all, we don't have a common background here which is why i'd like to try to agree on definitions of things like realism,anti-realism, direct realism, inferential realism, world simulaiton as far as I can tell they're huge topics of the past few centuries. will answer your questions soon... but for now!
World simulation model, instead of perceiving things in the world what our brain/mind is doing is constructing a virtual reality that tracks patterns in the real (mind independant) world.
the ability for the virtual world in our heads to track what's going on outside has been improving for 500+ million years.
Doesn't matter if you're a human, eagle or and other sentient, you'll never have access to the "the real world" only your simulation.
If i'm dreaming and see a mr blonde that mr blonde is internal to me, if i'm awake and see a mr blonde that mr blonde is still internal to me, the only difference is that I infer there's a sentient being behind the zombie in my image.
It's not just colours tastes sounds (secondary qualities) etc that the mind/brain is simulating and mapping onto reality, we're simulating our whole world. Visual acuity sounds like we're somehow honing in on something that's really there.
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Originally Posted by Mr. Blonde
Correct. As far as a material scientist like yourself goes, the statement that "senses only exist in biology where biological beings capable of sensing things exist" would seem like a statement you would agree with.
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"If consciousness is the "fire" then it could be the only thing that has causal efficacy, I find this concept novel and exciting."
Everything that's ever happened is experiential (or is experience involving...), long before biology, the big bang or the multiverse is experience involving.
If this isn't the case you need experience to emerge from non-experiential stuff, I don't see how this can happen.
If it can happen biology has no explanation as to how.
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Originally Posted by Mr. Blonde
How are they describing the color red in the first place? I would be very interested in knowing this. I assume they previously had eyeballs and now no longer do? Would not this fact of previous eyeball ownership taint the whole experiment, given that they could simply be experiencing a memory of the color red through another stimuli?
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How can you experience the memory of a colour? seeing red is seeing red? back later with some eyeball stuff
Back without eyeball stuff, experiencing a memory of the colour is experiencing the colour. where is this colour memory stored and how could the mind brain recall phenomenal red?
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Originally Posted by Bertrand Russell (1927, 1954) The Analysis of Matter. New York: Dover. p. 197: Chapter XX The Causal Theory of Perception
Common sense holds ... that perception reveals external objects to us directly: when we "see the sun", it is the sun that we see. Science has adopted a different view, though without always realizing its implications. Science holds that, when we "see the sun", there is a process, starting from the sun, traversing the space between the sun and the eye, changing its character when it reaches the eye, changing its character again in the optic nerve and the brain, and finally producing the event which we call "seeing the sun." Our knowledge of the sun thus becomes inferential; our direct knowledge is of an event which is, in some sense, "in us." This theory has two parts. First, there is the rejection of the view that perception gives us direct knowledge of external objects; secondly, there is the assertion that it has external causes as to which something can be inferred from it."
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Originally Posted by David Pearce
Perception? All analogies break down somewhere - including the analogy of a dreaming brain-in-a-skull with a brain-in-a-vat. But the phenomenon of dreaming illustrates how the intuitive contrast between subtle, elusive and ineffable consciousness and the solid and refractory material world is actually internal to conscious mind. Of course, if one is a direct realist about perception, then the mind-dependent mountain of one's dreams is replaced on waking by direct access, somehow, to a mind-independent physical mountain. The wide-awake world-simulationist, on the other hand, believes that the phenomenally apprehended mountain beyond his egocentric body-image now tracks real but only inferred mind-independent geographical features of the world outside his transcendental skull. Or, to quote T.S. Eliot, "one is always alone".
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Originally Posted by David Pearce
The mind-dependence of phenomenal colour can be interpreted in various ways. A recent poll of philosophers (cf. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/...phers-believe/)
found that around half were direct realists about perception. On this story, we directly perceive our local surroundings, but somehow our minds "paint on" phenomenal colour (I'll pass over colour realism here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_color)
By contrast, the world-simulation model holds that phenomenal sticks and stones, mountains and sunsets are features of the world-simulation run by one's mind-brain. When one is awake, these phenomenal objects track gross fitness-relevant patterns in the local environment. In other words, the mind-independent external world is a theoretical inference to best explanation, not a given.
Such inferential realism is much better supported by modern science. |
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Originally Posted by Chalmers
Option three is the view that says consciousness, although irreducible, isn’t exactly “outside” that physical causal network at all, consciousness instead is deeply tied to the intrinsic nature of the physical world. This goes back to Immanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell, we don’t really know the intrinsic nature of entities out there in the physical world, the physical world is always revealed to us via its appearances, its effects on us.
Take a bunch of physical particles, we understand their relationships to each other and the causal structure of this network out there, but do we really know what these particles are “in themselves”?
As Kant said, do we know the nature of the “thing in itself” the “ding an sich” or as Russell said “we understand the extrinsic properties of physical entities but not their intrinsic properties” that’s a big metaphysical mystery, what is the intrinsic nature of entities out there in the physical world? Combine this with another metaphysical mystery, we have these intrinsic properties of consciousness, how are we going to place them with respect to the physical world? Russell’s idea was maybe we can solve both of these problems at once. Say it turns out that the physical properties of the world are either precisely the properties of consciousness or certain other special intrinsic properties which are very closely related to the properties of consciousness.
So on this view which I sometimes think of as the panpsychist view for consciousness everywhere or the pan-protopsychist view for protoconsciousness everywhere, wherever you have fundamental physical entities in the world, like physical particles, they have an extrinsic nature and an intrinsic nature, that intrinsic nature might be closely tied to consciousness itself, so consciousness or protoconsciousness spread throughout the physical network.
Now if you take this view there’s no danger of consciousness being epiphenomenal, being outside the network. In some sense consciousness is going to be present at the ground of all physical causation, it’s going to be consciousness in some sense which is doing the work, when one particle hits another particle that particle is somehow intrinsically constituted by consciousness or protoconsciousness, it’s right in there in the causal network. Likewise when I perform an action certain intrinsic properties in my brain are going to be tied to consciousness and in some sense that’s really doing the work. So on this view consciousness is right there in the causal network.
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Searle has a new book out defending direct realism.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/vision-science
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When it comes to the long tradition of thinking and writing about perception, Searle takes the situation to be rather bleak. He believes that the entirety of philosophical work on perception since Descartes has been bewitched by what he calls “the Bad Argument” and, as a consequence, is unnecessary and incoherent. Yet Searle wants to not just bury philosophical theories of perception but also praise them. In particular, he believes that once the bad argument is identified and diagnosed, nothing will prevent us from endorsing a form of direct realism about perception, of the sort Searle himself developed in his 1983 classic Intentionality. According to this form of direct realism, we do not perceive external objects by way of first perceiving intermediate ideas, impressions, or sense-data; instead, perception serves to provide us with immediate presentations of external objects and attributes themselves.
There seems to be a lot to recommend this basic picture of perception. How could we plausibly deny that perception plays a central role in connecting us to, and helping us acquire knowledge about, the empirical world? According to Searle, however, the picture has not only been denied; it has been denied by “just about every famous philosopher who writes on this subject.” “Indeed […],” Searle observes, “I do not know of any Great Philosopher who even accepted […] Direct Realism.” If you’re wondering who the “Great Philosophers” might be, he is referring to Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and maybe Mill and Hegel, too.
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an dent
P.S. you should get yourself over to Esalen