As I said a few posts ago, it's possible to keep on living and using logic regardless of our lack of knowledge about first philosophies.

The reason: assumptions. 

I thought it was just because roughly only 1 in 100000 people give a shit. 

Sometimes, "not giving a shit" and "making assumptions" are the same thing. 

from http://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/2277

...researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity; in this case, adding versus subtracting.

"If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future," said Haynes.


This is awesome. And scary. 

.. is real life ?? 

Ok. We have a somewhat socialist bend on things here in Finland. It is reasoned that a child is not responsible what kind of parents he or she has. Hence the state tries to give equal chances to all kids. It starts from small babies, mothers get a "motherhood kit" with some clothes and equipment from the state. Education is free, universities too... etc etc.
It makes sense. There are many smart people who have bene born in poor families and have worked their way through the education system to good jobs.

Sick people are helped too. It is seen to that nobody has to starve to death here.

Now, this all is based more or less on the premises that "all men are born equal", and that some basic minimum level of living is maintained for all for humanitarian causes. But what happens when one goes to another country from Finland? Suddenly, other countries have very different systems. In many countries there are lots of poor people in hopeless situations, and not because of their own fault, all the while the rich in the same land don't just care.

But we can reason that "our jurisdiction doesn't reach over there", we can't do much about it etc... Give some help and that's it. They are not "our folks" so we spend considerably less resources (0.7% of GDP?) than to our own social programs.

Now then, if a person from that kind of country comes to my country. We suddenly start giving them money and apartments. Pretty much like our own people.

Now, what I find of great interest is this discontinuity that happens at the border. Is the person worthless while he or she is abroad, and suddenly gains value when he or she crosses the border into our land? Isn't that absurd?

I haven't yet said much, but thought that this could perhaps start some discussion. 

I thought about saying something about Schrodinger's cat, but considering how much of a literalist interpretation inertia put on my last comments, now I think it would be better to save the poor lad the confusion. 

am quite interested in Schrodinger's cat. 

there is socialism, but it's not all entirely good. While I agree with the idea of a minimum standard of living (I even think there should be a maximum), a significant-enough-to-bug-me amount of tax money goes towards pacifying political correct crusaders in their endless quest for "equality." There needs to be some affirmative action and grants for artists and so forth, but it's kinda ridiculous when you're living in a country where 70+% of the people speak English only, and every phone call I've ever had answered when I've called a federal department has been by someone with a thick accent, usually French (not picking on anyone that's just how it is). Also, while writer's grants and so forth are nice it would be nice if they didn't all go to lesbians and cripples. Lately a court just decided that Canadian Pension Plan money can now go to the survivors of gay couples (I mean when one partner dies), which opens another can of worms because gay marriage hasn't been legally decided yet.

While I don't intend to come across as a nazi (or a bigot, the favoured term of feminists), it would be nice of the social spending in our country was more enlightened and less ideological. Subjective ideology is never a good basis for government. 

if they invent teleports that measure you exactly when you go in, destroying you in the process, then transmit the information by light, and then do a reassembly at the other end... would you go into such a teleport?

I know I wouldn't! It would destroy me. That guy who would come out at the other end would claim to be me, but it wouldn't be me... I would be dead!

Still, that other, post-tele person would surely think it was me.

Now, what happens every night when you go to sleep? What if the guy who is reading func right now, you, is just a copy of the previous day's guy, reassembled from brain structures in the morning when he wakes up? And not the original? There's no way to know. It's funny to think about the continuity... and the importance of memory for the image of self. :)

Well, death is like sleeping but never waking up. 

so you aren't a feminist? :) 

heh, we have a lot of the same here in finland (although not the french part). You have to be a lesbian or write about gays at least to get the Finlandia book prize. Not that the books weren't decent, just kinda sticks out... 

according to most of the people in here, the guy who came out of the teleporter would be you, becuase there is no more to the "self" than physical body and brain. 

the question of what is "you" is actually fuzzy. 

 

and wake up, the only proof you have that you were not killed and reassembled during sleep is your memories, which can be fabricated (if we believe in complete physicalism). So you have no way of knowing. :)

In an extremely physicalist sense, in the teleport example, when your physical expression is killed and transferred through fiber optics, it is you who is travelling as light in the fibers.

How would that feel afterwards, after the assembly?

Now, what if this light can be split and two copies created? Interesting thought. What would happen at the split? Or if the original wasn't destroyed in the teleport?

Of course one can run away and propose that quantum mechanics prohibits making a copy of the brain without destroying it, and same would be with the photons, the information is "untouchable". It's like how one can't make money by cutting bank notes in half.

Quantum mechanics, some say, is the only basis behind randomness and enables unpredictability of the brain and ultimately, free will. But most researchers say that the brain mechanisms are macroscopic and quantum effects have no say. That would mean that it'd be in theory possible to copy it atom by atom. (A few mistakes here and there wouldn't matter.) 

I think the strongest argument for physicalism or what you call it, is the absurdity of the other alternatives.

Let's say the soul resides on some other "plane" that can not be measured by nature's forces like electromagnetism, gravity, the weak or strong force. Hence, our measuring equipment can't see it (and we can't see or touch it), since it doesn't interact with ordinary matter.
Now, it has to effect the brain somehow somewhere, because it has to interact with ordinary matter to cause decisions etc... And ordinary matter has to give feedback to the soul, otherwise we couldn't observe anything. What is the proposal for this mechanism? Descartes thought it was the pineal gland.
But even this is not the killer problem - it's the notion that it's just another dodge!
What is the soul like in the astral reality then? What is it and what is it not? Why do people die? Does it explain anything? What happens when people sleep? What happens when people are born? Are the souls ready made, waiting in the wings? What about growth? Can the astral soul switch between physical people? etc...

I'm baiting a little controversy here, but what are the nonphysicalist arguments you find the most convincing? 

...I've been contemplating your post #34 and some of those that directly preceded same. I'm not sure we need to ditch the discussion of the ontology of mind/consciousness just yet. Your robot example demonstrates that, as it stands, physicalism will only take us just thus far. Yes, Mary the Super Scientist "knows" red until she steps outside the room and upon experiencing her first Jonathan realises that she hadn't all along...and there's nothing in our experience that can ever replace hers (I might need to clarify at this point that I'm not making an epistemological point here, which is another reason why the 'know' is in scare quotes).

The more I look into this debate, the less I am convinced by the argument from science. Maybe science will eventually help us to discover the "mind", but at this stage that "mind" will be a highly generalised, rather impoverished thing. The phenomenological dangler argument is only convincing if you believe that science "as it stands" (not the growing body of "knowledge" attributed to science, but rather the discourse - in the Foucauldean sense - of science) will be able to bring the "mind" into the fold. That science struggles so hard and fails to explain away the "mind" and "mindstuff" might be an indicator that treating human "consciousness" (that special act of being aware of being aware of) might not be an extension of - or even emergent property of complex enough - simple consciousness (e.g. my housemate's cat leaps the top of the living room sofa and stares out the window when it becomes conscious of the sound of its owner's Volvo approaching) but might actually be of a different order. This is not to say that science (or even physicalism) won't be crucial in understanding human consciousness, but rather that neither is sufficient as they stand. The route to the "mind" might involve the next Copernican Revolution...and wouldn't that be thing to live through?!?

The point regarding "consciousness continuum" is relatively mundane if (as you point out) one accepts "consciousness" in the physicalist sensed used by the majority of those responding to this thread. Panpsychism takes that discussion to a far more radical/enjoyable, if somewhat hysterical/pointless, end. The nexus of meditation for me has been the conjunction between your last statement in the "consciousness continuum" point and the "consciousness defined by nature of input" point. The reason being that it seems that:

1. Human brains continue to develop from a less complex to a more complex state following birth.
2. Human senses continue to develop from a less discerning to a more discerning state following birth.
3. The sense data that these developing brains receive over time remains constant in "nature".
4. There are distinct moments in the life of a human where 1, 2 and 3 hold such that consciousness alters (one might point to the Lacanian "mirror stage" at this point, at which it might be argued that one begins to develop a "self/mind" capable of being aware of being aware of).

The upshot seems to be that consciousness is not (for humans at least) defined by nature of input alone but more importantly by nature/mode of reception...as well.

I continue to find Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, especially the discussion of the 'Child's Relations to Others' and of the chiasmus, inspiring on this point. And, I recommend that particular volume.

At this stage the physicalists will be pointing and announcing with glee that if I hold 4 to be true then I must accept that science will out. Not so good friends, even with 1 through 4 the physicalist cannot explain away (or in-corporate) the "mind". Further, even if I grant that 1 and 2 are time dependant and 3 is true, at no stage can I point to a part of Mary's brain and say, "Yes, there it is...red". Yeah, that might be "Red for Mary on this occasion" but little else. Adding a phenomenological accent ("phenomenological" as developed from Husserl, not the other type used in para 2 of this rant) to the physicalist discussion of the mind by the likes of Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson might be very useful.

We live in hope! 

I realise that in the preceding rant I've made reference to the "blabber" philosophers Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, but also acknowledge the Australian Anglo-American Analytic philosopher Frank Jackson (by refering to the "Mary" thought experiment) as well as Braddon-Mitchell. Confused? Well also consider, I've been lucky enough to be present both at one of the few lectures by Jaques Derrida in Australia, and at the innaugural symposium for the Centre for Consciousness at ANU (wherein Frank Jackson admitted publicly for the first time that he was no longer sure what the "Mary" experiment actually demonstrated). I'm not bragging, rather my point is that there are decent philosophical minds on both sides of the (strangely arbitrary) divide. Certainly, the American Literary Theorists took one very small part of Derrida's work out of context and used it mercilessly to critique all and sundry, until people caught on and stopped paying them...but you can't blame Derrida for ALT. Most (but not all) Heideggerian philosophers I've met have been as dismissive of Analytic philosophy as say Devitt and Sterelny are of poststructuralism...the commonality being that in both cases neither party actually read the primary sources. Poor philosophy is poor philosophy on both sides of the continental/analytic "divide" and those that buy into the rhetoric without doing the hard yards are just plain ignorant (no offence meant to anyone in particular, all the preceding is merely IMHO, etc., etc.) 

has a famous essay called "What is it like to be a bat" or whatever the title is. What do you think about his point there, distrans, that even if physicalism is true, we can't pretend to understand how consciousness "emerges" from the body/brain?

To be frank, I don't know if you addressed that already in your posts, since you use lots of terminology that obliterate my senses! 

You write in such a "fancy" style? It's kinda annoying to read, but maybe that's just me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary's_room

Anyway, the Mary experiment. I assume this is done by clueless philosophers who know nothing about neuroscience?

This is pretty easy to deconstruct. Basically, knowing something about something isn't the same as experiencing something. If you know what would approximately happen when someone hits you in the face, versus if someone hits you in the face, god damn, they are completely different things on all levels. Sensory, brain, feelings, you know, you could make tests, I bet the latter would make people much less happy than the former, even if you asked people to imagine hard...

In the extreme physicalist sense, seeing red things causes direct brain activation that can not happen if you see the word "red" or hear descriptions about it etc etc.. This brain activation can't be done any other way except by seeing red. There are huge areas of the brain dedicated to it, formed during the evolution.

I think the thought experiment doesn't demonstrate anything else except the sad state of philosophy - they seem utterly clueless about basic physiology, and somehow think people are very different from animals, we are not very much slaves of our senses like them "filthy" animals are, or that somehow in our high fantasies we could present to our own brains whatever we wanted.

There are direct ways to affect the brain which the brain can not itself "simulate", maybe with drugs or in some other very strong hallucinations. That way Mary could have "simulated" the sensation.

There are people who shoot themselves, just to "get to know how it feels". That's what Mary would get to know. "Ok, this is how it actually feels like to see red."
I don't know if it'd make much sense to her though if she hadn't grown up in a world of colors.

-

What's interesting if you look at the senses, is the sense of smell. People can recognize a big amount of different smells, and they all feel very different too. That is weird.

Taste, vision or touch are just combinations of a finite set of "basic" variables as senses. But smell can be different, in it that it has thousands of dimensions.

If you read basic neuroscience, you also see the anatomy and physiology of smell is different from other senses.

If I did qualia research, I'd work with smells.

-

Collective consciousness. Oh great. Maybe that's what the philosophers nowadays love to babble about. It's become utterly irrelevant to anything real anymore. 

That's what Mary would get to know. "Ok, this is how it actually feels like to see red."

so, it does demonstrate something other than the sad state of philosophy.

If I did qualia research, I'd work with smells.

Indeed, my inclination too.

Collective consciousness

err...I thought I dismissed this?

inertia: I found my copy of the piece...I'll get back to you in a month or so :) 

Nagel just says that if physicalism is true then we have to understand how the body (brain) "produces" subjective experience.

IMHO, it's an intriguing introduction to the whole issue, but not that useful. 

the point of the Mary story is that not all knowledge is knowledge of the world, therefore a physicalist account of reality is incomplete. 

interesting posts... you're into a depth I never got to in college, but I did want to mention something I hadn't before -- if consciousness is a continuum instead of a yes/no proposition, that doesn't just mean dogs and jellyfish are "less" conscious, but it also means that creatures or machines could be even MORE conscious than us. And it also opens the door for the idea that we could have our consciousnesses elevated somehow (drugs or something else).

But I also have a big concern about the difference between being more conscious and having the feeling of being more conscious. I've had dreams in which ideas seemed funny, or clever, and when I wake up and remember the content of the dream, I realize that it wasn't that funny, or it wasn't that clever. The thing about dreams that seem so compelling is that they don't have to present an actual experience (of hearing something funny or insightful or clever), becuase they can short circuit that whole process and present the feeling of having an experience (of hearing something funny or insightful or clever).

This is one thing that troubles me about this is that it means that the experience of being "more conscious" can also easily be a fake. We can easily identify things that make our brains less reliable, like sleep deprivation, drugs, etc. But with those things absent, how could distinguish between a real heightened consciousness and just the feeling of having heightened consciousness?

This sounds kind of paradoxical since I previously equated consciousness with a feeling of thinking, but that feeling does have to rest on some physical foundation, and so it can't be wholly mistaken.

Also, regarding your statement about how we get more conscious as our lives progress, is it really more of a narrowing of focus? Are we excluding more and more of raw input and is more and more of our experience pre-filtered by our expectations? This kind of plays into a suspicion I have that things like language and analytical thought actually enforce a structure on the mind, and while it may feel like the internal world becomes more and more crisp, is it really just becoming more limited? Otherwise, where does the extra complexity come from in our finite brains?

(Sorry none of these ideas are well-formed or cross-referenced to any academic tradition :)