Well, I would start by asking both Chalmers and Dennett what they mean by "qualia", after all, clever as they undoubtedly are, they are not immune to conceptual confusion and this might be revealed when we push them to express what they mean. — jkg20
If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. So if it were just a conceptual confusion, you would think someone would have pointed that out by now, and all the rest of the philosophers engaged in the debate would have been like, "Oh yeah! How did I not see that? Moving along ...". — Marchesk
But if a tool can be used, it can be used well or badly. I'm not saying this is the case, but perhaps Chalmers and Dennett did not use those tools effectively at the outset. The only way we could ascertain that they did or did not, would be to go back to what they say and apply those tools once again. — jkg20
Well, consensus amongst dissenting parties doesn't guarantee anything and some of the most well known philsophers are renowned for changing their minds after many years. — jkg20
don't think so. There could well be systematic reasons why some conceptual disputes cant get cleared up, because we lack the cognitive ability to understand — Snakes Alive
In any case you seem to allow that analysis of language use can be a useful tool at least at the beginning of a debate. — Snakes Alive
Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence. — jkg20
You expect that Wittgenstein's philosophy should enable us to prevent deception? — Luke
1: For the person feeling a pain, the pain sensations they have represent some other thing or process. — jkg20
2: For that person to really be in pain, the pain sensation must correctly represent the presence or occurrence of that other thing. — jkg20
3: Where there is representation there is the possibility of misrepresentation. — jkg20
4: So a person could be having pain sensations, but not actually be in pain because those sensations are incorrectly representing the presence of that other thing. — jkg20
If we're going to debate anything, we have to use language. That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. — Marchesk
Analyzing the language usage of "social distance" and "flattening the curve" isn't going to tell us how long to continue to doing both, for example. That's a matter for the epidemiology of Covid-19 and health care capacity balanced against economic concerns. — Marchesk
But that doesn't happen. So either Witty diagnosed some really deep and difficult problem with philosophy. One that's hard to root out. Or his approach doesn't work for long standing and well known disputes, because maybe they're about something more than proper use of language. — Marchesk
That might be the case for the kind of idealism that Berkeley advocated, although even that is not certain: I would need to see a detailed argument to convince me, not just some name dropping of millenia dead Athenians. As for Absolute idealism, the situation is even more complex, after all, central to many versions of it is the dynamic of the dialectic. But that aside, let us at least try to get me to understand at least one thing about your position.because most forms of idealism represent ideas as static passive things.
Yes, and the problem is far deeper than that simple representation you offer.
The point I want to get clear on about your position is whether you consider that the sensations of pain an individual feels has a representative function for that person, not whether those feelings of pain are representations or not. My expression of point 1 explicity did not call feelings of pain representations, it just described them as having a representative function. With that disinction in mind, do you accept 1 as it was stated, i.e, with the use of "thing" dropped: — jkg20
We can then discuss the intricacies of what representation is, and how the concepts of representing and representation come apart, later on. — jkg20
Haha, that's funny. Philosophy has a long history of rooting out and exposing deception. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all addressed sophistry as a significant problem inherent within the educational institutions of the day. Then came skepticism. Now we have all sorts of modern attacks on deception, starting with Descartes. I believe that a philosophy with no principles for the recognition of deception, to distinguish real knowledge from fake knowledge, is useless, and not actually philosophy. But many, perhaps you, believe that philosophy is useless. — Metaphysician Undercover
I'm really not trying intentionally to change the subject, I am just trying to get to an understanding of what you mean. The route might be meandering, but I retain a glimmer of hope of reaching the destination. In any case, it was you that introduced the idea of representation in relation to the whole "beetle" / "pain" discussion:You seem to be changing the subject. Having a "representative function" implies being used for a representative purpose.
It can't be more than a representation of my beetle, which may or may not be an accurate representation.
You seem to have reached the opinion that there is some third process involved in pain that most people are ignorant of. Would you be able to express that opinion as the conclusion of a deductively valid argument? If so, would you do me the favour of giving that deductively valid argument, with precisesly articulated and numbered premises and do so, if possible, without name dropping any philosophers or philosophical movements? If, on the other hand, the opinion is one that cannot be reached by the route of a deductively valid argument, why do you think that is so? — jkg20
Please do not read into these requests a belief on my part of the sacrosanctity of deductive logic, it is one philsosophical tool amongst others. It is, however, a tool that I am thoroughly comfortable handling, and if you yourself can use that tool to show how you reached your conclusion, it would greatly help me understand what you are trying to say. — jkg20
At first glance, you might think ok, the cause of pain is some physiological processes, let's say it is damage to the living body which causes pain. But that description wouldn't account for the defining feature of pain which is that it is an unpleasant feeling, one we try to avoid. I can cause damage to all kinds of things, without causing that unpleasant feeling within myself, so the cause of pain cannot be described that way. Therefore, to account for the cause of pain, we need to account for what is essential to that feeling, according to accepted definition, and this is the unpleasantness of the feeling. What causes the unpleasantness of the feeling is unknown.
s your claim then, that I cannot know that pinching myself is the cause of the pain because I cannot know how it causes the pain? That seems like quite an ask as a general principle for being able to know what a cause of an event is. After all, it seems reasonable to suppose that I can know that the cause of my car starting is my turning the ignition key, without my having to know the details of how internal combustion engines work. I can also know that my spilling a cup of coffee on my laptop caused it to stop working without knowing the first thing about computer hardware. — jkg20
In the particular instance of my pinching myself, why is it not a sufficient account of my feelingthat specific pain? I can strike a match and it produces a flame. Sometimes I can strike a match and the flame is not produced. But where I strike a match and the flame is produced, it would seem sufficient to account for that flames presence that I struck the match. Premise 4 is the claim that I cannot know the cause of pain. My claim is simply that sometimes I can.As I suggested, we could turn to the fact that the act of pinching is damaging to your body, but damage to a body is not sufficient to account for the feeling of pain, because things can be damaged without causing that feeling.
To know the cause of "pain" in general, is to know what makes some feelings distinguishable from other feelings, and identifiable as pain
In the particular instance of my pinching myself, why is it not a sufficient account of my feelingthat specific pain? I can strike a match and it produces a flame. Sometimes I can strike a match and the flame is not produced. But where I strike a match and the flame is produced, it would seem sufficient to account for that flames presence that I struck the match. Premise 4 is the claim that I cannot know the cause of pain. My claim is simply that sometimes I can. — jkg20
Are you suggesting that there is a general cause of pain? Why do you think that? — jkg20
From my own case, many different things cause me pain. — jkg20
Like effects must have like causes does not seem like a particularly tenable general principle. — jkg20
Perhaps, however, it is not that principle you are relying on. If you could give me the deductive argument for premise 4, perhaps I could see things more clearly. — jkg20
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