No? Why would I do that? — khaled
I could just do this as I have been.
But if this is what you think then why were you asking “how” neurons produce experiences? — khaled
... I prefer the not so easy question: what necessarily is not there? — 180 Proof
Apologies for the delay in responding.Could you expand on that?
Like listing some examples, or describing how such an approach works, more or less. — Manuel
You said it's the same thing. — Manuel
I think that while in principle you could stimulate the brain to do this, we know way too little about the brain. — Manuel
I never got an answer. What's your ontology? — Manuel
Thoughts? — 180 Proof
So your objection is more empirical and fundamental. I don’t know much about neurology so idk if it’s founded or not. — khaled
What exists? Why stuff of course! In other words I’m a monist. I think the only things that exist are physical though I hesitate to use the word because it’s basically lost all meaning. “Quantum wave states” have no position, speed, defined mass, color or smell but we still call them physical. — khaled
There are contingent ways the world could have been (i.e. contingent versions of the world), or can be described (i.e. narrated, measured, mapped, modeled), that are constituted by contingent facts.What there is?
These belong to the set of what there is.Nixon could have been impeached, removed, prosecuted and died in prison.
You could have been raised speaking Mandarin.
Nature can be described via poetry.
Nature can be described via ecological systems.
Time can be described phenomenologically (re: duration).
Time can be described chronometrically (re: clocks).
This post could have been posted a decade ago and written in Swahili and read by someone other than you.
Etcetera ... — e.g. contingent versions / descriptions of the world
Yes.When you say there are no necessary facts for this world. Do you have in mind something along the lines of: had the variables during the big bang been a bit different, we would not exist? — Manuel
'Necessary, or non-contingent, facts' – as I pointed out – because such notions are contradictory (or contain inconsistent predicates or they're unconditional-unchangeable). Btw, I use "possible world" to mean contingent version / description of this world – not some separate, other world or worlds.If that's roughly on the right track, then what could not exist in any possible world?
You may decry some of these scruples, and protest that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven and earth. — Goodman, Fact Fiction and Forecast
Sometimes in other forums, philosophy of mind sections are literally only about neuroscience. It should then be called brain philosophy, which is fine. But so far as I can see, current brain science says very, very, very little about the mind. Which is strange, admittedly. Still, if we "reduce" mind to brain, we lose out on almost everything. — Manuel
What would an answer to that request be like? I mean how would you know you've had such an answer. I could say - your occipital cortex starts a chain of neural firings which, on average, lead to reports consitent with what we describe as 'seeing a tree'. Why isn't that an answer, what's missing? — Isaac
What I have in mind when I ask that question is that it seems to me that a lot is left missing. You can say that stimulating X and Y area of the brain is the same as seeing a tree. I think that while in principle you could stimulate the brain to do this, we know way too little about the brain. — Manuel
if “seeing a tree” is an experience independent from the physical state, how does it influence it and seem influenced by it? Same with “anger”. How did the emotion move the arm (I would simply say that the emotion is precisely the neural event that moved the arm)? — khaled
I thought you were coming from a Churchland perspective. Alex Rosenberg would argue in this manner. — Manuel
Again, how are you reaching this conclusion absent of a thorough survey of that which neuroscience does, in fact, know about the brain?
Also, if seeing a tree were more than certain neural activity, then what is the more that it would be? As has already been pointed to... — Isaac
That raises the question of how to admit the utility of folk psychology heuristics without making them the be all and end all of one's philosophy of mind — fdrake
EG 2, if I learn my partner "hates garlic", that gives me some of their behavioural tendencies and lets me incorporate that into how I treat them. If I'm a hard reductionist or eliminativist or one of those brands, that doesn't stop me from believing "my partner hates garlic" in whatever metaphorical/analogical register mental events lay (to be later mapped to neural ones) and acting upon it. — fdrake
Maybe one part of "what's missing" is regarding the scope of useful condensations of the information. On a day to day basis you don't have access to someone's brain, but you do have access to someone's behaviour. — fdrake
I cited the fact that we have mapped all 302 neurons in C Elegans. We don't know why the thing moves. — Manuel
What I take the tree to mean, how I categorize it, how I relate to it, etc. It comes from the brain all right, but these things are assumed, not discovered. — Manuel
There's the problem also that neurons might be the wrong place to look, in that case we might have to look at microtubules. But then it goes down to the level of physics. You would not be wrong in saying that seeing a tree is nothing more that the complex behavior of quantum phenomena. I don't think that says much at all. — Manuel
We do. It moves because some external trigger sets off a chain of neural signals which evetually lead to acetylcholine being released from motor neuron cells into the neuro-muscular synapse which causes the protein channels to open in the membrane of the neighbouring muscle cell. The resultant ion diffusion alters the structure of tubules within the cytoplasm of the cells causing them to contract. So it moves. — Isaac
I can't make sense of this sentence, I'm afraid, perhaps you could rephrase it? — Isaac
Really, that seems wildly dismissive of all the work physicists have done. Why would you say it doesn't say much? — Isaac
You're speaking about stimuli and reaction. I'm talking about will. — Manuel
when we speak of will, science either denies it exists or tells us nothing about it. — Manuel
You can speak of stimulating a finger to go up, but it's very different from moving your finger. It's a bit like Wittgenstein once asked:
"What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" — Manuel
You can't take these things away and study the world "value free" as it were. — Manuel
seems to be highly unlikely that physics can say much about mind. — Manuel
Neuroscience is extremely useful, while not being able to say much about the self — Manuel
How do you know those are two different things? — Isaac
No — Isaac
Indeed. So how does philosophy magically duck that problem then? The very theorising you're doing right now, the one in which you're trying to dismiss the role of neuroscience is itself replete with the already-embedded assumptions by which you conduct any such theorising. Either no study can say anything at all or you must concede that it is, after all, possible to say something useful about the mind despite the fact that one is using a mind to do so. — Isaac
Why would your assessment of the likelihood be of any use here. You're not a physicist. If a physicist thinks it likely their subject can say something about mind but you don't, what merit would there be to following your judgement over the physicist's? They should surely know their own subject's capabilities better than you. — Isaac
You seem consistently to confuse a subject's not saying anything you like the sound of with its not saying anything at all. — Isaac
Having you're finger move by an electrical shock is the same as you willing to move the finger? Press you palm with any object and watch your fingers move. Afterwards move your fingers by yourself. Is that in any way the same thing? — Manuel
Either we have free will and you can find some way to see if neuroscience as anything to bear on the subject. Or we lack it and we go to neuroscience to prove that we don't have it.
In either case it's stipulated. — Manuel
I'm mentioning specific things: "self", "psychic continuity", "categorization", etc. What's given in experience and must form a part of it for us to form an intelligible world at all. — Manuel
we could not theorize at all if did not have these things as given. When we speak of the self, at no point do you lose consciousness or stop categorizing, it's always there on every topic. — Manuel
We experience speech and vision as manifest activity, not non-mental processes. That these non-mental processes are essential for speech or vision, no one could doubt, but we have linguistics and vision science, which are different than neuroscience. Why do we have these fields? Why don't linguists just study the brain and forget about sentence structure? — Manuel
Which physicist would be crazy enough to say appeal to physics to explain the mind? — Manuel
Physics is amazing, while saying almost nothing of mind. — Manuel
If that's how you interpret it, fine. — Manuel
Those things being different doesn't imply that they're not both caused by stimuli and response. Having a finger move by electric shock is different to fainting, but that doesn't mean one of them has to be modelled differently in terms of causation. — Isaac
How is it stipulated? One can quite coherently ask the question of whether we have free will from a neuroscientific perspective. We could look for signals driving physiological events associated with decisions (like moving an arm) and see if they are accounted for by preceding signals. How's that 'stipulated'? — Isaac
You're assuming the contents of your experience are features of collective experience. I have no idea what you mean by "psychic continuity", I don't feel like I have a consistent 'self' and for me 'categorisation' is distinctly post hoc. It's monumental arrogance to just assume whatever world view you happen to have is somehow foundational to any enquiry just because it's how you happen to see things. — Isaac
the existence of a simpler way of talking about something doesn't prove the more complex way is false, just, you know, more complex. — Isaac
Now you disingenuously change the claim to physics 'explaining the mind'. — Isaac
It's not an interpretation. I've supplied evidence of hundreds, if not thousands, of papers from well respected, peer reviewed journals talking about the subjects you specified. — Isaac
That's a clear sign of cause and effect. That's something we normally wouldn't do in normal life, put a flashlight in front of your eyes. If for whatever reason, you choose to look at a flashlight, you are using your will to continue looking at the flashlight. That's different from causes and effects. — Manuel
If for whatever reason, you choose to look at a flashlight, you are using your will to continue looking at the flashlight. — Manuel
Do you believe we have free will, experiments aside? If you do, then you'll look at how that's possible using neuroscience. If you don't, like Sam Harris, he'll look to neuroscience to prove his point. — Manuel
Psychic continuity is what Locke described: when we look at an object at time t1, we take to be the same object at time t2. In other words, when you go outside and see a bird in the sky, you will continue to see it as the same bird through out the time span you are looking at it. Maybe I'm a total Martian, but I can't help but recognize the tree outside my window as the same tree the next day. I can't get rid of it if I wanted to. — Manuel
I'll grant you the "self" argument, people are different in these regards. — Manuel
You're telling me that when you visit a place for the first time, you don't already know what a river or a statue is? You take time after seeing a place to think to yourself that's a tree and not a light post? — Manuel
the point remains. I don't know of a physicist who claims that physics tells us anything substantive of the mind, that was not already obvious years ago: that it's physical. — Manuel
If you can't already tell we have will, there's nothing I can say that will make you believe that we do. — Manuel
I thought you were studying free will, not the "sensation that you have chosen to do so". — Manuel
Object permanence highlights the point that was already obvious to people like Locke. It doesn't tell you how it arises, nor why we have it. — Manuel
If statues and trees and everything else were subject to "learning", we would still be debating what they are. — Manuel
I said:
"the complexity of manifest reality cannot be explained by neuroscience, we simply know way too little."
"brain science says very, very, very little about the mind"
Also "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", "classifying trees" aren't explained by anything in current brain science.
I said that physics says virtually nothing about the mind.
Now you are mis-interpreting me. — Manuel
What kind of argument is that? It amounts to nothing more than "if you don't see things the way I do there's nothing to say". Well then I have to ask what exactly you thought you were going to get out of posting on a public forum? — Isaac
Again, what reading have you done on object permanence to be able to judge what it does and does not have to say? — Isaac
Why? — Isaac
Nope, it's those exact claims I'm disputing. — Isaac
This has veered way off the OP. Which was for people to discuss what they think there is. — Manuel
Yes, I think that's true - in that it's missing from a neurological account. But that would be a matter of translation wouldn't it? — Isaac
The question the folk psychologist should be asking of the neuroscientist in that context is more like "but what does that mean for me?".
The accusation would be "You've not translated that", rather than "you've not accounted for something".
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. — Stephen Hawking
What I think an important distinction people often miss in these discussions is the map and the terrain. A lot of it may come down to "what" exactly are properties. If mental states have properties like a photon or a gluon has properties, that would be an odd conclusion because that is saying mentality is just a brute fact of existence, quite the opposite of what materialist conceptions would like to think. Thus, often materialists unintentionality fall into ontologies that posit mentality as somehow fundamental. — schopenhauer1
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