Who says it's unsolvable? — frank

All the mysterians do - Chomsky, Penrose, McGinn, etc

I think McGinn just expresses pessimism. He doesn't really say it's unsolvable, does he?

So do you see phenomenal consciousness as essentially being an emergent property of the brain's processing capabilities? Details to be understood in the fullness of time via a scientific approach? — Tom Storm

Yes. I think there has been progress in recent decades explaining the emergence of "phenomenal consciousness" by the likes of neuroscientist-philosopher Thomas Metzinger (re: self model theory of subjectivity) et al.

Frank I'm no expert but I'm not sure there is a great functional difference between the two positions.

For starters read this thread. Also, mysterians et al. Pay attention, man!

Right, no comprehensive explanations. — jorndoe

I,m not sure what you mean by a comprehensive explanation, but that's not the one I'm looking for. You can't comprehend color just as I can. You can give it a contextual meaning just as I can. Maybe color is a necessity to see the difference between different materials, as is usefull in a Dawkinsian approach to evolution. Maybe it corresponds to different wavelengths of a small range of the solar electromagnetic field. Maybe it is a huge collective parallell traveling of electric spike potentials on a least resistant path on the forrest of the intricate and madly complex and orderly chaotic neuronal structure in the visual cortex. Operating on its own or stimulated by the retina, formally, dynamically (temporally), non-linearly, and holistically structured in the larger context of that same neuronal structure. I comprehend color, and so do you. We both know what blue is. No question about it. But do you understand what it is? No. It's a hard problem

I had one all written up, it I couldn’t access proper references to support it. I have some books by Russell, just not pertaining closely enough to this topic. And, of course, without them, my recourse is the inevitable cognitive prejudices, which, while loosely pertinent, isn’t fair.

Ok. Fine. Regarding this......

why does the necessarily given need to be developed?
— Mww

Because if one isn't careful, they will begin to think that they are looking directly at a brain and that non-mental activity (neuronal and electrochemical activity) is mental activity. — Manuel

.....in a nutshell, the professional already is careful, due to an irreducible given, and the commoner doesn’t need to be, due to mere disinterest, so why the necessity to develop the distinction between mind and matter.

Cool. To me it doesn't seem to make sense to hold that it would be impossible for consciousness to be an emergent property of the brain. An urge to explain consciousness in supernatural terms seems as fraught as the need to use the more speculative aspects of quantum physics as the engine for driving a fresh cult of transcendental obscurantism.

There's just no way to use a brain to look at a brain and say, "This is what brains are like, according to my brains, and my brains must be right."

I fancy myself a hard Mysterian: this problem cannot be practically solved.

With greater perspective could come a more common sensical assumption. But we don't know, at this juncture, where we are or what we're made of. We see the Earth as still and it's hurtling through space. We see hard matter and liken it to something called "the physical" and at the same time know it's all in flux.

It isn't saying anything to say that the mind is physical anyway, because we don't know what the physical is.

The best we can do is tinker with it and exploit its resources and capabilities. We cannot, ever, in my view, precisely dictate what it is. Is everything mundane or completely abstract? There's just no way of dictating this.

It's the vocabulary he chose to use, as do many other philosophers, accompanied by the usual connotations people tend to have when they use them.

The important distinction, the one which I think is intelligible is to associate matter with "non-mental" and mind with "mental". It is claimed that matter is not mind, I don't agree but, that's the vocabulary we are stuck with.

The idea would be that the physiologist studies (non-mental) matter, as seen in brains. This is the famed "third person perspective." Then the physiologist presents us an objective report on the observed phenomena, in this case the (non-mental) brain.

What Russell is saying using this contentious vocabulary, is that the physiologist is actually not studying (non-mental) matter, he is studying how his mind reacts to a supposedly "objective" thing. So it's a mental construct on the occasion of a stimulus.

We don't get to study (non-mental) matter anywhere, unless we could literally get out of our bodies. We just have to postulate its existence.

It's obvious to everyone, — Wayfarer

Ah, would that it were, would that it were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npvQ3M3WaPA

Who says it's unsolvable? — frank

I do. Whatever formal explanation you give to the color blue, it's no explanation of the color blue itself. "Das Ding an Sich" can't be known. Only experienced from within.

Instead of mental state = physical state, you would have mental state = mental state, which would commit you to either idealism or dualism.

We don't get to study (non-mental) matter anywhere, unless we could literally get out of our bodies. We just have to postulate its existence. — Manuel

We do not postulate anything. If you can see and touch a thing you have to be far off to even think about the possibility that it might not "exist". That is the problem with undirected reflections and witty, but mindless, efforts. If e.g. social constructivism tells us that we can construct the "reality" of things it is clear that we can construct an idea of things that makes it impossible to say anything about
it. Given we can - why should we do it?
Where is step B? Where is the negation of the negation? What should be the difference between empirical science and philosophy be, if it loses itself to it's objects (e.g. "truth")?

So it's a mental construct on the occasion of a stimulus. — Manuel

Yes. The representational cognitive system intrinsic to the human condition, writ large. Really difficult to theorize, or even speculate, its negation. It is still necessary to account for that “objective” thing, otherwise representations have no ground, the well-worn yet hardly acknowledged, “we are presented with the absurdity of an appearance, without that which appears...”. (Not Russell)

My contention is only that there is no need to develop a distinction between mind and matter, because the absence of that distinction, is impossible, with respect to our human system of rational agency. It follows that without the development of a distinction, any illusory predicates assignable to it, disappear, which is where this whole dialogue began.

Granting that doctrinal conclusion, mind and matter are already necessarily distinct, Russell’s neutral monism, which says mind and matter are indistinguishable, re: “Analysis of Mind”, 1921, is invalid, for it reduces ultimately to the paradoxical conclusion that whenever one is conscious he is aware of his own brain, (secondary literature, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, Vol.7, pg 241. Sorry).

Logically, it’s quite simple: develop theories of mind, develop theories of matter, the distinctions between them fall out as a consequence.

The only way around this, such that neutral monism is viable, is to defeat the theoretical predicates sufficiently enough to falsify the representational cognitive system. As far as I am aware, Russell didn’t take that bait. But he did wrap, or rather, smother, himself in language, which is just as ill-begotten.

Anyway.....as I said. My only contention.....

The explanatory gap" is misinterpreted by many philosophers as an "unsolvable problem" (by philosophical means alone, of course) for which they therefore fiat various speculative woo-of-the-gaps that only further obfuscate the issue. — 180 Proof

Not at all.

In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem". — Wikipedia

As I've shown already in this thread, the hard explanatory problem has scientific validation, namely, that of the subjective unity of consciousness, and how to account for it in neurological terms. This is one aspect of the well-known neural binding problem, which is how to account for all of the disparate activities of the brain and body can culminate in the obvious fact of the subjective unity of experience.

As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. — Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem(s)

Your continual invocation of 'woo of the gaps' only illustrates that you're not grasping problem at hand. It's a hard problem for physicalism and naturalism because of the axioms they start from, not because there is no solution whatever. Seen from other perspectives, there is no hard problem, it simply dissolves. It's all a matter of perspective. But seen from the perspective of modern scientific naturalism, there is an insuperable problem, because its framework doesn't accomodate the reality of first-person experience, a.k.a. 'being', which is why 'eliminative materialism' must insist that it has no fundamental reality. You're the one obfuscating the problem, because it clashes with naturalism - there's an issue you're refusing to see which is as plain as the nose on your face.

'Speculative woo-of-the-gaps' is at bottom simply the observation that there are things about the mind that science can't know, because of its starting assumptions. It's a very simple thing, but some guy by the name of Chalmers was able to create an international career as an esteemed philosopher by pointing it out.

actually I've found a quote in an old thread from pan-psychist philosopher Philip Goff which speaks directly to this point:

Perhaps the most important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of natural science. But he felt able to do this only after he had revolutionised our philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers smelt sweet. But it’s hard to see how these sensory qualities – the redness of tomatoes, the spicy taste of paprika, the sweet smell of flowers – could be captured in the abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an equation capture what it’s like to taste spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter.

Galileo’s solution to this problem was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul. The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers but in the soul of the person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika but in the soul of the person tasting it. Even colours, for Galileo, aren’t really on the surfaces of objects but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter had no qualities, then it was possible in principle to describe it in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics.

But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory qualities. Rather he took them to be forms of consciousness residing in the soul, an entity outside of the material world and so outside of the domain of natural science. In other words, Galileo created physical science by putting consciousness outside of its domain of enquiry. — Philip Goff

But now naturalism has 'forgotten' that it has made this move and tries to account for 'the soul' - which of course it denies the reality of - in amongst the mindless objects which it has deemed the only real entities. Hence the whole argument.

There is a very simple solution. The physical charges, electric, strong, and hyper-strong, give the explanation. The charge of matter is what gives matter that special ingredient.

If you're of the mindset that all mental states are brain states, then psychological solutions are material solutions. — RogueAI

I have no idea what else they could be, although I prefer the term 'processes' to 'states'. — Janus

Instead of mental state = physical state, you would have mental state = mental state, which would commit you to either idealism or dualism. — RogueAI

Saying that a mental state is a mental state is tautologically true, of course, but tells us nothing. It is only if we can determine that something is really something else that it is not immediately obvious that it is, that we can be said to have discovered something.

I prefer to say, with Spinoza, that the mental and the physical are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. So, the mind and the brain/ body are not different things; we are embodied minds or enminded bodies depending on which perspective you want to take. But this should not be taken to be advocating pan-psychism.

We conceive of inanimate objects as 'brute matter' but objects appear only in the "mental/ physical" act of perception. So we can think of what is perceived as either a mind-independent object or a mind dependent perception, and neither conception, on it's own, will be right. In this we approach the limits of language.

That's my take on it. anyway.

We do not postulate anything. If you can see and touch a thing you have to be far off to even think about the possibility that it might not "exist". That is the problem with undirected reflections and witty, but mindless, efforts. If e.g. social constructivism tells us that we can construct the "reality" of things it is clear that we can construct an idea of things that makes it impossible to say anything about
it. Given we can - why should we do it?
Where is step B? Where is the negation of the negation? What should be the difference between empirical science and philosophy be, if it loses itself to it's objects (e.g. "truth")? — Heiko

This would be more compelling if materialists had some idea of what consciousness is and how brains produce it. Let me ask you: suppose science is still stumped on consciousness 1,000 years from now. Would you still think all there is is matter?

think it is. I think scientists can study this for a thousand more years and still not know how minds are produced by brains. This is because there's no way to verify other minds exist. You can only be certain that your own mind exists. So, if a scientific theory predicts that that clump of matter over there is conscious, how are we going to verify it? That seems like an insolvable problem. — RogueAI

You may be right.

The explanatory gap" is misinterpreted by many philosophers as an "unsolvable problem" (by philosophical means alone, of course) for which they therefore fiat various speculative woo-of-the-gaps that only further obfuscate the issue.
— 180 Proof

Not at all. — Wayfarer

I agree with Wayfarer. Nobody is wooing any gaps.

Would you contend that it is absolutely impossible for phenomenal consciousness to be an emergent property of the brain?

This would be more compelling if materialists had some idea of what consciousness is and how brains produce it. Let me ask you: suppose science is still stumped on consciousness 1,000 years from now. Would you still think all there is is matter? — RogueAI

If you are, then you are. It surely is not the fault of some neuroscientist, that most of philosophy were unable to reach a synthesis on ontological difference.

Nobody is wooing any gaps. — frank

Rudolph Steiner.

Oh. Wait. Nobody here is.

Never mind.

Rudolph Steiner. — Mww

Well, yeah. :lol:

I do. Whatever formal explanation you give to the color blue, it's no explanation of the color blue itself. "Das Ding an Sich" can't be known. Only experienced from within. — GraveItty

It's very conceivable that we could peep into the experiences of other humans and animals. It happens in science fiction all the time.

We do not postulate anything. If you can see and touch a thing you have to be far off to even think about the possibility that it might not "exist". — Heiko

We postulates things all the time, not only in science but in day to day life too.

I agree that something exists. I can't prove it. Human knowledge doesn't work with "final proofs". It's that I think there are better reasons for believing that something exists independently of me than there good reasons for thinking that nothing does.

My contention is only that there is no need to develop a distinction between mind and matter, because the absence of that distinction, is impossible, with respect to our human system of rational agency. It follows that without the development of a distinction, any illusory predicates assignable to it, disappear, which is where this whole dialogue began. — Mww

Ah, I see. The terminology can get really tricky, but I'll be willing to grant that there is some kind of natural inclination to distinguish mind or soul from everything else. It's the way we naturally view the world, "folk" psychologically, as it were, not that I'm enamored with that term.

But no substantive problem here, on my part.

Russell’s neutral monism, which says mind and matter are indistinguishable, re: “Analysis of Mind”, 1921, is invalid, for it reduces ultimately to the paradoxical conclusion that whenever one is conscious he is aware of his own brain — Mww

Correct on the part of him saying that we aware of our brains, through experience. But, as I understand it, Neutral Monism is not so much that mind and matter are indistinguishable. Neutral Monism is the idea that world is neither mental nor physical as we understand these terms.

As far as I am aware, Russell didn’t take that bait. But he did wrap, or rather, smother, himself in language, which is just as bad. — Mww

Sure, his use of words can be problematic. But his point about neurologists examining brains is correct, in my view. There is no view from nowhere.

I agree with you that there needs to be something which grounds the phenomena we are interpreting. It's just that we can't go directly to these grounds.

What is the much-vaunted "unity of consciousness" if not merely a sense and/ or idea of unity? We cannot be aware of everything at once, but aware only serially, from moment to moment, of what stands out as more or less determinate "local" figure against a more or less indistinct "global" ground.

Rudolph Steiner. — Mww

Or Swedenborg, or Madame Blavatsky, or Gurdjieff, or Aleister Crowley, or Eliphas Levi, or Sri Aurobindo, or Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, or Bubba Free John, or Gautama, or... countless others...in fact anyone who claims to be determining the indeterminable.