Matter has causally relevant "properties" anyway you slice it. — Francis
You were using the idea to make a distinction between what might be a problem of experience between beings who care about it with an object you are confident does not share the problem.
:clap: :100:That's the weasel argument. We happily accept the idea of a physical quantity – a measure of "stuff" or substantial being, such as charge. And so the linguistic trick is get us thinking of a quality – qualia – in a similarly physicalist and countable way. Little jolts of experience like the feeling of red or smell of a rose flashing through the mind.
The sleight of hand works as our folk metaphysical notions of physical quantity are as suspect as our ones about mental qualities.
Something fundamental like charge is treated as if it were like a measure of some fluid stuff that flows. It is already pictured and talked about in an overly concrete fashion. Then Chalmers takes that folk physics and applies it to the mind as if consciousness is also a quantity of this atomistic stuff called qualia, or isolated flashes of experience. — apokrisis
:sweat: :up:There is something it is like to be a football. — NOS4A2
30 volumes!! I just checked it in Wiki: 45,000 articles, 6,500 contributors, 9,000 bibliographies, 150,000 cross-references, 1,000+ tables, 1,200 maps, 4,500 images. Quite impressive!I picked up the entire 1957 Americana Encyclopaedia collection at a garage sale, all 30 volumes. They came with a very nice cabinet. — NOS4A2
Well, one has to use ... something! :smile:What is this "something that can be experienced"? All these references to "something", for instance, "there is something it is like" ... — NOS4A2
Yes, I guess this is often the case.it can only be assumed in a series of question-begging assertions. — NOS4A2
spin and charge are two separate properties of particles. — Francis
Physicists have actually managed to model the behavior of some particles by separating them into "quasi-particles" in which one has the spin and one has the charge. — Francis
Well, one has to use ... something! :smile:
Words like "something", "thing", etc. function as wildcards, passe-partouts. They are used for lack of ... something more concrete. I guess they are OK, as far as they help expressing, explaining, etc. ... something.
What is it like to be a football? What are you thinking of? Round (or oval if you're a septic), inflatable, ect? Is that what you mean?
I'm just confused by the statement that "there is something it is like to be such-and-such". It refers to the same thing too many times for me. There is something (the football) it (the football) is like to be the football (the football). It can be applied to literally anything, is all I'm saying. — NOS4A2
You can, in theory, learn everything there is to know about a football. You can learn about its aerodynamics; the way it absorbs heat from the sun; the elasticity; the frequencies of the visible spectrum that it reflects, etc., etc. And you can learn all there is too know about the particles that the football is made of, and how their properties gave rise to all those other things you learned about. In the end, you will know everything there is to know about the football.I'm just confused by the statement that "there is something it is like to be such-and-such". It refers to the same thing too many times for me. There is something (the football) it (the football) is like to be the football (the football). It can be applied to literally anything, is all I'm saying. — NOS4A2
All of that is what is meant by "There is nothing it is like to be a football to a football" and "There is something it is like to be a bat to a bat."It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. — Nagel
Chalmers was a big hit because he was "making it respectable to be a Cartesian dualist again". That was literally the gleeful response of the philosopher sat next to me when Chalmers gave the hard problem talk that made his name. — apokrisis
A sociological side-show in other words. — apokrisis
What am I not grasping? — NOS4A2
“Consciousness, properly an abstract term which, like “happiness”, “graciousness”, or “thoroughness”, refers to some quality of the human being taken in abstracto. However, the hypostatizing tendency of human thinking has led to its use as if referring to something existential. Since a man may be conscious, it is easy to fall into the assumption that he may have consciousness, then that something like a consciousness exists.
The problem is: when we look around for what it is Chalmers is talking about we come up empty-handed. — NOS4A2
But upon an objective analysis we find there is only one state and it is wholly biological. — NOS4A2
You can do the same for, the famous example being, a bat.
Presumably, you would agree that there is a difference between a non-sentient organism, such as a tree, a simple sentient organism, such as a fish, complex sentient organisms such as elephants and primates, and complex, rational, sentient beings, such as humans. All can be understood through the perspective of biology, but biology does not necessarily extend to, or explain, the nature of what differentiates the complex-sentient and rational-complex-sentient beings from trees and comb jellies. They are subjects of experience - something which is not plausibly deniable. At issue is what it is that gives them this quality of subjective awareness.
This also accounts for why I cannot see from your perspective, which is the perspective of your particular and discrete biology — NOS4A2
We do not need to stir in fictions like experience, consciousness, and mental properties, because all states of experience (as Chalmers called them) are states of the body. — NOS4A2
The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory. — Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos
Chalmers proposes the concept of "naturalistic dualism" as an alternative to traditional Cartesian Dualism. — Wayfarer
...but which may not be fully explicable within physicalist scientific frameworks. — Wayfarer
Yes, it's annoying that he's gone on to become a tenured academic at New York University, author/editor of half a dozen anthologies on philosophy of mind, and that rarest of things, a well-known philosopher. You'd think we could have expected something better from a Bronze Medallist at the International Mathematics Olympiad. — Wayfarer
The point isn't that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat. The point is that there is something it is like to be a bat. And, while we are not aware of any consciousness that is independent of a brain's activity, knowing everything about a bat's brain's activity doesn't give us any insight on the bat's inner experience. It doesn't suggest the bat has any inner experience. It's all just physical processes.The simple reason why I cannot know what it’s like to be a bat is because I am not a bat. — NOS4A2
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