Some physical processes are information processing apt, while most physical processes aren't information processing apt. If what we refer to as mental processes can only supervene on information processing apt physical processes, then we are some distance from square one. — wonderer1
the relationship between chemistry and life is analogous to the relationship between neurology and mind. — T Clark
It is superficially so, but not actually, no. — schopenhauer1
As often is the case, you confuse your refusal to engage in discussion with making a coherent argument. — T Clark
IMO, part of the gordian knot of the Hard Problem is that we have developed a 2,000 year habit of thinking in terms of "objects and substances," instead of patterns. Information theory seems like a prime example where we should be taking the process view, and yet the legacy of Platonism in mathematics seems to keep dragging it back. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing". — schopenhauer1
But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1
Direct realism assumes the human animal has a god-like view of the universe. — schopenhauer1
As a squirrel, a fish, a bat, a rat, and a bee all have their own view, and yet, do they have direct access to the world too? If it is different, then certainly there is something that mediates between directly observing the object, and processing it (i.e. indirect realism). Surely something is causing differences upon the objects perceived between species. — schopenhauer1
Are you saying there is a hard problem of biology too? — T Clark
The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. — Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?
The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] 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. — Thomas Nagel
they (idealists) still have the problem of explaining what empirical criteria can be used to determine what is or isn't conscious. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Thought is at least correlated with that physical phenomenon, so it's not like you can completely disconnect it. — schopenhauer1
fails by essentially recreating the Cartesian Homunculus. It's like asking someone to "find the neuron in the brain that speaks English." — Count Timothy von Icarus
But the Chinese Room is not really relevant for that set of problems since we could take the Room apart to see how it works very easily, all you'd need is something to knock the door in. The same hasn't been true for us. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Consider this possibility: Consciousness is just the being of the world for various embodied subjects. We don't live in private dreams. Your toothache is part of my reality. It doesn't matter that I access it differently. I can reason about it with you. It lives as concept in the logical space we share. — plaque flag
Maybe it's dark or I'm sleepy. But my being mistaken need not be explained in terms of some ghostly stuff about which I cannot be mistaken. [Indirect realists tend to misunderstand direct realism, loaded as they are with certain assumptions, used to as they are to incorrigible images.] — plaque flag
I do not at all contest that there are all kinds of causal relationships that can be examined between eyes and objects and brains. No one is denying the biological complexity of seeing. But when I talk about the Eiffel tower, I'm talking about the fucking Eiffel tower and not my idea of it. Language is deeply ego-transcending and social. We intend the worldly object. Even my toothache is a worldly object, despite my special access to it. I can use it to explain being rude. Its cessation might be explained by Novocain.
What you ignored in my first post was the absolute centrality of giving and asking for reasons -- the philosophical situation itself. This is prior to any ontological thesis. We reason about and intend worldly objects. I talk about the rose, our worldly rose. It's not completely insane or absurd to invent a private rose for everyone, but it is insane or absurd to get rid of the worldly rose.
We can just as well talk about brains. Presumably you like indirect realism because the brain is conceived as a mediation machine. But then the brain is an illusion. The brain-in-itself (the one that does the work) is now a wild hypothesis.
It's much easier to believe that we see the familiar brain directly, if never completely and perfectly and exhaustively. Objects have depth and complexity. They are seen from different perspectives, understood with more or less sophistication.
We can be wrong about them. But this does not force indirect dualism on us. A daydream, for instance, doesn't need its own level or plane of reality. We can understand consciousness as the being of the world for this or that subject, instead of its own kind of being. — plaque flag
The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] 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. — Thomas Nagel
Or must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? — plaque flag
You'd have to flesh that out...Otherwise it's words coherently put together that don't mean much for me. — schopenhauer1
But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. — Quixodian
I'm afraid this is trivially true. — plaque flag
Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. — schopenhauer1
But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1
As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing". — schopenhauer1
I think the better path is how the world appears. For this is the rat looking at the cheese and not some internal image of the cheese. The problem with subjective experiences is that it slides toward looking only at the image of the cheese. Then one is tempted to say the image of the cheese is made of a special 'nonphysical' stuff. As if there's no other option. — plaque flag
Do you see your question as a purely rhetorical question? Or do you want to learn about the answers? To develop some understanding of how far beyond square one (some of) humanity is? — wonderer1
However, I only presented information processing as a criteria for ruling out the many physical processes which aren't the sort of physical processes suitable for resulting in mental events. Narrowing things down further is not a problem, depending on how specific we want to get in various ways. — wonderer1
One reason I hate these debates of direct and indirect realism is this notion of "mental representation" and what that really means. It's very vague and becomes a weird sticking point. — schopenhauer1
Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. — plaque flag
In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. — Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science
We are sensing an actual object that is interacting with the organism, yes. So in the sense that I think we are actually perceiving an object and not some intermediary, call me a direct realist then.. However, do brains process the inputs in a way that was shaped by the environment? Yes, so perhaps that is indirect realist. — schopenhauer1
But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that? — Quixodian
You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience. — Quixodian
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