This 'position' of mine really is not either idealist or realist in the commonly understood sense, because I do not posit either mind or matter as constitutive. — John

In a pragmatic everyday sense, what you say about the objects of experience is similar to my own view. However I would instead say we are experiencing the world rather than projecting onto a noumenal background. The difference here is that I think we can investigate those objects and discover further objects of experience at a deeper level. For example, per our earlier discussion, I think our experience of (what we call) gravity is our experience of spacetime curvature. Also I would say our abstractions must eventually ground in something concrete, whatever that turns out to be.

The other way to go is to say that it is a fact now that dinosaurs existed back then, but it could not have been a fact then, because there were no minds back then that it could have been a fact for. But then it would seem to be unintelligible to say that dinosaurs existed back then, because if they existed it must have also been a fact that they existed. — John

I agree with your first sentence, but not the second. When we say that something is a fact, we are saying that it is proven or known. On this view it is intelligible to say that dinosaurs existed back then, but unintelligible to say that it was proven or known back then.

There are facts that are not widely known (little-known facts) but not, I think, unknown facts.

I agree with that too, but it conceals more than it reveals, especially in the way it is used by Ryle and Dennett. In effect, the ghost is declared unreal, and all that is left is the machine. — Wayfarer

I agree that, per ordinary usage, machines (and robots) are insentient. But you seem to accept that it is possible, in principle, to create a sentient machine - which we would recognize as a being with rights. The issue then is what would explain the difference between the sentient machine and the mere machine.

Would there be some immaterial substance or properties in addition to the matter it is composed of? Or would our mental terms be abstractions over the matter it is composed of?

It seems to me that we can intelligibly hold the latter view while also holding that their pains, desires and beliefs would be real.

I'm guessing you're not a realist. Is an object of the senses different to an object in the world?

Conversely, from the point of view of perception, insofar as no matter can appear at all except it be to a mind, we have matter dependent on mind. — John

I don't really follow you here. We can say that the dinosaurs appeared on earth millions of years ago, despite no-one being around to see them. Or, in another sense, that the dinosaurs didn't appear to anyone because no-one was there to see them. But in what sense would dinosaurs be dependent on mind?

But mind can also act on or have causal influences over matter, in fact, it does this all the time. For instance, in the case of brain injury, the mind is able to re-route its activities so as to repurpose parts of the brain to fulfil its needs. The subjects of 'mind-body medicine', psycho-somatic illnesses, the placebo effect, and neuroplasticity are evidence for such abilities. Whereas if mind was purely a consequence or result of cellular interactions, these couldn't be accounted for, as all of the causation could only act from the physical to the mental. — Wayfarer

Yes, we can certainly treat people's health in psychological terms and that will have physical effects. But this does not imply that there are immaterial substances or properties. I think it is a mistake to think of the mental as a kind of ethereal parallel to the physical. Mental terms and physical terms operate in very different ways.

To press the university analogy, a university is the way in which its buildings are organized. The university (and its character) is not epiphenomenal to the buildings, the buildings have no universityness property, and there will be no university left if you take away the buildings. We can talk meaningfully about universities without supposing they require an immaterial explanation.

Humans are 'rational animals', i.e. able to grasp through abstract thought, language, intuition and imagination, things which animals cannot. In my view, machines are not sentient, being simply assemblies of switches. They can emulate some activities of intelligence, but they are not beings. If we were to create a truly sentient machine, then we would have to endow it with rights, as it would no longer be a machine, but a being... — Wayfarer

I agree.

You should be saying that you had a subjective experience of seeing Alice--that's what seeing Alice is, after all, but of course you're also saying that you trust your subjective experience to be an accurate perception of something objective--Alice crossing the street. Alice crossing the street isn't identical to having the experience of seeing Alice cross the street of course. — Terrapin Station

In ordinary use, perceptual terms like "see" have success criteria. Gilbert Ryle called such terms achievement verbs. So to see Alice cross the street entails that Alice crossed the street.

Why do you think that Dennett has latched onto that phrase 'moist robots' to describe humans, then? — Wayfarer

Because he doesn't preclude robots being conscious. Searle similarly says, "'Could a machine think?' The answer is, obviously, yes. We are precisely such machines." (Minds, Brains and Programs)

But are humans merely machines or merely animals? Is it the vital spark of immaterial phenomena that accounts for the difference? Or is a different logical conception of the machine required that doesn't, itself, reduce to the machine?

OK, but when you say " mind is an abstraction over matter." it makes it look as though you are asserting that matter is more than a mere abstraction but that mind is not. If mind is not a mere abstraction, and it is not reducible to matter, then that seems to leave the question as to what it is unanswered. — John

They are both abstractions and they are both real. But there is a dependency and a direction of dependency. Mind depends on matter, just as universities depend on buildings. But mind is neither reducible to matter nor something immaterial in addition to matter.

That's my account of the logical landscape here. As you note, that leaves open the question of what mind and matter is.

Usually when a materialist says that matter exists or is real, she means that matter exists or is real independently of all and any thoughts about it, that is, that matter is not a mere abstraction. If mind exists or is real independently of all and any thoughts about it, then it must be something more than a mere abstraction, no? — John

That's right, matter, minds and selves are real independent of whether anyone ever forms the abstractions. But we need to form the abstractions if we want to talk about those things.

"The argument concludes that minds are not conscious, but a collective predicate for a set of observable behaviour and unobservable dispositions."

That underlined sentence is the basis for Dennett's 'intentional stance' argument (and as noted, Dennett was a student of Ryle's.) — Wayfarer

That's right, minds are not conscious, human beings are. Mind is the category that mental terms belong to just as matter is the category that physical terms belong to. In ordinary usage, we say we have minds (we have beliefs, purposes, desires), change our minds (revise our opinions), make up our minds (make decisions and choices) and so on. In Aristotelian terms, man is the rational animal.

Now as for your description of mind as 'an abstraction over matter' - what do you propose that means? — Wayfarer

Ryle uses the phrase "ghost in the machine" to characterize Descartes' mind-body dualism. Whether substance or property dualism, the idea of a division between subjective and objective phenomena persists. But rejecting dualism doesn't mean resigning oneself to the machine half of the bargain. It means bringing the ghost out into the light of day as full-blooded objective phenomena.

This means that feelings, pains, desires, beliefs, etc. become things that we can observe in others as well as ourselves. This is the intentional stance. As an added bonus, the problem of other minds is dissolved.

When we recognize that people have intentionality, we have abstracted over the matter that their bodies are made of. They are not merely machines, nor ghosts in machines, but human beings.

I disagree. This is taking us into perception now, but it also relates to the qualia theme. In ordinary usage "observe", and related terms like "see" and "hear", are achievement verbs. When we say that we saw Alice walking across the street, we don't mean that we had a subjective experience of seeing Alice. We mean that Alice was really walking across the street. If we later discover that she was overseas at the time, then we retract our claim. We didn't see Alice at all, we only thought we did.

Since we've covered hallucinations and mistakes, we might as well cover illusions as well! When there is a straight stick partially submerged in water that looks bent, we're not seeing a bent stick, we're seeing a straight stick that appears bent. There is no need to invoke qualia or sense-data to explain the experience.

But is mind reducible to matter? — Wayfarer

No. Mind and matter belong to different categories and to suppose that mind reduces to matter is a category mistake. Mind is not matter. Instead, mind is an abstraction over matter.

Gilbert Ryle gives an example of this mistake in "The Concept of Mind":

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks ‘But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’ It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if ‘the University’ stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong. — Gilbert Ryle

Sure, say that you're experiencing the walls melting. Well, that's both what you appear to be experiencing and what you're really experiencing, since there's no difference.

However, what's really going on that caused that experience might be that you took some LSD. But that you took some LSD and it's having the effect of making you see the walls melt isn't what you're experiencing when you experience the walls melting. (Earlier, of course, you surely experienced taking some LSD (well, unless it was given to you surreptitiously).) — Terrapin Station

OK, but you're using the word "experience" in a subjective sense here. In its objective sense ("practical contact with and observation of facts and events"), you're experiencing an hallucination.

When you report that you saw the walls melt, we can take the context into account to figure out what you mean. If it is really thought that you're making an objective claim, then we can go and check the walls.

I'm not sure I follow you. Can you give an example?

Right, so then we couldn't say that the intentional stance is the same thing as what exhibits behaviorally. — Terrapin Station

No. We are interested in what the person is really experiencing, not what they appear to be experiencing.

'Particles shifted around' is not in question, but 'shifted by what' is. The materialist must say that they are only shifted around by physical forces or at any rate by some factor which is ultimately attributable to same; according to which 'mind over matter' can never occur. — Wayfarer

For the non-eliminativists about mind, mind is an abstraction over matter. People are capable of shifting particles around. They can change the world or change their minds.

Surely he thinks that they can exhibit behaviorally, or that they're just the sorts of things that sometimes do exhibit behaviorally, no? — Terrapin Station

What we think and feel may not always be noticeable in everyday observable behavior but, per materialism, there is always some material instantiation (e.g., in brain activity, particles shifting around, or some such).

Although if there's a difference between what does exhibit behaviorally and what doesn't but could (and what nevertheless occurs while not exihibiting behaviorally), it would seem that one can't actually identify the "intentional stance" as what exhibits behaviorally. — Terrapin Station

The "intentional stance" is identified with the objects of experience - the actual pain, smell, belief, etc. The exhibited behavior enables us to form the relevant language concepts for those objects. But things are not always as they appear - a person might be in pain but concealing it, or a person might not be in pain but faking it.

Rejecting the qualitiative difference between the first and third person perspective is the nub of the entire debate. — Wayfarer

I think the debate is whether there are subjective phenomena. Everyone agrees that smelling a rose is a qualitatively different experience to seeing someone else smell a rose. However the phenomena are the same in both experiences.

Denett grants that first-person experience has properties, but he denies that they're intrinsic, he denies that there is anything that can't be explained in third-person terms. They appear real, but are not intrinsically real — Wayfarer

Dennett espouses what he calls a mild realism about mental terms. For example in "Real Patterns" he says, "I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather like centers of gravity."

I would claim that an abstraction over something physical is real, not merely apparently real.

Eliminativism is a radical school of thought, in that it really does question the reality of first-person experience - not simply 'reports' about it, but the reality of it. And it is exactly in that context that the term 'qualia' is debated. It's got little to do with Wittgenstein's 'private language' argument, as I have noted, Wittgenstein was not a materialist, but Dennett is. — Wayfarer

Dennett, unlike eliminative materialists, generally accepts our ordinary common-sense mental terms which he describes as the "intentional stance". What he rejects is any epiphenomenal or radically-private instantiation of those terms. Here's Dennett in "Quining Qualia":

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I do not deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. — Dennett

Note that he explicitly accepts the reality of conscious experience. Instead, what he goes on to reject is the idea of private phenomena as an object or property of conscious experience, namely qualia.

Searle said further: "To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have." — Wayfarer

Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness as the above "Quining Qualia" quote makes clear. Contra Searle, Dennett rejects a first-person/third-person phenomenal distinction. Instead the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have - exhibit behaviorally.

Per Wittgenstein's private language argument, we can only describe our experiences in publicly-accessible language. That does not imply that the language only refers to the behavior (which Wittgenstein's critics accused him of). It instead refers to the first-person experience which is not separable from the behavior. There is no private qualia property that could, even in principle, be switched on or off.

But Dennett is an eliminative materialist, which Wittgenstein never was.

Dennett's view is that what we take to be qualia, what appears to us as first-person experience, really is the snap, crackle and pop of synapses. — Wayfarer

It seems to me that you are describing materialism there. But why do you say it is eliminative?

To say that a solid chair is really a distribution of atoms and mostly empty space does not make us eliminative about solid chairs. They are different concepts and there may also be explanatory gaps in our understanding of how the physics relates to our ordinary concept of chairs.

Similarly, a natural explanation of first-person experience does not imply a denial of our experience, including our beliefs, feelings, desires, etc.

That is why Dennett is dismissive of arguments for the reality of the first-person perspective. His whole life's work is to try and demonstrate that the first-person perspective can be reduced to third-person descriptions of natural processes, with nothing left out. Which is the gist of the argument between Chalmers and Dennett. — Wayfarer

What Dennett is dismissing is the infallible authority of the first-person perspective, not the reality of first-person experience. That is, our reports of our experiences are always open to investigation and analysis and can, at least in principle, be mistaken.

This, I think, just follows from Wittgenstein's private language argument. We are reporting on our experience in the world (the apple is red, etc.), not on a private, inner world.

I think it helps to understand Dennett's OLP and Wittgensteinian roots. Dennett is not denying the beetle-in-the-box. He is instead saying that language that purports to talk about the beetle is misleading and illusory. As you mention, qualia is not an object of experience. But that doesn't mean for Dennett (as also for Wittgenstein) that there is nothing there. It only means that qualia should not be reified as an object of experience.

"But you will surely admit that there is a difference between
pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour without any
pain?" — Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — "And yet
you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a
nothing" — Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either!
The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a
something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected
the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 304

And what are the consequences of dismantling qualia? What happens to our manifest image? Does pain no longer hurt? Does red no longer look red? The absurdity of this leads me to believe that the entire project to dismantle qualia is fundamentally flawed. — darthbarracuda

I don't think anyone denies that pain hurts or thinks that science will someday explain it away. Instead, the objection is that the term lacks a meaningful referent or useful function, similar to the older notion of "sense-data" in perception. Our experiences have a qualitative nature. It doesn't follow that qualia is a thing or that we experience qualia.

That latter may well sum up philosophy. :-)

OK, so to connect this back to an earlier point: Our experience of feeling like we're being pushed back in the seat just is our experience of the car's forward acceleration. The only issue is one of knowledge (or awareness) of the correct explanation. We might instead explain our experience in terms of an invisible force pushing us backward, which would be incorrect. (Although we may choose to model it as a fictitious force for instrumental purposes.)

Similarly with gravity. We feel like we are being pushed (or pulled) down by something. That just is our experience of the ground's upward acceleration. Which, in turn, just is our experience of spacetime curvature.

Then you're really talking about how your experience seems to you which I agree doesn't commit you to any particular explanation. It does feel like we're being pushed back in the seat and that is consistent with the explanation that the seat is actually accelerating us forward.

My point is that lived experience happens in the world. It is not limited to what it feels like but also includes its physical instantiation (whether recognized by us or not).

We don't. That's a mistake. Though we may think we feel something pushing us back.

The scientific explanation does not relegate our lived experience to the status of "fictitious" (how could it?) It relegates a particular scientific explanation (a reversed effective force) to the status of "fictitious".

Since nothing pushes us back in the accelerating car scenario, it cannot be the case that we experience being pushed back. Our lived experience is real and happens in the world (whatever the correct explanations turn out to be) but our report or explanation of our experience may be mistaken in any given instance.

This is an account in ordinary language terms. There is no need to invoke a manifest/scientific distinction nor to necessarily privilege scientific explanations over any other kind of explanation.

I don't see how this account can be right. If I am in a vehicle that accelerates powerfully and if I am leaning forward with my body out of contact with the seat, I am pushed back into the seat.

Likewise if I jump off a cliff I will as though I am being inexorably pulled down, although I am not in contact with the Earth at all. — John

Your body is actually at rest and it is the seat that accelerates forward towards you. Imagine that you are in a motionless rocket in space with you also floating motionless in the middle of the rocket. If the rocket suddenly accelerates forward, you might report that you fell or were pushed to the floor. But it is the rocket floor that caught up with you, not a force pushing you towards the floor. That's why it's called a fictitious force.

This is also true if you jump off a cliff. If you were wearing an accelerometer, it would measure zero. Nothing is pushing or pulling you down. Whereas an accelerometer on the ground would measure an upward acceleration of 9.8m/s/s. So gravity, understood as a force, is also fictitious. The ground's acceleration is explained by spacetime curvature.

I actually do agree with what you write in your first paragraph; I think Sellars is ultimately aiming at the primacy of science. And I do agree that science is an extension of lived experience; it's just that when it leads to the objectification of the human (which it inevitably seems to) it has separated itself (and us, if we follow it) from lived experience. You may not agree, but for me the most important part of lived experience consists in spiritual experience; and science endangers that dimension of human life by excoriating it as 'mere superstition' and exiling it from its conception (and by extension any 'respectable' conception) of human life. — John

I think those are really philosophical issues rather than statements about science itself. In its most basic form, science is methodological naturalism, which can be effectively practiced regardless of the philosophical views that the scientist (or the consumer of science) brings to it.

So, in that sense, there is no undermining of lived experience from science, but there may well be from philosophy.

You've raised a tricky point. Are the push-back of acceleration and the push-down of gravity experienced, or merely conceived, as external forces? You say we need not suppose "that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies". On immediate impulse I want to say 'actual' in this context just means 'acting upon', so the phenomenological question becomes 'do we feel acted upon?'. I would say we do insofar as we experience something that is not volitional; the pushing is not experienced as something we are doing, but something which is done to us by 'something else'. — John

Yes, so the question then is what is the 'something else'? In the case of the car's acceleration, it isn't an invisible force that is pushing us back into the seat, it is the seat (attached to the car) that is pushing us from behind. Similarly our experience of gravity isn't as an invisible force pushing us down (per Newton), it is the ground that is pushing us from below (due to space-time curvature caused by the earth's mass).

I don't see that there's a necessary connection between Sellar's distinction and representational realism. Husserl pointed to the same phenomenon, that science cannot explain human life as it is lived, in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

To me it seems to be simply an undeniable phenomenological fact that we cannot understand our own behavior in terms of causes, but instead we understand it in terms of reasons; a fact which is attached to no particular metaphysics but is despite all of them. The response: "because of neuronal activity in my brain" is never going to be a satisfying, or even really an intelligible, answer to the question "why did you go to the shop?". — John

I agree. But I think that Sellar's distinction assumes and reinforces a particular (Humean) idea of science and causality that leads to just the kinds of concerns you raise. Whereas something like the Aristotelian idea of causality can better capture the notion of reasons and explanations that are relevant to human life as it is lived. On this view, the sciences are a natural extension of what we do every day rather than something that is a distinctly separate kind of activity with different objects of interest.

I think we do experience a force that acts on our bodies that we call 'gravity'. This is so whatever we might think, or come to think, the explanatory mechanism of gravity is. The Greeks of antiquity, the Aboriginals of Australia and the ancient Chaldeans all felt it just as surely as we do. Of course they would not have called it 'gravity'; they would have had other names for that bodily feeling of being acted upon by some force or power. — John

Would you similarly say that you experience a force that pushes you back in your seat when you are in a car that suddenly accelerates?

It seems to me that we can feel like we are being pushed back in our seats (or are being pulled towards the ground) without also supposing that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies.

Right, I reject Sellar's distinction and representational realism generally.

Anyway thanks - that clarifies for me the view you hold now.

Though I'm not sure how your claim that "we experience the 'weight' of gravity" works on this distinction. Is that a manifest image claim (but then why the scientific term "gravity")?

I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, we don't experience space-time as being curved; we experience the 'weight' of gravity, and the curvature of space-time is just an explanation for our experience of that 'weight' (amongst other things). — John

Most of the time we would just say that Alice fell off the cliff rather than invoke scientific terms like "gravity" or "space-time curvature". But on the view that our experience is of the world as it really is, a scientific description is simply a description of our experience at a more complex level of abstraction. That's the hierarchical structure that jkop mentions above.

So I guess I'm curious whether you are intending to make some kind of experiential/real distinction here or else would agree with the above.

Likewise we don't experience the world as Quantum mechanics tells us it 'really is'. — John

What would our experience be like if we were to experience the world as Quantum Mechanic describes it?

Secondly, the advents of those theories have not, in themselves, (as opposed to technological advances that may be associated with them) expanded our realm of experience. — John

True, those theories have simply expanded our understanding of our experience.

OK, but the 'greater reality' I had in mind would be a greater dimension of possible experience. And I don't think String theory qualifies; it is nothing more than a mathematical theory. Really the same goes for QM and Relativity. We cannot directly experience, or even visualize, the warping of three-dimensional space-time, for example. — John

I would say our experience of (what we call) gravity just is our experience of space-time curvature under General Relativity. Similarly, if we live in a quantum world and not a classical Newtonian world then the quantum world is what we always experience. We may have trouble making sense of our experience sometimes (for example, with the double-slit experiment) but that is really an issue of our knowledge not our experience.

He's right that MW is local, but he's wrong about the rest, so I think my point stands. — Michael

Fair enough, but this may just be a semantic difference over the meaning of "locality".

The SEP page on Action at a Distance in QM says, "Yet, the question of whether the EPR/B correlations imply non-locality and the exact nature of this non-locality is a matter of ongoing controversy."

However "locality" is defined, Hanson's experiment doesn't imply "action at a distance".

... so single-world realist theories that are absolutely deterministic are not ruled out by this or any other Bell-type experiment. — tom

I agree.

Local realism is just the union of locality and realism. Dr Hanson's experiment appears to demonstrate non-locality, which he himself describes as spooky action at distance. — Michael

Hanson's experiment rules out local hidden variable theories but not local realism. In particular, it doesn't rule out Many-Worlds since Many-Worlds doesn't involve any action or communication between entangled particles.