What's the point of philosophy any more?

[polymath257]

Well, yes, the first person experience isn't discernible to me because their brain isn't my brain. But I would know that they are feeling pain, or in the case of the bat, sonar. I would be able to describe, probably in some detail, *what* they are experiencing. But yes, it is not my brain that is experiencing it all.

But I fail to see why that is such a deep issue to so many people. When my computer gets some information, and processes it, your computer may not get the same information or it may process it slightly differently. That seems, to me, to the sole difference in 'first person' versus 'third person' descriptions.

The problem isn't missing information. The problem is, even when every single piece information is accounted for, something is still missing.

That is the essence of the mind/body problem, and that is the great riddle of consciousness.

Of course, some will say it's really no big problem at all, which is why super empirically-minded folks seem comfortable with functionalism. I'm not one of them though. Something about the mystery of consciousness intrigues me. Looking at it one way, it almost seems more fundamental than any other metaphysical problem. Looking at it another way, its a simple distinction that (if made like the functionalists make it) is really no problem at all.

I guess I fail to see what is missing *other* than it is a different brain that is doing the processing. From what I can see, there is *only* a 'easy' problem of consciousness: how to find the neural correlates and how they are causally linked together. What else is there that is left unexplained? The experience is mine because the processing happens in my brain. The experience isn't yours because it doesn't happen in yours.

I really don't see a 'hard' problem of consciousness at all.

Another common example is the case of Mary, who knows everything factual about color vision, but has never seen red. When exposed to red, does she learn anything? Yes, of course. She learns that *she* has seen red. But that's the only piece of new information that I can see.

---

You maintain the validity of your subjective experience even as you negate it.  That, is a problem.  It's not a problem in your everyday life, granted..obviously you can hold those opinions and function,.but it reduces your position to noise signifying nothing.  You don't even know..or cant coherently explain, why -you- think what you do.  That's laying aside the plain reading..that you have an incoherent thought process, for generosity's sake, alone... - which..just like before, is at least a possibility that is unlikely to impact your daily function.  

How would experience be invalid?  It's not a position, a philosophy, or a world view.  I don't see that there's anything about it that CAN be invalid.  What can be invalid are interpretations about the objectivity of experienced objects-- but that's really not the same thing.

I don't think a sense of self can be, or need be, interpreted.  It's not a conclusion or an inference.  It's just a label for whatever-it-is.

yes, but like all sensory information, it can be wrong. For example, we have a sense of the 'continuity of the self'. In actuality, the continuity is an illusion of after-writing in the brain. In reality, many different 'selves' from different areas of the brain combine to give the 'sense of self' and they are not always working, or working in tandem.

[rskovride]

I get quite bored by philosophy when it makes an obviously simple problem needlessly complicated because "thought experiments." I'm sure it still has its place. I'm just not interested.

I feel the same sometimes. Logical analysis certainly has its place but I think I (we) sometimes miss out on the whole idea when I (we) try to over analyze. Should I strive for crystal clear thinking? Absolutely. Should I allow fuzzy around the edges thinking? Yes, I think so.

[I_am_not_mafia]

The problem isn't missing information. The problem is, even when every single piece information is accounted for, something is still missing.

That is the essence of the mind/body problem, and that is the great riddle of consciousness.

I guess I fail to see what is missing *other* than it is a different brain that is doing the processing. From what I can see, there is *only* a 'easy' problem of consciousness: how to find the neural correlates and how they are causally linked together. What else is there that is left unexplained? The experience is mine because the processing happens in my brain. The experience isn't yours because it doesn't happen in yours.

I really don't see a 'hard' problem of consciousness at all.

Another common example is the case of Mary, who knows everything factual about color vision, but has never seen red. When exposed to red, does she learn anything? Yes, of course. She learns that *she* has seen red. But that's the only piece of new information that I can see.

Yep. Those who see it as a hard problem are making it hard for themselves because they are seeking an explanation for something that they cannot define and won't ever be able to.

Take the recent study that's hit the media about how LSD breaks down a sense of self. We can scan brains and correlate how the drug is inhibiting or exciting different parts of the brain with what people are reporting. Eventually we'll reach a point where we understand exactly how the brain functions and why. But those who talk about qualia and who perceive something else are trying to use their own brains to define their own subjective experience to relate it to other's subjective experience all the while knowing that no one will ever be sure that it's possible without being that person, which is impossible.

In other words, it's a hard problem for them because they are asking to do the impossible by the way they have defined their own terms. Not that the word qualia is properly defined anyway or anyone can even be sure it exists. It's like using X as a placeholder.

They are trying to use the brain's internal experience to understand it's nature without taking into account its functionality, it's environment, thermodynamic origins or evolutionary history. That approach is never going to make progress. Considering that philosophy is supposed to study the nature of knowledge, by asking such ill defined questions it is failing quite spectacularly at doing what it claims to be best at doing. It's like economics failing to predict a crash that everyone else can see coming.

The conclusion I am coming up with is that there is a need for philosophy, but because of historical baggage it is not fit for purpose and needs a new paradigm to stay relevant. It happens in other fields, why not also philosophy?

[vulcanlogician]

Gee, it's really nice that philosopher Thomas Kuhn examined the sciences and (in his useless, pointless, philosophical way) discerned that the sciences experience paradigm shifts rather than simply growing linearly as people thought. If he hadn't done that, Mathilda wouldn't know what to prescribe for philosophy.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Gee, it's really nice that philosopher Thomas Kuhn examined the sciences and (in his useless, pointless, philosophical way) discerned that the sciences experience paradigm shifts rather than simply growing linearly as people thought. If he hadn't done that, Mathilda wouldn't know what to prescribe for philosophy.

So if it works for the sciences, why shouldn't it also work for philosophy?

And it didn't require a philosopher to point out that paradigm shifts happen. The history of science tells us that.

[vulcanlogician]

So if it works for the sciences, why shouldn't it also work for philosophy?

I'm not saying it doesn't work for philosophy. Philosophy is really kind of in a perpetual paradigm shift, at least until very recently. I mean, all a paradigm shift is is a discovery that you were operating under a set of assumptions that aren't true. Philosophy is always challenging its own assumptions.

And it didn't require a philosopher to point out that paradigm shifts happen. The history of science tells us that.

Why do we need wheat farmers? Bread comes from the supermarket, after all.

[I_am_not_mafia]

And it didn't require a philosopher to point out that paradigm shifts happen. The history of science tells us that.

Why do we need wheat farmers? Bread comes from the supermarket, after all.

That analogy fails because at the moment the supermarket is growing its own wheat and selling it because the wheat farmers are growing imaginary plants.

Take emotions for example. There has been so little progress made on understanding emotions until very recently when science started to investigate it.  Like consciousness, they lead to an extremely subjective experience. Neuroscience tells us that emotions come before our conscious rationalisation of  why we act the way we do. Evolutionary psychology tells us that cognition widens the range of options available to an agent acting within an environment whilst emotions will narrow them to a range of evolved responses. Emotional behaviours that may seem irrational become rational when viewed over evolutionary time scales.

Neuroscience tells us that what we experience as emotion is the process of chemical neuromodulators in our brain acting to excite or inhibit entire neuronal areas. AI and computer modelling of the brain reveals that it is a bio-physical self-organising system that is constantly trying to settle into a stable state and that emotions make it more or less difficult to do so. It also tells us that such emotions can be used for switching seamlessly between exploration and exploitation of our environment and that they provide high impact signals carrying low information.

Armed with this understanding you can start to appreciate the similarities in your own subjective experience with that of others. Other people's emotions then start to make sense regardless of whether or not they are consciously aware of why they act the way they do.

But none of this progress would have been made without new evidence, new data, creating models and testing whether our assumptions bear out in simulation and then comparing the results with objective measurements. None of this progress would have been made without science. It would have been useful if philosophers had been keeping an eye on the different fields and connecting the dots. Instead it was left up to the specialists to learn about other specialisms while the philosophers were arguing about what qualia is.

There is a reason why no one ever hires philosophers to be professional philosophers except to teach a new generation of philosophy students.

[The Grand Nudger]

Thomas Nagel asks the question "What is it like to be a bat?"

A scientist may fully understand a bat's physiology and fully understand how it uses sonar to navigate its nocturnal environment but something is left unexplained. There is a certain sensation and experience that the bat has when it uses sonar--the qualia involved.

What about the sensation of pain? You might understand every neural pathway activated by a pin prick to the finger. Even if you had privilege to view every change in someone's brain states when his/her finger is being pricked with a pin, the first-person experience of the pin prick (pain) would not be discernible to you.

As John Searle puts it, conscious experience is causally reducible but not ontologically reducible to brain states.

A variation of the colorblind color scientist.  Where we posit that some scientist knows everything about color, but..being blind..lacks one thing..forgetting that we began by asserting that they knew everything about color..and what it would look like to some creature x is certainly part of "everything about color". It's interesting that we don't conceptualize any other thing in this way.   When we use a voltmeter we say that we've observed electricity, a thermometer..temperature....but if we (had and) read a "painometer"...we... won't be doing that..?

How would experience be invalid?  It's not a position, a philosophy, or a world view.  I don't see that there's anything about it that CAN be invalid.  What can be invalid are interpretations about the objectivity of experienced objects-- but that's really not the same thing.

I don't think a sense of self can be, or need be, interpreted.  It's not a conclusion or an inference.  It's just a label for whatever-it-is.

It would be invalid in the same way you declared any other thing invalid (or, not).  If you invalidate some other thing by reference to it's subjectivity your subjective experience of self is invalidated.  If you invalidate some other thing by referring to it as an interpretation your interpretation of self is invalid.  These are redundant, two ways to say the same thing.

I'm not telling you that it is, I'm noting that consistency of your position on these matters demands that it would be for the reason you lay out.

Responding to both of the above comments with a single line of thought...I think that it may be that our minds are so special to us....so integral, that we import that attachment into our notions that they are somehow mechanically or functionally special. That there's something irreducible, or something we can't see or even -couldn't- see gong on..even when the same language applied to any other thing would be utter nonsense. The first and grandest of all special pleading cases, one we're literally born into. Personally, I think it was far easier to rationalize this when we were completely ignorant of the fact that the brain was relevant to the subject, and even after that when we were still unaware of how to mechanically implement systems like logic...and that's the point in time that the mind body problem and the philosophic tradition surrounding it arises from (it was conceptualized then..ofc as the soul/body problem, so at least it's made a little progress...lol). Rather than incorporate what is...granted, nowhere near a complete understanding of that...that tradition chose instead to find ways to dissemble over what is nevertheless an immense body of observation in order to reassert and maintain it's traditional relevance.

It's in this context that a persons dissatisfaction with philosophy might find it's root...but it's worth pointing out that there is a (philosophic) theory of mind for just about every discipline and observation that we've since learned to be relevant to mind, as well. That, for example...a scientist engaged in this research -is- being gainfully employed as a "philosopher of mind". That people will use Matthildas ai research, if and where they can, to provide insight on mind wherever it can. That these people are armed with more information, armed with more sound propositions and a better method of generating further sound propositions and a less ambiguous language to communicate them than any who came before them. It makes little sense..to this mind...to reassert or assent to the tyranny of a tradition based in a meaningful and relative ignorance...though it does help to have the counterpoint as a guard against potential overreach.

In effect - we ask how these traditional problems can be overcome by some position, and the position describes how that's done...it makes little sense after asking and hearing that answer, to reassert "but you -can't- overcome problem x". They just did, or at least showed one way it could be. What would be required to competently criticize those positions is not a reassertion that no observation could touch it, but a demonstration that the observations are inaccurate. For example..that no one can demonstrate a "neural state" upon which some conclusion rests. Not the insistence that their ability to demonstrate a neural state is somehow insufficient in ways that demonstrating a state of potential electrical or actual thermal difference is not. The latter, though commonly employed to argue against some position..is no less than a complete concession -to- that position. If we concede (even for the purposes of argument) that this x is the neural state of pain..we have observed and explained pain in exactly the same way as we observe or explain any other thing.

If this doesn't satisfy us, then we haven't observed electricity, or temperature, or any other x in-kind either...and we find ourselves in the conceptual black hole all over again.

[possibletarian]

I'm of the 'Everything in the the mind, is of the mind' type of person, and that it can be explained by strictly material means.

But like a lot of things I know only what i read others saying on the subject, sometimes I do wonder if i have reacted too strongly on my struggle from theism to some kind of hard lined materialism. For now though I have no choice in a way, my mantra is right now to only accept what can be sensibly proven while at the same time leaving room for some future re-balancing of my thoughts.

For now the material brain makes much more sense to me, and in a way seems more exciting than some kind of 'other worldy' explanation, as the workings of the mind seem simpler (at least to me) to explain that way.

[polymath257]

Gee, it's really nice that philosopher Thomas Kuhn examined the sciences and (in his useless, pointless, philosophical way) discerned that the sciences experience paradigm shifts rather than simply growing linearly as people thought. If he hadn't done that, Mathilda wouldn't know what to prescribe for philosophy.

Interesting. Kuhn did a historical piece looking at how the Copernican revolution proceeded. He then modified a viewpoint about how scientific development occurs. He overstepped his data and didn't quite prove what he claimed. Seems to me like he was doing history more than philosophy.