Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Question: Can you think of an experiment that would prove whether qualia are generated by physical processes versus facilitating them?

Those of us interested in philosophy of mind have a fair understanding of the issues and arguments surrounding the mind-body problem. To the best of my knowledge we all agree that a causal relationship exists between the brain-states and mental properties. How this fact is interpreted depends on whether you are a monist or dualist.

For philosophical reasons, I consider physical matter incapable of producing qualia and see the need for some other vehicle capable of supporting phenomena qualities (dualism). The analogy I use is that of a radio, which does not cause music, but is by virtue of its state can receive signals. Others consider first-person awareness an emergent property. They believe particular configurations of physical matter are capable of producing qualia as a non-fundamental property of reality.

Do you believe there is a non-philosophical way, i.e. scientific one, to determine which interpretation is correct?

[Chas]

Question: Can you think of an experiment that would prove whether qualia are generated by physical processes versus facilitating them?

Those of us interested in philosophy of mind have a fair understanding of the issues and arguments surrounding the mind-body problem. To the best of my knowledge we all agree that a causal relationship exists between the brain-states and mental properties. How this fact is interpreted depends on whether you are a monist or dualist.

For philosophical reasons, I consider physical matter incapable of producing qualia and see the need for some other vehicle capable of supporting phenomena qualities (dualism). The analogy I use is that of a radio, which does not cause music, but is by virtue of its state can receive signals. Others consider first-person awareness an emergent property. They believe particular configurations of physical matter are capable of producing qualia as a non-fundamental property of reality.

Do you believe there is a non-philosophical way, i.e. scientific one, to determine which interpretation is correct?

The neurological evidence to date is sufficient for me to reject dualism.

[Zazzy]

The neurological evidence to date is sufficient for me to reject dualism.

Indeed. I have never studied philosophy, and it seems weird to feel the need to slide by the data. These experiments have been done- over and over. Damage a brain so that there is no ability to think or sense, but leave the medulla and brainstem intact. A person can have a living body with absolutely no experience of essential personhood- no subjective consciousness. If you've ever known someone in the end stages of Alzheimer's disease, you know that they are empty shells- bodies with no awareness, no person, inside. It is also extremely easy to alter human perception and experience with drugs.

This would strongly suggest that the physical properties of the brain are entirely responsible for qualia (if I understand that term correctly as human awareness and sentience).

It's also REALLY obvious to me that many animals experience qualia of their own, and I don't know if any religious sects acknowledge a mind-body problem in animals. Do they?

[freedomfromforum]

Does a watch dictate time, or does it measure it? If the watch ceases to run, does time cease to move forward? My body is not a mechanism for measuring any qualia. When my body ceases to to run, there is no 'me' left to have an experience.

[pocaracas]

Oh... boy....

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/0...rroll-text

The Actroid androids are part of a new generation of robots, artificial beings designed to function not as programmed industrial machines but as increasingly autonomous agents capable of taking on roles in our homes, schools, and offices previously carried out only by humans. The foot soldiers of this vanguard are the Roomba vacuums that scuttle about cleaning our carpets and the cuddly electronic pets that sit up and roll over on command but never make a mess on the rug. More sophisticated bots may soon be available that cook for us, fold the laundry, even babysit our children or tend to our elderly parents, while we watch and assist from a computer miles away.

“In five or ten years robots will routinely be functioning in human environments,” says Reid Simmons, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon.
[...]
HERB is a homely contraption, with Segway wheels for legs and a hodgepodge of computers for a body. But unlike pretty Yume, HERB has something akin to a mental life. Right now the robot is improving its functionality by running through alternative scenarios to manipulate representations of objects stored in its memory, tens of thousands of scenarios a second.

“I call it dreaming,” says Siddhartha Srinivasa, HERB’s builder and a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. “It helps people intuitively understand that the robot is actually visualizing itself doing something.”
[...]
To negotiate human spaces, robots like HERB need to perceive and cope with unfamiliar objects and move about without bumping into people who are themselves in motion. HERB’s perception system consists of a video camera and a laser navigation device mounted on a boom above his mechanical arm. (“We tend to think of HERB as a he,” Srinivasa says. “Maybe because most butlers are. And he’s kind of beefy.”) In contrast to a hydraulic industrial robotic armature, HERB’s arm is animated by a pressure-sensing system of cables akin to human tendons: a necessity if one wants a robot capable of supporting an elderly widow on her way to the bathroom without catapulting her through the door.
[...]
Picking up a drink is dead simple for people, whose brains have evolved over millions of years to coordinate exactly such tasks. It’s also a snap for an industrial robot programmed for that specific action. The difference between a social robot like HERB and a conventional factory bot is that he knows that the object is a juice box and not a teacup or a glass of milk, which he would have to handle differently. How he understands this involves a great deal of mathematics and computer science, but it boils down to “taking in information and processing it intelligently in the context of everything he already knows about what his world looks like,” Srinivasa explains.

[...]
The researcher who has gone the furthest in designing ethical robots is Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Arkin says it isn’t the ethical limitations of robots in battle that inspire his work but the ethical limitations of human beings. He cites two incidents in Iraq, one in which U.S. helicopter pilots allegedly finished off wounded combatants, and another in which ambushed marines in the city of Haditha killed civilians. Influenced perhaps by fear or anger, the marines may have “shot first and asked questions later, and women and children died as a result,” he says.

In the tumult of battle, robots wouldn’t be affected by volatile emotions. Consequently they’d be less likely to make mistakes under fire, Arkin believes, and less likely to strike at noncombatants. In short, they might make better ethical decisions than people.

In Arkin’s system a robot trying to determine whether or not to fire would be guided by an “ethical governor” built into its software. When a robot locked onto a target, the governor would check a set of preprogrammed constraints based on the rules of engagement and the laws of war. An enemy tank in a large field, for instance, would quite likely get the go-ahead; a funeral at a cemetery attended by armed enemy combatants would be off-limits as a violation of the rules of engagement.

[...]
Back at Carnegie Mellon it’s the final week of the spring semester, and I have returned to watch the Yume Project team unveil its transformed android to the Entertainment Technology Center’s faculty. It’s been a bumpy ride from realism to believability. Yan Lin, the team’s computer programmer, has devised a user-friendly software interface to more fluidly control Yume’s motions. But an attempt to endow the fembot with the ability to detect faces and make more realistic eye contact has been only half successful. First her eyes latch onto mine, then her head swings around in a mechanical two-step. To help obscure her herky-jerky movements and rickety eye contact, the team has imagined a character for Yume that would be inclined to act that way, with a costume to match—a young girl, according to the project’s blog, “slightly goth, slightly punk, all about getting your attention from across the room.”

That she certainly does. But in spite of her hip outfit—including the long fingerless gloves designed to hide her zombie-stiff hands and the dark lipstick that covers up her inability to ever quite close her mouth—underneath, she’s the same old Actroid-DER. At least now she knows her place. The team has learned the power of lowering expectations and given Yume a new spiel.

“I’m not human!” she confesses. “I’ll never be exactly like you. That isn’t so bad. Actually, I like being an android.” Impressed with her progress, the faculty gives the Yume team an A.

[Mister Agenda]

Do you believe there is a non-philosophical way, i.e. scientific one, to determine which interpretation is correct?

One could make predictions based on what must follow if one or the other is true and see if that's what happens. What would be true of a brain that is a receiver of soul signals that would not be true of a brain that generates its mind?

[Jackalope]

The neurological evidence to date is sufficient for me to reject dualism.

This, although I would add the caveat that my rejection is, as always, provisional.

[max-greece]

Question: Can you think of an experiment that would prove whether qualia are generated by physical processes versus facilitating them?

Those of us interested in philosophy of mind have a fair understanding of the issues and arguments surrounding the mind-body problem. To the best of my knowledge we all agree that a causal relationship exists between the brain-states and mental properties. How this fact is interpreted depends on whether you are a monist or dualist.

For philosophical reasons, I consider physical matter incapable of producing qualia and see the need for some other vehicle capable of supporting phenomena qualities (dualism). The analogy I use is that of a radio, which does not cause music, but is by virtue of its state can receive signals. Others consider first-person awareness an emergent property. They believe particular configurations of physical matter are capable of producing qualia as a non-fundamental property of reality.

Do you believe there is a non-philosophical way, i.e. scientific one, to determine which interpretation is correct?

I find this whole subject extremely difficult to get to grips with. With that in mind here is my first go:

I stand in front of a STOP sign late at night. It is too dark to read the sign. I take a photograph of the stop sign with my digital camera (no flash).

I then don a pair of night vision glasses and can now read the word stop. I take a photo of the sign through the glasses.

When I get back home I load the photos onto the computer and tell it to load them as scanned documents. The first photo cannot be read by the software. The second can and it gives me the single word in a text file - stop.

Now I am not sure if this is even a proper example of qualia but if the ability to see/read the word and interpret it is a result of qualia then both the computer and I have made the same gain through the use of equipment.

Does this even make sense? Fuck I hate philosophy.

[pocaracas]

Lookie what we have here!??

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...140632.htm

Smart Neurons: Single Neuronal Dendrites Can Perform Computations

Oct. 27, 2013 — When you look at the hands of a clock or the streets on a map, your brain is effortlessly performing computations that tell you about the orientation of these objects. New research by UCL scientists has shown that these computations can be carried out by the microscopic branches of neurons known as dendrites, which are the receiving elements of neurons.

[genkaus]

For philosophical reasons, I consider physical matter incapable of producing qualia and see the need for some other vehicle capable of supporting phenomena qualities (dualism).

And what philosophical reasons would that be?

So far, the only reason you've given is that "monism has not satisfactorily explained qualia and you can't believe that it can - therefore you subscribe to dualism". That's not a philosophical reason, that's an argument from incredulity.

The analogy I use is that of a radio, which does not cause music, but is by virtue of its state can receive signals. Others consider first-person awareness an emergent property. They believe particular configurations of physical matter are capable of producing qualia as a non-fundamental property of reality.

Do you believe there is a non-philosophical way, i.e. scientific one, to determine which interpretation is correct?

Your analogy is more appropriate than you might think.

Suppose you find an odd looking contraption from which music is heard. Is it a radio that isn't actually causing the music and simply relaying the signals in an audio form? Or is it a music box or an instrument that is capable of causing the music? How do you determine the difference?

The simple answer is - you fiddle with the knobs. You move it around. You try to figure out if the alterations in the mechanical structure produces a change in music or if the music itself remains unaffected. You'll find that in the radio, the music is not under your control. Sure, you can change the station, but you cannot change what is being played on it. And the same station would give different outputs at different times. However, with the instrument, you do get consistent results.

Similarly, when you fiddle with the brain and see that not only it behaves consistently, but that behavior can be controlled by altering states in a very different way than simply being selected from a range of options. Which indicates that your brain is a musical instrument and not a radio.