RE: Mind is the brain?
March 17, 2016 at 10:05 am
(This post was last modified: March 17, 2016 at 10:12 am by Kiekeben.)
(March 17, 2016 at 1:22 am)bennyboy Wrote:(March 16, 2016 at 1:41 pm)Kiekeben Wrote: You appear to be ignoring two things. First, that you could perform this test on yourself. You may not strictly speaking know that other people have qualia, but you know that you do.This is an excellent point, and I kind of suggested a cyborg experiment along those lines a couple pages ago, in which you could start to break out of philosophical solipsism by transferring parts of experience among people (hypothetically at least). But it's only fairly recently that subjectivism and science have been so at odds with each other, especially in the study of the mind.
Quote:Both the materailists who are mysterians and the dualists go beyond merely saying that qualia are unique to arguing that this somehow makes consciousness problematic for materialism. I don't think so at all, because the uniqueness of qualia is something we should expect whatever is true about the makeup of the mind. It all has to do with the simple fact that qualia simply ARE the experiences each individual has, and are therefore private to each individual. So of course you can't experience someone else's qualia! And that's why there is a "problem" of zombies, and all that.Fair enough. To me the problem isn't so much with humans, who I just kind of "feel" have minds and accept that feeling. It's with any other physical structure. How do we know whether anything else experiences qualia, even if it seems to? How do we know that all electrochemical or electromagnetic interchanges aren't actually little sparks of awareness all through the universe?
It's hard, not having found what about the brain is actually responsible for qualia, to turn whatever we learn out into the physical universe in general, which I think is very much the aim of science: to take specific cases and succeed in establishing general rules.
Good post, by the way. I like the way you think.
(March 17, 2016 at 1:22 am)bennyboy Wrote:(March 16, 2016 at 1:41 pm)Kiekeben Wrote: You appear to be ignoring two things. First, that you could perform this test on yourself. You may not strictly speaking know that other people have qualia, but you know that you do.This is an excellent point, and I kind of suggested a cyborg experiment along those lines a couple pages ago, in which you could start to break out of philosophical solipsism by transferring parts of experience among people (hypothetically at least). But it's only fairly recently that subjectivism and science have been so at odds with each other, especially in the study of the mind.
Quote:Both the materailists who are mysterians and the dualists go beyond merely saying that qualia are unique to arguing that this somehow makes consciousness problematic for materialism. I don't think so at all, because the uniqueness of qualia is something we should expect whatever is true about the makeup of the mind. It all has to do with the simple fact that qualia simply ARE the experiences each individual has, and are therefore private to each individual. So of course you can't experience someone else's qualia! And that's why there is a "problem" of zombies, and all that.Fair enough. To me the problem isn't so much with humans, who I just kind of "feel" have minds and accept that feeling. It's with any other physical structure. How do we know whether anything else experiences qualia, even if it seems to? How do we know that all electrochemical or electromagnetic interchanges aren't actually little sparks of awareness all through the universe?
It's hard, not having found what about the brain is actually responsible for qualia, to turn whatever we learn out into the physical universe in general, which I think is very much the aim of science: to take specific cases and succeed in establishing general rules.
(2nd attempt - sometimes these messages don't go through for some reason):
I think you're right about this. I don't see a way to determine whether, say, a computer (like HAL in 2001) is conscious. And it's not just that we haven't learned how the brain manages to be conscious - it's that even if we do, we might not be able to apply what we learn to anything that's sufficiently different. This is where I agree with the mysterians - consciousness presents a unique problem for science.