RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
December 31, 2018 at 7:39 pm
(This post was last modified: December 31, 2018 at 7:50 pm by bennyboy.)
(December 31, 2018 at 2:33 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote:(December 31, 2018 at 10:57 am)bennyboy Wrote: By the way, Zainab, if nobody's mentioned it, the essential issue is about "qualia," knowing what things are like-- what it's like to taste chocolate, for example.
We are our bodies. Stuff which happens to our bodies happens to us. Thus "qualia" only become a problem when people think of consciousness as somehow independent of the body. But our bodies are what are conscious.
That's an expression of material monism by fiat, not an observable truth. Don't believe me? Given any physical system X, how would you establish that it does / doesn't experience qualia?
The brain's easy, because we can poke it and people say "I smell smoke" or whatever; we can correlate neural systems or responses with subjective reports, and need only make the assumption that if a body says "ouch" it is actually feeling pain rather than simply seeming to. But what about a general test of consciousness for say a robot, or a complex mechanism found on some planet's moon near Alpha Centauri?
(December 31, 2018 at 6:12 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(December 31, 2018 at 2:33 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote: We are our bodies. Stuff which happens to our bodies happens to us. Thus "qualia" only become a problem when people think of consciousness as somehow independent of the body. But our bodies are what are conscious.
The trouble with qualia is that nobody knows how we get them.
If you believe in mind/body dualism or res cogitans that's not a problem -- you just say qualia are a different substance. But if you believe, as most brain scientists do, that the mind arises from the body, then the trouble is that how qualia arise is completely unknown.
Yes, it's quite a nasty logical loop, actually. Our minds (brains?) are capable of experiencing "truths" which aren't represented in reality at all. For example, I might say something like "Wow, this marble table top is almost perfectly flat," when in fact it consists of a cloud of shapeless quantum wave functions kind of vibrating in space. In fact, the idea of discrete objects AT ALL is probably a human construction.
So when we say "A brain's a thing and it does X and it has property Y," we're already so far down the rabbit hole that just getting out of bed is evidence that we've already made our philosophical questions-- i.e. that we are begging the question.
