(January 21, 2019 at 7:51 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: Brain science has shown how the brain abstracts and interprets such information and presents it to our bodies, to us, in our brains. If you doubt this, study the brain science.
See, you've slipped into dualistic language here. The brain abstracts such information and presents it to us in our brains. Those of us who think that we are our bodies don't want to use language that shows the brain as somehow not-us. If the brain is a part of us (which I'm pretty sure it is) then we're just saying that we present the sensory information to ourselves, and it somehow presents itself to us as qualia.
Quote:Therefore the real question is why we are selves to begin with, not why we have qualia. THAT is the question science hasn't answered yet (along with some of the details of the mechanics). THAT is the question about which the book I mentioned speculates: how did life differentiate from non-life and how did that lead to selves?
Yes, that's a difficult question. I don't think there is any good answer to that yet.
Quote:IMO there is no "hard problem of consciousness" dealing with qualia for people like me who think we are our bodies. It's a purely philosophical question.
I think we are our bodies. I think that science has not explained how the electrochemical events in our brains present themselves to something we think of as the self as qualia, which do not look like electrochemical events. If it's a purely philosophical question, that's because science has no idea at present how to answer it.
Quote:Perhaps the real problem is that philosophers think scientists are accountable to them, and must explain things to them in their own terms. That is based on the assumption that science is just a branch of philosophy, when it's really a spinoff. Philosophers can speculate however they want, but they are not the final judges on the importance of scientific research.
You can call it a subset or a spinoff or whatever. The label isn't so important to me. Science has a particular way of approaching questions, which philosophy doesn't necessarily have. Nor would any sane philosopher assert that he should be the "final judge" on a scientific question. Nor have I ever heard a philosopher say that scientists are "accountable" to them. It may be that you're inventing some kind psychological resistance that you imagine philosophers have.
As soon as science has a good explanation for how qualia arise, I'm sure the philosophers will be pleased to accept it. In the meantime, a lot of us think it is worthwhile pondering why no such explanation seems forthcoming.
In the Chomsky speech that I linked to earlier in the thread, he points out how scientists have "lowered the bar" in terms of what they expect to explain. Newton, for example, acknowledged that he couldn't explain what gravity is, only what it does. (Earlier natural philosophers would not have been satisfied with this.) So far brain science is working in a similar way about qualia. We have no idea how they arise, but we continue to get more detailed information about the electrochemical events which somehow mysteriously give rise to them. It may be that science will answer that question soon, or it may be that we'll continue to do without it, as we get along fine without knowing what gravity is.
