Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

I am a trained and published scientist that has worked in academia but if I received such a letter of course I wouldn't be mocking. It wouldn't be professional of me. But this is a discussion forum and so I can express what I truly feel about such concepts. Academics also express themselves more freely at conferences.

I've been to conferences where they have discussed consciousness and qualia. Even when someone has gone up and talked about qualia, they always try to define what they mean.

You simply cannot make any progress at all without doing so. This is why qualia is such a useless term. It's a quagmire.

Only if you insist that there's no value in anything you can't define in scientific terms.

By ANNs I assume you mean the classic kind with back propagation, activation functions and learning rules? That is an extremely simplistic model that is not biologically plausible. I suggest that you read Christoph Koch's Biophysics of Computation to show quite how complicated a single neuron actually is. It's computational complexity far surpasses a whole artificial neural network. Then try putting the biologically plausible neurons, with dendritic trees, neuromodulators, leakage and a local learning rule in a network that self organises. That will give you an entirely different view point on how the brain functions. Doing so really brought it home to me how the brain is a naturally occurring physical system.

Okay, that's all fine, but we're still stuck. The brain has many levels of context, from the coordinated whole to brain parts, then neurons, then the chemistry, then QM particles. Is there a "critical mass" at which there was no mind and suddenly there is? Or does it scale all the way down to nothing, with the essence of mind therefore being a property at the most fundamental level? See, my problem isn't with the idea that the brain is somehow related to or responsible for our human consciousness: the way we feel, think, hear, etc. It's with psychogony that I have doubts.

--edit-- Yes, it was classical back-prop ANNs. Even at that time, though, it was already pretty obvious that whatever a machine could "think," the exact pathways involved would be inscrutable to outside observers due to the overwhelming complexity. It's very simple to really get what's "going on" as soon as you get any kind of complexity in the feedback loop

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no such thing as an inscrutible computer.  You can -always- isolate your way to every function and reverse engineer it.  It;s only a matter of time.  For a human computer (if we are such a thing) this isn;t the case.  The sort of things you'd have to do (to re a brain like we might re a board) would be unethical and murderous.

[bennyboy]

There's no such thing as an inscrutible computer.  You can -always- isolate your way to every function and reverse engineer it.  It;s only a matter of time.  For a human computer (if we are such a thing) this isn;t the case.  The sort of things you'd have to do (to re a brain like we might re a board) would be unethical and murderous.

In theory you can, but when you have to carefully trace a trillion connections, you are likely to reach the end of the universe before you can process say what it's like to listen to a good song.

And that's just if you treat neurons as black boxes.  As Mathilda was saying, a single neuron is immensely complex.  Just seeing which neurons happen to fire isn't even getting the whole picture.  You have the reuptake of neurotransmitters, complex interactions with hormones, fluctuations in chemistry as the brain pumps. . . probably more complexity in a single moment of a single brain than all our computers have calculated, ever.

My point is at the end, you never really get to look the whole process in the face.  You have to reduce it, symbolize it, describe it mathematically-- and risk losing the essence of mind due to problems with degrees of precision etc.

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no such thing as an inscrutible computer.  You can -always- isolate your way to every function and reverse engineer it.  It;s only a matter of time.  For a human computer (if we are such a thing) this isn;t the case.  The sort of things you'd have to do (to re a brain like we might re a board) would be unethical and murderous.

In theory you can, but when you have to carefully trace a trillion connections, you are likely to reach the end of the universe before you can process say what it's like to listen to a good song.

That seems like an exaggeration.  No one said it was easy, or could be done in a jiffy, ofc.  That's kind of the problem, atpresent. It wouldn;t be easy to do if it were a pc that no one gave a shit about.....but it;s not, it;s a living human beings brain we;d need to jack around with. The failures of our current theories of mind are not, primarily, philosophical. They withstand the test of rational scrutiny, which is the test you would apply. They;re sufficient. Whether or not they are accurate is another question entirely. Might not be.

And that's just if you treat neurons as black boxes.  As Mathilda was saying, a single neuron is immensely complex.  Just seeing which neurons happen to fire isn't even getting the whole picture.  You have the reuptake of neurotransmitters, complex interactions with hormones, fluctuations in chemistry as the brain pumps. . . probably more complexity in a single moment of a single brain than all our computers have calculated, ever.

-and knowing all of that...and seeing what the primitive shit we have for computational architectures can do, you don't think that this is, at least, a candidate for an accounting of our experience?  It's all just assumptions?  No observations, no conclusions, no knowledge, no real science?  

My point is at the end, you never really get to look the whole process in the face.  You have to reduce it, symbolize it, describe it mathematically-- and risk losing the essence of mind due to problems with degrees of precision etc.

I doubt that we'll ever know anything to the zero point of accuracy, scientifically or otherwise....this is hardly a criticism of any specific position.  Again, it seems to me, that your issue is not with materialism even as it relates to mind, but with knowledge itself.

[I_am_not_mafia]

As I said, first you should define what qualia is and what you mean by 'experiencing'.

How does one define qualia in scientific term?  Qualia is the experience of "what things are like."

My point exactly. So we shouldn't be asking for scientific explanations for something that cannot be defined as a scientific term.

[robvalue]

I expect sound waves are an abstract idea, no? That they actually represent movements/vibration in a physical medium? There's no such thing as "a sound wave", right? I mean, as a separate entity.

If I'm right, we have the existent, moving under rules, and then a pattern/property which can be described abstractly as a sound wave.

Just repeating my question to see if my understanding is correct.

[Bunburryist]

I expect sound waves are an abstract idea, no? That they actually represent movements/vibration in a physical medium? There's no such thing as "a sound wave", right? I mean, as a separate entity.

If I'm right, we have the existent, moving under rules, and then a pattern/property which can be described abstractly as a sound wave.

Here's an example to illustrate the idea I'm trying to get at.  Since science doesn't provide us with an explicit distinction between properties of light (of which color is not one - there's no such thing as a red photon), and experiences supposedly happening in a material brain, we talk about "sound waves" like we talk about "red light."  Imagine someone sticks a knife in your leg.  If we take the scientific sense story at face value, the experience of pain doesn't happen in your leg, but rather happens in "the brain."  Neither does the brain somehow send or project the experience of pain to the site of there injury.  There is no physical basis for such a idea.  Now, would we say the knife had a quality of "pain"?  Would we say the knife was a "painy knife"?  No.  But we do exactly that when we talk about "red light" and "sound waves."  Are there, in materialist terms, wavelengths of air vibration which, upon entering the ear set in motion a sensory process when results in an the experience we call "sound" that happens, somehow, in the brain?  Yes.  But the two - the air vibrations and the experience of sound happening in the brain have nothing to do with one another - except that they are at two ends of a process.  By calling the air vibrations "sound waves" we make this important difference hard to see, and makes it easy for people to confuse the two.  Am I saying we should stop saying "sound waves" and "red light"?  Absolutely.  Is it going to happen?  Absolutely not.  But that doesn't mean that I - or any one else who really wants to have an accurate understanding of the materialist sense story (whether or not one believes it) - have to talk and think in ambiguous terms.  They should have signs posted near all buildings where physical science is being done saying, "Phrases such as "red light" or "sound wave" are not allowed within 100 feet of this building."

[The Grand Nudger]

Actually, we talk about sound waves because we can map them, we can set sensors down and track their movement -as- a wave.  We can arrange the test conditions so that we can even -see- them. We can both estimate and observe their movement and form through various mediums, we can explain the differences we observe -between- medums. We can test the accuracy of our model to describe them every time we use sonar, or build a guitar. Either everything just happens to look like this, and we're wrong, but incredibly lucky.........or......

[bennyboy]

How does one define qualia in scientific term?  Qualia is the experience of "what things are like."

My point exactly. So we shouldn't be asking for scientific explanations for something that cannot be defined as a scientific term.

Holy crap!  I think we actually agree.

[bennyboy]

Actually, we talk about sound waves because we can map them, we can set sensors down and track their movement -as- a wave.  We can arrange the test conditions so that we can even -see- them.  We can both estimate and observe their movement and form through various mediums, we can explain the differences we observe -between- medums.  We can test the accuracy of our model to describe them every time we use sonar, or build a guitar.  Either everything just happens to look like this, and we're wrong, but incredibly lucky.........or......

Music is more than sound.  The sound represents complex ideas and feelings, and sound is a medium for that.