Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

As predicted, you ask about materialism, and then immediately default to mind.  Just to be clear, you don't care whether or not anything, or indeed -everything- else is explained via materialism...it's just this one thing?   You mean non-science papers, because science can't even study qualia, right?  Remind me.  

Mind isn't a little thing. It's literally everything for us. So yeah, this one issue matters that much. But look, bring even the kind of "non-science" papers I'm talking about; frankly, I'll be surprised if you can find ANY serious scientific paper that will touch the issue of qualia with a 10-foot pole. Seriously-- I've tried to find any scientific commentary on qualia; I've tried to find research papers about it; I've spent tens of minutes googling various things like "scientific definition of qualia" or "scientific qualia experiments," and it is very hard to come up with anything.

I suspect it's because scientists, like me, are perfectly aware that you can't objectively study the nature of subjectivity.

You mean bring some non-science, and not about materialism, about qualia, then we can move forward?  I doubt that fulfilling this criteria as asked will work, since it's already been done..and hasn't moved the chains for you.  You think that qualias the special sauce.  It;s the one and only example, and you;ve flatly decided that science can;t study it, that anything that purports to study is is just a bunch of assumptions, and that the entire body of materialism is nothing more than a philosophical choice.

I'd prefer science to non-science, but you and I both know that qualia is neither a thing nor an observable property of things. It's the major shortcoming of the material world view, and anyone who wants to make positive assertions about reality in favor of materialism will have to have a very good answer to the question of mind. So far, the one thing that we ALL observe, all the time-- the experience of ideas-- is so poorly explained that the current material view of reality must be considered seriously incomplete.

But I'll keep asking-- do you have any actual science to support your position? If not, then why are you a materialist? What about your experience is so compelling that you are willing actually to DEFINE ALL OF REALITY, to put it all in a single box and to claim that nothing we know of may rest outside that box? How is this a better position than "I don't know"?

[The Grand Nudger]

As predicted, you ask about materialism, and then immediately default to mind.  Just to be clear, you don't care whether or not anything, or indeed -everything- else is explained via materialism...it's just this one thing?   You mean non-science papers, because science can't even study qualia, right?  Remind me.  

Mind isn't a little thing.  It's literally everything for us.

So, again..and just to be clear.  You don't need me to explain any other thing via materialism, you're cool with all of that, in fact idealism subsumes it all as an accurate description.  If I I describe sound ala materialism you;'re not going to pop up and say "aha, that;s wrong, you can't know that, and materialism can;t explain it!"

Just mind, just this one special thing?

...you don't already see a fundamental problem with our interactions?  

So yeah, this one issue matters that much.  But look, bring even the kind of "non-science" papers I'm talking about; frankly, I'll be surprised if you can find ANY serious scientific paper that will touch the issue of qualia with a 10-foot pole.  Seriously-- I've tried to find any scientific commentary on qualia; I've tried to find research papers about it; I've spent tens of minutes googling various things like "scientific definition of qualia" or "scientific qualia experiments," and it is very hard to come up with anything.

Serious is the new non. 

I suspect it's because scientists, like me, are perfectly aware that you can't objectively study the nature of subjectivity.

I suspect it's because you stopped looking when it suited you.  

I'd prefer science to non-science, but you and I both know that qualia is neither a thing nor an observable property of things.  

So you keep insisting.

It's the major shortcoming of the material world view, and anyone who wants to make positive assertions about reality in favor of materialism will have to have a very good answer to the question of mind.  So far, the one thing that we ALL observe, all the time-- the experience of ideas-- is so poorly explained that the current material view of reality must be considered seriously incomplete.

lol....you keep making the same mistake. If i tell you about the mistake, you complain about being notified, and then proceed to repeat yourself.

But I'll keep asking-- do you have any actual science to support your position?  If not, then why are you a materialist?  What about your experience is so compelling that you are willing actually to DEFINE ALL OF REALITY, to put it all in a single box and to claim that nothing we know of may rest outside that box?  How is this a better position than "I don't know"?

"Prove my repeated insistence wrong" - No.  "Defend this position I just came up with for you". No.

Do your own homework.

[Angrboda]

When I put the probes of a voltmeter across a certain part of an electrical circuit, the readout displays a number which represents an electrical quantity. We know it does so accurately because we've designed it to provide an accurate representation of the electrical quantity. When it's voltage, we say that we have measured the voltage across the probes. With current, current. We only have correlates for the things we measure. The large hadron collider is a massive correlate provider. If there were a single cluster of neurons that have been found to be solely responsible for the experience of red. Say we've mapped out experience and what happens in the brain when you experience red. Is it a valid objection to the practice of measurement to say that I haven't measured the presence or absence of the experience red in this hypothetical brain? This seems consistent with practice in other areas. When I measure 5 volts in a circuit, I say that the circuit is presenting 5 volts. I don't say that the voltmeter is measuring a correlate of a circuit presenting 5 volts. Measurement assumes ontology. To take the knife in the thigh example, our experience is only a correlate of the event. Some people don't experience the pain as being undesirable. Others don't experience the pain at all. All you have is a representation that something is occurring. But if correlates aren't admitted into evidence as witness to the existence of a thing, then your experience isn't witness to its own existence. After all, your experience is just a correlate of reality. That you have 'an idea' that you have an idea is no more valid than that the voltmeter is measuring 5 volts. I think every one of us has experienced the phenomena of being half awake and thinking something, and that thought turned out to be nonsensical once we are fully awake. How do you know that your notion of an idea isn't just another half awake illusion? Are we going to doubt reality on the basis of the point that we know nothing in and of itself, all we know are representations of reality, correlates? All we have are correlates; once you dispense with them, you've dispensed with the notion that anything is real. Including experience. Skepticism cuts both ways.

[bennyboy]

"Prove my repeated insistence wrong" - No.  "Defend this position I just came up with for you".  No.

Do your own homework.

Look, you have a position about the nature of mind, and assert it positively. Fine. . . demonstrate that your assertion has validity to it. So far, you haven't.

[Bunburryist]

There are two ideas here:

1) The brain is solely responsible for consciousness and intelligence.
2) Consciousness and intelligence are a product of something non-material.

The first hypothesis is scientific. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is reproducible. Above all, it is useful.

The second is none of these. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not reproducible and it absolutely is in no way useful. It is not science.

As an AI researcher myself, the first is useful. I want to try and create intelligence in a computer or a robot. Or consciousness. I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc. I can come up with hypotheses and test them out and see if they work in practise. And after all that, I can create models of consciousness or intelligence that do something in the real world. The same if I was a neuroscientist trying to find cures to a neurodegenerative disease or a psychiatrist trying to solve mental illness.

How would you even start doing any of the above if you start from the premise that something non-material produces consciousness, our identity, intelligence and who we are? You can't. It is not helpful in the slightest. You can have a belief in some kind of soul or whatever to give you personal comfort, but that's all you can do with it. It has no other relevance to reality. It is also wrong. Because if you start from that premise, you first have to explain what science already knows.

For example, why and how anesthetic works, or alcohol, or drugs, or the effect of brain damage on different parts of the brain, or neurodegenerative diseases. It is also consistent with what we understand about evolution and biology. You would have to explain away hundreds of thousands of papers in the scientific literature from many generations of scientists working across the globe. All this scientific data that is reproducible and falsifiable, tells us that materialism is the correct approach.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't. There is no reason to believe that the material brain is not entirely responsible for who we are and how we function.

Let me start by saying that I don't start with the premise that something non-material produces consciousness.  (I don't even know what consciousness is, much less how, or even that it is "produced" by anything.)  I start with two things - my self-evident experience (that I call "This Experience") and the fact that the scientific approach allows us to make many useful models of This Experience.  What I have come to understand is that there is a third thing that is neither This Experience, nor is it a scientific idea - it is the conception of This Experience as being a "world" in which my nature is that of a "thing" that exists in space.  We learn to believe this as children, and stick a label on it that says "material world."  Our conception of ourselves as "living things in a world" is not a scientific idea, but the worldview implicit in our thinking that we come to have as we learn to think in terms of language.  I call this Siimple Realism.  It is not a philosophy, but rather the worldview implicit in human language.  "I am my body.  That ball is red."  We learn to believe that scientific ideas which are derived from This Experience describe a material world.  We learn to believe that This Experience is "the material world," and "the physical world."  That is, we confuse science - a system of investigation, etc. with  non-scientific worldview.  We learn to believe a bunch of beliefs without realizing there are a lot of contradictions involved.

That is where the problem comes up - a problem that the scientific community simply refuses to acknowledge and work into scientific thinking, and which you yourself demonstrate in your post.  You do this yourself when you say you " I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc."  Is a "real" brain a material object or an experience somehow happening in a material brain?  They are not the same thing; they exist/happen at objectively different places in "the" material world and hence should not be conflated into the same thing, any more than we'd conflate a material cow in a field with an image of that cow on a TV.  They not the same thing, so let's stop pretending and talking like they are.

This Experience cannot be a material world.  Even the materialist sense story tell us it isn't.  It tells us that it is something happening, somehow, in a material brain.  This puts us in the position of needing a system of labels which science refuses to give us.  If the "things" in This Experience are something happening in a brain, then those "things" are neither material nor made of atoms.  So when you say "look at a real brain" there are actually two "things" involved - things which exist at objectively different places in "the" objective material world.  There is the material brain which photons are reflecting off of (and which has no color as an aspect), and there is the colorful experience you call "a real brain" happening in your material brain.  They are objectively separated in objective time and space in the material world.  And yet science, by not label-ing out it's own theory, refuses to deal with this problem, conveniently leaving it to "philosophers" to deal with, and leaving the vast majority of otherwise well-meaning, logical people to use ambiguous phrases like "the brain," "the material world," etc.

We are so used to thinking that this is somehow a "philosophical" problem (we have all kinds of fancy labels like "Representative Realism") that it doesn't occur to us to turn to the scientific community and say, "Hey, YOU'RE the guys telling us our experience happens in material brains.  So flush it out logically and NAME everything.   If it's something existing in a material world (which would be made of atoms and so wouldn't "look" like anything since atoms don't have color as an aspect), give us a word that conveys that idea.  If it's an experience happening in a material world (which can't be "made of atoms"), then we need a different label.  But to go on, and on, and on with ambiguous phrases like "the brain," "the material world," "the universe," "my body," etc. is simply refusing to acknowledge their own theory of "the senses" and disguising this important problem.

Once a person is able to really understand that This Experience is not a material world (even in the context of the materialist sense story), one is, for the first time, in the position to really examine the materialist worldview.  I am not anti-science.  I have simply learned to be able to tease out physical science from the material worldview and to understand that it is not a scientific idea, and that we don't need to think in it to do physical science.

I don't subscribe to some vague, new-age "philosophy."  I've simply come to realize that I don't know what I am. I don't know what "mind" is.  I don't know what "consciousness" is.  But I don't know what I, as a being am, and I don't understand the reality underlying it.   (It's easier to understand this when you also understand that we don't know what space is, what photons are, what leptons are, etc..)  That's where I'm coming from.  Is there a relationship between the brains we find as aspects of This Experience (which cannot be a material world) and the experience as a whole.  Clearly.  But that doesn't mean it has to be one that is conceived in the non- and pre-scientific materialist worldview.

Another issue you brought up is the usefulness of theories.  Lots of mistake theories are useful.  Newtonian physics was, and still is useful.  But that doesn't mean it's an accurate description of reality.  On the other hand, if the only way you can do useful research is to think in materialist terms, then go for it.  Engineers use Newtonian ideas all the time.  But I think we have to separate two different realms of thought - goal oriented research, and questions about what we are.  I remember a few years ago I traded emails with a guy who ran a memory research lab somewhere, and I remember he said he won't even hire anyone who's primary interest is in something vague like "what is memory."  He wanted people interested in doing hard research and solving problems with real patients.  And for his goals, that's fine.  But that's not my goal.  My goal is trying to have as clear as understanding about what I am as I can.  

I know I'm not going to change many people's minds about this.  I know many, if not most people think my ideas are kooky.  I know I'm not going to convince the scientific establishment of anything.  I find these things interesting to think about.  I'm glad to try and explain it.  I hope people will, at the very lease, give me credit for trying to make sense of something that none of us really understands.  (I know I started the last six sentences with "I".)  Most of the ideas I'm trying to explain are actually about understanding the materialist worldview itself - not to prove that it's "wrong."  You can't understand my reasons for understanding the materialist worldview is mistaken until you understand the materialist world-view itself, accurately, inside and out.

[bennyboy]

When I put the probes of a voltmeter across a certain part of an electrical circuit, the readout displays a number which represents an electrical quantity.  We know it does so accurately because we've designed it to provide an accurate representation of the electrical quantity.  When it's voltage, we say that we have measured the voltage across the probes.  With current, current.  We only have correlates for the things we measure.  The large hadron collider is a massive correlate provider.  If there were a single cluster of neurons that have been found to be solely responsible for the experience of red.  Say we've mapped out experience and what happens in the brain when you experience red.  Is it a valid objection to the practice of measurement to say that I haven't measured the presence or absence of the experience red in this hypothetical brain?  This seems consistent with practice in other areas.  When I measure 5 volts in a circuit, I say that the circuit is presenting 5 volts.  I don't say that the voltmeter is measuring a correlate of a circuit presenting 5 volts.  Measurement assumes ontology.  To take the knife in the thigh example, our experience is only a correlate of the event.  Some people don't experience the pain as being undesirable.  Others don't experience the pain at all.  All you have is a representation that something is occurring.  But if correlates aren't admitted into evidence as witness to the existence of a thing, then your experience isn't witness to its own existence.  After all, your experience is just a correlate of reality.  That you have 'an idea' that you have an idea is no more valid than that the voltmeter is measuring 5 volts.  I think every one of us has experienced the phenomena of being half awake and thinking something, and that thought turned out to be nonsensical once we are fully awake.  How do you know that your notion of an idea isn't just another half awake illusion?  Are we going to doubt reality on the basis of the point that we know nothing in and of itself, all we know are representations of reality, correlates?  All we have are correlates; once you dispense with them, you've dispensed with the notion that anything is real.  Including experience.  Skepticism cuts both ways.

I'd disagree with the assertion that everything is necessarily a correlate.  A correlate means that one variable maps to another.  My experience of say a "dog" may be seen as a correlate to a real dog, and I think you've come up with an original and interesting way to turn that around.  However, it is not necessary to draw a correlate-- you could, for example, just see "dog" as a label for an experience of a particular category of experience-- a cute thing with 4 legs etc.-- with no reference or assertion to "reality" required.  You could also study neurology without any reference at all to qualia or mind, by using purely objective language.  So long as you are studying the relationship between brain function and behavior, there's not much need to talk about what a subject is/isn't experiencing  (a la B.F. Skinner).

The problem is specifically with regard to qualia, for which there are ONLY correlates, and no other way to access it.

[Sal]

I'm starting to think we're bogged down on purely semantic differences, when we're actually talking about the same phenomenon.

My argument, in a materialist worldview, is that everything - even ideas - is reducible to the material. That's the essence, as I understand it, of the materialist worldview.

To an idealist, we live in a stop-gap, wall or whathaveyou where ideas, qualia, or whatchamacallit is what everything is reducible to - even the material - an idealist, abstract representation of the material. Because we can't separate an observer (mind) from what it observes (reality).

If you compare the 2 paragraphs above - "ideas", "qualia" is just placeholder words that are equal to "material", "reality".

---

The only thing I can see & concede, is that we can't separate mind from the material. For there even to be ideas of "mind" and "material" there needs to be a mind to observe the material, just as there needs material to be around to even make up a mind (the mind is afterall I think we can obviously agree on part-and-parcel of constituent reality).

So, is it purely semantics we disagree on? Or is there something special about ideas that I'm missing?

[robvalue]

I don't know. What does material mean? If it means "that which literally exists", then by definition everything that exists is material.

[LadyForCamus]

Qualia can be and -has been- detected.  It's not even difficult to do so.

ikr? My Qualo-meter 2100 is on its way from Amazon even as I type! Soon, I will be able to know exactly what physical systems do/don't experience qualia, and WHAT exactly they are experiencing.

Oh, wait. . . that's not a real thing. I suppose I have to wait for you to tell us that things that aren't qualia really are.

 We recognize it in others -with no training whatsoever-, no understanding of the phenomena at all, required.   It has a definition, it has parameters, it can be located....discovered...discovered, discovery -is- qualia...jesus fucking christ......."discovering" anything at all....anything.......is simultaneously "discovering" qualia.  That's what the term refers to, an experience.

We assume it in others, and call it recognition. Is making an assumption the same thing as recognizing?

Sorry, a little late to this party. What makes such an assumption unreasonable?

[bennyboy]

Sorry, a little late to this party. What makes such an assumption unreasonable?

Nothing's wrong with making assumptions. I make some in order to feel it's worthwhile living and getting out of bed in the morning.

The problem is that assumptions ingrained in the world view, if they are also treated as objects of observation or conclusions of inquiry, lead to a nasty circle-- a kind of implicit begging of the question, if you will.