My take on zombies is that I don't think it's possible to construct a system that exhibits all the characteristics and behaviours of a mind without constructing a mind.
Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
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Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#42There's a lot of talk in here about whether consciousness is binary, whether it can turn on and off like a lightswitch, as if that's a good proxy for dualism vs. materialism. I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I'm a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being "weakly conscious" makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have…
> In my father's last months, I saw him medicated on morphine to the point of being near unconscious, and it's easy to imagine that he was having the same sort of weak experiences as I've had. None of this rattles my dualist intuitions at all.
But if your consciousness is separate from your physical brain, how come pumping certain chemicals affect consciousness on a very fundamental level ?
With your examples, you could explain those 'weak experiences' as some kind of signal-degradation between the incorporeal consciousness and the physical brain; but if you look at psychoactive drugs this explanation no longer flies.
I've taken psilocybin a few times and while there are sensory effects that you could explain as a transmission error it's a very tiny part of the experience. It really affects the way you think for a few hours, how can you explain that if consciousness is separate from the physical brain, why is it affected ?
Same goes for brain injury, people have complete changes in personality after suffering brain damage. How do you explain that if the brain is just a transceiver ?
Also, why do you trust your intuitions at all ? Intuition evolved to be able to deal with every day situations quickly. It breaks down when you start thinking about things outside human experience.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the age of casual pseudoscience influencing the general public (homeopathy, the surge of meditation apps and methods, the supplement industry) then sure, Dennett is the odd man out. But from a hard science standpoint his is a hard philosophy to refute. No amount of "feeling" like there's some bigger or deeper meaning to it all changes the fact that consciousness is just a bunch of neurons firing in a biological co…
I think it's unfair of you to lump meditation with homeopathy. The latter is obviously pseudoscience but there are many studies backing the former's claims to reduce anxiety, depression, etc.
This is somewhat true, but the pseudoscience I was referring to in that case is that a lot of these apps and companies are marketing to a new wave of hipster types that think all natural foods and a hip new app can cure their depression when really an hour with a shrink and some reliable meds might be better for them...but no, these things are "unnatural" and "dangerous".
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#44> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
I don't think Dennett is denying that animals have rich inner lives, or that they can express basic desires to us. He's saying that their conscious experience is somehow fundamentally incomprehensible to us.
I'm not so sure. Maybe for an octopus, but as mammals we have fundamentally similar brains and neurology to many other mammals.
When I quiet my mind, look around me passively and simply experience the input of my senses, I can easily suppose that the experience I have in those moments is very similar to the experience of a dog or a chimp in a similar mental state. If I'm not using the higher functions of my brain such as language and only using those functions I share with other mammals, I don't see why I should expect my experience of them to be radically different.
Similarly, many mammals exhibit emotions and desires. We have those too and we evolved them from common ancestors. If a common ancestor of chimps and humans evolved these behaviors and we and chimps exhibit them, why should we necessarily expect the experience of them to be utterly and incomprehensibly different? Especially when many of the resulting behaviors in chimps and humans are so closely analogous and presumably also closely analogous to the behavior of our common ancestor? Surely any claim that we should expect them to be completely different or incomprehensible is the one that is extraordinary and needs to justify itself?
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's unfair of you to lump meditation with homeopathy. The latter is obviously pseudoscience but there are many studies backing the former's claims to reduce anxiety, depression, etc.
This is somewhat true, but the pseudoscience I was referring to in that case is that a lot of these apps and companies are marketing to a new wave of hipster types that think all natural foods and a hip new app can cure their depression when really an hour with a shrink and some reliable meds might be better for them...but no, these things are "unnatural" and "dangerous".
I've tried a couple of the more prominent ones (Headspace, 10% Happier) and I really did not find anything aimed particularly at the new age/hipster crowd. Maybe it's true of some of the rest.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#46The sword of not knowing cuts two ways. The so called hard problem of consciousness[1], where does "qualia" come from. We don't actually know if it is hard at all.
Maybe qualia arises trivially.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#47First problem: philosophers are not divided into two camps, so Rothman is misinformed. Aristotelianism is another. But let's return to these "two camps" for a moment. Typically, these two purported camps are some variation of dualism and elimnativism. Both ultimately rest on the Cartesian metaphysical legacy. Dualism comes in a variety of forms. Examples include property dualism (Searle, though he denies it) and panp…
One of the best papers I've read on cartesian duality was by Vaughan Pratt[1] on Chu spaces. It's a little bit of a slog for those not conversant in foundations, but it does help ground the conversation in terms that are more rigorous.
As an aside, Chu spaces also provide a semantics for linear logic and are useful in understanding concurrency.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's unfair of you to lump meditation with homeopathy. The latter is obviously pseudoscience but there are many studies backing the former's claims to reduce anxiety, depression, etc.
Meditation apps. People are clearly getting rich selling "mindfulness" to people who think they need it. Of course, what they really need to do is put their phone away and actually focus on, you know, nothing.
I think a great many people could benefit from mindfulness. Especially those who think they don't need it.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#49My take on zombies is that I don't think it's possible to construct a system that exhibits all the characteristics and behaviours of a mind without constructing a mind.
I go in circles in this. Yes - that argument seems watertight but I cannot make the 'hard problem' go away. The one thing Descartes got right is that there is a single existence proof for qualia. All the difficulties we have in defining them or either logically or experimentally finding evidence for their existence is irrelevant.
Solipsism strikes me as a more defensible position than consciousness as an emergent phenomenon in a purely materialist universe.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#50There's a lot of talk in here about whether consciousness is binary, whether it can turn on and off like a lightswitch, as if that's a good proxy for dualism vs. materialism. I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I'm a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being "weakly conscious" makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have…
> In my father's last months, I saw him medicated on morphine to the point of being near unconscious, and it's easy to imagine that he was having the same sort of weak experiences as I've had. None of this rattles my dualist intuitions at all. But if your consciousness is separate from your physical brain, how come pumping certain chemicals affect consciousness on a very fundamental level ? With your examples, you co…
This is the (one of the) difference(s) between property and substance dualism.
You can claim that mental properties and physical properties interact without claiming that they are ontologically the same thing, or that one supervenes on (i.e. is just a result of the behaviour of) the other.
There are ways around the problem of interaction for substance dualists too, but they often rely on ad hoc interventions like God guaranteeing that the two worlds always match up (occasionalism).