I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.
All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.'
In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical.
So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.
>There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.
This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense.
Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be?
Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical.
Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected.
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Consciousness%3A%20eliminativism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...
We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234
I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel).
I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness.
Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.
I've long-described myself as an eliminativist about everything but consciousness :) I think there were some really interesting attempts to save classic architectures that were purpose-built to save the folk conception (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444310498 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443104...), but ultimately I think we don't have the sort of neural architectures that support such a view.
Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2 https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2
Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.
The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met.
The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification?
Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually...
It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular.
All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.
I should add that I’m agnostic as to the actual reality of things, and a perspective that has felt useful to me is to remind myself that the fields of science are a map, and that there are portions of the map that are just completely undefined. We know there’s a terrain to explore, but haven’t made much progress in increasing the fidelity of that portion of the map. What I do know is that the fundamental Christian version of beliefs leaves a particularly shaped imprint on the psyche, and my relationship with what I thought myself to be started shifting/expanding when I started diving deeper into these unexamined “mystical” notions and having those notions confront the scientific view. That confrontation is what leaves me agnostic.
As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence.
Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable.
Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers.
Looks like a good thread. Thanks.
So this leads down to some interesting consequences.
If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?"
The conclusion from this view must be one of two:
1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'.
2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with.
A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?
I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature.
Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.
> Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red?
Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention.
The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand.
If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red.
Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested:
https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/ https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/
> you have caused them to actually perceive the color red
Perhaps pedantic, but I'd argue there is no perception going on, since the senses are not involved.
> the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand
To me the important part is this: knowledge of the experience of redness can be transferred to a someone, without them going through the process of seeing redness, but purely by means of changes to their neural states. Framed this way, it is not so difficult to swallow that similar neural changes could also happen in response to reading or being told about seeing the colour red.
I don't think it's pedantic, semantics are absolutely necessary for talking about this kind of thing precisely. I use the word perception to describe certain mental phenomena that we take as usually occurring in response to stimuli: sights, smells, etc. I'm not certain I totally understand your definition, but it sounds like you use the term to describe a type of process where sensory organs and the brain interact with the rest of the physical world to create mental phenomena—the same phenomena that I would call a perception. So because there aren't actual objects interacting with the sensory organs, then direct neural stimulation of the brain isn't a perception under your definition.
I can see where you are coming from with the idea that you could trigger those neural changes through some other process. It's an interesting idea, and I wonder if it could be true in practice somehow. Regardless, I'd still argue that you are manipulating the brain in one way or another to create a firsthand experience of seeing the color red. If you can explain redness fully in terms of physical systems and processes, then somebody having that firsthand experience for the first time shouldn't be thinking "oh, so that's what it is like to actually see red."
If these are purely physical processes, then that knowledge should have come along with your complete knowledge of all of physics. You should also know what it is like to have experiences that your brain doesn't have the hardware for, like a bat's experience of echolocation. It seems like an unfairly high bar to clear; how could you understand an experience without having it firsthand? But if you are committed to believing that conscious experience is a physical thing, then I think you are also committed to believing that it can be fully described in physical terms. Physicalists do have arguments that try to explain how you could pass that bar in theory or dodge the commitment altogether, but personally I think those arguments are pretty weak.
Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant?
The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?"
Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.
I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat.
It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves.
That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.
Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient?
Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive?
How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died?
I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.
I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero.
"Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince.
There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance.
But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.
Do you consider non-persons have an "I"? I presume you do, because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to deserve rights.
In that case, the question is still valid: how would you convince the non-person "I" that the "I" is dead?
(I can see how the original "person I" might be dead after such a change, but it doesn't really make the premise invalid.)
No, I don't think nonpersons have an "I," because that requires a level of self-reflective awareness that's incompatible with their nature. Being or not being a "thou" is a characteristic of persons, which is why I said it's a category error.
Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.
I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.
I don't intend to convince you or get convinced. To me, the answer depends on the purpose of the question.
I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?
In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?
I think an "it" can have rights. I'll go back to the horse. It has a basic natural right not to be beaten because it's a creature that can experience pain, not because it's an "I."
The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.
"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)
Are you sure this is a simulation of life? All the story is talking about is longer nerves, brain still connected to the body, it's just slightly further away.
The brain has been severed from the body, and a new type of connection spliced in to replace it. Even if this happens one connection at a time, by the time none of the originals are remaining, all that remains is a simulation of life.
Then you got my gist.
No, it's just your syntax is unparseable. Try using more words. Try breaking some of your sentences into multiple sentences.
> If the job of the philosopher is to form questions, why are the questions he's begging so debasing of a commonsense status of the individual and substitution of the corporate?
"If the job of the philosopher is to form questions" is a good clause, but "the questions he's begging" is a confounding noun-phrase. Firstly, because I am not sure what "begging" means in its position, here. You said he was forming questions, but now he's begging them? Or are you suggesting that he begs the question--a frequently misused and almost universally misunderstood rhetorical fallacy? I personally shy away from using this idiom, and I certainly don't understand its use here.
The main thrust of your question--"why are the questions so debasing of status"--simply doesn't parse. How does a question debase status? Does it impugn some aspect of the subject? What status, anyway? Social status? Battery charge status?
What is a "commonsense status?" I have never heard of such a thing. Is it like marital status?
"...and substitution of the corporate" is an entirely mind-boggling clause. Substitution of what with what? Not clear. Substitution of the individual with the corporate? Are we stuffing blue jeans and boots with incorporation papers filed in Delaware? Are we removing suggestion boxes from front offices, and instead accepting only faxed complaints from others' back offices? I have no idea what is going on in your view of the world.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
> you got my gist
No, I 100% did not.
My introduction to Daniel Dennett in undergraduate philosophy left me with only a faint impression of the guy's "brain in a vat" thought experiment. I think it's a reasonably accessible question about how we relate to our perceptions, eg are we looking at things, or are we only thinking about them with all-encompasing clarity? How much of what we see is simply the noise of our sensing apparatus, or an entirely false signal of our sensing apparatus?
A decent respite from the sort of existential vertigo this induces might be "The Construction of Social Reality" in which John Searle reminds us that we can easily take a shared external reality as axiomatic, eg "There is ice and snow at the top of Mount Everest."
Anyway, for my sake, please make more sense. Maybe re-read some juvenile literature and remember what it is to explain things plainly to minds steeped in other contexts.
I don't think there's any assumption, and later on he explores your point of view as well:
> The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once.
But this also has problems that he gets into. If the brain and body are both "you", and one is destroyed, do you not exist anymore? Do you half exist? What if your brain gets a new body or your body gets a new brain, or both at the same time? I thought the whole point of this story was to challenge the assumption that your brain and body are both "you" by imagining different scenarios that make that difficult to believe, not to just assume it isn't true. I also didn't think it made any arguments or conclusions, it's just following an interesting thread and seeing where it leads. It's supposed to be thought-provoking, not persuasive.
> My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition?
There's a text adventure game that has exactly that as a game mechanic. I don't remember what it is called, I want to say it's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" but reading about it on Wikipedia makes no mention of this.