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I neither recognize in my discourse a sermon targeted at the choir (our psalms are way past this), nor do I feel an obligation on my part to convince you. I don

by mekoka 2y ago

I neither recognize in my discourse a sermon targeted at the choir (our psalms are way past this), nor do I feel an obligation on my part to convince you. I don't even register as a blame my failure to communicate my "belief" to you, especially since you say that you were already acquainted with those arguments, which you've looked into in the past, but also failed then to integrate. I doubt that I'd fare any better than your past attempts. For that matter, I also doubt that you're my target audience. But that's totally fine. I'm indeed interested to blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I don't see much value in debating the subject to the point of sophistry. Philosophy is not my day job. My interest in it is as a tool that informs a practical orientation. Does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary. To me this is practical. If what you're after is ironclad proof, you won't find it and personally I don't see the practical point. Opposing views to the knowledge argument take two general forms. Either they deny the distinction between phenomenal experience and conceptual knowing (e.g. Dennett). Or they concede that divide, but posit that phenomenal experience could still be physical in nature, but built into this is a requirement to account today, for some unknown property of matter, of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover (e.g. Alvin). I personally see either as a cop-out. You're free to assign them the value you see fit and even to think that they successfully reduce the idealist intuition to mere beliefs. I think I recognize glimpses of the tangent the discussion is taking and would rather avoid venturing in ever speculative terrains, that hinge on hopes that some day, some big reveal in physics will be retrofitted to what is currently a baseless, hasty, and problematic assumption. From experience, this tends to drag on and people interested in that sort of exercises tend to already have a somewhat significant, even if tacit, commitment to materialism. No argument will be sufficient, as new pseudo-counters are sought out to justify the hold out. I think it's best for me to conclude this exchange here. I'll echo the O.P.'s suggested paths of exploration, books/articles/videos by Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman, who contrary to me, have invested copious amounts of energy to make the modern views of idealism accessible. Their arguments go into details about what I've only evoked as bullet points throughout the thread. They attack the subject from physics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience, and sometimes even venture into the spiritual (why not, if consciousness is indeed fundamental). Thank you for an interesting discussion. I hope you find the answers you're looking for.

mannykannot 2y ago
Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness. Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion. While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism. Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2] Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here. As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.) If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3] Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition. Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy. Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism. I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479264 [2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners. [3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)

by mekoka 2y ago

mannykannot 2y ago

Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness. Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion. While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism. Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2] Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here. As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.) If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3] Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition. Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy. Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism. I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479264 [2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners. [3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)