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John Searle's "easy" solution to the mind/body problem

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#2
Syne Offline
No, he's just trying to explain it away rather than explain it. He admits "we don't know the details", "it's immensely complicated, we don't know, in fact, how the brain causes consciousness", but goes on to beg the question, by just assuming it's all the brain. That's presuming the conclusion, not any kind of explanation or even the pretense of an argument. He's essentially just saying "forget about any argument that counters mine." That's "easy" because it's lazy and fallacious.

The mind/body problem exists because we can't, as he admits, explain how the latter would give rise to the former. And all his talk about inherited vocabulary is just an appeal to modernity, without any substance to justify it. The mind/body problem is not just an artifact of past thinking, it's the current chasm between experience and science.
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#3
C C Offline
(May 12, 2021 02:18 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: It certainly sounds easy. Do you agree? Specifically, is mind just a higher level of description for brain processes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXXK3VGSuI

Unlike the "hard problem of consciousness" that specifically focuses on experience and it origins, the classic "mind-body problem" collectively addresses memory, learning, recognition, understanding, body control, attention, anticipation, etc. Most of which can be correlated to dynamic, interactive structure and overt procedures without untied strings or deep explanatory discontinuities remaining afterwards. 

Since there are so many of these performers crowded under the circus of "mind", the magician will usually get lost in the cover of that majority. Few onlookers in the audience will be perceptive enough to notice that the acrobats, elephants, lions, clowns and other acts don't belong to a special category in which the performance is like a spell that conjures dissimilar events not composed of the magician and his/her actions.
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#4
Syne Offline
(May 12, 2021 08:04 AM)C C Wrote: Unlike the "hard problem of consciousness" that specifically focuses on experience and it origins, the classic "mind-body problem" collectively addresses memory, learning, recognition, understanding, body control, attention, anticipation, etc. Most of which can be correlated to dynamic, interactive structure and overt procedures without untied strings or deep explanatory discontinuities remaining afterwards. 

Since there are so many of these performers crowded under the circus of "mind", the magician will usually get lost in the cover of that majority. Few onlookers in the audience will be perceptive enough to notice that the acrobats, elephants, lions, clowns and other acts don't belong to a special category in which the performance is like a spell that conjures dissimilar events not composed of the magician and his/her actions.

That's some classic arm waving right there.
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#5
Magical Realist Offline
(May 12, 2021 08:04 AM)C C Wrote:
(May 12, 2021 02:18 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: It certainly sounds easy. Do you agree? Specifically, is mind just a higher level of description for brain processes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXXK3VGSuI

Unlike the "hard problem of consciousness" that specifically focuses on experience and it origins, the classic "mind-body problem" collectively addresses memory, learning, recognition, understanding, body control, attention, anticipation, etc. Most of which can be correlated to dynamic, interactive structure and overt procedures without untied strings or deep explanatory discontinuities remaining afterwards. 

Since there are so many of these performers crowded under the circus of "mind", the magician will usually get lost in the cover of that majority. Few onlookers in the audience will be perceptive enough to notice that the acrobats, elephants, lions, clowns and other acts don't belong to a special category in which the performance is like a spell that conjures dissimilar events not composed of the magician and his/her actions.

It will be interesting to see, if we live that long, what explanation science will come up with for all these mental states that fall under the umbrella of "mind". What will be passed off as explained well enough? Will it satisfy us as much as say the biological explanation for life does? Or will it only serve to emphasize the total separateness of the problem of consciousness/experience as a core issue that is not even getting addressed?
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#6
C C Offline
(May 12, 2021 09:31 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:
(May 12, 2021 08:04 AM)C C Wrote:
(May 12, 2021 02:18 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: It certainly sounds easy. Do you agree? Specifically, is mind just a higher level of description for brain processes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXXK3VGSuI

Unlike the "hard problem of consciousness" that specifically focuses on experience and it origins, the classic "mind-body problem" collectively addresses memory, learning, recognition, understanding, body control, attention, anticipation, etc. Most of which can be correlated to dynamic, interactive structure and overt procedures without untied strings or deep explanatory discontinuities remaining afterwards. 

Since there are so many of these performers crowded under the circus of "mind", the magician will usually get lost in the cover of that majority. Few onlookers in the audience will be perceptive enough to notice that the acrobats, elephants, lions, clowns and other acts don't belong to a special category in which the performance is like a spell that conjures dissimilar events not composed of the magician and his/her actions.

It will be interesting to see, if we live that long, what explanation science will come up with for all these mental states that fall under the umbrella of "mind". What will be passed off as explained well enough? Will it satisfy us as much as say the biological explanation for life does? Or will it only serve to emphasize the total separateness of the problem of consciousness/experience as a core issue that is not even getting addressed?

The first robots that tried to walk were clumsy. They gradually got better, now we've got the Boston Dynamics droids with amazing agility.

Computers have memory, they can recognize human speech, analyze images, etc -- not as well as people yet, but that too incrementally improves.

Just as the behavior and cognitive abilities of smart machines correspond to operations and structural configurations in a technological substrate -- the abilities of humans slotted under the "mental" label have Searle's appeal to "biological processes" as a provenance.

Even experience doubtless has neural correlates (NCCs). But unlike life and those other "mental attributes", these manifestations don't have anything posited about matter in physics to developmentally fall out of, much less the biological level that Searle appeals to (which ultimately involves electrochemical activity). NCCs would seem to be like magicians conjuring a radical novelty that isn't even publicly detectable by either bare observation of brain tissue or instrument detection.

To avoid strong dualism and the appearance of magic or brute emergence by neural patterns performing the equivalent of correct "spells", there's no explanatory direction for a physicalist orientation other than attributing an intrinsic, proto-phenomenal character of existence to matter. No longer being restricted to treating matter as abstract form or a mapping of extrinsic relationships and measurements (causal structure). That's why there's an eruption of thinkers supporting offshoots of Russellian monism and panpsychism -- they see the writing on the wall.

Which does not mean that an elaborate discipline will ever be developed for that "answer" beyond just noting the provenance, and a descendant of something like IIT providing a supposed quantification of experience for systems.

It doesn't mean that such is ultimately what's going on, just that it's the only practical route for science or science-revolving philosophy, given the anti-extraordinary presuppositions it is bound to. It's either that or continue to neglect slash dodge the subject area. (Which I feel that researchers or their surrogate philosophical spokespeople have acquired too much ego in a scientism vein to do anymore. The public, the sheep, have become aware of the "hard problem", so that it grows into a potential embarrassment.)

Margaret Mead: "The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer."
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#7
Syne Offline
(May 13, 2021 12:57 AM)C C Wrote: The first robots that tried to walk were clumsy. They gradually got better, now we've got the Boston Dynamics droids with amazing agility.

Computers have memory, they can recognize human speech, analyze images, etc -- not as well as people yet, but that too incrementally improves. 
Ah, the boundless hope of scientism. Just wait long enough and everything they claim will inevitably come true. The fly in the ointment is that it isn't a valid argument now.
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