(Aug 2, 2024 06:00 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I was laying in bed last night pondering the ramifications of the de facto privacy of consciousness. The obvious fact that experience itself, of all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions, is nowhere to be found in the physical world. That we may be able to justifiably infer experiences in other persons based on their words and facial expressions, but never directly perceive those experiences as we do physical things. So I encountered this article this morning by Colin McGinn about why it might be that our consciousness is not an objective publicly existing phenomena. As a mysterian, Colin raises more questions than answers. But I found his thoughts quite provocative and deepening to my reverence for the mysteries of the mind.
https://www.colinmcginn.net/explaining-mental-privacy/
"The privacy of the mind is generally treated as a platitude, but it is seldom (if ever) asked what explains this platitude. Privacy here is best understood perceptually: states of mind are not perceptible by means of the senses. It is not denied that they may be subjects of legitimate inference, or even of interpretative seeing, but they are not objects of perception in the way the body is. I can see your facial features in a way I can’t see your thoughts or feelings or sensations.[1] These are hidden from me, directly accessible only to you. If consciousness is a stream, it is an invisible stream. The senses are defeated by the mind; the two do not work well together. But why is this the case? What accounts for the invisibility of the mind?"
And the external world itself is also only "visible" in a person's private phenomenal space. It obtains its ironic "mind-independent" classification via it being that part of consciousness
that is intersubjectively shared with other people. And by each individual mind being unable to control those "outer" events and circumstances through sheer "will" alone. (Introspective hallucinations do not injure the body; but extrospective hallucinations [sensory representations] can.)
IOW, it's disingenuous for some members of the materialist or anti-panpsychism community to imply that the objective environment is "manifesting" even without observers (as they sometimes occasionally and erroneously slash inconsistently do). When the actual consequences of that metaphysical view places the overall universe in the fix that McGinn explores below (i.e., matter normally exists in the "dark").
Colin McGinn: A more promising line of thought is that we are formulating the problem wrongly: we are presupposing that visibility is the norm and then fretting over why the mind doesn’t conform to the norm, but in fact, it is the other way about. Actually things are naturally invisible and what needs an explanation is why anything should be detectable by the senses. The question should be why the body is perceptually accessible. There is nothing surprising about the mind not being perceptible, since that is the default condition of the universe; what is surprising is local pockets of perceptibility—and even there the perceptibility may be glancing and superficial. We can imagine a version of Kantian idealism behind this view, or reflections on current physics and “dark matter”. The thought is that reality is inherently removed from our senses and what we say we see is just our own mode of representing it—sense data, mental constructions, subjective phantasms. Then it is simply par for the course that minds are not perceptible—since nothing is! Reality is inherently not set up for the senses, or the senses are not set up for it.
But I don't agree that mitigated panpsychism faces fatal problems, as he espouses in the excerpt below.
Colin McGinn: Is it that the raw materials of mind are themselves imperceptible, so that evolution has no choice but to render the mind imperceptible? A panpsychist might contend that the proto-mental aspects of reality that form the basis of the mind are by nature imperceptible entities, more so than atoms and the like. So there is really no alternative to invisible minds—the properties of the parts transmit themselves to the whole.
But this proposal also faces fatal objections. First, it can’t explain introspection: those primitive parts have to be capable of composing inwardly perceptible mental states–but how? Second, they raise the same question: why are they so radically imperceptible? Why does reality consist of both public and private objects?
Proto-experiences would merely seem to be "invisible" because at that level they would not be organized into a memory-based cognitive system that can identify and validate that each "is indeed there", presenting itself.
In contrast, a sophisticated brain reciprocally manipulates its complex manifestations to verify each other -- like there being an image of a house, that is followed by the audible thought of "That structure is the Smith's residence." The first appearance requires the succeeding one to provide meaning and to verify that it is showing. And that interplay between different sensory and introspection modes constantly continues in a regulated fashion.
I don't like the term "panpsychism", however, because it can be abused. I prefer "panphenomenalism" or something instead. But either places emphasis on how matter exists to itself rather than how the "
stripped of qualia" abstract descriptions of materialism and physics portray matter (to make the latter more useful).
David Chalmers: "Physical theory only characterizes its basic entities relationally, in terms of their causal and other relations to other entities. Basic particles, for instance, are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specified, to be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated by certain forces, and so on. Each entity is characterized by its relation to other entities, and so on forever. …The picture of the physical world that this yields is that of a giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this causation relates. Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on; but what is the thing that is doing the causing and combining? As Bertrand Russell notes, this is a matter about which physical theory is silent. (Russellian Monism)
And what undermines
epiphenomenalism -- that brain processes and verbal reports actually are aware of the supposedly causally impotent qualia and manifestations that are not supposed to be able to affect the physical structure -- highlights how matter does have internal states. Its own way of existing to itself that is different from the externalized and artificial descriptions of physics.
That said, though, there obviously is no science and set of principles for explaining and predicting what specifically would be transpiring with those internal states of matter -- the scheme or logic they adhere to. (
Why Science Will Never Explain Phenomenal Consciousness)
Aug 2, 2024 06:00 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 2, 2024 07:44 PM by Magical Realist.)
