Aug 16, 2016 03:02 AM
Tam Hunt - The Mind/Body Problem Revisited: An interview with UC Riverside professor of philosophy Eric Schwitzgebel
https://www.noozhawk.com/article/tam_hun...ted_080416
EXCERPT: [...] I interviewed Eric by email for my upcoming book, Deep Science: Further Essays in Philosophy, Science and Spirituality.
Tam Hunt: How do you define consciousness? Why does it matter to people who don’t make a living reading and writing journal articles, or the occasional blog post?
Eric Schwitzgebel: Consciousness, or conscious experience, is the stream of sensory experiences, emotional experiences, and conscious thoughts and imagery that we all experience most of the time. It’s your experience of what you see when you open your eyes and what you taste when you have a sip of tea. It’s what you experience when you close your eyes and think about going to the beach. It’s the sudden rush of anxiety you feel when a car swerves your direction on the road, or your feeling of quiet contentment as you relax after a long day. If you care about experiences of this sort — and of course you do! — then you care about consciousness.
TH: What is your philosophical orientation on the hard problem of consciousness, more generally known as the mind/body problem?
ES: Some beings clearly have conscious experiences: human beings, of course, and presumably most other animals with sophisticated brains. Other entities presumably do not have any conscious experiences: chunks of granite, bacteria, your laptop computer. What exactly is it that the former have that the latter lack, so that the former have consciousness and the latter don’t? Although many theories have been proposed, by both philosophers and scientists, there seems to be no good way to adjudicate among those theories.
TH: Do you have any doubts about materialism providing the best answer(s) to the philosophical problems of consciousness?
ES: If I had to place a bet on one broad type of approach to consciousness, I would bet on materialism, which is the view that everything in the universe, including our conscious experience, is ultimately composed of matter and energy, or forces and fields, of the sort described by fundamental physics; and in particular, materialism denies that there are immaterial souls of the sort posited by some religious theories.
Despite my materialist inclinations, however, I don’t think we can rule out alternative views. The main competitors are substance dualism (according to which there are immaterial souls in addition to material stuff), idealism (according to which there are only minds and their experiences and no mind-independent material world at all) and various views that compromise among these alternatives or reject all three alternatives.
Here’s one form of idealism: Maybe we are all just ideas in the mind of God. How do we know this is not so? Although that wouldn’t be my first guess about the nature of the universe, it does have a certain elegance as a basic cosmology, I think. This is not the kind of view that we can show to be false by building a large enough particle accelerator or an accurate enough brain imaging device. We can only evaluate this type of claim in a less straightforward way, and I think a certain amount of agnosticism about such matters makes sense.
TH: Which of the various modern and debated materialist theories of consciousness do you think have the most promise? And why have none of these theories gained very broad support yet?
ES: I’m afraid I’m skeptical of them all! I don’t have a favorite. They all seem to have tradeoffs of various sorts and to rest on assumptions that I don’t think we’re really in a position yet to evaluate....
The Definition of Death First published Fri Oct 26, 2007; substantive revision Tue Aug 9, 2016
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death-definition/
INTRODUCTION: The philosophical investigation of human death has focused on two overarching questions: (1) What is human death? and (2) How can we determine that it has occurred? The first question is ontological or conceptual. An answer to this question will consist of a definition (or conceptualization). Examples include death as the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning and human death as the irreversible loss of personhood. The second question is epistemological. A complete answer to this question will furnish both a general standard (or criterion) for determining that death has occurred and specific clinical tests to show whether the standard has been met in a given case. Examples of standards for human death are the traditional cardiopulmonary standard and the whole-brain standard. Insofar as clinical tests are primarily a medical concern, the present entry will not address them.
The philosophical issues concerning the correct definition and standard for human death are closely connected to other questions. How does the death of human beings relate to the death of other living things? Is human death simply an instance of organismic death, ultimately a matter of biology? If not, on what basis should it be defined? Whatever the answers to these questions, does death or at least human death have an essence—either de re or de dicto—entailing necessary and jointly sufficient conditions? Or do the varieties of death reveal only “family resemblance” relations? Are life and death exhaustive categories of those things that are ever animated, or do some individuals fall into an ontological neutral zone between life and death? Finally, how do our deaths relate, conceptually, to our essence and identity as human persons?
For the most part, such questions did not clamor for public attention until well into the twentieth century. (For historical background, see Pernick 1999 and Capron 1999, 120–124.) Sufficient destruction of the brain, including the brainstem, ensured respiratory failure leading quickly to terminal cardiac arrest. Conversely, prolonged cardiopulmonary failure inevitably led to total, irreversible loss of brain function. With the invention of mechanical respirators in the 1950s, however, it became possible for a previously lethal extent of brain damage to coexist with continued cardiopulmonary functioning, sustaining the functioning of other organs. Was such a patient alive or dead? The widespread dissemination in the 1960s of such technologies as mechanical respirators and defibrillators to restore cardiac function highlighted the possibility of separating cardiopulmonary and neurological functioning. Quite rapidly the questions of what constituted human death and how we could determine its occurrence had emerged as issues both philosophically rich and urgent.
Various practical concerns provided further impetus for addressing these issues. (Reflecting these concerns is a landmark 1968 report published by a Harvard Medical School committee led by physician Henry Beecher (Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School 1968).) Soaring medical expenditures provoked concerns about prolonged, possibly futile treatment of patients who presented some but not all of the traditionally recognized indicators of death. Certainly, it would be permissible to discontinue life-supports if these patients were dead. Concurrent interest in the evolving techniques of organ transplantation motivated physicians not to delay unnecessarily in determining that a patient had died. Removing vital organs as quickly as possible would improve the prospect of saving lives. But removing vital organs of living patients would cause their deaths, violating both laws against homicide and the widely accepted moral principle prohibiting the intentional killing of innocent human beings (see the entry on doing vs. allowing harm). To be sure, there were—as there are now—individuals who held that procuring organs from, thereby killing, irreversibly unconscious patients who had consented to donate is a legitimate exception to this moral principle (see the entry on voluntary euthanasia), but this judgment strikes many as a radical departure from common morality. In any event, in view of concerns about the possibility of killing in the course of organ procurement, physicians wanted clear legal guidance for determining when someone had died.
The remainder of this entry takes a dialectical form, focusing primarily on ideas and arguments rather than on history and individuals. It begins with an approach that nearly achieved consensus status after these issues came under the spotlight in the twentieth century: the whole-brain approach. (Most of what are here referred to as “approaches” include a standard and a corresponding definition of death; a few offer more radical suggestions for how to understand human death.) The discussion proceeds, in turn, to the higher-brain approach, to an updated cardiopulmonary approach, and to several more radical approaches. The discussion of each approach examines its chief assertions, its answers to questions identified above, leading arguments in its favor, and its chief difficulties. The entry as a whole is intended to identify the main philosophical issues connected with the definition and determination of human death, leading approaches that have been developed to address these issues, and principal strengths and difficulties of these visions viewed as competitors....
https://www.noozhawk.com/article/tam_hun...ted_080416
EXCERPT: [...] I interviewed Eric by email for my upcoming book, Deep Science: Further Essays in Philosophy, Science and Spirituality.
Tam Hunt: How do you define consciousness? Why does it matter to people who don’t make a living reading and writing journal articles, or the occasional blog post?
Eric Schwitzgebel: Consciousness, or conscious experience, is the stream of sensory experiences, emotional experiences, and conscious thoughts and imagery that we all experience most of the time. It’s your experience of what you see when you open your eyes and what you taste when you have a sip of tea. It’s what you experience when you close your eyes and think about going to the beach. It’s the sudden rush of anxiety you feel when a car swerves your direction on the road, or your feeling of quiet contentment as you relax after a long day. If you care about experiences of this sort — and of course you do! — then you care about consciousness.
TH: What is your philosophical orientation on the hard problem of consciousness, more generally known as the mind/body problem?
ES: Some beings clearly have conscious experiences: human beings, of course, and presumably most other animals with sophisticated brains. Other entities presumably do not have any conscious experiences: chunks of granite, bacteria, your laptop computer. What exactly is it that the former have that the latter lack, so that the former have consciousness and the latter don’t? Although many theories have been proposed, by both philosophers and scientists, there seems to be no good way to adjudicate among those theories.
TH: Do you have any doubts about materialism providing the best answer(s) to the philosophical problems of consciousness?
ES: If I had to place a bet on one broad type of approach to consciousness, I would bet on materialism, which is the view that everything in the universe, including our conscious experience, is ultimately composed of matter and energy, or forces and fields, of the sort described by fundamental physics; and in particular, materialism denies that there are immaterial souls of the sort posited by some religious theories.
Despite my materialist inclinations, however, I don’t think we can rule out alternative views. The main competitors are substance dualism (according to which there are immaterial souls in addition to material stuff), idealism (according to which there are only minds and their experiences and no mind-independent material world at all) and various views that compromise among these alternatives or reject all three alternatives.
Here’s one form of idealism: Maybe we are all just ideas in the mind of God. How do we know this is not so? Although that wouldn’t be my first guess about the nature of the universe, it does have a certain elegance as a basic cosmology, I think. This is not the kind of view that we can show to be false by building a large enough particle accelerator or an accurate enough brain imaging device. We can only evaluate this type of claim in a less straightforward way, and I think a certain amount of agnosticism about such matters makes sense.
TH: Which of the various modern and debated materialist theories of consciousness do you think have the most promise? And why have none of these theories gained very broad support yet?
ES: I’m afraid I’m skeptical of them all! I don’t have a favorite. They all seem to have tradeoffs of various sorts and to rest on assumptions that I don’t think we’re really in a position yet to evaluate....
The Definition of Death First published Fri Oct 26, 2007; substantive revision Tue Aug 9, 2016
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death-definition/
INTRODUCTION: The philosophical investigation of human death has focused on two overarching questions: (1) What is human death? and (2) How can we determine that it has occurred? The first question is ontological or conceptual. An answer to this question will consist of a definition (or conceptualization). Examples include death as the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning and human death as the irreversible loss of personhood. The second question is epistemological. A complete answer to this question will furnish both a general standard (or criterion) for determining that death has occurred and specific clinical tests to show whether the standard has been met in a given case. Examples of standards for human death are the traditional cardiopulmonary standard and the whole-brain standard. Insofar as clinical tests are primarily a medical concern, the present entry will not address them.
The philosophical issues concerning the correct definition and standard for human death are closely connected to other questions. How does the death of human beings relate to the death of other living things? Is human death simply an instance of organismic death, ultimately a matter of biology? If not, on what basis should it be defined? Whatever the answers to these questions, does death or at least human death have an essence—either de re or de dicto—entailing necessary and jointly sufficient conditions? Or do the varieties of death reveal only “family resemblance” relations? Are life and death exhaustive categories of those things that are ever animated, or do some individuals fall into an ontological neutral zone between life and death? Finally, how do our deaths relate, conceptually, to our essence and identity as human persons?
For the most part, such questions did not clamor for public attention until well into the twentieth century. (For historical background, see Pernick 1999 and Capron 1999, 120–124.) Sufficient destruction of the brain, including the brainstem, ensured respiratory failure leading quickly to terminal cardiac arrest. Conversely, prolonged cardiopulmonary failure inevitably led to total, irreversible loss of brain function. With the invention of mechanical respirators in the 1950s, however, it became possible for a previously lethal extent of brain damage to coexist with continued cardiopulmonary functioning, sustaining the functioning of other organs. Was such a patient alive or dead? The widespread dissemination in the 1960s of such technologies as mechanical respirators and defibrillators to restore cardiac function highlighted the possibility of separating cardiopulmonary and neurological functioning. Quite rapidly the questions of what constituted human death and how we could determine its occurrence had emerged as issues both philosophically rich and urgent.
Various practical concerns provided further impetus for addressing these issues. (Reflecting these concerns is a landmark 1968 report published by a Harvard Medical School committee led by physician Henry Beecher (Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School 1968).) Soaring medical expenditures provoked concerns about prolonged, possibly futile treatment of patients who presented some but not all of the traditionally recognized indicators of death. Certainly, it would be permissible to discontinue life-supports if these patients were dead. Concurrent interest in the evolving techniques of organ transplantation motivated physicians not to delay unnecessarily in determining that a patient had died. Removing vital organs as quickly as possible would improve the prospect of saving lives. But removing vital organs of living patients would cause their deaths, violating both laws against homicide and the widely accepted moral principle prohibiting the intentional killing of innocent human beings (see the entry on doing vs. allowing harm). To be sure, there were—as there are now—individuals who held that procuring organs from, thereby killing, irreversibly unconscious patients who had consented to donate is a legitimate exception to this moral principle (see the entry on voluntary euthanasia), but this judgment strikes many as a radical departure from common morality. In any event, in view of concerns about the possibility of killing in the course of organ procurement, physicians wanted clear legal guidance for determining when someone had died.
The remainder of this entry takes a dialectical form, focusing primarily on ideas and arguments rather than on history and individuals. It begins with an approach that nearly achieved consensus status after these issues came under the spotlight in the twentieth century: the whole-brain approach. (Most of what are here referred to as “approaches” include a standard and a corresponding definition of death; a few offer more radical suggestions for how to understand human death.) The discussion proceeds, in turn, to the higher-brain approach, to an updated cardiopulmonary approach, and to several more radical approaches. The discussion of each approach examines its chief assertions, its answers to questions identified above, leading arguments in its favor, and its chief difficulties. The entry as a whole is intended to identify the main philosophical issues connected with the definition and determination of human death, leading approaches that have been developed to address these issues, and principal strengths and difficulties of these visions viewed as competitors....