(Jul 13, 2018 10:19 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Wow! Just what I needed. I'll check it out.
I see that Susan Blackmore still has the psychedelic hair.
She's right that if consciousness is "conjured" by computation or brutely emerges by some correct electrochemical dance, then that's obfuscated dualism. Such simply replaces the idea of a soul entering the brain when the fetus is mature enough with the idea of experience associating itself with the brain when the algorithmic processing is complex enough. Either way it's a sort of "alien to the formal system" add-on which doesn't fall out of or incrementally develop from the already existing affairs and properties.
All three parties, however, suffer from the "what it's like" myopia and fixation on qualities. Experience boils down to "manifestation of anything" regardless of whether classified as subjective or objective, abstract or concrete. In contrast to the opposite "not even nothingness" of non-consciousness. Without that more basic acknowledgement of "manifestation" even those against panpsychism wind-up sounding like they are referring to the supposed quantitative, third-person / objective events as if they are ubiquitously appearing throughout the cosmos (
monistic idealism) with or without the introspective, first-person / subjective events. There's no evidence of either without
presentation of visual, auditory, tactile, etc phenomena and other possible types of alien sensation modes -- along with the conceptual understanding that something is indeed there (cognition).
"Panpsychism" or "panexperientialism" doesn't have to go by such labels. In a physicalism context it would actually convert to referencing the legitimate ontological "substance or principle" of the world which the mechanistic relationships are manipulating and which the measurements and abstract explanatory networks of science do not address (methodologically avoiding metaphysics). Peter Unger aptly labels such "the non-structural components of reality". With Michael Lockwood clarifying that we might have epistemological access to the nature of that "intrinsic stuff" after all. As the figurative "paint" which the dynamic connections of brain structure mold into the organ's fictional and non-fictional manifestations of personal imagination, body states, and of the external environment.
James Ladyman:
Peter Unger also argues that our knowledge of the world is purely structural and that qualia are the non-structural components of reality. Jackson argues that science only reveals the causal / relational properties of physical objects, and that “we know next to nothing about the intrinsic nature of the world. We know only its causal cum relational nature”. [Rae] Langton argues that science only reveals the extrinsic properties of physical objects, and both then argue that their intrinsic natures, and hence the intrinsic nature of the world, are epistemically inaccessible. Jackson points out that this inference can be blocked if the natures of objects and their intrinsic properties are identified with their relational or extrinsic properties, but argues that this makes a mystery of what it is that stands in the causal relations. --Structural Realism ... Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Michael Lockwood:
Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity. (1998, p.88, “The Enigma of Sentience”, in Hameroff, S.R. et al, 1998, 83–95)
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Jul 12, 2018 08:59 PM
