…a paradigm where ‘explanation’ means something different than the modern usage of the term.
I wrote this in response to a question about supernatural events but I think it applies to Chalmers’ ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness‘ also:
Me: Who said I was unattached and objective? Find me a single example of a supernatural event.
Other guy: Jesus’ resurrection.
Me: Perfect example. We’ll assume that Jesus’ resurrection was a real event, witnessed by millions. A team of doctors pronounce him dead as a doorknob. He turns blue, rigor mortis sets in, and the doctors take his liver and heart for transplant patients so we know he’s as dead as they come. No tricks.
Now, the next morning, a team of scientists representing every known discipline with every possible piece of testing equipment starts monitoring the cadaver. They have EEG, MRI, CAT, mass spectrometers, chemical analysis teams, scales, x-ray machines, scopes up his ass and forced through his urethra, down his throat, in his ears and nose and around his eyes up his femoral artery, cloud chambers to measure the particle interactions, and a cop with the insta cocaine detector kit snipping bits of his hair at 2 second intervals to make sure his carcass doesn’t commit a crime. After watching the decaying flesh vigilantly all morning, suddenly the systems reanimate. Brain waves start registering, a heart regrows and starts pumping, the liver develops and the gall-bladder fills with bile. Jesus takes a breath. Witnessing the monitoring devices with a mix of awe, fascination and horror, the eyelids flicker and Jesus sits up. The cop’s test turns positive and Jesus nonchalantly waves his hand and the test turns negative.
What do you think the scientists do?
Being shocked at the resurrection, they may call it a miracle, but does that mean they just drop their equipment and regard the recording of the event as useless? Not if they are worth a shit as scientists. First, if they do their science well, they acknowledge that the scientific model which predicts that no person will ever rise from the dead failed to predict the event. Second, they begin to assemble the data of what happened to the body. The event happened. The data recorded every single change that swept through every single atom in his body at 2 million fps. The data was recorded at the atomic, molecular, organ/body component, and room levels of resolution.
At that point, the model requires revision to accommodate the new forces and interactions the crowd witnessed. Suddenly, those events are possible in the universe. Some force exists which can do those things. That force was measured, even if indirectly through effect. As part of what is possible, it is natural. If it can happen, it is within the rules of existence. The word natural by definition includes it. The word miracle has been subsumed by a new paradigm. It has been emptied of use in language.
I don’t have time to answer the likely objection of “But we use the word, therefore it has meaning!!!!!!!one eleven!!11!!!!!! but to note that it is undone by its own argument.
Words have meaning. Words that simply mean “What just happened dude?” are of little use to people who can tell you. Just because an event is poorly understood or unexplained, doesn’t and actually can’t mean that the event is unexplainable. We don’t have any fucking idea what gravity is but we don’t call it supernatural.
Link to original
Chalmers’ question, stripped of the flourishes, asks only, “why is there quality to experience?” but uses the word quality as a supernatural term. Once the supernatural is run through the filter that I ran the resurrection through above, the question becomes a simple question with a simple answer. We assign quality by assigning names. Red is not an intrinsic value, it is assigned by the modeling apparatus in our head.
I think Chalmers would deny that he is using “qualia” or “quale” as a supernatural term. He talks about the possibility that we might need some new physics, but he doesn’t suggest that there is anything outside of what physics could study.
I never could make sense of “qualia”. Some philosophers have said that we receive “sense data”, and that we perceive the world by logical analysis of that sense-data. It is said that this sense-data idea comes from John Locke. To me, that seems like a misreading of Locke. I never could make sense of that sense-data idea, and I suspect that the qualia idea is based on an elaboration of sense-data.
J.J. Gibson’s ideas on direct perception make more sense to me.
Haven’t read JJ Gibson. Thanks for the reference.
And I’m sure Chalmers would disagree with the label. But the question of subjective experience is either one which can be explained, explains or neither. He posits the question in such a way as to eliminate answers which conform to one of the first two, leaving only neither as allowable. Well, then, any answer which seeks to explain won’t be valid. But he breaks his rule by listing the easy problems. They are explanations. Schematics as a matter of fact. So if he wants a similar answer to his hard problem, it’s not hard nor a problem. He doesn’t though.
My take on qualia is this (BWE can try to fit it into his paradigm :)):
“Consciousness” doesn’t make sense as an “intransitive” phenomenon – we are always concious “of something” even if that “something” is one’s own awareness that there isn’t anything to be conscious of!
In other words, consciousness always has content. And I suggest that the content consists of a set of programs for action with regard to something, even if the program for action is as simple as a saccadic eye movement towards it, or as complex as the various programs of action that might be appropriate for “red things”, with the simulated outputs of those programs fed back in as inputs.
I don’t expect that to make sense, as it stands, but I’m just putting my stake in the ground, so as to speak 🙂
I don’t think Chalmers made sense of qualia either. IIRC (it’s been a long time) in The Conscious Mind he concluded qualia and consciousness are real, and irreducible to physical phenomena – yet also accepted that the physical universe as described by mathematical physics is causally closed, and consciousness and qualia have no causal relationship to events the physical world, including the actions of our bodies, whatsoever. He accepted that a non-conscious zombie twin of Reciprocating Bill with a physical structure identical to my own is possible, and would behave identically to the conscious RB, right down to the verbal behavior of claiming to be conscious.
That all was very unsatisfactory both to me and to my zombie twin (so he says).
I haven’t read Gibson, but enjoy Hilary Putnam, who also characterizes the “qualia” move, and the notion of that we experience “sense data” rather that objects, as a mistake.
Which is where I was going with the OP. I C&P’ed it somewhat hastily. I blush to admit I didn’t make a strong enough effort to tie it all together. If the HPoC is hard in the sense he claimed, that it couldn’t be explained, then he used the word ‘explained’ in the same way as people use the word ‘supernatural’. It is a category error of some sort.
I don’t think that ended up being a functional distinction that added anything if memory serves. (which it doesn’t always) We can consider objects or sense data as equivalent in any but the most abstract cases which is exactly where it doesn’t matter. Does that make sense?
I wonder. The transitive character sounds right, but yours doesn’t resemble a description of the shifting contents of my consciousness at this moment. I’m conscious of my body and it’s lopsided deployment in my chair, the objects before me (laptop, table, mug), my hands, a slight degree of fatigue across my forehead, the whirring of the refrigerator compressor in the adjacent kitchen, night sounds, the cat pawing at the front door screen (now a recollection of same), a passing rehersal of time spent squeezed under my car earlier this afternoon (where I discovered the absence of a caliper slide pin…), and my ongoing considerations of the wisdom of using car until I can obtain the needed part. And of course this passage.
Stuff like that. I’m sure the sort of reentrant processing of motor plans (etc.) you describe in part underlies consciousness in some way, yet I don’t find that descriptions of that re-entrant activity at all resemble descriptions of experience itself, which mostly consist of the furniture of the earth and the buzz of being a living person. It’s an intriguing disjunction of domains of knowledge that is likely to persist regardless of gains in neuroscience.
(Just thinking aloud)
Okay, since everyone is just batting around a few ideas, it seems to me we perceive consciousness, like time, through changes of state. In fact, it seems that the basic operating principle of our senses is the detection of changes in state. The saccadic eye movements referred to above are the process of scanning for points or lines or boundaries in the visual field which are the change from one color to another, from darker to lighter, in other words, a change of state.
We observe these changes of state, both internally and externally by the changes of state they induce in our senses and nervous system,
As an aside, it reminded me of the illustration I have used before concerning the nature of information. A dendrochronologist looking at tree-rings can extract a significant amount of information about the history of the plant and the environment in which it grew. Some people explain this as the tree containing something called information. Yet what happens is that light reflected from the tree-trunk enters the observer’s eye and induces changes of state in the photoreceptors in the retina, which induce a cascade of electrochemical changes that propagate along the optic nerve and into the brain. At this level, as I think John Wilkins would point out, all we have is physical causation. So whence information and, by extension, consciousness?.
Clearly, explaining, conscious perception by a little ‘me’ inside my brain observing all this sensory data doesn’t help. It’s like the tiny alien inside the head of a sort of android in the movie Men In Black watching the world through an array of tiny monitor screens, it just invites an infinite regress. The question is, can we explain consciousness by some sort of internal, self-referential model. Is it an accidental or inevitable byproduct of our capacity for modeling at various levels of abstraction? Am I and you and all the other ‘selfs’ something like avatars in a video game? Any internal model of the outside world must also include some representation of ourselves at the point of observation.
Okay, that’s enough for now. I’m getting way over-cogitated. Time to go watch some Stargate.
Well, it’s a Thursday. And on Thursdays I have some sympathy for the HPoC. After all, it’s not at all obvious to me (maybe I’m stupid) that there’s anything incoherent or self-contradictory about a world that’s just like ours except that no one really experiences anything. Our zombie counterparts have brains that can be observed to work just like ours do, but they don’t feel it. There’s no inner life. No qualia.
So when I’m in these Thursday moods, Elizabeth’s description of consciousness doesn’t seem to shed any light on qualia, despite her preamble. Our zombie counterparts have patterns of brain-activity that mirror ours, with the same capacity for representation — whether that’s representation of sensory data or of “programs for action” or whatever. To say “that’s what qualia are” is to make a category error, between un-shareable inner experience and observable brain activity.
At this point I have a nagging feeling that I’m just displaying confusion of exactly the sort that BWE’s post was intended to clear up, but that I haven’t gotten it yet.
I have a completely different take on this stuff on Fridays. I’ll post again tomorrow, IPU willing.
Here’s my problem with that view of qualia:
According to the proponents of the idea, I am picking up huge amounts of information from the environment, using that information to adjust and control my behavior as I interact with the world. Yet, supposedly, I am totally oblivious to that information. It has no effect on me at all. I am a zombie with respect to that information, although I am using that information to control my behavior.
Quite separate from that information, of which I am oblivious, I am experiencing something called qualia. This qualia completely dominates my conscious experience. Yet it is causally inert, in the sense that the way that I behave is independent of the qualia.
It seems to me that the qualiaphiles have taken one thing – the information that is being used – and have said that it is two things. And they have thereby made everything unnecessarily mystical. They have created the mystery of how my behavior can be affected by information to which I am oblivious, and they have created the mystery of how my experience can be dominated by causally inert qualia.
It makes more sense to me when there is only one thing. We just experience the information itself. There are no qualia.
That was helpful. And very nicely written. 🙂
heh.
Looking forward you your Friday view, Brother Daniel 🙂
Very nice, Neil:)
Although it does sort of leave open the question: “how do we experience information?”
But I think my program-for-action thingy might address that.
Yes, I agree that there are still unexplained details there. I might try starting a thread on that at some future time.
For the moment, let me say a little more about information. The idea that we don’t experience information comes, I think, from our thinking in terms of computers.
In ordinary life, we think of information as meaningful. With computers, we encode that meaning in syntax strings. And the computer deals only with the syntax, not with the semantics. I think the commonly expressed idea of that the brain is a computer leads people to think that the brain is dealing with syntax, and that leaves semantics a mystery. I see that as mistaken. I disagree with the “brain as computer” metaphor, and I see the brain as mainly dealing in semantics, rather than in syntax.
The “quality to existence” (as in the HPoC) is what makes the difference between the real tangible existence of our universe and a merely abstract platonic existence (as an element of a space of possible universes). So at best, the HPoC looks like an overly fancy way of asking why there is something rather than nothing. (Nothing wrong with that question, of course, but it’s better left without the disguise.)
But it’s worse than that: It leads us to consider “quality to existence” as an optional property of any hypothetical universe we consider, which is tantamount to considering “real tangible existence” as such an optional property. We’re digging from the same pit of madness whence emerges the ridiculous Ontological Arguments for God.
The HPoC is cheating.
That’s how it looks to me on a Friday.
“Me: Who said I was unattached and objective? Find me a single example of a supernatural event. Other guy: Jesus’ resurrection.”
What I find puzzling is why you care. I presume you’ve read the New Testament yourself and probably have at least done a cursory investigation of the sources. OK, so you don’t believe it. Fine. You’ve made your choice. Why spend precious time on it? Are you trying to talk Christians or theists *out* of believing?
There is a short answer and a long answer to that question. I’ll give both.
First, what I find puzzling is why you think I do or don’t believe anything based on that post. That sounds snarky I guess, but it isn’t. It’s actually the same question I was asking myself when I got into that original discussion in the first place.
The short answer to your question “Why do I care enough to spend my precious time writing a post like the OP if I don’t believe the bible anyway?” is that I care about a different thing entirely from what you appear to assume I care about. I care about a structural element in how we construct truths within communities and how we construct our truths as individuals. I spend some of my precious time writing posts like the OP as a process of refining a hypothesis I am entertaining regarding a particular peculiarity in language and behavior–which is not, BTW, limited to religious topics at all – because I am interested in the peculiarity.
As the the main part of your question, “[Am I] trying to talk Christians or theists *out* of believing?” the answer is no. I am interested in responses. How someone chooses to address statements like the one I made in the OP is often more interesting to me than the arguments they make. I am kind of exactly not trying to change minds. I do not care what specific things people assume to be historical events. And I have not ‘decided’ to believe or disbelieve anything that I cannot witness or reproduce. Actually, I am not sure that in terms of my essential question, ‘belief’ is even a relevant term.
And that brings me to my long answer which is also the point I tried to get across in the OP. The long answer involves a narrative explaining how I came to ask the sort of question I do ask nowadays though.
I hadn’t met a true fundamentalist before college and I didn’t really believe they existed in places that were accessible by roads. When I discovered my first one, I was actually surprised but not really worried since he seemed to be an anomaly. Then a few more showed up as life progressed and their ignorance levels astonished me and made me very nervous when I was around them. Wrong information leads to poor decisions and I didn’t know for sure who their God hated from day to day.
Fast forward some years during which fundamentalist wingnuts blew up the federal building, started murdering doctors and flying planes into buildings and electing criminals to public office. When the Dover trial started, I was glued to my computer, waiting anxiously for the transcripts to show up online. The blog “The Panda’s Thumb” tended to link to them first so I started reading the blog to while away the time between releases. At the time, I was very much interested in changing minds of fundamentalists of whatever persuasion, be they economic, religious or cultural.
Bush II was in the white house, we were involved in 2 wars which we entered on false pretenses, our economy had become a credit economy at the consumer level, Jerry Falwell was still alive and the kind of hate preached by religion looked to be at the center of it all for me. Not to mention I had a sore spot for people trying to teach religion in science classes.
At the time, I believed ignorance was curable and that those who wanted to teach religion in science classes could learn why they were wrong and would stop doing the fundamentalist thing as soon as they learned. And since the wingnut faction seemed eager to debate and discuss the issue at Panda’s Thumb and various other places around the web, I figured it would be a quick transition from a violent anachronistic worldview to at least some harmony in public discourse regarding at the very least, the understanding of what evolution means and why it was science where religion is not.
The effort culminated in a semi-formal debate I had online with a fundamentalist over, of all things, the validity of dendrochronology as a scientific subject. After that debate, my entire perspective changed. For one, I discovered that rigid clinging to truth is a liability in pretty much all cases. Even our very best truths are approximations at some level due to the definitions of terms. However, requiring truths to accurately depict the processes they describe and at least roughly relate prediction to perception is a matter of great practical import. But when I went looking, I discovered that 100% of the people I encountered, both in real life and through discussions online, held on to some truths, reifying them actually, to the point where they functionally could not understand a proposition which included a foundational assumption which conflicted with one of their more tightly held truths. They, 100% of them, could not communicate the problem they had with the proposition. They held the truth so tightly that they couldn’t even see that they held it as a truth. It blinded each and every one of them to the entire argument they encountered and they universally substituted an argument that fit their truths rather than the ones I used to construct the proposition and universally the definitions made the responses answer questions I hadn’t asked with arguments which were irrelevant to my original proposition.
I spent a few years fine tuning the skill of recognizing truths which people held tight enough to blind themselves to observation and testing those truths. That is what the OP is about. The language we use determines literally what we can conceive of as possible and also what we are entirely blind to. I am not a theist nor an atheist so your question which assumes that one can only accept or reject the claims of the new testament doesn’t exactly work for me. Both theism and atheism are exclusionary definitions. They define what is and by extension, what is not.
The supernatural has been replaced by the natural. Not in any religious or mystical way, but by the way we define our terms. Forces which can be measured can be modeled. Religion of the ancient world did not deny that. God caused floods and volcanoes. Measurable and modelable events. And the model allowed us to try to manipulate those events however weak our powers were. We could appease the gods. We called a force supernatural if we couldn’t directly see the cause. Now we just look at forces. There is literally no more use for the term supernatural in our model defined by language and number. And the reason the HPoC seems like a cheat to me is that it will not allow qualia to be measured. It puts the word qualia in the place of ‘qualify’ in order to keep it from the monological and unfeeling gaze of science.
And that, to me, demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of science. Chalmers demands a schematic explanation, a model, but injects a term which he denies is modelable. Science doesn’t produce more rigid or ‘right’ truths. It provides more useful truths. Science loosened truth itself from the moorings of consciousness.
And everyone is just as blinded by their own truths as everyone else is by theirs. Here’s the thing. If you define God as the cause of a flood, then it is a true statement to say God is the cause of the flood. Once you model the water table and its inputs and outputs, it is not now False that God causes floods, it is nonsensical. The definition previously given to God is now given to the hydrology and weather patterns. Using the term ‘God’ then requires one of two things: a brand new definition (which is fine but it no longer relates to the one used by the authors of texts which provide the original definition of God), or a denial of the entire new model as not as good –read that ‘accurate’- of a model as the old one.
Well, when people who understand the new one look to see which one allows them to engineer better dike systems, the challenge looks ridiculous because the new system is more predictively accurate, it is truer. They tend to then assume they know the real truth and the archaic model is simply wrong. Those who stick to the archaic model are afraid to loosen a truth that seems so important elsewhere and, in fact, they are not wrong. They are simply less able to predict with their model.
This creates a weird tension because those in possession of the better model (from a practical standpoint) then call their definitions and stored procedures ‘truth’ and the older set ‘false’. Which sets up the field for an us/them fight where the holders of ‘truth’ cannot understand why the clingers to ‘falsehood’ would do such a strange thing.
I do think there is a HPoC of sorts but I don’t think Chalmers got it right by demanding a model of a thing which he declares not modelable. The problem is all the same, the equivocation of truth with reality. It’s bound to fail no matter who tries it. Whether materialist, theist, atheist, monist, dualist, empiricist, rationalist or simple wingnut, no model will ever tell us anything about reality other than what we should expect to encounter according to the symbols we define and the procedures we devise. We can improve prediction possibly forever, theoretically creating perfect truth even, but this will never give us the mind of God unless God too is forced to equivocate truth with reality due to a limitation forced upon God of being once removed from the action the same way we are. The existence of qualia, or the need to qualify our input according to devised and learned symbol, is evidence of a machine, not consciousness in my opinion. There is another place to look I think.
I’m a bit, quite, inebriated right now, so if none of that made any sense, you’re probably on your own.
I might have overdone it there. As clarification I need to add that of course I am looking for counter-arguments also. Just that so far there hasn’t been one.