Would it be fair to say that your position is that there could be two physically identical brains, and one of them wants to eat an apple but the other doesn’t, or perhaps that one of them is rational but the other isn’t. In other words that preference-zombies or rationality-zombies could exist?
(In case it’s not clear why I’m saying this, this is what accepting
“want to eat an apple” implies being in brain state ABC or computational state DEF (or something of that nature)
while denying
being in brain state ABC or computational state DEF (or something of that nature) implies “want to eat an apple”
I think your question again gets right to the nub of the matter. I have no snappy answer to the challenge -here is my long-winded response.
The zombie analogy is a good one. I understand it’s meant just as an analogy -the intent is not to fall into the qualia quagmire. The thought is that from a purely naturalistic perspective, people can only properly be seen as, as you put it, preference- or rationality-zombies.
The issue here is the validity of identity claims of the form,
Wanting that P = being in brain state ABC
My answer is to compare them to the fate of identity claims relating to sensations (qualia again), such as
Having sensation S (eg, being in pain) = being in brain state DEF
Suppose being in pain is found empirically always to correlate to being in brain state DEF, and the identity is proposed. Qualiaphiles will object, saying that this identity misses what’s crucial to pain, viz, how it feels. The qualiaphile’s thought can be defended by considering the logic of identity claims generally (this adapted from Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity).
Scientific identity claims are necessary—if water = H2O in this world, then water = H2O in all possible worlds. That is, because water is a natural kind, whatever it is, it couldn’t have been anything else. It is possible for water to present itself to us in a different phenomenal aspect (‘ice9’!), but this is OK because what’s essential to water is its underlying structure, not its phenomenal properties. The situation is different for pain—what’s essential to pain is its phenomenal properties. Because pain essentially feels like this (so the story goes), it’s correlation with being in brain state DEF can only be contingent. Since identities of this kind, if true, are by their natures necessary, the identity is false.
There is a further step (lots of steps, I admit) to rationality. The thought is that our access to people’s rationality is ‘direct’ in the way our access to pain is. The unmediated judgement of rationality would, if push were to come to shove, trump the scientifically informed, indirect inference from brain states. Defending this proposition would take some doing, but the idea is that we need to understand each other as rational agents before we can get as far as dissecting ourselves to understand ourselves as mere objects.
I think the formal similarities of some aspects of arguments about qualia on the one hand and rationality on the other, are the extent of the similarities. I haven’t followed all the recent discussions on qualia, so I’m not sure where you stand, but personally, I cannot make sense of the concept of qualia. Rationality-involving concepts (among them beliefs and desires), though, are absolutely indispensable. So I don’t think the rationality issue resolves into one about qualia.
I appreciated your first July 07 comment about the details as to how norms can be naturalized and started to respond, then noticed the sound of a broken record. Going round one more time, to me it boils down to what Hume took to be obvious:
What you ought to do is distinct from what you will do.
Natural science can tell you at best what you will do.
Natural science can’t tell you what you ought to do.
It is surprising to me there is so much resistance (I mean, from many people, not just yourself) to this train of thought. When you say in that earlier comment ‘You have a set of goals...’, you have already, in my view, crossed out of natural science. What natural science sees is just what it is your propensity to do, and that is not the same thing as a goal.
I think the formal similarities of some aspects of arguments about qualia on the one hand and rationality on the other, are the extent of the similarities. I haven’t followed all the recent discussions on qualia, so I’m not sure where you stand, but personally, I cannot make sense of the concept of qualia. Rationality-involving concepts (among them beliefs and desires), though, are absolutely indispensable. So I don’t think the rationality issue resolves into one about qualia.
Rationality uncontroversially involves rules and goals, both of which are naturalisable. You have said there is an extra ingredient of “caring”, which sound qualia-like.
What you ought to do is distinct from what you will do.
Not in all cases surely? What would an is/ought gap be when behaviour matched the ideal
Natural science can tell you at best what you will do.
Natural science can’t tell you what you ought to do.
That depends on what you mean by ‘can’. All the information about the intentions and consequences
of your actions is encoded in a total physical picture of the universe. Where else would it be? OTOH,
natural science, in practice,cannot produce that answer.
It is surprising to me there is so much resistance (I mean, from many people, not just yourself) to this train of thought. When you say in that earlier comment ‘You have a set of goals...’, you have already, in my view, crossed out of natural science. What natural science sees is just what it is your propensity to do, and that is not the same thing as a goal.
Natural science is not limited to behaviour: it can peak inside a black box and see that a certain goal
is encoded into it.even it it is not being achieved.
I do accept that ‘wants’ imply ‘oughts’. It’s an oversimplification, but the thought is that statements such as
X’s wanting that X eat an apple implies (many other things being equal) that X ought to eat an apple.
are intuitively plausible. If wanting carries no implications for what one ought to do, I don’t see how motivation can get off the ground.
Now, if we have
1) wanting that P implies one ought to do Q,
and
2) being in physical state ABC implies wanting that P
then, by transitivity of implication, we get
3) being in physical state ABC implies one ought to do Q
And this is just the kind of implication I’m trying to show is problematic.
Would it be fair to say that your position is that there could be two physically identical brains, and one of them wants to eat an apple but the other doesn’t, or perhaps that one of them is rational but the other isn’t. In other words that preference-zombies or rationality-zombies could exist?
(In case it’s not clear why I’m saying this, this is what accepting
while denying
would imply.)
I think your question again gets right to the nub of the matter. I have no snappy answer to the challenge -here is my long-winded response.
The zombie analogy is a good one. I understand it’s meant just as an analogy -the intent is not to fall into the qualia quagmire. The thought is that from a purely naturalistic perspective, people can only properly be seen as, as you put it, preference- or rationality-zombies.
The issue here is the validity of identity claims of the form,
Wanting that P = being in brain state ABC
My answer is to compare them to the fate of identity claims relating to sensations (qualia again), such as
Having sensation S (eg, being in pain) = being in brain state DEF
Suppose being in pain is found empirically always to correlate to being in brain state DEF, and the identity is proposed. Qualiaphiles will object, saying that this identity misses what’s crucial to pain, viz, how it feels. The qualiaphile’s thought can be defended by considering the logic of identity claims generally (this adapted from Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity).
Scientific identity claims are necessary—if water = H2O in this world, then water = H2O in all possible worlds. That is, because water is a natural kind, whatever it is, it couldn’t have been anything else. It is possible for water to present itself to us in a different phenomenal aspect (‘ice9’!), but this is OK because what’s essential to water is its underlying structure, not its phenomenal properties. The situation is different for pain—what’s essential to pain is its phenomenal properties. Because pain essentially feels like this (so the story goes), it’s correlation with being in brain state DEF can only be contingent. Since identities of this kind, if true, are by their natures necessary, the identity is false.
There is a further step (lots of steps, I admit) to rationality. The thought is that our access to people’s rationality is ‘direct’ in the way our access to pain is. The unmediated judgement of rationality would, if push were to come to shove, trump the scientifically informed, indirect inference from brain states. Defending this proposition would take some doing, but the idea is that we need to understand each other as rational agents before we can get as far as dissecting ourselves to understand ourselves as mere objects.
It is still not clear whether you think rationality is analogous to qualia or is a quale.
I think the formal similarities of some aspects of arguments about qualia on the one hand and rationality on the other, are the extent of the similarities. I haven’t followed all the recent discussions on qualia, so I’m not sure where you stand, but personally, I cannot make sense of the concept of qualia. Rationality-involving concepts (among them beliefs and desires), though, are absolutely indispensable. So I don’t think the rationality issue resolves into one about qualia.
I appreciated your first July 07 comment about the details as to how norms can be naturalized and started to respond, then noticed the sound of a broken record. Going round one more time, to me it boils down to what Hume took to be obvious:
What you ought to do is distinct from what you will do.
Natural science can tell you at best what you will do.
Natural science can’t tell you what you ought to do.
It is surprising to me there is so much resistance (I mean, from many people, not just yourself) to this train of thought. When you say in that earlier comment ‘You have a set of goals...’, you have already, in my view, crossed out of natural science. What natural science sees is just what it is your propensity to do, and that is not the same thing as a goal.
Rationality uncontroversially involves rules and goals, both of which are naturalisable. You have said there is an extra ingredient of “caring”, which sound qualia-like.
Not in all cases surely? What would an is/ought gap be when behaviour matched the ideal
That depends on what you mean by ‘can’. All the information about the intentions and consequences of your actions is encoded in a total physical picture of the universe. Where else would it be? OTOH, natural science, in practice,cannot produce that answer.
Natural science is not limited to behaviour: it can peak inside a black box and see that a certain goal is encoded into it.even it it is not being achieved.