Further, why is that possibility tied to the word “soul”, which carries all sorts of irrelevant baggage?
It’s just the history of some words. It’s not that important.
I experience red, and other qualia
People frequently claim this. One thing missing is a mechanism that gets us from an entity experiencing such fundamental mental states or qualia and that being’s talking about it. Reductionism offers an account of why they say such things. If, broadly speaking, the reductionist explanation is true, then this isn’t a phenomenon that is something to challenge reductionism with. If the reductionist account is not true, then how can these mental states cause people to talk about them? How does something not reducible to physics influence the world, physically? Is this concept better covered by a word other than “magic”? And if these mental states are partly the result of the environment, then the physical world is influencing them too.
I don’t see why it’s desirable to posit magic; if I type “I see a red marker” because I see a red marker, why hypothesize that the physical light, received by my eyes and sending signals to my brain, was magically transformed into pure mentality, enabling it to interact with ineffable consciousness, and then magicked back into physics to begin a new physical chain of processes that ends with my typing? Wouldn’t I be just as justified in claiming that the process has interruptions at other points?
As the physical emanation “I see red people” may be caused by laws of how physical stuff interacts with other physical stuff, we don’t guess it isn’t caused by that, particularly as we can think of no coherent other way.
We are used to the good habit of not mistaking the limits of our imaginations for the limits of reality, so we won’t say we know it impossible. However, if physics is a description of how stuff interacts with stuff, so I don’t see how it’s logically possible for stuff to do something ontologically indescribable even as randomness. Interactions can either be according to a pattern, or not, and we have the handy description “not in a pattern, indescribable by compression” to pair with “in a pattern, describable by compression”, and how matter interacts with matter ought to fall under one of those. So apparent or even actual random “deviation from the laws of physics” would not be unduly troubling. Systematic deviation from the laws of physics, isn’t.
Do you think your position is captured by the statement, “matter sometimes interacts with matter neither a) in a pattern according to rules, nor b) not in a pattern, in deviation from rules”?
Photons go into eyes, people react predictably to them (though this is a crude example, too macro)...something bookended by the laws of physics has no warrant to call itself outside of physics, if the output is predictable from the input. That’s English, as it’s used for communication, no personal definitions allowed.
if I type “I see a red marker” because I see a red marker, why hypothesize that the physical light, received by my eyes and sending signals to my brain, was magically transformed into pure mentality, enabling it to interact with ineffable consciousness
There’s a fascinating psychological phenomena called “blindsight” where the conscious mind doesn’t register vision—the person is genuinely convinced they are blind, and they cannot verbally describe anything. However, their automatic reflexes will still navigate the world just fine. If you ask them to put a letter in a slot, they can do it without a problem. It’s a very specific sort of neurological damage, and there’s been a few studies on it.
I’m not sure if it quite captures the essence of qualia, but “conscious experience” IS very clearly different from the experience which our automatic reflexes rely on to navigate the world!
I’ve only heard of that particular test once. They shined a light on the wall and forced them to guess where. All I’ve heard is that they do “better than should be possible for someone who is truly blind”, so I’m assuming worse than average but definitely still processing the information to some degree.
Given that it’s a neurological condition, I’d expect it to be impossible to have it in just one eye/brain side, since the damage is occurring well after the signal from both eyes is put together.
It’s just the history of some words. It’s not that important.
People frequently claim this. One thing missing is a mechanism that gets us from an entity experiencing such fundamental mental states or qualia and that being’s talking about it. Reductionism offers an account of why they say such things. If, broadly speaking, the reductionist explanation is true, then this isn’t a phenomenon that is something to challenge reductionism with. If the reductionist account is not true, then how can these mental states cause people to talk about them? How does something not reducible to physics influence the world, physically? Is this concept better covered by a word other than “magic”? And if these mental states are partly the result of the environment, then the physical world is influencing them too.
I don’t see why it’s desirable to posit magic; if I type “I see a red marker” because I see a red marker, why hypothesize that the physical light, received by my eyes and sending signals to my brain, was magically transformed into pure mentality, enabling it to interact with ineffable consciousness, and then magicked back into physics to begin a new physical chain of processes that ends with my typing? Wouldn’t I be just as justified in claiming that the process has interruptions at other points?
As the physical emanation “I see red people” may be caused by laws of how physical stuff interacts with other physical stuff, we don’t guess it isn’t caused by that, particularly as we can think of no coherent other way.
We are used to the good habit of not mistaking the limits of our imaginations for the limits of reality, so we won’t say we know it impossible. However, if physics is a description of how stuff interacts with stuff, so I don’t see how it’s logically possible for stuff to do something ontologically indescribable even as randomness. Interactions can either be according to a pattern, or not, and we have the handy description “not in a pattern, indescribable by compression” to pair with “in a pattern, describable by compression”, and how matter interacts with matter ought to fall under one of those. So apparent or even actual random “deviation from the laws of physics” would not be unduly troubling. Systematic deviation from the laws of physics, isn’t.
Do you think your position is captured by the statement, “matter sometimes interacts with matter neither a) in a pattern according to rules, nor b) not in a pattern, in deviation from rules”?
Photons go into eyes, people react predictably to them (though this is a crude example, too macro)...something bookended by the laws of physics has no warrant to call itself outside of physics, if the output is predictable from the input. That’s English, as it’s used for communication, no personal definitions allowed.
There’s a fascinating psychological phenomena called “blindsight” where the conscious mind doesn’t register vision—the person is genuinely convinced they are blind, and they cannot verbally describe anything. However, their automatic reflexes will still navigate the world just fine. If you ask them to put a letter in a slot, they can do it without a problem. It’s a very specific sort of neurological damage, and there’s been a few studies on it.
I’m not sure if it quite captures the essence of qualia, but “conscious experience” IS very clearly different from the experience which our automatic reflexes rely on to navigate the world!
What if you force them to verbally guess about what’s in front of them, can they do better than chance guessing colors, faces, etc.?
Can people get it in just one eye/brain side?
I’ve only heard of that particular test once. They shined a light on the wall and forced them to guess where. All I’ve heard is that they do “better than should be possible for someone who is truly blind”, so I’m assuming worse than average but definitely still processing the information to some degree.
Given that it’s a neurological condition, I’d expect it to be impossible to have it in just one eye/brain side, since the damage is occurring well after the signal from both eyes is put together.
EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight is a decent overview of the phenomena. Apparently it can indeed affect just part of your vision, so I was wrong on that!