Without my dealing here with the other alternatives, do you Yvain, or does any other LW reader think that it is (logically) possible that mental states COULD be ontologically fundamental?
Further, why is that possibility tied to the word “soul”, which carries all sorts of irrelevant baggage?
Full disclosure: I do (subjectively) know that I experience red, and other qualia, and try to build that in to my understanding of consciousness, which I also know I experience (:-) (Note that I purposely used the word “know” and not the word “believe”.)
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.
Hmm. Unless I’m misunderstanding you completely, I’ll assume we can work from the example of the “red” qualium (?)
What would it mean for even just the experience of “red” to be ontologically fundamental? What “essence of experiencing red” could possibly exist as something independent of the workings of the wetware that is experiencing it?
For example, suppose I and a dichromatic human look at the same red object. I and the other human may have more or less the same brain circuitry and are looking at the same thing, but since we are getting different signals from our eyes, what we experience as “red” cannot be exactly the same. A bee or a squid or a duck might have different inputs, and different neural circuitry, and therefore different qualia.
A rock next to the red object would have some reflected “red” light incident upon it. But it has no eyes and as far as I know no perception or mental states at all. Does it make sense to say that the rock can also see its neighbouring object as “red”? I wouldn’t say so, outside the realm of poetic metaphor.
So if your qualia are contingent on the circumstances of certain inputs to certain neural networks in your head, are they “ontologically fundamental”? I’d say no. And by extension, I’d say the same of any other mental state.
If you could change the pattern of signals and the connectivity of your brain one neuron at a time, you could create a continuum of experiences from “red” to “intuitively perceiving the 10000th digit of pi” and every indescribable, ineffable inhuman state in between. None of them would be more fundamental than any other; all are sub-patterns in a small corner of a very richly-patterned universe.
How do you know? Do you know Latin, or just how this word works?
I’m not doubting you—just curious. I’ve always wanted to learn Latin so I can figure this sort of thing out (and then correct people), but I’ve settled for just looking up specific words when a question arises.
I apologize for being too brief. What I meant to say is that I posit that my subjective experience of qualia is real, and not explained by any form of reductionism or eliminativism. That experience of qualia is fundamental in the same way that gravitation and the electromagnetic force are fundamental. Whether the word ontological applies may be a semantic argument.
Basically, I am reprising Chalmers’ definition of the Hard Problem, or Thomas Nagel’s argument in the paper “What is it like to be a bat?”
Do qualia describe how matter interacts with matter? For example, do they explain why any person says “I have qualia” or “That is red”? Would gravity and electromagnetism, etc. fail to explain all such statements, or just some of them?
If qualia cause such things, is there any entropy when they influence and are influenced by matter? Is energy conserved?
If I remove neurons from a person one by one, is there a point at which qualia no longer are needed to describe how the matter and energy in them relates to the rest of matter and energy? Is it logically possible to detect such a point? If I then replace the critical neuron, why ought I be confident that merely considering, tracking, and simulating local, physical interactions would lead to an incorrect model of the person insofar as I take no account of qualia?
How likely is it that apples are not made of atoms?
You may posit that your subjective experience is not explained by reduction to physical phenomena (including really complex information processes) happening in the neurons of your brain. But to me that would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
It seems to me that until we completely understand the physical and informational processes going on in the brain, the burden of proof is on anyone suggesting that such complete understanding would still be in principle insufficient to explain our subjective experiences.
There is no explanation of HOW mass generates or causes gravity, similarly for the lack of explanation of how matter causes or generates forces such as electromagnetism. (Yes I know that some sort of strings have been proposed to subserve gravity, and so far they seem to me to be another false “ether”.) So in a shorthand of sorts, it is accepted that gravity and the various other forces exist as fundamentals (“axioms” of nature, if you will accept a metaphor), because their effects and interactions can be meaningfully applied in explanations. No one has seen gravity, no one can point to gravity—it is a fundamental force. Building on Chalmers in one of his earlier writings, I am willing to entertain the idea the qualia are a fundamental force-like dimension of consciousness. Finally every force is a function of something: gravity is a function of amount of mass, electromagnetism is a function of amount of charge. What might qualia and consciousness be a function of? Chalmers and others have suggested “bits of information”, although that is an additional speculation.
I don’t think “[T]heir effects and interactions can be meaningfully applied in explanations” is a good way of determining if something is “fundamental” or not: that description applies pretty nicely to aerodynamics, but aerodynamics is certainly not at the bottom of its chain of reductionism. I think maybe that’s the “fundamental” you’re going for: the maximum level of reductionism, the turtle at the bottom of the pile.
Anyways: (relativistic) gravity is generally thought not to be a fundamental, because it doesn’t mesh with our current quantum theory; hence the search for a Grand Unified Whatsit. Given that gravity, an incredibly well-studied and well-understood force, is at most questionably a fundamental thingie, I think you’ve got quite a hill to climb before you can say that about consciousness, which is a far slipperier and more data-lacking subject.
Without my dealing here with the other alternatives, do you Yvain, or does any other LW reader think that it is (logically) possible that mental states COULD be ontologically fundamental?
Further, why is that possibility tied to the word “soul”, which carries all sorts of irrelevant baggage?
Full disclosure: I do (subjectively) know that I experience red, and other qualia, and try to build that in to my understanding of consciousness, which I also know I experience (:-) (Note that I purposely used the word “know” and not the word “believe”.)
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!
Hmm. Unless I’m misunderstanding you completely, I’ll assume we can work from the example of the “red” qualium (?)
What would it mean for even just the experience of “red” to be ontologically fundamental? What “essence of experiencing red” could possibly exist as something independent of the workings of the wetware that is experiencing it?
For example, suppose I and a dichromatic human look at the same red object. I and the other human may have more or less the same brain circuitry and are looking at the same thing, but since we are getting different signals from our eyes, what we experience as “red” cannot be exactly the same. A bee or a squid or a duck might have different inputs, and different neural circuitry, and therefore different qualia.
A rock next to the red object would have some reflected “red” light incident upon it. But it has no eyes and as far as I know no perception or mental states at all. Does it make sense to say that the rock can also see its neighbouring object as “red”? I wouldn’t say so, outside the realm of poetic metaphor.
So if your qualia are contingent on the circumstances of certain inputs to certain neural networks in your head, are they “ontologically fundamental”? I’d say no. And by extension, I’d say the same of any other mental state.
If you could change the pattern of signals and the connectivity of your brain one neuron at a time, you could create a continuum of experiences from “red” to “intuitively perceiving the 10000th digit of pi” and every indescribable, ineffable inhuman state in between. None of them would be more fundamental than any other; all are sub-patterns in a small corner of a very richly-patterned universe.
“Quale”, by the way.
How do you know? Do you know Latin, or just how this word works?
I’m not doubting you—just curious. I’ve always wanted to learn Latin so I can figure this sort of thing out (and then correct people), but I’ve settled for just looking up specific words when a question arises.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
I apologize for being too brief. What I meant to say is that I posit that my subjective experience of qualia is real, and not explained by any form of reductionism or eliminativism. That experience of qualia is fundamental in the same way that gravitation and the electromagnetic force are fundamental. Whether the word ontological applies may be a semantic argument.
Basically, I am reprising Chalmers’ definition of the Hard Problem, or Thomas Nagel’s argument in the paper “What is it like to be a bat?”
Do qualia describe how matter interacts with matter? For example, do they explain why any person says “I have qualia” or “That is red”? Would gravity and electromagnetism, etc. fail to explain all such statements, or just some of them?
If qualia cause such things, is there any entropy when they influence and are influenced by matter? Is energy conserved?
If I remove neurons from a person one by one, is there a point at which qualia no longer are needed to describe how the matter and energy in them relates to the rest of matter and energy? Is it logically possible to detect such a point? If I then replace the critical neuron, why ought I be confident that merely considering, tracking, and simulating local, physical interactions would lead to an incorrect model of the person insofar as I take no account of qualia?
How likely is it that apples are not made of atoms?
You may posit that your subjective experience is not explained by reduction to physical phenomena (including really complex information processes) happening in the neurons of your brain. But to me that would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
It seems to me that until we completely understand the physical and informational processes going on in the brain, the burden of proof is on anyone suggesting that such complete understanding would still be in principle insufficient to explain our subjective experiences.
You should check out the recent series that orthonormal wrote about qualia. It starts with Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary’s Room and Qualia.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
There is no explanation of HOW mass generates or causes gravity, similarly for the lack of explanation of how matter causes or generates forces such as electromagnetism. (Yes I know that some sort of strings have been proposed to subserve gravity, and so far they seem to me to be another false “ether”.) So in a shorthand of sorts, it is accepted that gravity and the various other forces exist as fundamentals (“axioms” of nature, if you will accept a metaphor), because their effects and interactions can be meaningfully applied in explanations. No one has seen gravity, no one can point to gravity—it is a fundamental force. Building on Chalmers in one of his earlier writings, I am willing to entertain the idea the qualia are a fundamental force-like dimension of consciousness. Finally every force is a function of something: gravity is a function of amount of mass, electromagnetism is a function of amount of charge. What might qualia and consciousness be a function of? Chalmers and others have suggested “bits of information”, although that is an additional speculation.
I don’t think “[T]heir effects and interactions can be meaningfully applied in explanations” is a good way of determining if something is “fundamental” or not: that description applies pretty nicely to aerodynamics, but aerodynamics is certainly not at the bottom of its chain of reductionism. I think maybe that’s the “fundamental” you’re going for: the maximum level of reductionism, the turtle at the bottom of the pile.
Anyways: (relativistic) gravity is generally thought not to be a fundamental, because it doesn’t mesh with our current quantum theory; hence the search for a Grand Unified Whatsit. Given that gravity, an incredibly well-studied and well-understood force, is at most questionably a fundamental thingie, I think you’ve got quite a hill to climb before you can say that about consciousness, which is a far slipperier and more data-lacking subject.