Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t see in what way this argument is specifically about consciousness, rather than just being a re-hash of the Sorites Paradox—could you spell it out for me?
If we were just talking about names this wouldn’t matter, but we are talking about explanations. Vagueness in a name just means that the applicability of the name is a little undetermined. But there is no such thing as objective vagueness. The objective properties of things are “exact”, even when we can only specify them vaguely.
This is what we all object to in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, right? It makes no sense to say that a particle has a position, if it doesn’t have a definite position. Either it has a definite position, or the concept of position just doesn’t apply. There’s no problem in saying that the position is uncertain, or in specifying it only approximately; it’s the reification of uncertainty—the particle is somewhere, but not anywhere in particular—which is nonsense. Either it’s somewhere particular (or even everywhere, if you’re a many-worlder), or it’s nowhere.
Neil flirts with reifying vagueness about consciousness in a similarly untenable fashion. We can be vague about how we describe a subjective state of consciousness, we can be vague about how we describe the physical brain. But we cannot identify an exact property of a conscious state with an inherently vague physical predicate. The possibility of exact description of states on both sides, and of exactly specifying the mapping between them, must exist in any viable theory of consciousness. Otherwise, it reifies uncertainty in a way that has the same fundamental illogicality as the “particle without a definite position”.
By the way, if you haven’t read Dennett’s “Real Patterns” then I can recommend it as an excellent explanation of how fuzzily defined, ‘not-always-a-fact-of-the-matter-whether-they’re-present’ patterns, of which folk-psychological states like beliefs and desires are just a special case, can meaningfully find a place in a physicalist universe.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t see in what way this argument is specifically about consciousness, rather than just being a re-hash of the Sorites Paradox—could you spell it out for me?
If we were just talking about names this wouldn’t matter, but we are talking about explanations. Vagueness in a name just means that the applicability of the name is a little undetermined. But there is no such thing as objective vagueness. The objective properties of things are “exact”, even when we can only specify them vaguely.
This is what we all object to in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, right? It makes no sense to say that a particle has a position, if it doesn’t have a definite position. Either it has a definite position, or the concept of position just doesn’t apply. There’s no problem in saying that the position is uncertain, or in specifying it only approximately; it’s the reification of uncertainty—the particle is somewhere, but not anywhere in particular—which is nonsense. Either it’s somewhere particular (or even everywhere, if you’re a many-worlder), or it’s nowhere.
Neil flirts with reifying vagueness about consciousness in a similarly untenable fashion. We can be vague about how we describe a subjective state of consciousness, we can be vague about how we describe the physical brain. But we cannot identify an exact property of a conscious state with an inherently vague physical predicate. The possibility of exact description of states on both sides, and of exactly specifying the mapping between them, must exist in any viable theory of consciousness. Otherwise, it reifies uncertainty in a way that has the same fundamental illogicality as the “particle without a definite position”.
By the way, if you haven’t read Dennett’s “Real Patterns” then I can recommend it as an excellent explanation of how fuzzily defined, ‘not-always-a-fact-of-the-matter-whether-they’re-present’ patterns, of which folk-psychological states like beliefs and desires are just a special case, can meaningfully find a place in a physicalist universe.