Evidence that physicalists have been trying: books like Dennett’s “Consciousness explained” and Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism” and Koch’s “The quest for consciousness” and so forth, all putting forward hypotheses about what physical goings-on give rise to consciousness and how.
Evidence that dualists aren’t trying (more specifically, not trying to do more than just say “Consciousness is fundamental, and that’s all there is to it” or something else that similarly tries to take credit for solving the problem without doing the work): I’m not sure what sort of evidence I could present. All I can say is that I’ve so far not seen any sign that dualists are trying, or have any interest in doing so.
I’m sorry, but I’m just not saying the things you think I am saying.
Well, I do keep asking you to clarify your meaning—and you keep replying by saying things like “That is because it is difficult”. I decline to take the blame for not understanding you if you aren’t prepared to try to be understood.
dualism is not as obviously false as sometimes made out.
I haven’t been claiming that dualism is obviously false. I’ve been claiming that some things offered as evidence for dualism (or for more complicated sets of ideas that involve dualism) are rotten evidence.
I haven’t read Chalmers’s book, but so far as I can tell from reading about it it doesn’t in fact offer the sort of thing I’m complaining dualists aren’t trying to do. Is that wrong? If so, where in the book—I have a copy on my overflowing to-be-read shelves—should I look to find an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation of why the relationship between consciousness and physical stuff is the way it is? (Note: simply saying “there are bridging laws that make that relationship what it is” is not an explanation, nor anything like one; but if Chalmers has something more substantial to offer then I’m all ears.)
[EDITED a minute or two after posting; I’d forgotten that I do actually have a copy of Chalmers’s book. It’s been sat in my read-this-some-time pile for about the last 10 years, though. Note: “10 years” is literal, not rhetorical. I went to Amazon to see how much it would cost if I wanted to buy it and Amazon kindly put up a note saying “You purchased this in 2001.”]
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation of consc. you are not going to find it the dualist literature or the physicalist literature. I don’t see there is much else I can add. If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself. Alternatively, you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with. EIther way it is up to you. I am not particularly selling dualism myself.
If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself.
That’s one of the very bad things about philosophy. Nobody tells you “if you want to understand general relativity, read Einstein’s papers”—it has been rehashed and cut into parts and explained in various ways and accompanied with exercises and summed up or stretched out and put into a bunch of textbooks. Nobody tells you “if you want to know what Nozick thought about libertarianism, go read his book”—just grab the summary and commentary on ESR or Faré′s websites.
Equally, the OP could read WP articles, amazon reviews, etc. (And Chalmer’s book itself contains summaries of much foregoing mind-body phil.).
The thing is he is claiming that dualists are making no efforts to explain: but they are[*], he is just making no effort to find out what they are saying.
[*] Dualist phils. have no miraculous way of rising through the academic ranks whilst publishing nothing.
[...] an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation [...]
You:
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation [...]
I do wish you wouldn’t do that.
If you want to know what Chalmers’s book says, you have to read it yourself.
Clearly that’s true for some definitions of “what C’s book says” and false for others. On the other hand, if what I actually want to know is whether C’s book contains a particular sort of thing then it seems obviously reasonable to ask whether you’ve got any suggestions for where in it I should look.
you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with
What particular strong conclusions do you have in mind? And what ideas are they about with which you think I’m unfamiliar?
So I had a look at the first five things linked from the first of those pages.
A dissertation by Aryanosi. Not available online so far as I can tell. Aryanosi does not in fact appear to be a dualist; at least, looking for other work of his the first thing I found was a paper offering an argument for the thesis that the mind is identical with the brain. Excerpt: “This brings me to the argument I would like to put forward, to the conclusion that the doctrine of naturalistic dualism is probabilistically incoherent, and that physicalism, in the form of the identity thesis, is the likeliest candidate for the mental-physical relation.” I did also find a chapter of his dissertation online. It’s concerned with Chalmers’s zombie argument, and argues that it’s unsound.
A paper on gallium arsenide nanowires. It seems unlikely that this has anything to say about dualism. I have no idea what it’s doing on that page.
A paper whose filename is whyiamnotadualist.pdf. Presumably its author is not a dualist.
Looks like another version of the same paper.
Not available online. I can’t tell from the abstract whether the author is a dualist, but it doesn’t appear to be either defending dualism or attempting to construct a theory of how dualism might “work”.
So that seems to be 0 for 5. This doesn’t encourage me to read on and check more. What makes you regard it as “evidence that dualists are trying”? Evidence that some people are writing about dualism, yes, but that’s not the same thing at all. To save me wading through every link there, is there anything there that actually (1) is by a dualist and (2) offers the sort of thing I was complaining dualists don’t do?
Evidence that physicalists have been trying: books like Dennett’s “Consciousness explained” and Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism” and Koch’s “The quest for consciousness” and so forth, all putting forward hypotheses about what physical goings-on give rise to consciousness and how.
Evidence that dualists aren’t trying (more specifically, not trying to do more than just say “Consciousness is fundamental, and that’s all there is to it” or something else that similarly tries to take credit for solving the problem without doing the work): I’m not sure what sort of evidence I could present. All I can say is that I’ve so far not seen any sign that dualists are trying, or have any interest in doing so.
Well, I do keep asking you to clarify your meaning—and you keep replying by saying things like “That is because it is difficult”. I decline to take the blame for not understanding you if you aren’t prepared to try to be understood.
I haven’t been claiming that dualism is obviously false. I’ve been claiming that some things offered as evidence for dualism (or for more complicated sets of ideas that involve dualism) are rotten evidence.
Evidence that dualists are trying...
..not to forget The Conscious Mind (400+ pages)
I haven’t read Chalmers’s book, but so far as I can tell from reading about it it doesn’t in fact offer the sort of thing I’m complaining dualists aren’t trying to do. Is that wrong? If so, where in the book—I have a copy on my overflowing to-be-read shelves—should I look to find an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation of why the relationship between consciousness and physical stuff is the way it is? (Note: simply saying “there are bridging laws that make that relationship what it is” is not an explanation, nor anything like one; but if Chalmers has something more substantial to offer then I’m all ears.)
[EDITED a minute or two after posting; I’d forgotten that I do actually have a copy of Chalmers’s book. It’s been sat in my read-this-some-time pile for about the last 10 years, though. Note: “10 years” is literal, not rhetorical. I went to Amazon to see how much it would cost if I wanted to buy it and Amazon kindly put up a note saying “You purchased this in 2001.”]
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation of consc. you are not going to find it the dualist literature or the physicalist literature. I don’t see there is much else I can add. If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself. Alternatively, you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with. EIther way it is up to you. I am not particularly selling dualism myself.
That’s one of the very bad things about philosophy. Nobody tells you “if you want to understand general relativity, read Einstein’s papers”—it has been rehashed and cut into parts and explained in various ways and accompanied with exercises and summed up or stretched out and put into a bunch of textbooks. Nobody tells you “if you want to know what Nozick thought about libertarianism, go read his book”—just grab the summary and commentary on ESR or Faré′s websites.
Equally, the OP could read WP articles, amazon reviews, etc. (And Chalmer’s book itself contains summaries of much foregoing mind-body phil.).
The thing is he is claiming that dualists are making no efforts to explain: but they are[*], he is just making no effort to find out what they are saying.
[*] Dualist phils. have no miraculous way of rising through the academic ranks whilst publishing nothing.
Me:
You:
I do wish you wouldn’t do that.
Clearly that’s true for some definitions of “what C’s book says” and false for others. On the other hand, if what I actually want to know is whether C’s book contains a particular sort of thing then it seems obviously reasonable to ask whether you’ve got any suggestions for where in it I should look.
What particular strong conclusions do you have in mind? And what ideas are they about with which you think I’m unfamiliar?
That dualists aren’t interested in explaining consc, for some value of “explaining consc” where by physicalists are interested.
eg. the ones in TCM.
So I had a look at the first five things linked from the first of those pages.
A dissertation by Aryanosi. Not available online so far as I can tell. Aryanosi does not in fact appear to be a dualist; at least, looking for other work of his the first thing I found was a paper offering an argument for the thesis that the mind is identical with the brain. Excerpt: “This brings me to the argument I would like to put forward, to the conclusion that the doctrine of naturalistic dualism is probabilistically incoherent, and that physicalism, in the form of the identity thesis, is the likeliest candidate for the mental-physical relation.” I did also find a chapter of his dissertation online. It’s concerned with Chalmers’s zombie argument, and argues that it’s unsound.
A paper on gallium arsenide nanowires. It seems unlikely that this has anything to say about dualism. I have no idea what it’s doing on that page.
A paper whose filename is whyiamnotadualist.pdf. Presumably its author is not a dualist.
Looks like another version of the same paper.
Not available online. I can’t tell from the abstract whether the author is a dualist, but it doesn’t appear to be either defending dualism or attempting to construct a theory of how dualism might “work”.
So that seems to be 0 for 5. This doesn’t encourage me to read on and check more. What makes you regard it as “evidence that dualists are trying”? Evidence that some people are writing about dualism, yes, but that’s not the same thing at all. To save me wading through every link there, is there anything there that actually (1) is by a dualist and (2) offers the sort of thing I was complaining dualists don’t do?