Downward Causation: Useful or Misguided Idea?

[Subsymbolic]

I say we throw out the term qualia. It's a useless distraction, and puts far too much in Dennet's side of the court. Subjective experience is subjective experience. The content of this experience is qualitative, although, since we all experience consciousness, consciousness is not qualitative, but demonstrably objective.

ie: The content of private experience is qualitative; while the fact that we ALL experience, is, for all intents and purposes, objective.

So, you prefer the "content of private experience" rather than "qualia". I'm fine with that. "Qualia" is a bit cheap. "Content of private experience" unlike "qualia" is vague enough not to prejudge that this content should have a qualitative nature and it is effectively 23 characters more impressive than "qualia".

Still, could you explain why Dennett should be better pleased with the word "qualia" than with the more impressive expression "content of private experience" (I'm getting the hang of it, I think).

I don't know what you mean by "demonstrably" objective but I agree with your idea that subjectivity in this case is just as good as objectivity, except for the possibility that other people be all p-zombies. You can't rule that out.
EB

Well, I see your point about qualia being easier to type out! Score 1 for Speakie!

What I mean about putting the ball in Dennet's court is simply by flinging this word qualia around. As far as I know, he has popularized the term above and beyond anyone else? You tell me.

Also, let's look at the presumptuous and premature title of his major book: "Consciousness Explained."

I think it safe to say that consciousness has not been explained? Chalmers, regardless of what ever the actual fuck the hard or easy problems are, still has the upper hand, as far as little ole' me is concerned. I also think he's wickedly bright, and a LOT fookin' brighter than Dennet, Harris, or most of the neoroscientists who study consciousness, with the possible exception of Ramachandran.

As much as I defend Chalmers, I dislike the p-zombie thing. People with NO subjective experience are machines. They are purely fictional, like Twilight's silly zombies. It's a purely theoretical gambit, and distracting.

Do you agree?

I already know Subsie is fairly certain that I don't understand the p-zombie thingie, which is probably true, bless his heart. Subsie has been so kind to me, and charitable, he has won me over. He could call me a complete moron and I would not mind. Hell, I may be a complete moron!

**ETA: Why haven't any of you smartypantses addressed my thread about Kant being caught with his lederhosen down? Did you see where Kant admitted that he attacked Thomas Reid without even reading him???

Now, what kind of intellectual dishonesty is that? Remember, Kant was an internationally renowned and professional philosopher! He was NOT a member of the peanut gallery, like me.

I would have thought that Sub and Cop would have looked into it. And that maybe fast and yourself, Speakie, would have thought it worth at least worthy of a casual response.

The thread is here:

https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?13949-Ah-Hah!-Kant-Caught-with-his-Lederhosen-Down

I was once dragged, by a potential girlfriend, to a Kant symposium that seemed entirely fixated on whether Kant got laid. It put me off anything to do with Kant's social life and irritated me to the point that poor Konstanze and I never quite saw eye to eye again - that's a pity as we worked well on translating the Cornell Wittgenstein hoard that summer. I cannot read the word 'verknupfung' without remembering a very earnest German lass with lovely hair earnestly arguing about gluing or knotting carpets and the sort of entailment it might metaphorically stand for. I hear she advocates for Euthanasia back in Germany these days. I don't approve.

 

[WAB]

Well, I see your point about qualia being easier to type out! Score 1 for Speakie!

What I mean about putting the ball in Dennet's court is simply by flinging this word qualia around. As far as I know, he has popularized the term above and beyond anyone else? You tell me.

Also, let's look at the presumptuous and premature title of his major book: "Consciousness Explained."

I think it safe to say that consciousness has not been explained? Chalmers, regardless of what ever the actual fuck the hard or easy problems are, still has the upper hand, as far as little ole' me is concerned. I also think he's wickedly bright, and a LOT fookin' brighter than Dennet, Harris, or most of the neoroscientists who study consciousness, with the possible exception of Ramachandran.

As much as I defend Chalmers, I dislike the p-zombie thing. People with NO subjective experience are machines. They are purely fictional, like Twilight's silly zombies. It's a purely theoretical gambit, and distracting.

Do you agree?

I already know Subsie is fairly certain that I don't understand the p-zombie thingie, which is probably true, bless his heart. Subsie has been so kind to me, and charitable, he has won me over. He could call me a complete moron and I would not mind. Hell, I may be a complete moron!

**ETA: Why haven't any of you smartypantses addressed my thread about Kant being caught with his lederhosen down? Did you see where Kant admitted that he attacked Thomas Reid without even reading him???

Now, what kind of intellectual dishonesty is that? Remember, Kant was an internationally renowned and professional philosopher! He was NOT a member of the peanut gallery, like me.

I would have thought that Sub and Cop would have looked into it. And that maybe fast and yourself, Speakie, would have thought it worth at least worthy of a casual response.

The thread is here:

https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?13949-Ah-Hah!-Kant-Caught-with-his-Lederhosen-Down

I was once dragged, by a potential girlfriend, to a Kant symposium that seemed entirely fixated on whether Kant got laid. It put me off anything to do with Kant's social life and irritated me to the point that poor Konstanze and I never quite saw eye to eye again - that's a pity as we worked well on translating the Cornell Wittgenstein hoard that summer. I cannot read the word 'verknupfung' without remembering a very earnest German lass with lovely hair earnestly arguing about gluing or knotting carpets and the sort of entailment it might metaphorically stand for. I hear she advocates for Euthanasia back in Germany these days. I don't approve.

Thanks for the response, Subsie. Hope you don't mind me calling you that, but I only do it because you signed a PM to me with that, which I take as a term of affection.

Re Kant: I have read him quite a bit, but not deeply. I also am to understand that he never left his hometown, and that he was a completely isolated scholar. Whether or not he ever got laid, meh, who cares, right?

Nonetheless, don't you agree that it's a bit silly for an internationally renowned, famous, and professional philosopher, to hand-wave away a work of another professional philosopher, in this case the really FUNNY Thomas Reid?

You simply must read at least the beginning few chapters of Reid's book An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense; BUT, in the original! NOT, I repeat, NOT via one of those bowlderized & modernized hack-jobs by well-meaning but silly modern scholars.

There is actually only one that I know of who has deliberately butchered Reid's perfectly lucid English, with the conscious (IMhO) intent of ruining Reid's already diminished reputation.

I cannot recall the man's name, but I'm sure a google search will yield positive results.

 

[WAB]

****deleted****

I posted all this to my 'Kant Caught with his Lederhosen Down' thread.

https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...ederhosen-Down&p=540627&viewfull=1#post540627

Which still has a goose-egg in the reply column.

Sniffle...sniffle...

C'mon, Cop, Sub, Speakie, fast, DBT, et al, throw me a little something before they throw the net over me?

In the honor of kennethamy, who has passed, and with whom I locked horns, but with whom I made friends before his passing, here on what was then FRDB. That ought to tickle the sweet and loving heart of fast at least.

DBT - I underlined your name because you are a sweet person, plus no doubt you will remember our discussions about Thomas Reid, Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, and the long threads where you and I locked antlers often.

Luckily, we are actually human type creatures, and only locked antlers metaphorically. I have endless pity for those real creatures, deer, elk, rams, moose, who really do lock horns, and who die of starvation, exhaustion, exposure, and/or dehydration, and think of the does and other bucks who dance around them, helpless! There are not enough tears to mourn for them, nor for any of the human victims of human monsters throughout the ages.

Let us be thankful that we are at the top of the chain, and grateful to Mother Nature, and perhaps the FSM, and maybe even to the Great Spirit, which even a diehard, and wickedly intelligent poet like SHELLEY, said was "co-eternal with nature."

Think of Spinoza's natura naturans, or Aristotle's Prime Mover.

Or not.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I say we throw out the term qualia. It's a useless distraction, and puts far too much in Dennet's side of the court. Subjective experience is subjective experience. The content of this experience is qualitative, although, since we all experience consciousness, consciousness is not qualitative, but demonstrably objective.

ie: The content of private experience is qualitative; while the fact that we ALL experience, is, for all intents and purposes, objective.

Fuck the fuck off is it!

We have behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. We have the seventy odd year old realisation that this behaviour could be no more than simply being able to use the grammar correctly and we have the conjunction of intersubjective agreement that could be achieved by any p-zombie that processed information - there are few qualia that couldn't be correctly identified by a machine and named precisely by a Loebner prize style AI. Igor Alexander was pimping such a system around a decade ago, but it looks positively archaic when we look at the capabilities of modern systems from Google and all.

The possibility of zombies, radically different experiences and just being wrong about what seems intuitively obvious about our own case has not been remotely ruled out. Descartes was conflating two sorts of mental activity - either could achieve that trick and Dennett has carefully explained how it could be achieved from the intentional stance. That account wouldn't give you qualia at all; just the judgement that you had qualia.

I can only agree that I can't rule out that other people be p-zombies. Now, in my case at least, from my own private subjective perspective, what I can't rule out to begin with is that the putative world where p-zombies cannot be ruled out maybe doesn't exist as I have the impression that it does.

I'd really like to be able to go a bit further than that, but no, I'm a very rational being, I Kant.

Cases like binocular rivalry, blindspots, Phi and the absolute kludge that we fail to notice unless doing science suggests our user illusion is smaller, more fictitious and less real than we can comfortably admit. Dennett just takes the next logical step - when the only bit of your vision that can reasonably be said to look like we think it does is only a few degrees of visual angle wide and has a fat blind spot in it that we fail to notice except in extremis, that's not much room for visual qualia that are not fictional.
Once you concede that all the rest is simply fiction, you can hold desperately on to those few 'real' degrees of visual angle or you can just let the whole lot go.

I confess, the more I read here the more tempting I find the tidy austerity of Dennett's vision.

The notion that the reality of our blind spot could suggest qualia only exist in our fictional account of ourselves in turns suggests to me either that you're a p-zombie yourself, or fast becoming one (have you been bitten recently by a p-zombie? Perhaps by Dennett himself?), or that you don't really understand the notion of qualia, which may amount to the same. If you know your qualia, they exist. I quale, therefore I am. Beats everything else in my view, especially anything coming from potential p-zombies or even from people I don't even actually know that they exist at all.
EB

 

[WAB]

Even if none of this were true. I'm unclear what intellectual tradition you could make the claim above from; theology? literature? That's not to downplay their importance, just that they have no problem with fictional ontologies.

- SUB

Philosophy first, via Aristotle's Prime Mover, Some great stuff by Philo, Plato (via the toady Socrates: Plato was of course the man who wrote down most of Socrates' arguments, since Soc, like another great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, didn't write anything down), [skip a little brother...] LOTS of early church fathers, like Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas (by way of Aristotle, by way of Averroes), Boethius.

Onward to many & sundry spiritualists & teachers in & out of orthodoxy, which I shant name because you can get a list of these guys on Wikipedia, and it will be a L O N G list [skip a little brother...] all the way up to modern theologians, scholars, novelists like Orwell & Huxley (son of a Big Brain), etc, etc, etc, etc...

I agree: theology is the art of making sh.t up. It is linty speculation for the most part.

Luckily for us all, we have disciplined scientists, & the scientific method, lest the world be full of poets & other pretentious peanuts (Plato tossed out the poets from his Republic).

*

Apologies & deeply heartfelt respect for fromderinside. Lest he think I am being so silly I don't recognize that the progress of humanity is deeply indebted to science and scientists. Far, far more than to poets & artists.

And, I have enjoyed your poetry. I was hurt by your comments about me and Dylan Thomas, so I fabricated an insult, by way of firing the silly slings & arrows of my outrageous fortune.

"I always made an awkward bow..."



Peace & Noodly Love to all.