Subsymbolic
Screwtape
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2017
- Messages
- 806
- Location
- Under the Gnomon
- Basic Beliefs
- Beliefs are an ancient theory of brain content which would be ripe for rejection except it's the idiom in which we came to know ourselves and thus elimination is problematic. We make it up from there
Ryan said:Finding neural correlates to the consciousness is very important and sought after in the science of consciousness, and probably the most important and sought after thing.
I hope you don't mind me snipping this single point to respond to. I think it's the key one but if you feel shortchanged, I'll return to the others later.
Here's my problem, and I think, the problem for science: There is a problem of other minds which hasn't, to my knowledge been resolved. I think this matters, conscious experience is a private experience that it is assumed that we all have. The problem is that we are all inferring that from a single case and as philosophers like Wittgenstein have pointed out, we really cannot even know that it is the same case across people as we, individually and collectively, have no criterion for judging how similar our experiences are, beyond the judgements we express in words. That's one reason why linguistic behaviourism isn't flat out ridiculous - we really don't know that others are conscious, just that we judge ourselves to be conscious, a judgement that people like Dennett assert is an indefeasible error such that judging ourselves, in language, to be conscious is all there is to consciousness, the position he holds in Consciousness Explained.
I mention all this just to really make it clear that the only example we have of putative mental lives is our own. Now, the next step concerns the methodology of science. At the heart of science are the axioms that all experiments have to be repeatable by anyone and objective. My individual conscious experience is not only not objective, it's not even intersubjectively verifiable, hell, it's barely subjective as what seems to me is indefeasible rather than factual. As for repeatable? my conscious experience isn't, nor is yours and the notion that we all have the same experience is an act of faith that doesn't bear up to even the most cursory of inspections.
I'm red green colourblind - I didn't even realise until I was seventeen and even then all I knew about is my discriminatory abilities, no one can know how much my experience varies, (See all of the 'inverted qualia' argument) just that there are some colour distinctions I can't make and some colours that I cannot distinguish well when superimposed. The point here is that no one knows I'm colourblind unless I tell them - I can use colour language better than most (I like being a psych test subject and my alma had a huge vision department - who never noticed I was colour blind while running experiments on qualia - I was a partial colour zombie and no one noticed - my heterophenomenology, aided and abetted by a degree of expertise and perfectly good hue and saturation detection meant that my few errors were outriders and not noticed. Yeah, I didn't let on, because I was blinding them as much as they were blinding me, so as to speak.
However, there's a remarkable postscript, because my color blindness isn't dependent on a lack of ability to discriminate, but in a processing issue in which my eye doesn't filter wavelength gradients properly. Last year I was given some glasses that literally cure my sort of color blindness by the simple expedient of blocking critical chunks of wavelength to allow my brain to process the overwhelming majority of the signal in a opto-neurotypical manner. As a result, I'm in the rare position to know that even if I'm still not seeing what the opto-neurotypical see I'm seeing the colour difference between twilight and midday with every berry on a holly bush (rather than being a vague shadow) picked out in psychedelic relief. Yet still, in ordinary communication you wouldn't notice the difference (and again, I repeat, that's merely discrimination, that is clearly different. No one can tell if my mental experience is the same, merely that I will use the word 'scarlet' under certain conditions, I, as Wittgenstein pointed out, learned the grammar of Scarlet, not the phenomenal and entirely personal reality. (notice how much metaphorical language I needed just to communicate the possibility of such a difference.
So consciousness isn't objective, it isn't reproducible and as for falsification and the null hypothesis, how exactly would you put forward a falsifiable account of your own, let alone another's private experience? Whenever someone tells me they are looking for correlation or more between the mental and the physical as an empirical project then all I think they need to have a think about the scope, limits and methodologies of science. If they want to say it's a metaphysical or philosophical project then I want to hear about the project in detail - it's easy to be right, you only have to be sufficiently vague, or anecdotal...
There's a faint hope we might be able to correlate the neural correlates of nociception and discrimination in as much as they are not mental events, but the raw feels of consciousness - science has no way of proving they exist, let alone correlating physical events and mental events. That's phenomenology, when it gets to intentions, you have a very different and even more perplexing problem, But that's enough about this, I have a very silly Christian to school on motor mechanics and evolution yet! (and it's bed time, my best mate is over from Magyaristan and I have to set up a bass guitar for him before I go to bed).
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