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To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Consciousness Assayed
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 13:22:23 EDT
William quotes me. . .
>
> In sum, it's arguable that in two millennia -- right up
> to today -- we have
> made almost no conclusive progress on these core questions
> in philosophy of
> mind.
. . .and he comments:
"The inperial we relies on the proposition that one person's notion must
conform to another person's notion or there will be muddling."
I regret that the 'we' came across as imperial, and I withdraw it. I should
have repeated my earlier phrase, "no progress has been made".
I wouldn't want to be understood as saying other than that the notions a
speaker stirs in his audience are likely to conform to the speaker's notion
only
to a degree. They'll never conform perfectly, but very often the degree of
likeness is high enough so that communication is quite serviceable.
"Why is the receptive notion need to be in place in order to receive the
proposed notion? Cannot one notion evoke the other?"
When we speak, we're counting on our words to evoke notion in the hearer.
My
position is that they do this entirely by association -- that is,
remembering
the earlier notion that our minds connected with the words. If you say
"Eiffel
Tower", those words "call to mind" notional images of the Tower that were
linked to those words when they were juxtaposed for us in the past. If we
say
"Eiffel Tower" to an Andean shepherd who'd never heard them before -- and
thus
never had an association impressed in his memory -- our words will not
evoke the
notion we were hoping for.
For me, the association theory "accounts for" the vast majority of
communication I see, and for the way I've seen children -- and adults --
"learn"
language (and other tools of communication).
I certainly agree that one notion evokes another -- but only in the same
"mind". My having a notion will not of itself evoke notion in someone
else's head.
But once my used tool -- words, a gesture, etc -- evokes notion in the
other
guy, that notion will by association will "call to mind" other notion in
his
head.
"Do we not propose notions to ourselves and thus "converse" with ourselves
just as we do with others? This conversing is the mutual shaping or
creating
of notions."
I agree with that. I've said that what notion arises in a mind depends on
two
things: The already acquired inventory of memories, and the receiving
apparatus. I take that apparatus to include not just the receptor of raw
sense data,
but the "operating system" in each head. We've all experienced the failure
of
our retrieval system to call to mind a datum we're sure is in our memory
inventory -- like someone's name. The difference between recall and
recognition is
often cited. All recognition is, is a cluster of previous associations with
the subject.
"If there can be consciousness outside the functioning brain, how is it
manifested? A dead brain has no consciousness, or, if it does, then
consciousness
exists independently of the brain. Cheerskep seems to be arguing for that
when he alludes to cases where pain, for instance, is sometimes independent
of
a physical source, apparently. I don't think anyone has shown that
thoughts
or consciousness can occur without a brain (the bodily object) producing
them."
I hope I haven't said that consciousness exists independently of the brain.
I
believe that "awareness" and a physical neural disposition are always
critically connected. It's the nature of that connection that remains
unclear. Thus I
stop short of saying the neural tissue "produces" the consciousness. We
certainly see concomitance -- they seem both to obtain at the same time.
But the
"causation" at work here is at the heart of the "mind-body" problem. When
William asks, "Cannot one notion evoke the other?" I have to say it
certainly seems
so, but I can imagine a physicalist maintaining that, no, it's one neural
activity causing another, and the consciousness is in some yet to be
explained way
a "reflection" of the neural activity.
"Damasio, at least, is not a philosopher but a neurologist. His
propositions are based on clinical evidence, not philosophical
speculation."
Believe it or not, I mentioned Damasio in the same breath as Dennett,
Searle,
and Chalmers as a kind of courtesy to you, William. I know you respect him
a
good deal on matters of "the mind". Yes, he is a neurologist, but much of
what
he says has pertinence in philosophy. And certainly when Damasio writes a
book like "Descartes' Error", it becomes part of the literature of
philosophy of
mind.
"Is consciousness merely biology in action or is it something independent,
even if produced by biology? If we knew, we might conclude that life is not
worth living because if consciouness is merely biology in action, our
"selfhood"
is a fiction, a lie, a delusion."
I don't feel this way myself. In my fuzzy way, I think of my body as part
of
"me" -- part of my "self". Which is to say, I fuzzily take "me" to be a c
ombination of my material body and my notional consciousness. Once, someone
in the
early stages of Alzheimer's uttered this sentence to me: "I feel as if my
mind
is leaking away." One of my current "awarenesses" is that I can no longer
recall certain kinds of data with the speed of my youth. I'm not the same
guy I
was -- but then, as the joke goes, I never was, was I?
"(There is a large hunk of involuntary consciousness that prevails without
our direct control or awareness -- like maintaining a heart beat, for
instance)."
I myself don't think of such neural activity as "consciousness".
Interestingly, however, there are some recorded cases of people who by an
"act of will"
control their heart beat -- very like the way most of us can, if we "think
about
it", control our breathing rate.
"I think I disagree with Cheerskep's insistence that one person's
pre-existing notion must be matched by another person's very, very similar
notion before
there can be communication."
I hope my remarks above about degree of conformity help clarify my position
on this a bit. If I say "John McCain", it's a sure thing the notions I
occasion
will vary a good deal, and yet it would be serviceable enough in a line
like,
"John McCain will be on Charlie Rose tonight."
Even an abstraction like "rich", with wildly varying possibly stirred
