On 7/23/2019 4:50 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Brent,
On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
consciousness.
That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that
consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
I understand your point that we can always make additional demands for
explanation, and that any scientific theory cannot be expected to do more than
what successful scientific theories do, which is to correctly predict phenomena.
My main point is this, and I think it goes to the core of our disagreement:
No scientific theory predicts consciousness!
What would it mean to predict consciousness. When we predict electrons
what we mean it we predict the observable effects of electrons. In that
sense I think we will, eventually, predict consciousness. We will
engineer intelligent entities and some of them will have the observable
aspects of consciousness...and we will be able to say why the do and
others don't and how we can design entities that have more or less or
different kinds of consciousness: perception, self-identity, reflection,
etc.
Putting it another way, every single successful scientific theory that we know
about as these two properties:
- Consciousness is not required for anything "to work";
- Consciousness is not predicted to exist in any way.
But when we have a successful theory of intelligence I think we will
find that consciousness is required for it to work for certain kinds of
entities, one's we would think of as "social".
Now, I know you will argue that yes, neuroscience can predict and observe
conscious states, but the only thing it can do is find correlates between
observable behavior and brain activity. Which is great, but has nothing to do
with the hard problem.
I reject the "hard problem". It's a problem that is intractably hard
because it asks what no scientific theory ever provides.
Firstly because consciousness itself cannot be measured or observed. What you
can do is observe behaviors that you *assume to be correlated with
consciousness*. I challenge you to find any other theory or filed of science
where such a speculative leap is accepted and the results after such a leap
taken seriously.
- Are my cells individually conscious? I don't know.
- Are stars conscious? Is Google? Who knows. Emergentists might suspect they
are, because they are systems with highly complex behavior.
- Are cats conscious? I assume they are, but am I not just noticing their
similarities to me? What about plants? Why or why not?
- Etc.
Are electrons waves or particles? Why or why not?
Brent
In the end, I find John Clark's position on this more palatable: he agrees that
consciousness cannot be measured, so he doesn't care about the problem. He
thinks it's a waste of time to think about it. Intelligence is the interesting
thing. Fair enough. But your position is a bit different: you present your own
metaphysical belief as scientifically justified, and I don't think that is a
tenable position.
Telmo.
Brent
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