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From: Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Making your mind up
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:46:18 +0200
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On 25/04/2024 09:55, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Apr 2024 07:58:55 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
> 
>> On 22/04/2024 10:23, Martin Harran wrote:
>>> On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:37:42 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 17/04/2024 13:54, Martin Harran wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 13 Apr 2024 14:41:16 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 12/04/2024 13:56, Martin Harran wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 21:32:18 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 2024-04-11 2:42 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:19:45 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> snip
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> As discussed just a couple of months ago, science, at least at this
>>>>>>>>> point in time, cannot explain consciousness of which decision-making
>>>>>>>>> is a subset.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Is this an accurate description of the problem though? I thought the
>>>>>> most common dualist position at this point was that science cannot
>>>>>> explain *qualia*, and that explaining the underpinnings of various
>>>>>> visible behaviors could never even in principle account for them. When
>>>>>> you say "consciousness" in that sentence do you mean "qualia" or "any
>>>>>> aspect of consciousness at all"?
>>>>>
>>>>> Qualia is one of those loosely defined expressions for things we
>>>>> experience. A typical example is how do you explain the difference
>>>>> between 'black' and 'white' to a person blind from birth? I mean
>>>>> consciousness in *all* its many aspects such as how we do experience
>>>>> things like colour and why we are awed by, for example, a spectacular
>>>>> sunset but other things like how we are able to forecast future
>>>>> conditions and plan ahead for them; where our moral values come from;
>>>>> how we can create imaginary characters and build a story about them;
>>>>> one of favourites is negative numbers - they don't exist in reality
>>>>> yet the drive the commerce and financial systems which are an esentail
>>>>> part of modern life. The big one for me, however, is how do
>>>>> neurological processes lead to us being able to have the sort of
>>>>> discussion and debate that we are having right here?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thank you for clarifying.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> And is "decision-making" not a visible
>>>>>> behavior? Certainly this whole conversation seems to have built
>>>>>> arguments on visible manifestations of it (like coming to a decision
>>>>>> after sleeping on it, or changing one's mind).
>>>>>
>>>>> Sorry, I can't get a handle on your point here, why you think
>>>>> *visibility* of behaviour is relevant.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Because that's the core of what's called "the hard problem of
>>>> consciousness"; the idea that we can imagine philosophical zombies that
>>>> would outwardly behave exactly like us but with no inner experience and
>>>> that the behavior of such philosophical zombies might be scientifically
>>>> studiable, but that is all science could study and science can never
>>>> account for subjective experience. The visibility of behavior matters
>>>> here because it's what makes it amenable to scientific study, as opposed
>>>> to qualia/subjective experience/the thing the hard problem suggests
>>>> science can't study.
>>>
>>> I accept that science can only study *visible* behaviour - that is the
>>> very definition of science. That doesn't mean that all the answers can
>>> be found purely through visible behaviour and we certainly should not
>>> rule out potential answers just because they aren't based on visible
>>> behaviour. There seems to be a double standard here; scientists rule
>>> out dualism because it's non-visible yet are quite happy to accept
>>> other ideas that are equally unamenable to study, like the multiverse
>>> for example.
>>>    
>>
>> I don't think that's a very relevant tangent since we've established
>> that we're talking about visible stuff anyway, but I think that's a
>> pretty big misunderstanding about how science works or what "study the
>> visible" implies.
> 
> I think we are talking at cross-purposes here, perhaps partly because
> of your choice of the word "visible". Perhaps "quantifiable" or
> "testable" would have been a better choice.

I guess we are talking at cross-purposes because neither word was what I 
meant. I used "visible" as a word that pertains to *phenomena*; 
"quantifiable" and "testable" are words that pertain to *models* - or 
more precisely relationships of models to phenomena. (... and by 
"phenomena" I don't just mean "things we observe" because that would 
make "visible phenomena" a tautology; I mean the presumed "real things" 
that under realism would be the causes of our observations but exist 
independently of them, and some of which could in principle never cause 
an observation at all).

"Quantifying" a phenomenon means building a mathematically tractable 
model of it; "quantifiable" is a word that applies to phenomena only 
insofar as it's referring to *ideas about* those phenomena. And us being 
able to easily form mathematically tractable ideas about something is 
completely distinct from us being able to observe the thing. As for 
"testable", a model being "testable" does mean it implies some visible 
phenomena because scientific testing means comparing observations to 
predictions, but again it's the *model* that's testable not the 
phenomenon and the testability is very much downstream of visibility.


So when you said "dualism" and "multiverse theory" are both non-visible 
so it's a double standard that science considers one but not the other, 
I read your applying "non-visible" to those models as saying "both of 
those are models positing the existence of 'real things' that haven't 
been observed, and maybe cannot be observed at all". And like I said 
science doesn't exclude such models in principle because "observation" 
is a constantly moving target. If you have a model positing some real, 
currently-unobservable thing X, and working out the logical consequences 
of this model you find that it says something about some part of the 
word we *could* observe that requires the existence of X, and based on 
that you formulate the prediction "if X is true then we should observe 
Y"... Then it's not only that would we be able to find X is true even 
though X cannot be observed - the observation of Y would *count as an 
observation of X*! Meaning X would have been become observable. The 
history of modern science is full of such transitions from "hypothetical 
unobservable entity" to "come up with clever experimental validation of 
the entity's existence anyway" to "the clever experimental setup is now 
a tool for observing the entity".


I don't know if that clarifies at all the more detailed explanation I 
had below of the differences between dualism and multiverse theory that 
account for the different ways they're treated in science?

> 
>> Science isn't about mindlessly looking at things,
>> science is about building models, theories - and validating them by
>> figuring out if they have any consequence on what anything might look
>> and looking there. The theory is more fundamental than the observations
>> and it can get away with even the most glancing relationship to the
>> "visible". The issue with dualism isn't that it's non-visible, it's that
>> it has no explanatory power and the main reason it has no explanatory
>> power is that it behaves like a false idea in response to evidence (for
>> example act like it's irrelevant when brain activity turns out to
>> totally correlate with every distinct aspect of the mind one can find).
>> In other words there is "being non-visible" and then there's "actively
>> shunning visibility", and dualism does the latter. This is a tradeoff of
>> risk of disconfirmation for lack of content, and it's lack of content
>> that's the real problem for science.
>>
>>
>> Multiverse ideas that science entertains (which is obviously not all of
>> them) are straightforward deductions from models that have been
>> otherwise validated by their interactions with visible things,
> 
> That doesn't mean that their answers are reliable. The Ptolemaic model
> was used for rather a long time, giving what mostly were correct
> answers but turned out to be utterly wrong in its foundation.
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