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From: Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Making your mind up
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:23:29 +0100
Organization: University of Ediacara
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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.
 
>
>But it sounds like it isn't the hard problem of consciousness you are 
>talking about, but more that you don't think science could account for 
>the behavior of philosophical zombies to begin with.

I think you are overplaying the zombies problem, it's just one thought
experiment to illustrate the 'hard problem'. Having said that, I'm not
suggesting that science could not account for it; what I am saying is
that the *approach* science has taken so far has provided very few
real answers and I think we need to widen our thinking (no pun
intended).

>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Except that there are scientists working on the problem and believe they
>>>>> have some promising ideas (there is a short discussion in last months
>>>>> Scientific American on AI)
>>>>
>>>> They have been promising for rather a long time. As I pointed out to
>>>> you two months ago, in Matthew Cobb's book "The Idea of the Brain", he
>>>> refers back to a meeting of 20 scientists in Quebec in1953 for a 5-day
>>>> symposium on 'Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness'. Opening the
>>>> symposium, Horace "Tid" Winchell Magoun, regarded as one of the
>>>> fathers of neuroscience, warned his colleagues of 'the head-shaking
>>>> sympathy with which future investigators will probably look back upon
>>>> the groping efforts of the mid-twentieth century, for there is every
>>>> indication that the neural basis of consciousness is a problem that
>>>> will not be solved quickly'. Cobb observes that "Tid would probably
>>>> have been amused to learn that nearly seventy years later the neural
>>>> basis of consciousness is still not understood, nor, the optimism of
>>>> Science magazine notwithstanding, is there any sign of an answer on
>>>> the horizon."
>>>>
>>>> Has there been some major development since that book was published of
>>>> which I am not aware?
>>>
>>> Plenty. Scanning technology has improved and has allowed to connect
>>> brain functioning to all kinds of conscious processes and behaviors to
>>> an extent they didn't imagine in 1953 or whenever it is they came up
>>> with the joke of the astronaut saying "I've been hundreds of times to
>>> space & have never seen God" and the neurosurgeon answering "I've
>>> operated on hundreds of brains & have never seen a thought". Dualists
>>> now straight-up grant that brain processes *correlate* to conscious
>>> activity and see dualism as a claim that this correlation isn't
>>> identity. Of course for science "correlations" is all one can ever study
>>> so it isn't an issue for developing our understanding.
>> 
>> I wasn't talking about development since 1953, I was talking about
>> development since Cobb's book was published in 2020. Unless, of
>> course, you are trying to suggest that there were significant
>> developments since 1953 that he failed to take into account. I would
>> need to see specific examples of that because the book is a
>> comprehensive account of the study of the brain from Ancient Greece
>> (and even earlier) through to the present day. TBH, I found the detail
>> he goes into a bit tedious at times.
>> 
>
>You're right, I'd missed that or kinda skipped over it. I haven't read 
>the book but reading the sentence and some reviews it looks like he is 
>talking about the hard problem of consciousness - i.e. he isn't saying 
>there's been no progress since 1953 in accounting for the neural bases 
>of our behavior, or the way our internal lives correlate to brain 
>events, but that this isn't the same as accounting for 
>qualia/awareness/[the thing philosophical zombies lack], and it's that 
>last one he sees no progress on.
>
>If that is indeed what he's saying then we debate how unrelated the 
>"easy problem" is to the "hard problem" but the position is at least 
>defensible. But it's not the one you seem to have.
>
>Am I wrong about what he's saying, and if so do you maybe have a quote 
>that shows more clearly he's talking about lack of progress on the 
>neural basis of more specific aspects of consciousness you're thinking 
>of like decision-making, emotion, imagination, predicting the future etc?

He's not talking about the 'hard problem' at all; he only briefly
touches on Chalmers and also Nagel ('What Is It Like to be a Bat?')
and dismisses both of them  as not taking us any further forward,
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