Sorry, twnf, I missed your post. I believe you’ve misunderstood me (my bad for not being clear). Let me explain myself better:
One of the best ways (I think) to define ‘mind’ or ‘experience’ (I prefer ‘experience’) is “how something feels” or “how something appears, how it seems”. That is to say, it is the ‘feeling’, the ‘appearing’, the ‘seeming’ itself that is ‘experience’. If something is unconscious, with no mind, no experience, nothing ‘seems’, nothing ‘appears’ to it.
So having said that, I will add that a ‘feeling’ can be defined as whatever within it is felt. For example, the feeling of redness is nothing more than whatever it is you feel in the experience of red. What this means is that, unlike a physical object like a rock, you can’t say that there is anything in the feeling that is not felt. At least with a rock, you can say there exist atoms within it - indeed, that those atoms constitute the rock - even though when looking at the rock you don’t see the atoms. The atoms are hidden, out of sight, behind the scenes so to speak. But this is only possible because the rock, as a physical object, does not inhere in our minds. It exists ‘outside’ our minds, independently of our minds. Therefore, there can be things in it, components of it, that we are not conscious of and don’t feel. Not so with feeling itself. If feeling just is what within it is felt, then how could it consist of anything that is not felt. If some feeling - say of experiencing red - consisted of any components that we did not feel (i.e. were not conscious of) then how could they make up part of the feeling? They would have to be ‘outside’ the feeling, behind it, covered up by it.
Seeing as how reductive physicalists seem in the habit of claiming that the neuro-chemical events underlying our experiences - our ‘feeling’ of things, of being conscious of them - just are those experiences, feelings, and consciousness-of-things (on a lower level of scale), then they are saying those experiences, feelings, consciousness-of-things consist of those neuro-chemical events without those neuro-chemical events being part of the experience, feeling, or consciousness-of-things.
Actually, we do not experience anything in the outside world directly. We experience mental representations of objects in the world. It is a mental representation of an object that triggers a response, not the actual physical object itself. For example if I see an apple the light coming from the apple strikes the retina of my eye. Nerves from the retina send information to my brain where a representation of the apple is assembled. This representation is what is processed by the brian. It is compared with stored memories for similarities and associations within the databank. In this way I recognize the object being represented in my brain as an apple. The category “apple” also has emotional information stored within it so I have an emotional (physical) response to the object currently being represented in my brain. So, while objects exist outside our brains, our experience of them is entirely within our brain and is triggered by the internal neural representation of the external object.
In the case of an experience of a color (red for example) any sensation that red triggers is generated in a similar way. I have stored emotional information associated with the color. If red makes me feel warm then physical sensations are occurring that have been triggered by associations in my brain due to past encounters with that color and I call these sensations warmth. Emotions/feelings are viscerally experienced (even if extremely subtly). In order for us to feel anything our nervous systems must be stimulated. We can only be aware of that which can be detected by our nervous systems. This is what awareness is; neuro-chemical activity that has been triggered by some kind of stimulus. This stimulus can be a mental representation of an object in the external world such as the representation of a rain drop striking your face or a mental representation composed of stored information in memory such as the recollection of a rain drop that struck your face last week.
If anything non-physical did exist we would not have any awareness of it and could, therefore, not have any feeling about it whatsoever. Our physical nervous systems would not be able to interact with it and so could not be stimulated by it.
I’m aware of the whole model-in-the-brain view of how we’re acquainted with the world. It doesn’t really address my concerns as expressed in my last post.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake (and it would have to be for arguments sake), that you’re right, and everything we experience - as we experience it - and the very process of experiencing it - is thoroughly physical. It could never be reduced to neuro-chemical activity. Once again, let’s consider red. I actually can see how red might be considered physical - it’s a physical property after all - but it’s not neurons or brain chemicals - it’s a coat of paint on a fire truck. All I experience in seeing red (in feeling it, in something seeming red, in the appearance of red) is, well, red. Nowhere in the experience do neurons or chemicals appear. Thus, as argued in my previous post, neurons and chemicals can’t be part of the experience - and for reductionism to work, they would have to be.
The question is how does your experience of red actually occur. As you point out you are never aware of the brain’s role in what you are aware of, the feeling/experience of, the appearance of red. Just because we are not aware of light striking the retina in our eye does not mean that it doesn’t happen. The physical processes involved in sight all take place without our direct awareness of them. The passage of information from the retina to the brain and the processing of that information by the brain takes place without our awareness. But I don’t think you would deny that these processes are necessary for sight just because you do not experience them. If these physical processes were not necessary for sight we would be able to see with our eyes closed or with no eyes at all. As you point out, these processes are not experienced by us (“Nowhere in the experience do neurons or chemicals appear.”). But just because we are not aware of these processes does not mean they are not responsible for generating the very experiences of which we are aware.
I agree totally with everything you say twnf. What I was trying to point out was not that neuro-chemical events can’t be going on, nor that they aren’t intricately involved in our experiences as we feel them, but just that I don’t understand how. Obviously, there has to be a way of understanding how - because they are linked - but I don’t have that understanding (to me it’s like a natural phenomenon that I know to be real, the scientific explanation of which I have yet to come across - and the ones I have come across [i.e. physicalism] don’t sit right with me). I was hoping to shed some light (for you and other physicalists) on what the crux of the problem is for me: that it seems to me that if you’re going to reduce a feeling/appearing/seeming down to neuro-chemical events (or to anything physical - in fact, anything at all), the least of requirements would have to be that those things you’re reducing them to have to be ‘in’ the feeling/appearing/seeming (like atoms are in a rock). But if a feeling/appearing/seeming is nothing but what is felt, what appears, or what seems, then whatever’s ‘in’ them must also be felt, appear, or seem. Otherwise, they’re not part of the feeling/appearing/seeming, and are ‘outside’ it, ‘behind’ it, ‘beneath’ it (or some such term like that).
I’m not arguing this as a means to attack physicalism (although I could if that were my purpose here), only to show the conceptual impass I find myself up against and unable to mount over. This is why I mentioned in passing earlier that if you want to argue for a causal account - not a reductive one - that would make it easier for me to digest - but still one in which I lack an understanding for how.
A cause would require that there is something in memory to tell you about it. Something that is able to be recalled and used to explain how. Unless something was acausal, in which case there would be no way of knowing how it happened.
The artificiality of the explanation is what keeps the how of the cause enclosed. “Life” is given to the sensing of things through constantly thinking about them - a tremendous investment in all these things. But these are all memories, ideas.
We don’t really know what memory is. We were told that “To recall a specific thing at a specific time” is memory. We repeated this definition as students of psychology. But it is much more than that. They say that memory is in the neurons. If it is all in the neurons, where is it located in them? The brain does not seem to be the center of memory. Cells seem to have their own memory. So, where is that memory? Is it transmitted through genes? Who knows? Some of these questions have no answers so far. Probably one of these days they will find out.
Yes, the processes that are responsible for a feeling are “behind it” in the sense of causing it and not being felt. A feeling is not a persistent thing like a rock but rather it is a passing phenomenon during which nerves are stimulated by neurally mediated responses to physical stimuli.
Feelings are much like weather conditions. Weather conditions are constantly changing and flowing according to unseen processes resulting in the conditions we call precipitation, wind, heat, and cold. While we use words like “conditions” and “feelings” which seem to refer to persistent things they are, in fact, constantly evolving processes. We should not confuse processes with the things that are interacting. Of course these processes involve things (neurons and chemicals) but since these things in themselves do not produce experiences there is no direct connection between them and the results of their interactions (feelings). This is why we cannot say that feelings are composed of things and that “whatever’s ‘in’ them must be felt”. There simply are no things in them to be felt. What we feel (physically) is the result of millions of interactions (chemical exchanges) between things (neurons), not the neurons or chemicals themselves.
Well, it’s fun to assume and pick up as many clues as possible … and then what twnf said (about not needing to know how the process works) comes to mind. It seems that whenever I engage a line of thought, there is a goal of understanding something, but often I’m just confirming my suspicions which in turn may be a ploy with the intention being to arrive at what I already know and as my viewpoint.
But if it’s true that I don’t need to know, and if indeed I do not know, then there would be no investigation and there would be no suspicions. All this lack of confirmation as to how consciousness functions - with all of its supposed levels, directions and dimensions - would tell me to go back and take a closer look at the primary assumption: Are there really depths and divisions in consciousness, or is all that an epistemologically created notion?
Because we have sensations physically, the knowledge of which we use to express them and assess their magnitude, perhaps we think we’re being clever by shifting the whole thing over to thought and claim that there is something in how we interpret perceptions that can bring about discoveries that lie dormant until we hit the right dimension or level. But as you know of me, I tend to believe that living thought is something dead and anything it says about anything – it tries to talk about, deal with, or experience the body – it cannot. So is there another way, another instrument aside from thought? What about the part that the glands play?
… or a thought. Thoughts are not physical phenomena, yet one thought can have an effect on every cell in the body. So neural or thought activity in the brain is not the only location. Feelings can extend throughout the entire system.
I’m not sure this makes things any more clear for me. Just as I don’t feel any neurons or chemicals in my experiences, neither do I feel neuro-chemical processes (or events, interactions, exchanges, etc.), so how can the feeling of something be reduced to these? If feeling is the result of these (in the manner of being an effect of a cause) as you seem to be saying, we still have a gap to leap across as I don’t understand how such neuro-chemical interactions result in any feeling at all.
It may be possible to find correlations between feelings (emotions) and functional brain activity - to locate in the brain what area of neural activity is being stimulated when a particular sensation is current.
We would also probably agree that the impression taking place bodily happens without regard to the knowledge of what it is, let alone how it takes place. The initial and immediate occurrence of a sensation is spontaneous in the sense that it was not a result of deliberate thought. Perhaps these ’natural’ phenomena have their origins in some primal area in the evolution process, but their existence is unquestionably real.
Now, in order for one to know that they are having a sensation or experience of any certain kind, thought would have to come in and capture it within a frame of knowledge, otherwise they would remain pure, unadulterated and unknown. Therefore, someone else, having the knowledge of it, would have to tell you. The knowledge creates the experience in consciousness (awareness). If the experience is not repeated, it looses strength in knowledge. Experience reinforces the knowledge. With the repetition of the experiences from memory, we can now ’see’ (in our mind’s eye) what we are talking about and may proceed in intellectual discussion. We may even hone the intellect towards perfection, yet have no clue as to how life mysteriously brought into the organism its various remarkable operations.
There is definitely a mechanical thing taking place in the way the intellect and thought works. Very much like a computer. But, what is so special about the brain? Is it the special material of the brain that makes what we call ‘mental events’ possible? Or is it simply the nature of processes themselves, without regard for the material in which they occur?
Reduction is something that can happen. I don’t see why it’s something that ought to happen. Reduction is a tool, not a necessity. And all tools have their specific uses and appropriate contexts.
I agree, but if you’re going to be a monist, you must use reductionism in some way. Incidentally, your point turns out to be more versatile than you might think (though you’re probably quite aware of this already), for the suggestion that one apply reduction to a set of elements says nothing of which elements get reduced to which other elements. Physicalists are in the habit of reducing mind/consciousness to matter/brains, but an idealist/subjectivist (such as myself) are in the habit of flipping the reduction 180 degrees: from matter/brains to mind/consciousness.
I might even add that the reduction can work 90 degrees: whereas the brain can be reduced to molecular and atomic structures, there is a parallel reduction at work when one’s awareness of the world is reduced to his thoughts, sensations, emotions, memories, fantasies, pains and pleasures, etc..
I am simply trying to keep language as concise and precise as possible here, to effect the best possible communication of these thoughts. It is not my intention to ban words, but to refine our use thereof.
Why? Just because (hypothetically speaking) red can be reduced to a particular pattern of black and white certainly does not mean that redness itself does not exist! Is the fact that a thing has a causal ground or reason for existing a critique or judgment against that thing itself, as if it could somehow exist without such reasons and causal grounding?
You are implying that I am coming from a reductionist perspective - I am not. Thought does not reduce to neuronal activity because thought involves many other organic elements as well, and since thought directly plays into these elements (including neurons) the causality is all mixed up together - this is the essence of a reflexive system like the brain. The parts exist in each other, dependently so, and a sufficient understanding of one part implies understanding others. Thus, nothing can be “reduced” to anything but the global system itself, which is to say, to the particular ways in which the relations between “parts” of the system obtain, change, function, grow.
To your original point, to know your thoughts is, yes, to feel the effects of them. Nothing is known in itself, but through its effects caused. Thus the “thing” itself, from the perspective of the experiencer, is the effect, the energy imparted (information transfered, interpreted, translated, re- and de-coded, created, memorized, etc). We speculate about the things which give rise to these effects only after we have new knowledge about the context in which the effects take place; knowledge of cellular biology reinvents understanding of thought, as we now attribute the action of thought to the functionings of cells in the brain. But this (scientific) process of increasingly refined conceptual ideas in which we understand our basic experiential sensations is always changing with time, and the metaphors (cells, etc) in which we try to best capture these ideas/experiences are never perfect or complete. There is always room “at the bottom” for the unknown, because we are entities with finite means of perception (even with the aids of technology) and limited faculties thereof.
These differences in how we experience thoughts would then reveal to us the essential qualities of thought itself - how does thought feel, what does it motivate in us, how do we respond and react to thoughts? These are not problematic concerns, they merely point to the fact that thoughts are of different things, arise from different context, and impart different effects or consequences to us. Thoughts are not distinct entities, they intermingle with perception, memory, feelings, language use, imagination. Thought is a general term I would use to describe these forms of self-experience that are at least partially able to be experienced under the faculty of cognition/representation (of ideas, images/forms). As every sort of self-experience obtains at least in part under such faculty, thought can be understood as involved in most if not all of our self-experiences, of any type whatsoever. Of course thought may take a subservient role to emotion, or recollection, or desire, etc; but this does not mean that these primary impulses are not themselves at least partially captured and expressed under the images of thought.
It is this “non abstract” that I think is confusing you here. what do you mean by this?
Again, I do not share your idea of “physicalism”. I do not think or conceive of these notions under such a conception. Things exist, they are, one way or another, and this “they are” takes form within a context (it is for some sustaining reason, in that without this reason it would not be, or it would cease to be). This is not only a logically mandated position but is also our common experience of the world as such; in otherwords there is no reason to assume that things “just happen”. Nor, of course, is there a reason to assume that we can or will know the reasons for why everything (or even anything) happens. To me, what you call physicalism is just the common notion that 1) everything is in some manner or another, and 2) nothing is in such a way that it is not connected to other things which are. And no, this does not imply causal determinism (see Deleuze or Whitehead in this regard).
By seeing where you are now in terms of the idea/concept, and then progressively subtracting pieces from this view which you know to be the product of your conditional human form. You start with where you are, what you are in the now, and move ‘backward’ through causal layers toward a ground which is pre-human, in terms of pre-contrived and conditional to what you now understand as your “anything but human” perspective. It is not a perfect science; but then again, it is never about being perfect. It is about getting better over time. As well as: the utility of such perspectives (“mental tools”) is great even when we realize that the tools themselves are not perfect nor will they ever yield perfect results.
What do you mean, “like being a rock”? What does it mean to “be like a rock”? Rocks are human ideas. Outside of the human there is just energy coalesced into particular and conditional patterns, forms, of one sort or another. Some of these sorts coincide with what we label ‘rock’. Does this word, this label need to point to some essential reality, to some ontological truth outside of the human? Certainly not. Words are merely contrived human notions we use to divide up, classify and make sense of our experiences. I think you are trying to imply that the words we use to label things are saying something about the ontological status of those “things” themselves – well they are saying something ontologically about how we humans experience these things, but is this the same as if these words (the essence invoked or created or prescribed by the word/concept itself) actually carve our a space in reality itself, as if these words are unveiling some essential ontological characteristic of reality “itself”, absent the human? No. But does this then mean that we ought never to attempt at encountering this “extra-human” in the world, that we ought to assume we never at all come up against the world as it is? No.
Perhaps it would help here if you conceive of the idea that every “thing” that exists, be it rocks, trees, humans, stars, atoms, each of these is a unique event. The only “things” (events) which are not unique would be the most basic quanta of reality (hypothetically). But we need not concern ourselves with this realm (not yet, anyway, not until we are ready to delve there). All things, rocks etc, are unique organizations of energetic patterns, obtaining in uniqueness at every moment of their existence. Because of this, there is no “being like” in itself, in reality, other than a form-al sense of approximation of conditions or qualities which take shape under various situations/environments (matter). Because of this structural patterning, physical matter is possible; but the actual organization, internally, of the structure of the event itself is always unique, novel. No two “things” (events) share the same properties (relations to others) with each other. If we grant this as true, what then does this imply? It implies not that there are not similarities in form and structure among certain events, but that these similarities are never categorical nor are they essential. We humans assume that identity exists because identity is a necessary concept we must make use of in order to go about differentiating, classifying and making sense of our world. The trick is not to try and do away with identity altogether, but to shed more and more layers of it progressively, gettting closer to the “truth” (the genuine “that which is as it is” of a thing/event) all the time.
I accept that to experience obtains under somewhat stable and consistent forms. But this does not mean that that which is experienced, nor that which experiences, will ever be identical with others of their same ‘kind’. What we have here is approximations of forms of similarity; but what does this tell us about subjectivity? Nothing other than that it exists within an environment of somewhat stable natural logic and laws. 2+2 will always equal 4. Well, so what of it? Every moment is still wholly unique, every event in this mathematical space-time still novel and originary in itself.
Anyway, I feel like we may be going off topic… feel free to guide all this back into whichever direction you are trying to point at here.
Yes, I think you are right here - we can replace identity with equivalence, and we retain the position that things/events obtain under certain sufficiently common forms and structures, without compromising the novelty and unique nature of these things/events themselves. Or, maybe I am completely off here as to what you mean by equivalence…
Yes, I’m aware of all that. Well said - thanks for saying it for me! I don’t consider myself a monist though, so I have no overriding need to use reductionism in some way. I really do think it’s merely a useful tool, and that it’s best to maintain flexibility about how we use it.
A feeling is a sensation. A sensation is how we experience/feel the stimulation of nerve cells. Nerve cells can be stimulated by signals sent from the brain. These signals are the result of neuro-chemical interactions in the brain. It is similar to the way muscle cells can be stimulated by signals sent from the brain. These signals are also the result of neuro-chemical interactions in the brain. Both feelings and muscle movement are physical responses generated by brain activity.
environmental or internal stimulus reaches the brain → neuro-chemical interactions are activated by the stimulus → electro-chemical signals resulting from neuro-chemical interactions travel through the nervous system to various nerve cells → signals stimulate nerve cells → sensation/feeling (electro-chemical activity) is felt.
I know what you’re getting at here and it really doesn’t matter from where it came … it brings the unitary process of stimulus response to mind though. Imagine yourself as an entity not discrete from everything that surrounds you or that is happening inside you due to utter lack of knowledge. Sensory stimulation is occurring and the proper response being registered in the brain. But there is no subject there to decipher all the indistinctness. Thought has to come in and say, ‘this is the stimulus and that is the response.’ It has to make a separation in the unified event by being introduced to the knowledge of what’s going on, otherwise ‘you’ are not there. You cannot see or comprehend.
Actually, it is still the case even when the knowledge is there. Since the knowledge is given (second hand) it doesn’t belong to me. And since it doesn’t, I am not there. So, is it me that knows? Am I thinking now? There is nothing there. It’s all so mechanical.
Clumping together subjective/mental terms such as ‘sensation/feeling’ with physical terms such as ‘electro-chemical activity’ doesn’t make them the same thing. Observe:
I claim apples and oranges are the same thing. Proof: put a seed in the ground → give it water and sunlight → watch it grow → buds begin to emerge → those buds become an apple (i.e. orange) ← see what I did there?! See?!