This is a quote from somebody undoubtedly more intelligent than I in the realm of logic. Do you agree or disagree? Why?
Depends on how one conceives the material in question.
I’d like to see what this person thinks the conditions for each term are.
What does it mean to be a material thing? What doesn’t it mean to be a material thing?
What does it mean for a thing to be/have consciousness. Which condition[s] essential to consciousness are inconsistent with which condition[s] of materialism?
edit: damn you xunzian.
I’d might as well give you guys the entire conversation…I hate to be a copy paster without fully understanding it, but I’ll live…
Can a computer feel?
If we programmed a computer to have a capacity for pain, would it be motivated to succed?
Are our thoughts dictated by the neurological state of our brains?
For me this long and boring debate comes down to an idea of determinism versus the nature of the universe, being finite or infinite, closed or open.
People end up getting worried about themselves living illusions and not having free will…
Even if reality is entirely a farce, inclusing ourselves, would that change the way we should live? would that give us insight into knowledge?
can philosophy answer qestions of the nature of reality , conciousness and existence?
I don’t buy his definition. And i don’t think this is what most people mean at all by that word. I think they just mean “awareness”. Conscuousness is merely self-awareness. “I can separate myself from other entities, and i am aware that i can”.
People use the word “gravity” without knowing exactly what it “means”. Gravity has been somewhat elusive to science. But we feel what we take to be its affects, and the explanation we have works pretty well.
That we don’t know everything about “consciousness” does not mean that we must assume God. It’s not a zero-sum game.
The rationalist is constantly saying “We don’t have all the science about this - so God must exist”.
Paff.
Some stuff is pretty much what it seems to be.
“Consciousness” is just a word - you can define it any way you like.
I agree with Faust that most people define consciousness as their awareness of the world (and the self), but I don’t think it follows from this that it’s material.
There’s the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem. The easy problem is explaining how an organism becomes conscious, which modern neuro-science seems to have a fairly decent handle on, but the hard problem is explaining why consciousness feels the way it does - namely, so immaterial. The hard problem, in my view, will never be solved by a strict materialist account.
There are some who dismiss consciousness as just a bad theory that we ought to dispense with - they say there isn’t, and never was such a thing. We just didn’t know how to explain the mechanism driving our behavior and so we made up this mystical and enigmatic force we called “consciousness”. Now that science has revealed the mechanisms driving our behavior, we can do away with the old archaic theory of consciousness.
I don’t take these guys seriously. I think either their motives are purely political or they’re deluded by their own confused theory. I agree with d0rkyd00d’s quote:
meaning that we all have these private subjective experiences that are self-evidently there and a perfect place to start a theory of consciousness from. The eliminativist (those who dismiss consciousness as a bad theory) are essentially denying they have these experiences (I guess they’re pzombies) which is flat out ludicrous to me and places them beyond the scope of reasonable philosophy.
But they don’t represent the whole of materialists. There are plenty of materialists who hold their position on grounds I fully respect.
There are the reductionist. These guys propose that our private subjective experiences are real, but they nevertheless reduce to material brain and chemical processes. These guys fall into two camps: those who claim not only that consciousness is reducible to matter but that it is completely intelligible how, and those who claim it is not intelligible. The latter group, I respect, the former, less so. Of the latter, there are again two camps: those who believe such a reduction will become intelligible as science improves her methods and storehouse of knowledge, and those who believe science will never make the link intelligible, nor will any method of investigation for that matter. Again, I have more respect for the latter than the former (but at this point, they’re both fairly respectable in my books).
Then there are those materialists who, in a modest sense, betray their own cause by proposing that what we need in order to understand consciousness in term of the physical is a whole new physics - a revamp, in other words, of the most fundamental assumptions we hold about the nature of the physical world. I call this a sort of “betrayal” of materialism because it runs a high risk of putting materialism through such a drastic conceptual shift that it may not be materialism once it’s finished with.
I think I fall into the latter camp, and yes I have thrown my entire worldview through such a radical shift that I can’t say I’m a materialist (so am I part of the latter camp?). My grasp of physics is quite different from the materialists/objectivists, but it doesn’t really shake the grounds on which our entire knowledge base of physics and other sciences stand - that is, all the discoveries and depth of understanding we have attained over the past few centuries is still vouchsafed - we can still make the same claims about the physical world as we always have - it’s just the framework within which we say it - or rather, how we understand the things we’re talking about - that are different.
Hi All
The second bit of the opening post was a cut-n-paste of something I posted on another board, and it needs to be put into context. First “materialism” means naive/traditional materialism (i.e. a claim about realms of existence, not causal reducibility to the physical.) Second, it is a deliberate abuse of Wittgenstein insomuch as it contains a premise which takes an idea out of the Investigations ( a private ostensive definition) which was only described by Wittgenstein as part of an argument which claimed such definitions were impossible. I think if you believe Wittgenstein is wrong - if you are willing to accept a private definition of the word “consciousness” - then the argument succeeds in causing problems for naive versions of materialism. Whether or not Wittgenstein’s private language argument is valid or not is a whole other ball game.
Geoff
double post
Yes, and what’s more, a materialist cannot have a concept without running into inconsistency.
It can help us to see contradictions in what we currently believe. It can tell us we can’t simultaneously believe X and Y, but can’t tell us which one of them is wrong.
Gib - gravity feels odd on an amusement park ride.
I’m not sure, however, that consciousness feels any way at all.
I think that strict materialist accounts have not explained consciousness. That doesn’t mean they won’t. Materialists have science on their side. Science hasn’t explained anything completely, though. But neither has anything else.
Sitt - if i understand you correctly, i agree. Materialism doesn’t lend itself to a Unified Omnibus Theory of much of anything.
Well, that’s half of the problem. Materialists generally don’t take much notice of Kant and use the word “material” to mean “noumenal material” and “phenomenal material” interchangably. The result is confusion all around.
Is that true, Goeff? Those are pretty bad materialists.
Hi Faust,
What is a “strict materialist”?
What do you mean by “consciousness”?
What counts as a scientific explanation?
Strict Materialist: all facts are physical facts.
There’s a famous thought experiment to help you decide if you’re a materialist(physicalism).
A scientist places a baby in box in which everything is black, white, and grey. This person grows up in the box to become a great scientist. Throughout it’s life it has information piped in on black and white TV’s and on black and white paper. This person comes to know everything there is to know about the color red in terms of it’s physical properties, in terms of what science can discover about it. On this person 35th birthday the door to the box is opened and the person steps out into a rose garden, and sees red for the first time. The question is, did this person learn something new when the box was opened and he/she saw red for the first time, did the person learn a new fact about what red is.
If no then physicalism(strict materialism)
If yes, then not physicalism.
Ah, Mary the colour-blind scientist.
For me the only “strict” version of materialism is eliminativism.
Well, I’ll come out of the closet here.
I was a firm believer that everything related to consciousness has a physical correlate, which I’m guessing puts me in the materialism camp, no?
I’ve yet to understand why materialism is inconsistent with the belief of consciousness…
Alright, have a crack at me.
See, i’ve always considered eliminatvism fanatical materialism.
blah