How can science make progress on an issue where it can’t define the thing it is trying to make progress on?
Faust keeps telling us that consciousness doesn’t really exist. If that is so then there’s no point in people like Dennett trying to “explain” it.
That doesn’t answer my question.
What puzzles me about the materialist solution to the mind-body problem is how a material entity can ‘feel’ at all. It doesn’t satisfy to define ‘feel’ as a physical stimulation of the brain by the environment or body because that’s clearly question begging. What I identify as a ‘feel’ seems to bear no physical properties whatsoever, so I’m at a loss in attempting to follow the materialist’s lead.
It would be one thing if the materialist granted that this is a genuine problem but that one day science will yeild the answer and we will finally see how ‘feels’ can be put in materialist terms, but so many seem loathed to do this - they give me the impression that they aren’t troubled by this in the least.
Why do we need to define it without reference to brain activity or behavior, except in order to enable your proof?
Science can be a process of discovery - not all the variables involved in scientific examination need to be predefined - why not let the science work itself out first and then define it based on that?
Faust and Dennett hold seperate positions. However, even if consciousness “doesn’t really exist” that doesn’t preclude an explanation of what might have given rise to the notion that it did in the first place.
I have trouble envisioning what it might be like to “feel” anything in the absence of physicality . . .
Sure - so feeling and physicality are interdependent - they may even be one and the same - I just wish somebody would explain to me how.
Well, that’s the rub, and that’s part of the explanation science is currently seeking . . .
There are a lot of “things” that “exist” only in language. Metaphors, figurative speech, metaphors for collections of metaphors.
We are conscious. That is a characteristsic of humans.
We love. That doesn’t mean that love exists apart from us.
Consciousness is a feature or characterisitic of humans. Like height.
That does not mean that “height” exists experientially. High things exist.
Your getting right down to the crux of the problem - one of them at least.
Yes, I’ve struggled with clarifying what I mean by the “existence” of mental experiences. Same with experiences as “things”. It can’t be that mental experiences exist in a corporeal, external, or independent (CEI) sense, like physical objects do, but I can’t conceive of them not existing at all either. TBH, I try to avoid the term all together. I opt for “having” instead - that is, I have mental experiences. Does it follow that mental experiences exist? Is my having them a license to posit their existence? I think it can be so long as I define “existence” in this context as the “having” of mental experiences. Of course, that leaves me at a loss for how to articulate it any further - it renders it seemingly irrediucible. How to translating “existence” as “having” to existence as CEI - that’s the problem.
Personally, I think any attempt to do so is folly, and my philosophy pivots on an alternate approach to that problem (I translate existence as CEI into existence as “having”). If I were to grant the materialist his views instead, I would hold onto my “having” definition of “existence” and expect him not only to show me the proper translation of this to the CEI definition, but to put it in physicalist terminology in the same stroke.
The problem is that materialism tries to understand the immanent in terms of the transcedent, but assumes the immanent is fundamentally different than the transcendent, and thus finds only contradiction and nonsense when it talks about the immanent. Immanent entities are assumed to be “objects” in the same way that a chair is an a object, and then when it is realized that this doesn’t make sense, intentionality and immanence are denied.
Immanent entities are not objects, they are not substances, they are exactly what we experience them as. They are not even psychic, they are act structures, they are lived experiences. Transcendence independent of a constituting immanence is trash. The entity as judged is constituted objectively as judged. You cannot talk about a chair unless it is in terms of how it is objectified and given in immanence. The chair is the how of objectification. Talking about a chair independent of how it is given in intentionality is trash. Just like trying to define intentionality independent of the intentional concrete being is trash. Immanence and Transcendence are intimately related.
This denial of immanence and intentionality is a denial of what you are, a locus of lived experiences and constituting act structures. How someone tries to understand man without intentionality is beyond me.
The results shouldn’t surprise us, the claim “abstract things” exist in language within an ontology that denies the existence of language. An abstraction of an abstraction. It’s incomprehensible.
Gib - Humans exist. They are conscious. They are selfaware. Once you stray from that type of formulation, you tend to reify.
Sitt - I don’t really have much interest in your statement except to say that the very vocabulary you use stacks the deck. Which is why I use everyday language - consciousness is an everyday event.
An everyday event that doesn’t exist, right.
Now the real question is, are you a mystic. The claim that we are conscious, but consciousness doesn’t exist, and this none existing consciousness experiences none existent things screams mysticism. Well mysticism or nonsense.
Because if we define it in terms of brain activity of behaviour then the word we have defined cannot refer to subjective experiences. How can one word refer to two different things at the same time?
You’re just not getting it, Sitt. It exists the same way that walking exists. It’s the noun form of a verb. English is funny that way, even for those who do understand it.
“I am walking” doesn’t mean that “walking” or “walk” is a thing. “Walking is good” doesn’t mean that walking is a thing. “I am conscious” doesn’t mean that consciousness is a thing. The verd “to be” is the problem here. It’s a famous problem, entirely different for a mystic than a materialist.
“I am being conscious” does not mean that “being” is a thing. Which is the real problem for the phenomenologist. It’s a problem of misunderstanding the verb “to be” in its various usages. It’s a problem in the construction of many langauges. Half of all philosophy is a mistake about this.
Try Russell’s theory of logical types. Might help.
The verd “to be” cannot itself be predicated. Or you get stuff like “isness” and “beingness”. It’s gibberish.
If it is as simple as you’re making it out to be, then why all the debate over it?
Surely there must be more to it than a simple semantics issue…right?
I know. I want to stray - or rather build on. I want to do this without reifying. Is that hopeless? It’s not hopeless until I’ve given up.
What I depend on is this: that I can claim that I am indeed having mental experiences, and that others can claim the same of themselves. Once we’ve gotten this far, we can establish the having of experiences as a starting point - that as, as a key premise. If we can further agree that by the “existence” of these experience, we simply mean the having of them (rather than that they are CEI as defined in my previous post), then we can make headway using reify-ish terminology without confusing that terminology for literal reified things (CEI things). Like you said, it’s a language problem. Language seems to be very limited. I doesn’t readily make available alternatives to the word “exist”, the words that I need.
It’s like your example of “walking”. You yourself said:
which admits that there is a sense in which walking exists. I’m trying to be clear about the sense in which my mind exists. In the end, though, this does seem rather hopeless unless I already have the agreement of others that we’re all having mental experiences.
I think it may be the persistence of these questions which eventually forces our materialist friends to admit there is a problem. All of their attempts to solve the problem are parlour tricks. They all leave you feeling like you’ve been duped, and for good reason. The explanations only seem to make sense to the materialists themselves and therefore the questions don’t go away. They just keep coming back again.
Either I’m misunderstaning your metaphor, or there is a shortcoming with it. Either way, I’ll try to address it.
I don’t think you can equate “walking” with “consciousness.” One is a description of a particular action of something material. We can attribute a physical description to walking: it is the movement of a person’s legs, which are material. We cannot do this with consciousness: it is not material. The brain is material, but isn’t this what leads to the question in the first place, how consciousness arises from the material?