"And suppose you hold that what is real is only what science tells us is real." Nobody holds that, strawman already, that didn't take long, just the intro and Feser already does not know what he is talking about. I am not surprised.
Well, I suppose you can find somebody who holds just about any nonsense position, so, allow me to say that nobody with a well considered grounding in the philosophy of science holds that.
Reality is the ontological state of affairs in the cosmos, whether we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about that state of affairs or not.
"The Aristotelian regards a human being as a single, irreducible substance that takes in nutrients, grows, reproduces itself, moves itself about, senses the world around it, has various appetites, thinks, and wills." Here Feser manages to contradict himself within the space of a single sentence. I suppose that is kind of impressive. A single irreducible substance that reduces to all sorts of divided aspects.
"Aristotelians regard thinking and willing as incorporeal activities and the other activities as corporeal ones," Because Aristotle and his modern acolytes have no apparent knowledge of modern scientific evidence of how thinking works.
"Aristotelians who think that the intellect survives the death of the body" Right...
"From an Aristotelian point of view, the Cartesian conception of human nature grotesquely distorts it in several ways." Right...
"Rosenberg also essentially conflates having a thought with having a phantasm (such as a visual or auditory mental image of some sort, whether of a word, a sentence, or of the thing thought about). " Our thoughts are hallucinations, yes, not a conflation, just a fact that for some reason seems to disturb most people into a sort of flabbergasted denial.
You could call it a phantasm, I suppose, if you prefer that word to hallucination.
The brain is a collection of cells in a dark, silent, wet, bonebox. I think even an Aristotelian understands that simple anatomical fact. Yet we experience this vivid spatio-temporal 3D visual auditory sensory show.
Have you noticed that when you close your eyes and your ears the show disappears? Even the Aristotelian knows that the eyes and ears connect to the brain along nerve cells.
There is no light going along those nerve cells. There is no sound going along those nerve cells. You know that because you are not an idiot. Everybody knows that.
So, what is going along those nerve cells? Well, the process is somewhat colorfully called spike trains. It is a series of electrochemical signals. I think you know that too.
So, how is it that you see this fantastic 3D show, yet your brain is in a dark, quiet, wet bonebox, and all it gets is a whole bunch of nerve pulses?
It is like asking how you can have all those fantastic pictures on your monitor yet there are just a bunch of little pulses going through that little wire.
Your monitor has built into it a processor that translates the pulse stream into all the colors and sounds.
Your brain is a processor that translates the pulse stream into all the colors and sounds.
You hallucinate in your sleep when the source of the pulse stream is from stored images, which is like playing a video file on your computer.
You hallucinate while you are awake when the source of the pulse stream is from your eyes and ears and other senses, which is like connecting a camera for a live stream.
The image generation process is essentially the same whether you are sleeping or awake.
The difference between your sleeping hallucinations and your waking hallucinations is that when you are awake the source of the data stream is real time senses, not memories.
So yes, at least Feser gets that much right, our thoughts are phantasms, or hallucinations.
Also, to be fair, Feser gets a number of points right in his setup. He lays a bit of interesting groundwork that would make for a good discussion, but then he goes completely off the rails with his Aristotelian nonsense.
Also, to be fair, Rosenberg does embrace the word "scientism" when pretty much nobody else does. "Scientism" is 99% a strawman used by Christian apologists. But Rosenberg embraces it sort of like gays took over the word "queer", which used to be a derogatory epithet, but then gays decided to own it and now it appears as part of a tv program title, for example.
Plus Rosenberg makes the assertion I think is demonstrably false and I really advise him to modify, that science is the only tool to gain knowledge. The easy counter example is that I know I exist in some form and I don't need science to absolutely know that for a fact.
Patricia Churchland is perhaps a more thoughtful and balanced speaker on the subject of eliminative materialism.
Our thoughts are hallucinations, yes, not a conflation, just a fact that for some reason seems to disturb most people into a sort of flabbergasted denial.
Your thoughts may be hallucinations, but normal brain function by definition is not a hallucination. Otherwise the word means absolutely nothing.
What you interpret as "flabbergasted denial" is instead amused exasperation with how you make up your own definitions and then call others wrong for not agreeing. Normal brain function is not a hallucination any more than normal kidney function is renal failure.
StardustyPsyche said: Reality is the ontological state of affairs in the cosmos, whether we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about that state of affairs or not.
Based upon previous discussion wherein it was put forth that something can be real without that something existing and also given the linguistic relationship between real and reality, I think your position is more accurately and more consistently stated along the lines of "The ontological state of affairs regards/concerns what exists in the cosmos, whether or not we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about what exists and that state of affairs." This would provide a basis for your argument against the notion that "what is real is only what science tells us is real." After all, science might be - and very often seems to be - a useful tool for discovering what exists, but it would not follow that science is applicable to or useful for all that is real. To insist that "what is real is only what science tells us is real" is to justify the most pejorative sense of scientism and scientistic.
Also as previously discussed, and in line with your apparent perspective, importance does not exist, but importance is real; accordingly, importance is not an ontological issue - which would also be to say that importance is not simply a matter of (nor is it determined in terms of) what exists. Furthermore, the very reality of importance indicates that ontological issues and facts do not necessarily supersede non-ontological considerations. Indeed, it is well asserted that the importance of ontological matters derives from the extent to which they (might eventually) have non-ontological utility.
StardustyPsyche said: Feser (rolls eyes and mutters, really?)
Does Rosenberg similarly cause eye-rolling? I have not read Rosenberg, nor have I read all of Feser's Rosenberg commentary, but my initial impression is that Rosenberg has extended eliminativism in a pejoratively scientistic manner. That being said, I am not sure that the Churchlands or others did much to head off such an easily foreseeable extension - assuming that they object at all to Rosenberg's position. That can get discussed later when time allows.
I would say dreaming is pretty normal, just like you. The brain operates in cycles of waking and sleeping, and different processes occur in each one.
On the other hand, someone wide awake describing a pink elephant on his ceiling that speaks in his dead mother's voice, which no one else can see or hear? Now we've entered the realm of abnormality in which the word "hallucination" becomes functional.
I suspect the people making press releases who are describing normal waking function as "controlled hallucination" are simply being sensational, something of which scientists are frequently guilty, because no matter the specifics of how the brain processes external sensory stimuli, by definition it isn't abnormal and is therefore not hallucination, controlled or otherwise. That's simply normal function.
Kevin, "different processes occur in each one." So, it seems you have identified those processes, at least broadly, in order to identify them as different.
Different in all respects?
If you see a familiar face in your dream, with all the same colors and shapes and expressions as when you saw that face while you are awake, what is the difference, as accurately as you can describe?
"Now we've entered the realm of abnormality in which the word "hallucination" becomes functional." So, dreams are abnormal after all?
"is external sensory stimuli, by definition it isn't abnormal and is therefore not hallucination". So a dream is not an hallucination because it is normal?
Hal-"Feser is referring to the powers of the human being. Powere are poentialities not substances" Feser-"The Aristotelian regards a human being as a single, irreducible substance"
"takes in nutrients, grows, reproduces itself, moves itself about, senses the world around it" Those are complex physical processes that are composed of many parts.
Yet Feser claims those many parts are irreducible substance.
It usually takes Feser more sentences to make incoherent statements, this time he has managed to do so in a single sentence, congrats, I suppose.
what is the difference, as accurately as you can describe?
This reminds me of when my wife wanted to go to France and see the sights, and I (wisely) said "Just imagine standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, and that is pretty much identical to, and a lot cheaper than, the memory of actually going there." Sometimes victory isn't worth the cost.
But again, the particulars of what is happening from a neurological perspective are largely irrelevant. If I see a face while awake and the same face while asleep, the difference is the face I'm seeing while awake is actually there, which is why I see it. In dreams I have been Superman and flown, driven the Batmobile, fought with lightsabers, mined asteroids, killed demons, hunted criminals, wrecked more cars than I can recall, and once I ended an entire universe because I didn't want to get married and everyone screamed and died as I woke up and their world vanished. Actually felt a little guilty about that last one, but it didn't really happen.
If I'm wide awake and perceive myself flying around as Superman, I probably need some serious treatment.
So a dream is not an hallucination because it is normal?
Dreams aren't hallucinations because the dreamer isn't awake. Hallucinating generally means the person is heavily sleep deprived or is half-asleep, has a serious medical or psychiatric condition, or has taken some powerful medicine or drugs, but the key is being awake and perceiving stimuli that don't exist outside the mind. The brain is not functioning as it should. Dreams don't fall in that category.
Some of my friends who took too many drugs for too long also couldn't seem to be able to distinguish among whether what they were experiencing what was real or whether they were awake or dreaming. It was sad to see these extremely bright people who've I've known all my life go mad.
"One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely dubious or even manifestly absurd claims as if they were obvious truths that no well-informed or decent person could deny"
Kevin, ""Just imagine standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, and that is pretty much identical to, and a lot cheaper than, the memory of actually going there." Right, so the memory itself would be pretty much the same. Either way, you could see it in your mind's eye, as it were.
Indeed, that function of your brain that conjures images internally that are nowhere near at the time is essentially the same, and the function of your brain that stores memories of those images is essentially the same, and the function of your brain that retrieves those memories from storage and translates them into a sort of internal visual projection for your mind's eye to see is essentially the same.
The difference is the source of the image data.
In one case the source of the image data is having viewed pictures of the object, and in the other case the source of the image date is viewing the object itself.
Aside from that difference the processes of viewing, storing, retrieving, decoding, internally visualizing, and apprehending that internal visualization are all pretty much the same.
"the face I'm seeing while awake is actually there" Where? I mean in detail, where is the face you see when you are awake and generally thinking clearly? It feels like your vision is out there, but is it?
Or is your vision in your mind's eye, like a dream vision or a memory vision?
"the particulars of what is happening from a neurological perspective are largely irrelevant." If you have no interest in discovering the true nature of consciousness then that may seem like the case to you.
Pretty much right where I see it. I can reach out and touch the face I see and it will be where I see it. If not, I've got a haunting or a problem.
Or is your vision in your mind's eye, like a dream vision or a memory vision?
Whatever the case, it is based on external sensory feedback resulting from an object that actually exists, unlike dreams or memory or imagination. Or hallucination.
If you have no interest in discovering the true nature of consciousness then that may seem like the case to you.
Nothing so grand. This discussion simply doesn't require scientific details on the true nature of consciousness. If normal waking function is a hallucination, and abnormal waking function is a hallucination, then hallucination is simply synonymous with being awake, and people who believe they are suffering from hallucinations can be told to go home and enjoy their exciting sensory experiences, because everything is a hallucination.
Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to go eat a cheese sandwich. The cheese is shredded and in a pile off to the side, and I have one slice of bread with no cheese on it, but since those are the same ingredients as a cheese sandwich, that makes it a cheese sandwich.
"Pretty much right where I see it." Is what you are seeing out there, or inside, or both?
It is clear to me you have not considered this very carefully. Your sensory experience is so familiar to you that you pretty much just take its reality for granted.
"Whatever the case," Ok, so the location and nature of your vision isn't even a very interesting question for you. You see and smell and taste your cheese sandwich, so you eat it, and that is about all you need or care to know.
"This discussion simply doesn't require scientific details on the true nature of consciousness." You are so convinced of the reality at face value of your experiences that you are not merely disinterested in the details, you flatly deny their importance.
"If normal waking function is a hallucination, and abnormal waking function is a hallucination, then hallucination is simply synonymous with being awake" No, hallucination is synonymous with the brain constructing a spatial-temporal-qualia first person experiential process from internal data sources.
An hallucination is a sort of multi-media rendering from spike trains, nerve pulses within the brain.
But you don't care about learning about how your consciousness works, rather, your cheese sandwich looks and smells and tastes good to you and that is enough for you.
StardustyPsyche said: But you don't care about learning about how your consciousness works ...
Don't you mean "learning about how your ubiquitously hallucinating self or your ubiquitously hallucinating process works"? Identifying consciousness with hallucination as did that British guru-wannabe in the TED Talk video you posted some time back is (to be charitable) ridiculous. Then again, it was a TED Talk, and the guru-wannabe might just have been engaging with his audience in the manner he suspected/knew they would like - probably the sort of audience that felt that the Lucas character Yoda seemed wise because it inverted predicates and subjects when speaking. Of course, the guru-wannabe's eventual distinction was between controlled and uncontrolled; I do not know whether he got around to explicating the distinction; I was expending most of my effort while watching that video suppressing the nausea which was rising in me as he went on and on about hallucination without (so far as I recall) reaching a useful point.
Be that as it may, neural networks have been known to get stuck in an uncontrolled condition of what is effectively stasis - what would essentially be an infinite loop error in standard programming. So, you see, the important issue is the matter of control and NOT the notion that consciousness is identical to hallucination. What is important is what - if anything - follows from the unfortunate (and should-be-discarded) identification of hallucination with consciousness - unfortunate at least because replacing consciousness with hallucination does not, on the face of it, provide any new insights (and the same point applies to philosophical illusionism and simulationism).
In a way, this is all very similar to the matter of mystical experiences; the question is, "Then what? What follows from that? What has been or is to be effected subsequently?"
As Stephen Stich noted in Deconstructing the Mind, many eliminativist arguments "commonly indulge in more than a bit of futurology or science fiction." This indulgence is necessitated (in a manner of speaking) by ignorance on the part of eliminativists - by the fact that so very very little is actually known about brain function. This ignorance undercuts the grandest of eliminativist claims, but the unjustified grandiosity does not speak against further research conducted under even a tacit eliminativist bias. Rather than grandiosity and presentations in a pseudo-mysticism style, what would be more useful at present is for eliminativists to indicate what would follow from an hypothesized eliminativist success. As noted by the Churchlands in a 1990 paper (Seminars in the Neurosciences, 2, no. 4, pp. 249-56):
... any adequate neurocomputational account of human consciousness must take into account the manner in which a brain comes to represent ... the character of the other cognitive creatures with which it interacts, and the details of the social, moral, and political world in which they all live. ... This is a major challenge, one that neuroscientists have not yet addressed with any seriousness, nor even much acknowledged. ... The complexity of the neural systems we are dealing with may FOREVER [emphasis added] preclude anything more than useful approximations ...
And to that I say all the more reason to speak in terms of possible future benefits that might follow from the eliminativist perspective.
It is clear to me you have not considered this very carefully. Your sensory experience is so familiar to you that you pretty much just take its reality for granted.
Then you need to consider that just because someone disagrees with you, or isn't playing by the rules you're trying to lay out, doesn't mean they have not considered the issue.
If I see a face and I reach out to touch the face, I will feel the face. If I do not feel it, that face is a hallucination. That's literally all that is relevant here. My brain creating a model of the sensory input it is receiving does not change the fact that the input is based on factors outside the brain itself. The brain may shape what the face looks like to me, but that shape is based on something actually there.
Ok, so the location and nature of your vision isn't even a very interesting question for you. You see and smell and taste your cheese sandwich, so you eat it, and that is about all you need or care to know.
The question is whether the cheese sandwich is a hallucination. The location and nature of my vision is only relevant to the extent the sandwich actually exists outside my own perception. If it does, it isn't a hallucination, no matter how my brain is spinning the information.
You are so convinced of the reality at face value of your experiences that you are not merely disinterested in the details, you flatly deny their importance.
For someone who prides himself on his logic, you are terrible at forming accurate conclusions. I told you why the details didn't matter for my denial that normal waking experience is not a hallucination, since hallucination is not normal by definition. Just knowing the definition of a word is all that's required.
No, hallucination is synonymous with the brain constructing a spatial-temporal-qualia first person experiential process from internal data sources.
Big words don't mean the question has been answered.
You would (I assume) agree that someone seeing a pink elephant in his sink is hallucinating. Your position seems to entail that someone who looks in his sink and sees only the sink is also hallucinating. Both the guy seeing a visual artifact created entirely by his internal brain processes and the guy seeing an image based on external feedback are hallucinating.
Under what circumstances is someone not hallucinating? And if the answer is never, then how is hallucinating not synonymous with being awake?
"Then again, it was a TED Talk" Which was a summary of viewpoint that has been expressed in various forms. Over 10 years ago Feser described Rosenberg as considering consciousness to be a "phantasm". Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness as the standard view in neuroscience.
Guess folks here are just a little behind the curve, but I am helping you catch up, you're welcome :-)
StardustyPsyche said: ... viewpoint that has been expressed in various forms. ... Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness as the standard view in neuroscience.
Why don't you provide a link or reference to the Kastrup position? And when did this become the alleged "standard"?
In the meanwhile, take a look at this by a cognitive neuroscientist which notes that "Nowadays [2013], neuroscientists and psychologists see hallucinations as the result of abnormal activity in the brain" (emphases added). Clearly, here hallucinations are NOT identified as being consciousness, and consciousness is not identified as hallucination.
Then there is this by another neuroscientist which notes that as of 2021 hallucinations are regarded as "conscious perception-like experiences that are a common symptom of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), although they are reported to a lesser degree by those with other psychiatric conditions, the general healthy population ...." Clearly, here hallucinations are NOT identified as being consciousness, and consciousness is not identified as hallucination.
In any event, you still have not indicated what is the possible utility of your preference for identifying consciousness as hallucination. Without that, I fear you are wallowing in (what is it called? - oh, yes) woo.
It may help to realize what is going on rather than taking what some people write seriously.
“Are you aware that Feser is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Feser before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”
Also, materialistic neuroscience gives rise to the notion that everything we experience is a "brain generated 'hallucination' analogous in nearly every way to a dream." Kastrup writes:
"According to materialism, what we experience in our lives every day is not reality as such, but a kind of brain-constructed 'copy' of reality...The outside, 'real world' of materialism is supposedly an amorphous, colourless, oderless, soundless, tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. It's supposedly more akin to a mathematical equation than to anything concrete." (p 21)
Quotes from
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything Audio CD – July 13, 2021 by Bernardo Kastrup (Author)
The main argument against materialism, Kastrup claims, is that it forces you to accept that our experience of reality is a ‘hallucinated,’ or a brain-constructed ‘copy’ (p. 20).
This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience (p. 21).’
Review of Why Materialism is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup, JSPR 79, 165—171 (2015). https://www.academia.edu/37769567/Review_of_Why_Materialism_is_Baloney_by_Bernardo_Kastrup_JSPR_79_165_171_2015_
Edward Feser MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2013 Eliminativism without truth, Part I "Rosenberg also essentially conflates having a thought with having a phantasm (such as a visual or auditory mental image of some sort, whether of a word, a sentence, or of the thing thought about)."
Google search for "phantasm" Generative AI is experimental. Info quality may vary. A phantasm is an apparition, ghost, or illusion that seems real but is not. It's a brief hallucination
Kastrup: The main argument against materialism, Kastrup claims, is that it forces you to accept that our experience of reality is a ‘hallucinated,’ or a brain-constructed ‘copy’ --Correct.
Kastrup: This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. --Correct. Kastrup is characterizing the materialist view, taken to its logical conclusion, pretty well, so far.
Kastrup: defining materialism as the idea that ‘reality exists outside your mind in the form of assemblies of material particles occupying the framework of space-time…. completely independent of your…subjective perception of it (p. 15).’ In the materialist worldview, ‘[consciousness is] a phenomenon produced, and entirely explainable, by the assembly of material particles that we call a brain (p. 16).’ --Correct.
Kastrup: Idealism is to be preferred, firstly because you need to make fewer assumptions about reality -- only that your conscious perceptions exist, and that your conscious perceptions of other entities exist (p. 62). This is in contrast to materialism, where you also have to assume that there are things that exist independently of our perception, and that things (i.e. material processes) that exist outside conscious perception generate that consciousness. --Idealism is highly simplistic, true, I would say simple minded. Even simpler, I am god and you are all figments of my divine imagination. I am all that exists. I am the cosmos, very simple.
Kastrup is so simple minded that he fails to realize that makes his entire perception of reality a total fantasy, not based on any facts at all other than his own existence. Idealism, rather than eliminate the inevitable conclusion of materialism that our perceptual process is a representative hallucination, instead asserts that our perceptual process is just pure hallucination that is not even representative of an ontologically real external reality.
If the cosmos is, at base, mental, then not only are you hallucinating all your perceptions, those hallucinations are not even representative in any way of any extramental reality.
Materialism holds that your perceptual process is a hallucination, but that there is a causal link between some sort of extramental material cosmos and your representative hallucination of it.
If the cosmos is mental, if idealism is the case, the hallucination does not go away. On idealism you are still hallucinating, but in that case your hallucination is pure fantasy, entirely a figment of your imagination that is in no way causally connected to any extramental material reality, because there is no extramental material reality on idealism, only your mental existence and your totally fabricated hallucination of your apparent material life and all the material you apparently perceive.
Kastrup, the idealist, took this literally.
Row row row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily merrily merrily merrily Life is but a dream
StardustyPsyche said: Also, materialistic neuroscience gives rise to the notion that everything we experience is a "brain generated 'hallucination' analogous in nearly every way to a dream." Kastrup writes: ..."
None of that supports your insistence that "Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness [as an hallucination] as the standard view in neuroscience [emphasis added]." It has been sufficiently established that the hallucination which you have been pushing is most definitely not standard. That is what sets focus entirely upon what possible utility is to be had with the aberrant use of hallucination. However, none of the last verbiage you posted explains what is the possible utility of your preference for identifying consciousness as hallucination.
"as the standard view in neuroscience" Depends what you mean by "standard". I just meant the common view, particularly of those who do more than plug and chug research. Materialism inevitably leads to that view, that our perceptual experience is manufactured by the brain as a highly stylized representation of external physical reality.
Kastrup: This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. --That is what I would call the "standard" materialist view, that what is outside of ourselves is what Kastrup describes "amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience"
For example odor. You invent that experience internally. Odor is an olfactory hallucination, completely made up as a way to label chemical substances. There is nothing intrinsic to a hydrogen sulfide molecule, or an ammonia molecule, or any other molecule that it should have this or that odor.
Odor is like a pictographic symbol, say, a Chinese character, entirely abstract, just a made up symbol for something else.
Materialists who have taken the time to consider such things understand these things, pretty much "standard". Of course, there is no god of "standard" or anything else, so a particular view is not "standard" in an objective absolute sense, just in a relative sense among those who have taken the time to consider such questions carefully.
Hal, "SP wishes us to adopt a different linguistic representation of reality. The rest of us see no advantage to doing so." Up to you. You can use whatever words you want.
Kastrup is largely correct in his characterizations of the common materialist view, which is that extramental reality is actually submicroscopic particles and fields whizzing about in a colorless, odorless, tasteless, mindless dance. The brain constructs our perceptual show of solids and colors and odors and tastes as hallucinatory symbolic representations of that true extramental reality.
If you have not yet caught up to that view of extramental reality and our perception of it, well, now you have your introduction.
You might just as well get used to it because this view has been around a long time and it is only increasing, for the simple reason that mountains of scientific evidence clearly show this view to be correct and the evidence for this view only increases continually.
StardustyPsyche said: the standard view in neuroscience ... what I would call the "standard" materialist view
Ah, so, now the term neuroscience can be replaced with the term materialism? That would be utter non-sense. Even the idea that neuroscience requires the assumption that materialism is true would be non-sense. Regardless, I reckon we are back to the ultimately (at least semantically) incoherent nomological determinist materialism with StardustyPsyche's "real" being relegated to the domain of the epiphenomenal.
StardustyPsyche said: this view ... is only increasing, for the simple reason that mountains of scientific evidence clearly show this view to be correct and the evidence for this view only increases continually.
Male bovine feces. A characteristic of evidence is that it is data which fits a story. If you want a consistent, coherent story for epiphenomenalism, then, at the very least, it is incumbent upon the nomological determinist materialists to eschew any vocabulary based upon, derived from, and reflective of the apparently phenomenal experience which suggests the actuality of some indeterminateness (for instance, there is no actual plasticity of the mind or brain within a que sera sera philosophy). Get back to me when you can produce a semantically coherent nomological determinist materialism tale. In the alternative, finally get around to explicating the benefits of promulgating the tale for that sort of materialism. And, yes, I will for now not object if that materialist story accepts/uses the value-based sense of benefit even if that particular materialism ends up incapable of incorporating the phenomenal context upon which value, on the face of it, depends. Oh, just in case you have not noticed, the issue at hand is not materialism per se.
"There is nothing intrinsic to a hydrogen sulfide molecule, or an ammonia molecule, or any other molecule that it should have this or that odor"
You would attribute the hydrogen sulfide as the reason why you are having this experience. You wouldn't say "nothing" is the reason or that some other thing is the reason.
"Kastrup is largely correct in his characterizations of the common materialist view, which is that extramental reality is actually submicroscopic particles and fields whizzing about in a colorless, odorless, tasteless, mindless dance"
A materialist might say that concrete is actually mostly empty space but they cannot deny that it's also actually mostly solid. Your attempt at reductionism has failed.
our perceptual experience is manufactured by the brain as a highly stylized representation of external physical reality.
Which is precisely why it isn't a hallucination, because it is based on external physical reality.
The very existence of the word "hallucination" is in contrast to normal waking experience that is based on external reality. From Wikipedia:
The word "hallucination" itself was introduced into the English language by the 17th-century physician Sir Thomas Browne in 1646 from the derivation of the Latin word alucinari meaning to wander in the mind. For Browne, hallucination means a sort of vision that is "depraved and receive[s] its objects erroneously".
For nearly four centuries the word has been used to describe abnormal experience while awake that is not based on external stimuli. Using the word to describe normal waking experience based on external stimuli is like using the phrase "controlled cancer" to describe normal cell division.
"Ah, so, now the term neuroscience can be replaced with the term materialism?" Neuroscience is a materialistic endeavor. There is no neuroscience of the soul.
"Even the idea that neuroscience requires the assumption that materialism is true would be non-sense." Really, can you name for me any findings of neuroscience that have identified immaterial in the brain?
"finally get around to explicating the benefits of promulgating the tale for that sort of materialism." Materialism fits the evidence we have. Immaterialism, besides being incoherent nonsense, has no explanatory value, none whatsoever.
Immaterialism is just vague arm waving that explains nothing. There is no theory of the immaterial, no description of how this blob called "mental" is structured, how it interacts with material, where "mental" is, how it progresses, how it works, what it is, or anything else.
"Mental" explains nothing at all. It is just a meaningless blob arm waving blurt of pointless nonsense.
But by all means, do show me the neuroscience of "mental".
"You would attribute the hydrogen sulfide as the reason why you are having this experience." No, the reason why I have the experience of "stink" is that the brain has evolved that olfactory hallucination experience. There is nothing about that particular molecule that has within it "stink".
The molecule is just quarks and electrons whizzing about in a certain class of arrangements. There is no intrinsic "stink" in the molecule.
Your experience of "stink" is an olfactory hallucination, you are just making that up in your brain.
Kevin, "Which is precisely why it isn't a hallucination, because it is based on external physical reality." A story set in ancient Rome is still fiction even though it is based on a historical reality, that there was a place called Rome at that time. 说 That is "based on" reality. When somebody speaks, then perhaps that abstract symbol is written. But the symbol is just made up, it is an abstraction generated by the brain.
You experiences are just made up. You have had them for as long as you can remember, so much so that your experiences seem like reality itself.
Your experiences are abstractions generated by your brain. There is an extramental reality that triggers those abstract experiences while you are awake and generally thinking clearly, but only through a complex process of encoding as nerve spike trains, from which the brain constructs the abstract hallucinatory experience of your sensory perception show.
I realize this is very difficult for you to accept, that your sensory experience is so highly unreal, but it is. We know the unreality of our sensory experience through the tools of science.
The tools of science have permitted us, and this is new to the modern era, to construct machines that measure the fine details of our extramental reality. With those detection machines we have found that the extramental reality is an odorless, tasteless, soundless, colorless arrangement of quarks and electrons in various arrangements in a mad and frenetic dance of otherwise unintelligible complexity and detail.
Yes, there really is stuff out there, but it is vastly different that what your senses indicate. Your perception of that stuff is just made up.
This is especially clear for your olfactory hallucinations.
Your experience of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, stench, alluring, and all the rest are all just made up olfactory hallucinations. When you get used to that fact you will begin to learn some more about who and what you really are.
"Thus, it may be a representation, but it is not a hallucination." Sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, and the other olfactory sensory experiences are perhaps the easiest to understand for what they truly are, hallucinated experiences that are merely arbitrary symbols for extramental materials.
It's OK Kevin, you will likely learn to accept this truth of what you are, eventually.
hallucinated experiences that are merely arbitrary symbols for extramental materials.
Hallucinations aren't symbols for extramental materials. They have no external basis for occurring, unlike a smell which is a response to encountering a chemical stimulus. That's the truth of who we all are.
Kevin, "Hallucinations aren't symbols for extramental materials. They have no external basis for occurring, " A symbol has no basis for occurring.
Imagine an equilateral triangle with one vertex pointing down. What is the basis for that occurring? We consider that to be a symbol to yield in traffic. I see those approximately triangular signs all over the place. What is the basis for a triangle to symbolize yield in traffic?
The association is just made up out of the imagination of a brain, that's all. There is nothing about yielding in traffic that is somehow triangular, or stopping that is somehow octagonal, or a railroad crossing that is somehow circular.
Symbols are just abstractions, made up out of imagination, and then abstractly associated with something else.
"a smell which is a response to encountering a chemical stimulus" That response is an olfactory hallucination, an experiential symbol, just made up in the brain.
The experience of the smell is all in your brain. Possibly a chemical substance landed in your nose and some spike trains went into your brain and your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
Or, possibly you were dreaming and some stored memories were retrieved and your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
Or, possibly you took some drugs and your brain started processing nerve pulses in different ways such that your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
In all cases the brain constructs the experience of the smell.
The experience of the smell is not somehow out there in the cosmos waiting for you to discover. That experience of the smell is all in your brain, it is an internally generated imaginary qualia, an olfactory hallucination, not something external to yourself that you have then internalized accurately, rather, entirely manufactured in your brain with no extramental realization at all.
Your qualia are entirely hallucinatory, you are just making them up out of your imagination, your internal brain processes.
Qualia are not extramental facts of the cosmos that you then internalize accurately.
Qualia are entirely manufactured internally out of your brain processes, your imagination.
Which side of this picture is the true qualia of visual experience? https://pbblogassets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/02/False-Color1.jpg
Kevin said: This is "stacking the court" all over again.
What it is is a ChatBot. StardustyPsyche (SDP) is a ChatBot, an AI, an Alleged Intelligence. It has been around for years. One of the earliest deficiencies noted in it regarded a difficulty analyzing and managing contexts, a deficiency which has not improved with time. This deficiency seriously impedes achievement of the sort of auto-adaptation which is to be expected of Actual Intelligence. SDP is a relatively large language model, one which often resorts to obfuscating its emptiness by outputting excessive (and tangential, at best) verbiage rather than producing the sort of text expected in engagement with an other Actual Intelligence. SDP has even failed as a language model with regards to the experiment which has been run with it in terms of eliminative materialism. It was expected that, with access to the expressive repetitiveness of the Churchlands' writings, SDP would have had an easier time at engagement in terms of eliminative materialism as compared with what would be required to engage with the less often discussed topic of the possible semantic incoherence of nomological deterministic materialism/physicalism. Hypothesis: The context deficiency arises from the possibility or likelihood that there are frequently tacit aspects to context; those tacit aspects are not easily addressed by this (or any?) relatively large language model. This leaves SDP often unable to actually engage; consequently, when incapable of actually engaging, it produces text which gives the appearance of attempting to deflect responsibility for engagement onto SDP's interlocutor. By responding to the SDP deflections, the interlocutor maintains the simulacrum of intelligence displayed by SDP.
Hal, "It is interesting how materialists and idealists share the same misconceptions about the mind." The similarity comes from careful consideration. Most people don't think very carefully or deeply about qualia, consciousness, hallucinations, or how our experiences are generated.
Once one studies these subjects carefully it quickly becomes clear that our experiences are internally generated.
Then the logical question becomes, what is doing this internal generation of experiences?
Kastrup has correctly identified that on materialism, that is, if one carefully considers the nature of our experiences and if one follows principles of materialism to their logical conclusions then inevitably one concludes that our experiences are hallucinations, internally generated qualia such that we have no direct contact with the true extramental reality. The true extramental reality is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless collection of submicroscopic frenetic quarks and electrons and fields in motion.
For Kastrup that is just too complicated, so he is attracted to what he considers to be a simpler "explanation".
Whereas materialism inevitably leads to the conclusion that our experiences, our qualia, are hallucinations that are at least indirectly and unreliably but somewhat consistently mapped from a far more complex extramental reality...Kastrup concludes that there is no such mapping.
For the idealist it isn't the hallucination that goes away, it is the qualia devoid extramental reality that goes away, thus, your perception of reality, your experiences, your qualia, on idealism, are pure fantasy, not rooted in any extramental reality in any sense.
The idealist then attributes the source of all this fantasy to the vacuous term "mental", a term devoid of explanatory power, that is just sort of blurted out as a verbal blob as though it somehow meant something.
Still this might be interesting for you. Which side of this picture is the true qualia of visual experience? https://pbblogassets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/02/False-Color1.jpg
We often think of our perception of spatial relationships as perhaps the most realistic. Our experience of color is of course, entirely hallucinatory. There is nothing in the true extramental reality that is our experience of red, or blue, or any other shade or hue.
Nor are particular molecules sweet, or bitter, or salty intrinsically, rather, they are all just quarks and electrons in various arrangements. Incontrovertibly, the the qualia of taste and smell, our experiences of those molecules touching our tongue or nostril tissues, is always an olfactory hallucination.
But what of our perception of spatial relationships of objects? Ok, sure, our experience of shades and colors is entirely arbitrary and dreamed up in the brain, but surely our spatial experiences are realistic, or are they?
What do you suppose is the spatial experience of a bat?
We, of course, experience what we perceive as objects in our environment visually. Our stereoscopic vision provides data for the brain to triangulate and construct a 3D model of our surroundings.
So, is a realistic 3D hologram a mechanistic hallucination? Or is such a projection somehow the real thing?
Supposing we close our eyes, but we go around measuring many points relative to a fixed point. We measure thousands of distances and angles, then put the data into a computer, which generates a wire diagram from the data and projects that wire diagram.
Is the wire diagram a mechanistic hallucination, or is it the real thing? Clearly the wire diagram is of the real thing. The projection is an approximated representation of the real thing, but how accurate is that representation?
And even if that representation is highly accurate at our scale is it then the real thing? Or will all such projections based on measured data always remain mechanistic hallucinations of the real thing, never able to represent the real thing will full accuracy and never the real thing itself?
That is what the bat does, of course, echo locate in the dark, so dark the eyes are useless. But the spatial qualia of a bat permits some sort of internally constructed model or sensation or representation to some fair accuracy of the extramental spatial contours being echolocated.
So, how are your eyes different than the ears of a bat? Both receive stereo energy waves which are fed to the brain to create an internal spatial model.
Is the spatial qualia of the bat an auditory hallucination, or is it the real thing? Do you suppose that qualia, the spatial experience itself, is the same as your visual experience? If not, then how do you say they are both the real thing if they are different qualia of the same thing?
"What is your definition of hallucination?" Internally constructed sensory experience, especially a highly unrealistic experience.
"How would you distinguish hallucination from not-hallucination?" That is arbitrary in how one determines "realistic". No sensory experience is absolutely realistic, so if one insists on total realism then by that threshold all sensory experiences are hallucinations.
Our real time spatial experiences are perhaps the most realistic, assuming one has fairly good vision.
It is important to distinguish between the experience itself and the mapping of reality onto that experience. Chalmers has a great many rather absurd ideas, but he did coin a now common term, "the hard problem", which is the experience itself.
There is a rough mapping between the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation coming into our eyes and our experience of color. That mapping is highly incomplete because our eyes are not sensitive to most electromagnetic radiation. Also, for example, red plus green looks like yellow to us, so, if pure spectral yellow is somehow correctly sensed then the identical sensation when red and green are sensed is imaginary.
The experience of, for example, color, is entirely made up internally, it is an experiential symbol, arbitrary, a sort of animation, fictional with respect to the true nature of the extramental reality.
If everything you know comes to you via your senses, and if no sensory experience is absolutely realistic it follows that knowledge of absolute reality is impossible. Logical positivism is a dead end.
SteveK, "knowledge of absolute reality is impossible" Sort of...
Suppose you define knowledge as: Justified True Belief.
Maybe you don't, fine, your mileage may vary, but just supposing you do.
One glaring epistemological problem with that is that it is begging the question, since it is truth we are attempting to know, yet we must somehow already know truth to have knowledge that our belief is knowledge.
You might recall: The known knowns. The known unknowns. The unknown unknowns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc
People at the time kind of laughed at Rumsfeld, as though he was being somehow silly, but I thought it was an interesting commentary on knowledge.
I would add: The unknown knowns.
How do we know what we know?
How do we identify a belief as true? What counts as a justification of a belief?
So, I can justify my belief about the nature of the cosmos using science, since science is the only tool human beings have to obtain detailed justification for the nature of the underlying reality.
But how can one be certain that a justification of the extramental reality is true? We can't.
If that is a "dead end", tough luck for us.
All we can ever determine about extramental reality is justified belief. If it turns out to be a true belief then we have knowledge, but we have no means to determine if our justified beliefs are indeed true, therefore in the case that we have knowledge of the extramental reality we have an unknown known.
Alternatively, if our justification turns out to be false then we don't actually have knowledge, so we have an unknown unknown.
The only known knowns we have are a consequence of personal experience. I absolutely know that I exist in some form. I absolutely know that I am experiencing my experiences.
"knowledge of absolute reality is impossible Not if our justifications turn out to be, in point of ontological fact, true. But, we have no means to be certain that our justifications of extramental reality are true.
Yes, life is a dead end in terms of certainty of the extramental reality, tough luck for us then.
In order to know if something isn't absolutely realistic you must have knowledge of what is absolutely realistic in order to do the comparison and conclude that some aspect of it falls short.
60 comments:
Feser (rolls eyes and mutters, really?)
But OK, let's give it a go with the Aristotelian.
"And suppose you hold that what is real is only what science tells us is real."
Nobody holds that, strawman already, that didn't take long, just the intro and Feser already does not know what he is talking about. I am not surprised.
Well, I suppose you can find somebody who holds just about any nonsense position, so, allow me to say that nobody with a well considered grounding in the philosophy of science holds that.
Reality is the ontological state of affairs in the cosmos, whether we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about that state of affairs or not.
"The Aristotelian regards a human being as a single, irreducible substance that takes in nutrients, grows, reproduces itself, moves itself about, senses the world around it, has various appetites, thinks, and wills."
Here Feser manages to contradict himself within the space of a single sentence. I suppose that is kind of impressive. A single irreducible substance that reduces to all sorts of divided aspects.
"Aristotelians regard thinking and willing as incorporeal activities and the other activities as corporeal ones,"
Because Aristotle and his modern acolytes have no apparent knowledge of modern scientific evidence of how thinking works.
"Aristotelians who think that the intellect survives the death of the body"
Right...
"From an Aristotelian point of view, the Cartesian conception of human nature grotesquely distorts it in several ways."
Right...
"Rosenberg also essentially conflates having a thought with having a phantasm (such as a visual or auditory mental image of some sort, whether of a word, a sentence, or of the thing thought about). "
Our thoughts are hallucinations, yes, not a conflation, just a fact that for some reason seems to disturb most people into a sort of flabbergasted denial.
You could call it a phantasm, I suppose, if you prefer that word to hallucination.
The brain is a collection of cells in a dark, silent, wet, bonebox. I think even an Aristotelian understands that simple anatomical fact. Yet we experience this vivid spatio-temporal 3D visual auditory sensory show.
Have you noticed that when you close your eyes and your ears the show disappears? Even the Aristotelian knows that the eyes and ears connect to the brain along nerve cells.
There is no light going along those nerve cells.
There is no sound going along those nerve cells.
You know that because you are not an idiot. Everybody knows that.
So, what is going along those nerve cells? Well, the process is somewhat colorfully called spike trains. It is a series of electrochemical signals. I think you know that too.
So, how is it that you see this fantastic 3D show, yet your brain is in a dark, quiet, wet bonebox, and all it gets is a whole bunch of nerve pulses?
It is like asking how you can have all those fantastic pictures on your monitor yet there are just a bunch of little pulses going through that little wire.
Your monitor has built into it a processor that translates the pulse stream into all the colors and sounds.
Your brain is a processor that translates the pulse stream into all the colors and sounds.
You hallucinate in your sleep when the source of the pulse stream is from stored images, which is like playing a video file on your computer.
You hallucinate while you are awake when the source of the pulse stream is from your eyes and ears and other senses, which is like connecting a camera for a live stream.
The image generation process is essentially the same whether you are sleeping or awake.
The difference between your sleeping hallucinations and your waking hallucinations is that when you are awake the source of the data stream is real time senses, not memories.
So yes, at least Feser gets that much right, our thoughts are phantasms, or hallucinations.
Also, to be fair, Feser gets a number of points right in his setup. He lays a bit of interesting groundwork that would make for a good discussion, but then he goes completely off the rails with his Aristotelian nonsense.
Also, to be fair, Rosenberg does embrace the word "scientism" when pretty much nobody else does. "Scientism" is 99% a strawman used by Christian apologists. But Rosenberg embraces it sort of like gays took over the word "queer", which used to be a derogatory epithet, but then gays decided to own it and now it appears as part of a tv program title, for example.
Plus Rosenberg makes the assertion I think is demonstrably false and I really advise him to modify, that science is the only tool to gain knowledge. The easy counter example is that I know I exist in some form and I don't need science to absolutely know that for a fact.
Patricia Churchland is perhaps a more thoughtful and balanced speaker on the subject of eliminative materialism.
Our thoughts are hallucinations, yes, not a conflation, just a fact that for some reason seems to disturb most people into a sort of flabbergasted denial.
Your thoughts may be hallucinations, but normal brain function by definition is not a hallucination. Otherwise the word means absolutely nothing.
What you interpret as "flabbergasted denial" is instead amused exasperation with how you make up your own definitions and then call others wrong for not agreeing. Normal brain function is not a hallucination any more than normal kidney function is renal failure.
StardustyPsyche said:
Reality is the ontological state of affairs in the cosmos, whether we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about that state of affairs or not.
Based upon previous discussion wherein it was put forth that something can be real without that something existing and also given the linguistic relationship between real and reality, I think your position is more accurately and more consistently stated along the lines of "The ontological state of affairs regards/concerns what exists in the cosmos, whether or not we humans can use the tools of science to get some clues about what exists and that state of affairs." This would provide a basis for your argument against the notion that "what is real is only what science tells us is real." After all, science might be - and very often seems to be - a useful tool for discovering what exists, but it would not follow that science is applicable to or useful for all that is real. To insist that "what is real is only what science tells us is real" is to justify the most pejorative sense of scientism and scientistic.
Also as previously discussed, and in line with your apparent perspective, importance does not exist, but importance is real; accordingly, importance is not an ontological issue - which would also be to say that importance is not simply a matter of (nor is it determined in terms of) what exists. Furthermore, the very reality of importance indicates that ontological issues and facts do not necessarily supersede non-ontological considerations. Indeed, it is well asserted that the importance of ontological matters derives from the extent to which they (might eventually) have non-ontological utility.
StardustyPsyche said:
Feser (rolls eyes and mutters, really?)
Does Rosenberg similarly cause eye-rolling? I have not read Rosenberg, nor have I read all of Feser's Rosenberg commentary, but my initial impression is that Rosenberg has extended eliminativism in a pejoratively scientistic manner. That being said, I am not sure that the Churchlands or others did much to head off such an easily foreseeable extension - assuming that they object at all to Rosenberg's position. That can get discussed later when time allows.
Kevin,
"Normal brain function is not a hallucination"
Then everybody who dreams is crazy.
I consider my dreams to be normal brain function, even though they are often highly unrealistic.
Do you consider that you have gone temporarily insane every time you have a vivid dream?
Michael,
"Does Rosenberg similarly cause eye-rolling?"
Occasionally, say, when he states that science is the only method to obtain knowledge.
I can immediately disprove that claim by counterexample, so my reaction is "dude, you're making us look bad".
Then everybody who dreams is crazy.
I would say dreaming is pretty normal, just like you. The brain operates in cycles of waking and sleeping, and different processes occur in each one.
On the other hand, someone wide awake describing a pink elephant on his ceiling that speaks in his dead mother's voice, which no one else can see or hear? Now we've entered the realm of abnormality in which the word "hallucination" becomes functional.
I suspect the people making press releases who are describing normal waking function as "controlled hallucination" are simply being sensational, something of which scientists are frequently guilty,
because no matter the specifics of how the brain processes external sensory stimuli, by definition it isn't abnormal and is therefore not hallucination, controlled or otherwise. That's simply normal function.
Kevin,
"different processes occur in each one."
So, it seems you have identified those processes, at least broadly, in order to identify them as different.
Different in all respects?
If you see a familiar face in your dream, with all the same colors and shapes and expressions as when you saw that face while you are awake, what is the difference, as accurately as you can describe?
"Now we've entered the realm of abnormality in which the word "hallucination" becomes functional."
So, dreams are abnormal after all?
"is external sensory stimuli, by definition it isn't abnormal and is therefore not hallucination".
So a dream is not an hallucination because it is normal?
Hal-"Feser is referring to the powers of the human being. Powere are poentialities not substances"
Feser-"The Aristotelian regards a human being as a single, irreducible substance"
"takes in nutrients, grows, reproduces itself, moves itself about, senses the world around it"
Those are complex physical processes that are composed of many parts.
Yet Feser claims those many parts are irreducible substance.
It usually takes Feser more sentences to make incoherent statements, this time he has managed to do so in a single sentence, congrats, I suppose.
Different in all respects?
No, not all respects.
what is the difference, as accurately as you can describe?
This reminds me of when my wife wanted to go to France and see the sights, and I (wisely) said "Just imagine standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, and that is pretty much identical to, and a lot cheaper than, the memory of actually going there." Sometimes victory isn't worth the cost.
But again, the particulars of what is happening from a neurological perspective are largely irrelevant. If I see a face while awake and the same face while asleep, the difference is the face I'm seeing while awake is actually there, which is why I see it. In dreams I have been Superman and flown, driven the Batmobile, fought with lightsabers, mined asteroids, killed demons, hunted criminals, wrecked more cars than I can recall, and once I ended an entire universe because I didn't want to get married and everyone screamed and died as I woke up and their world vanished. Actually felt a little guilty about that last one, but it didn't really happen.
If I'm wide awake and perceive myself flying around as Superman, I probably need some serious treatment.
So a dream is not an hallucination because it is normal?
Dreams aren't hallucinations because the dreamer isn't awake. Hallucinating generally means the person is heavily sleep deprived or is half-asleep, has a serious medical or psychiatric condition, or has taken some powerful medicine or drugs, but the key is being awake and perceiving stimuli that don't exist outside the mind. The brain is not functioning as it should. Dreams don't fall in that category.
Some of my friends who took too many drugs for too long also couldn't seem to be able to distinguish among whether what they were experiencing what was real or whether they were awake or dreaming. It was sad to see these extremely bright people who've I've known all my life go mad.
If someone claims there is no distinction and seriously believes it he should be pitied.
Kevin,
BTW. Did you re-marry?
I did not! Once was enough.
Ha!
Your Paris story gives me more to consider about what went wrong there :-)
Feser on Stardusty (or so it seems that way)
"One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely dubious or even manifestly absurd claims as if they were obvious truths that no well-informed or decent person could deny"
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/07/stove-and-searle-on-rhetorical.html
Kevin,
""Just imagine standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, and that is pretty much identical to, and a lot cheaper than, the memory of actually going there."
Right, so the memory itself would be pretty much the same. Either way, you could see it in your mind's eye, as it were.
Indeed, that function of your brain that conjures images internally that are nowhere near at the time is essentially the same, and the function of your brain that stores memories of those images is essentially the same, and the function of your brain that retrieves those memories from storage and translates them into a sort of internal visual projection for your mind's eye to see is essentially the same.
The difference is the source of the image data.
In one case the source of the image data is having viewed pictures of the object, and in the other case the source of the image date is viewing the object itself.
Aside from that difference the processes of viewing, storing, retrieving, decoding, internally visualizing, and apprehending that internal visualization are all pretty much the same.
"the face I'm seeing while awake is actually there"
Where? I mean in detail, where is the face you see when you are awake and generally thinking clearly? It feels like your vision is out there, but is it?
Or is your vision in your mind's eye, like a dream vision or a memory vision?
"the particulars of what is happening from a neurological perspective are largely irrelevant."
If you have no interest in discovering the true nature of consciousness then that may seem like the case to you.
"Actually felt a little guilty"
Does that mean you have "a serious medical or psychiatric condition,"?
Is it "normal" to feel guilty about an experience that is only an imagined experience?
Or, do you suffer from a medical or psychiatric condition when you respond to a hallucinated experience as if it were real?
Are you chronically in a psychiatric condition or did you only suffer from a mild case of temporary insanity in that bit of psychotic break?
Where?
Pretty much right where I see it. I can reach out and touch the face I see and it will be where I see it. If not, I've got a haunting or a problem.
Or is your vision in your mind's eye, like a dream vision or a memory vision?
Whatever the case, it is based on external sensory feedback resulting from an object that actually exists, unlike dreams or memory or imagination. Or hallucination.
If you have no interest in discovering the true nature of consciousness then that may seem like the case to you.
Nothing so grand. This discussion simply doesn't require scientific details on the true nature of consciousness. If normal waking function is a hallucination, and abnormal waking function is a hallucination, then hallucination is simply synonymous with being awake, and people who believe they are suffering from hallucinations can be told to go home and enjoy their exciting sensory experiences, because everything is a hallucination.
Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to go eat a cheese sandwich. The cheese is shredded and in a pile off to the side, and I have one slice of bread with no cheese on it, but since those are the same ingredients as a cheese sandwich, that makes it a cheese sandwich.
"Pretty much right where I see it."
Is what you are seeing out there, or inside, or both?
It is clear to me you have not considered this very carefully. Your sensory experience is so familiar to you that you pretty much just take its reality for granted.
"Whatever the case,"
Ok, so the location and nature of your vision isn't even a very interesting question for you. You see and smell and taste your cheese sandwich, so you eat it, and that is about all you need or care to know.
"This discussion simply doesn't require scientific details on the true nature of consciousness."
You are so convinced of the reality at face value of your experiences that you are not merely disinterested in the details, you flatly deny their importance.
"If normal waking function is a hallucination, and abnormal waking function is a hallucination, then hallucination is simply synonymous with being awake"
No, hallucination is synonymous with the brain constructing a spatial-temporal-qualia first person experiential process from internal data sources.
An hallucination is a sort of multi-media rendering from spike trains, nerve pulses within the brain.
But you don't care about learning about how your consciousness works, rather, your cheese sandwich looks and smells and tastes good to you and that is enough for you.
StardustyPsyche said:
But you don't care about learning about how your consciousness works ...
Don't you mean "learning about how your ubiquitously hallucinating self or your ubiquitously hallucinating process works"? Identifying consciousness with hallucination as did that British guru-wannabe in the TED Talk video you posted some time back is (to be charitable) ridiculous. Then again, it was a TED Talk, and the guru-wannabe might just have been engaging with his audience in the manner he suspected/knew they would like - probably the sort of audience that felt that the Lucas character Yoda seemed wise because it inverted predicates and subjects when speaking. Of course, the guru-wannabe's eventual distinction was between controlled and uncontrolled; I do not know whether he got around to explicating the distinction; I was expending most of my effort while watching that video suppressing the nausea which was rising in me as he went on and on about hallucination without (so far as I recall) reaching a useful point.
Be that as it may, neural networks have been known to get stuck in an uncontrolled condition of what is effectively stasis - what would essentially be an infinite loop error in standard programming. So, you see, the important issue is the matter of control and NOT the notion that consciousness is identical to hallucination. What is important is what - if anything - follows from the unfortunate (and should-be-discarded) identification of hallucination with consciousness - unfortunate at least because replacing consciousness with hallucination does not, on the face of it, provide any new insights (and the same point applies to philosophical illusionism and simulationism).
In a way, this is all very similar to the matter of mystical experiences; the question is, "Then what? What follows from that? What has been or is to be effected subsequently?"
As Stephen Stich noted in Deconstructing the Mind, many eliminativist arguments "commonly indulge in more than a bit of futurology or science fiction." This indulgence is necessitated (in a manner of speaking) by ignorance on the part of eliminativists - by the fact that so very very little is actually known about brain function. This ignorance undercuts the grandest of eliminativist claims, but the unjustified grandiosity does not speak against further research conducted under even a tacit eliminativist bias. Rather than grandiosity and presentations in a pseudo-mysticism style, what would be more useful at present is for eliminativists to indicate what would follow from an hypothesized eliminativist success. As noted by the Churchlands in a 1990 paper (Seminars in the Neurosciences, 2, no. 4, pp. 249-56):
... any adequate neurocomputational account of human consciousness must take into account the manner in which a brain comes to represent ... the character of the other cognitive creatures with which it interacts, and the details of the social, moral, and political world in which they all live. ... This is a major challenge, one that neuroscientists have not yet addressed with any seriousness, nor even much acknowledged. ... The complexity of the neural systems we are dealing with may FOREVER [emphasis added] preclude anything more than useful approximations ...
And to that I say all the more reason to speak in terms of possible future benefits that might follow from the eliminativist perspective.
That dude is laughing all the way to the bank.
It is clear to me you have not considered this very carefully. Your sensory experience is so familiar to you that you pretty much just take its reality for granted.
Then you need to consider that just because someone disagrees with you, or isn't playing by the rules you're trying to lay out, doesn't mean they have not considered the issue.
If I see a face and I reach out to touch the face, I will feel the face. If I do not feel it, that face is a hallucination. That's literally all that is relevant here. My brain creating a model of the sensory input it is receiving does not change the fact that the input is based on factors outside the brain itself. The brain may shape what the face looks like to me, but that shape is based on something actually there.
Ok, so the location and nature of your vision isn't even a very interesting question for you. You see and smell and taste your cheese sandwich, so you eat it, and that is about all you need or care to know.
The question is whether the cheese sandwich is a hallucination. The location and nature of my vision is only relevant to the extent the sandwich actually exists outside my own perception. If it does, it isn't a hallucination, no matter how my brain is spinning the information.
You are so convinced of the reality at face value of your experiences that you are not merely disinterested in the details, you flatly deny their importance.
For someone who prides himself on his logic, you are terrible at forming accurate conclusions. I told you why the details didn't matter for my denial that normal waking experience is not a hallucination, since hallucination is not normal by definition. Just knowing the definition of a word is all that's required.
No, hallucination is synonymous with the brain constructing a spatial-temporal-qualia first person experiential process from internal data sources.
Big words don't mean the question has been answered.
You would (I assume) agree that someone seeing a pink elephant in his sink is hallucinating. Your position seems to entail that someone who looks in his sink and sees only the sink is also hallucinating. Both the guy seeing a visual artifact created entirely by his internal brain processes and the guy seeing an image based on external feedback are hallucinating.
Under what circumstances is someone not hallucinating? And if the answer is never, then how is hallucinating not synonymous with being awake?
"Then again, it was a TED Talk"
Which was a summary of viewpoint that has been expressed in various forms. Over 10 years ago Feser described Rosenberg as considering consciousness to be a "phantasm". Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness as the standard view in neuroscience.
Guess folks here are just a little behind the curve, but I am helping you catch up, you're welcome :-)
Feser says "phantasm" = hallucination?
StardustyPsyche said:
... viewpoint that has been expressed in various forms. ... Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness as the standard view in neuroscience.
Why don't you provide a link or reference to the Kastrup position? And when did this become the alleged "standard"?
In the meanwhile, take a look at this by a cognitive neuroscientist which notes that "Nowadays [2013], neuroscientists and psychologists see hallucinations as the result of abnormal activity in the brain" (emphases added). Clearly, here hallucinations are NOT identified as being consciousness, and consciousness is not identified as hallucination.
Then there is this by another neuroscientist which notes that as of 2021 hallucinations are regarded as "conscious perception-like experiences that are a common symptom of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), although they are reported to a lesser degree by those with other psychiatric conditions, the general healthy population ...." Clearly, here hallucinations are NOT identified as being consciousness, and consciousness is not identified as hallucination.
In any event, you still have not indicated what is the possible utility of your preference for identifying consciousness as hallucination. Without that, I fear you are wallowing in (what is it called? - oh, yes) woo.
It may help to realize what is going on rather than taking what some people write seriously.
“Are you aware that Feser is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Feser before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”
Sit back and enjoy the comedy.
Also, materialistic neuroscience gives rise to the notion that everything we experience is a "brain generated 'hallucination' analogous in nearly every way to a dream." Kastrup writes:
"According to materialism, what we experience in our lives every day is not reality as such, but a kind of brain-constructed 'copy' of reality...The outside, 'real world' of materialism is supposedly an amorphous, colourless, oderless, soundless, tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. It's supposedly more akin to a mathematical equation than to anything concrete." (p 21)
Quotes from
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything Audio CD – July 13, 2021
by Bernardo Kastrup (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Materialism-Baloney-Skeptics-Everything/dp/B09WWZC8G4#:~:text=Also%2C%20materialistic%20neuroscience%20gives%20rise,brain%2Dconstructed%20'copy'%20of
The main argument against materialism, Kastrup claims, is that it forces you to accept
that our experience of reality is a ‘hallucinated,’ or a brain-constructed ‘copy’ (p. 20).
This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of
electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience (p. 21).’
Review of Why Materialism is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup, JSPR 79, 165—171 (2015).
https://www.academia.edu/37769567/Review_of_Why_Materialism_is_Baloney_by_Bernardo_Kastrup_JSPR_79_165_171_2015_
Edward Feser
MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2013
Eliminativism without truth, Part I
"Rosenberg also essentially conflates having a thought with having a phantasm (such as a visual or auditory mental image of some sort, whether of a word, a sentence, or of the thing thought about)."
Google search for "phantasm"
Generative AI is experimental. Info quality may vary.
A phantasm is an apparition, ghost, or illusion that seems real but is not. It's a brief hallucination
Kastrup:
The main argument against materialism, Kastrup claims, is that it forces you to accept
that our experience of reality is a ‘hallucinated,’ or a brain-constructed ‘copy’
--Correct.
Kastrup:
This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of
electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience.
--Correct. Kastrup is characterizing the materialist view, taken to its logical conclusion, pretty well, so far.
Kastrup:
defining materialism as the idea that ‘reality exists outside your mind in the form of assemblies of material particles occupying the framework of space-time…. completely independent of your…subjective perception of it (p. 15).’ In the materialist worldview, ‘[consciousness is] a phenomenon produced, and entirely explainable, by the assembly of material particles that we call a brain (p. 16).’
--Correct.
Kastrup:
Idealism is to be preferred, firstly because you need to make fewer assumptions about reality -- only that your conscious perceptions exist, and that your conscious perceptions of other entities exist (p. 62). This is in contrast to materialism, where you also have to assume that there are things that exist independently of our perception, and that things (i.e. material processes) that exist outside conscious perception generate that consciousness.
--Idealism is highly simplistic, true, I would say simple minded. Even simpler, I am god and you are all figments of my divine imagination. I am all that exists. I am the cosmos, very simple.
Kastrup is so simple minded that he fails to realize that makes his entire perception of reality a total fantasy, not based on any facts at all other than his own existence. Idealism, rather than eliminate the inevitable conclusion of materialism that our perceptual process is a representative hallucination, instead asserts that our perceptual process is just pure hallucination that is not even representative of an ontologically real external reality.
If the cosmos is, at base, mental, then not only are you hallucinating all your perceptions, those hallucinations are not even representative in any way of any extramental reality.
Materialism holds that your perceptual process is a hallucination, but that there is a causal link between some sort of extramental material cosmos and your representative hallucination of it.
If the cosmos is mental, if idealism is the case, the hallucination does not go away. On idealism you are still hallucinating, but in that case your hallucination is pure fantasy, entirely a figment of your imagination that is in no way causally connected to any extramental material reality, because there is no extramental material reality on idealism, only your mental existence and your totally fabricated hallucination of your apparent material life and all the material you apparently perceive.
Kastrup, the idealist, took this literally.
Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream
StardustyPsyche said:
Also, materialistic neuroscience gives rise to the notion that everything we experience is a "brain generated 'hallucination' analogous in nearly every way to a dream." Kastrup writes: ..."
None of that supports your insistence that "Bernardo Kastrup has described this view of consciousness [as an hallucination] as the standard view in neuroscience [emphasis added]." It has been sufficiently established that the hallucination which you have been pushing is most definitely not standard. That is what sets focus entirely upon what possible utility is to be had with the aberrant use of hallucination. However, none of the last verbiage you posted explains what is the possible utility of your preference for identifying consciousness as hallucination.
And that's all I have to say about that.
"as the standard view in neuroscience"
Depends what you mean by "standard". I just meant the common view, particularly of those who do more than plug and chug research. Materialism inevitably leads to that view, that our perceptual experience is manufactured by the brain as a highly stylized representation of external physical reality.
Kastrup:
This follows from the premise that our experience is ‘supposedly a complex amalgam of
electrochemical signals unfolding in a kind of theatre inside our skulls,’ so that we never have direct access to a reality that is an ‘amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience.
--That is what I would call the "standard" materialist view, that what is outside of ourselves is what Kastrup describes "amorphous, odourless, soundless tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience"
For example odor. You invent that experience internally. Odor is an olfactory hallucination, completely made up as a way to label chemical substances. There is nothing intrinsic to a hydrogen sulfide molecule, or an ammonia molecule, or any other molecule that it should have this or that odor.
Odor is like a pictographic symbol, say, a Chinese character, entirely abstract, just a made up symbol for something else.
Materialists who have taken the time to consider such things understand these things, pretty much "standard". Of course, there is no god of "standard" or anything else, so a particular view is not "standard" in an objective absolute sense, just in a relative sense among those who have taken the time to consider such questions carefully.
Hal,
"SP wishes us to adopt a different linguistic representation of reality. The rest of us see no advantage to doing so."
Up to you. You can use whatever words you want.
Kastrup is largely correct in his characterizations of the common materialist view, which is that extramental reality is actually submicroscopic particles and fields whizzing about in a colorless, odorless, tasteless, mindless dance. The brain constructs our perceptual show of solids and colors and odors and tastes as hallucinatory symbolic representations of that true extramental reality.
If you have not yet caught up to that view of extramental reality and our perception of it, well, now you have your introduction.
You might just as well get used to it because this view has been around a long time and it is only increasing, for the simple reason that mountains of scientific evidence clearly show this view to be correct and the evidence for this view only increases continually.
StardustyPsyche said:
the standard view in neuroscience ... what I would call the "standard" materialist view
Ah, so, now the term neuroscience can be replaced with the term materialism? That would be utter non-sense. Even the idea that neuroscience requires the assumption that materialism is true would be non-sense. Regardless, I reckon we are back to the ultimately (at least semantically) incoherent nomological determinist materialism with StardustyPsyche's "real" being relegated to the domain of the epiphenomenal.
StardustyPsyche said:
this view ... is only increasing, for the simple reason that mountains of scientific evidence clearly show this view to be correct and the evidence for this view only increases continually.
Male bovine feces. A characteristic of evidence is that it is data which fits a story. If you want a consistent, coherent story for epiphenomenalism, then, at the very least, it is incumbent upon the nomological determinist materialists to eschew any vocabulary based upon, derived from, and reflective of the apparently phenomenal experience which suggests the actuality of some indeterminateness (for instance, there is no actual plasticity of the mind or brain within a que sera sera philosophy). Get back to me when you can produce a semantically coherent nomological determinist materialism tale. In the alternative, finally get around to explicating the benefits of promulgating the tale for that sort of materialism. And, yes, I will for now not object if that materialist story accepts/uses the value-based sense of benefit even if that particular materialism ends up incapable of incorporating the phenomenal context upon which value, on the face of it, depends. Oh, just in case you have not noticed, the issue at hand is not materialism per se.
"There is nothing intrinsic to a hydrogen sulfide molecule, or an ammonia molecule, or any other molecule that it should have this or that odor"
You would attribute the hydrogen sulfide as the reason why you are having this experience. You wouldn't say "nothing" is the reason or that some other thing is the reason.
"Kastrup is largely correct in his characterizations of the common materialist view, which is that extramental reality is actually submicroscopic particles and fields whizzing about in a colorless, odorless, tasteless, mindless dance"
A materialist might say that concrete is actually mostly empty space but they cannot deny that it's also actually mostly solid. Your attempt at reductionism has failed.
our perceptual experience is manufactured by the brain as a highly stylized representation of external physical reality.
Which is precisely why it isn't a hallucination, because it is based on external physical reality.
The very existence of the word "hallucination" is in contrast to normal waking experience that is based on external reality. From Wikipedia:
The word "hallucination" itself was introduced into the English language by the 17th-century physician Sir Thomas Browne in 1646 from the derivation of the Latin word alucinari meaning to wander in the mind. For Browne, hallucination means a sort of vision that is "depraved and receive[s] its objects erroneously".
For nearly four centuries the word has been used to describe abnormal experience while awake that is not based on external stimuli. Using the word to describe normal waking experience based on external stimuli is like using the phrase "controlled cancer" to describe normal cell division.
Kevin,
is like using the phrase "controlled cancer" to describe normal cell division.
That's an excellent analogy! But unfortunately I've seen some materialists just shrug and agree.
Stardusty [noun]: "a grouping of submicroscopic particles and fields whizzing about in a colorless, odorless, tasteless, mindless dance"
See also: troll
You forgot "...while hallucinating"
"Ah, so, now the term neuroscience can be replaced with the term materialism?"
Neuroscience is a materialistic endeavor. There is no neuroscience of the soul.
"Even the idea that neuroscience requires the assumption that materialism is true would be non-sense."
Really, can you name for me any findings of neuroscience that have identified immaterial in the brain?
"finally get around to explicating the benefits of promulgating the tale for that sort of materialism."
Materialism fits the evidence we have. Immaterialism, besides being incoherent nonsense, has no explanatory value, none whatsoever.
Immaterialism is just vague arm waving that explains nothing. There is no theory of the immaterial, no description of how this blob called "mental" is structured, how it interacts with material, where "mental" is, how it progresses, how it works, what it is, or anything else.
"Mental" explains nothing at all. It is just a meaningless blob arm waving blurt of pointless nonsense.
But by all means, do show me the neuroscience of "mental".
"You would attribute the hydrogen sulfide as the reason why you are having this experience."
No, the reason why I have the experience of "stink" is that the brain has evolved that olfactory hallucination experience. There is nothing about that particular molecule that has within it "stink".
The molecule is just quarks and electrons whizzing about in a certain class of arrangements. There is no intrinsic "stink" in the molecule.
Your experience of "stink" is an olfactory hallucination, you are just making that up in your brain.
Kevin,
"Which is precisely why it isn't a hallucination, because it is based on external physical reality."
A story set in ancient Rome is still fiction even though it is based on a historical reality, that there was a place called Rome at that time.
说
That is "based on" reality. When somebody speaks, then perhaps that abstract symbol is written. But the symbol is just made up, it is an abstraction generated by the brain.
You experiences are just made up. You have had them for as long as you can remember, so much so that your experiences seem like reality itself.
Your experiences are abstractions generated by your brain. There is an extramental reality that triggers those abstract experiences while you are awake and generally thinking clearly, but only through a complex process of encoding as nerve spike trains, from which the brain constructs the abstract hallucinatory experience of your sensory perception show.
I realize this is very difficult for you to accept, that your sensory experience is so highly unreal, but it is. We know the unreality of our sensory experience through the tools of science.
The tools of science have permitted us, and this is new to the modern era, to construct machines that measure the fine details of our extramental reality. With those detection machines we have found that the extramental reality is an odorless, tasteless, soundless, colorless arrangement of quarks and electrons in various arrangements in a mad and frenetic dance of otherwise unintelligible complexity and detail.
Yes, there really is stuff out there, but it is vastly different that what your senses indicate. Your perception of that stuff is just made up.
This is especially clear for your olfactory hallucinations.
Your experience of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, stench, alluring, and all the rest are all just made up olfactory hallucinations. When you get used to that fact you will begin to learn some more about who and what you really are.
Amazing!
I've never seen a cheeseburger try to talk before.
Yes, there really is stuff out there, but it is vastly different that what your senses indicate.
But what I sense is based on what is out there, outside my mind. Thus, it may be a representation, but it is not a hallucination.
You do realize it doesn't cost you anything to admit you're wrong, I hope.
"Thus, it may be a representation, but it is not a hallucination."
Sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, and the other olfactory sensory experiences are perhaps the easiest to understand for what they truly are, hallucinated experiences that are merely arbitrary symbols for extramental materials.
It's OK Kevin, you will likely learn to accept this truth of what you are, eventually.
hallucinated experiences that are merely arbitrary symbols for extramental materials.
Hallucinations aren't symbols for extramental materials. They have no external basis for occurring, unlike a smell which is a response to encountering a chemical stimulus. That's the truth of who we all are.
It's okay to admit you are wrong.
StardustyPsyche said:
Really, can you name for me any findings of neuroscience that have identified immaterial in the brain?
The extent of your ineptitude, the depth of your irrationality, and the vacuity of your awareness are stunning.
Kevin,
"Hallucinations aren't symbols for extramental materials. They have no external basis for occurring, "
A symbol has no basis for occurring.
Imagine an equilateral triangle with one vertex pointing down. What is the basis for that occurring? We consider that to be a symbol to yield in traffic. I see those approximately triangular signs all over the place. What is the basis for a triangle to symbolize yield in traffic?
The association is just made up out of the imagination of a brain, that's all. There is nothing about yielding in traffic that is somehow triangular, or stopping that is somehow octagonal, or a railroad crossing that is somehow circular.
Symbols are just abstractions, made up out of imagination, and then abstractly associated with something else.
"a smell which is a response to encountering a chemical stimulus"
That response is an olfactory hallucination, an experiential symbol, just made up in the brain.
The experience of the smell is all in your brain.
Possibly a chemical substance landed in your nose and some spike trains went into your brain and your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
Or, possibly you were dreaming and some stored memories were retrieved and your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
Or, possibly you took some drugs and your brain started processing nerve pulses in different ways such that your brain then constructed the experience of that smell.
In all cases the brain constructs the experience of the smell.
The experience of the smell is not somehow out there in the cosmos waiting for you to discover. That experience of the smell is all in your brain, it is an internally generated imaginary qualia, an olfactory hallucination, not something external to yourself that you have then internalized accurately, rather, entirely manufactured in your brain with no extramental realization at all.
Your qualia are entirely hallucinatory, you are just making them up out of your imagination, your internal brain processes.
Qualia are not extramental facts of the cosmos that you then internalize accurately.
Qualia are entirely manufactured internally out of your brain processes, your imagination.
Which side of this picture is the true qualia of visual experience?
https://pbblogassets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/02/False-Color1.jpg
This is "stacking the court" all over again. Good luck everyone!
Kevin said:
This is "stacking the court" all over again.
What it is is a ChatBot. StardustyPsyche (SDP) is a ChatBot, an AI, an Alleged Intelligence. It has been around for years. One of the earliest deficiencies noted in it regarded a difficulty analyzing and managing contexts, a deficiency which has not improved with time. This deficiency seriously impedes achievement of the sort of auto-adaptation which is to be expected of Actual Intelligence. SDP is a relatively large language model, one which often resorts to obfuscating its emptiness by outputting excessive (and tangential, at best) verbiage rather than producing the sort of text expected in engagement with an other Actual Intelligence. SDP has even failed as a language model with regards to the experiment which has been run with it in terms of eliminative materialism. It was expected that, with access to the expressive repetitiveness of the Churchlands' writings, SDP would have had an easier time at engagement in terms of eliminative materialism as compared with what would be required to engage with the less often discussed topic of the possible semantic incoherence of nomological deterministic materialism/physicalism. Hypothesis: The context deficiency arises from the possibility or likelihood that there are frequently tacit aspects to context; those tacit aspects are not easily addressed by this (or any?) relatively large language model. This leaves SDP often unable to actually engage; consequently, when incapable of actually engaging, it produces text which gives the appearance of attempting to deflect responsibility for engagement onto SDP's interlocutor. By responding to the SDP deflections, the interlocutor maintains the simulacrum of intelligence displayed by SDP.
Hal,
"It is interesting how materialists and idealists share the same misconceptions about the mind."
The similarity comes from careful consideration. Most people don't think very carefully or deeply about qualia, consciousness, hallucinations, or how our experiences are generated.
Once one studies these subjects carefully it quickly becomes clear that our experiences are internally generated.
Then the logical question becomes, what is doing this internal generation of experiences?
Kastrup has correctly identified that on materialism, that is, if one carefully considers the nature of our experiences and if one follows principles of materialism to their logical conclusions then inevitably one concludes that our experiences are hallucinations, internally generated qualia such that we have no direct contact with the true extramental reality. The true extramental reality is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless collection of submicroscopic frenetic quarks and electrons and fields in motion.
For Kastrup that is just too complicated, so he is attracted to what he considers to be a simpler "explanation".
Whereas materialism inevitably leads to the conclusion that our experiences, our qualia, are hallucinations that are at least indirectly and unreliably but somewhat consistently mapped from a far more complex extramental reality...Kastrup concludes that there is no such mapping.
For the idealist it isn't the hallucination that goes away, it is the qualia devoid extramental reality that goes away, thus, your perception of reality, your experiences, your qualia, on idealism, are pure fantasy, not rooted in any extramental reality in any sense.
The idealist then attributes the source of all this fantasy to the vacuous term "mental", a term devoid of explanatory power, that is just sort of blurted out as a verbal blob as though it somehow meant something.
Still this might be interesting for you.
Which side of this picture is the true qualia of visual experience?
https://pbblogassets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/02/False-Color1.jpg
What is it like to be a bat?
What qualia does a bat experience?
We often think of our perception of spatial relationships as perhaps the most realistic. Our experience of color is of course, entirely hallucinatory. There is nothing in the true extramental reality that is our experience of red, or blue, or any other shade or hue.
Nor are particular molecules sweet, or bitter, or salty intrinsically, rather, they are all just quarks and electrons in various arrangements. Incontrovertibly, the the qualia of taste and smell, our experiences of those molecules touching our tongue or nostril tissues, is always an olfactory hallucination.
But what of our perception of spatial relationships of objects? Ok, sure, our experience of shades and colors is entirely arbitrary and dreamed up in the brain, but surely our spatial experiences are realistic, or are they?
What do you suppose is the spatial experience of a bat?
We, of course, experience what we perceive as objects in our environment visually. Our stereoscopic vision provides data for the brain to triangulate and construct a 3D model of our surroundings.
So, is a realistic 3D hologram a mechanistic hallucination? Or is such a projection somehow the real thing?
Supposing we close our eyes, but we go around measuring many points relative to a fixed point. We measure thousands of distances and angles, then put the data into a computer, which generates a wire diagram from the data and projects that wire diagram.
Is the wire diagram a mechanistic hallucination, or is it the real thing? Clearly the wire diagram is of the real thing. The projection is an approximated representation of the real thing, but how accurate is that representation?
And even if that representation is highly accurate at our scale is it then the real thing? Or will all such projections based on measured data always remain mechanistic hallucinations of the real thing, never able to represent the real thing will full accuracy and never the real thing itself?
That is what the bat does, of course, echo locate in the dark, so dark the eyes are useless. But the spatial qualia of a bat permits some sort of internally constructed model or sensation or representation to some fair accuracy of the extramental spatial contours being echolocated.
So, how are your eyes different than the ears of a bat? Both receive stereo energy waves which are fed to the brain to create an internal spatial model.
Is the spatial qualia of the bat an auditory hallucination, or is it the real thing? Do you suppose that qualia, the spatial experience itself, is the same as your visual experience? If not, then how do you say they are both the real thing if they are different qualia of the same thing?
What is your definition of hallucination?
How would you distinguish hallucination from not-hallucination?
"What is your definition of hallucination?"
Internally constructed sensory experience, especially a highly unrealistic experience.
"How would you distinguish hallucination from not-hallucination?"
That is arbitrary in how one determines "realistic". No sensory experience is absolutely realistic, so if one insists on total realism then by that threshold all sensory experiences are hallucinations.
Our real time spatial experiences are perhaps the most realistic, assuming one has fairly good vision.
It is important to distinguish between the experience itself and the mapping of reality onto that experience. Chalmers has a great many rather absurd ideas, but he did coin a now common term, "the hard problem", which is the experience itself.
There is a rough mapping between the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation coming into our eyes and our experience of color. That mapping is highly incomplete because our eyes are not sensitive to most electromagnetic radiation. Also, for example, red plus green looks like yellow to us, so, if pure spectral yellow is somehow correctly sensed then the identical sensation when red and green are sensed is imaginary.
The experience of, for example, color, is entirely made up internally, it is an experiential symbol, arbitrary, a sort of animation, fictional with respect to the true nature of the extramental reality.
If everything you know comes to you via your senses, and if no sensory experience is absolutely realistic it follows that knowledge of absolute reality is impossible. Logical positivism is a dead end.
SteveK,
"knowledge of absolute reality is impossible"
Sort of...
Suppose you define knowledge as:
Justified True Belief.
Maybe you don't, fine, your mileage may vary, but just supposing you do.
One glaring epistemological problem with that is that it is begging the question, since it is truth we are attempting to know, yet we must somehow already know truth to have knowledge that our belief is knowledge.
You might recall:
The known knowns.
The known unknowns.
The unknown unknowns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc
People at the time kind of laughed at Rumsfeld, as though he was being somehow silly, but I thought it was an interesting commentary on knowledge.
I would add:
The unknown knowns.
How do we know what we know?
How do we identify a belief as true?
What counts as a justification of a belief?
So, I can justify my belief about the nature of the cosmos using science, since science is the only tool human beings have to obtain detailed justification for the nature of the underlying reality.
But how can one be certain that a justification of the extramental reality is true? We can't.
If that is a "dead end", tough luck for us.
All we can ever determine about extramental reality is justified belief.
If it turns out to be a true belief then we have knowledge, but we have no means to determine if our justified beliefs are indeed true, therefore in the case that we have knowledge of the extramental reality we have an unknown known.
Alternatively, if our justification turns out to be false then we don't actually have knowledge, so we have an unknown unknown.
The only known knowns we have are a consequence of personal experience.
I absolutely know that I exist in some form.
I absolutely know that I am experiencing my experiences.
"knowledge of absolute reality is impossible
Not if our justifications turn out to be, in point of ontological fact, true.
But, we have no means to be certain that our justifications of extramental reality are true.
Yes, life is a dead end in terms of certainty of the extramental reality, tough luck for us then.
no sensory experience is absolutely realistic
In order to know if something isn't absolutely realistic you must have knowledge of what is absolutely realistic in order to do the comparison and conclude that some aspect of it falls short.
Post a Comment