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Consciousness Unexplained, perhaps indefinitely
I enjoyed this review of Dennett, perhaps mostly because I agree with so much of it. THe gist is that while Dennett illuminates the issues partcularly well, his claim that we have already explained the phenomenon of subjective awareness in terms of more primitive elements is still in the end unconvincing. Those nagging intuitions that just won't go away seem like red flags as well, telling us that something real isn't being explained entirely. The review from Hudson Review by Harold Fromm is of the brief article collection volume called "Sweet Dreams."
Link to PDF of full review Extract from the review ... Quote:
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Re: Consciousness Unexplained, perhaps indefinitely
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Regarding the reviewer’s affirmation that he’s “accepting†that “there is nothing to consciousness that is not physical,†I suspect he’s simply providing the obligatory, IMO, CYA confession of faith paying tribute to the requisite materialist/atheistic orthodoxy—but the reality is that no one actually knows/understands what “physical†and/or matter/energy truly encompasses; and besides that inconvenient detail, there’s also objective mathematical truth—like pi, a transcendent irrational number—that undoubtedly “exists†and that we can consciously discern, but that apparently isn’t “physical.†|
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Re: Consciousness Unexplained, perhaps indefinitely
Hey there. Critics of Dennett's 'consciousness explained' typically mutter something about 'explained away he means'. He does seem to end up with a reductionist position that is ultimately... Somewhat unsatisfactory. That being said I am a Dennett fan and I enjoy his writing very much. I still think that there is something ultimately unsatisfactory about his theory of consciousness, however. He ends up... Reducing the phenomenon in a way that doesn't seem very plausible - especially in light of Chalmer's thought experiments with zombies and spectrum inversion.
I quite liked Searle... Conscious properties are emergent properties just like liquidity is an emergent property of water. Sounds fairly interesting and somewhat plausible at first glance but the trouble is that the analogy doesn't hold... If you know all the physical facts about the H2O molecules and the bonds (relations) between them then you can predict liquidity. Liquidity is an emergent property of arrangements of H2O molecules in the sense that a single H2O molecule doesn't have the property of liquidity yet a whole bunch of them do. He thinks that consicousness is similarly an emergent property of neurons but the trouble is that here the analogy does not hold. While we can't predict consciousness from a single neuron it also seems to be the case that we can't predict consciousness from lots of neurons and neural connections. There seems to be an explanatory gap with consciousness that there is not with liquidity and hence the analogy with the liquidity of water isn't as illuminating as it first appears. The first time I read Chalmer's "the conscious mind" I also thought that his criticisms started strong but that his theory was not so strong... While aspects of the book are technical Chalmers has become well known for his distinctions of different kinds of supervenience (similarly to how Dennett became well known for his distinctions of the different stances one can take to the world). Supervenience is now a notion in every philosophers tool kit... He has also continued to work on consciousness... You can access his more recent papers from his homepage. He currently has a substantial grant from the Australian Research Council and he works in the Centre for Consciousness Studies at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. In short... Along with Jerry Fodor he is considered one of the best philosophers of mind currently alive and he has continued to develop his work... In short... The notion is... That typical materialists think that if you list all the physical facts (physics) then that entails all the facts. Chalmers maintains that there are phenomenal facts that are not entailed by the physical facts. Hence if you want a complete description of all the facts you need to add the phenomenal facts as brute. Basically... Phenomenal redness is brute the way that mass is brute. You also need facts about indexicals (who you are, where you are, what time it is). And hence a PQTI description of the world (physical, qualitative, time, indexical (location and who i am) are all the facts of the world. (Possibly ethical facts need to be added but they don't go there). Chalmers hope is that just like superstring theory is an attempt to offer an underlying theory to unite... I forget... Special relativity and something else... Quantum mechanics???? he thinks there may be an underlying theory where the physical properties like mass and the qualitative properties like phenomenal redness are both entailed from the underlying properties of the unified theory... Otherwise we need to treat qualitative properties as brute like we treat physical properties like mass etc. We need to find correlations between qualitative properties and physical properties (hence psychology can progress as normal 'cause that is what they are up to anyways). Then we need to find the psychophysical laws relating the phenomenal lproperties to the physical properties. He is actually... Rather brilliant. 'The conscious mind' is 1996. He has developed his view rather a lot from there.... |
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