Re: Making your mind up

On 25/04/2024 09:55, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 23 Apr 2024 07:58:55 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

On 22/04/2024 10:23, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:37:42 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
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On 17/04/2024 13:54, Martin Harran wrote:

On Sat, 13 Apr 2024 14:41:16 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
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On 12/04/2024 13:56, Martin Harran wrote:

On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 21:32:18 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:
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On 2024-04-11 2:42 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:19:45 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

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As discussed just a couple of months ago, science, at least at this
point in time, cannot explain consciousness of which decision-making
is a subset.

>
Is this an accurate description of the problem though? I thought the
most common dualist position at this point was that science cannot
explain *qualia*, and that explaining the underpinnings of various
visible behaviors could never even in principle account for them. When
you say "consciousness" in that sentence do you mean "qualia" or "any
aspect of consciousness at all"?

>
Qualia is one of those loosely defined expressions for things we
experience. A typical example is how do you explain the difference
between 'black' and 'white' to a person blind from birth? I mean
consciousness in *all* its many aspects such as how we do experience
things like colour and why we are awed by, for example, a spectacular
sunset but other things like how we are able to forecast future
conditions and plan ahead for them; where our moral values come from;
how we can create imaginary characters and build a story about them;
one of favourites is negative numbers - they don't exist in reality
yet the drive the commerce and financial systems which are an esentail
part of modern life. The big one for me, however, is how do
neurological processes lead to us being able to have the sort of
discussion and debate that we are having right here?
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Thank you for clarifying.
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And is "decision-making" not a visible
behavior? Certainly this whole conversation seems to have built
arguments on visible manifestations of it (like coming to a decision
after sleeping on it, or changing one's mind).

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Sorry, I can't get a handle on your point here, why you think
*visibility* of behaviour is relevant.
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Because that's the core of what's called "the hard problem of
consciousness"; the idea that we can imagine philosophical zombies that
would outwardly behave exactly like us but with no inner experience and
that the behavior of such philosophical zombies might be scientifically
studiable, but that is all science could study and science can never
account for subjective experience. The visibility of behavior matters
here because it's what makes it amenable to scientific study, as opposed
to qualia/subjective experience/the thing the hard problem suggests
science can't study.

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I accept that science can only study *visible* behaviour - that is the
very definition of science. That doesn't mean that all the answers can
be found purely through visible behaviour and we certainly should not
rule out potential answers just because they aren't based on visible
behaviour. There seems to be a double standard here; scientists rule
out dualism because it's non-visible yet are quite happy to accept
other ideas that are equally unamenable to study, like the multiverse
for example.
  

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I don't think that's a very relevant tangent since we've established
that we're talking about visible stuff anyway, but I think that's a
pretty big misunderstanding about how science works or what "study the
visible" implies.

 I think we are talking at cross-purposes here, perhaps partly because
of your choice of the word "visible". Perhaps "quantifiable" or
"testable" would have been a better choice.

I guess we are talking at cross-purposes because neither word was what I meant. I used "visible" as a word that pertains to *phenomena*; "quantifiable" and "testable" are words that pertain to *models* - or more precisely relationships of models to phenomena. (... and by "phenomena" I don't just mean "things we observe" because that would make "visible phenomena" a tautology; I mean the presumed "real things" that under realism would be the causes of our observations but exist independently of them, and some of which could in principle never cause an observation at all).
"Quantifying" a phenomenon means building a mathematically tractable model of it; "quantifiable" is a word that applies to phenomena only insofar as it's referring to *ideas about* those phenomena. And us being able to easily form mathematically tractable ideas about something is completely distinct from us being able to observe the thing. As for "testable", a model being "testable" does mean it implies some visible phenomena because scientific testing means comparing observations to predictions, but again it's the *model* that's testable not the phenomenon and the testability is very much downstream of visibility.
So when you said "dualism" and "multiverse theory" are both non-visible so it's a double standard that science considers one but not the other, I read your applying "non-visible" to those models as saying "both of those are models positing the existence of 'real things' that haven't been observed, and maybe cannot be observed at all". And like I said science doesn't exclude such models in principle because "observation" is a constantly moving target. If you have a model positing some real, currently-unobservable thing X, and working out the logical consequences of this model you find that it says something about some part of the word we *could* observe that requires the existence of X, and based on that you formulate the prediction "if X is true then we should observe Y"... Then it's not only that would we be able to find X is true even though X cannot be observed - the observation of Y would *count as an observation of X*! Meaning X would have been become observable. The history of modern science is full of such transitions from "hypothetical unobservable entity" to "come up with clever experimental validation of the entity's existence anyway" to "the clever experimental setup is now a tool for observing the entity".
I don't know if that clarifies at all the more detailed explanation I had below of the differences between dualism and multiverse theory that account for the different ways they're treated in science?

 

Science isn't about mindlessly looking at things,
science is about building models, theories - and validating them by
figuring out if they have any consequence on what anything might look
and looking there. The theory is more fundamental than the observations
and it can get away with even the most glancing relationship to the
"visible". The issue with dualism isn't that it's non-visible, it's that
it has no explanatory power and the main reason it has no explanatory
power is that it behaves like a false idea in response to evidence (for
example act like it's irrelevant when brain activity turns out to
totally correlate with every distinct aspect of the mind one can find).
In other words there is "being non-visible" and then there's "actively
shunning visibility", and dualism does the latter. This is a tradeoff of
risk of disconfirmation for lack of content, and it's lack of content
that's the real problem for science.
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Multiverse ideas that science entertains (which is obviously not all of
them) are straightforward deductions from models that have been
otherwise validated by their interactions with visible things,

 That doesn't mean that their answers are reliable. The Ptolemaic model
was used for rather a long time, giving what mostly were correct
answers but turned out to be utterly wrong in its foundation.

Of course "satisfies predictions" isn't the only criterion by which science judges models; I mentioned it here because I was illustrating a relationship between unobservable and observable aspects of models. Science uses many criteria to evaluate models. In this case the models that I was talking about as being the baseline that multiverse ideas extrapolate from (those science entertains at least) either pass all the criteria easily because they're consensus science (like quantum mechanics, for quantum multiverse hypotheses), or they fit the criteria closely enough to merit debate (like all the candidate extensions of the Big Bang theory, for most of the other multiverse hypotheses).

 

and the
scientists entertaining them would love nothing more than to work out
consequences of these models that would result in a
yet-unobserved-but-visible difference compared to other models. Because
until they do, being "entertained" by science is the best those ideas
can hope for.
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But it sounds like it isn't the hard problem of consciousness you are
talking about, but more that you don't think science could account for
the behavior of philosophical zombies to begin with.

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I think you are overplaying the zombies problem, it's just one thought
experiment to illustrate the 'hard problem'. Having said that, I'm not
suggesting that science could not account for it; what I am saying is
that the *approach* science has taken so far has provided very few
real answers and I think we need to widen our thinking (no pun
intended).
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Except that there are scientists working on the problem and believe they
have some promising ideas (there is a short discussion in last months
Scientific American on AI)

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They have been promising for rather a long time. As I pointed out to
you two months ago, in Matthew Cobb's book "The Idea of the Brain", he
refers back to a meeting of 20 scientists in Quebec in1953 for a 5-day
symposium on 'Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness'. Opening the
symposium, Horace "Tid" Winchell Magoun, regarded as one of the
fathers of neuroscience, warned his colleagues of 'the head-shaking
sympathy with which future investigators will probably look back upon
the groping efforts of the mid-twentieth century, for there is every
indication that the neural basis of consciousness is a problem that
will not be solved quickly'. Cobb observes that "Tid would probably
have been amused to learn that nearly seventy years later the neural
basis of consciousness is still not understood, nor, the optimism of
Science magazine notwithstanding, is there any sign of an answer on
the horizon."
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Has there been some major development since that book was published of
which I am not aware?

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Plenty. Scanning technology has improved and has allowed to connect
brain functioning to all kinds of conscious processes and behaviors to
an extent they didn't imagine in 1953 or whenever it is they came up
with the joke of the astronaut saying "I've been hundreds of times to
space & have never seen God" and the neurosurgeon answering "I've
operated on hundreds of brains & have never seen a thought". Dualists
now straight-up grant that brain processes *correlate* to conscious
activity and see dualism as a claim that this correlation isn't
identity. Of course for science "correlations" is all one can ever study
so it isn't an issue for developing our understanding.

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I wasn't talking about development since 1953, I was talking about
development since Cobb's book was published in 2020. Unless, of
course, you are trying to suggest that there were significant
developments since 1953 that he failed to take into account. I would
need to see specific examples of that because the book is a
comprehensive account of the study of the brain from Ancient Greece
(and even earlier) through to the present day. TBH, I found the detail
he goes into a bit tedious at times.
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You're right, I'd missed that or kinda skipped over it. I haven't read
the book but reading the sentence and some reviews it looks like he is
talking about the hard problem of consciousness - i.e. he isn't saying
there's been no progress since 1953 in accounting for the neural bases
of our behavior, or the way our internal lives correlate to brain
events, but that this isn't the same as accounting for
qualia/awareness/[the thing philosophical zombies lack], and it's that
last one he sees no progress on.
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If that is indeed what he's saying then we debate how unrelated the
"easy problem" is to the "hard problem" but the position is at least
defensible. But it's not the one you seem to have.
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Am I wrong about what he's saying, and if so do you maybe have a quote
that shows more clearly he's talking about lack of progress on the
neural basis of more specific aspects of consciousness you're thinking
of like decision-making, emotion, imagination, predicting the future etc?

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He's not talking about the 'hard problem' at all; he only briefly
touches on Chalmers and also Nagel ('What Is It Like to be a Bat?')
and dismisses both of them  as not taking us any further forward,
having nothing to offer regarding answers:
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"These views [Chalmers and Nagel] are really a confession of despair,
for we know even less about hypothetical immaterial substances or
speculative exotic states of matter and how they might or might not
interact with the physical world than we do about how brain activity
produces consciousness. Not one piece of experimental evidence
directly points to a non-material explanation of mind. And above all,
the materialist scientific approach contains within it an
investigative programme that can in principle resolve the question
through experimentation. This is not the case for any of the
alternatives."
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Cobb is only concerned with our efforts to understand how the brain
work; although he never calls it that, he's effectively talking about
what are supposed to be the *easy* problems i.e. those that should be
solvable using a materialist approach.

Okay, then I have no idea what Cobb is talking about. Maybe he's
referring to some bar for "understanding" or "answer" that hasn't been
met and not saying there's been no change at all, or maybe he's
referring to some specific over-optimistic predictions made by that 1953
magazine. Or maybe he's indeed saying something I disagree with, idk.

 Bearing in mind that Cobb is an ardent materialist (see the quote
about Chalmers and Nigel above), I think you would find the book an
interesting read.

Yes, I'll see if I can get ahold of it.

 

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The more basic behavioral tools of breaking down consciousness & mental
life into distinct processes via double dissociations, studying people
with brain and/or psychological disorders and running experiments have
also continued bearing fruit. Antonio Damasio for example who wrote
classics in the field mostly uses such methods IIRC and his first book
is in 1994, over 40 years after 1953.

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Cobb does discuss the work of Damasio and others in the context of
localisation theories, particularly the different roles played by the
left and right hemispheres of the brain.  He goes on to show how those
localisation theories have been shown to fall short in further studies
showing that if a particular hemisphere stops functioning, the other
hemisphere can take over that function. He particularly refers to work
by Robert Sperry, 19814 Nobel recipient, that showed that when the
corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres, is physically
severed, each hemisphere starts to perform as a whole brain,
recreating the functions of the missing hemisphere. In Sperry's own
words: "The split-brain cat or monkey is thus in many respects an
animal with two separate brains that may be used either together or in
alternation." Although Sperry's work was initially on animals, further
work by one of his students on a man who had his corpus callosum
severed to treat epilepsy showed the same thing in humans.
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Damasio's work goes far beyond localisation theories, and the fact a
hard right brain/left brain division has been abandoned to some extent
and brain plasticity is a thing hardly undermines the more general
observation that certain aspects of consciousness are associated with
certain areas within the brain.

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Yes, I accept that but a single book covering every aspect of every
researcher is obviously impossible. I'm not familiar with Damasio's
work but I'd guess that Cobb has addressed at least some aspects by
discussing work by other reearchers in the same area. Have you any
specific aspect of his work in mind?

>
I read "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" and "Musicophilia"; the
former is as fun as the title suggests but I'm guessing your reading
list is quite full already :)

 I've bumped 'The Evolution of Agency' up my list and I'm currently
just over a third of the way through it; as you said it's a fairly
short and easy read. I'm finding it an interesting read but so far I
can't see how it in any way supports determinism - it seems the very
opposite - but I'm always cautious about judging a book until I read
it fully so I'll discuss that when I'm finished with it.

I'm glad you find it interesting! I'm not sure what you mean about it not supporting determinism; I wasn't thinking about determinism or non-determinism at all when I brought it up. ISTM in this bit of the conversation we were talking about dualism and where the science is at on understanding our minds. (and it was tangential to even this context, as I pointed out when I recommended it :))
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