Re: Making your mind up

On 27/04/2024 10:09, Martin Harran wrote:

On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:46:18 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

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

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

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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.

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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).

 Sorry, you're losing me a bit here. Perhaps it is me still
misunderstanding exactly what you mean by 'visible'. Thing don't have
to be visible for us to study them and draw conclusions; we can study
the effects or symptoms that they have and try to work out what could
be causing those effects or symptoms. Gravity is an example - gravity
itself is not visible and we don't even know yet exactly what it is,
but we have figured out a heck of a lot about it by studying the
effects and symptoms. We need,however, some way to assess those
effects and symptoms and that is where 'quantifiable' and 'testable'
come in.

But "visible" is upstream of either of those. The "effects and symptoms" of gravity are detectable - at the extreme end they're directly perceptible by our senses insofar as any measuring tool we have ultimately outputs something we can directly perceive. That's what allows us to infer that our model saying gravity has otherwise-unobservable features is correct.
"Quantifiable" and "testable" is a description of what science can *do* with those effects and symptoms, and that's something that evolves over time. What the words mean can also evolve over time - for example "is this aspect of some phenomenon present/absent" is a kind of quantification; it's not usually thought of as such because "quantification" suggests more numbers than 1 and 0 but 1 and 0 are indeed numbers and that's often where the studying starts.
I'm a bit confused because you said earlier that "you accept science can only study visible behavior" but now it seems you categorize gravity as non-visible while agreeing it's something science can and does study. This was kind of my point. Our understanding of gravity is mostly a *model* - an abstract idea of a thing that we can't directly observe but we still believe matches something real. The difference between science and "just making things up" is that science has very rigorous standards for the models and conditions belief in them on them having some suitable impact on our perceptions. By "suitable" I mean that this impact can be tiny or indirect, what actually matters is the comparative probability of this impact being observed if reality matches the model vs if it doesn't.
In terms of why I originally brought this up, I was responding to your statement that "science cannot explain consciousness of which decision-making is a subset". I probably misread the sentence as saying science cannot explain those things *in principle* when you actually just meant that science can't explain them *right now*. Even so I'm surprised at the idea that science currently cannot explain decision-making - but then I'm not sure what level of explanation you were thinking of with that sentence.
But all that to say "visible" in this context referred to the fact that if we think of consciousness as causing our visible behavior, then science absolutely could explain it in principle. And I probably misunderstood you when I thought this was something you might disagree with.

 

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"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.
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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,

 No, my issue is not with science favouring the study of one of them
because it is relatively easy to study it using well-established
practices that have produced good results in other areas; my issue is
science *ruling out* one of them out in principle. To some extent,
that is understandable because of it being so much less amenable to
study using those well-established practices but in the same way as we
figured out gravity, I think we should be able to figure out ways of
studying the effects and symptoms that would come from dualism.

Science doesn't reject dualism in principle, it rejects it because no dualism hypothesis meets the standards of a scientific hypothesis. "I think we should be able to figure out ways of studying the effects and symptoms that would come from dualism" is exactly correct! Can you give examples of such effects or symptoms?
Science rejects ideas for *lack of content* (or internally contradictory content, or content that clearly doesn't correspond to reality); being unquantified and untestable are often the signature symptom for lack of content but it's the lack of content that's the reason they get rejected.
It's not a trivial thing at all, plenty of perfectly cromulent-looking scientific ideas eventually gathered controversy and even rejections because closer examination eventually revealed that they didn't *say* anything - often a dichotomy of "what it does say is wrong, and if that's set aside then it doesn't say anything at all". I remember an essay about the island rule in ecology to this effect but I couldn't find it. Some blogs referring to the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis as a "zombie idea" seem to be similar though, as here:
https://www.oikosjournal.org/blog/zombie-ideas-ecology
String theory is another example - the main reason scientists are very cool on string theory isn't that it makes claims that cannot be tested in practice, it's that there are too many different things it can be made to say. Which raises the possibility that it doesn't say anything at all and is just a fun mathematical formalism with no specific relationship to the fundamental particles it claims to describe. The relevant thing to note here is that *scientists disagree on whether this is the case*. It can be legitimately hard to tell whether a hypothesis "says anything"! "This idea seems to say something" isn't enough to tell whether it does, and whether what it says isn't the exact same thing as an different idea that says it more clearly.
That is the standard by which science judges dualism and it hasn't met it for a very long time now.

 I get the impression, however, that it goes deeper than just being
difficult to study, there seems to be near-paranoia about opening a
door that might let God in. Take, for example, the early work done by
Rupert Sheldrake. He came up with the idea of 'morphic resonance',
that there is something like a cloud of collective memory that
everything adds to and draws from. He did some research using chickens
and published it in book form. Sir John Maddox viciously attacked the
book in an editorial in Nature, in a statement that caused
considerable jaw-dropping in the scientific ommunity, described it as
"the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." I
don't have an opinion either way on Sheldrakes' ideas and I'm
certainly not seeking to defend them, but what disturbed me was that
Maddox made no scientific attempt to critique his ideas and research,
baldly claiming in a BBC interview that "Sheldrake is putting forward
magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the
language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same
reason. It is heresy."
  'Heresy' is a word that should not have any place in science.

Yeah. I bet Sir John Maddox knew that very well. I mean, look - he invoked *the Pope's condemnation of Galileo*... on the side of the Pope!! You don't say that kind of thing because you mistakenly erred from the ideals of your field, or because you're failing to hold them up. You say that when you're trying to express whatever point it is you have in the most provocative way possible.
If you read the actual review you'll see he has concrete objections to Sheldrake's claims as hypotheses - in fact he says very little that suggests he objects to them as conclusions. One can presume he does object to the conclusions and his objections to the hypotheses as hypotheses follow from that, but the actual arguments are about their merits as hypotheses. When scientists dismiss something as "magic" that's usually what they mean: a claim that doesn't meet the standards of a scientific hypothesis, typically by not having enough content for any conclusions to be reliably drawn from the premise.
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