Re: Making your mind up

On 4/27/24 1:09 AM, 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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snip
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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).

>
Sorry, I can't get a handle on your point here, why you think
*visibility* of behaviour is relevant.
>

>
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.

>
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.
   

>
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).

 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.
 

>
"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.

As I understand it, lots of people *have* figured out ways to study effects that would come from dualism, and those effects are not there. Thus we reject dualism not because it is hard to study, but because it has been studied and found wanting.

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."

Sheldrake's proposal is quackery. Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the many and various forms of quackery does not need to read past the two words "morphic resonance" to by 99% sure that it is hokum.

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."

How does one give a scientific critique of magic? If anything can happen, how do you test for "anything"?

'Heresy' is a word that should not have any place in science.

Why not? Surely metaphors have a place in science, and "heresy" is useful as a metaphor.
--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell