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April 19 - August 7, 2020
So I have tried to keep my ideas compatible with contemporary science, but I have not restricted my ideas to what contemporary scientists find fashionable.
So the problem of consciousness may be a scientific problem that requires philosophical methods of understanding before we can get off the ground.
What is central to consciousness, at least in the most interesting sense, is experience. But this is not definition. At best, it is clarification.
when I talk about consciousness, I am talking only about the subjective quality of experience: what it is like to be a cognitive agent.
At a first approximation, phenomenal concepts deal with the first-person aspects of mind, and psychological concepts deal with the third-person aspects.
Awareness can be broadly analyzed as a state wherein we have access to some information, and can use that information in the control of behavior.
This problem arises from the logical possibility of a world physically identical to ours, but with additional nonphysical stuff that is not present in our own world: angels, ectoplasm, and ghosts, for example.
What about memes? They are nonphysical as well.
The B-facts merely redescribe what is described by the A-facts.
Supervenience is just another word for reductionism.
Reductive explanations should not be seen as displacing these other sorts of explanation. Each has its place.
Indeed. Many phenomena are rexucible. But many are not. I challenge the notion that everything can be reduced to matter.
What is most important is that if logical supervenience fails (as I will argue it does for consciousness), then any kind of reductive explanation fails, even if we are generous about what counts as explanation.
Yes.
A statement is logically necessary if and only if it is true in all logically possible worlds. Of
Conscious experience is almost unique in its failure to supervene logically.
The same goes for architectural facts, astronomical facts, behavioral facts, chemical facts, economic facts, meteorological facts, sociological facts, and so on. A world physically identical to ours, but in which these sort of facts differ, is inconceivable.
I could imagine phisically samme world with differennt biology. For biology means creation - means something that transgresses physicaity.
If it turns out that in the actual world, the sort of thing that tends to cause red experience is a certain surface reflectance, then objects with that reflectance are red even in worlds in which there is no conscious being to see them.
Perfect
intentionality cannot supervene logically on physical and phenomenal properties.
Does indexicality pose a problem for reductive explanation?
Indexicallity is nothig but a reflection of memeticality.
The position we are left with is that almost all facts supervene logically on the physical facts (including physical laws), with possible exceptions for conscious experience, indexicality, and negative existential facts.
To put it another way, there is an epistemic asymmetry in our knowledge of consciousness that is not present in our knowledge of other phenomena.
It is striking that there is no problem of “other lives,” or of “other economies,” or of “other heights.” There is no epistemic asymmetry in those cases, precisely because those phenomena are logically supervenient on the physical.
If so, it follows that the notion of consciousness cannot be functionally analyzed.
The functionalist treatment collapses the two notions of consciousness and awareness into one, and therefore does not do justice to our conceptual system.
It seems that the concept of consciousness is irreducible, being characterizable only in terms of concepts that themselves involve consciousness.
Penrose and Hameroff suggest that quantum collapse in microtubules may be the physical basis of conscious experience.
in particular he leaves around just as many copies of his genes. It follows that evolution alone cannot explain why conscious creatures rather than zombies evolved.
To repeat: he does not take memes i n accoount while linking consciousness to evolution .
While evolution can be very useful in explaining why particular physical systems have evolved, it is irrelevant to the explanation of the bridging principles in virtue of which some of these systems are conscious.
This is unsupported.
It remains as plausible as ever, for example, that if my physical structure were to be replicated by some creature in the actual world, my conscious experience would be replicated, too.
No. with a meme replicator?
It is this view—natural supervenience without logical supervenience—that I will develop.
conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties.
That is what Susan Blackmore claims: a meme needs a substrate that is attached to. Body without consciousness is possible. Meme without a body is not.
It remains plausible, however, that consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis.
Amazing. Not knowingly he e plainz emergence perfectly.
to embrace dualism is not necessarily to embrace mystery.
But it remains the case that if a variety of monism is true, it cannot be a materialist monism. It must be something broader.
If consciousness is an emergent property, it is emergent in a much stronger sense. There is a stronger notion of emergence, used by the British emergentists (e.g., Broad [1925]), according to which emergent properties are not even predictable from the entire ensemble of low-level physical facts.
Exactly. Emergence is emergence only if it is not supervenient to matter.
The view saves materialism only at the cost of making it entirely mysterious how consciousness could be physical.
If a materialist is to hold on to materialism, she really needs to deny that Mary makes any discovery about the world at all. Materialism requires logical supervenience, which requires that Mary can gain no new factual knowledge of any sort when she first experiences red.
This collapse is supposed to occur upon any act of measurement; and in one interpretation, the only way to distinguish a measurement from a nonmeasurement is via the presence of consciousness. This theory is certainly not universally accepted (for a start, it presupposes that consciousness is not itself physical, surely contrary to the views of most physicists),
That is why consciousness as the collapse of wave functions seemsmost plausible ;but within dualissm. Important is that such theory explains the emergence of consciousness, but not the pecularity of consciousness, that it is objectivelly not accessible.
Naturalistic dualism. Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical, without supervening logically or “metaphysically.”
This position explains memes without mentioning them.
Taking a broader view of the logical geography, we can say that there are three main classes of views about conscious experience. Type-A views hold that consciousness, insofar as it exists, supervenes logically on the physical, for broadly functionalist or eliminativist reasons. Type-B views accept that consciousness is not logically supervenient, holding that there is no a priori implication from the physical to the phenomenal, but maintain materialism all the same. Type-C views deny both logical supervenience and materialism.
A naturalistic dualism expands our view of the world, but it does not invoke the forces of darkness.
After all, any explanation of my twin’s behavior will equally count as an explanation of my behavior, as the processes inside his body are precisely mirrored by those inside mine. The explanation of his claims obviously does not depend on the existence of consciousness, as there is no consciousness in his world. It follows that the explanation of my claims is also independent of the existence of consciousness.
Logical, but...
judgments about consciousness are logically supervenient on the physical;
This is his claim. I do not remember he would somehow prove it.
The relationship between an explanation of phenomenal judgments and an explanation of consciousness is a subtle one, however.
As a challenge: How can my judgments be any more justified than a zombie’s, given that they are formed by the same mechanisms? As an argument: If my judgments are formed by the same mechanisms as a zombie’s, they cannot be any more justified.
Our knowledge of conscious experience does not consist in a causal relationship to experience, but in another sort of relationship entirely.
Because my zombie twin lacks experiences, he is in a very different epistemic situation from me, and his judgments lack the corresponding justification.
I am constituted by both physical and nonphysical properties, and the full story about me cannot be told by focusing on only one half.
Crucial point.
From the first-person point of view, my zombie twin and I are very different: I have experiences, and he does not. Because of this, I have evidence for my belief where he does not.
Indeed, some of our concepts (e.g., “Santa Claus”) have no referent at all, but they still have a primary intension
He is complicating his argumentation for he does not take memes in account. Santa Claaus meme is as referential as rock meme.
And second, there are questions about what constitutes the content of our concepts: Is
Again. Memes. Without memees you have to complicate like he does.
That is, it appears to be the relational concept of “red experience” that carries the communicative burden. This ineffability can be seen as providing indirect support for the explanatory irrelevance of experience: the
Recall that awareness is the psychological correlate of consciousness,
