[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 07:16:37 +0100
Stuart wrote:
> Cayuse wrote:
>> Stuart wrote:
>>> But THAT it occurs, that it is an inextricable part of the world is
>>> an empirical fact, as far as I can tell, and how that comes to be
>>> is therefore an empirical subject.
>>> <snip>
>>> Minds are not rocks and trees or tables and chairs but they are
>>> something in the world in the sense that anything that exists is
>>> IN the world.
>>
>> I don't understand these claims. Subjective experience constitutes
>> no part of what is categorized as exteroception, but rather
>> exteroception is a category of the contents of subjective experience.
>
> I don't understand this claim. It seems to me that all instances of
> perception of what is thought of as external to us are part of subjective
> experience because they consist of particular experiences and you
> cannot have experience without an experiencer AND whatever is
> experienced both.
and later:
>> I'm not sure how to interpret your use of the word "subjectness".
>
> I've already explained it. It's to be on the perceiving end of a
> perception relation, the conceiving end of a conception relation, etc.
> To be a subject is to be what we are, i.e., to be an experiencer
> having experiences (since you cannot be an experiencer without
> having experience or have experience without being an experiencer).
There is no experiencer of "subjective experience":
PI 398: "But when I imagine something, or even actually see objects, I have got
something which my neighbour has not." - I understand you. You want to look
about you and say: "At any rate only I have got THIS." - What are these words
for? They serve no purpose. - May one not add: "There is here no question of a
'seeing' - and therefore none of a 'having' - nor of a subject, nor therefore
of 'I' either"? Might I not ask: In what sense have you got what you are
talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do
not even see it. Must you not really say that no one has got it? And this too
is clear: if as a matter of logic you exclude other people's having something,
it loses its sense to say that you have it. [...] I think we can say: you are
talking (if, for example, you are sitting in a room) of the 'visual room'. The
'visual room' is the one that has no owner. I can as little own it as I can
walk about it, or look at it, or point to it. Inasmuch as it cannot be any one
else's it is not mine either. In other words, it does not belong to me because
I want to use the same form of expression about it as about the material room
in which I sit. The description of the latter need not mention an owner, in
fact it need not have any owner. But then the visual room cannot have any
owner. "For" - one might say - "it has no master, outside or in." [...]
Moritz Schlick wrote: "To see that primitive experience is not first-person
experience seems to me to be one of the most important steps which philosophy
must take towards the clarification of its deepest problems" (quoted in
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/).
>> The fact of the existence of that content (or of any category of that
>> content) simply IS the fact of the existence of subjective experience
>> (Chalmers calls this a "brute fact", maybe because the possibility of
>> doubt would be misplaced here (Augustine: Si fallor, sum)). Taking
>> "the world" to mean the collective totality of that content, I can make
>> no sense of the claim that subjective experience "is an inextricable
>> part of the world" -- it simply IS that world.
>
> Looking at the world around us we see subjects with subjective
> experience. Their physical bodies alone aren't part of the world; their
> subjective experiences are, too. Moreover, when we look at the world,
> our very looking is part of the world, just as the lense in the telescope
> is part of the world that includes the images observed through it.
Looking at the world around us we see people, but not the subjective experience
that is assumed to be associated with them (an assumption that is not grounded
in observation). Moreover, when we look at the world, there is no "looker" in
that world (LW's "visual room" example: "I can as little own it as I can walk
about it, or look at it, or point to it").
>> Taking "the world" to mean the "objective" world inferred through
>> exteroception, again I can make no sense of the claim that subjective
>> experience "is an inextricable part of the world" -- it makes no
>> appearance "in" that world at all, but rather that world makes an
>> appearance "in it".
>
> There is the same old language problem to be grappled with. The only
> way communicating about this kind of thing works is to develop a
> common vocabulary. But to do that both sides have to want to. Subjective
> experience, understood as what is private to each of us and as the private
> aspect of the experiences we can share, is part of the sum total of what is,
> that is of the world.
The categories of private and public are themselves categories of "subjective
experience" (the "what it is like"). The error is to consider one of these
categories to constitute "subjective experience" in contrast to some kind of
"objective experience" (whatever that might be). I don't deny that the
distinctions between private and public, and between subjective and objective,
are useful distinctions. What I deny is that experience (the "what it is like")
falls into such a category. Although I (uneasily) go along with using the
commonly used term "subjective experience" (always in shudder quotes!), failure
to recognize the inappropriateness of the qualifier "subjective" in this case
is to put the cart before the horse (as Moritz Schlick saw clearly). It
squeezes the "what it is like" into a category of itself.
> If there are physical objects in the world and physical features, there are
> also relations between these and states of affairs and, of course, the
> experiences of seeing, or otherwise "observing", each of these.
There is no observer of "subjective experience".
>> Here you have a picture (of a telescope and the images seen
>> through it), but it is a picture from a "god's eye" view.
>
> Substitute your own eyeball and your cornea. Do you still think it's
> from a "god's eye view"? If so then each and every one of us fits this
> odd description in which case there is nothing special or god-like to
> be found at all. There's just a subject's eye view.
As LW implies in 398 (given above), there is no subject capable of escaping the
"subjective perspective" and viewing it from the outside. Any such view would
require "god's eye", as he states in 426 (given below).
>> I would agree that "organisms more or less like ourselves" exhibit
>> behaviors that are consistent with having a concept of self (that is,
>> the concept of "the host organism" located within a conceptual
>> world-model). That is a clear matter of behavior, and is therefore
>> empirical.
>
> Of course it is and I have said as much.
But the picture we have of such "others" being associated with "subjective
experience" is not a matter of behavior, and is therefore non-empirical. As LW
says, the picture forces itself upon us, but it has no application.
>> PI part 1:
>>
>> 424: The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness.
>> But what is its application? Think of the picture of blindness
>> as a darkness in the soul or in the head of the blind man.
>
> "I do not dispute its correctness." As to "application"
> what application do you think he is challenging? The
> idea that brains can be shown to be causal re: minds?
Any application at all.
>> 425: In numberless cases we exert ourselves to find a picture and once
>> it is found the application as it were comes about of itself. In this case
>> we already have a picture which forces itself on us at every turn, - but
>> does not help us out of the difficulty, which only begins there. [...]
>
> Which "difficulty" do you think he is referring to?
The difficulty of placing that picture into a bigger picture in order to give
the (false) impression of providing an explanatory account of it.
>> 426: [...] Here again we get the same thing as in set theory:
>> the form of the expression we use seems to have been designed for
>> a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each
>> of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness.
>> For us, of course, these forms of expression are like pontificals which
>> we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the effective
>> power that would give these vestments meaning and purpose. [...]
>
> And what do you take his point here to be? Recall that we were discussing
> whether one can speak of consciousness as a matter of scientific inquiry
> and description. Do you think he is denying that possibility in the above
> quotes?
In the aspect of "subjective experience", yes.
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