[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 15:56:58 +0100
Stuart wrote:
> Cayuse wrote:
>> Language is a process that goes on between certain objects in the world,
>> namely people, and has utility in that respect in terms of how people
>> negotiate the world. It is pushed beyond that utility when employed to
>> address the conceived totality referred to as "subjective experience".
>> No special handling will lend any application to language employed in this
>> manner.
>
<snip>
> My reference to mental phenomena (including subjective experience) is a
> reference to an arena in which there are no shared observables.
> (You can't share my subjective experiences and I can't share yours.) Since
> language is publicly grounded it is used for, and is generally about,
> what we can share. However there are more ways of sharing than just by
> sharing observations. Thus we can and do talk about the phenomena of our
> mental lives all the time. (We speak of feeling emotional distress, of
> physical discomforts in our chests, of visualizing this or that, of
> remembering thing, etc.)
> But because there are no shared observables we must mediate such references
> to these kinds of things with various special linguistic techniques.
> Sometimes we add gestures to our words (I point at my chest and make a fist
> to indicate a particular sensatio) or create specialized words with
> applications
> that are limited to only a few of us (we develop various ways of speaking
> among small groups of us) . Sometimes we use metaphor or other poetic terms,
> too.
> And sometimes, to make a point, we recount a narrative intended to evoke in
> our hearer what we feel.
>
> My point is that there is no basis at all for thinking that "subjective
> experience" can only refer to something that has no linguistic dimension at
> all,
> such as your "all" or "the microcosm" you've cited for us in the TLP. Indeed,
> such an idea does lack all linguistic dimension how can you even imagine
> you can reference it as the "all" or "the microcosm" or, indeed, as anything
> else here?
>
> Isn't this whole discussion a contradiction in terms from your point of view?
> And if so, what's the point of going on about it?
The point is that Nagel's use of the word consciousness has no empirical
content, and is consequently unsuitable material for scientific investigation.
I'm not denying the utility of distinction like subjective and objective, and
like private and public. I only deny that "experience" (the "what it is like")
falls into such a category. Some phenomena are classed as subjective and some
are classed as objective, some are private and some are public, but experience
is not a phenomenon.
>>> However, insofar as you consider it "an inappropriate tool" as you put it,
>>> why do you insist on using it?
>>
>> I use it to offer my opinion concerning all the nonsense that is in vogue
>> now about the "scientific study of consciousness".
>
> But all you do is add to what you want to call nonsense because you are
> 1) talking about something scientists aren't talking about (because you're
> confusing their notion with yours)
If you think you can entirely divorce your use of the word consciousness from
Nagel's use then please go ahead.
> and 2) producing words about something (what?) which you have already told us
> no words can capture.
The idea arises, but it has no application.
>>> As my old roshi would have said, stop thinking, just go and sit.
>>
>> Precisely. So too for all those that jabber on about the "scientific study
>> of consciousness".
>
> I'm sorry Cayise but it seems to me you are way out to sea on this. There is
> no "scientific study of consciousness". It is the "scientific study of
> brains"
> that is at issue and how they do what they do, i.e., how they produce
> consciousness. Consciousness is a phenomenon in the world but it is the
> causal
> mechanisms of it that are of scientific interest, not some study of
> consciousness in abstraction.
I'm not criticizing the scientific study of brains but the claim that "brains
produce consciousness". Neither would I criticize the claim that "brains
produce behavior". And if you want to call some of that behavior consciousness
then so be it, but immediately you include "subjective experience" into your
definition of consciousness then you present the more interesting argument that
"brains produce subjective experience". Since "subjective experience" is
non-emprical, I'm interested in your defense of that claim.
>> I used Hume's comment as an example of how the use of common speech makes
>> this idea sound inconsistent.
>> And I do so in order to show that I don't accept your argument that LW's use
>> of common speech indicates that he is not addressing this issue.
>
> I know you don't accept it but you haven't shown why it doesn't work as I
> say. Certainly all the later work of Wittgenstein tends to confirm his own
> self-avowed rejection of the earlier ideas he had promulgated in the
> Tractatus and, more, we see no evidence of his repeating those ideas or
> making
> the same kinds of arguments in the later work. He said he took a different
> tack and all the evidence of his later work supports that. Moreover his own
> contemporaries understood him as doing that (except maybe for Popper who
> never seemed to have grasped Wittgenstein's shift and continued to
> hammer at the TLP long after Wittgenstein had moved away from it).
>
> So what's the case you can make on your side of the ledger?
LW makes this point again in the PI with his use of the "visual room" example.
>>> But who is fooled by the illusion? Here is where we see language,
>>> which is inherently public in its genesis and deployment as
>>> Wittgenstein noted, breaking down. So here we come to a kind of
>>> halt. What we now proceed to do with Hume's useful insight depends
>>> on us. Do we do as he did and simply decide we can know nothing
>>> for certain at all (here he misses the later Wittgensteinian insight
>>> about language) and just proceed in the world as we ordinarily
>>> do for lack of choice to do otherwise, or do we become idealists
>>> (a la Berkely and the Buddhists), or do we seek reconciliation of the
>>> two competing intuitions of reality a la Kant, to preserve both the
>>> idealist
>>> insights and the facts of a real world which we cannot get away from?
>>
>> We gain relief from the drive to provide an explanatory account of
>> consciousness.
>> "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an
>> illness." (PI 255)
>
> Ah yes, but Wittgenstein was referring to a different illness than you have
> taken him to have had in mind. He was, by repeated pronouncements to this
> effect, speaking of our tendency to confuse ourselves by allowing our
> linguistic usages to stray from their natural homes. He was speaking of
> philosophical
> problems really having the form of puzzles that we make for ourselves when we
> forget how our words really work and stray into metaphysical type issues.
We gain relief from the drive to provide an explanatory account of
consciousness.
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