[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:09:19 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Cayuse" <z.z7@...> wrote:
>
> Stuart wrote:
> > Cayuse wrote:
> >> I wonder if some confusion has arisen here by switching from the
> >> term subjective experience to the term consciousness. I can see why
> >> these terms are often used interchangeably, since consciousness
> >> (on Nagel's use of the word) manifests as though from a subjective
> >> perspective. Do you regard these terms as synonymous?
> >
> > I have frequently explained what I mean by "consciousness" as
> > having "subjective experience" or "subjectness" or "being a subject."
>
> Then I suspect this is where our respective uses of the word converge
> sufficiently to keep locking horns over it. If consciousness means "being a
> subject", as in having a concept (or at least a sense) of "self", then it has
> nothing to do with Nagel's definition, and I would accept that it has
> empirical content. But if it means "having subjective experience" then we may
> be about to lock horns again, so it would be good if we could get to the
> bottom of what we each mean by the phrase "having subjective experience". For
> me it means being associated with what Nagel calls a "what it is like",
> regardless of whether or not that "what it is like" encompasses a concept (or
> at least a sense) of "self". In this case I maintain my claim that it has no
> empirical content. Perhaps you could say what you mean by "having subjective
> experience".
>
"What it is like" strikes me as a fair way to describe this. Like you, I don't
think the what-it-is-likeness is something we can capture in an empirical
study. 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.
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. The question
that seems to bedevil us is how something so apparently alien to everything
else there is comes to be in the world with the rest of the stuff
(non-substance sense of "stuff" of course).
I think Wittgenstein's way of approaching this is the correct one. The
occurrence of subjectness is not "alien" at all, even if it is radically
different from all the things known through it. Indeed this looks no stranger
than the idea that the lense in a telescope (or any other part of the
telescope) is not the same as the images seen through it. The lense is just a
different part of the full gamut of things that make up the world.
Given its different position relative to ourselves it seems to be ourselves in
a way that the individual objects we encounter through the instrumentalities of
the self are not. In another sense, as you have noted, it IS all of a piece, of
course. The images and the lense through which we see them are part of the
total picture, the "all".
But language, indeed our very thinking (which is in large part
language-dependent), is simply not equipped to treat itself as the usual
subject of itself or to make mental objects, chief among them being things like
thoughts, objects of reference. Such objects of reference -- because language
is developed and deployed for public use, for application in a public
environment, including more than one speaker, both of whom are capable of
accessing common referents through perceptual and conceptual tagging -- are not
subject to the usual sort of linguistic handling though we often don't notice
this because of the similarity in the function, i.e., naming a physical object
or what's called a natural kind (a class of physical objects, say trees, rocks,
and the like) looks very much like naming abstracts or mental phenomena like
thoughts and feelings and perceptions and agglomerations of such features,
e.g., "minds" or "consciousness").
And so we come to talk about such referents as though they were objects, too,
forgetting the differences, and imagining are a special class of objects,
characterized by some special, perhaps ethereal, features analogous with the
features that distinguish observable physical things. I am suggesting that we
CAN and, in fact, must rely on language when we engage in such references
(think of my moment on the hospital gurney as I was being wheeled into the
emergency room) but that we always have to be alert to the differences of use
that are involved when using language outside its natural habitat of a public
domain.
Language, I am saying, can be deployed re: more "private" domains. Yet doing so
generally involves different linguistic mechanics (different grammars),
especially if we are trying to describe. We can create and use metalanguages
(talk of rules for language use, and rules for rules, of course) and we can
speak of our experiences in poetic terms invoking metaphors and such to evoke
sympathetic responses in others and/or to stimulate our own feelings in some
cases. We can devise and use religious and mystical systems of reference
designed to achieve particular states of the self. These are different games
but are not without language entirely. And, of course, we can point and cry out
when necessary or offer enough information to guide a diagnostician seeking to
figure out what ails us. Language is broader and more flexible than we
sometimes think but it has limits, too, and it is in learning those limits and
gaining the flexibility which comes with recognizing them, that we develop and
increase our understanding.
As Wittgenstein noted, we cannot and should not attempt to subsume all
linguistic uses under a single paradigm. The logical positivists were mistaken
precisely because that's what they set out to do and so were the logical
atomists, of whom Wittgenstein was once one, before the positivists. Language,
as he saw in his later period, is a tool box full of tools, lots of words and
phrases performing different functions, available for different uses. Speaking
a language is learning the way to use the different tools in the box.
So on the view I am espousing, being a subject has the dimension you want to
give it which does largely exclude this condition from the domain of
empirically based descriptive and denoting functions. That is, we cannot expect
to be able to identify and refer to instances of experience in the same way as
we do this with regard to objects and states of affairs (consisting of multiple
objects and their relationships) in the observable world.
But because the occurrence of subjectness is also seen in the observable world
through the behaviors of some of the objects of reference before us (organisms
more or less like ourselves) and because there is a clear relation between such
subjects and our own experienced subjectness, we can certainly talk about how
subjectness fits into the larger scheme of things which includes determining
(or trying to determine) what the genesis of being a subject is -- whether it
is co-existent or dependent on other features of an otherwise physically
explainable world.
So I don't want to deny the power of poetry or even of religion in all this. I
just want to be sure we keep these separate in our linguistic uses from what
we're doing when we take a scientific approach. And I want to be sure
philosophy doesn't stumble into a mistaken mix of these different games
(including the linguistic aspects of such games) in an effort to say something
important about the world and the human condition.
I think, in fact, that this was Wittgenstein's real point in regard to this
question -- not that he was a behaviorist or a nominalist or an anti-realist or
anything else of that sort. He just wanted us to learn the role of language in
thinking and to use this to think more clearly and more sharply. It was this
later realization of his that led him to oppose the idea of philosophy as
metaphysical theory and argument* or the kinds of disputes in philosophy that
cannot steer clear of such things.
SWM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Though I would agree that he was already moving in that direction in the TLP.
I just think he didn't get there cleanly and ultimately came to understand why,
i.e., his mistake lay in the fundamentally metaphysical/theoretical approach he
had adopted to move beyond that approach. The later Wittgenstein realized that
to cast aside that approach one needed an entirely new way of doing
philosophical business, that you couldn't build a ladder of nonsense and climb
it and then toss it away. As long as you depended on such a ladder to get
there, you would need to build it again and again. There was no tossing it away
so you had to get there by a very different route!
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