[Wittrs] Re: To Be Or Not To Become ... A Lobotomite
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 17:19:05 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Gordon Swobe <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> --- On Mon, 5/24/10, SWM <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
> > [Dennett] is not interested in eliminating ordinary references to
> > subjective experience or in denying that we have subjective
> > experience. His point is to explain the occurrence of such
> > experiences by reference to something more basic (something
> > constitutive, to use a term that has recently gained some
> > cachet heree!) which is not, itself, experience,
> > subjectiveness, etc.
>
> Dennett's effort to explain subjective experience in terms of something "more
> basic" amounts to complete nonsense, as anyone with basic subjective
> experience knows.
>
> -gts
Ah, yet another powerful argument! 'It's nonsense as anyone with basic
subjective experience knows.'
What about the world seeming to be flat to those who don't have a full picture
of the world's scope or who don't realize what happens when you try to see
beyond approximately 8 miles in a straight line?
How about the fact that the sun seems to go around the earth and that people
thought this to be the way things really are for millenia?
Your view is that we have subjective experience and so we KNOW that that
experience cannot be reductively explained as a function of something else that
is going on in a physical milieu that is not, itself, conscious!
Of course this is probably not what Searle's own position would be, but the
fact that you hang your argument on it is telling, I think, Gordon. I'm sure
you would agree that brains "cause" consciousness in the sense Searle uses
those words. If not, you would no longer be an official Searlean! But if they
do, how does that get accomplished, absent the leaping into existence, full
blown, of some new phenomenon in the universe?
You want to say that consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more basic
than itself, a la a Dennettian thesis, because "anyone with basic subjective
experience knows" it cannot, but such a view is deeply confused, I'm afraid,
because, by saying it, you are treating brains in a different way than you
treat computers when it is clear (unless you are an explicit dualist) that
brains are both physical entities AND causative of consciousness. This means
that, absent dualism, there is something (or things) they are doing that is
(are) physical which cause consciousness.
But if so, it cannot be "nonsense" to think that what we call "consciousness"
is explainable in more basic terms that do not, themselves, admit of being
called "conscious" or "consciousness."
Note that Searle's argument, when more tightly drawn by him, as in the APA
address you recently referred to, is much more narrowly drawn, even if
mistaken. (I will post the basic argument in another post here, so that we can
look at it in more detail and see what, if any, flaws it partakes of.)
SWM
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