[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:37:00 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Cayuse" <z.z7@...> wrote:
>
> 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. -
This is a reference to the use of ownership terms, ownership concepts. One
cannot reference an experience as if it were a possession. But think about it:
What grammar exists that reflects or enables us to speak of experience without
an experiencer?
How could that even be conceived? Experience implies experiencing. Can a rock
have experience? Can anything that is not a subject (with all that entails) be
said to have it? This is all part of the meaning, built into the grammar. But
what is not part of the meaning is the notion that we could "have" it as though
we possessed something the way we have a car or ticket to ride because, while
we can all have this experience instead of that one, we could not have no
experience at all (in the sense of any experience whatsoever) and still be.
When we die, we have no experience but then no one speaks of us as still being
around (unless the concepts of a soul and an afterlife obtain, in which case
the talk IS of nothing else but continued experience). A corpse is not said to
have experience because it has ceased to be animated. It has lost the capacity
of being a subject, the capacity to have experience.
It's clear you and I read Wittgenstein quite differently, not only with regard
to the TLP but the Investigations as well.
> 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. [...]
Note here, as we go forward in the reading, that he focuses repeatedly on the
"having" issue. THAT is the point of this passage, not whether there is an
experiencer for every experience!
> 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.
Again, note his emphasis on the issue of "owning"! And note, too, that he does
not drop the notion of a possessor ("it is not mine either"). Rather he
emphasizes that possessing is what's irrelevant to the matter. He is reminding
us that speaking of "my experiences" is not to speak of possessions, rather
like my sister castigating me for speaking of "my dog" because she took me to
be speaking of ownership (which, of course, IS how society defines such
relationships) in principle while forgetting that we can also use words like
"my" in different senses. As I reminded her, just because I referred to her as
"my sister" didn't mean I was claiming possession (though apparently it might
in some societies). Similarly, we need to be able to refer to "my experiences"
to differentiate them from those others may be having without supposing they
consist of certain kinds of objects which are in our possession. "Possession"
refers to different kinds of things and represents a different kind of
relationship than we get with claims about experiences. But there is, of
course, a family resemblance in the uses.
> 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/).
>
Wittgenstein didn't think Schlick or the other logical postivists really
understood him as you may recall.
Certainly there is a philosophical tradition that tries to break down
experience into its most basic components, i.e., those which are not further
analyzable. Logical atomism, which was Wittgenstein's earlier position when he
was writing the TLP (though he never argued for a theory called that, even if
Russell, his teacher at the time, did), supposes there are basic constituents
of our experience (atoms of experience) that can be found and referenced in a
logically atomistic way, i.e., so-called "simples". Russell argued for this
explicitly in his three lectures on Logical Atomism (published as such) but he
was unable to take this concept far enough because the approach broke down and
could ultimately say very little.
A proper name of a simple, Russell thought, could be "this" or "that" when used
in the moment to pick out a fleeting instance of sensory experience. But he
never really managed to take this concept anywhere because language was not the
construct of simples he imagined. Indeed, the very notion of a sense datum
seems to require a fairly sophisticated grammar to begin with so that it
becomes clear that ideas like logical atomism and the possibility of ideal
languages it depends on require a natural language out of which they must be
constructed. Russell and the early Wittgenstein had it the wrong way around,
i.e., they imagined that natural language arises as a kind of messy construct
that is built on top of a purer, simpler way of speaking.
Wittgenstein rapidly came to see this (abandoning Russell soon after he'd
written the TLP) and he never really took up the cause of the Logical
Positivists led by Schlick, who argued for abandonment of all metaphysics in
favor of reliance on a verification principle, even while these positivists had
come to consider Wittgenstein as a kind of mentor.
Just because someone (like Schlick or anyone) has said something, someone has
had an insight, is not license to assume it is valuable enough to adopt.
Wittgenstein certainly moved further and further away from the logical
positivists soon after he had abandoned the logical atomist position he'd built
up with and in the shadow of Russell (and Frege) and the Investigations
represents the culmination of this journey.
>
> >> 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).
As Wittgenstein noted in his later phase, there can be no private language.
Thus our language is built up with other speakers in a world of common
observations. What is observable is people and their behavior (among other
things). The words we use about the mental states of othes are keyed to
observations of such behaviors. Contra those who suppose we can never really
KNOW if others have minds, Wittgenstein made the interesting and, I think,
telling point that knowing such a thing depends on behavioral criteria and not
seeing into their heads, experiencing their experiences. The larger question,
though, is how this Wittgensteinian insight relates to our own sense of being a
subject. Whether this is a realization that's innate in us as some argue
(certainly babies seem to have such recognitions before they have language,
though perhaps it is only rudimentary and builds up to our level with language)
or whether it is built entirely through our interactions with others, we do
come to think of others who are like us as having a mental life as we do. But
this is connected to the behavior of the others as Wittgenstein points out. Our
language about others' experiencing anything hinges on behavioral criteria.
> 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").
>
Note his use of "I" in the text you cite. Could he have said this without such
a term (an "I" or equivalent)? Would he have wanted to or thought he could in
his later phase, after having given up the ideal language approach he took from
Russell?
I think you have allowed his linguistic usages, which are admittedly sometimes
vague rather than precise (because ordinary language allows for so many vectors
of meaning), to confuse you about this. His "visual room" is not the room in
which he, or any of us, sit (which can, of course, be owned, viewed, etc.) but
the perspectival orientation in which all things including particular rooms and
their contents are experienced. Because he uses "room" in the sense you cite
doesn't mean that he means to confuse that concept with particular rooms, etc.
>
> >> 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).
Ordinary language enables us to distinguish between subjective and objective
experience and it's to be recalled that Wittgenstein, in his later phase, was a
proponent of relying on and returning to ordinary language for meaning. You
shortchange your own efforts at understanding him if you forget the role of
ordinary language in all this.
Do you seriously think he would have endorsed a view that denies the point of
ordinary language here? Look, the issue is this: Philosophy often takes
language out of its ordinary milieu, takes it, as he said at times, "on
holiday". Then meaning is lost. When any of us speaks of what is subjective or
objective we know what we mean in most cases (if we are speakers of the
language in which these terms are expressed, of course). What is subjective is
what is seen from my perspective, what I cannot share with others. My dream as
I slept last night is subjective. My awareness of the waking world is
objective. My perception of that waking world as I am observing it is
subjective (because no one else can see it from my point of view) but what we
can observe in a shared way (determined by our ability to exchange information
about it or relate to physically in a shared way) is objective.
"Subjective" and "objective" have very clear meanings in ordinary language (as
clear as anything one can get without relying on some ideal language that
brings with it severe limitations). But philosophers often allow themselves to
fall into confusion about this. They think there must be some kind of ultimate
objectivity or ultimate subjectivity, one of which subsumes within the other,
etc. But Wittgenstein, certainly the later thinker, did not go there. He made
no claims about any such thing and, indeed, strove to avoid making such claims.
The world, on this Wittgensteinian view, is neither ultimately subjective
(idealism) or ultimately objective (materialism). It just is and what it is is
for science to determine insofar as it can. Philosophy's role is just to work
to keep our thinking clear about such things. Kant's noumenal reality is beyond
the scope of the later Wittgensteinian approach and for good reason.
> I don't deny that the distinctions between private and public, and between
> subjective and objective, are useful distinctions.
Then what else do you need? Why seek some kind of larger metaphysical doctrine
(even a doctrine purported to sustain a concept of an "all" that lacks grammar
and referent that leads to a surrender of thought)?
> 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!),
Yes, I don't like it much either because it seems to me that "experience" ought
to say enough. After all, in a very real sense experience is always subjective,
even when it is of the things we classify as objective.
In an important sense all that is objective IS subjective, but that sense is
not highly pertinent to Wittgenstein' later approach. What are subjective and
objective are that in terms of ordinary language. They are so in
contradistinction to one another as delineated by the ways in which we
experience them, either intersubjectively (via shared observations) or through
observations that cannot be shared either because they are not shared in
practice (only I saw what happened!) or not shareable in principle (only I
could see or know what happened).
We use "subjective" in ordinary language to denote both kinds and we use
ordinary language in a way that captures all these fine point distinctions. We
do that by understanding how to deploy the pertinent words, i.e., by knowing
the rules of the lingusitic road, the grammar.
> 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.
>
>
No, it doesn't. Recognizing a subjective dimension that cannot be spoken about
is not necessarily to confuse this with what we mean by "subjective" in
ordinary usage (what can be spoken about). Anyway, one can hardly use Schlick
to explicate the later Wittgenstein both because Wittgenstein denied Schlick
and his companions understood him in Schlick's lifetime and because
Wittgenstein radically changed his approach after Schlick passed on and the
Vienna Circle was no more.
> > 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".
>
>
There is and there isn't. It depends what we mean by "subjective experience"
(as we have seen above) and what we mean by "observe". As a Zen student I could
sit and observe my own breath (not literally see or look at it of course, but
be aware of it as it flowed in and out) and my own thoughts. Of course the aim
of the practice was to reach a stage where the feeling of being separate from
what I was attending to evaporated, where separate thoughts of self and the
world of a self and the recollections of such a world were finally banished and
all that was left was the observed, etc.
So Zen (and I suppose some other mystical disciplines) start out with an
observer and an observed (allowing us to use such terms, of course) and end up
with a sense that the two have merged or simply ceased to persist as distinct
and separate concepts. This, of course, is a mystical regime, an effort to
change the perspective. Whatever value this has, it is not philosophy per se.
One cannot argue for it or against it. One either seeks and/or achieves it or
not. It is outside the realm of philosophy and disputation. So it really has no
place here.
The real practitioner spurns such discussions and just sits.
> >> 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 think you are misunderstanding his intent here.
>
> >> 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.
>
>
What "has no application"? His point is that we don't discover minds in others
by peering inside their heads or by mental telepathy. Minds in others just ARE
behavior for the purposes of language. But we associate that behavior with
certain experiential notions (as Chalmers later suggests). I don't know that
Wittgenstein ever dealt with that directly. If he did, I don't recall (though
perhaps you or someone else here does?). Perhaps you're right that his
reference to a picture forcing itself on us is to that. (I don't recall the
exact context of the text you quote from and I'm too lazy to trudge upstairs
and pull out my PI and look it up -- maybe I will later.) But the fact remains
that we do make this connection and, while our use of words like "mind" in
reference to others never depends on seeing into their heads, etc., we do come
to expect that they have experience that is not unlike out own.
When I pulled that fish from the lake I mentioned in an earlier post I felt
sorry for it because of its desperate struggle to stay alive and dropped it
back into the water and let it escape. It wasn't language that prompted me to
do that. I had a deep feeling in my gut of shared pain with that fish as I
watched it struggle. Perhaps we don't all have that or have it to the same
degree (certainly many fishermen fish in this world and many children stomp on
ants, etc.) but it is a picture that often forces itself on us. But everytime
some of us act on it there is, in fact, an application as it were. But the
application is NOT to be found in how we determine if another has a mind
(which, if I recall correctly, IS the context of those quotes you cited).
>
> >> 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.
>
I don't think he can be taken as saying "any application at all." Think of the
moral application of acting in a way that reflects empathy for the pain of
another. Wittgenstein, if anything in his later years, was arguing against the
notion of solipsism, that we had no way of knowing that there was anything
beyond ourselves. As a man much given to solitude it's not surprising this held
his attention. But recall, as well, that his later work is directed to our
linguistic practices, to understand how these reflect and shape our beliefs,
ideas, understandings, etc. He himself often noted that ethical questions fell
outside the purview of analytical considerations and this, of course, is an
application! So your blanket statement that he meant "any applicationn at all"
when he asked "what is the application?" strikes me as quite wrong.
>
> >> 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.
>
Wittgenstein wanted to move us away from the idea that it is the role of
philosophy to explain all things. We explain within contexts and philosophy's
job is to understand the contexts and offer explanatory clarifications within
these. As you correctly note, he had no interest in developing vast
metaphysical canvasses to explain everything. He wanted to get us to attend to
the details and to forget about trying to paint such canvasses. But none of
this has a lot of relevance to the question with which we began, namely can we
say of brains that they are the source of minds and, if we can, what does it
mean to say that?
Do you really think that Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy and, of course,
to language, leads to a conclusion that scientists can't study brains for the
purpose of understanding minds?
If this is not what you are arguing (since you keep saying it's about
subjectivity, not minds per se), then what is it that you want to claim?
The Wittgenstein quotes are interesting to see but what do you think their
bearing is upon the questions we have been discussing? Do you think they imply
that Wittgenstein did not think we can use language to talk of minds or that,
because of them, we cannot speak of "being a subject" as integral to what it
means to have a mind?
>
>
> >> 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.
>
How? (I don't see that anywhere in the above quote.)
SWM
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