--- In
Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, Justintruth <wittrsamr@.
..> wrote:
>
> "Why do you think being a subject implies being non-physical in any
> possible way if we can give an account
> of a physical entity as a subject (as Dennett does)"
>
> Here is a possible way:
> <snip>
>
> To "be a subject" means (among other things) being aware.
>
> It may be that a particular arrangement of particles causes awareness
> but if it is true we currently do not know
> what arrangement that is although we know, and have known since the
> first caveman ducked a rock,
> that it has to do with brains.
>
> Certainly, however, no arrangement is awareness because the term aware
> does not mean to be an arrangement of particles.
But the term's meaning says nothing about what causes the phenomena we associate with being a subject. The issue isn't what do we mean by "aware" but what produces awareness in the world?
> In fact it is
> possible to conceive of any arrangement as not being aware and in fact
> current physics does this. There is no mention in the physics of
> awareness - no property of matter corresponding to the idea of it. If
> there is then you should be able to point to that law of physics or
> state of matter described in some physics book as having that
> property. It is not in the classical physics, quantum mechanics, or
> relativity theory, so where is it?
>
That the laws or causal factors have not yet been discovered does not imply they are not there to be discovered. The only thing at issue here is whether we can conceive of consciousness as being physically derived, physically caused -- whatever the factors of physics need to be involved.
> My understanding is all aspects of chemistry are the result of physics
> and aspects of biology are result of
> chemistry and the brain a result of biology. If that is true then
> there is something missing - some principle that correlates the
> existence of awareness with some level of organization of the
> material. Certainly it is in neurology and the ties are being advanced
> daily. Since current physical law does not contain this (these)
> principle(s) then to "be a subject" is non-physical.
>
Of course it's to be non-physical in the sense of it not being about describing the physical phenomena but, rather, the behavioral and experiential phenomena of subjects. The question is what is the cause, however, and if subjectness can be caused by physics then awareness is physical in THAT critical sense. Above you note that physics underlies chemistry and chemistry underlies biology and that biology underlies brains and that brains are the source of awareness. So what's the problem?
> We could modify the current physics to include descriptions of what is
> now called non-physical. Then we could make the statement that being a
> subject does not imply being non-physical but then the physics as we
> know it when judged from the physics as it currently stands would
> include non-physical statements.
If the line of descent you describe above is the case it already does in an important sense, even if one uses different vocabularies and ways of talking to describe and reference the phenomena happening at different levels.
> Not that we would need to refer to
> them as such once the new statements were admitted to what we would
> then call physics.
>
> A corollary of this is that Dennett has not given an account of a
> physical entity as a subject by using the laws
> of physics to show how the existence of awareness is predicted. At
> some point he has to modify the laws of physics or refer to something
> that is not predicted by them. Otherwise he just gets a geometric
> rearrangement of the unaware matter.
>
Why do you think he has to do that? There are brains and there are minds and, as you rightly note, smashing a working brain with a rock eliminates the mind. All Dennett has to do is give an account of how physical phenomena such as what we find in brains can be aware (behave consciously and have experiences) and that, of course, is what he does.
> There is one other possibility. It is possible that Dennet possesses
> no consciousness of his own awareness and it
> is even at the extreme edge of possibility that what we call Dennet is
> unaware. That he does not really exist but
> is a zombie.
He makes a very good case that the idea of philosophical zombies isn't coherent, that is, while we think we can conceive of them, we really aren't doing that at all but, rather, confusing them with the idea of a mindless automaton. Of course, a philosophical zombie, while stipulated to be a mindless automaton behaves in every way, in every conceivable circumstance, as we do, including giving reports of internal experiences and having the same physical things going on inside its head. So what is missing?
> Then when he testifies to the fact of his lack of
> awareness he does not need to explain anything because in fact, in
> him, there is no awareness - and this is not a lack of consciousness
> but a genuine fact. We could be listening to a pure machine. If that
> is true then Dennet in fact may be right. Right about himself but not
> about me I can assure you.
>
I think you are simply misinterpreting him here. Consider his point about philosophical zombies again.
> I can assure you that that is not true for me as I experience directly
> the fact that I am aware and by that I do
> not mean that I am a material arrangement. I might in fact be one - in
> a sense - but if I am then there is
> more to a material arrangement than what is currently described in the
> physics.
First this isn't a question of physics, even if physics underlies all the other sciences as you rightly point out above. Second, the question at hand is what material arrangement works to produce consciousness and, if it can be discovered, then why suppose being conscious requires anything else? Dennett's thesis is that consciousness can be explained in just this way though he is not asserting that he has figured out exactly how brains do it. He offers a proposal, a thesis for how, which then must be put to the scientific test.
> If I am then there is some principle that associates certain
> structures with awareness.
But need it be some special, non-physical principle? Isn't the question really whether the physical principles we already know can be seen to be sufficient to account for this?
> I can tell this because I have had
> anesthesia and
> by a slight altering of my brain I lost awareness. I remember loosing
> it and I remember when I gained it. Nothing in my reading of the
> physics remotely predicts such an event. If it is there can you show
> me where?
>
Perhaps you are just not sufficiently versed in the physics or the chemistry or the biology?
> In a limited sense, when we posit something as really existing we
> necessarily posit it as not being my
> experiencing of it. Reality is then the opposite of the "purely
> subjective".
"Subjective" and "objective" refer to different stances vis a vis the world that a subject can take and, moreover, they have a number of different meanings in keeping with the Wittgensteinian notion that words can get used in a variety of related ways without one use dominating the others.
> After all isn't that what distinguishes
> a hallucination from a reality? Whether it is just someone "just
> seeing something" as opposed to something really being there?
Sometimes. And sometimes they're hard to distinguish.
> Reality
> is then what exists objectively and is not merely subjective. And if
> this is the measure of being then any experiencing of the subject is
> an inherently unreal experiencing of nothing. If we believe this We
> could then be fooled into believing that awareness is purely physical.
> This is solved by a better understanding of what it means to be real.
>
The only question is what is the cause of awareness in the world. Does it exist in co-terminous way with everything physical, does it get brought into the world as a distinctly different thing by certain physical things? Or is really just certain physical things interacting in a certain way?
> Claude Shannon states that the information associated with signals has
> nothing to do with their meaning. Yet it seems that in the assembly of
> matter into a device where information is most highly collected,
> processed and (presumably) stored we also have the creation of
> awareness. Perhaps there is in fact a relation between the two and
> perhaps someday as neurology and computer science progress we will
> find it and define it. What we find will be a relationship between
> what we now call physics and entropy and what we now call, for
> example, awareness.
>
Perhaps. Indeed, why not?
> We already have a lot of the picture. we know for example that vision
> has something to do with signals from
> the eyes traveling to the back of the head. We routinely use phrases
> like "he lost sight in one of his eyes". As imprecise as these are
> they are such an association. We need only make them precise enough to
> admit them to the physics somehow. I think neurology and cybernetics
> has a chance on achieving such generality.
>
So you are denying a physical basis for awareness or you aren't? It seems to me you are saying a little of both here.
> That will be a new scientific principle and we may deem the result a
> part of what we will then call "physics". Absent that advance the
> relationship between awareness and physics is unknown and it seems
> misleading to ascribe to the current physics predictions that it does
> not make.
>
Ah, so you are looking for the missing principle but don't deny it may be just another one that applies to the dynamics of physical phenomena?
Dennett's point is that we don't need to find some new, missing deep physics principle, that what we already have is likely to be enough.
> Once the association is known we will be able to do that. We will be
> able to say that if a particular arrangement of matter is made then an
> awareness forms or occurs. But when we do that the awareness that
> forms will not in fact be reducible to the arrangement. It will be a
> result of it.
>
If it is the "result of it" then it is reducible in the causal sense which is all that is at issue here. One needn't deny that consciousness is a different level of reality than the physical behavior of matter and its constituents to recognize that consciousness is dependent on a physical platform like brains.
> Perhaps even a new form of the word "be" will have to be added to the
> list in the other thread as such an assignment will be different than
> those in the list.
>
>
I don't think that's needed, but Sean has, on occasion, suggested it might be.
SWM
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