Re: Original Sin

Richard Dudley wrote:

Aha, so that's then my misunderstanding of what you had meant by what
it would *be* like to be Dianelos greeting his wife. In your
description which followed that, you gave a third party account of
where neuroscience might be able to take us in terms of emotions and
probable responses, and I don't dispute that. It did though resolutely
remain a third party description until at the end you claimed that it
would be an answer to 'what it is like to be Dianelos'. That last step
is where I have taken issue with your position, that it appears you
were saying a description of an experience gives us the experience.
Now you are saying you haven't said that, so I remain somewhat
confused :-)

I was saying that a sufficiently detailed third-person description
of what's happening when the experience is had could suffice to
answer the question "what is it like?". That would only be the same
as saying that a sufficiently detailed third-person description
would be the same as having the experience if I thought that the
only way to answer the question "what is it like?" would be to
have the experience; the whole point is that I don't think that.

Does that help?

OK, I'm not saying that it couldn't. I can't see how it could at the
moment, but to me it would really be hubris to rule it out. I'd really
like to know how it is that the qualia of 'blueness' could be shown to
be derived from the mechanics of brain and eye operations but I don't
know how it could at the moment. So it seems we're not in disgreement
here.

Splendid. Dianelos, on the other hand, combines a robust belief
in the sufficiency of third-person, scientific, analysis to
account for everything that's objectively observable, with an
equally robust belief that experience is fundamentally inaccessible
to such analysis. I find this odd. I think he finds it odd that
I find it odd. Perhaps we'll understand one another better
eventually...

I think it could do, yes. (But it might turn out that the
answer could be described by saying "being a salamander
isn't like anything"; there might not be things going on
that are sufficiently analogous to what goes on in us
when we have experiences.)

That was where I was leading by introducing such a thought experiment.
We correlate our experiences with other people's experiences through
language. In the case of a salamander there's no experience to
correlate with. Which, incidentally, is why I think Nagel's 'what is
it like to be a bat?' is just silly :-)

I don't think we know enough about either experiences or
salamanders to be sure that salamanders don't have experiences.
Nagel explicitly assumes that bats are enough like us that we
can be confident that they have experiences; I think that's
overoptimistic, but it doesn't seem to me that anything Nagel's
saying would be particularly hurt if he had to switch to some
"higher" non-human animal, or perhaps to a hypothetical
creature with a bat's senses but a more human-like brain.

(If you think that only humans have experiences, though,
then I agree that you're not going to find much common ground
with Nagel.)

No apology necessary :-) I was pondering your analogy earlier today
and something jumped out at me. 'Respectable physicists' do actually
make that argument (absent the last line) - for 'massiveness' read
'Higgs boson'.

Hmm. I don't think that's true. That is, (1) the Higgs only
accounts for some of the mass in the universe and (2) if it
turned out tha there was no Higgs, those physicists wouldn't
say "oh, so that thing we've been studying turns out not to
be _mass_ after all". Whereas I think Dianelos is saying
that nothing that can be fully accounted for in material
terms *could* possibly be what he calls consciousness.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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