You’re an example of the only species that could say that. Other species simply act and either survive or not. You can envisage and enact various courses of action. That is what makes humans different.
1 Like
This is good, because we can compare the simulant with two other familiar entities: the p-zombie and my cat. In all three cases, we have only behavior to go on. Yet just about everyone would agree that my cat is conscious. Why? The relevant difference must be that it is biologically alive, so we see its behaviors as signs of consciousness, not artifice.
What about the p-zombie? It too is alive, but why don’t we call it conscious? I’m afraid the answer is, Because the thought experiment insists that it is not. There are no p-zombies in actuality, because if we met a creature that could do all the things the simulant does, but was also alive, we would of course credit it with consciousness.
As for the simulant, there’s actually no need to add the codicil “it is, in reality, an artifice devoid of self-awareness.” If it’s an artifice, this must follow.
Now having waxed very dogmatic about this, let me add that what I’ve written is the picture that will follow if we eventually determine that consciousness is a property only of biologically living things. And we don’t know that yet. I think that will turn out to be the case, but stick around.
I agree that we are the only species that I know of that can envisage the future with such intensity and power. I’m not a big alien guy, but I don’t rule out life on distant planets that are even better at this than we are.
To me there’s no shame in being flesh. If I see us as part of the tree of life, that doesn’t mean that I refuse to recognize the adventurous time-binding conceptuality that sets us part. Indeed, I lovingly obsess over just this.
Feuerbach saw — inspired by theology — that human reason is not tied to our DNA. Voltaire playfully imagined superior extra-terrestials in a satire of the wars over religion. Kant believed in intelligent life on other planets in this solar system, and worried about it in his anthropology.
Our species is uncanny. As far as I know, we are the only species that can sometimes be shocked that there is a world. Other animals at least seem to be “immersed” in objects. We can “transcend” our environment, “experience” it as contingent not simply in terms of this or that arrangement but “out of the blue,” as something that might be called a “miracle.”
But the traditional use of miracle suggests the violation of specific expectations. The “miracle” of there being a world here in the first place is a different kind of surprise.
In my view, ontotheology and the search for a “final story” even obscures this. One entity or event is used to account for the arrangement and quality of other events. This is metaphysics as quasi-physics, basically extending its mechanistic causal nexus to include entities typically rejected. So we get a nexus of events or entities, centered around a privilege event or entity. The “brute presence” of this nexus is taken for granted.
Sort of like Krauss taking the “why something rather than nothing?” question in crude way. “Nothing” becomes lawlike vaccuum or something. “Something” becomes not the brute presence of things but an arrangement of present events that gets classified as “something.”
I speculate that Krauss is worried about an opposed ontotheology. “God did it.” But he misses the point. Any entity fails to get the job done, misses the point.
Long response, I know. But you caught me when I was thinking about this stuff.
Speaking of Hoffman, does anyone seriously believe nature or living creatures have the slightest awareness of, or interest in, “truth”. Creatures learn via inheritance and lived experience. Where does truth have any place in that?
Think about it, close enough, is what matters. Isn’t it.
Exactly the point my mind screams at me.
Also hope you guys don’t mind, this seems a good place to mention it and perhaps get some further discussion.
Back to my bugaboo about the “experiencing the experience that someone else is experiencing.”
I finally received a concise answer:
… It’s a first-person, single-system problem:
why does processing feel like anything, at all, ever —
not how do I access what it feels like for you.
For which the Earth-centrist would say why would it not feel like something? How could it not feel like something?
The response to that will probably be, prove it, to which evolutionary biology can point to amazing and different information processing systems at work with amazing detail and cross coordination.
They will also point out that all the visible indicators of consciousness, can be traced through, back to single-celled organisms.
Ever looked closely at a micrograph of a bustling crowded cell and all the different things floating around. It’s amazing that scientists have been able to map up to 80% of it, though that leaves 20% basically undiscovered. Mapping is not the same as understanding what it does and how it interacts. It seems plain that the details are buried in there.
Guess my problem I can’t even conceive of doubting that living things have a sense of self - it would make a travesty of Earth’s evolution. The utter absolute reality, truth, of it I reasoned out in my youth because what I see around me is too fine tuned not to have grown out of what came before with absolute fidelity to fundamental natural laws of engagements so to speak. Once that genie is out of the bottle there was no stuffing it back in.
For me, our’s is to figure it out. Not to contrive stipulations, and then expect nature to prove herself to our satisfaction.
But people expect scientists to produce the specific agent for something that is diffused throughout the entire system, and that comes together with increasing awareness as creature complexity of body and lifestyle increases.
Well, philosophical zombies are hardly familiar! I hadn’t realised until now that the philosophical zombie was purported to be a biological entity without any sense of self. I’ve swung back to thinking that this is impossible in principle, as all organisms have a sense of self, in that the very state of being an organism is to be separate from the environment. Not saying that all organisms are conscious in the sense of h.sapiens or higher animals - many appear not to be - but that sense is there in a rudimentary sense. So if a philosphical zombie is purported to be biological in nature, it’s inconceivable that it would lack a sense of self..
John Vervaeke’s book on zombies, which I haven’t read, might be a clue here:
The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it.
That beings have a sense of self is not denied. What is under question is what that means. A great deal of modern biology is organised around the machine metaphor. Science looks for genetic or evolutionary mechanisms. Much of this goes back to the philosophy of Descartes who exerts a powerful influence over culture. His scheme was the immaterial soul or mind (res cogitans) harnessed somehow to a purely material body (res extensa). This was parodied by later philosophy as ‘the ghost in the machine’, but it still holds sway.
So the whole ‘hard problem’ argument is an argument against the organism-as-machine. With your sympathies, I don’t see why you can’t see that. You talk about ‘the feeling of life coursing through us’ and that creatures have a sense of self - Chalmers is actually a more natural ally for your attitude than those he’s criticizing!
This is a long way distant from qualia! But humans bear “the burden of self-consciousness”, knowledge of their own death and finitude, in a way that other creatures cannot.
1 Like
They are if you read enough philosophy! 
I don’t think we can be certain that “all organisms have a sense of self” or that all higher animals must be conscious. But I agree that it’s the likely outcome when we eventually learn what consciousness is. What we really want to learn, though, is whether only such entities can be conscious. There aren’t any p-zombies (advanced biological entities without consciousness) but there will soon be simulants, I think. Can they be conscious? The kind of “unified theory” I want would explain not only why certain types of biological organization must be accompanied by consciousness, but also why only such entities can have it.
Have you encountered Michael Levin? His ‘Ingressing Mind’ might be up your alley.
Hopefully my 2c is not repeating something said in the last 500 posts…
The mark of understanding a phenomenon is what predictive and inferential power we have.
There’s a long history of preemptively claiming we understand something. Then we come up with a predictive model and realize that previously we had nothing, or even a false hypothesis.
When it comes to qualia, there are dozens of questions about pain, about colours etc, and ancillary things like strong AI, that we have no idea how to begin answering. That’s why it’s correct IMO, to say there’s a big explanatory gap here, and I’d argue room for a whole “paradigm-shifting” model of subjective experience.
Looks fascinating. Thanks, on my list.
Agreed. I’d be very surprised if the concepts we currently have for talking about subjectivity and conscious experience turn out to be adequate.
A post was started on Michael Levin. I suggest starting with that, I’d be happy to discuss it there. I also have some of the articles he has published for a general readership, as distinct from his peer-reviewed journal articles, which require specialist knowledge.
To me we have “true” as a handy indicator of belief. Basically primates use this term to organize their cooperative coping. This is pragmatic “truth.”
Political-theological “truth” is a sign used to make a claim on status and authority. This is arguably just part of the cooperation discussed above, but here we have primates managing other primates, which are of course extremely relevant components of their environment. For instance, we compete for mates and resources. So we have a competition of primates within social groups.
The general structure is a claim on proximity to the “sacred.” This “sacred X” might be “objective reality” or “the will of God.” A structuralist analysis ignores the specification and looks to the role.
What I self-consciously take for granted here is a fuzzy qualitative empiricism. I don’t pretend to doubt that I share an environment with other sign-slinging primates. On the other hand, I don’t find it shrewd to smear too much icing on this cake. Terms like “physical” — if removed from their mundane pragmatic context — tend to lapse into an ideology that “evaporates” the fuzzy qualitative empiricism discussed above. This evaporation is merely verbal, in my view. Hoffman is a great example. He absurdly argues from the ordinary perceptual world toward its cancellation as evidence.
1 Like
I don’t think so.
Objects are present ( are “there” ) as chunks of quality.
Some philosophers read the signs used in methods that steer this quality as pointing beyond quality. The “true” object is “outside” of what is “there.” What is there is “caused” by the “true object.”
The quality of the object that is there gets cast in the strange role of an internal stuff.
How would you go about persuading your listener to believe this?
1 Like
Formal indication. Phenomenology is a helpless pointing. It is hermeneutic and “destructive” because it understands “consciousness” to point at the prejudicial disclosure of a world permeated with “linguisticality.”
It “excavates” or “uncovers.” It tries to dig under the historically accumulated sediment of the taken-for-granted routine/average slinging of this or that sign.
It does not offer “theorems.” It is a pointing with marks and noises that runs the risk of total failure.
Yet if you say the object is qualities, you are offering a theory. Are you going beyond the limits of phenomenology and proposing a transcendent vantage point?
1 Like
I can understand how I might signify that way from over there. But no.
We might call it a “theory” in the sense of a “seeing.” I “dig for the right signs” that radiate for me as good pointers at the structure in the-world-for-me that I hope are there in the-world-for-you.
But I don’t see marks and noises as “mirrors.” I see that we enact the “representational effect” of such marks and noises. Joe can chain sounds together for me that direct my comportment to the porch to bring in a package.
The ideal of objectivity is enacted as a trying to focus on structures that I wager are also there for others. But pointers “foreground.” Waldo is pointed out as having been there along. Signs can change the way the world shows up for us.
But I never live as the other. I believe that the world has “faces” it will never show to me. Yet I also enact constantly a belief in the blurry similarity of its many faces. The red couch is also there for my mom. The careful specification of this similarity is tentative and risky.
I risk myself and my current tentative specification through dialogue with others.
So there’s you. And there’s the the not-you.
It’s two sides of one coin. This coin goes by various names, one of which is the Absolute.
It might seem that the Absolute is a perch from which you can see yourself and the not-yourself, but it’s not a perch.
1 Like
Well I adore and constantly employ the coin metaphor myself.
The world primarily lives in darkness. Every specific revelation is simultaneously a vast concealing. In this sense all vision is blindness and all illumination darkness.
In every poly-faced object, there is more darkness than light. I enact this pre-theoretically constantly. I enact a sense that objects show themselves differently to others, without needing any help from me. The world is there for my wife, for my boss, for the cashier at the grocery store, for my dog.
A great topic ! So I am with Sartre on this issue. The self is another “transcendent object” in the world. My “consciousness” is the “being-there-ness” of only a small part of this empirical self. As “consciousness” I do not even engulf my own being as person.
I intensely agree that there is no perch above the world. The typical metaphysical use of “objective reality” is theology. I’d call it “nonsense.” But the mistake to avoid here is a tacit repetition of what is being denied. A naive logical positivist uses “nonsense” in the sense of “nonsense in the ears of God” or “nonsense-in-itself.”
To me the more beautiful move is to confess that we can’t personally make sense of this or that sign. We have no choice but to treat some sign chains as more potentially valuable than others. We can’t help mostly being deaf to what later reveals itself as having been significant after all. This is part of the “temporal depth” of every object. The “chunk” is an “ideal” interpersonal unification that includes quality that hasn’t arrived yet. Prejudicial revelation is expectant revelation. The object is primarily possibility.
“Authentic ontology is situated.” This can be tuned to read as a tautology. If I say that “all belief is situated,” then this too is a self-consciously situated belief. It’s the risky endorsement of a particular comportment. A primate points in the sense of “let’s go this way.” To go this way into the dark forest around our campfire is to not go every other way. No one sees the world naked. At best they get a flash of titty.
In other words, the rejection of the “god’s POV” or the “omniscient narrator” is not coherently voiced from the tacitly “divine” perch of a “universal logic.” The “impossibility of the perch” is not a “theorem” in the tongues of angels. It is not a mirroring in signs of the “true reality” of the impossibility of mirroring a “true reality.”
1 Like
Not sure if you’ve seen this killer passage from Kisiel about the Heidegger of 1919. For me it rings 20 bells.
In fact, it was in this semester which inaugurated his phenomenological decade that he first discovered his root metaphor of the ‘way’ to describe his very kinetic sense of philosophy. Philosophy is not theory, outstrips any theory or conceptual system it may develop, because it can only approximate and never really comprehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate. That which is nearest to us in experience is farthest removed from our comprehension. Philosophy in its ‘poverty of thought’ is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only ‘formal indications’ which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life’s possibilities of understanding and articulation. In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating ‘concepts’ are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn…
…
Philosophy is ‘philosophizing’, being ‘on the way to language,’ ways —not works.
1 Like