What’s the difference between a unique entity and a variation of a type?
The difference is the perspective.
External objectivistic perspectives are able to deal exclusively with variations. Language itself is one of these perspectives. Science, maths are such perspectives as well. They are completely unable to deal with total uniqueness, unable even to just conceive it.
My internal perspective, instead, which is when I pay attention to my feeling me, is a subjective perspective and it gives me continuously a data item of experience of myself as a totally unique experience.
They cannot have a direct connection with each other: objectivity is unable to penetrate into the world of subjectivity and subjectivity is completely unable to give any evidence of its own existence (otherwise, rather than being subjectivity, it would be objectivity).
The thing that creates our wonder is that, the moment we pay attention to our inner experience of us being present to us, this experience of total unique subjectivity is so undeniable, so certain, so verifiable and available to us any moment we decide to pay attention to it, that it makes us conclude, instinctively, that it must necessarily have some objectivity. However, as soon as we try to consider it from the external perspective of reflection, language, reasoning, we are forced to acknowledge that it is impossible to share, to express, because we discover that we have no words, no concepts to tell it even to ourselves.
Science doesn’t deal in ‘shared concepts’—it deals in measurable abstractions. Since Galileo, the scientific method relies on stripping away qualitative, personal experience to isolate variables that can be quantified and predicted mathematically. If ‘the personal’ enters science, it does so only after being translated into a measurable abstraction. And that’s the source of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’!
I think that measurable abstractions are undoubtedly shared concepts. For example, you consider several white objects, you abstract from them the white color, which exists just as an abstraction, never as a real autonomous object, and this way you have the abstraction that is “white color”. Moreover, white color is shared not only among objects that are white, but also among people who agree its understanding. If the abstraction “white” weren’t a concept shared by multiple people, it would be impossible to have an understanding of it.
The same way, measurements are shared concepts as well. If the concept “3 metres” weren’t shared and agreed by many people, nobody would be able to understand it. Science is unable to deal with non shared concepts, everything it uses as a concept or as an instrument is something shared by many people. There cannot be science without sharing.
The subject doesn’t invent any schemes action it ‘wishes’. Each scheme is constrained by what is possible. But the constrains the environment imposes are noe to each scheme, which is why each species inhabits its own micro-world. Furthermore, Jeremy are not exclusively subjective but involve rich intersubjective connections. We co-inhabit a world with other persons, animals and material circumstances. This isnt the identical world for each of us, it is a common world, a common field of possibilities, and we each inhabit our own aspects of it.
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Yes, if you put it that way, then I agree! Hence the term ‘intersubjective’ which nowadays is often used in place of ‘objective’.
The point of Goldstein, Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty is that to be an organism in the first place is to have a globally unified autonomy of self-maintaining functioning. A ‘self-model’ isnt something that comes at the tail end of a history of mechanistic development that was initially devoid of such autonomy.
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OK, I agree with you. I think consciousness is useful for survival. But that’s because I’m a panpsychist. I think consciousness causes behaviour in everything, even rocks. I don’t have a problem fitting consciousness in the world (well, there are problems, but they are different ones than the Hard Problem).
You aren’t a panpsychist. You’re an emergentist physicalist (I think). You think consciousness gradually emerges in the evolution of natural organisms. That’s great, it’s a very natural thing to think and I would guess the vast majority of scientists and philosophers would agree with you.
But there is a problem with physicalism. I take ‘physical’ to mean something like ‘consisting in structure and function’. I think that’s what people mean by ‘physical’, and I think physicalists think that everything is reducible to structure and function, at bottom. Or at least, what they don’t include, at bottom, is consciousness. They think consciousness emerged from non-conscious stuff getting complicated and doing new things, like, say, building a model of the world and predicting the future. This is where Zombies come in. Note they ONLY come in if we start with physicalism. No one would be talking about Zombies if someone didn’t think of physicalism first. So if you don’t like Zombies, blame physicalism, not Chalmers. (By the way, Chalmers wasn’t the first, there was another earlier paper by someone else going on about Zombies). Zombies are your fault for being a physicalist, not mine. So, physicalists start with structure and function. The trouble is, if that’s all you start with, it becomes really really hard to get consciousness from that. Because whatever structure and function you care to specify, it’s always possible to just imagine that happening without consciousness, right? Or wrong? A Zombie is just the non-psysicalist’s way of pointing out the problem with physicalism. Specify whatever structure and function you like, even all the structure and function involved in a human being, it’s still not enough to get consciousness, because we can always, without contradiction, conceive of all that happening without consciousness. There is a logical gap. A conceptual gap. Consciousness does not follow, logically, conceptually, from structure and function.
If you find Zombies annoying, stop being a physicalist, and they will stop jumping out of cupboards at you. Philosophers will stop hassling you with them.
How to get rid of Zombies:
Either
- Stop being a physicalist, or
- Convincingly derive consciousness from structure and function
Nobody likes Zombies. We all want rid of them.
I thought you had to drive a wooden stake…no, wait, that’s vampires…
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But is it not also obvious that we possess basically the same body, and that our shared biology creates our shared drives – as unique as each of love to believe ourself to be – sobriety drives home the recognition that on most levels we are all the same. I would suggest that our differences are driven by circumstance, more than biology and are a difference of facade and frills, rather than a difference of substance.
Hmmm. Science is my foundation, but it includes the understanding that “science” does the observations and measurements and repeatability - after that it is up to human minds to do all the rest.
Key foundational observation to absorb:
Appreciating the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide.
@bert1,
Thank you that was an awesome explication, constructive and helpful.
I noticed that you never mention “interaction” and I’m wondering how can we hope to discuss & understand conscious if we never spend time on absorbing the significance that consciousness is all about interaction.
That adds dimension I never hear getting discussed.
More details to follow, getting closer on take two.
Regarding Chalmers’ sure he didn’t create it, but he is its champion and has become millionaire and superstar out of milking it, so he’s a fair target.
PS
And if today’s world weren’t such a hideous mess, physically and general mental health, on top humanity’s general disregard for how we are quite literally destroying our own home planet - it wouldn’t be such an issue for me. This is all an outgrowth of coming to grips with what we people have been doing to ourselves and me wonder why it was so easy to break so badly
I don’t think it is “obvious” and “basically”. Rather, it is about selection. Once you decide that what you need to get knowledge of objects is a selection of what they have in common, the logical result is that they will appear all similar to you. This is a fundamental limit of science, because science has been created to allow our limited minds to get some knowledge of objects. We humans decided to use this extraordinary trick, which is abstraction. Abstraction is selection of what things have in common. Once, for example, we decide to group together all objects that, to a certain degree, are white, the obvious logical result to our mind is that they are all obviously and basically white. But, if we criticize this procedure, and pay attention to the fact that two objects are never 100% identical to each other, whatever aspect of them we consider, even after you have painted both of them with the same white paint, then we realize how poor and limited science is in this aspect. You were right at calling this “sobriety”, which means “moderation”: we need such a moderation in science, otherwise we get lost, because our mind is extremely limited. But actually, strictly speaking, there is no reason why we should give more importance to what objects have similar, in common, rather than to what objects have different, however microscopic and invisible their differences are.
You said “we love to believe”, “facade” and “frills”. Actually it is just science. The moment we try to do science with a severe mind, we can easily realize that actually “we love to believe” that objects are very similar to each other, while in reality they ultimately have absolutely nothing in common. Seeing common aspects between objects is possible only at the expense of severity and precision. The more severe and precise you are in science, the more all similarities disappear and what remains is only uniqueness of every single item in this world.
Our mind likes to group things, because this is an extremely efficient strategy to survive, extremely useful for a lot of things, but it is also extremely approximate and shallow, once we decide to be more severe and precise.
I don’t know that there ever was a decision made.
This sounds an “idealized world view” to me, not of this evolving Earth with its evolving creatures doing the best they can, with what they have. Which is the lens through with I view my experience and the world around me.
Are you saying we don’t have our physical biology in common?
That’s because you’re looking at complex ‘finished’ object, but get down to the molecular agents that everything else is built out of your analogy falls apart. Atoms and molecules and about as absolute a form as can be imagined, if they didn’t no edifice could have been constructed out of them.
Within your body biological components such as genes and proteins whose molecular structures need to be exactingly consistent and go back hundreds of millions of years.
All this sounds more like idealism, poetry, art.
Sorry I come at this from a very different direction.
The hard problem of appreciating physical reality - Take Two
I hope no one objects to me starting a fresh thread on this. It is significantly different from my previous. (Thank you for the feedback) and I’ve striven to bring it up to your standards: Hard Problem of Appreciating Physical Reality - take two. Philosophers ask: why does physical processing feel like anything at all? They call this the “explanatory gap,” which I believe stumbles because it lays a human perspective onto physical reality, rather than allowing the physical reality itself to dic…
Obviously it is not a conscious decision, but is a decision, determined by the structures that make up us, our minds. It is a decision that has scientific evidence, but it is still a decision. For example, deciding that the engine of your car is an obvious part of your car is a human decision. We could adopt different parameters and notice that the engine of your car has actually a lot of elements that make it related to, let’s say, a dog. There is no objective reason to consider that the relationship between the engine of your car and your car is more important than the relationship between the engine of your car and a dog. It is just our mind that decides which relationships are primary and which ones are secondary.
Once we want to discuss about consciousness in a way that wants to be as objective as possible, we cannot take for granted that our human way of framing our understanding of the world is itself just objective: we have to acknowledge that it is deeply conditioned by our human structures. As a consequence, any understanding of our consciousness cannot avoid being deeply conditioned by our mental structures. Once we ackowledge this, we can go on in an effort to be as objective as possible, but we cannot forget that what we do are just human efforts.
Why do you think I take that for granted?
Remember, for me everything flows from an appreciation of the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide. (With physical reality including biology)
…Which brings me back to Gould’s magisterium and his missing key. The missing key is appreciating the fundamental “Magisteria of Physical Reality,” and recognizing both science and religion are products of the “Magisteria of Our Mindscape.”
Science seeks to objectively learn about our physical world, but we should still recognize all our understanding is embedded within and constrained by our mindscape.
Religion is all about the human mindscape itself, with its wonderful struggles, fears, spiritual undercurrents, needs and stories we create to give our live’s meaning and make it worth living, or at least bearable.
What’s the point?
Science, religions, heaven, hell, political beliefs, even God, they are all products of the human mindscape, generations of imaginings built upon previous generations of imaginings, all the way down. … (Citizenschallenge: The missing key to Stephen Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.”)
Agreed.
Absolutely, we are in agreement.
You lost me at this point. No, atoms do not communicate, influence or co-operate with “other entities”. You are using verbs which only make sense when applied to agents which are intelligent (not conscious, but these two things are likely to be related). Atoms posess zero capacity for either they are 100% not conscious and 100% not intelligent.
Your whole argument is based on this category mistake. As soon a you are prevented from assuming that “atoms communicate” you will not be able to get to “animals are conscious” without encountering a threshold where consciousness begins, and there will be the Hard Problem.
The real problem is not that “philosophers can’t accept reality”, but that physicalists can’t accept reality, as you are demonstrating right now. Nobody really believes that “atoms communicate”.
Geoff, thank you for taking the time to share your comments, questions.
And yes, according the physicists they do “communication” to be mistaken with having a discussion.
Where did I say that they were “conscious” or possess “intelligence”?? Those are concept you have just injected, and they do not relate to the essay’s wording.
I think not. I admit this OP essay has issue and inconsistencies and gaps, which I think I did a good job of buttoning up in “Take Two” Although as it stands now that is still missing the essay’s “closure” which took another couple days to percolate to the surface of my thoughts. It’s sweet the way it came together, but life is crowded and the ending still needs some polishing before it’s ready for posting.
I suggest you goggle that question:
Actually, physicists and chemists use terms like “atomic communication” as a metaphor to describe quantum entanglement, molecular signaling, and information transfer in physics. While atoms do not have minds, conscious thoughts, or intent, they absolutely exchange information through fundamental forces.
Fixed it for you. Your entire argument depends on mis-representing this metaphor as a literal truth.
And you are ignoring the content of that article.
The exchange of particles is not a metaphor!
I’d suggest that’s what comes of trying to lay human conceptions on top of biology - rather than allowing biology’s facts to dictate the stories we share.
Thanks for the feedback.