Thanks you Alex………………..for opening my eyesx

A book I would suggest getting at the library is Naturalizing Phenomenology
Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science It’s a bit old now but there are a number of papers in the book that are exceptionally relevant today.

Ralph I will start with some of the comments you made which I think highlight some of the critical issues in neuro-science. The first comes from the ‘cause vs. correlates‘ point you make. I agree that to lump the whole community together is a little unfair. I’ve had notable scientists tell me they were ‘good old fashioned dualists’, possibly not realizing I’d remember.

However, what I think you would agree with is that saying ‘neural correlates’ is a bit of a cop-out. Anyone who’s studied statistics knows that you can’t argue from a correlation to a cause. The typical example we all got in stats class was the almost perfect positive correlation between churches in a city and crime rates in the same place. At some level the community will have to say (and some do) that a property of neural activity (parallel distributed processing maybe??) is a cause of some sort. The best answer I’ve seen come from both Pribram andEdelman neither of whom approximate the mind-body problem but at least come close to a holsistic theory. Others include Verela and some of the others at the CNRS in Paris.

The answer that scientists are quite rightly eager to avoid is if consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, has causal relations with brain activity, is identical to it and if so in what way…the list of unanswered issues are of course numerous. None of these issues also touch the biggest elephant in the room, the mind-body problem. So for me at least it’s an assumption of neuroscience at present that cause is implied at some level. The use of the term correlates is at the present time only used as the most appropriate word to illustrate the methodology behind the state of the science.

Richard Rorty in his seminal work ‘Nature and the Mirror of Nature (which is a wonderful book) talks about the form of the thought experiment that you refer to. His point is (and I am inclined to agree, as would someone like Max Velmans) that the actual nature of what is being referred to is less relevant than the reference itself. It isn’t the truth of the statement that is under question in this world or in any other possible world, it’s the intentionality of the subject making the reference and their associated mental state. I happen to think that a) all thought experiments have the same logical form (which I will write about an another post in relation to the philosophy of mind) and that b) in relation to the H2O/XYZ example this is the case in point, what your duplicate means by water is true by virtue in their world by virtue of being in their world.In other words the truth values are not even relevant (in relation to if water is XYZ or H2O), what is relevant is that the person in question wasn’t lying when they referred to what they thought was a liquid called water.

I think you are right in what you say however about my article. It is about reductionism and the state of science. This is especially the case in a broader context, science tends to have an impact on a much wider audience than just the scientific community and it is our concepts and our language that I think are lacking. What I am essentially saying amongst other things is that we can not conceive of complete explanations because we don’t have the associated language, concepts of methodology. The implication of which I begin to refer to in the essay.

Regarding Davidson I think this is a good thought experiment for the other minds problem. I don’t agree entirely. Although we have unique histories, let us for one moment assume that despite slightly diverging histories our limbic system is otherwise identical, as is other mid brain structures. In addition to that we literally have identical visual, auditory and tactile senses. then to what extent are the qualia and the contents of consciousness in fact different? I can’t answer this question as it is a deeply philosophical question at present (although that may change with time).

Regarding your point about evolutionary explanations. Although evolutionary biology may explain a part of our sociability and cooperation I still don’t think that it can explain the whole of of it. There are a number of bahviors that people engage in that can’t be accounted for under the accepted arguments, take martyrdom and chastity for example, neither of these are easily accountable for in the current climate. Some propose memes but, it seems to me that memes are a bit like our understanding of the universe in the time of Ptolemy, they don’t add elegance to explanation but rather multiply the entities needed to account for phenomena (see my essay on memes and things that don’t exist). I think consciousness is fundamentally important in our explanations otherwise we would be left with reductionism of some form. The view that I advocate is that phenomenology is essential if we are going to have sufficient understanding, otherwise we are approximating elimitavism of some form which, as many have shown is an implicit form of dualism.

But less than consciousness this article was about the way we understand things and the impact that has on the concepts we use. This in addition to the problems with out methods of analysis. I think you picked up on that very well. I just happen to think we are at a time where our framework needs to shift. Unfortunately the orthodox community, like all orthodox communities have blind-sided themselves with a point of view that I think is harmful to the future of our understanding. I, unlike many, see parallelism between science, philosophy and society. I also see politically minded people using poor interpretations of science as axioms for rather bad political theories.

I will leave off for now, I’d like to give some more thought to both Winslow and Geoff’s points which I didn’t answer sufficiently. However, I would be keen for your response.

I look forward to discussing further.

I want to point out though that I don’t think it is the case that “notably the neuroscientific community) have said that consciousness is in the brain” and philosophers do not. For the most part, neuroscientists are very aware of how far their findings can get them (even if they have diffrent personal views), thus the talk of neural corrolates, not neural causes. Even Crick, who was a physicalist, never talked about functionalism or identity theory in his publications – to the best of my knowledge. In my view it is often the philisphical community who has the forthright materialists – Dennet, Quine, Fodor and Ramsey to name but a few.

I also think that you do not nead to resort to consciousness to explain why we are not selfish. It has been explained by evolutionary psychology. The objection to that is that it is still a “selfishness” of sorts, because it serves our advantage. It, however, is not our advantage, but the advantage of the group. Psychopathy can work well for the individual in a large area (so that people do not get to know your ways). If doing what is best for the group, whether because of evolution or otherwise, is not alturism I do not know what could ever be.

All that said, I think you have hit the nail on the head with the point about our connection to the world getting in the way of reductionism. Take the twin earth thought example of externalism (I’m sure you know this but I will repeat anyway beacause I feel like it): The classic argument is the twin earth:

Imagine that there is another world exactly like ours in every respect except that in our world water refers to H2O and in theirs it refers to XYZ. Water in both world looks exactly alike from a macro perspective – looks same, tastes same ect.

Before 1750 we did not know that water was H2O, but people on this world when referring to water would be referring to H20, while on the twin earth they would refer to XYZ.

If you take a statement about water before 1750, the truth conditions would be different depending on which world you where on. On earth “water is a liquid” is true if and only if H20 is liquid, while the twin counterpart’s statement would be true if and only if XYZ was liquid.

Because of this these two people, although intrinsically identical, have different beliefs. One thinks XYZ is liquid while the other thinks H2O is liquid. Because of this mental states cannot depend on intrinsic properties of the person alone, they must be in part external.

There are some counterarguments, but I’m not convinced so I won’t put them here, feel free to look at them yourself.

One question tho is whether all mental contents are external, or wide. There may be some claims that are purely logical and thus cannot be external. Say the belief that “whatever will be will be”. It is difficult to see how this could be affected by the references of the words.

However, I am inclined to agree with Davidson, who says that an identical copy of me with no causal history (ie, they appeared spontaneously) would not have any thoughts. The causal history of how we came to our beliefs is fundamental to what they mean, otherwise the neural patterns are just meaningless junk.

I think this last part a bit of a leap of faith on my part, but it comes from my background in neuroscience whereby I can see no way that any arrangement of neuronal firing can have meaning. The meaning must depend on what caused those beliefs in the real world. ie, what they refer to. The neural patterns that would represent the thought “whatever will be, will be” must have grounding in external inputs such as language ext to have meaning. My neural pattern for such a thought IS different from yours, so simply replicating mine in someone else’s body does not constitute the same thought, as for you that pattern might mean something else entirely.

One objection might be, “but these are just words, not qualia”: Response:

OK but say we change the mental state to “I love my mum”. Now in the twin world (all things but this being equal) “love” means hate. By some freak coincidence the brain states (or neural patterns) of these two mental states are identical. However, one means you hate and the other means you love.

(There is no reason why this should not be so, due to multiple-realizability, or a mental state can be realised by many different mind states)

So in twin world when you have mental state “I love my mum”, you are infact experienceing what we call “I hate my mum”, even tho the thought and the brain are the same, the only diffrence is the causal history that gave you that type of brain state.

Sorry if this was long winded, but I thought I’d give all I could muster on the topic this time. Good post!