How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
This is akin to a Greek of 5th bce asking Leucippus and Democritus how we could know the structure of a world we cannot see.
The absence of an answer is not proof of nonexistence or impossibility. It is just neutral absence. Absence as evidence is only """ valid""" when all possibilities are exhausted in a definite way. Outside of math, that threshold is exceedingly rare in problems of even moderate difficulty.
Moreover, this style of inquiry can easily be turned on its head and used to (apparently) redress the interlocutor... Neither are worthwhile endeavors.
Just curious, can you think of a non-contrived, moderately difficult, non-mathematical problem that has or even in principle could be settled through abscence of evidence? Especially a positive assertion. Closest I could come up with is say confirming a diagnosis by elimination, through abscence of evidence of other candidate diagnoses. But even then there's a non-zero possibility that it's a hitherto unknown disease, or that there was some false negative somewhere.
Isn't that a bit extreme? Sure we don't have "the answer" but saying that the amount of things we know about how our brain works, from behavioral rhings how can our perception system can he tricked, biases in our cognition modes, the mechanism of memory and how it fails ... down to more low leven things about how the neuronal tissue works, neuroplasticity, the effects of brain injury on cognition (my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people).
There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.
Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.
After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?
There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)
I agree with you. The way I stated it was a little blunt. But no matter what the hard sciences show, they don’t really make claims about subjective experience. This is simply because the hard sciences by definition make no such claims. They can find things like correlations between states of matter and claimed subjective experience, but this doesn’t really get to the point. I think if it ever does, it will be such a huge revolution that what we’re left with should be called something other than physics or chemistry.
> my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people
My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.
If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside:
By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).
By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).
By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).
And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).
Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...
Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.
I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
This is just full of ontological and epistemological assumptions which have been mainstream for a few decades but are very controversial among philosophers. Philosophers don’t sit in bubbles—and use all the evidence they can find—and make great contributions to knowledge, even though what they do is not science. There’s a reason there are other subjects besides chemistry and physics.
Try reading "Waking Up" by Sam Harris. I feel it does a decent job of straddling the fields of science and philosophy, and where we are in each.
Science may not yet be able to explain consciousness but it certainly can inform our understanding, and the work continues. If nothing else, it can help us understand what consciousness is not, and much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
>much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
A good book on this is the late neurologist Oliver Sachs' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat". It's a collection of interesting cases of exactly this sort. And Sachs was a wonderful author and speaker. Really recommend his talks as well.
soganess|3 years ago
The absence of an answer is not proof of nonexistence or impossibility. It is just neutral absence. Absence as evidence is only """ valid""" when all possibilities are exhausted in a definite way. Outside of math, that threshold is exceedingly rare in problems of even moderate difficulty.
Moreover, this style of inquiry can easily be turned on its head and used to (apparently) redress the interlocutor... Neither are worthwhile endeavors.
mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago
ithkuil|3 years ago
There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.
Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.
After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?
There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)
whittingtonaaon|3 years ago
aquaduck|3 years ago
My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.
mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago
By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).
By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).
By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).
And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).
Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...
Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.
I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
whittingtonaaon|3 years ago
haswell|3 years ago
Science may not yet be able to explain consciousness but it certainly can inform our understanding, and the work continues. If nothing else, it can help us understand what consciousness is not, and much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago
A good book on this is the late neurologist Oliver Sachs' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat". It's a collection of interesting cases of exactly this sort. And Sachs was a wonderful author and speaker. Really recommend his talks as well.