Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter.
Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?
Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up?
Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?
>It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?
you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".
it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.
my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
The nonphysicality of consciousness isn't taken as axiomatic, there are arguments for it. Consider the argument from knowledge, summarized in TFA:
> A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts.
In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical.
Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.
Is consciousness not special? It certainly isn't obvious to me my experience of the world isn't present in all matter. And how is it obvious that is a fundamental product of matter?
It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis.
My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.
This sort of sloppy, shoddy, “I don’t like how I feel about it therefore it must be false” type of thinking has fallen to analysis and the scientific method every single time they meet. The sloppy retreats to another bastion but it merely delays the inevitable.
That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience.
The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.
To provide some context: It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher. His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area, which most users here (including me) don't. If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
> It's important to keep in mind that Edward Feser is an extremely traditionalist Catholic, and neo-Aristotelian, philosopher.
This hints of bigotry and poisoning the well. Focus on his arguments.
(Also, what does "extremely traditionalist Catholic" mean? He certainly doesn't meet that description as I understand it. He has been critical of both laxity and rigorism, for example.)
> His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area
His academic background was originally in the tradition of analytical philosophy. The man was an atheist. It was only after he began teaching and rehashing tired caricatures of Aquinas's arguments that he took notice and began to find the real McCoy convincing. So, he is very familiar with what else is on offer and skillfully deals with those topics. Many of his writings, including blog posts, take these other views on their own terms, often to show where their weaknesses and errors lie.
I presume that by calling his views "niche", you mean "views held by a minority of philosophers today", or perhaps "fringe" in some pejorative, dismissive sense? Because the subject matter isn't niche at all. It's a full-blooded view of expansive scope (hello, metaphysics anyone?), and frankly, IMO, the most well-defended and defensible. .
Truth is not decided by majority vote.
> If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
Again, not true. He writes in an eminently accessible manner. His book "The Last Superstition" is 101 material. Having some familiarity with basic Aristotelian notions can sometimes expedite understanding, perhaps, but you don't need to be a scholar to grasp much of what he writes. And often, he doesn't even make any explicit use of technical language from the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, only arguments using common language.
Of course, I am not averse to straining to learn something new. I have heard one philosopher say that he only began to grasp metaphysics in his 50s. Anyone looking for a royal road is perhaps ill-suited for philosophy, or any serious field of study.
I find it odd how often people feel obliged to make these kinds of disclaimers about Catholic philosophers (one can find more downthread), as though we ought to handle their work with mental ice tongs or something.
When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice:
- Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!)
- In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it.
- The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is.
By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example.
Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist.
So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal.
Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.
This is the exact point where I always get off the hard problem p-zombie train:
> It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience.
No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No.
One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED.
Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own.
There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale).
None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding.
The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.
Yeah, his resolution to the problem is him saying "nuh-uh" in a very long winded way. Sure if you just completely abandon any attempt to explain or understand things, a lot of difficult problems evaporate. But you're not "contributing" by doing that, you've just declared that you aren't interested.
Sorry but ed feser is regarded as a lunatic by most professional philosophers. He is a man of strange opinions. Not necessarily about this problem but his average opinion on an average topic is on the lunatic fringe.
[+] [-] chaboud|1 year ago|reply
Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?
Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up?
Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".
it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.
my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
[+] [-] mxkopy|1 year ago|reply
Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows
[+] [-] canjobear|1 year ago|reply
> A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts.
In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical.
Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.
[+] [-] andoando|1 year ago|reply
It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis.
My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.
[+] [-] ergonaught|1 year ago|reply
That materialistic, mechanical, “mathematically reductionist” brains might produce the particular qualia isn’t a hard problem. We alter the brain and the qualia of experience are altered: it is unavoidable that the brain is involved in generating the experience.
The actually hard problem is how (or whether) chemistry can generate awareness, into/onto which the qualia of experience arise.
[+] [-] pcwalton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|1 year ago|reply
This hints of bigotry and poisoning the well. Focus on his arguments.
(Also, what does "extremely traditionalist Catholic" mean? He certainly doesn't meet that description as I understand it. He has been critical of both laxity and rigorism, for example.)
> His writings frequently assume that the reader has a background in this niche subject area
His academic background was originally in the tradition of analytical philosophy. The man was an atheist. It was only after he began teaching and rehashing tired caricatures of Aquinas's arguments that he took notice and began to find the real McCoy convincing. So, he is very familiar with what else is on offer and skillfully deals with those topics. Many of his writings, including blog posts, take these other views on their own terms, often to show where their weaknesses and errors lie.
I presume that by calling his views "niche", you mean "views held by a minority of philosophers today", or perhaps "fringe" in some pejorative, dismissive sense? Because the subject matter isn't niche at all. It's a full-blooded view of expansive scope (hello, metaphysics anyone?), and frankly, IMO, the most well-defended and defensible. .
Truth is not decided by majority vote.
> If you aren't really familiar with the contents of the Summa Theologica, you probably won't get much out of Feser's essays.
Again, not true. He writes in an eminently accessible manner. His book "The Last Superstition" is 101 material. Having some familiarity with basic Aristotelian notions can sometimes expedite understanding, perhaps, but you don't need to be a scholar to grasp much of what he writes. And often, he doesn't even make any explicit use of technical language from the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, only arguments using common language.
Of course, I am not averse to straining to learn something new. I have heard one philosopher say that he only began to grasp metaphysics in his 50s. Anyone looking for a royal road is perhaps ill-suited for philosophy, or any serious field of study.
[+] [-] lambdaphagy|1 year ago|reply
When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice:
- Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!)
- In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it.
- The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is.
By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example.
Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist.
So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal.
Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.
[+] [-] dartharva|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|1 year ago|reply
> It is possible at least in principle, he says, for there to be a world physically identical to our own down to the last particle, but where there are none of the qualia of conscious experience.
No. I don't consider this possible even in principle. Imaginable, yes, possible? No.
One example is enough to dispose of any contradiction, so here's one: in this contrafactual world, a person says "I feel the sun warming my skin". Since qualia do not exist in the contrafactual, in that world, the person is a liar. In this world, he is not. That is a difference: QED.
Ah, but you may say: this is not a physical difference. No, perhaps not. But it most rapidly results in one. Liars and honest men are not the same. Especially when they lie about having any and every experience of existence. This is a difference which must perforce produce change: it beggars the imagination to picture such a world careening forwards identical to our own.
This is not physics. It is fantasy.
[+] [-] nickelpro|1 year ago|reply
There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale).
None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding.
The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.
[+] [-] Vecr|1 year ago|reply
This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable.
On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.
[+] [-] empath75|1 year ago|reply
And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)
[+] [-] huitzitziltzin|1 year ago|reply