[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

I will admit that conversations between Scott and I can spiral into 
idiosyncracy fairly quickly, but that's because, in our search to understand 
each other, we stop playing to the crowd at some point so that we can 
establish some kind of understanding between each other.  My focus, when 
writing posts to Scott, isn't on general conversation at the moment, its on 
Scott.  The idea is that, if we start out in a general, public conversation, 
where things aren't hooking up and making sense, we'll spiral into a more or 
less private conversation to figure things out, and then when we think 
things are settled, we'll move back out into the public conversation and 
attempt to hook the more obscure terms we've using with terms that are more 
understandable to others.  It's just the normal course of inquiry.  It's 
like popular science books: "Well, I've been doing all this technical work 
in physics, in the professional journals and such, but here's what I've 
found in terms that are easier for the public to understand."  You can't 
have popular exposition without the technical work in the trenches.  At 
least not always.

DMB said:
Consciousness is created is a language game? I'm thinking to myself, don't 
we suppose that consciousness is needed to speak any kind of language and to 
play any kind of game, so how could a language game create consciousness?

Matt:
All that means is that, for pragmatists like Dennett and Rorty, 
"consciousness" is a stance, the first-person stance.  We attribute 
consciousness to things that have an individual perspective, like a person 
or a bat, things that could reasonably say (if they spoke a language), "I 
seem to be experiencing/sensing/thinking...."  Rorty and Dennett suggest 
that what we call "consciousness" is a function of playing a particular 
language game, the one that creates the first-person stance, the one that 
uses seems-statements.  I'm not sure that's so far out of the loop for 
someone who's willing to say that he's a heavy-duty idealist for whom 
everything's a deduction.

DMB said:
Gents, it seems to me that you still haven't even yet agreed on what it 
means to be a physicalist or an essentialist.

Matt:
It's true, we haven't really.  We're still in negotiation over that, which 
is why things spiral the way they do.

The point I'm trying to convince you of is that to give a microstructural 
explanation of an event does not imply reductionism.  All it does is give an 
explanation for a particular purpose (prediction mainly).  You can have 
neurological explanations and mystical explanations.  Reductionism would be 
if you thought a given explanation _emptied out_ all there was to a given 
event.  The pragmatism I'm trying to enunciate purges itself from the notion 
that one could _ever_ empty out an event.  That's what I think it means to 
be a nonreductionist.  And it does mean, as Scott agreed, that "the second 
kind of physicalist [the nonreductionist] hasn't even entered a metaphysical 
conversation and her assertions should be greeted with an enthusiastic 
yawn."

The kind of flexability in vocabulary I'm trying to encourage is the kind 
illustrated by Pirsig in LILA, page 387, with the Dharmakaya light: "he 
thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening of the 
iris of the eyes of the observer that lets in extra light and makes things 
look brighter, a kind of hallucinatory light produced by optic stimulation, 
somewhat like the light that comes when one stares at something too long."  
When Pirsig says "the light was _nothing more_ than..." he sounds like the 
reductionistic physicalist you're trying to accuse me of being.  But Pirsig 
isn't, and neither am I.  Pirsig is simply giving the microstructural 
explanation of what the light is.  And he clearly does not think that that 
empties out its explanation.  He goes on to talk about it for another couple 
pages.  What he's not doing is adding directly to the _microstructural_ 
explanation, he's providing other explanations for other purposes.

Now, as far as I can tell, to be a naturalist as you want to be, and not a 
supernaturalist, you have to think that all events have microstructural 
explanations, like the one Pirsig gave.  That's what it is to dissociate 
yourself from the idea that God could step in at any moment and change 
things.  What you don't think, if you are a pragmatist, a nonreductionist, 
is that a microstructural explanation _empties out_ the event.  The only way 
that could happen is if language stopped growing and every possible thing 
that could be said in the frozen language had been said.  That _was_ the 
dream of reductionists--to find the language, hopefully small, probably 
physics, that could explain everything and that _that_ language would be the 
_only_ one we would ideally need to speak.  But that's not what we have with 
static patterns and Dynamic Quality.

Matt

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/