[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

Anthony,

Anthony said:
this definition of  ‘consciousness’ as “a stance, the first-person stance” 
seems an intuitively false and a limited one especially when it’s qualified 
by assertions on the lines that if bats utilised human language, they would 
be asserting things such as “I seem to be 
experiencing/sensing/thinking....”.

Matt:
The first thing I would want to do is clear out the idea that marking 
something as "intuitively false" is a good idea for a Pirsigian.  For one, I 
would think Pirsig, with his distinction between "frontal truths" and 
"lateral truths" (which parallels Kuhn's distinction between normal and 
revolutionary science), would be quite against the idea that there are brute 
"facts" given to us, which is how I read such a rebuttal.  But two, if we 
tone down what that claim might mean, such that it isn't so much a rebuttal 
as it is pointing out that X goes against our common sense, the "intuitively 
false" just are those "lateral truths" that might expand our imagination and 
give us new tools.  This doesn't mean that everything that grates against 
our intuitions, our common sense or the way we are used to seeing things, is 
going to bring about something useful.  Philosophy is surely about balancing 
new, intuitively false things with our older, intuitively correct things.

The second thing I would want to do is clear out the "reductionist" charge.  
If it doesn't mean essentialism, as you agree that I don't mean at the end 
of the post, then all it means is that I'm being narrow, but I'm not sure 
what the problem is with narrowing you sights.  As my last post intimated, 
I'm not too concerned about debates in what we call "consciousness" or how 
we define it.  It doesn't matter much to me whether we use a narrow 
definition or a wide definition, just so long as we explain the area in 
question enough.  I was explaining one narrow thing by "consciousness," 
Leary was explaining a larger set of things.  It doesn't matter to me much 
which route one goes.

But with the Dennett/Rorty idea, its simply the idea that one of the common 
sense ideas behind consciousness is that it is a first-person report.  Like 
Nagel's famous paper, "What is it Like to be a Bat?"  To save that 
intuition, but shed the idea of incorrigible qualia (which gives the notion 
of privileged epistemic status more power than it should), they suggest that 
giving a first-person report, with its implicit status of "I'll have to take 
your word for it because I'm not in your head", is a matter of learning to 
speak in a certain way.  Its a way we are not likely to shed if for no other 
reason than we haven't found a way into people's heads.  But it allows to 
shed more of the Cartesian paradigm then before.

That isn't an extensive explanation of the idea, and it does grate against 
common sense.  But all I was really wanting to focus on was physicalism and 
reductionism.  If you agree with the last paragraph against the very idea of 
"emptying out" an event, then I think that's agreement enough against 
essentialism and reductionism, while agreeing that "nonreductionist 
physicalism," so understood, is neither.

Matt

p.s.  Dennett, as far as I know, doesn't identify as a pragmatist.  Rorty 
simply enlists him as one (like his enlistment of Davidson).  I have a habit 
of doing the same thing to people Rorty enlists, and anyone else I choose to 
enlist, if they've shown the same overall tendencies, I identify as 
"pragmatist," whether they identify as it or not.  Call it a rhetorical 
strategy.

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