[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[david buchanan]

Dave thinks dmb conveniently avoid this:

[Dave before] You left the impression that James concludes that "consciousness" does not exist. When in fact that is the furthest thing from the truth. As a powerful lecturer he is using this statement as a rhetorical devise to wake up his audience, to get their attention. Once he has their attention he goes on to make his main point that yes, "consciousness" does exist but as a psychological function. Which Chalmer's confirms on page 13 of his introduction to "The Conscious Mind".


dmb says:

Didn't mean to leave that impression and I have said many times that James takes consciousness to be a process rather than a thing or an entity. It's on the Oxford DVD, in fact. 



Dave said to dmb:

Brush up on your "supervenience." what the hell ever that is, it is a big deal to Chalmers.  ...A clue, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship. 



dmb says:

Yea, I know. This is one of the terms used by those who don't want to go all the way in saying that the brain and the mind are identical. One such position, barely distinguishable from the brain-mind identity theory, is know as "eliminative materialism". Richard Rorty is one of these, as you can see from Wikipedia's overview:

"Eliminativism maintains that the common-sense understanding of the mind is mistaken, and that the neurosciences will one day reveal that the mental states that are talked about in every day discourse, using words such as "intend", "believe", "desire", and "love", do not refer to anything real. Because of the inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly think that they have such beliefs and desires. Some eliminativists, such as Frank Jackson, claim that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function; others, such as Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses. Consciousness and folk psychology are separate issues and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not the other. The roots of eliminativism go back to the writings of Wilfred Sellars, W.V. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty. The term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an important inspiration for eliminativism, particularly with his attack on "private objects" as "grammatical fictions".Early eliminativists such as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two different notions of the sort of elimination that the term "eliminative materialism" entailed. On the one hand, they claimed, the cognitive sciences that will ultimately give people a correct account of the workings of the mind will not employ terms that refer to common-sense mental states like beliefs and desires; these states will not be part of the ontology of a mature cognitive science. But critics immediately countered that this view was indistinguishable from the identity theory of mind. Quine himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about eliminative materialism after all:"Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger in favor of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state of the physical organism with the mental state)?"


I'd also point out that this is a pretty classic example of reductionism.


"Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it.Reductionism does not preclude emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand the emergent in terms of the phenomena and process(es) it emerges from."

I think the MOQ is at odds with this view in a pretty big way.