[MD] The Quarterly Digest of dmb Delusions

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
You have been ranting about consciousness all these years and not heard of Chalmers. Wow, how about Dennett, Searle, Pinker, Churchland, McGuinn, Jackson, Nagel, Blackmore?


dmb says:

Oh, I'd heard of him. But I've been "ranting" about pragmatist and radical empiricism, not consciousness. But it's actually quite audacious of you to suggest that I need to get as hip as you to Chalmers because he's a very serious opponent of your view. His hard problem of consciousness criticizes Dennett's view in almost exactly the same way I have been criticizing your view. Like I said, if you can understand his attack on physicalism, you'll understand my "rants" against your position. 
This has come up in my research, but I found it in Rorty because I'm working the area known as pragmatism. That's what led me to the Churchlands and other eliminative materialists, which is a position in the philosophy of mind. I'm glad to have discovered Chalmers because he's against that view and, roughly, he's against for the same reasons.

Wiki on:  "Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. Some eliminativists argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. Rather, they argue that psychological concepts of behaviour and experience should be judged by how well they REDUCE TO THE BIOLOGICAL LEVEL. Other versions entail the non-existence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions. ... Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s-70s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that commonsense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist. The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland, and eliminativism about qualia (subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey. ... 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. ... Today, the eliminativist view is most closely associated with the philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes (a subclass of intentional states), and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered to be an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness. One way to summarize the difference between the Churchlands's views and Dennett's view is that the Churchlands are eliminativists when it comes to propositional attitudes, but reductionists concerning qualia, while Dennett is a reductionist with respect to propositional attitudes, and an eliminativist concerning qualia."

Wiki on:  "Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). He makes the distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist."


dmb continues:

Actually, it's pretty exciting to find that I have been thinking about the "hard problem of consciousness" all along. I just didn't know it had a name and I didn't expect to find such a famous and excellent ally. Thanks for trying to use him against me. 


Wiki on:  "Philosophers such as Mary Midgley strongly criticize all forms of reductionism—of which eliminative materialism is an extreme form—as unjustified imperialism that tries to annex one subject into another with poor evidence. She suggests that the reduction of chemistry to physics is problematic and the reduction of biology to chemistry is impossible. She points to sentences like "John was allowed home from prison at last on Sunday" suggesting that this would be impossible to reduce to physical terms since the details of the physical movement are irrelevant to the meaning which depends on complex non-physical concepts. Her stance is that "human beings are complex wholes, about which we know really very little" and that attempts to reduce this are naive, unjustified and doomed to failure. She also claims that Behaviourism proved to be a philosophical and scientific dead-end."