[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
His [Chalmers'] dualism says that consciousness is a separate ontological category and cannot be reduced to physical processes. Because his anti-reductionism is being asserted against physicalist positions in the philosophy of mind, this criticism is very helpful to the MOQ. 


Krimel replied:
Seriously? A separate ontological category for mind? And another category for physical processes? You mean like matter? Mind and matter as separate ontological categories? This helps the MoQ? How?  ...So the bugbear of reductionism trumps the bugbear of SOM?



dmb says:
Yea, seriously. 

Even in the Weakipedia article (that's a joke, not a spelling error) we see that Chalmers rejects Cartesian dualism to some extent. Clearly, better sources would be needed to parse the subtleties and find out exactly how far he goes in his rejection of Cartesian dualism. Since we find this in the most basic descriptions of his view, it is not at all clear that he's a SOMer. That same article also describes Chalmers' position as one that would qualify, by your standards, as anti-scientific romanticism. He entertains a qualified panpsychism, it says. Uh, oh! Is somebody singing Kumbaya? Seriously, though. Here's just a few lines from the article. Both of these points just happen to be contained in less than one paragraph:


"Chalmers argues that ... qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. However, he rejects Cartesian-style interactive dualism in which the mind has the power to alter the behavior of the brain, suggesting instead that the physical world is "causally closed" so that physical events only have physical causes, so that for example human behavior could be explained entirely in terms of the functions of the physical brain. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Though Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries."

And just so you can get a little taste of "panprotopsychism", chew on this little bit-o-wiki, where even the criticism is illuminating. 

Panexperientialism, panprotoexperientialism, and panprotopsychism
Panexperientialism or panprotopsychism are related concepts. Alfred North Whitehead incorporated a scientific worldview into the development of his philosophical system similar to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. His ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism, also known as panexperientialism, due to Whitehead’s emphasis on experience, though the term itself was first applied to Whitehead's philosophy by David Ray Griffin many years later. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience, which can be collected into groups creating something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness; there is no mind-body duality under this system as mind is seen as a very developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist and, while his philosophy resembles the concept of monads first proposed by Leibniz, Whitehead’s occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that has ever occurred. He embraced panentheism with God encompassing all occasions of experience, transcending them. Whitehead believed that the occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles.
Criticism
A criticism is that it can be demonstrated that the only properties shared by all qualia are that they are not precisely describable, and thus are of indeterminate meaning within any philosophy which relies upon precise definition. This has been something of a blow to panpsychism in general, since some of the same problems seem to be present in panpsychism in that it tends to presuppose a definition for mentality without describing it in any real detail.
The panpsychist answers both these challenges in the same way: we already know what qualia are through direct, introspective apprehension; and we likewise know what conscious mentality is by virtue of being conscious. For someone like Alfred North Whitehead, third-person description takes second place to the intimate connection between every entity and every other which is, he says, the very fabric of reality. To take a mere description as having primary reality is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
One response is to separate the phenomenal, non-cognitive aspects of consciousness — particularly qualia, the essence of the hard problem of consciousness — from cognition. Thus panpsychism is transformed into panexperientialism. However, this strategy of division generates problems of its own: what is going on causally in the head of someone who is thinking—cognitively of course—about their qualia?


dmb continues:

One response, they say, is to make a distinction between the non-cognitive aspects of consciousness, the essence of the hard problem, from cognition. C 'mon. You don't see how that resembles the distinction between pre-conceptual experience and definable concepts? You don't see how that relates to the distinction between dynamic and static? Notice that we're also in the area of process philosophy and recall that Sneddon's master's thesis compares Pirsig and Whitehead. Notice also that the criticism centers around the fact that qualia are not given to precise definition and then recall that Pirsig says the same thing about Quality, except of course he does not let that fact stop him. He acknowledges the paradoxical nature of building a metaphysics around an undefined term and then proceeds anyway. James's radical empiricism is centered around pure experience, which is also prior to our conceptual categories and is therefore undefinable for the same reasons that DQ is undefinable. 

Gents, there is some real philosophical meat in all this. And I'd be happy to discuss it in a reasonable manner. Or you can build more straw men and otherwise continue to fish from the stream of snark, in which case you're on your own. 

Whatever.