[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[Krimel]

[Krimel]
All I could think was, when dmb wakes up Chalmers is going to look coyote
ugly.

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. 

[Krimel]
Like the taste of arm much?

If this is your idea of a flesh and blood argument I'll be happy set the
strawmen aside. They will be disappointed of course. Perhaps some time in
the closet will allow them to settle their disagreement over who has dibbs
on your remaining limbs.

[dmb]
Even in the Weakipedia article (that's a joke, not a spelling error) we see
that Chalmers rejects Cartesian dualism to some extent. 

[Krimel]
Is this like being a little pregnant? I can see how one could argue that in
the first trimester a woman is a little pregnant, certainly "less" pregnant
than she will be in the third trimester. But I don't understand how it is
possible to reject dualism to any extend without embracing dualism.

[dmb]
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:

[Krimel]
My Chalmers is rusty so I will defer to Dave on subtleties and just take
what you offer from wiki. There is plenty enough there.

"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. 

This frankly "ontologically autonomous" sounds nine months, full on, water's
about to break pregnant. The MoQ doesn't just resolve SOM dualisms. It
resolves all dualisms. But even worse this doesn't sound like just any old
dualism it is mind/body dualism, the specific dualism the MoQ is alleged to
Triumph over.

[More from dmb's quote]
"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."

[Krimel]
Well, I should hope so. It seems that he is rejecting Cartesian dualism as
being too conservative. At least Descartes allowed the interaction of mind
and body. The problem with it was the image of the Cartesian theater with a
homunculus strapped to a chair pulling levers and watching a through your
eyes. In the theater you are defending the homunculus is blind and limbless
cast into the corner powerless to do anything but piss and moan. It creates
a dual reality and beyond the physical world of shared experience you are
projecting some netherworld of the unknown, the acausal, the absurd, utterly
chaotic.

Seriously?

[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?

[Krimel]
So you think the hard problem of consciousness is unconsciousness?
Pre-conceptual experience is unconscious experience after all, at least I
think James and Freud would agree.

[dmb]
 You don't see how that relates to the distinction between dynamic and
static? 

[Krimel]
Yes, unconscious experience is dynamic, it is the body rising up from the
dust, interacting with the environment and returning to the dust.

Conscious experience is reflecting on that rising up.
Spinning tales and swapping lies about it.

The unconscious is linked, often directly, to the biological programs
sustain us. 
It keeps us from becoming food for worms and DustBusters.

Consciousness involves memory. It provides slippage in time. It creates a
representation of four dimensional space in three dimensions. It is the
first truly random access memory. Pretty much everything else in nature is
sequential.

The unconscious actively engages us in the real and consensual worlds we
share with our neighbors. Almost none of which require conscious processing
at all.

Consciousness identifies and classifies static patterns. It sorts the
certain from the uncertain, makes probability assessments and slaps labels
on whatever it can.

But do go on.

[dmb]
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.  

[Krimel]
I recall Sneddon' thesis well. I liked many things about Whitehead but you
should know that he developed his process philosophy after the tragic loss
of his son. He winds up being hyper-Platonic. There is a world of ideal
forms that sounds almost Hammish. He is pantheistic in a top down kind of
way. I get the impression of the world around us as the condensation of God
evaporating. He claims God has an eternal nature that is unchanging and
perfect, then he adds God's consequent nature or the unfolding of events in
time. He has a clever way of resolving this contradiction but it escapes me
at the moment. Christian theologians took up Whitehead and named it process
theology. Sneddon contended that Pirsig was a process philosopher.

In both cases what you get is a fundamental duality with stuff we can agree
about on one hands and whatever the fuck anybody wants with no criteria for
agreement possible, on the other. 

But I'd still be willing to cast that in terms of certainty and uncertainty.


After all you really can't prove there is no God. 
All you can do is consider him very unlikely. 
And really all that makes the hard problem hard
Is refusal to accept any solution as possible.

I find enough uncertainty in the world of flesh and bone to chase after it
in the supernatural and I really don't know what else to call... what were
your words? Oh yeah, "a separate ontological category and cannot be reduced
to physical processes..." 

Make no mistake that is where Whitehead's Platonism and Chalmer's hard
problem lead. That mystical world where your long time ally Wilber has set
up camp.