[MD] Social level for humans only

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
Perhaps you can explain how bracketing consciousness off as a separate
ontological category does anything but make a worse mess than SOM.

dmb says:
I think you're still not grasping the problem. Chalmers' is criticizing
physicalist positions within the philosophy of mind. "The hard problem" is
hard precisely because physical explanations do not explain anything except
the physical processes. The eliminative materialists have eliminated
everything but material processes and so Chalmers is saying that doesn't
work. As he puts it in his 1995 paper, "To explain experience, we need a new
approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and
neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to
explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of
it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the
performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard
approach has nothing to say."

[Krimel]
Whether or not material monism works or not is a question I will leave open.
But whatever difficulties that solution has, it sees mind and matter as the
same stuff not separate substances. If you don't agree that this monism is
satisfactory, claiming it is a "hard problem" that remains unsolved is
hardly a solution. 

Some might argue that an explanation in terms of performance and
evolutionary function is all that is required. But even if you don't it is
hard to see how making up a separate ontological category solves the
problem. I can only seeing it making matters worse.
 
[dmb]
Another way to put it is that Chalmers is criticizing the answer that the
materialist school gives to the mind-body problem, which "says reality is
all matter, which creates mind". Chalmers is saying no, it's not just a
matter of matter. Pirsig can say this too and making such a distinction does
not necessarily mean you're a Cartesian dualist. 

[Krimel]
I think this is dualism and it is much worse than Cartesian dualism. What is
this other stuff and how does it interact with matter? If it doesn't
interact with matter, what does it do? 

These platyi seem much worse than the question of why my head lights up red
at stop signs.

[dmb]
Even the MOQ, there is a line between mind (social and intellectual) and
matter (inorganic and biological). 

[Krimel]
The essence of the MoQ is that these are conceptual distinctions not
ontological catagories.

[dmb]
If we transfer Chalmers critique into this framework, we could say the hard
problem is designed to show why the former cannot be explained in the terms
of the latter. 

[Krimel]
The hard problem is designed and framed around the assumption that the
former cannot be explained in terms of the later. But the hard problem, if
it is a problem isn't solved by this radical dualism either.

[dmb]
The physicalists think they can, mostly because there is no such thing as
mind apart from the material processes. 

[Krimel]
Are you seriously saying that there is mind apart from matter and that such
a claim demands no proof, no example, no demonstration of any kind? In
solving the various easy problems that Chalmer's agrees have or can be
solved in this way, it would seem that if they have demonstrated anything
they have demonstrated that mind does not exists apart from material
processes. Whatever this ontologically new category is it clearly results
from the underlying material processes and vanishes in their absence.

[dmb]
Their answer to the mind-matter problem is to reduce mind to matter. The
mind is what's eliminated. 

[Krimel]
Mind emerges from matter. Bottom-up mind is created not eliminated.

[dmb]
Now, I seriously doubt if Chalmers' dualism is an attempt to re-establish
the Cartesian subject but he does maintain that phenomenal experience cannot
be explained in terms of sensory processes. 

[Krimel]
Maybe it can and maybe it can't but what you are offering seems to be a cure
that is worse than the disease itself.



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