Materialism

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Rusty,

Let me see if I can try to explain where I am coming from in a different way.

First of all, what is knowledge? What does it mean to say I know something?

I would say that it means I have memories of it. For example, if I know that my name is Kevin, it means that I remember that is my name. If I know what red looks like, it means I remember having seen red.

Now one thing we know (thanks to neuroscience) is that memories are physical configurations in the brain.

I must reiterate here that knowledge is not information. A memory can store information, but it is not information itself. It is a physical structure in the brain.

So what does physicalism say about memories? Nothing, other than that they are physical. Physicalism does say that anything that exists must be perceivable (or reducible to the perceivable). This is no problem, since perceiving another person's memories does not imply actually remembering those memories as though they were your own.

As to the Mary problem, in principle, all of the facts about Mary's brain, and about perception of red, should be perceivable by humans. They could then write this down in a book. They could even figure out what Mary's brain would be like if she had memory of seeing red, and put that in the book too.

What they cannot put into the book is the memory itself. They can no more put that in the book than they could put a cat in the book. All they can put in is a description of the memory (or cat). In other words, the information.

Now Mary reads the book. Mary is a supergenius, so she is able to understand it all. She knows what her brain would be like if she had seen red before. She knows exactly what kind of emotional and intuitive responses the color would invoke in her. She can even figure out what her favorite color would be.

What she cannot do, is remember having seen red. That is what it would mean to say that she knows what red looks like. She does not have that knowledge, because that memory cannot be acquired by reading a book. Maybe surgery could do it, as I suggested before, but reading a book? No.

Reading the description of the memory in the book will not create the actual memory, any more than reading a description of a cat will produce a real cat.

I hope that helps.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Interesting Ian]

What if Mary is colorblind, does this render physicalism true?

Okay, Mary cannot learn everything about the color red and said experience until she herself experiences it. Why does this eliminate the possibility that said experience is purely physical in nature? The photon hits the retina triggers the nerve activates the visual cortex is interpreted by the frontal lobes.

Because the physical world is informational in nature. All information in principle can be learnt from books. If something is learnt (eg the actually experience of seeing red) which is not informational in nature, then materialism is refuted.

 

[The One called Neo]

This is priceless, UCE.

Do you feel a kind of Messiah?

What's happened to your cool avatar baby??

God can you believe how kewl my avatar is!???

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Rusty said:

Paul, I am saying that IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IFIF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IFIF

IIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFF

There is something that can only be gained subjectively then there is a problem.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY KEYBOARD?

I believe I recently said that I do understand. Then I asked you a question, to which you've replied with a restatement of the question using more capital letters. I'll ask the question one more time, just in case it helps:

Name one thing that we can only gain through some method other than experience (other than subjectively).

~~ Paul

 

[Interesting Ian]

Rusty,



I don't see how this follows. The fact that the cripple will not be able to learn how to walk without actually doing it is not a limitation imposed by physicalism, but rather by the way the physical brain and body work.

Maybe this will clarify my position with respect to Mary. I will rephrase the thought experiment in such a way that the idea is the same, but it is actually physically possible.

Imagine that Mary has never seen red, and as a result, she has no memories of seeing red, her visual cortex is not equipped to distinguish red, and of course, she does not know what the experience of seeing red is.

Now imagine that we have a supercomputer, which knows all the physical facts about how visual perception works, and knows all the physical facts about Mary's brain. This computer controls a robotic surgeon, which is capable of performing micro brain surgery. For the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that it is capable of doing pretty much anything to the brain that is physically possible.

Now, imagine that our computer works out exactly what the physical state of Mary's brain would be if she had always been able to see red. Imagine that it also works out what the physical state would be if she had memories of having seen things in full color. The robot then goes in and modifies her brain. It creates the necessary neural connections in the visual cortex. It makes all the necessary connections to modify her memories. When Mary wakes up, she remembers having been able to see red, remembers what it is like to see red, can even visualize the red things she remembers having seen in her mind.

Now we fix Mary's eyes. For the first time ever, Mary actually has the experience of seeing red. According to physicallism, she will not gain anything new by this experience.

In other words, physicalism holds that the experience is a physical process, and that all the facts about the experience are physical. When we say that Mary has all the physical facts, we are not just talking about abstract information, we are talking about the physical state of Mary's brain. So in effect, we should be able to alter the state of Mary's brain is such a way as to give her all the facts about seeing red that somebody who has seen red would have, even though she has never seen red.

Dr. Stupid

Again you beg the question by presupposing materialism. The idea that the robot can do this task presupposes the correctness of materialism. Therefore your argument acheives nothing.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Rusty said:
Regardless of what you think about the KA, you have to agree that seeing red causes physical changes in the brain's neural network and other components, right?


It changes your neural connections. That's what knowledge is, right?


How does it assume that? Regardless, what you say is true. There is a "red portion" of the visual cortex that hasn't been exercised until red light is actually seen (or Stimpy's robot does his thing).


For the same reason we can't teach some to be a world champion high jumper. You gotta practice.

You keep thinking off all knowledge/facts as book knowledge. Some knowledge is gained through doing/experiencing/sensing/acting.

~~ Paul

Paul,

For the materialist to gain knowledge means to gain information. Information is not gained on first experiencing red (otherwise it could in principle be learnt from a book).

 

[Guest]

Paul, I am saying that IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IFIF IF IF IF IF IF IF IF IFIF

IIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFF

There is something that can only be gained subjectively then there is a problem.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY KEYBOARD?



Now in another post I have asserted that Mary gains something subjectively (qualia). I did that several times in several stories about Mary and the black/white room. I'm not going to repeat them again. You really need to get your memory looked at or something, becasue I've only told the story FOUR TIMES.

Wait, maybe I should say it again. And again. And again. And again.

Weeeeeeeeee!

Only four times?

Rusty, look at my post-total. At least half of those posts were directly concerned with endlessly explaining to materialists why their belief system doesn't hold water.

A problem with materialism?

WHAT PROBLEM?

 

[Interesting Ian]

Rusty said:
Here is the definition of physicalism from Websters:

"a thesis that the descriptive terms of scientific language are reducible to terms which refer to spatiotemporal things or events or to their properties"

Which can be described. Anything which can be described is information. All information can in principle be learnt from books.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Ian,

Again you beg the question by presupposing materialism. The idea that the robot can do this task presupposes the correctness of materialism. Therefore your argument acheives nothing.

I refuse to believe that you could possibly be this clueless. I can only assume that you are not following the conversation, and instead just attacking my statements out of context. please read through the posts leading up to that one again. It should be abundantly clear that the point of that thought experiment was not to serve as a proof that materialism is correct, but rather to describe the mechanism by which, under materialism, a person could know what it is like to see red, without ever having had the experience herself.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian, Stimpy said "According to physicalism ...". Now, you have an interesting point. If the robot did this, would Mary feel as if she had a new experience or would it feel as if she already knew what red was? This is the other problem with the KA. There is no way to know without actually doing the experiment. It's a thought experiment that cries out for a real experiment.

For the materialist to gain knowledge means to gain information. Information is not gained on first experiencing red (otherwise it could in principle be learnt from a book).

Yes, that's what Rusty has been saying all day. So you're saying that the neural connections formed upon seeing red are not information? Or are you saying that they are, and Mary could form those connections by reading a book?

You folks spend a lot of time not answering simple questions.

~~ Paul

 

[Guest]

Ian,



I refuse to believe that you could possibly be this clueless. I can only assume that you are not following the conversation, and instead just attacking my statements out of context. please read through the posts leading up to that one again. It should be abundantly clear that the point of that thought experiment was not to serve as a proof that materialism is correct, but rather to describe the mechanism by which, under materialism, a person could know what it is like to see red, without ever having had the experience herself.

Dr. Stupid

Stimp.....

Do you understand that it is possible, as a biblical literalist, to re-arrange every possible line of thought according to the tenets of biblical literalism, and therefore refute every possible proof that the Bible is false, simply by re-arranging the definitions and the questions so they pre-suppose the Bible is true? Do you understand that by this method it is completely impossible to ever see that the Bible is false, because the literalist never actually thinks about the problem itself because he has re-arranged every problem and every question in order to avoid the Bible being proved false?

Ian isn't being clueless. YOU ARE. You have spent a year defending materialism by pre-supposing its truth and then re-defining all problems according to definitions that are-predestined to exonerate materialism regardless of whether it is true or not.

You are still doing it :

"It should be abundantly clear that the point of that thought experiment was not to serve as a proof that materialism is correct, but rather to describe the mechanism by which, under materialism, a person could know what it is like to see red, without ever having had the experience herself."

We all know d*mned well that it is impossible to prove materialism is correct. We are trying to establish whether the reality we actually find ourselves in is compatible with the tenets of materialism. And we find THAT THEY ARE NOT. So in order to 'defend' materialism you bastardise English, redefine words, re-specify problems, or just make statements which are PURE NONSENSE, but help to solidify your materialistic thought-box e.g. "Under materialism subjective things are actually objective". B***LL**CKS to 'under materialism'. Under Biblical literlaism God made the world in seven days therefore Darwinism is wrong! Whoopee Doo! I've defended Biblical literalism from the theory of evolution!

Why you can't understand this to be a problem is quite beyond me. Well, that's a lie. It's a lie because on those occasions when you have finally run out of arguments you claim that a proof against materialism would deal a fatal blow to science, and herald the end of life as we know it.

I need a drink.



edited :

Just in case you didn;t get that :

It serves no purpose to create an imaginary world where it is possible to book-learn red in order to defend materialism. The TRUTH is that we live in a world where it is NOT POSSIBLE to learn what it is like to see red without seeing red. i.e. IN THE REAL WORLD materialism is false. IN YOUR IMAGINARY WORLD WHERE IT IS POSSIBLE TO BOOK-LEARN RED materialism might be true.

Now I really do need a drink.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Again you beg the question by presupposing materialism. The idea that the robot can do this task presupposes the correctness of materialism. Therefore your argument acheives nothing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I refuse to believe that you could possibly be this clueless. I can only assume that you are not following the conversation, and instead just attacking my statements out of context. please read through the posts leading up to that one again. It should be abundantly clear that the point of that thought experiment was not to serve as a proof that materialism is correct, but rather to describe the mechanism by which, under materialism, a person could know what it is like to see red, without ever having had the experience herself.

But the point I'm making is your "argument" does nothing to counter the refutation of materialism employing the Mary argument. Are you not able to understand this??

 

[The One called Neo]

Originally posted by Stimpson J. Cat
Again you beg the question by presupposing materialism. The idea that the robot can do this task presupposes the correctness of materialism. Therefore your argument acheives nothing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I refuse to believe that you could possibly be this clueless. I can only assume that you are not following the conversation, and instead just attacking my statements out of context. please read through the posts leading up to that one again. It should be abundantly clear that the point of that thought experiment was not to serve as a proof that materialism is correct, but rather to describe the mechanism by which, under materialism, a person could know what it is like to see red, without ever having had the experience herself.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



But the point I'm making is your "argument" does nothing to counter the refutation of materialism employing the Mary argument. Are you not able to understand this??

Yes I'm afraid he truly doesn't understand Ian Truly remarkable isn't it!

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian, how does the KA refute materialism? Can you just explain that in simple terms we might all understand. Don't just restate the thought experiment, because we all know it.

~~ Paul

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

UCE,

Do you understand that it is possible, as a biblical literalist, to re-arrange every possible line of thought according to the tenets of biblical literalism, and therefore refute every possible proof that the Bible is false, simply by re-arranging the definitions and the questions so they pre-suppose the Bible is true? Do you understand that by this method it is completely impossible to ever see that the Bible is false, because the literalist never actually thinks about the problem itself because he has re-arranged every problem and every question in order to avoid the Bible being proved false?

Jesus Christ! Are you people stupid? Let me spell it out for you in simple to understand words:

The above thought experiment was not intended as an argument for physicalism being true.

What part of the above do you not understand?

Rusty has presented an argument that he claims refutes physicalism. I have claimed that his argument assumes that Physicalism makes claims that I do not think Physicalism makes. Exactly how do you propose that I go about explaining this without explaining what I think physicalism does claim?

Are you guys just not paying any attention to context at all? Could you possibly be this stupid?

We all know d*mned well that it is impossible to prove materialism is correct. We are trying to establish whether the reality we actually find ourselves in is compatible with the tenets of materialism. And we find THAT THEY ARE NOT. So in order to 'defend' materialism you bastardise English, redefine words, re-specify problems, or just make statements which are PURE NONSENSE, but help to solidify your materialistic thought-box e.g. "Under materialism subjective things are actually objective". B***LL**CKS to 'under materialism'. Under Biblical literlaism God made the world in seven days therefore Darwinism is wrong! Whoopee Doo! I've defended Biblical literalism from the theory of evolution!

What you have done is attack strawman versions of materialism. If materialism really claimed what people like you, Ian, and Rusty, have claimed it does, then it would clearly be false. But materialism does not claim those things. If my argument is that materialism does not say what you are claiming it says, how could I possibly formulate my argument without making reference to what I claim materialism does say?

If I told you that Idealism was false because it implies things that you do not believe Idealism implies, wouldn't you respond by telling me what Idealism really does imply? Indeed, haven't you done exactly that before?

It serves no purpose to create an imaginary world where it is possible to book-learn red in order to defend materialism. The TRUTH is that we live in a world where it is NOT POSSIBLE to learn what it is like to see red without seeing red. i.e. IN THE REAL WORLD materialism is false. IN YOUR IMAGINARY WORLD WHERE IT IS POSSIBLE TO BOOK-LEARN RED materialism might be true.

Have you completely ignored the argument I have been making? I am agreeing that in the real world, you cannot learn what it is like to see red by reading a book. Where I disagree is the ridiculous assertion that materialism implies that you should be able to!


Ian,

But the point I'm making is your "argument" does nothing to counter the refutation of materialism employing the Mary argument. Are you not able to understand this??

I didn't claim that it did. The point that refutes the Mary argument is the fact that physicalism in no way implies that Mary should be able to learn what it is like to see red by reading a book.

The alternate thought experiment was presented as nothing more than an illustration of a possible mechanism by which she could learn what it is like without having the experience, and was included only to address the point that, although physicalism does not imply that she should be able to learn it by reading a book, it should be possible, in principle, for her to gain that knowledge in some way besides directly experiencing it.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Win]

Ian, how does the KA refute materialism? Can you just explain that in simple terms we might all understand. Don't just restate the thought experiment, because we all know it.

~~ Paul

Thought I'd answer this one, if I may, Ian.

The knowledge argument demonstrates that the full set of physical facts about seeing red doesn't logically entail the facts about the experience of seeing red.

If this is so, materialism is false.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Win,

The knowledge argument demonstrates that the full set of physical facts about seeing red doesn't logically entail the facts about the experience of seeing red.

But as I have explained, the knowledge argument doesn't demonstrate that at all, because having all the facts about the experience of seeing red does not equate to actually having the knowledge of seeing red, anymore than having all the facts about a puppy would equate to actually having a puppy.

If I understand your own position correctly, you agree that the memory of having seen red is a purely physical thing. You only disagree about the physicallity of the experience itself. But this thought experiment does not address that at all. It only addresses the person's knowledge of the experience. According to your own prior arguments, I would think that you would argue that this knowledge is completely explicable under materialism, and that it is only the fact that this knowledge is correct that depends on this non-physical aspect of consciousness.

Dr. Stupid

 

[ChuckieR]

Thought I'd answer this one, if I may, Ian.

The knowledge argument demonstrates that the full set of physical facts about seeing red doesn't logically entail the facts about the experience of seeing red.

Win, thanks for that succinct summary. I think I'm finally starting to get a glimpse of the root of the problem.

Facts in books are static. Physiological responses are dynamic processes. Facts about the color RED are static. Seeing red is a dynamic process. This is apples and oranges.

In order to learn to see red, you have to train the response of your nervous system. You can only do this by experience. That experience will tune the weights on your synapses and allow you to differentiate between red, green, blue, and combinations of these colors.

Yes, reading about red is in fact an experience and it will change some areas of your brain. But it will not change the parts of your brain that actually process visual stimui. It's not as if we are "superhumans" who can change any part of our brains at will, just by reading about what those changes should be. That would be a very strange world indeed. Much of our brain is wired up during early childhood development, and we do not have direct access to it (but is is accessable to scientific study, though not as easily as we would like yet).

I think we get hung up on colors because it is difficult to get at their internal representation. Let's take an outwardly measurable response instead. If you rotate your head 20 degrees to the right, your eyes will rotate 20 degrees to the left. This is a reflex. You normally don't have any direct control over this. You can "adapt" this reflex by, for instance, sitting in a chair that is rotating back and forth and staring at a target that is moving the "wrong way" relative to the chair. After about an hour of this you can test your eye movements by rotating the chair in the dark. Your eyes will no longer move 20 degrees in response to a 20 degree chair movement.

Pretty obscure, you say? But this is a type of "learning" that you can only do by "experiencing" it, and it is completely explainable and understandable in scientific terms (you've adjusted the settings of your oculomotor system through experience). You can read about it all day long (in fact, some days that's what I do ), but you can only "train" it by sitting in the chair with the crazy target.

If this is so, materialism is false.

I think we should change that to say that if this is so, then there are physiological responses that cannot be trained by reading about them.

Isn't that all it really says?

 

[Win]

Stimpy:

But as I have explained, the knowledge argument doesn't demonstrate that at all, because having all the facts about the experience of seeing red does not equate to actually having the knowledge of seeing red, anymore than having all the facts about a puppy would equate to actually having a puppy.

Let me break this down a little.

The puppy first. No one claims that a puppy is logically entailed by all the physical facts about a puppy. People do claim that the experience of seeing red is logically entailed by all the physical facts about seeing red.

OK. The knowledge part now. If you know all the physical facts about seeing red, then necessarily you know what it's like to experience red, if experiencing red is a physical fact. Either you know it by virtue of knowing all the physical facts (and materialism is true), you don't it even though you know all the physical facts (and materialism is false) or the experience of seeing red doesn't contain any information, that is to say, isn't a fact that you can know.

If I understand your own position correctly, you agree that the memory of having seen red is a purely physical thing. You only disagree about the physicallity of the experience itself. But this thought experiment does not address that at all. It only addresses the person's knowledge of the experience. According to your own prior arguments, I would think that you would argue that this knowledge is completely explicable under materialism, and that it is only the fact that this knowledge is correct that depends on this non-physical aspect of consciousness.

Memories are physical, yes. The experience of memories isn't.

From my position, information has a dual quality. The information about the content of qualia isn't physical information, it's phenomenal information. It isn't "contained" in our brains, as it were.

So, Mary does learn a new fact, but the fact isn't physically encoded anywhere. Rather, it's phenomenally realized.

Now, I guess we could ask, what would happen with p-zombie Mary. Emerging from her black and white room, light of the right wavelength will hit zombie Mary's eyes, causing signals to travel along her optical nerves to her geniculate bodies, thence to her visual cortex. New patterns, never before existing in zombie Mary's brain, will cause her to remark, "I can now see red." Those same patterns will create, or perhaps better, are in part, the false belief that she has had the experience of seeing red.

In real Mary, however, those patterns will be accompanied by experience, and the phenomenal information contained in the experience of seeing red is what is not logically entailed by all the physical facts.

 

[Win]

Chuckie:

Indeed, it's possible to claim that the experience of seeing red isn't a fact, but rather an ability like training your eyes not to counter-rotate with your head.

But, having learned to do that, would you say you've learned a fact?