Materialism

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I, too, would be interested to know what Bell's Theorem has to do with consciousness. Was it just an example of something we don't completely understand?

~~ Paul

 

[BillHoyt]

Bill:



As is your nature.

Nevertheless, you're inability to grasp the logic of the positions should have no bearing on your tendency to be smug.

Recognise your limitations.

Gee, Win,

You're just not helping me here. I don't have a lot of time, in between handling the customers at this joint. Just what about citing Bell's Theorem and Stimpy's explanation that it is still a mystery is not an argument from ignorance in the context of a request for evidence about the non-material nature of consciousness?

Your very kind ad homs, you realize, don't logically address the question.

Back to work. Candy's up next. Somebody always gets out of control when she dances.

Cheers,

 

[Solitaire]

Collapsing a wave function requires an observer, true: but it does
not require a conscious observer. You can collapse wave functions
while asleep, or even dead. Rocks count as observers in quantum physics.

Oh yes? Kindly inform me how you could possibly know this.

From the way that the theory defines an observer we say the rock registers the quantum event re-entangling it with the rest of the universe.

Assuming a human observer leads to a strange universe, for example
an experiment that puts an elephant in a box along with a sinister device.
The device consists of an atom of a radioactive substance that if it decays,
it triggers a hammer to fall smashing a bottle of cyanide killing the elephant.
After a half hour has passed the atom has half a chance of decaying. What
state will the elephant be in - alive, dead, or a superposition of both alive
and dead?

If we make the assumption that the elephant exists in a state of both
alive and dead at the same time until a human observer peers into the
box then we get a strange universe. When the elephant dies it falls over
sending out seismic waves that propagates into the surrounding world,
it no longer gives off heat also affecting the environment, even it's position
gravitationally affects to some small degree other bodies around it. In other
words a macroscopic superposition leaks out of the box throwing the entire
universe into superposition including the observer who has not yet peered
into the box.

If on the other hand you realize that the observer in the box is in fact the
detector then the way out of this unpleasant state of affairs becomes clear.
The detector’s recording of the even results in a definite alive or dead state
for the elephant. What the human observer does not know about the state
no longer matters and the universe become consistent.

If you want, you can sink deep into the quantum philosophy of John G.
Cramer and the Transactional Interpretation. See also: Wigber's Friend.

 

[Jethro]

Also, in the so-called Schroedinger's Cation experiment, the investigators were able to put an atom (which in a quantum sense is fairly huge) into a superposition of two states, but once the seperation of the two states got large enough the wave function collapsed before a measurement was made. References available upon request (i.e. once I find them again. Google up NIST schroedinger. The latest part of the experiment took place in 2001).

 

[Guest]

I, too, would be interested to know what Bell's Theorem has to do with consciousness. Was it just an example of something we don't completely understand?

~~ Paul

READ THE LINK.

 

[Guest]

My time here is done, folks. If you want your evidence then read the link I posted yesterday on Bells theorem, and then give it a good long think, and while you are doing it think about your own thought process - are you seeking the truth or are you trying to defend your pet beliefs?.

Seek and ye shall find.

I have asked Hal to permanently disable my accounts.

This is UndercoverElephant signing off.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Win, Rusty, and David,

I have been away for a few days, and have not been able to access the Net. It will take me a while to go through all of these posts, and address all of the comments and questions you have made to me.

Dr. Stupid

 

[BillHoyt]

This is UndercoverElephant signing off.

The UcE function collapses whenever it gets entangled with rational particles.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Rusty,

People have been making such theories since the dawn of time. That is where religion comes from. Maybe Thor really does cause the lighting bolts? Can you prove he doesn't? Maybe all those fancy laws of physics we use to describe lighting are just how he does it, but he is the real ultimate cause?

Unfalsifiable theories are completely and utterly pointless.
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But according to physicalism the theory must be falsifiable in principle.

Not true. Indeed, physicalism directly implies that it must be possible to construct unfalsifiable theories.

Someone theorized that 'Thor' was creating the lightning bolts, it was later demonstrated that static buildup creates the lightning bolts. Theory asserted, disprove, and dismissed.

This is where you are wrong. It is not possible to disprove the theory that Thor was creating the lightning bolts. All that has been demonstrated is that the existence of Thor is not necessary to explain the existence of lighting. One can always claim that Thor just uses the build-up of static in the atmosphere, in order to do it. Maybe the way Thor creates lighting bolts is by influencing QM in some subtle way, in order to cause lightning to occur exactly when and where he wants it to? Do you see now why it is also pointless to try to use QM as a way for your agent to influence the physical World? It is exactly the same type of unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Just like my assertion of an "agent". In principle it must be possible to discover the causer of every effect, and if we can't do that (in principle) then physicalism must be false.

Physicalism does not claim that every effect has a cause. You are confusing yourself about what physicalism is, by trying to apply a definition of physical to it that is not consistent with the one that physicalism is based on.

It might not. Welcome to the world of QM, where even conservation of mass and energy only happen "on average".

Anyway, I think you should give some thought to the difference between saying that some set of events are acausal, and saying that the existence of something is not necessitated by anything else. Existence is just one property that something can have.
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This is a different argument, the one that existence is an effect. I assert that existence is an effect and not a property.

I am not even sure what you mean by the word "effect". Existence is clearly a property, as evidenced by the fact that I can say "my car has the property of existing, and my imaginary friend, Bob, does not".

What makes my rock continue existing through time?

Where did you get the bizarre notion that something has to "cause" things to keep existing through time? This is certainly not an assumption of science, or of physicalism.

Why the prior state of the universe, or the rock itself, causes the effect of the rocks existence in the next slice of time. It may sound wacky but its nothing earth-shattering. I'm just saying that my rock, assuming no one moves it or blows it up etc.., continues to exist because it existed before. But it is a cause and effect chain.

You are making a big assumption about the nature of reality here. It may be an intuitively compelling assumption, but it is nevertheless an assumption, and one which contrary to available evidence.

Existence being property (and not an effect) would be an idealist view.

Once again, I don't understand what you mean by "effect". When I say "effect", I mean an event that was caused by some other event. In science, everything is defined in terms of events. Some events are causes, because they cause effects. Some events are not effects, because they were not caused. All observable events are causes, because they affect other things (they have to, in order to be observed).

No, if it's a cause and not an effect then by definition it is not physical. That is the definition of an "agent". Perhaps in physics that makes it physical but in philosophy it is no longer physical.

In physicalism, which is a philosophy, it is also physical. I think you are being somewhat naive in your assertion that "philosophy" has one set definition for "physical", or anything else, for that matter. I know that you, Win, UCE, and Ian, all seem to define "physical" differently. And of them, only Win seems to willing to entertain the notion that somebody else might actually define the term differently than he does.

That is not what is meant by physical scientifically, or materialistically. I am sorry if I misunderstood you before, and gave the impression that it is.
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That is what it is. Simply saying that something must cause is not enough. If things spontaneously caused but had no effects we are in violation of TLOP.

Huh? I am not talking about things being causes without an effect. That would just be self-contradictory. A cause has to cause something in order to be a cause. What I am talking about is events which are not caused, but which act as causes for other events.

Why do you think there is TLOQP? Because TLOQP is in violation of TLOP.

You are confused. QM violates classical mechanics, but that is ok, because classical mechanics is wrong. Quantum Mechanics is physics.

You do not appear to be a physicalist, rather you appear to be a skeptical scientist. In philosophy the definition of physical is what I have given.

I am most definitely a skeptical scientist. But what makes you think you are more qualified than me to say what physicalism is? Do you think there are any people in the world who call themselves physicalists (or materialists) who define "physical" the way you do? I have certainly never met any. Maybe not "all" philosophers define physical the way you do?

When I say the "laws of rusty" are reducable to TLOP I'm not saying anything meaningful..

When I prove that something had no cause it is no longer physical. That is the definition of physical.

Please don't introduce semantic arguments to complicate the issue, it's not necessary and won't disasway me.

Do you not realize that your claim that physicalism is false because the definition of "physical" is "X", is nothing more than a semantic argument?

You are attacking a strawman. Physicalism simply does not mean what you think it means.

C, as you have defined it, can and does exist. It is simply the set of uncaused effects. Quantum events are such effects. Such effects may or may not be random.
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By definition they are random. Random means not caused. If they are not caused then they are random.

Once again, that is your definition. I have never met anybody who agrees with that definition. Regardless, it is not the physicalist or scientific definition, and therefore of zero relevance to the question of the validity of materialism/physicalism.

We can debate the meaning of the word "random" in your randomness thread, if you want, but it has no place here.

Before you get all excited about the possibility of the agent being non-causal and non-random, though, keep in mind that non-causal determinism is still inconsistent with Libertarian free-will, as you have defined it. A-causal determinism is still a form of fatalism.
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That's called soft determinism.

Call it what you want. It is still incompatible with LFW.

Not at all. Materialism does not require that everything be causal, or even deterministic. Some older forms of ontological materialism did, but such naive notions had to be abandoned when General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were discovered.
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So you no longer believe physicalism but something else? Perhaps this is that ontological monism that UE was talking about then.

Do you have any idea how arrogant that sounds? I am a physicalist. Physicalism just doesn't mean what you think it means. You can either let people who are physicalists explain to you what it really means, or you can insist it means something that nobody actually believes, and simply be ignored. The choice is yours.

For one thing, the claim that we had not, in fact, rendered everything to a state where it can be understood. The best we can do is say that we know of nothing that has not been rendered to such a state. That does not prove that no such thing exists. That is impossible to prove.
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You need to change your last sentance to "That is impossible to prove in application." And it is only impossible if there are infinite things in the universe. Otherwise it certianly is plausable to believe that eventually we will have rendered everything to a state of our understanding.

The Universe being finite is not sufficient. We would have to know that it is. That is impossible. The best we could do is claim that everything we have observed is explicable in terms of a finite Universe.

Remember that no scientific theory can ever be proven true. All we can do is demonstrate that the theory is sufficient to explain the observed phenomena.

This problem has been addressed at length in this thread. All that can be put into a book is abstract information. All Mary can learn from the book is abstract information. This in no way contradicts materialism. Materialism says that everything can be described in terms of our observations. Those descriptions are abstract information, and nothing more.
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No I had to be away from the thread for the end of the argument but you reached the same point every physicalist reaches. You asserted that if we actually did the experiment then Mary wouldn't learn anything.

I asserted that she does not learn any new information.

Don't confuse that with asserting that it is NOT possible to render all physical occurances into a state where they can be observed (and hence recorded). You cannot assert that and remain a physicalist, so please STOP asserting it or stop asserting physicalism.

I never asserted that. What makes you think I have? Physicalism holds that all physical events are, at least in principle, observable.

Mary does not gain any new information about red when she sees it. All she gains is the physical memory of having seen red.
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You just contradicted yourself. If information is being used to say the recorded observations we made when we reduced everything to obersvable states and mary doesn't gain any new information then she doesn't gain ANYTHING. If she gains anything (including "the physical memory") then one thing has happened:

1) We can't reduce some part of the "physical memory of having seen red" to an observable state.

This renders physicalism false.

This is simply nonsense. If I gave Mary a book with all the information about a rock, and she reads it all, and knows everything there is to know about that rock, and then I give her the rock, does she gain anything? Of course she does. She just doesn't gain any new information.

She can know exactly what her brain will be like after she has seen red. That information isn't going to magically transform her brain to that state, any more than it will magically cause a rock to appear in her hand.

What a physicalist has to assert (as I said many pages ago at the begining of the Mary KA discussion) is that if we do render everything to such a state and feed it to Mary then she won't gain anything. It also has to be possible in principle to do so.

The physicalists only has to assert that she will not gain any new information, since that is all she can get from reading a book. And a physicalists certainly doesn't have to assert that it is possible to do the experiment. On the contrary, the idea that a person could even know all that information is ludicrous.

It is starting to sound like you are not a physicalist either.

Nobody is. There is probably not a single person on this planet who actually believes what you are claiming physicalism is.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

DavidSmith73,

I do not deny the possibility that you could construct a different logically framework from which the scientific method would be logically valid. When you come up with one, let me know. At that point we can discuss the relative merits of it versus physicalism.

As it is, none of the various forms of idealism or dualism that I have ever heard of can manage this.
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You have changed the argument slightly here. I am saying that under my philosophy, the scientific method would not have the same assumptions (objective and subject would no longer be mutually exclusive) so it would be different from its current form. So I am constructing a different framework of reality and therefore science would have different assumptions.

That's fine, but it is not enough to simply say that you are constructing such a framework. You need to explain exactly what those assumptions are, and show the chain of logic that leads from those assumptions to the scientific method.

Good luck.

David: The justification behind the methods would be the same. Specifically, that observation and theory agree. What the theory relates to and the reasons for its limitation in fully describing what it refers to would have changed.
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Stimpy: It is not that simple. The very claim that the theory and observation agree can only be made within a logical framework that makes some basic assumptions about both the nature of reality and observation.
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Erm, I have made assumptions about the nature of reality and observation. Can you be more specific about these assumptions ?
I am assuming that a mathematical description does not reflect an objective reality separate from our experience. It merely embodies a description of qualia that have a degree of stability. If the description is a good one then its descriptive predictions about other qualia (observations made under different conditions) will roughly agree.

How stable? Under what conditions can they be expected to be stable, and not-stable? Why those conditions? What control methods can be used to assess the reliability of an observation, and on what logical basis are those methods derived?

These are all questions that physicalism can, and has, answered. Your alternative framework must answer them as well.

You do not understand why it allows us to draw any conclusions at all from our observations. The assumption of objectivity is one of those reasons. Without that assumption, we cannot logically conclude anything from our observations.

What we could do is draw conclusions as though the assumption of objectivity were true, even though we don't believe it is, but that would not be logical.
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No. You have again displayed the inability to view reality from outside your materialistic perspective. Without the assumption of objective reality, we cannot conclude anything about an objective reality. This is logical. If we drop this assumption then our mathematical descriptions become just that - descriptions of our qualia. And of course, these descriptions are qualia themselves since they reside within the confines of our experience (under my philosophy).

Read what I said again, particularly the first sentence. You must understand why the scientific method allows us to logically draw conclusions from our observations. Your own framework must also provide a logical basis for drawing conclusions from our observations. You can strip away the axioms of science, and replace them with other ones, but those new axioms must also allow us to logically draw conclusions from our observations.

A heuristic algorithm is one that seems to work, but you don't really understand why.
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How ironic that you have paraphrased materialism.

It would be, if that were true. But it is not.

Assumptions of objective reality - it is logical and consistent

For an observation to exactly adhere to these assumptions it must be exactly logical and consistent. Show me how every observationion is exactly logical and consistent (whatever that means )

Our observations are not logical and consistent. Objective Reality is. Fortunately, reliable information about Objective Reality can be extracted from those observations.

It is really easy to take scientific knowledge that we already have, and say "that is consistent with my philosophy". The question is, could you start with you philosophy, and without making any additional assumptions conclude those scientific facts?
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Yes. All I have to do is to change the meaning of what a theory relates to.

If you do that, you change the meaning of the theory. You are no longer talking about science. You are talking about something else. Something else which has not been demonstrated to be reliable (as science has). You must therefore demonstrate that it is reliable too.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Win,

For clarity's sake, let me point out that an eliminative materialist is not someone who holds that phenomenal properties just are physical properties. Rather, she denies their existence.

This makes no sense to me. If you define "phenomenal" properties to be those properties we have direct access to, then there would be no "eliminative materialists". One would only endorse that position if "phenomenal" were defined in such a way as to presume more than just "direct access".

It is for this reason that I say that the knowledge argument allows the truth of the eliminative materialist position. The knowledge argument suggests that reductive materialism is false.

How so? I don't see how the fact that Mary will gain the memory of seeing red, but not any new information, in any way invalidates reductive materialism.

In fact, you could replace Mary with a computer, and get exactly the same results.

You could have a computer which takes visual input from a camera, and does preprocessing on this input with one processor. The results of that preprocessor are set to the CPU, which does information processing.

Give the computer memory which stores the input from its visual preprocessor, and give it the ability to store the results of its information processing by encoding it in the same format as the visual input. That way, the only way it can remember things is by reprocessing the remembered "experience".

Now, teach this computer how to read, and name it Mary. Stick it in the black and white room.

The situation will be the same as Mary. From reading its books, it will learn everything about red, and about how its camera sees red, and how its preprocessor treats that information, and about how it (the CPU) deals with that information. It has all of the relevant information.

Now take it outside, and show it something red. It does not learn any new information. It just gains the memory of having seen red. Just like Mary. Any information that the CPU could potentially extract from that memory, is already there in other memories. But the memory is new. The computer has changed, just as Mary will change.

How does this violate reductive materialism? If reductive materialism is true, then it should be possible to make the computer so sophisticated that it possesses phenomenal consciousness too. But that doesn't change the experiment one iota, because that phenomenal consciousness is nothing more than a set of physical processes occurring in the computer's CPU.

Now, Stimpy has suggested that, if "every observable phenomena is consistent with the hypothesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, then even if you assume that phenomenal consciousness does exist, you cannot infer anything about it from the physical observations." This, I believe, is not so. Imagine two theories, one which predicts the existence of phenomenal consciousness, as well as things about the phsyical world, the other which makes the same physical predictions, but does not predict a phenomenal world. Which is a better theory? Depends on whether you think phenomenal consciousness is a feature of the world.

That depends. If the second theory predicts that there is no phenomenal world at all, then you reject it, because you believe in the phenomenal world. But what if it simply doesn't make any claim either way? It is still consistent with the existence of a phenomenal world, it just doesn't require it. You have no grounds for rejecting this theory, and it is more parsimonious than the first one.

What's more, if your p-zombie argument is valid, then such a neutral alternative theory must exist.

Which brings me to the idea that observations are the only way to distinguish between competing theories. I also think that this is not so. We pick betwen theories of the world based on other considerations than confirmation by observation. Is the theory parsimonious, for example.

Exactly. If the p-zombie argument is valid, then the most parsimonious theory will always be one which makes no reference at all to the phenomenal world. That doesn't mean it is inconsistent with the existence of the phenomenal world. Just the opposite, it will be consistent both with the existence and non-existence of the phenomenal world.

The idea that there are an infinite number of theories for any given set of observations, and we can have no position of which one is correct strikes me as wrong. There isn't an infinite number of good theories.

Irrelevant. The p-zombie argument requires that the best theory will be one which makes no reference to the phenomenal world at all, and also requires that such a theory must exist.

Which brings me to my final point, about instrumentalism versus realism in science. I think it necesssary (in the sense of desireable) that we accept that science is telling us something about the real world. To say that science is just a mechanism to make predictions about future observations, and beyond that makes no claim to be explaining the "real" world is to abdicate the point of science, which is to understand the world.

I don't see the conflict. Science does tell us something about the "real" world. It just doesn't tell us anything more than what we should expect our future observations of it to be. This isn't just a philosophical position. Science is not capable of telling us any more than this. We can make up interpretations of our scientific theories that say more than this, but that is just speculation, and in any event, science is not providing those interpretations.

Instrumentalist positions, which dismiss as mere metaphysics the idea that our theories of the world are actually teliing us something about what it is "really like," are the legacy of a bankrupt positivism.

Nevertheless, it is the truth about the way science works. If you extract anything more from a scientific theory than predictions about observations, then those additional things are not being logically concluded from the theory. They are being made up by you. That is fantasy, not science.

In any event, it is not the case that to understand what science really is, or to have a scientific worldview, you have to be an instrumentalist, though many instrumentalists would make that claim.

Even if you are not an instrumentalist, if you understand what science really is, then you know that any metaphysical interpretations you attach to scientific theories is not part of science.

An eliminativist accepts the existence of entities like beliefs, desires, and sensations in a psychological sense, which is to say as descriptions of functional components of the mind. What an eliminativist doesn't accept is that these entities have any phenomenal component, as folk psychology would suggest. So, once you've explained, say, what's going on in the brain, nervous system and body when you cut your finger, you've exhausted explanation. There's no point in asking, let alone explaining, what the pain feels like to you, because the phenomenal experience of the pain is an "illusion."

There's no such thing as phenomenal experience. We may think that there is, but we're mistaken, and an explanation can be provided for why we have this mistaken belief.

Saying that it is an illusion is not equivalent to saying it doesn't exist. On the contrary, it is saying that it does exist, but just isn't what we are led by our intuition to believe it is.

I think that the distinction you are making between eliminative and reductive materialism is a purely artificial and semantic one.

Dr. Stupid

 

[Dub]

My time here is done, folks. If you want your evidence then read the link I posted yesterday on Bells theorem, and then give it a good long think, and while you are doing it think about your own thought process - are you seeking the truth or are you trying to defend your pet beliefs?.

Seek and ye shall find.

I have asked Hal to permanently disable my accounts.

This is UndercoverElephant signing off.

Back inside your box you go.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Just the data, ma'am

Stimpy said:

Now take it outside, and show it something red. It does not learn any new information. It just gains the memory of having seen red. Just like Mary. Any information that the CPU could potentially extract from that memory, is already there in other memories. But the memory is new. The computer has changed, just as Mary will change.

I must not be reading this right. Let's talk about Mary. The data stored in Mary's visual pathways as a result of seeing red is not available from her book-learned memories. We've agreed on that before. You seem to be saying that the visual pathways have memory, but that the data in that memory is non-information. What does that mean?

~~ Paul

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Paul,

Now take it outside, and show it something red. It does not learn any new information. It just gains the memory of having seen red. Just like Mary. Any information that the CPU could potentially extract from that memory, is already there in other memories. But the memory is new. The computer has changed, just as Mary will change.
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I must not be reading this right. Let's talk about Mary. The data stored in Mary's visual pathways as a result of seeing red is not available from her book-learned memories. We've agreed on that before.

Careful. There is data, and there is the neural pathways themselves. The information about what those neural pathways will be like was in the book. She knows exactly what the physical condition of her brain will be after she sees red. Her brain will just not have that physical condition until after she sees red.

You seem to be saying that the visual pathways have memory, but that the data in that memory is non-information. What does that mean?

Not exactly. The memory itself is not information. It is a physical state. She already knows everything about that physical state. She just doesn't have that physical state, until she actually sees red.

That new memory does have information in it, just like any memory. But she already has that information encoded in other memories.

Also, don't confuse the memory of seeing red with the physical changes to her visual cortex that are necessary for processing red. That is a whole other issue. It is also somewhat irrelevant. Your brain changes everytime you have an experience. So in that sense, all experiences are "novel". You always get "something new". The only really relevant question is whether she gains any new abstract information, since as I have said before, that is all she can get from the book anyway.

Put simply, the physical changes to her brain are irrelevant. The only relevant question is whether she gains any new abstract information from actually having the experience. I say that if we accept the ludicrous premise that she is actually capable of learning all of the abstract information from a book, then she will not gain any new abstract information from the experience. Any abstract information she could potentially extract from her memory of the experience, will be information she already has.

The entire thought experiment is, in my opinion, little more than a deliberate attempt to use misleading language in order to make materialism appear less intuitively reasonable. By using vague terms like "facts", "learn", and "know", in ways that refer to different things in different parts of the explanation, it creates what appears to be a contradiction, but is really nothing more than deliberately obfuscated semantic nonsense.

If they really wanted to present it clearly, they would do so using the terminology of materialism. Something like the following:

Mary lives all her life in a black and white room. A complete description of how perception of color works, is compiled into a book, along with a complete description of the workings of Mary's brain, and even a complete description of what the state of Mary's brain will be after she sees the color red. Mary reads this book, and for the purposes of this thought experiment, we will assume that Mary is able to completely understand all of the information therein.

After doing so, she sees red for the first time. Does she get any new information from this experience?

The answer, if physicalism is true, is clearly no.

Of course, when presented this way, the experiment no longer seems very interesting. It amounts to no more than saying "If we imagine somebody had all the information about something, would it be possible for them to get more?".

Phenomenal stuff doesn't even enter into it. Neither does dualism. Under both materialism and dualism, we would say that the physical state of her brain changes when she sees red. If that is not a contradiction for dualism, then why would it be one for materialism?

Dr. Stupid

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Stimpy said:

Careful. There is data, and there is the neural pathways themselves. The information about what those neural pathways will be like was in the book. She knows exactly what the physical condition of her brain will be after she sees red. Her brain will just not have that physical condition until after she sees red.

I basically agree, but if any of the neural encodings are stochastic, she doesn't know exactly the physical condition. But the important point is that knowledge of the physical condition isn't the physical condition itself.

That new memory does have information in it, just like any memory. But she already has that information encoded in other memories.

No way!

Also, don't confuse the memory of seeing red with the physical changes to her visual cortex that are necessary for processing red. That is a whole other issue. It is also somewhat irrelevant. Your brain changes everytime you have an experience. So in that sense, all experiences are "novel". You always get "something new". The only really relevant question is whether she gains any new abstract information, since as I have said before, that is all she can get from the book anyway.

Aha, this is the source of our confusion. All along I've been talking about the changes in her visual pathways/cortex, not her memory of red. The weights and other values in the neurons in her visual pathways is the data she doesn't have from book reading, nor does she even have a good guess at it, because it is surely stochastic.

I agree she gains no abstract information, but I think if we refer to the pathway data as facts/information, we make it stunningly clear that she does gain information when she leaves the room, information that she clearly cannot get from books. So the premise that she's learned all the information about red is incorrect.

Well, I feel much better now. Even if we don't agree on the exact definition of some terms, I now understand the source of our confusion.

The entire thought experiment is, in my opinion, little more than a deliberate attempt to use misleading language in order to make materialism appear less intuitively reasonable. By using vague terms like "facts", "learn", and "know", in ways that refer to different things in different parts of the explanation, it creates what appears to be a contradiction, but is really nothing more than deliberately obfuscated semantic nonsense.

Yeah!

~~ Paul

 

[Loki]

Paul/Stimpy,

Lately I've been thinking about Mary and the KA in computer terms - when we say that Mary has "all the facts" about red, we mean that she has access to the complete source code of the "red" program. She's a very clever programmer, so reading the source code she can see *exactly* what will happen, when, why, and how. She can confidently state that the "red' program will produce the answer "42".

But it's not until she actually leave the B&W room that the program runs. She doesn't actually *learn* anything, since the program performs exactly as she knew it would, and the answer is "42", exactly as expected. But the one thing that has changed is that a program that had never run before has now run. It seems to me that this "new fact" is still very much a physical fact.

By using vague terms like "facts", "learn", and "know", in ways that refer to different things in different parts of the explanation, it creates what appears to be a contradiction, but is really nothing more than deliberately obfuscated semantic nonsense.

Hopefully I haven't confused the issue, because this is essentually how I see it - *if* she gains something new, it's only in the sense of having run a program that had never run before. Why this would constitute a fatal flaw for materialism escapes me.

 

[Loki]

davidsmith73,

Lets say I were to give a radio set to my friend Bob who has never encountered one and who does not know about electromagnetism. I then set him the task of coming up with a theory about how the output of the radio is produced. Some time later I check how he is getting on and he looks perplexed. Bob says, "well, I removed this funny looking bit from all the other bits inside and the speaker made no sound. When I put that bit back the music returned". I asked him "what do you conlclude from this". He replied, "Its obvious that the special arrangement of bits produces the output of the radio. The music is therefore a product of this arrangement".

Bob is right on the one hand. The arrangement of matter does produce the music. However, as much as Bob's conclusion seems to follow a logical argument, the source of the music has been overlooked.

I know this is just an analogy, not a concerted effort at a full explanation or proof, but I find the analogy "weak" in two important details.

First, every radio on the planet is, apparently, receiving it's own private channel.

Second, the communication appears to be two way, rather than one way. For some reason, the "radio broadcast" is often aware of any damage to the reciever, and is able to make statements like "the quality of my output is poor ever since the speaker cone was damaged".

Any analogy that doesn't address these two points seems weak, in my opinion.

 

[davidsmith73]

davidsmith73,


I know this is just an analogy, not a concerted effort at a full explanation or proof, but I find the analogy "weak" in two important details.

First, every radio on the planet is, apparently, receiving it's own private channel.

Perhaps because each radio is subtly different in physically descriptive terms. Also, the privateness of each channel may not be so private after all. When the radios are coherent enough to recieve the same channel we may observe phenomena that you will find being discussed over on the paranormal forum. But that is another topic of debate. I don't want to push this radio/receiver analogy because to take it too literally would be naive.

Second, the communication appears to be two way, rather than one way. For some reason, the "radio broadcast" is often aware of any damage to the reciever, and is able to make statements like "the quality of my output is poor ever since the speaker cone was damaged".

Any analogy that doesn't address these two points seems weak, in my opinion.

You are right but I wasn't intending to theorise about any particular aspects of consciousness. I was merely illustrating how we may be limiting our thinking about it.

 

[davidsmith73]

DavidSmith73,

Our observations are not logical and consistent. Objective Reality is. Fortunately, reliable information about Objective Reality can be extracted from those observations.

This is where I am having troubles. You say that our observations behave exactly as if the assumptions about an objective reality were true, namely that the reality is logical and consistent.

Now, here we agree that our actual observations are not logical and consistent in an exact way, a characteristic which has failed to pass them for our criterion of behaving exactly as if the objective assumptions were true.

So I'm still not sure precisely what you mean when you say our observations behave exactly as if the assumptions about objective reality were true ?

You said this does not mean the observations adhere exactly to logically consistent mathematical descriptions, so what else do you mean ?

I'm not trying to play word games or anything, I am just genuinely perplexed.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

davidsmith73,

Our observations are not logical and consistent. Objective Reality is. Fortunately, reliable information about Objective Reality can be extracted from those observations.
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This is where I am having troubles. You say that our observations behave exactly as if the assumptions about an objective reality were true, namely that the reality is logical and consistent.

Now, here we agree that our actual observations are not logical and consistent in an exact way, a characteristic which has failed to pass them for our criterion of behaving exactly as if the objective assumptions were true.

So I'm still not sure precisely what you mean when you say our observations behave exactly as if the assumptions about objective reality were true ?

You said this does not mean the observations adhere exactly to logically consistent mathematical descriptions, so what else do you mean ?

I'm not trying to play word games or anything, I am just genuinely perplexed.

Look at it this way. In order to understand reality (whatever it is), we must assume it is logical and consistent. I think we are in agreement on that point, right?

The simplest hypothesis we could start with, is that our perceptions are reality. This hypothesis, however, is easily falsified, when we see that our perceptions are, in general, neither logical nor consistent.

So now we have to change an assumption of our hypothesis. If we reject the "logical and consistent" assumption, then we are essentially giving up. So we move the next, more complicated possibility: That our perceptions are not reality itself, but instead we assume that reliable information about reality can be extracted from these perceptions.

Now, this hypothesis is still falsifiable. To see how, look at a simpler example that we see all the time in science. Measurement.

When we make any kind of measurement, there is always some kind of error involved. Does this mean that the quantity being measured does not actually have any consistent well-defined value? Not necessarily (forget QM for now).

Instead, we can construct the hypothesis that there is, in fact, an actual value which we are measuring, and that the error is due to various types of external bias that can be controlled for. We can then attempt to control for them, for example, by making repeated measurements, and looking at their statistical distribution.

Note that we can never rule out the possibility that, on some scale, the measured quantity is not consistent. What we can do is show that the average of repeated measurements seem to converge towards a specific value. More importantly, we can say that if our hypothesis of the measured quantity having a specific, consistent value, were false, then we could not expect repeated measurements to converge to a specific value.

This is what I mean when I say that our observations behave exactly as though the hypothesis were true. I mean that our observations are consistent with a falsifiable hypothesis, and that if the hypothesis were false, thy would not have to be.

The use of the term "exactly" here may be somewhat misleading. I was not trying to imply that the hypothesis of an objective reality somehow predicts exactly what every observation should be. It does not. My point is simply that the set of all observations is consistent with the hypothesis that reality is objective, logical, and consistent.

Dr. Stupid