Stuff for Brent and more.....
1) Phenomenality
Definition:
Block N. 2003. Consciousness, Philosophical Issues about. In: Nadel L, editor. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Nature Pub. Group.
>
> What's "phenomenality"? Did you look for it in a brain?
>
Yes. That's the whole issue. Phenomenal consciousness. Qualia. And it is an important piece of evidence as to how phenomenality works in the brain that it is not able to be seen with phenomenality. Inability to see it is not evidence that it does not exist nor is it evidence that we can't be scientific about it.
Have a read up on all the descriptive mileux and learn the terms.
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2) Straw man?
> 3) Fail to find it, find only cellular correlates (or nothing, if you
> are Descartes!). 4) CONCLUSION: Phenomenality doesn't exist. I can't do science.
>Who concludes this? Not Dennett or Churchland or Pinker - or anyone else
> I can think of. Sounds like you're setting up a straw man.
Have you been listening? Holy smoke! I already said this in an email to Bruno. Who cares squat about what philosophers think? They are NOT doing the science. This is a problem with scientific method! Scientists do the science, not philosophers! All I have to do is reach out to the nearest scientist (like right outside my door where I can hear rats squealing) and tell thim I'm doing science on qualia. If they have any clue at all they'll class you as non-scientific. Why, because according to them "you can't be scientific (empiricalo) about qualia". The .0001% of the population who talk about this stuff do not represent the industrialised beheamoth that is mainstram science. That's who I am talking about. Especially the ones doing neuroscience- where it most definitely matters the most. Almost totally devoid of physicists in any way that matters in relation to subjectivity. This is a real living cultural issue.
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3) The delusions of the rational empiricist.
> How do I maintain this fallacy? a) Ascribe (delude youself) that
> scientific generalisations a la F = MA are literally implemented by the natural world.
> What scientist does that?? Try reading - >
> http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/nothing.html
> some philosophy of science by a scientist.
In denying phenomenality itself as scientific evidence scientists are tacitly
a) in denial - claims made about the underlying natural world are meaningless. This is the radical empiricist.
b) in delusion.- the underlying natural world is a clockwork implementation of mathematical models. This is the radical rationalist.
Scientists are enrolled automatically in these 'camps' (or inbetweens thereof) without question. Without them being told they have been. They are then trained not to know there is a question to ask.
Here's an extract from your own quote!!!
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Nothing/02_StuffKicks.pdf
"...Still, scientists believe that their observations and the models they build to describe those observations have something to do with an ultimate reality. They reject the notion that scientific models are merely the subjective narratives of their particular culture, as some postmodern authors have asserted. The great success of science and its dominant role in human life belies the postmodern claim..."
Can't you see that the argument is right and wrong at the same time?
Yes: models are merely the subjective narratives of their particular culture
Yes: observations have something to do with an ultimate reality.
This is the quintessential form of the blindness. An inability to see that just because we have an 'ism bucket, that the natural world shall comply and obey the 'ism bucket.
and......
"The great success of science and its dominant role in human life belies the postmodern claim"
Not quite so......In one glaring singular place we have chronic failure: phenomenality....another quote from my paper.....
"This is the mystery of phenomenal consciousness[Chalmers, 1996, ;Chalmers, 2000] and the singular exemplar of chronic failure of science to understand the natural world. Failure is it’s ongoing culture and it can be seen in a summary text[Block, 2003], broadcast media[Mitchell, 2003], books[Koch, 2004, ;McGinn, 1999] and other print media[Searle, 2005]. The failure appears to be because we can’t observe something and therefore conclude we can’t ‘be scientific’. This is a category mistake with the definition of science, not an evidentiary failure. The conclusion that it is not scientific is an error of the type illustrated by the following quotation:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
M. Rees
[Barrow and Tipler, 1988] page 586
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4) Theorems
> b) Fail to be isolate a theorem of science (a theorem about the worlds
> characterisation by theorems, which is of exactly the same validity as
> F = MA, a property of the natural world).
Theorems are propositions of mathematics. What do they have to do with science?
A _scientific_ theorem (hypothesis, postulate....blah blah whatever...) is a descriptive proposition that is NEVER proven. It remains permanently in a state of useful but tentative verisimiltude awaiting the first refuting evidence. They are NOT proven like mathematical theorems. The entire collection of ontological scientific theorems can be denoted in set theoretical terms as a set thus:
tn = The natural world in < insert context> behaves as follows <insert behaviour>
If a scientific theorem may contain a mathematically represented generalisation like f = ma.
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5) The mother of all scientific theorems, t0
t0 = The natural world in the context of being scientific about the natural world behaves as to formulate scientific theorems denoted tN, each of which is a statement of regularity in a specific context in the natural world arrived at through the process of critical argument and that in principle can be refuted through the process of experiencing evidence of the regularity.
This theorem exists in the literature but has never been written down in one place, never tested and never even reviewed properly. The evidence that it is a scientific theorem comes from dozens of books and traces back to aritotle. It is a theorem about the natural worlds amenability to descriptions by theorems.
Science is being unscientific because i has failed to enact critical argument on t0. If it did we wouldn't be here arguing about phenomenality or the structure of science. Me doing exactly that review on behalf of science has singled out unscientific behaviour in relation to t0. To find the hole you merely have to examine in detail the one word in t0 : experience. You get paradoxical behaviour: science behaving very strangely and totally failing to _explain_ (causally necesstiate) anything, let alone phenomenality....merely describing.
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Isn't this the same discovery Plato made about 3000yrs ago. How do the tautologies of logic and mathematic "generate" the appearance of the natural world? Do you mean the mathematical models of physics, or what? Have you considered the other possibility - that the material world generates, via our brains, all that a-priori stuff.
You are trying to belittle my proposition as adding nothing, when it is adding something. A two-sided epistemology inclusive of causal necessity. Have you been listening? Plato did nothing of the sort.
>>
>> Phenomenal consciousness is the key and ONLY evidence for both. Both
>> sides are only a representation of the natural world... all we can do
>> when we are inside it, made of it. A cognitive approach to science...
>> When you do this you start to get answers.
> I don't see anything new in this.
Well then perhaps you can explain the gigantic hole in epistemology better than me with empirical evidence. Read the literature........I can do no more. I am not here to throw away intellectual property. I am here to help you scrutinise science and flush out aspects responsible for promulgating complete failure of science to deal with phenomenality, not to explain phenomenality. It's step 1 of a very very long process.
> It has long been recognized that subjective experience (is
> that "phenomenality"?) is the basis of knowledge; that we only
> have representations (models) of the natural world, which we create.
Really? Then perhaps you better explain when, where, how this has made it into neuroscience....Why don't we have a physics of subjectivity? Why is this statement still treated as an oxymoron? Why do all mainstream neuroscientists up to their armpits in offal deny phenomenality as scientifically approachable? Why does the only paradigmatic scientific approach to consciousness (phenomenality), the NCC (neural correlates of consciousness, courtesy of Sir Francis Crick) paradigm insist that somehow they will explain phenomenality (underlying causality) with descriptions when for 300 years we f = ma has not explained underlying causality).
You fail to truly grasp the picture. It does not matter what my model or anyone else's model of phenomenality actually is. The same discussion would ensue. The same symptoms for science would be seen. The same ogoing failure would be found. Me telling you the physics of my particular flavour of a solution to phenomenality changes nothing of the importance of all the things we have discussed. If I told you you'd still not have grasped the implications.
So forget about my model for the moment. Just take it as MODEL X. A real physics solution to phenomenality. Then take in the whole implication for science and you'll have the same discussion. Layers 3/4 enable chip technology and I'm not compromising the IP. However I have a duty to the disciplines to help sort out the implications of a real solution, regardless of the detail. That is what this is about.
So from now on lets simply call it MODEL_X and keep to the real issue of the implications for science and the surrounding mileux.
cheers
Colin Hales
Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 02:11:39 PDT