tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post3101781365619088924..comments2024-03-28T13:39:03.094-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Churchland on dualism, Part IVEdward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-75525902646347989942022-07-06T14:08:05.494-07:002022-07-06T14:08:05.494-07:00=="Is the soul ..."==
What do you mean ...=="Is the soul ..."==<br /><br />What do you mean by 'soul'?<br /><br />=="Is the soul identical before and after experiencing something new the same ? No."==<br /><br />Really? And your evidence for this is?<br /><br />=="Then how did it changed if there in no parts to change ? Or it is a whole new soul ?"==<br /><br /><i>Whatever it is that you mean by 'soul'</i>, if materialism/physicalism (i.e. atheism) were taken <i>seriously</i> by its adherents, then they would indeed answer that yes, it is a new 'soul'.Ilíonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15339406092961816142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1101604336706853392022-07-03T17:42:30.912-07:002022-07-03T17:42:30.912-07:00Is the soul identical before and after experiencin...Is the soul identical before and after experiencing something new the same ? No.<br />Then how did it changed if there in no parts to change ? Or it is a whole new soul ?<br /><br />Psychology seems to have refuted decarte, as they are things in our mind we consciously don't know about...swaggerswaggmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16452871878835259394noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-20207365287435148062010-07-01T05:06:14.316-07:002010-07-01T05:06:14.316-07:00Codgitator: Thanks. I agree about qualia being in...Codgitator: Thanks. I agree about qualia being inescapable. I suppose an "imperceptible" world would be possible though; it would be all quantitative instead (i.e. our experience of it would be all number and intellectually comprehensible attributes, rather than sensible ones). An interesting (though perhaps unanswerable) side-question is: is the world perceptible to beings that have no senses? That is, do angels, being immaterial, have any awareness of the quality red, or do they understand matter only in quantitative terms? <br /><br /><i>I'm not a dogmatist about qualia but I do find objections against them suspiciously of the "protest too much" flavor (!). </i> <br /><br />Heh. Qualia may be "mysterious" insofar as we don't completely understand them; but explaining away our actual experiences is surely more mysterious.Davidnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-77746762806754536912010-06-27T22:26:20.877-07:002010-06-27T22:26:20.877-07:00...
There is something telling in explaining "......<br />There is something telling in explaining "what wavelength goes with what color" (e.g., http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html ), since that is really the case: in nature a certain wavelength of light is formally united to a quale, and it's just a bias to say the latter is an epiphenomenon of (or even a non-existent predication to) the former. For all we know, the wavelength parameters of "red" could be accidental to "red" in other worlds. In the meanwhile, though, our encounter with such wavelengths is inherently "qualic", otherwise it is an unperceived encounter, and thus not an encounter at all. "I saw a colorless rainbow of refracted light"--what? "I felt a rough stone without texture under my foot"--huh? "Scalding water splashed on my hand but I know it wasn't really hot"--ehh, how's that? <br /><br />As I say, I'm not a dogmatist about qualia but I do find objections against them suspiciously of the "protest too much" flavor (!). <br /><br />Best, thanks as always for a cordial dialogue,Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-54490836508717873432010-06-27T22:25:12.433-07:002010-06-27T22:25:12.433-07:00...
My basic impression, which I don't hold do......<br />My basic impression, which I don't hold dogmatically, is that qualia really are inescapable, otherwise "perception" becomes vacuous. (I'd like to say qualia are the respective "modes" of a thing's sensible forms. But I can't really unpack that right now, so I mention it only in passing.) Even if the "color" or "tone" of an object or sound is just how one module in our brain codes the synaptic emissions of one or more other modules, nevertheless there is a perceptual *content* in those codings which reconnects us with the rich perceptible world. To say the idea of there being a rich perceptible only begs the question, I must wonder what a world wholly lacking in rich perceptible qualities would be like. The word imperceptible obviously comes to mind. "The feeling of what happens" is a legitimate concept, otherwise either nothing happens or there are no feelings. But that kind of reduction is a Pyhrric victory, since the whole point of materialist phenomenology is to account for admittedly real feelings without qualia. But how can there be a feeling without a distinct *feeling* to it? Dreaming may be "what your brain does at night," but *what a dream is* requires qualitative content. A perceptually blank dream is not a dream at all, like a sound without a pitch is not really a sound. <br /><br />If a neurologist tells me that when I look at a clown's nose I am "really" only having light of wavelength 650 nm strike my retina and trigger electrochemical firings in my occipital lobe, etc., it only describes the means by which a qualia is actuated in me. It doesn't reduce my qualitative experience, since that experience is exactly what we agree exists. It is thus merely a matter of taste as to how to verbalize that experience. <br /><br />If you see me realxing with headphones on and ask me what I'm listening to, and I say, "nice music", I'm not really saying anything at all. Nice music amounts to more than "vibrations in my eardum," because the pleasure of the listening is wrapped up with the qualitative content of the music. Both the neurologist's description of sight and my taste for "nice music" simpliciter lack *content*, yet the inescapable content of both is qualia. <br />...Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-47426362522126496022010-06-27T22:24:20.131-07:002010-06-27T22:24:20.131-07:00David:
Qualiana is a term of art I invented (on ...David: <br /><br />Qualiana is a term of art I invented (on the spot), since I didn't feel like writing "the belief in qualia". Qualiana refers to the whole qualia discourse/debate. For some, the very existence of the debate is a grave error, worthy only of a Wittgensteinian exile of "the very idea" as a linguistic confusion. <br /><br />I agree the debate gets much more interesting when we factor in the other senses, so I'm glad fuzziness is on your mind too. <br /><br />I guess I'm just not comfortable with the idea of "intrinsic physical properties" versus "scondary properties [for people]", like molecular bonds versus greenness, since both those bonds and qualitative chromaticity only hold *under the right circumstances* (i.e., tweak with the strong and weak forces, and the bonds go all out of whack; tweak the lighting, quality of air, colored contact lenses, etc., and as a result etc.). Appearing red is intrinsic to a clown's nose *only under the right circumstances* but therefore no less intrinsic than bond properties for an object under the right circumstances. <br />...Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-59586254102076547982010-06-27T13:48:48.001-07:002010-06-27T13:48:48.001-07:00I find functionalist accounts of qualia totally sa...I find functionalist accounts of qualia totally satisfactory. The way things feel to me influences my behavior and thoughts in countless ways. The more I think about all of those diverse influences, the more satisfied I am with saying that what red looks like to me is a physical state in me which is determined by its causal connections with the endless other things it's causally connected to. This account obviously has the advantage of making it non-mysterious why we should expect other people to have similar qualia to our own. Most of the alleged counter-examples seem to me to be cases of saying "you could have the qualia without this causal connection" or "you could have that causal connection without any qualia," while ignoring the possibility that maybe it takes more than one or just a few causal connections to constitute qualia.<br /><br />I suppose I should credit this; this is of course basically Dan Dennett's "fame" model of consciousness. However, I also think it makes unusually good sense of some of Hume's views about impressions, so I think it may be older than Dennett.Protagorashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12645042531440559735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-46291329777590232072010-06-27T13:17:15.533-07:002010-06-27T13:17:15.533-07:00Is the topic of qualia actually the core of Husser...Is the topic of qualia actually the core of Husserl's phenomenology?<br /><br />Is it fair to say we are in nature and through our bodies we are interconnected with nature? Our bodies have unique ways to take nature in and make "sense"-ations of it. What the various sensations "feel" like are the qualia of conscious sense awareness. Consciousness is what our perceptions of what we are caring about (intention) feel like.<br /><br />As different species have different sense perception organs, they have different qualia/consciousness (Nagle's bat). But even within a species, bodily organs are somewhat different, so a synesthete will feel red very uniquely fron someone else.Just Thinkingnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-68540429750092980762010-06-27T12:26:07.859-07:002010-06-27T12:26:07.859-07:00Hm, now you have me wondering about touch. (Is &q...Hm, now you have me wondering about touch. (Is "fuzziness" a different kind of sensation from "smoothness", the way redness is different from blueness? Or is there just "touchiness", and fuzzy things are the result of a lot of little sensations of touch with little spaces between, whereas smoothness is an uninterrupted stretch of touch-sensation? Ah well, that's a different question, though, so I'd better stick to the topic.) The act/potency thing isn't the issue, I would say; that works fine to explain how I can abstract "twoness" from a pair of tennis balls: I can actualise the same twoness in my mind that is in the objects.<br /><br />The twoness, in this example, really is intrinsically in the pair of objects. Even if God could somehow(!) trick me into abstracting threeness from the pair, it clearly would be a <b>trick</b>: there would be something wrong going on. But if God instead made me to hear 262Hz not as middle C, but as C an octave higher, where's the problem? Let's suppose for simplicity that God made everyone always hear that way. Why not? I cannot see any possible contradiction in that. (Or indeed, any contradiction in God's making 262Hz sound like the A an octave higher!) Nothing would break down, our experiences would always agree with physics, and with each other. It's not even possible that we could run into such problems, whereas if our intellects didn't grasp twoness as twoness, everything would fall apart, our experiences simply could not be logically consistent.<br /><br />I have to conclude then that whereas the twoness <i>is</i>intrinsic to physical objects, <i>"soundness"</i> is not. Same for colouredness. (I didn't mean a green thing appears blue under a funny light, though; I meant it like the old saw of why can't what you perceive as redness "feel" like blueness to me (even though we both call it "red", of course)? We could go even farther: what if your sense of "redness" feels like "middle C" to me?? Bizarre, but still not logically impossible.) Touch is a bit different: however it works, clearly the physical structure (the arrangement and position of molecules, etc.) is part of what makes different touch-sensations. The molecules and their arrangement obviously are intrinsic to the physical object, so at least part of touch is intrinsic in a way that colour and tone are not.<br /><br />As for Lichtenberg, we still have plenty of intrinsic forms (number, shape, at least some parts of touch). And the qualities that I want to say are not intrinsic are still tied to intrinsic properties of matter (whether it could have been different or not, the fact is that middle C <i>is</i> perceived when and only when a physical wave of 262Hz exists). I don't know what "Qualiana" is, but I'm not positing an antropocentric error, just an anthropic nature.Davidnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-104199153106422832010-06-27T10:36:28.408-07:002010-06-27T10:36:28.408-07:00Act and potency, young Jedi. I find qualia in obje...Act and potency, young Jedi. I find qualia in objects the same way I find the form of those qualia––in the ACT of abstraction. Does a tennis ball "have" fuzziness in a dark, soundproof vacuum? Does it also have sphericity? Patently, for its adhered fibers and its sphericity are what makes it a tennis ball (otherwise it might just be a smooshed, bleached racquetball heheh). Yet, the fuzziness of the fibers is only actually "fuzzy" to sense organs that are, well, sensitive to fibers in the act of touching. A tennis ball's fuzziness is both objectively "in" the ball and subjectively "in" the perceiver, since for Aristhomism, the object is really (intentionally) one with the subject. To a dust mite, the tennis ball is neither fuzzy nor spheroid, nor for that matter neon green, yet I fail to see how the mite's inability to actualize the form of fuzziness, sphericity, and greenness deprives the ball of those intrinsic features. As for the ball appearing blue under an ultraviolet light (?), this is actually a case of us abstracting a distinct qualia from a distinct act of perception. If Qualiana is allegedly an anthropocentric error, then all perception is anthropocentrically skewed, and we are left in Lichtenbergian solipsism. <br /><br />Or so it seems to me at this section of my worldline. ;) <br /><br />Best,Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-15876642253691572722010-06-26T15:18:23.856-07:002010-06-26T15:18:23.856-07:00Codgitator: "Yet it seems absurd to say that ...Codgitator: <i>"Yet it seems absurd to say that such colors wavelengths lack qualia anymore than do the colors we commonly perceive."</i><br /><br />Really? I would say they do lack any qualia! Actually, I don't think there's any logical contradiction to it, so they might have qualia; but we have no reason to think they do. In fact, I would say I cannot imagine infrared, etc. at all. It's possible there are no other colours/qualia other than what humans can experience; or maybe there are but humans are incapable of experiencing any quality beyond human capabilities (I mean mental capabilities here, not physical, though I rather suspect it doesn't make sense to be limited in that kind of a way). Or maybe there are no other qualities, but if God created some then we could experience them (though perhaps not physically, maybe God would have to beam them into our minds). It's tricky because qualia seem to be free-floating in some way: they're not implicitly tied into anything else, so which qualia exist and how we come to perceive them seems to be entirely contingent on how God felt like setting up reality.<br /><br />But OK, let's assume that "invisible" light also has colours (still not sure retinal augmentation would help: what could you do with X-rays that hit your eye other than "translate" them into some signal that we already know... i.e. just like a regular X-ray machine "translates" X-rays into "white" in the pictures it produces — but let's just assume that too). I would expect the qualia to be "parallel" to the physical wavelengths of light, insofar as that makes sense (and is that very far, really??), but not because they would <i>have</i> to; only because God likes making harmonious universes. <br /><br />It's perhaps easier to see with sound; double the wavelength, and you get the "same" sound an octave lower. That's an obvious tie-in with the physics: our tonal qualia match up with the sound waves in a nice mathematical pattern. But it's still arbitrary, as you can see by asking why is <i>this</i> frequency middle C instead double or half the wavelength? Here's another question: what makes this sound wave "middle C" instead of "redness"? Why can't we "hear" light, or "touch" sounds? How do we know that everything doesn't have all kinds of qualia (like to a synaesthete)? But at the end of the day, no matter how many ways the qualities map onto the matter (e.g. frequencies <—> octaves), it seems to be a contingent alignment. The qualia aren't "in" the matter itself, no matter how intently Mary studies physics and neuroscience and the rest.Davidnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-88005053262684888222010-06-25T22:35:17.501-07:002010-06-25T22:35:17.501-07:00Imagine a wavelength of light beyond what humans c...Imagine a wavelength of light beyond what humans can normally perceive. Work hard on 'seeing' it by analogy to the colors closest to it within the human visual spectrum. Maybe it's infrared or ultraviolet, or even farther beyond them. I would say that no matter how "vivid" your mental grasp of such "invisible colors" is, it still falls short of an actual qualitative experience of them, say, after a retinal augmentation. Yet it seems absurd to say that such colors wavelengths lack qualia anymore than do the colors we commonly perceive. Otherwise, we would not imagine their rarified colors, otherwise inaccessible to us, BY MEANS OF analogical chromatic inference. If the notional size of light wavelenghts (e.g., 580mm) is a valid device in scientific inferences (e.g., if we raise the frequency of this beam by X, it will generate a light of Z wavelength, or vice versa), then it seems that qualia are similarly permissible in phenomenological inferences (e.g., if this red light beam were shifted into ultraviolet light, it would look such-and-such to a capable perceiver). <br /><br />Or maybe I'm just huffing ASCII fumes.Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-89788270294549982602010-06-25T16:33:42.326-07:002010-06-25T16:33:42.326-07:00B.Feser: "[point 1 to Aaron]"
And thus ...<b>B.Feser:</b> "<i>[point 1 to Aaron]</i>"<br /><br />And thus do we <i>know and elucidate</i> -- in the language that self-identifying atheists themselves accept as valid -- that atheism is false and necessarily so.<br /><br /><br /><i>We (being rational beings in a material world) are the proof that God is.</i>Ilíonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15339406092961816142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-47695397295688286162010-06-25T16:29:03.265-07:002010-06-25T16:29:03.265-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Ilíonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15339406092961816142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-18502746776042995002010-06-25T16:17:51.960-07:002010-06-25T16:17:51.960-07:00David: "Of course, science isn't really a...<b>David:</b> "<i>Of course, science isn't really as rational or fundamental as the Scientisists would have us believe. ...</i>"<br /><br />I call such persons '<i>scientistes</i>' (think of Miss Piggy, the '<i>Artiste</i>'), for it seems to me that a specific, and mocking, name is needed for such <i>poseurs</i>, whether or not they are practicing scientists in their more lucid and rational moments.Ilíonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15339406092961816142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-55586215607408108252010-06-25T05:37:37.737-07:002010-06-25T05:37:37.737-07:00Thanks for the Ross recommendation. I find his ph...Thanks for the Ross recommendation. I find his philosophy of mathematics to be naive and wrong, the latter being more important but the former being why I can't explain why very briefly. The best I can do is say that I follow Carnap, and the principle of tolerance is incompatible with the claims Ross makes about what we "must be" doing when we do logic or mathematics. Carnap was right when he said "in logic there are no morals," and Ross is trying to argue that there have to be morals in logic. If you presuppose that morals are necessary, no theory without them will satisfy you, but it seems to me that this presupposition is unnecessary, and furthermore unsatisfiable and so inevitably counter-productive.<br /><br />It is evident that I can't say anything brief and helpful about your second point (since my efforts so far to express my points briefly have clearly not been helpful); needless to say I still think you're wrong, and will no doubt have something long-winded to say after I've looked at your book.<br /><br />On your third point, I do not use "the scientific worldview" and "science" interchangeably; I suppose I used the former expression rather than your apparently preferred expression "naturalistic philosophy" because I'm such a Carnapian, but I mean roughly the same thing by it as you mean by "naturalistic philosophy." Though I think the scientific worldview is very intimately connected with science, I realize that that is one of the points of dispute between us.Protagorashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12645042531440559735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-55119421049827574302010-06-24T23:02:50.987-07:002010-06-24T23:02:50.987-07:00Professor Feser,
Two quick questions about Mary. ...Professor Feser,<br /><br />Two quick questions about Mary. How does God know "red"? And what do you think of this paper by Linda Zagzebski on omnisubjectivity?<br />http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/Z/Linda.T.Zagzebski-1/omnisubj3.docVincent Torleyhttp://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/index.htmlnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-9005235160696022062010-06-24T17:29:01.593-07:002010-06-24T17:29:01.593-07:00Here's Pat Churchland on the latest episode of...<a href="http://philosophybites.com/" rel="nofollow">Here's</a> Pat Churchland on the latest episode of 'Philosophy Bites' complaining about how misunderstood she and her husband are.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-30940721966013031522010-06-24T16:15:06.871-07:002010-06-24T16:15:06.871-07:00Aaron,
Three brief points:
1. Certain intentiona...Aaron,<br /><br />Three brief points:<br /><br />1. Certain intentional phenomena simply cannot be explained away by replacing them with a physicalistically "respectable" ersatz. To borrow an example from James Ross, when we carry out mathematical operations or reason in accordance with modus ponens and the like, what we do is determinate in a way that no physical operation can be even in principle (as, Ross argues, the arguments of Quine, Kripke, and others show). But it won't do to respond to this problem by simply responding "Fine, we don't really carry out those operations or reason in accordance with the logical principles in question; we just approximate them." For the operations are all-or-nothing. Merely to "approximate" valid reasoning is just to reason invalidly. Hence to deny that we ever do anything but approximate such reasoning is to deny that we ever reason validly, or at least that we can ever know that we do so -- which undermines every argument, including arguments for physicalism. Furthermore, even to deny that we actually carry out the operations in question presupposes grasping the operations, and thus having thoughts that are as determinate as the operations themselves -- which, again, means doing something nothing physical can do. This is, of course, just a sketch. See Ross's article "Immaterial Aspects of Thought" for the whole story. It's online, so just Google it.<br /><br />2. Accounts like those of Millikan are ambiguous. Either they implicitly deny that "aboutness" or "directedness" is really there in the natural world, in which case they simply change the subject; or they don't deny it, in which case they implicitly return to something like Aristotelian-Scholastic final causality. More power to them in the latter case, but in that case they do not constitute defenses of physicalism. There's more about this in TLS.<br /><br />3. We neo-Aristotelians aren't critical of the "scientific worldview," if by that you mean the actual results of science. We're critical only of the naturalistic philosophy of nature in terms of which science is too often interpreted, even if this is often peddled as if it were itself established by science.Edward Feserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-80735076824623093652010-06-24T15:27:00.888-07:002010-06-24T15:27:00.888-07:00David,
I think this is Chomsky's point from t...David,<br /><br /><i>I think this is Chomsky's point from the recent quotation: everything that a materialist needs, he counts as "matter". What happens when the day comes that, say, biology does demonstrably require design? Then "design" will suddenly become a law of nature (even though they won't call it that, any more than they call "form" or "finality" by their real names when they use them).</i><br /><br />I agree with this wholeheartedly, and that's been one of the biggest eye-openers for me in these discussions. That tendency to say, "We don't need (forms, final causes, teleology, essences, intentionality, qualia, etc, etc), because we have (explanation/concepts labeled physicalist)!" Then when more details are asked for.. strange, it actually sounds like those things we don't need are playing a role in the explanation after all.<br /><br />I was flipping through reviews of some philosophy books at Notre Dame's Philosophy Review site just today, and saw one review discussing how one of the contributors to the book was apparently making the move of claiming qualia and subjectivity as physical, which mostly seemed to add up to 'Clearly I think it's it real, and anything real must be physical, so these things are physical now.'<br /><br />It's one reason why I'm less and less interested in 'physicalist arguments'. Look at this "ectoplasm" - not only is it not what even substance dualists were discussing, but "ectoplasm" sounds downright physicalist to me. I go further than Ed in that Ed thinks physicalism can and does include all kinds of weirdness, but the line is drawn at formal and final causes. I suspect even that line isn't drawn - or at least, if there's any line, it's "you can't call these things which are hard or impossible to distinguish from formal and final causes, formal and final causes."Crudehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04178390947423928444noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-70482382932116403032010-06-24T10:46:00.487-07:002010-06-24T10:46:00.487-07:00Intentionality seems to me to be a real and import...Intentionality seems to me to be a real and important phenomenon. Millikan seems to me to talk about a real and important phenomenon which seems real and important in ways that are suspiciously similar to the ways intentionality seems real and important. When you start telling me that Millikan's account may cover what intentionality does, but doesn't get at what it really is (presumably its mysterious essence), my sympathy for the old positivists kicks into overdrive. I do not understand what you are talking about when you refer to what intentionality is apart from what it does, and I'm afraid I suspect the problem is not on my end. But I finally broke down and ordered Feser's book on atheism from Amazon; I should have more detailed things to say about this neo-Aristotelian criticism of the scientific world view when I've had a chance to look at that.Protagorashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12645042531440559735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-59963611259232537922010-06-24T09:24:29.447-07:002010-06-24T09:24:29.447-07:00Aaron Boyden: And, of course, thinking that intent...Aaron Boyden: <i>And, of course, thinking that intentionality can be explained makes me especially suspicious of theories claiming it can't be. </i><br /><br />There can be many things to say about something even though it's "simple" or primitive. (E.g. there's lots you might explain about electrons, but that doesn't mean they're made up of smaller parts.) Millikan's book addresses language and meaning, and in particular what it <i>does</i> rather than what it <i>is</i>, but it's not clear that when she connects that to intention that she's talking about the same thing as traditional philosophy. In fact, it seems clear that she isn't:<br /><br />Feser: <i>Hence "directedness" or "aboutness" is ultimately not the right way to think about it…</i><br />Millikan:<i> The key notion that is needed in order to discuss intentionality ("of-ness", "aboutness")…</i>Davidnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-36485169379340123742010-06-24T08:42:34.190-07:002010-06-24T08:42:34.190-07:00"I will have more to say about the knowledge ..."I will have more to say about the knowledge argument – and in particular about Jackson’s later change of heart about it – in a future post."<br /><br />Looking forward to this.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-31845902947189169882010-06-24T04:30:20.415-07:002010-06-24T04:30:20.415-07:00I on the other hand actually tend to think that, f...I on the other hand actually tend to think that, for example, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277378728&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">Millikan</a> manages to make a good start on explaining intentionality. I mean this not in the sense that she doesn't violate physicalist assumptions so I have to give her points for ideology; I mean that I actually find her account plausible and satisfying. It seems to me when I think about it that intentionality would have to be something like that. And, of course, thinking that intentionality can be explained makes me especially suspicious of theories claiming it can't be. I guess that probably makes me different from some of the physicalists you're discussing here (though it seems to be the view of Dennett, and I would tend to say the Churchlands).Protagorashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12645042531440559735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-34501286281832445712010-06-23T21:54:27.676-07:002010-06-23T21:54:27.676-07:00Prof. Feser: Dualists traditionally tend to regard...Prof. Feser:<i> Dualists traditionally tend to regard metaphysical inquiry as an enterprise every bit as rational as, but distinct from and more fundamental than, empirical science. </i><br /><br />Of course, science isn't really as rational or fundamental as the Scientisists would have us believe. <i>That's</i> mathematics they're thinking of, but because science uses so much math, they like to pretend that science itself is the indisputable, objective, ultimate fruit of pure logic.... Traditional metaphysics on the other hand is like mathematics (though not precisely, since obviously its subject matter is not mathematical objects!). Indeed, mediaeval philosophy can be found laid out just like a mathematical proof in geometry.<br /><br />I've never been quite sure about Jackson's story about Mary; I think it's a good way to illustrate the point, but if Mary studied everything there was to know about football players, would that necessarily make her a good football player? Note that this doesn't even make it possible to conclude that redness is anything physical — maybe studying light and perception would actually trigger a sensation of redness in her, just as detecting wavelengths of light triggers sensations of redness normally. Qualia are funny that way. To repeat an earlier question of mine, how does a quality get communicated to my mind when it can't be abstracted from anything I actually sense?<br /><br />I can see two apples, and get the two-ness in my mind, easy. (Well, not so easy, since the information is encoded in light and in signals in my brain, which have to be decoded — but the point is, the two-ness is out there, so it can end up abstracted in my mind.) Similarly with the roundness of the apples: physical stuff (molecules, etc.) has actual position, and shape is just a certain positioning of the apple's matter, and those relative positions (albeit encoded in some way) can reach my mind where that form of roundness is intelligible, and I can perceive that the apples are round. <br /><br />But the apple's redness is different. Position and number are quantities which I can perceive through my physical senses, but "redness" does not seem to be. What I perceive with my sense of sight is light of a certain frequency, and while that is the direct and natural result of the light's interacting with the nature of the apple, it's not <i>colouredness</i>. The transmission via light via my retina via synaptic signals, etc. isn't the point; that happens with the size or shape of the apple, but in those cases, the transmission is carrying the right kind of in-form-ation. In the case of colour, it isn't. The apple may really be red after all (i.e. participating in the form of redness), but there doesn't seem to be any way for that information to be communicated to my senses. Augustinian illumination or Leibnizian pre-harmony could explain it, but it seems more direct to conclude that the redness isn't in the apple itself; or if it is it's a coincidence. (The apple could participate in blueness, but we'd still see red because it's not really the blueness that we're "seeing".)<br /><br />This isn't to say that the colour is arbitrary or subjective (other than the obvious sense that it is a sensation in a <b>subject</b>); presumably God simply constituted our minds so that certain physical frequencies would appear to us as colours, and certain other kinds of physical frequencies as sounds, and so on. That would be part of human nature, and He could have given us a different nature just as much as He could have given us eight fingers each or twelve. But no matter what kind of nature God gave us, two would still be two and round would still be round.Davidnoreply@blogger.com