I’m saying that a brain is an environment where ideas can do interesting things (like reproducing themselves, mutating, splitting and recombining) comparable to the interesting things that started happening a very long time ago between amino acids and phospholipid membranes and assorted other organic chemicals which eventually resulted in the formation of brains. Any Turing-complete computer is also a sort of environment for ideas.
An idea outside an environment capable of supporting it does not do interesting things. It might be dormant, like a virus or bacterial spore, and colonize any less-hostile environment to which it’s introduced. It might not. As yet, the only reliable way to distinguish between a dormant idea and a different arrangement of the same parts which does not constitute a dormant idea is to find an environment in which it will do interesting things.
For example, if you find a piece of baked clay with some scratch-marks in it, and want to know if they’re cuneiform or just random scratches, you could show it to an archaeologist. The archaeologist looks at the tablet and compares it to prior knowledge about cuneiform—that is to say, transfers information about shape and coloration into her brain via the optic nerve and, once inside, drops them into the informational equivalent of a dish of agar. If anything interesting pops up, it’s an idea. If not, either it’s just noise, or it’s an idea that the archaeologist can’t figure out. There’s no way to definitively prove the absence of potential ideas in a given information-bearing substrate.
If these disembodied qualia-properties don’t help you make any actionable predictions beyond what physicalism could do, and their presence is unfalsifiable, I can’t see any point to this debate. Is it a social-signaling contest of some sort?
A creature isn’t conscious until there’s a brain with a concept of ‘consciousness’ that identifies it as such.
OK, so according to you, we have concepts existing before and independently of consciousness, and we also have that consciousness is not a property that is objectively present (or else there’d be no need to appeal to the conceptual judgement of a brain, as a necessary cause of consciousness’s existence). Both of these have to be true if you are to avoid circularity.
The second one already falsifies your account of consciousness. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not a matter of convention. It’s an internal fact about you which is not affected by whether I am around to express opinions.
It sounds like you want the consciousness of a brain to depend on the conceptual judgements of that same brain, which is at least less abjectly dependent on the epistemology of outsiders. But it’s still false. If you are conscious, you are conscious regardless of whatever opinions or concepts you have. Your conceptual capacities limit your possible conscious experience, in the sense that you can’t consciously identify something as an X if you don’t have the concept X, but whether or not you’re conscious doesn’t depend on how you are using (or misusing) your conceptual faculties at any time.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self. Even raw, self-oblivious sensory experience is a form of consciousness.
If these disembodied qualia-properties don’t help you make any actionable predictions beyond what physicalism could do, and their presence is unfalsifiable, I can’t see any point to this debate. Is it a social-signaling contest of some sort?
Maybe my very latest comments will clear things up a little. The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self.
Ah, so we’re arguing over definitions.
The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Let’s say you take an organism capable of receiving and interpreting information in the form of light, such as e.g. a ferret with working eyes and a visual cortex. Duplicate it with arbitrary precision, keep one of the copies in a totally lightless box for a few minutes and shine a dazzling but nondamaging spotlight on the other for the same period of time. Then open the box, shut off the spotlight, and show them both a picture.
The ferret from the box would see blindingly intense light, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem bright and vivid. The ferret from the spotlight would see near-total darkness, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem dull and blurry. Same picture, very different subjective experience, but it’s all the result of physiological (mostly neurological) processes that can be adequately explained by physicalism.
Does the theory of qualia make independently-verifiable predictions that physicalism cannot? Or, if the predictions are the same, is it somehow simpler to describe mathematically? In the absence of either of those conditions, I am forced to consider the theory of qualia needlessly complex.
Where else would it be?
I’m saying that a brain is an environment where ideas can do interesting things (like reproducing themselves, mutating, splitting and recombining) comparable to the interesting things that started happening a very long time ago between amino acids and phospholipid membranes and assorted other organic chemicals which eventually resulted in the formation of brains. Any Turing-complete computer is also a sort of environment for ideas.
An idea outside an environment capable of supporting it does not do interesting things. It might be dormant, like a virus or bacterial spore, and colonize any less-hostile environment to which it’s introduced. It might not. As yet, the only reliable way to distinguish between a dormant idea and a different arrangement of the same parts which does not constitute a dormant idea is to find an environment in which it will do interesting things.
For example, if you find a piece of baked clay with some scratch-marks in it, and want to know if they’re cuneiform or just random scratches, you could show it to an archaeologist. The archaeologist looks at the tablet and compares it to prior knowledge about cuneiform—that is to say, transfers information about shape and coloration into her brain via the optic nerve and, once inside, drops them into the informational equivalent of a dish of agar. If anything interesting pops up, it’s an idea. If not, either it’s just noise, or it’s an idea that the archaeologist can’t figure out. There’s no way to definitively prove the absence of potential ideas in a given information-bearing substrate.
If these disembodied qualia-properties don’t help you make any actionable predictions beyond what physicalism could do, and their presence is unfalsifiable, I can’t see any point to this debate. Is it a social-signaling contest of some sort?
Let’s go back to your original statement:
OK, so according to you, we have concepts existing before and independently of consciousness, and we also have that consciousness is not a property that is objectively present (or else there’d be no need to appeal to the conceptual judgement of a brain, as a necessary cause of consciousness’s existence). Both of these have to be true if you are to avoid circularity.
The second one already falsifies your account of consciousness. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not a matter of convention. It’s an internal fact about you which is not affected by whether I am around to express opinions.
It sounds like you want the consciousness of a brain to depend on the conceptual judgements of that same brain, which is at least less abjectly dependent on the epistemology of outsiders. But it’s still false. If you are conscious, you are conscious regardless of whatever opinions or concepts you have. Your conceptual capacities limit your possible conscious experience, in the sense that you can’t consciously identify something as an X if you don’t have the concept X, but whether or not you’re conscious doesn’t depend on how you are using (or misusing) your conceptual faculties at any time.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self. Even raw, self-oblivious sensory experience is a form of consciousness.
Maybe my very latest comments will clear things up a little. The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Ah, so we’re arguing over definitions.
Let’s say you take an organism capable of receiving and interpreting information in the form of light, such as e.g. a ferret with working eyes and a visual cortex. Duplicate it with arbitrary precision, keep one of the copies in a totally lightless box for a few minutes and shine a dazzling but nondamaging spotlight on the other for the same period of time. Then open the box, shut off the spotlight, and show them both a picture.
The ferret from the box would see blindingly intense light, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem bright and vivid. The ferret from the spotlight would see near-total darkness, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem dull and blurry. Same picture, very different subjective experience, but it’s all the result of physiological (mostly neurological) processes that can be adequately explained by physicalism.
Does the theory of qualia make independently-verifiable predictions that physicalism cannot? Or, if the predictions are the same, is it somehow simpler to describe mathematically? In the absence of either of those conditions, I am forced to consider the theory of qualia needlessly complex.