tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post1838916055095457941..comments2024-03-28T06:07:03.667-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: GUEST POST BY PATRICK WOLFFRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-64916316271514894642013-04-02T16:00:21.159-04:002013-04-02T16:00:21.159-04:00For a rather excellent example, we *used to* not k...For a rather excellent example, we *used to* not know how to describe other animals' perception of colors.<br /><br />But now that we have analyzed their eyes and brains in great detail, we actually can construct a picture of how other animals *see* the world.<br /><br />We know now.neroden@gmailhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07475686367097445497noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-43569181344591142192013-03-20T06:58:10.742-04:002013-03-20T06:58:10.742-04:00Dear Wolff,
I've been reading your blog for ab...Dear Wolff,<br />I've been reading your blog for about a year now and although I've never commented, I come back faithfully almost everyday, and always enjoy what you have to say.<br />I just wanted to say, in reply to Eggs Maledict, that I don't think the arguement in this post is begging the question. Yes, Patrick Wolff assumes that physicalism is true, presumably because he is convinced by good and ample evidence. But that physicalism is true is not a premise of his argument. All he's saying is that for all we know, physicalism might be able to explain qualia.<br /><br />I also wanted to ask a question to R. P. Wolff himself: I was reading Rawls and an old post of yours came to my mind, where you said that once his project of providing a theorem in game theory failed, Rawls's attachment to his two principles was only comparable to faith in the Biblical word. My question is: doesn't the Difference Principle have a strong 'intuitive force'? I don't mean it in the sense in which the first principle might have intuitive force. The latter could simply be due to the 'success' of liberalism in the last few hundred years. What I mean is that if you think inequality is bad, it's prima facie a brilliant solution to allow inequality only if it benefits those that are worse off (incidentally, it might turn out that virtually no inequality at all is the only situation that satisfies this requirement; I actually think that the greatest problem with Rawls is that to know which economic system satisfies his requirements, we would need a 'scientific' economics AND we would need perfect knowledge of the present situation, of how different situations affect judgements, etc., which just seems to be impossible).<br />Anyway, I just assume that inequality is bad (I do not care for Nozickisms, and I don't understand why you call his a 'delightful book'; it's simply evil, because it represents the sort of thought that made it ok once again to blame poverty on the poor. Although it didn't CAUSE it, it is complicit in the destruction of the welfare state all over the Western world), and I just think Rawls's proposal 'sounds good'.<br />Again, thanks for your blog. It's great to have the oppprtunity to discuss these things with you!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13337589981696719316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-79862058801831068962013-03-19T22:42:52.361-04:002013-03-19T22:42:52.361-04:00I think this piece has a rather large problem, in ...I think this piece has a rather large problem, in terms of formally begging the question. <br /><br />"But we have no reason at present to believe that a physicalist account would not be possible. Instead, we have every reason to believe that such an account should be possible, at least in principle, because we are all physical beings in the world and consciousness is a physical phenomenon."<br /><br />The precise question at hand is whether or not consciousness is a physical phenomenon, and so relying on this claim as a premise is question-begging.<br /><br /><br />"Even though we cannot now provide any sort of adequate physical description of the entire process, do we have any reason to doubt that it is entirely a physical process?"<br /><br />Certainly - the failure of a physicalist account to adequately deal with qualia problems (e.g. inverted qualia), and the empirical experience of mental states as not being physical both give us at least some reason for such doubts.<br /><br />On a related note, regarding assumptions/stipulations: <br /><br />"It is surely undeniable that bats have qualia."<br /><br />It doesn't appear to be. Certainly we have no way of testing whether bats have qualia. It seems very likely that they do, but a high likelihood is not the same as being undeniable.<br /><br />Further:<br /><br />"Let us suppose that we want to know what it is like for a bat to perceive the wall of a cave using sonar. Then we must understand the bat’s brain in sufficient detail to know precisely what physical processes are associated with “perceiving this wall under these circumstances using sonar”. In doing so, we must learn precisely where the conscious states that are associated with such perception are located, and we must identify every single relevant feature of the brain that is associated with such conscious states."<br /><br />There are more potential problems here, mostly epistemic. Given that we do not have access to the bat's qualia to begin with, how are we supposed to know what conscious states are present, let alone which brain states are associated with them. And even if we did know this, we would still need to show that the brain states fully explained and caused the mental states. I do not say that this is utterly impossible, but it certainly isn't obviously possible, even in principle.<br /><br />"But the special epistemological status of one’s own mental states has been known since Descartes, yet the general response is not to slide into solipsism. Even if I taste the food that my friend raved about, all I can really know is what it tastes like for me; I can never know for sure what it was like for her. So what?"<br /><br />So, it presents a problem for physicalist accounts.Currently the physicalist 'gold standard' in terms of philosophy of mind is functionalism, and functionalism has notorious problems dealing with qualia issues. If a better physicalist account were to be developed, we could engage with it - but currently, the lack of a good physicalist account of these issues is a good reason not to believe that physicalism is true. <br /><br />This is not the stronger claim that physicalism is impossible in principle - just that we do not currently have a convincing argument that it really is the case.<br /><br />"What is it like to be a bat? We don’t know today, but we have every reason to believe that it is in theory knowable."<br /><br />This just hasn't been established. We have reason to believe that it <b>may</b> be knowable, i.e. reasons not to dismiss the concept out of hand, but physicalism also has difficult problems which have not been adequately dealt with.<br /><br />"More importantly, until we learn far more than we know today we are wasting our time raising philosophical objections to the possibility of such knowledge."<br /><br />Nonsense. If we were to show that physicalism contains a contradiction in itself, that would prove that it is impossible. And even if this is not the case, we might learn something about epistemic limitations, or find a good <i>a priori</i> argument <b>for</b> physicalism (or against the other contenders).<br />Eggs Maledicthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16702143644807880214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-61558622335740259342013-03-19T19:07:13.171-04:002013-03-19T19:07:13.171-04:00What bothers me about qualia is that we assert tha...What bothers me about qualia is that we assert that they exist but can't describe them or define them except privatively - they are what language can't describe about our experiences. It looks for all the world that we are making inferences from locutions like "what it is like to be" as if that had to have some denotation. Subjectivity is not all that mysterious - it is a perspectival property of observer systems. The added weight that qualia are supposed to bear is where a hard problem becomes Hard, but why think it has any traction at all?<br /><br />It seems to me that this is what Wittgenstein would have called a case of being bewitched by language. If we do not assume there even is a "what it is like" apart from just <i>being</i> that observer, the issue dissipates.John S. Wilkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04417266986565803683noreply@blogger.com