Enduring Problems in Philosophy

[Ren]

yay it's a thread by @Ren

I'd love weighing in more, but unfortunately am not well-educated about philosophy. If anybody could recommend something to help me brush up, I'd appreciate you <3 it won't happen right away, but somewhere on my list of skills & knowledge to accumulate.

Most of my threads are in the philosophy section

Sure, happy to recommend stuff. I made a little introductory video back in the day, which might be helpful:

Otherwise I would recommend this article on the nature of philosophy from a contemporary perspective: https://iep.utm.edu/con-meta/

 

[dZpADTLrPmX4c]

Most of my threads are in the philosophy section

Sure, happy to recommend stuff. I made a little introductory video back in the day, which might be helpful:

Otherwise I would recommend this article on the nature of philosophy from a contemporary perspective: https://iep.utm.edu/con-meta/

thank you ^_^ much appreciated

 

[Ren]

thank you ^_^ much appreciated

You're welcome

 

[Moranga]

This thread is designed to provide a space in which to discuss any thorny philosophical problem. Anyone is free to bring forward a problem which they would like to address and discuss, in a philosophical spirit.

The list of problems in philosophy is endless, but to give a few examples:

- The Mind/Body problem
- Free will
- Evil
- Realism versus Anti-Realism in metaphysics
- The existence of God
- The nature of time
- The scientific status of theories
- The nature of mental states
- Consciousness
- The Self
- The Good
- Linguistic meaning
- The unconscious

Let's discuss anything! If nobody makes a suggestion, I'll make one myself.

Interesting List but The Nature of Time jumped off the page first. What is something I have noticed is that Time seems to speed up with age and responsibility. Its also seems to slow down at times such as leading up to something that is eagerly anticipated. I'm curious if its possible to control the experience of Time thru??? Change if perspective, focus, I don't know exactly and I know its not actually speeding up or slowing down, but I am referring to perception and feeling that it does.

 

[Moranga]

Also snowflakes all have unique but similar and symmetrical designs because they go through chaotic motions in the clouds. [/QUOTE]

The Fibonacci sequence spiral is a fractal as well. Apparently it can be found within the Mandelbrot set and it seems like no one knows why.

Are you saying It shows up in mandelbrot sets unintentionally?

 

[Ren]

Interesting List but The Nature of Time jumped off the page first. What is something I have noticed is that Time seems to speed up with age and responsibility. Its also seems to slow down at times such as leading up to something that is eagerly anticipated. I'm curious if its possible to control the experience of Time thru??? Change if perspective, focus, I don't know exactly and I know its not actually speeding up or slowing down, but I am referring to perception and feeling that it does.

Time definitely seems to speed up with age. Perhaps because more of it is habit and routine, and less exploration of things unknown?

 

[charlatan]

I've thought about this intentionality issue a bit/my thoughts kinda circled around....at this point, at least, I tend to wonder whether adding consciousness above the physical helps much with intentionality; the reason is basically that the fact of "aboutness" of, say, a visualization of a car, seems to be determined by causal mechanisms: the light bouncing off the car/causing a certain experience.

Whether that experience is itself neurons firing or a more immaterial consciousness seems to me a matter that's not obviously relevant, if at all

(I think this is probably what various physicalists might offer as a take, and while I do have problems with "naive" physicalism, I might be inclined to buy this particular point.)

 

[Ren]

I've thought about this intentionality issue a bit/my thoughts kinda circled around....at this point, at least, I tend to wonder whether adding consciousness above the physical helps much with intentionality; the reason is basically that the fact of "aboutness" of, say, a visualization of a car, seems to be determined by causal mechanisms: the light bouncing off the car/causing a certain experience.

Whether that experience is itself neurons firing or a more immaterial consciousness seems to me a matter that's not obviously relevant, if at all

Yes, but there is a difference between "being determined by" and "being identical to". The argument for causal determination doesn't eliminate the mental states as mental states. It only says that the physical has causal priority.

In order to reduce the mental to the physical, intentionality would have to be reduced as well. Now certain physical objects, like maps, do have intentionality; but it seems (or at least Searle thinks) that in every case, those objects are 'injected' with intentionality by a conscious subject in the first place, i.e. whoever made the map. So the intentionality of consciousness is not really eliminated here either.

 

[charlatan]

Yes, but there is a difference between "being determined by" and "being identical to". The argument for causal determination doesn't eliminate the mental states as mental states. It only says that the physical has causal priority.

Yeah of course/that part was I think something I'd agree with. (In fact, as someone cautious about physicalism in its "naive forms" and probably more skeptical than sympathetic, I DON'T think mind = the causal powers of the brain -- I don't rule the view out, but I am more skeptical of this one than alternatives. I do go with Searle and others that way.)

My point, rather, is that some of the "traditional physicalist" views that go against Searle/ say that intentionality is not a defeater for their brands of physicalism use arguments that even an anti-physicalist could approve of. Those anti-physicalists would be appealing to something besides the ability to account for intentionality for doubting mind-brain identity.
That is, the issue would not be accounting for intentionality, but some other faculty of the mind.

The reason anti-physicalists do not necessarily worry that physicalism can't account for intentionality is that the anti-physical experiences may not have any faculty that really helps beyond what the physicalist ones. The explanation may be the same: the about-ness of the mental state is accounted for by the causal relation: the stimulus causes the visual experience.

Searle, I think, would NOT give this account of how the about-ness is determined: I think he would probably say something about the first person ontology of consciousness is essential. Obviously, the first person ontology is not reducible to causal relations, as it's precisely the part that's private, and not something you can get at using empirical investigation (which has to proceed using causal relations).

I think that this issue is controversial enough that I would not recommend either anti-physicalists or nontraditional physicalists from hinging their critique of physicalism on intentionality issues.
Thinking back over it, I do think Searle could end up being right that intentionality depends somehow on the more nontrivial aspects of the brain's workings, but what I wrote earlier is why it very well may not end up helping much over the traditional physicalist accounts.

I think the main issue, rather, is that consciousness seems to reveal metaphysically substantive information, and that this information definitely seems to be very, very independent of anything you could phrase in terms of traditional physics, which basically is written in terms of mathematics and laws of nature.

 

[Ren]

Yeah of course/that part was I think something I'd agree with. (In fact, as someone cautious about physicalism in its "naive forms" and probably more skeptical than sympathetic, I DON'T think mind = the causal powers of the brain -- I don't rule the view out, but I am more skeptical of this one than alternatives. I do go with Searle and others that way.)

My point, rather, is that some of the "traditional physicalist" views that go against Searle/ say that intentionality is not a defeater for their brands of physicalism use arguments that even an anti-physicalist could approve of. Those anti-physicalists would be appealing to something besides the ability to account for intentionality for doubting mind-brain identity.
That is, the issue would not be accounting for intentionality, but some other faculty of the mind.

The reason anti-physicalists do not necessarily worry that physicalism can't account for intentionality is that the anti-physical experiences may not have any faculty that really helps beyond what the physicalist ones. The explanation may be the same: the about-ness of the mental state is accounted for by the causal relation: the stimulus causes the visual experience.

Searle, I think, would NOT give this account of how the about-ness is determined: I think he would probably say something about the first person ontology of consciousness is essential. Obviously, the first person ontology is not reducible to causal relations, as it's precisely the part that's private, and not something you can get at using empirical investigation (which has to proceed using causal relations).

I think that this issue is controversial enough that I would not recommend either anti-physicalists or nontraditional physicalists from hinging their critique of physicalism on intentionality issues.
Thinking back over it, I do think Searle could end up being right that intentionality depends somehow on the more nontrivial aspects of the brain's workings, but what I wrote earlier is why it very well may not end up helping much over the traditional physicalist accounts.

I think the main issue, rather, is that consciousness seems to reveal metaphysically substantive information, and that this information definitely seems to be very, very independent of anything you could phrase in terms of traditional physics, which basically is written in terms of mathematics and laws of nature.

I both agree and disagree.

I agree with you that when we get into more subtle distinctions between various forms of physicalism and anti-physicalism, the arguments against physicalism are also going to get more subtle. They will go beyond intentionality of mental states and head into first-person ontology, qualia, the epistemic primacy of raw feels, etc.

The argument about raw feels in particular is interesting. I may feel pain (e.g. phantom pain) even though there is no accompanying C-fiber stimulus in my nervous system. If pain was identical to C-fiber stimulus, the statement that I feel pain ought therefore to be false. But if I do feel pain, then it seems absurd to claim that I am wrong about being in pain. Therefore pain and C-fiber stimulus are not identical.

I disagree insofar as for the majority of philosophy non-specialists, the argument centering on intentionality of mental states would be good enough to cast doubt on the identity between the mental and the physical. It also has the advantage of being easy to explain and illustrate in accessible language. If possible, I would like this thread to be open to everyone, and therefore to limit technical terms to what is strictly necessary (or else illustrate with concrete examples).

 

[charlatan]

I disagree insofar as for the majority of philosophy non-specialists, the argument centering on intentionality of mental states would be good enough to cast doubt on the identity between the mental and the physical.

Well, that's technically not disagreeing with my exact claim, actually, it seems to me: my claim was not about whether it casts doubt to a non-specialist, so much as that the argument that traditional physicalist views fail to account for intentionality seems to me more controversial than other arguments/to depend a bit more on Searle's particular views as compared to what many philosophers might subscribe to.

However, it's true that on this point, there's a very intuitive quality to Searle's view here, so it might be especially good for illustration of where the doubts come in.

I just would ultimately hinge my doubts for "traditional physicalism" holding more on other stuff. (For the kinds of reasons I was giving.) The pain/C-fiber stuff you mention certainly enters into some of the arguments I'd look at as casting doubt.

 

[Ren]

Physicalist. My sense is that materialism is a somewhat outdated and vaguer term, because 'matter' underdetermines the realm of the physical.

But do you think that things that happen mentally are reducible to physical processes? Here's a simple argument to offer an objection. Let's say you miss someone: this is an emotion, which we would describe as a mental state. Now, if you say that the mental state is reducible to a physical process, you are saying effectively that your state of missing that person is identical to neuron firings in your brain.

But it is not identical, because in the emotion you are missing someone. The mental state is directed outward, and toward a specific object (the person you miss). Philosophers call this the intentionality of mental states: they have an intrinsic 'aboutness', something which they are directed to. (Notice it is the same with consciousness: we are not just conscious, but conscious of...). On the other hand, it makes no sense that a series of neuron firings in the brain is 'about' anything. Physical processes are devoid of intentionality. Therefore they cannot be the same.

How would you respond to this objection?

@Pin !

 

[Pin]

@Pin !

I'll respond later, busy day ahead of me.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren BTW, thanks for bringing up this point, it's definitely an interesting one. I'm quite torn on the issue actually, the more I think about it -- does intentionality get properly accounted for by bare-bone physicalism?

I think that the temptation could be to say that many conceptions of even anti-physicalist conscious experience don't actually help much with intentionality. On the other hand, maybe they do. The case for why they don't relates to the coherence (even if false!) of epiphenomenalism -- if the mental experience seems like it can stand apart from any causal chain, then one might make the case that it does not contain within itself an "about-ness" pointing to whatever caused it, and that the about-ness actually comes from the causal relation between the stimulus and the experience, not from within the experience itself.

On the other hand, perhaps even in the above case, the conscious mental state involved in say visual experience contains a pointer to something outside of itself to "the cause of this experience" even if that cause happens to be empty.

Of course, all this stuff relates to why I tend towards nonstandard physicalisms or modestly anti-physicalist "neutral monism" as my favored views. I think both our conception of experience and our conception of physics seem really strangely complementary and weirdly un-integrated. The experiences seem to reveal nothing of the causal chain of events they are part of, and the causal chain (as covered in physics) seems to reveal nothing of the nature of the 'private experience.'
This picture seems like it can't be right/whatever deeper conception of metaphysics would integrate the two better is basically the goal.

And to be honest, @Ren, I think intentionality is a really interesting place where these issues all come forth -- we do intuitively have a sense that our mental experiences are about something. This is the pre-Descartes-thought-experiment view that colors of red are painted on apples in the world. With some Descartes-style musing we're led to the idea that color-experience is in our heads, not on the apple.
This "in-our-heads" view seems to somewhat deflate the intuition that our experiences are about something potentially in the outside.
Still, we can do things like turn our mental attention to an object, and prima facie, that does feel like it has to do with stuff outside the experience itself.

 

[Ren]

I'll respond later, busy day ahead of me.

False promise! You never responded! Boo-hoo!

 

[Pin]

False promise! You never responded! Boo-hoo!

Oh, I'll respond today!

 

[Ren]

I think that the temptation could be to say that many conceptions of even anti-physicalist conscious experience don't actually help much with intentionality. On the other hand, maybe they do. The case for why they don't relates to the coherence (even if false!) of epiphenomenalism -- if the mental experience seems like it can stand apart from any causal chain, then one might make the case that it does not contain within itself an "about-ness" pointing to whatever caused it, and that the about-ness actually comes from the causal relation between the stimulus and the experience, not from within the experience itself.

I'm not sure this works. To illustrate why, I suggest you listen to this passage from Proust's In Search of Lost Time:

This internal monologue is triggered by the tasting of a madeleine. However, it is very clear that the mental experience is not about the madeleine. It takes the character three minutes before he even realises that the taste of the madeleine caused him to have that experience. His mental experience is about the nature of memory and its link to the past. The tasting of the madeleine causes the experience, but the experience is not at all about that cause. It is much bigger, much more complex; it is a metaphysical rumination. It would be ridiculous to claim that the aboutness of that experience is a reflection of the causal relation between the stimulus (the tasting of the madeleine) and the experience. It is about something else, which transcends the causal relation, even though the causal relation is a part of it.

The claim that mental states are actually devoid of intrinsic intentionality can only be substantiated by examples of very basic mental states. Yes, if you see an apple and think about the apple, you might say that the intentionality is in the causal relation between the stimulus and the experience. But that argument breaks down very quickly when we consider the immense complexity of many mental states, such as are explored in literature. Heraclitus crosses a river and experiences a vision of the world as an eternal flux, the becoming in which 'there is nothing permanent except change'. How is the about-ness of that experience a mere physical relation between stimulus and output? I find that account absurdly reductive.

I think the key notion here is that intentionality is not the same as causality; nor is it some kind of mental artefact of causality. So on no account can intentionality be reduced to the cause-effect relation.

 

[Ren]

Oh, I'll respond today!

I look forward to it

 

[charlatan]

@Ren

So on no account can intentionality be reduced to the cause-effect relation.

That's true, but that's extremely, extremely far from the point I was making/regardless of where it's arising, this misunderstanding is too major to not clarify quite significantly.

I think one big source of the problem is we have to distinguish the experience itself from the mental state (the way YOU are using "state" -- I'm not sure I made such a distinction, but you definitely seem to be). Many philosophical views are significantly externalist about the content of a mental state.
These would say that the aboutness of the mental state is significantly determined by factors outside of the experiential components. In other words, it'll involve the very complex causal web the mental experience is part of, not just the experience itself.

All that's being claimed is that it's not obvious the metaphysical nature of the experience itself is playing a big role in determining the aboutness. In your post, you are underscoring that the aboutness may be determined by something more complex than a single causal relation.
Nobody disputes that among physicalists....most/all would say often there's at least a huge causal web the mental state fits into that is needed to understand the content of the state.

The example of visual stimulus is as good as any to illustrate the point, in that sure, in that case it was a single causal relation determining the aboutness, but the point is even if it's a complex web of causal relations that the experience is part of, that doesn't change the fact that it is this web/the experience being involved in a giant mosaic, NOT a very specific point about the metaphysical nature of the experience itself, that may determine the aboutness.

You mention the issue of whether a mental "state" has about-ness -- that's not the question quite. The way you're using state, you're likely distinguishing it from the experiential component alone. We both might even agree that the experience of tasting ice cream doesn't itself come with an aboutness. What triggered that experience would have to play a role -- whether it was a machine stimulating the brain or whether it was an actual spoon of ice cream being placed in the mouth.

The burden is really to decide if the metaphysical nature of the purely experiential component (the qualia part) is essential to conferring intentionality.

My point was that one could be an anti-physicalist about mind quite easily who thinks the latter. I'm not saying if I agree with those anti-physicalists, but I think this issue is controversial/one of the less clear.

 

[charlatan]

Basically, you read the example of visual experience to somehow be supporting the claim that "aboutness" can be reduced to some really simple causal relation between a stimulus and the experience, then going on to say something to the effect, I think, that a leaf falling could somehow trigger a state that has to do with something way more complicated...thus the aboutness is way beyond the cause-effect relation between leaf and experience.

That was incredibly misunderstanding the point (of course, I apologize if I contributed to the misunderstanding, but the discussion will be pointless if I don't nip this).

Of course I agree with that. The point of the visual experience is if anything that even in the simplest case, the aboutness may be determined by stuff outside the experiential component itself, and not depend on the precise metaphysics of qualia you commit to, and indeed, many anti-physicalist accounts of qualia won't help significantly change the account of intentionality one gives in this regard. Giving an account of how anti-physicalist accounts of qualia actually help even in the simplest case seems challenging.

One can further expand this point! Even if we say we need more than a complex causal mosaic/"functionalist" in flavor accounts to account for the aboutness -- say we care about being able to think about abstract objects or something -- again the point arises that many anti-physicalist accounts of mind that are responses to the problem of qualia don't obviously help with that aspect of intentionality.

I'm certainly not saying you can't try to make a highly nuanced point about how traditional physicalism doesn't work to account for intentionality, but the specific objection you raised would be easily dismissed, as at minimum bare-bones physicalists do agree that complex causal webs, not single casual relations to the direct stimulus, are obviously often necessary to give a proper account.