> In the glossary he provides on his home page site, Koch adds in his
> definition of Qualia: "I argue that qualia symbolize, in a compact
> manner, the vast amount of explicit and implicit information that is
> contained in the penumbra of the winning coalition sufficient for one
> particular conscious percept."
That is a bit vague ("penumbra"?), but I agree in substance. The
mysterians, of course, will want to know how a physical system manages
to "symbolize" that information in that particular manner ("Why doesn't
all this symbolizing go on "in the dark?"). They're entitled to some
kind of answer.
>> As I mentioned in my last post to Andy, we reserve the term
>> "fundamental" for properties or forces which are, as you indicate,
>> ubiquitous --- which play an explanatory role in a wide variety of
>> phenomena. I.e., we don't want to posit an ubiqitous property unless
>> its manifestations are ubiquitous. Consciousness
>> (of the empirical sort we wish to explain) is a phenomenon
>> encountered only in a small class of complex systems.
> If whatever enabled brains to create mental states wasn't ubiquitous
> in matter, then the success of that would be hit and miss.
Why so? An automobile engine, properly assembled, will exhibit
horsepower and RPMs. Do we need to impute power of some kind, or some
kind of proto-rotary motion, to the bolts, gaskets (much less the atoms)
composing it to assure the engine will display those properties?
> We'd have
> zombies being born either occasionally or quite frequently; and I
> believe zombies could be identified.
Per the "zombie hypothesis" they couldn't be. They are defined to be
indistinguishable from humans by all objective means. (That renders the
concept vacuous, but that's another argument).
> Biochemical "machines" that don't
> have internal states won't be talking about such, or will be confused
> as to what non-zombies are talking about (just as a deaf child is
> initially baffled by this "sound experience" its teachers refer to in
> sign language, but eventually learns to believe from evidence and
> from being outnumbered by "hearers" that those properties exist in
> "normal people").
Not a good parallel. The zombie, unlike the deaf child, can perceive and
differentiate sounds (and all other normal sensory imputs). It just does
not (by hypothesis) experience a subjective state when it does so. It
would have no trouble learning the terms for all those "qualia," and
indeed would find them just as useful for referring to those
distinguishable percepts as humans do.
> If one goes the dualism route of "mental states" brutely appearing
> from nowhere to supervene on brain states, then once again the brain
> shouldn't even know there are such nonphysical properties that have
> established a parallel harmony with its activity. They are
> "nonphysical" from the standpoint that biology doesn't need them as
> causes or can detect them publicly, and thus "mental states" must be
> actually be an aspect of brain states (physical) in order to have
> effects (be known at all by the brain).
I'm gonna snip this and insert it into my response to Andy, which I hope
to get to next. He has raised a related point, and I'll offer a response
which (I hope) covers both.
> "Panpsychism thus offers a kind of resolution to the problem of
> [radical] emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as
> well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question. At
> issue is the specific form it might take, and what its implications
> are."
http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/panpsych.htm
The "resolution" offered by panpsychism is illusory. Imputing proto-
consciousness to atoms or other elementary particles does not in the
slightest way "resolve" the "mystery" of consciousness. It does not
permit predictions of which configurations of matter will display the
kind of consciousness in which we're interested, namely, the
consciousness we experience and which we impute to other persons, some
animals, and perhaps (eventually) even some machines. It does not
explain why those configurations display consciousness and others, such
as bricks and baseballs, do not. As a "fundamental property," it is
impotent, lacking any explanatory power, similar to the old notion of
vitalism. As Emmeche remarked concerning vitalism, it is "an
intellectual tranquilizer, or verbal sedative."
Nor does panpsychism supply an alternative to "brute emergence." It
merely displaces the emergence back in time, to the Big Bang or earlier
(if one may speak of an "earlier,"), where it is to remain permanently
inexplicable.
Panpsychism is a pseudo-explanation that actually explains nothing.
> The "radical" was added by me, as I don't see anything miraculous with
> conventional or "resultant" emergence ratcheting properties that
> already existed up to new or different levels of complexity.
Almost all complex systems exhibit properties which their components do
not exhibit and which could not be predicted from the known properties
of their components. A DNA molecule, and a few other complex molecules,
have the property of being able to duplicate themselves. Atoms of
carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, et al, do not. Atmospheres exhibit such
phenomena as hurricanes, tornados, jetstreams, which molecules of
nitrogen and oxygen do not. Were we not already familiar with those
emergent phenomena, we could never have predicted them, knowing only the
elementary properties of their constituents, because they occur in only
a few of the infinitely many possible combinations of those
constituents. (They are all *consistent* with the known properties of
their components, of course, and so we can account for them *ex post
facto*. And so can we with consciousness).
> "This brings us back to the question of the origin of the mind. Lloyd
> Morgan (1933; cf. Wright 1935) treated the origin of mind in the
> course of evolution as a phenomenon of the same sort as the emergence
> of a new organ or physiological capacity. A new organ, however,
> involves nothing more mysterious than differential growth, leading for
> example to an outpocketing from flat tissue that turns out to be
> useful and can be further elaborated. Similarly, loss, addition or
> rearrangement in a protein molecule may enable it to bind other
> molecules in such a way as to catalyze a new metabolic process.
> Emergence of either of these sorts, however surprising their
> consequences, poses no serious philosophical difficulty. Emergence of
> mind from no mind at all is sheer magic.
No more magical than the emergence of life from non-life. It seems
magical if one assumes *a priori* that mind and body are dichotomous,
disjoint, intrinsically unrelated substances which somehow become linked
together (as those authors do). Then you need some magic to account for
this observed, but altogether inexplicable relationship. So either mind
emerges from thin air when some combinations of matter are assembled, or
it appears out of thin air at the Big Bang, and only manifests itself in
the presence of those combinations of matter, for reasons that remain
unspecified. In either case, the mystery remains.
This "mystery" disappears if the notion of "mind" as a substance, and of
mental phenomena as properties of that substance, is abandoned.
> Regarding explanatory overkill: Endeavors in philosophy and science
> have probably gotten blurred together at times in this thread. But
> concerning the latter: Is superstring / brane theory explanatory
> overkill? Gobbling-up the time of physicists for two decades on the
> basis that the beauty or aesthetics of a scheme can be a kind of
> "evidence" for it in science, along with other criteria that some
> accuse of flying against so-called traditional grain?
>
> IOW, you seem to be appealing to an a priori conservatism ("should
> ALWAYS do this, not engage in explanatory overkill") which scientists,
> at least, probably worry about whether or not they're strictly abiding
> by about as much as they have the various conventions and
> methodologies that have been concocted over time:
>
> "When the scientist ventures to criticize the work of his fellow
> scientist, as is not uncommon, he does not base his criticism on such
> glittering generalities as failure to follow the "scientific method,"
> but his criticism is specific, based on some feature characteristic of
> the particular situation. . . . What appears to [the working
> scientist] as the essence of the situation is that he is not
> consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels
> complete freedom to utilize any course that his ingenuity is capable
> of suggesting to him. No one standing on the outside can predict what
> the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow. In
> short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific
> methods as there are individual scientists." --Percy Bridgman,
> "Reflections of a Physicist"
I certainly suggest no restrictions on the methodologies scientists
should follow, especially in that creative phase where nascent theories
are conceived and born. That is the realm of unfettered imagination. But
most scientists will not themselves accept, nor expect their colleagues
to accept, hypotheses and theories which lack explanatory power.
Superstring theory is an intriguing notion that merits exploration.
Unlike panpsychism, it ties together a number of observable phenomena in
a coherent way. Whether it ties together everything that needs to be
tied together, or has any explanatory power, remains to be seen.
