This is "Burdock Root". Due to technical difficulties with Google
Groups, I'm having to borrow someone else's nic on this contraption, as
it provides usenet as part of the service. Thus the "storage" in the
name; that's all they normally use this secondary account for nowadays.
Extremely irritating and time consuming, because this system doesn't
automatically quote the previous post, with markers. I hope it at least
preserves the double spacings below when it appears, otherwise it'll
truly be a mess.

BR: 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."

Publius: That is a bit vague ("penumbra"?), but I agree in substance.

BR: "Penumbra" should be defined in the same glossary. Time I finally
posted a link: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/glossary.html

Publius: 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.

BR: But no one can posit anything naughty like "pan-symbolism" as an
answer, right? That would be like saying that gravity existed before
hydroelectric dams needed it.

Publius: 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.

BR: If whatever enabled brains to create mental states wasn't ubiquitous
in matter, then the success of that would be hit and miss.

Publius: 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?

BR: Are you trying to claim now that bolts, gaskets, etc aren't moving
before they're assembled into an engine? The Earth orbits the Sun, the
Sun revolves around the Mllky Way, the Milky Way goes around or is
affected by galactic clusters, etc. Nothing is "static" in the universe,
and the fact that the ability of objects to "move" can be augmented into
various forms of motion that they weren't engaging in beforehand is the
unremarkable kind of emergence, not the "ex nihilo" hocus pocus.

BR: We'd have zombies being born either occasionally or quite
frequently; and I believe zombies could be identified.

Publius: 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).

BR: Semi-zombies, then, that can be distinguished by their talk /
behavior.

BR: 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").

Publius: 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.

BR: Wasn't intended as a parallel to semi-zombies except in regard to
both being initially puzzled by the auditory experiences that "hearing
people" refer to. An android would come closer to the literal zombie
role because it could be programmed to pretend that it is having
expriences (matching the right "qualia talk" up to its sensory
information); but disqualified because it only looks externally
person-like. A human semi-zombie might learn to "try" to deceive like
that eventually, but not in early years. The deaf, of course, could
never carry out a deception for long; reading lips is one thing, but not
receiving data from a radio announcement is another.

BR: 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).

Publius: 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.

BR: With this annoying usenet provider, I can't even promise I'll
address that in a separate post either today or tomorrow. It struck me
that you might unknowingly(?) be arguing (in your response over there)
for proto-panpsychism (or a pan-dual-aspect version of materialism
anyway) if "mental properties" are physical properties that emerge from
previous physical properties (conventional or non-brute emergence). That
was necessary for explaining how the brain knows about qualia, etc.

The other option (for how the brain could "know" in the context of
dualism) is generic pre-Established Harmony that David Papineau refers
to in one of his papers about physicalism, which seemingly allows mental
as nonphysical to be possible (though he doesn't necessarily favor it).
But it looks like that kind of dualism could easily be re-interpreted as
matter having an intrinsic side to it rather than matter just having an
extrinsic aspect, which is a kind of panpsychism that the other online
philosophy encyclopedia (by Stanford) covers in a part of its
panpsychism entry. The "neutral monism" entry also gets to that in
discussing Strawson's brand of materialism.

BR: "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

Publius: 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.

BR: Was "dark matter" originally posited for its predictive powers, or
instead to explain how certain situations got to be how they are in the
cosmos? Was evolution originally posited for predictive powers, or
instead to explain how the current situations of life forms got here? Do
geologists only examine terrestrial features to predict the presence of
resources (like oil), or do they also study them to figure out how they
got they way, to decipher what happened in the Earth's past?

Publius: 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."

BR: Brute emergence is what needs defense, since it is a pit of
indolence, proud to be a vacuous miracle. Like walking by a mugging
victim on the basis that "we shouldn't get involved" or "pretend like
there is no mugging victim".

Publius: 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.

BR: What does such "ex nihilo" hocus pocus being fashionable in the
universe's genesis in cosmology have to do with philosophical thought
related to biological evolution? Did the first cell spring out of
nothing or the various species that followed? Did the mutations
involving novel molecules, tissues, and organs spring out of nothing?
Proto-panpsychism supplies an alternative to the craziness of brute
emergence in biological evolution. But more precisely, philosophical
thought surrounding biology. No one is promoting proto-"panpsychism" as
a science theory at this point. This gets back to what I said about the
endeavors of science and philosophy seemingly getting blurred together
in this thread.

Publius: Panpsychism is a pseudo-explanation that actually explains
nothing.

BR: And "magic" is an explanation?

BR: 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.
Publius: 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).

BR: "And so can we with consciousness"? Are you finally allowing
something previous for it to arise from, or is this just more accounting
for qualitative "consciousness" by way of miraculous radical emergence?
Though no "occult beings" should be affliated with this POM
"miraculous". One doesn't want to corrupt the pristine bruteness of it,
which is of a purer kind than that of God springing a soul upon the
brain when it reaches a key stage of fetal development. Or is that at
conception? I forget how this or that Christian denomination varies in
their beliefs. Zzzzzzzzzzzz....

For now I'm going to have to cut-off before the finish, as this is
taking an eternity. Sorry if I might have sounded a bit cranky or
sarcastic at times. Having to go through there trying to clarify who
said what because this system doesn't automatically quote was
frustrating. I usually don't post enough in usenet to warrant using
anything that's not free (Google Groups) or available for borrowing
(like this).