SeekerofTruth wrote:Chap wrote:
To make your problem meaningful, could you kindly explain to us what it would mean for a creature of flesh and blood to "know first hand what [an] object is actually like", in some way that does not involve the activity of sensory nerves and the information processing of the central nervous system?
Your problem would, I suggest, go away if you dropped the idea (implicit in your discussion, I think) that there is a non-physical 'you' somewhere that only perceives the world 'through' the apparatus of the body. The body is you. Its 'perception' involves many parts of itself in all kinds of interconnected activity. There is no evidence that the body is merely mediating contact with some 'non-physical' entity such as a separate 'you' that uses it as a medium of perception.
I can only speak from my experience, but I assume yours is similar to mine. I can identify no physical component to my being conscious
Not being able to identify it doesn't really prove anything. Further, what do you think it would be like if you could identify a physical componet. Think about that for a while. You might also try to be clearer about what you mean by physical. Can you really identify no physical component of your pereience when you get hit with a rock?
and yet I am consciously aware of my own personal version of a physical world
What you really have is a perspective on the physical world as well as your propensities, thoughts, attitudes, blindnesses, associations etc.
; what I refer to as my phenomenal world.
You didn't make up this terminology and it is a theoretical world. Nothing obvious about it.
In this phenomenal world I seem to have a brain which provides me with an accurate representation of the physical world.
Only as accurate as it is able to predict. I predict that if your visual cortex were cut out, you would be blind.
But I have no way of knowing how accurate that representation is.
Again, accuracy is as accuracy does. Do some tests, make predictions, look for internal and external consistancy. You do have ways of knowing unless you think it must be some God's eye, unmediated, perspectiveless kind of knowledge (does such an idea of knowledge make sense even???)
I seem to be getting around reasonably well in my phenomenal world, so I assume it must be fairly representative of the physical world. However, it could all be a dream; a fiction that I have made up or that someone or some thing has imposed upon my consciousness.
So what? My computer may be fooled into thinking it is connected to the real internet when it isn't (and it will tell me so!).
How can I know for certain one way or the other? How is it that you know what you wrote is indeed fact? Have you somehow discovered things-as-they-are in a way that eludes me?
You are hung up on a Cartesian duality that has been supsect ever since Descartes described it.
Heidegger even tried to explain why it was a confusion. You are employing a certain kind of substance ontology to your mere "seemings". But where do you get off making "seemings" have some kind of reality.
It makes sense that we should have some kind of built in incorrigable theory of "mind" since we have for millenia needed to give reasons for our actions some of which we had no good reasons--we created fictions and they became perhaps automatic. We didn't know about the brain, we couldn't see our brains working etc.
But now, we can fight of this innate spiritualism and our faulty intuitions about what is going on.
This phenomenal world you think you can "see" is really just some a kind of theorizing, a kind of confabulation with theoretical entities (the redness of red, the "stuff" dreams are made of", "inner figment", the phenomenal world", "immaterial mind" etc. A machine could do that too if it could shuffle tokens that represent meaningful content--it could theorize about itself. it could also theorize about itself without realizing that it was a theory, it might be certain it was a "direct knowledge".
A lack of ability gives a feeling of mystery maybe but it isn't something to be amazed by.
You keep saying
"I
can't see how..."
"I
don't know.."
"I
can't describe..."
"I
can't put X into physical terms etc.."
Stop being amazed by inability. An artificial intelligence engineer doesn't get a raise becuase his robot has a human like
inability.
You really need to give Dennett's book a real chance. I know it isn't convincing to many and it wasn't to me on the first read (but it had cool stuiff in it so I read it again).
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo