{"id":238,"date":"2018-12-24T03:59:25","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T03:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=238"},"modified":"2018-12-24T03:59:25","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T03:59:25","slug":"sleight-of-hand-sleight-of-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/24\/sleight-of-hand-sleight-of-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleight of Hand, Sleight of Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your view<\/a> is that: – the world is made of physical events (qualityless, feelingless, atomic, quantitative) (A)<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can already sense the irrelevancies creeping in! The reason I have reduced the m\/b problem to presence\/absence of feeling alone — and the rest to just physical “functing” is precisely to avoid equivocation on a proliferation of irrelevant, redundant and profligate synonyms, paranyms and peripherals that simply cloud (crowd!) the picture and make it appear as if there are more things to face and answer than the one simple one:<\/p>\n

Apart from feelings, there is no explanatory problem. Everything there is is causally explainable (in principle). I call all that “functing”. The problem then is simply to explain how and why some of the functing is felt. Never mind “atomic” and “quantitative”! And “qualityless” adds nothing: it just means feelingless.<\/p>\n

– consciousness is having feelings (relational, intentional, qualitative)(B)<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, all the needless, distracting synonyms, paranyms and irrelevancies:<\/p>\n

“Relational” is irrelevant, “intentional” is highly ambiguous and equivocal, but if it means that, amongst our feelings, there’s the feeling that we cause things to happen, then yes, that’s one meaning of “intentional”. And yes, the problem of explaining the causal role of feeling is what the why and how are about.<\/p>\n

The other meaning of intentionality is “aboutness”, a useless, pseudo-explanatory term, but fine, yes, feelings are “about” things in the sense that I seem to be feeling what it feels like to eat an apple, or to refer to 2+2 as being =4 etc. The “aboutness” is the content of the feeling, what feelings feel like, when they feel like they are about an outside world (rather than just my own, say, fatigue).<\/p>\n

But this too is just make-words. The issue, again, is that there exist feelings, and the problem again is to explain how and why there not just unfelt functings instead.<\/p>\n

thus there is no way to put together A with B.<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No explanation of how and why some functings are felt. (The F\/f problem.) try to show that our feelings are somehow reducible to the physical world as it is defined in A. You don’t think this epistemic strategy is going to work. Neither do I. You demolish many popular attempts at reducing B to A. One of your key arguments is the fact that the functional cannot produce the felt. Fine. I couldn’t agree more.<\/p>\n

But here is a different view against which I didn’t find any specific critique to my position, which is, very shortly:<\/p>\n

– the physical world is made of processes (qualitative, relational …) (A’) – consciousness could be a subset of such processes (relational, intentional, qualitative) (B)<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You have just managed to fall into the usual trap: To simply say by fiat that feelings simply are<\/i> a form of functing — whereas the problem is to explain how and why! You have simply begged the question.<\/p>\n

I don’t doubt for a minute that some sort of “identity” theory is correct. That’s not the point! The problem is to explain “how” and “why,” not just to state “that”.<\/p>\n

And it won’t do to state “well, some things just are as they are, like gravitation: no further hows or whys!”<\/p>\n

The point is that electromagnetism is among the unproblematic functions. And the problem is to explain how and why some functions are felt, not simply to state that<\/i> some functions are felt because they are “identical” with feeling. That is just another way to state that the F\/f problem is insoluble.<\/p>\n

(That’s fine too, but then we have to acknowledge, explicitly, that what we are saying is that although the question — “how\/why are some functions felt?” — was a perfectly natural and justified one to ask, exactly like innumerable other reasonable functional questions that we ask, and get an answer, this time there is no answer. We are simply told that asking that question is like asking how\/why gravity pulls, in other words, feeling is just one of the brute facts about the way things are. That sounds like no answer at all to me! Does it mean the m\/b question made no sense? I think not…)<\/p>\n

A is an abstraction that hinders our understanding both of the nature of the physical world and consciousness.<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“A” is everything there is, and that happens, apart from feeling, along with our functional explanation (from maths, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, etc.) of how and why everything is and happens.<\/p>\n

You say this is all just an “abstraction: that hinders our understanding of function and feeling.<\/p>\n

In reality, it is<\/i> our understanding of function, and there is nothing at all wrong with it — except that it can’t explain feeling.<\/p>\n

No point blaming the success for the failure. Especially when you have nothing remotely near the explanatory power of the successful part (physics etc.) to replace it!<\/p>\n

The world is not made of atomic physical events on top of which you have a functional level that cannot transfigurate in feelings. The world is made of processes which are in themselves qualitative and relational. Could you explain why not? I am not trying to reduce B to A, but rather I claim that A’ should be substituted for A’ and then there is no opposition between A’ and B.<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, as I said “qualitative” and “relational” are weasel words. I don’t know what “qualitative” means if it does not mean either unfelt physical properties (such as mass, frequency, etc.), with which there is no problem at all — or it just means “felt”, in which case that is the one and only problem, and you are camouflaging it with all the paranyms.<\/p>\n

“Relational” is even worse. There are plenty of unfelt relational properties (functions). “Bigger,” for example.<\/p>\n

Feelings are another matter. And calling them “relational” adds absolutely nothing. It can only mean either:<\/p>\n

(i) what it feels like to perceive or contemplate relational properties (which in no way helps, because the F\/f problem is explaining how\/why anything at all is felt) or<\/p>\n

(ii) that feeling itself is “relational” (the “relation” between the feeler and what is felt, the “relation” that is rhapsodized in the notion of “aboutness” or “intentionality”):<\/p>\n

This banal property of feeling (that feeling is something that is felt by a feeler) will not explain itself by its bootstraps. And it is not a “relation” of a kind that dissipates the F\/f problem, turning it into just another functional relation problem!<\/p>\n

(In fact, the only substantive insight that has ever come out of the fact that feeling feels-like a 3-part relation — (1) what the feeling feels like [“qualitatively”], the fact (2) that the feeling is felt, and (3) that it feels like the feeler is the feeler — is the Cogito! And even that was expressed in an equivocal way, making it seem as if it delivered more than it real did: “I think therefore I exist”. In fact it was just “I feel therefore I feel” and even that has too many entities [the feeling plus the “I”]: It should just have been “feeling is being felt, therefore feeling is being felt”. In other words, feelings exist. The “I” who feel the feelings is just what the feelings feel like. It is not a further ontological entity, squeezed out of a 2\/3-part relation!)<\/p>\n

This solution to the problem of consciousness is not a thesis on the nature of consciousness, but rather a thesis on the nature of the physical world. Is it such a crazy view?<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I regret to say that pointing out that feeling is a relation, “just like” other relations in the world begs the question. It is not “just like” other relations (like “bigger”)! And that’s the problem.<\/p>\n

One final comment. If feelings were identical (not produced by or emergent from) certain physical processes, the issue of mental causation would be solved since there would be no longer mental causation (mental to physical) but only physical to physical.<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, too many synonyms simply delude us into thinking that repeating the questions with redundant terminology amounts to answering them!<\/p>\n

“Mental” just means felt. So I repeat, without the multiplication of terms:<\/p>\n

First, the m\/b or F\/f problem: “How\/why are certain functions felt rather than just functed?”<\/p>\n

Your reply:<\/p>\n

“If feelings were identical with (not caused by) certain functions, the m\/b problem is solved, because everything would be functional”.<\/p>\n

Yes, yes. But you left out how\/why certain functions are felt, which is what this is all about! You cannot answer a substantive question about how\/why certain functions are felt by simply stating that they are identical with feeling. They may well be. But the part you left out was how and why! And that is a problem of causal, functional explanation not solved either by multiplying terminology or invoking identities without explaining them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your view is that: – the world is made of physical events (qualityless, feelingless, atomic, quantitative) (A) I can already sense the irrelevancies creeping in! The reason I have reduced the m\/b problem to presence\/absence of feeling alone — and the rest to just physical “functing” is precisely to avoid equivocation on a proliferation of … <\/p>\n

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