Philosophy 101

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« on: April 24, 2013, 06:34:58 pm »
    Quote from: Jorge
    Recent 'philosophy wank' posts in Scott's blog have revealed that a lot of the things he discusses are extremely opaque to some of his readers (and I do not exclude myself, I find most Continental philosophy very opaque). Therefore, I think it's only natural to start a thread here that we can point people to if they want to understand what Scott is going on about. Obviously, the philosophy underpins a lot of his writing, so understanding the background could allow people to have deeper readings of his work.

    First, I'd say that most blog posts of Scott's are related to a single philosophical problem. The Hard Problem of Consciousness.

    Relevant initial reading:
    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

    I also highly, highly recommend Chalmer's book "The Conscious Mind" as a primer. He also gets into the extremely thorny issue of intentionality. Another book I could recommend for people unfamiliar with these types of philosophical questions is "The Mind's I", a collection of classic essays compiled and commented on by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter.

    Extremely briefly:
    The hard problem of consciousness is primarily a problem that we run into with the predominant "physicalist" mindset that has been so successful at explaining the world, thanks to science. Basically, the assumption that "a consistent physical world with highly structured laws" is all that exist underlies the scientific methods. Scientists don't 'do' ghosts, souls, spirits, gods, magic. We break things into smaller things and see how they work. The power of reductionist empirical methodology is undeniable: computers, vaccines, atomic bombs, men on the moon, etc. In this way, scientists and philosophers (and intellectuals more generally) have come to reject heliocentrism, special creation, the existence of a Judeo-Christian omnibenevolent deity, and so forth. Science explains it all away.

    The problem occurs when you turn that scientific lens INWARDS, towards the brain. Suddenly, the human 'soul' (consciousness, Being, first-person frame, phenomenology, whatever you want to call is) vanishes. You look with science, and all you find is cells. But it seems like science is wrong here! I most definitely 'have' a first-person perspective... there is something it is like to be me. I bold that statement because the meaning of those words constructed in that fashion may lie at the heart of the problem.

    Perhaps the concept that most vividly illustrates the disconnect between science and soul, is the concept of a quale (plural qualia). Again, I'm doing an injustice to this idea here, but I think many children get a sense of this problem when they ask the seemingly innocent question:

    "How do you know my blue is your blue?"

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

    The existence of qualia seems undeniable, they lie at the heart of what it means 'to be' for a human being. However, when science gets involved, qualia disappear. There seems no way to account for their existence from a purely physicalist perspective. It gets really weird in the literature. You have philosophers denying qualia exist or that the concept is nonsensical (Dennett) or those who advocate that many objects possess 'mental phenomenology': there is something it is like to be a thermostat.

    Alright, so that's a quick and dirty primer on the philosophy of mind.

    Scott's entries on 'philoso-wank' can be reduced to the following ideas:

    1. Philosophical ideas cannot be trusted because there is no good measuring tape by which to judge them. Academics are as prone (or more prone) than laymen to fall pray to self-confirmation bias and in-group selection. Basically, the "Ivory Tower Eggheads are Also Idiots and Will Defend Nonsense" hypothesis. This is more of an institutional attack (specifically on the division between analytical and continental philosophy), and one that also considers academics to be self-excluding. Scott claims that many literarati don't actually want to communicate to the masses, because they shun the genres that would be most effective at doing so. Then (in typical Bakker fashion), he turns the canon on himself and says that this is due to his own self-confirmation bias since he writes fantasy.

    2. Your sense of volition or "willing" actually comes after the decision has been made at parts of your brain you have no conscious access to. This deserves a much longer treatment, and I will eventually get around to fixing this entry, but for now just understand that this is the pervading theme of the Prince of Nothing trilogy, and a recurring motif in the Second Apocalypse in general. It also plays a huge role in his psych-thriller Neuropath. Very quickly: cognitive neuroscience is starting to prove Hard Determinism. More generally, science is starting to deliver final answers on philosophical problems previously thought to be intractable or only solvable by introspection.

    3. The Hard Problem of Consciousness occurs because of the way the brain is structurally wired, and because of the way evolution works. Bakker has never made the claim that he has solved the problem. But his "Blind Brain Theory" (BBT) makes testable empirical predictions about consciousness. BBT is too difficult to quickly recapitulate, but a rough and dirty summary might be as follows.

    [list=1]
    You can injure someone's brain in such a way as to cause them to lose function of an arm. That is not hard to believe, we have all met stroke victims. Startlingly, it is also possible to injure someone's brain in way that makes them unable to recognize that their arm no longer works. They will 'confabulate' explanations as to why their arm no longer functions. More startlingly, it is possible to do the same thing with blindness. The stroke-blinded patient will vehemently insist that they can see. This phenomenon is call anosognosia and it reveals something profound about the way our conscious experience always seems "full" or "complete". Blind brain theory postulates that ALL conscious experience can be summarized this way. That every qualia you experience is the result of some part of your brain hitting an asymptotic limit in information integration, which is the result of the more recently evolved parts trying to track the information in the deeper parts. This "thalamo-cortical" loop eventually 'runs out' on tracking itself.[/list]

    An empirical prediction this theory would make is that we should be able to 'indefinitely' expand qualia space (ie: see colors you've never seen before, or have a novel phenomenological experience associated with sonar). It also predicts that we don't actually understand our own phenomenology as much as we would like to believe we do. That is, that our own awareness of our mental states might be deeply flawed. (also see: Eric Schwitzgebel's blog)

    4. Dissection of middle and late 20th century philosophy through the lens of BBT. These posts are extremely difficult, primarily because philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida did not go out of their way to make themselves easily understood.

    5. Future implications. If you ever see a blog post with the words 'Semantic Apocalypse' in them, that means Scott is using it to buttress his claim that cognitive neuroscience will annihilate 'intentionality' and 'meaning' from the world.


    So... what the hell does this have anything to do with Drusas Achamian, Anasurimbor Kellhus, and Esmenet?

    Everything.

    My own reading of the Second Apocalypse, is Scott's attempt to structure a hypothetical universe where "intentionality" and "meaning" cannot be extricated by science. God and Soul are literally true. The work then examines the epistemological and moral consequences of such a universe, a universe where science still works but it is wrong.

    In other words, the most mind-blowing piece of fantasy fiction this side of 1954.

    What Came Before

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    « Reply #1 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:14 pm »
    Quote from: dharmakirti
    Wow, what a great overview.  Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

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    « Reply #2 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:20 pm »
    Quote from: Callan S.
    I think these pieces always suffer from the reader not percieving any problem to begin with. So it all ends up looking like an elaborate rain dance. Whilst it's raining.


    Quote
    a universe where science still works but it is wrong.
    My own interpretation is that gods, souls, magic all exist...and science will still win out, even with all of that present. But I'm slightly off topic.

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    « Reply #3 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:27 pm »
    Quote from: Jorge
    Quote from: Dharmakirti
    Wow, what a great overview. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

    You're welcome. These things serve also to test myself and see how much I really get it. Hopefully people will start asking questions. Everyone should feel free to post useful links that illustrate philosophical issues pertaining to the blog.

    Quote from: Callan
    I think these pieces always suffer from the reader not percieving any problem to begin with. So it all ends up looking like an elaborate rain dance. Whilst it's raining.

    Yes Callan, you are correct. The initial perception of the problem is key.

    I don't think you can do better than the "is my blue your blue?" idea. Basically, it shows how subjective mental frames are 'special' and 'closed'. No mater how much neuroscience you throw at the colorblind guy, he won't "know" red until he actually experiences it.

    Another issue is that you have to be a materialist to begin with. Otherwise you see this whole line of argument, and you just shrug and say "Magic. There's something science can't explain. What a shocker."

    The problem with that line is that we talk about the problem. That means that there's a physical encoding, and a causal chain of events that leads to all this filthy philosophizing. Qualia are physical, we just can't see how that's possibly true. BBT at least attempts to explain that blindness.

    Quote from: Callan
    My own interpretation is that gods, souls, magic all exist...and science will still win out, even with all of that present.

    Well, I have no idea what will 'win', but the books are extremely interesting outside of whomever Bakker pens winning the conflict. The range of emotions I've experienced while reading about Esmenet, Mimara, Achamian, Kellhus, Cnaiur, Comphas, Serwe, Sorweel, Cleric and Proyas is quite astounding. And even more astounding is how your perception of these characters changes as revelations unfurl. For example, in TDTCB and WP I thought Proyas was "awful". But he has a simply astounding moment in TTT, where he actually lives true to his principles and actually stands out as quite possibly the most compelling character in terms of our contemporary real world Western morality, despite the fact that Achamian has painted him as a zealot throughout the entire narrative. It'd be the equivalent of waking up one day to find out that Theodore Beale had saved 13 orphans from a burning building.

    But perhaps the most incredible thing about the books is how one can genuinely root for the Inchoroi and the Unholy Consult. No one ever rooted for Sauron and his Ringwraiths.

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    « Reply #4 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:32 pm »
    Quote from: sologdin
    who thinks in terms of "philosowank"?

    and does RSB really believe that stuff about ivory tower eggheads?  it's affirmatively sophomoric, borderline teabagger.

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    « Reply #5 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:39 pm »
    Quote from: Jorge
    I don't know if Bakker "really believes" anything.

    However, from his posts, it seems he experienced some in-group mentality in academia that really bothered him. It's implied that at some point in his college education he felt compelled to hide his love of pop-culture 'nonsense' like fantasy literature because the literati in-groups he was trying to become a part of did not approve. At some point during his philosophy PhD (after he had mastered the art of talking like the scarf-wearing tweed jacketed motherfuckers), he became disillusioned with the way academics seemed to only be writing for themselves, and isolating themselves from dissenting audiences.

    This is the narrative of his academic life that he sell us anyways.

    He makes a particularly compelling case for the way 'literary fiction' has been compartmentalized and essentially become a 'genre' of its own... one with its own tropes and audience expectations, no different than Fantasy or Thrillers.

    Again, he often mocks his own stance by pointing out that OF COURSE he would think this, given that he suffers from the same cognitive biases as any other monkey on this ball of dirt. He writes fantasy, therefore fantasy matters.

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    « Reply #6 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:44 pm »
    Quote from: TWNF
    I would like to suggest that qualia are physical. When one considers what it is like to be angry/happy/confused or any other state of being there are corresponding felt sensations. It's just that we don't often realize this because most of the time these sensatons are relatively subtle. We lump these sensations under a name like fear or wonder. What it feels like to be you at any given moment is a constellation of physical sensations that you may describe as being in love, being irritated, being depressed, etc. If qualia are really constellations of physical feelings the question becomes how these sensations arise. I believe the answer is again to be found in biology. Our brains automatically trigger releases of chemicals at various bodily sites according to genetically programmed responses to situations (perceptions). Add to these genetic programs the miriad programs acquired through life experiences and you get a repertoire of automatically triggered chemical responses to virtually any situation. The result is a contiuous flow of qualia as we go through our days.

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    « Reply #7 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:51 pm »
    Quote from: sologdin
    nice.  the issue for me, assuming the constellation of sense perceptions, what intrudes to cause an interpetation A of constellation B, where the interpretation is an abstract ideology of affect?

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    « Reply #8 on: April 24, 2013, 06:35:57 pm »
    Quote from: Jorge
    Quote from: TWNF
    If qualia are really constellations of physical feelings the question becomes how these sensations arise. I believe the answer is again to be found in biology. Our brains automatically trigger releases of chemicals at various bodily sites according to genetically programmed responses to situations (perceptions). Add to these genetic programs the miriad programs acquired through life experiences and you get a repertoire of automatically triggered chemical responses to virtually any situation. The result is a contiuous flow of qualia as we go through our days.

    Why should physical chemicals lead to a mental phenomelogy? Or, if you are not a neural chauvinist*, why should "programs" or informational structures lead to a mental phenomenology?

    You have simply restated the Hard Problem of consciousness.



    *Neural chauvism is the belief that only carbon-based organic lifeforms with neurons can have inner mental lives and first-person phenomelogical experiences. It is not widely held in philosophical circles, nor amongst scientists.

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    « Reply #9 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:04 pm »
    Quote from: TWNF
    Quote from: Jorge
    Why should physical chemicals lead to a mental phenomelogy? Or, if you are not a neural chauvinist*, why should "programs" or informational structures lead to a mental phenomenology?

    *Neural chauvism is the belief that only carbon-based organic lifeforms with neurons can have inner mental lives and first-person phenomelogical experiences. It is not widely held in philosophical circles, nor amongst scientists.

    Can you give me an example of a mental phenomenon that could not be produced neuro-chemically?

    I would agree that neural chauvinism is not popular among philosophers but among scientist, and in particular neuroscientists it is quite widely held. I doubt that many neuroscientist would subscribe to the idea that there is anything we experience that is not neuro-chemically induced.

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    « Reply #10 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:12 pm »
    Quote from: Callan S.
    I think you missed the point, TWNF. You're approaching it from the outside.

    The hard question is hard because of attempting to answer it from the inside.

    Claim some kind of qualia on your own behalf - this will anchor you on the inside, trying to explain it from there. 'neuro-chemical' does not answer anything on this subject - you do not engage neuro-chemical structure, you do not think neuro-chemical structure, you FEEL.

    That's the sport of it - you can't solve the hedge maze by walking around outside of it to the end, even though this technically solves it. You need to find the way through the hedge maze. The answer needs to lie along those lines.

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    « Reply #11 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:18 pm »
    Quote from: sologdin
    seems to me that the neurochemical thesis is bracketed by the same issue on each side:

    the neurochemicals, accepting them arguendo, certainly are not randomly dispensed--a neurochemical slot machine, say--and therefore infusion of same must be triggered by some causality that is not random: perhaps the sight of my kid dumping her food on the floor with a smirk that i read as deliberate mischief--her fuck you to me that morning for denying her the new toy she desires--produces a series of recognitions in me (i have to clean that shit up now! i must buy yet more plastic crap to entertain her!  she doesn't listen! she defies my authoritah! i am horrible at parenting!  the state will dispossess me of her!  she will end up in the gutter!).  the recognitions might reasonably be triggers for certain neurochemicals.  considering that i am capable of reacting to those recognitions in different ways at different times, and considering that wife also reacts differently at different times--inconsistent between her reactions viewed diachronically, and inconsistent with my own contemporaneous reactions at times--it might well be that the triggers are context sensitive, vary across human persons, but do not necessarily partake of either randomness or individuated determination:  there is likely a discernible pattern to the varying infusions, and it is not solely a matter of "well, every person is an individual!" which is the grat battle cry of the liberal humanist who labors under the influence of ayn rand without necessarily realizing it.

    once infused, one must interpret the infusion.  i suggest two layers of reading: one, the less-than-conscious hermeneutics of turning the infusion into an abstract mental state:  anger, fear, adoration, slowly dawning horror, abject failure, whatever.  the second: the probably conscious recogntion that the abstraction has come into existence.

    neither bookend of the interpretitve apparatus appears to be neurochemical in itself, but more a matter of ideology, shared structures of affect, circulating as power-knowledge intersubjectivities. 

    that in itself is no explanation or answer.  but i respectfully submit that it attempts to frame the question.  relying on the neuroscientists to frame it will lead only into simplistic positivism, which is to restate the question in a rhetoric that introduces as much mystery as it seeks to explain.

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    « Reply #12 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:24 pm »
    Quote from: TWNF
    Quote from: sologdin
    neither bookend of the interpretitve apparatus appears to be neurochemical in itself, but more a matter of ideology, shared structures of affect, circulating as power-knowledge intersubjectivities.

    What are ideology, shared structures of affect, and power-knowledge if not patters stored in neurons (acquired through heredity and experience)? The brain matches stored information with current information to compute what information is important (wins the neural relevance competition). It then takes that information and computes an appropriate response to the features of the current situation it has calculated to be of importance. It's neuro-chemical activity all the way down.

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    « Reply #13 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:36 pm »
    Quote from: TWNF
    Quote from: Callan S.
    I think you missed the point, TWNF. You're approaching it from the outside.

    The hard question is hard because of attempting to answer it from the inside.

    Claim some kind of qualia on your own behalf - this will anchor you on the inside, trying to explain it from there. 'neuro-chemical' does not answer anything on this subject - you do not engage neuro-chemical structure, you do not think neuro-chemical structure, you FEEL.

    That's the sport of it - you can't solve the hedge maze by walking around outside of it to the end, even though this technically solves it. You need to find the way through the hedge maze. The answer needs to lie along those lines.

    I agree that trying to solve the hard problem from inside is hard and I would say it's impossible. When you do this you are trying to understand how a mental state arises from within a mental state. It can't be done. It's just spinning intellectual wheels. To understand how mental states arise you need to look at the mechanisms within the brain that are producing those states. The brain is the maze that needs to be examined to see what is producing the effects we call mental states.

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    « Reply #14 on: April 24, 2013, 06:36:43 pm »
    Quote from: sologdin
    It's neuro-chemical activity all the way down.

    certainly the mental arithmetic.  but the causality of the ideology: neuro-chemical?