Challenges to Cartesian materialism: Understanding consciousness, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
1 Challenges to Cartesian materialism: Understanding consciousness, naturalism and the mind-world relation Jonathan Knowles http://www.academia.edu/2651043/Challenging_Cartesian_Materialism_Under
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http://www.academia.edu/2651043/Challenging_Cartesian_Materialism_Under standing_Naturalism_and_the_Mind-World_Relation
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problem’ of consciousness
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two conflicting intuitions:
– I can ‘think away’ everything but conscious thought from the nature
(Descartes). – We can imagine creatures physically just like us and behaving just as we do, but with different conscious experience (‘inverted spectra’) or with no conscious experience at all: ‘Zombies’ (David Chalmers). Assuming these thought experiments are genuine guides to possibility, consciousness properties ≠ physical properties, seemingly.
5 David Chalmers, ANU, author
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actions (‘the completeness of physics’). So either conscious events (having a pain, seeing red, hearing music) are identical with or somehow realised in physical causes (contra the Zombie Argument), or they are epiphenomenal. But the latter seems absurd, for surely it is my pain that makes me jump.
problem’ of consciousness: why does anything physical feel a certain way.
sciences, that the conscious mind is somehow physical and realised in the brain.
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least a working hypothesis.
language production/understanding, early visual processing, solving mathematical problems etc. Now Descartes also thought reasoning was non-physical, since creative/non-mechanical. But modern computer science (cf. esp. Turing) has shown that we can reduce many kinds of intellectual problem to computational problems which can be realised in a physical device.
are hardware, and reasoning, planning, perceiving etc. are programmes run
relations to ovjects/properties in the external world
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(Rosenthal, Carruthers)
the world/body (Tye, Dretske)
informational integration (e.g. Baars, Tononi).
(’biological theory’, Block)
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though there is an answer (’Mysterianism’, e.g. McGinn).
fabric of physical reality. Animal consciousness involves a special
(Chalmers).
third and first person perspective.
theatre’ where this is all inspected by ’the mind’, e.g. Dennett. All we have is what people tell us about what they perceive/experience, and our job as researchers is to find out what the real mechanisms are in a way that explains why people report what they do, but also how they behave in experimental settings.
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unsolvable (Evan Thompson, Mind in Life). At least there is absolutely no consensus on how to make progress on it.
If it isn’t, there is arguably no clear demaraction in physical reality between the realms of the conscious and the non-conscious, in which case, why think that understanding physical reality will yield an understanding of consciousness?
assumptions of classical cognitive science/philosophy of mind: notions of function/behaviour/reference/anything physicalistically respectable given, whilst phenomenology, ’what it is like’, is to be explained.
we provide a better understanding? Can we do so, and in a way that is recognizably naturalistic/scientific?
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within recent cognitive science, often known as ’4e’, that opposes CCS:
Hurley, Rodney Brooks, Evan Thompson, Mark Rowlands, Dan Hutto, Tony Chemero et al.). Meant to be ’anti-Cartesian’, though controversial as to how and to what
much more contextually and that this will diminish (at least, alter) the role played by internal representations and the brain.
influenced by the phenomenologists, esp. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Perceptual experience is an extended temporal process involving dynamic interaction with the environment, undergirded by implicit knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies (’laws’). We need to think of vision as more like touch and less like taking a snapshot
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by sensation, action, the external world and knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies.
(’the hard problem’)? Does it make sense to suppose the external world ’feels’ at all? And if all the feeling drains down to the sensations, which are assumed to be neural, where is the advance
what would happen if I did. Does knowledge feel any particular way? Can’t it in any case be realised in the brain?
thinking about consciousness.
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experience as being in objects in the external world. Thinking there is a good question of where experiences are to be found is simply a ’category mistake’ – pace Noë: ‘[W]e are looking for consciousness in the wrong place if we look for it in the brain.’ (Out of Our Heads, p. 65).
the (or a) world presented/revealed to one. It is only to a subject of experience that attributions of consciousness make sense, and this involves attributing it an apprehension of a world.
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can indeed must contribute directly to any science of consciousness. Phenomenology is a first-personal form of analysis but is not a matter of introspection, but rather of detailing the structure of lived, embodied experience involving inter alia our direct contact with wordly
underlying physical nature). Phenomenology thereby aims to reveal the principles underlying conscious experience qua the lived, experienced world.
assumptions driving the ’hard problem of consciousness’ are obviated and the usual debate not joined.
conception of phenomenology. But this is compatible with the primacy of phenomenological analysis in the study of consciousness. Together with input from empirical studies and indeed an understanding of the brain, we can in this way make progress towards a scientific understanding of consciousness – one that will be able to mesh with the insights and general approach of enactivism, freed of its reductive ambitions.
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some point in the history of living things consciousness sprang up
and the central explanandum?
thinking about consciousness science, one that may also mesh with fundamental thinking about the logic of life and the idea that life/consciousness is an emergent phenomenon (cf. Varela/Maturana/Thompson on autopoiesis).
the primordial slime, what it is to be thus emergent etc.…
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incommensurable discourses: the discourse of fundamental physics/physical processes on the one hand, and the discourse of experience/the lived world/life
the discourses, and our knowledge as a whole must aim for a certain overall
inclusive story about ’reality’?
Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’
as, arguably, being the only viable response to the age-old epistemological problems of philosophy.