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George Berger said:

I'm suggesting a new space here for references of matters related to consciousness. I'm ignorant about many items in the field of consciousness studies. There's simply too much to learn. The best example is this standard page maintained by David Chalmers, who made consciousness research respectable under that name. Before then it was Philosophy of Mind. But the "Decade opf the Brain," (1990s) enlarged out knowledge so much that any sort of armchair philosophy was looked upon with suspicion.

Thank you so much George.  This is very interesting and helpful for me.

David Chalmers' website has a large amount of links and other resources for consciousness studies.

John Searle's articles on his Berkely web site. I'm a defender of Searle's views.

George Berger said:

I have been q occupied with other matters for several days. I hope to be back in a day or so with a few more references and some comments. So I still exist.

HaHa! No you don't. Not if epiphenominalism is true. You just *think* you exist.

It's no problem at all. We are all just bunches of matter blowing air back and forth now and then. Each bunch contains a subbunch called its Chinese Room, and each room contains a syntactic engine named Siri. That's all there is to us, so one doesn't even need epiphenomenalism, just some material means of zapping signals (of some kind, needn't be air) back and forth, with some material gadget that materially forces each bunch to behave as if it were, uh, conscious. The final result is a bunch of bunches that act as if they were conscious but are not. Since they can even act as if they were self-conscious but are not, we'll call them Zombies.

I didn't make this up all by myself. Part of it comes from some philosophy I have read. I think the air-blowing part comes from Paul Churchland. The Chinese Room and its occupant come from John Searle (of course) and PW. The needlessness of Epiphenomenalism comes from my grandteacher Wilfrid Sellars. He rejected epiphenomenalism because of his basic idea that an entity exists only if it can have causal effects on some other entities. Epiphenomenalism denies this. So for Wilfrid, epiphenomenalism is false. He was quite clear and tough-minded about this and so am I. Hence I hold that Searle need not invoke mental qualities. In his first writings on the mind he has no arguments for them except an appeal to common sense. But it is quite reasonable to hold that the scientific world is so weird that common sense cannot accurately describe it. Then (one final step) if one holds that "sciencia mensura" (Sellars' phrase), science describes the structure of everything, and no epiphenomenalism or qualia are needed. There's no "hard problem." Philosophers call this "eliminative materialism." In theoretical biology it was close to what Maturana and Varela called "autopoiesis."

Sellars rejected eliminative materialism, since he held that some notion of qualia must be correct (I think I do too). He attempted to reconcile this with his strong denial of epiphenomenalism. This led him to a version of emergence , a notion that biologists use as if it was obvious. It's not, which brings me to other matters. Another time please. I was "just" trying to explain my absence of several days, and I've gotten quite deep here into some philosophy. As for myself, I don't know what position to hold.

I would make a distinction between freedom and free will. Since there is no independently existing "self" (no little agent in the skull) there is nothing there to have free will. However, the brain does exist and the number of options available to its neural computations is its degree of freedom. The more options that the brain is aware of the more freedom (range of choices) it has.

George Berger said:

 radical metaphysical behaviourism.

George, could you explain what you mean by "metaphysical behaviourism"?

Post edited 10:45 pm – August 30, 2010 by twnf

George Berger said:

First the easy part. I have no idea what to say about free will. The topic is too slippery for me, too impalpable. I'd like to be a determinist, but it's pretty hard to feel like one (and I wouldn't want to). 

How about something in between determinism and free will? In systems theory and in Buddhism there is the idea of mutual causality. The basic idea is that since everything is part of one inseparable and indivisible whole all phenomena are the contingent products of the intra-actions of other phenomena (no separate, independent existence). For example, molecules are products of intra-actions between atoms, which are themselves products of intra-actions between subatomic particles.  In this view all phenomena are simultaneously cause and effect; agent and acted upon, mutually caused. When two moving billiard balls collide, which is acting on the other? Or are they simply intra-acting with each other? The same questions can be asked of two people in a relationship.

I was not able to reply here today, thanks to some committments. I used what time I had to say something about the phenomenon of blindsight. See the bottom of the forum page. I hope to return here asap, although it's quite possible that my offhand remark about behaviourism cannot be further developed, at least by me.