Emergence. Thats the concept which a certain type of materialist will say defines the relationship between the mind (I prefer to say conscious experience) and the brain, and the paradigm example of it, they will say, is the relationship between something like wetness and molecules of H2O: just as the phenomena we group under the word wetness emerge from the behavior of H2O molecules, so conscious experience emerges from the brain. (The position is called emergentism and adherents refer to themselves as emergentists.) Is any of this helpful? The first point we should make is that the notion of emergence implied by this example is not necessarily the same as the notion that some of the emergentists statements will imply he thinks he is advocating. In other words, the emergentist is often equivocal as to whether by calling a thing something which emerges, he is calling it something truly new - an addition to the picture - or not; we will see why this matters in a few moments. If the relationship between wetness and the behavior of molecules of H2O are what he chooses as the paradigm illustration of what an emergent relationship entails, however, then he is not. To make this clear, lets subtract any of the qualitative experiences we might call wet from the picture, as it would clearly be circular if our explanation of the emergence of conscious experience itself involved taking the emergence of conscious experience on assumption. Now, wet refers solely to the outward physical behaviors which we might group under the term. Clearly, wetness is nothing in any way, shape, or form, over or above the behavior of molecules of H2O at all; rather, it just literally is that very same behavior: objects sink in water because loose connections between molecules of H2O allow molecules of other substances to slip between them; and there is nothing extra whatsoever about wetness to explain - they are just two different terms for that very same thing. We cannot, then, allow other aspects of an emergentists rhetoric to confuse us about the fact that he is actually a mind-brain identity theorist in a new outfit, and that if we reject mind-brain identity theories, emergentism truly adds nothing new and we must reject it too. And a whole host of thought experiments, from the knowledge argument to the zombie argument to others, converge (granted without being able to avoid some degree of technical circularity, as I acknowledged and explained in a status post yesterday) on the common conclusion that mind-brain identity theory gets it wrong: whatever their relationship may in fact be, a vibration of photons at a certain frequency and the private subjective experience of love, or hate, or the color red just are not and could not ever be in principle the same literal thing. And if you ask me, anyone who tries to deny this fact is not so much doing philosophy of mind so much as they are taking its very most central first question and pretending it doesnt exist at all. The second and related but more important point is that if we DESCRIBE the behavior of molecules of H2O, then precisely because they are in fact identical, we have already literally described wetness. When we describe molecules of an extra substance slipping through the loose connections between molecules of H2O, there is literally nothing else whatsoever about the phenomena of sinking to explain. But this is just exactly what is definitively not true about consciousness! No matter HOW much description we may give to the outward physical behavior of neurons, no such description will ever have so much as begun to describe the subjective experience of love - or hate - or the color red. And this will be true for all time, as a plain matter of principle, because there is IN PRINCIPLE no causal mechanism we could ever describe for which it would not be true that we could perfectly well conceive of that causal mechanism being enacted without any subjective experience accompanying the execution of that mechanism. So neither is the disanalogy from H2O molecules and wetness to neurons and consciousness one that could conceivably ever advance through some development in our understanding of the behavior of neurons or brains: the disanalogy holds as a matter of principle, eternally, in virtue of the most core essential unchanging traits of the kinds of things we are talking about. So the analogy doesnt work. The picture adds nothing new. Emergentism collapses into an identity theory, and identity theories collapse into absurd eliminativist claims that conscious experiences actually do not exist at all: in order to escape the obvious force of the premise that the feeling of love (or hatred, or seeing red) is whatever else it may be something somehow additional to any particular shaped tiny objects plugging in to similarly shaped receptacles, the identity theorist defines consciousness by abstracting the outward evidences from cases we describe as conscious, thereby being able to say that seeing red emerges from the brain processes involved in that seeing because seeing red, per his definition, precisely just means being able to label a word to the recognition of a particular frequency of vibrating photons and so forth - but by doing this, the identity theorist has cast away what actually needed to be explained - our consciously seeing red as a qualitative, ineffable phenomena within private streams of subjective experience - and has thus committed himself to denying that conscious experience actually does exist by default. What the eliminativist does openly and explicitly, the identity theorist does by shuffling the meaning of words around in a dishonest shell game. Thus, all forms of physicalism either implicitly or explicitly collapse into the very denial of conscious experience itself. And this is what we have the eliminativists themselves to thank for introducing to the dialectic of philosophy of mind, because their absurd presence has drawn this fact out in even more stark relief. When the eliminativist Daniel Dennett begins his book, Consciousness Explained, by openly stating: in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs... and through the process of rigorously following this rule down to its final end concludes with statements like: when we talk about that feeling—you know, the feeling of pain that is the effect of the stimulus and the cause of the dispositions to react—the quale, the “intrinsic” content of the subjective state. How could anyone deny that!? Just watch... his willingness to adopt such an insane conclusion may be so absurd it steps far beyond idiotic, but he has nonetheless shown us something extremely important by illustrating that he does, in fact, reach that conclusion by a consistent application of his starting premises. What, for Dennett, is happily accepted as a modus ponens (P, if and only if P then Q, therefore Q) should be accepted by all the sane among the rest of us as a valid modus tollens (Not-Q, if and only if P then Q, therefore not-P) and this is, indirectly, a valid and significant contribution to our understanding: by making himself into such a profoundly confused caricature of sound thinking, writers like Dennett have done more than almost anyone else to demonstrate to us the falseness of their very own starting premises (namely, that is: of physicalism itself). The options, then, become stark: ones choice is either to deny - with some greater or lesser degree of intellectual honesty and self-awareness - that conscious experience exists at all, or else to endorse some form or other of outright dualism. Both options are indeed extreme and radical - but only one of them is actually coherent. Like it or not, that option is dualism. Private, subjective conscious experiences exist in the world as a thing in their own right. And somehow, private subjective conscious experiences (as I have yet to make my proof for explicit in this recent series of posts) absolutely undeniably have causal activity in the world - in virtue of their private, subjective aspects as such, separate and distinct from any number of physical processes which may accompany that metaphysically private ineffable subjectivity whatsoever. Dennett claims, in continuation of an earlier quote, that given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up. If we reject the absurd conclusion which Dennett himself realizes he has no other choice but to brazenly endorse, however, we might instead say that denying that conscious experience exists at all is the only way to actually give up on attempting to account for and explain it - and that (at least SOME BROAD FORM OF) dualism, far from wallowing, is the correct position precisely because it is the only one which acknowledges that a profound, fundamental mystery simply does exist - and, in fact, lies at the most central core of our very existence in the world itself. If thats how it is, then, . . . well, . . . thats how it is.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:31:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015