Greg Detre
28/2/00
appearance of contingency resulting from first person perspective = illusion
physical organism vs conscious mind
no purely functionalist characterisation of a system entails (by virtue) of our mental concepts) that the system is conscious
conscious PoVs are logically irreducible to, but still necessarily connected with the physical properties of the organisms whose PoV they are
i.e. supervenient to, cf Davidson, right???
as light = irreducible to but connected with the behaviour of charged particles and gravitation with the behaviour of masses etc.
but connection between the subjective and physical = a new ballgame
inadequate current concepts � just state the conditions needed
we can tell that a number doesn't have parents just by thinking about it and don't need to leave room for what future scientific research might uncover
Descartes felt the same about the human mind with its Cogito
[in a sense though, both are almost self-evident by our perspective on their definition]
the concept of mind doesn't seem to leave space for what it designates (mind) being, upon close scientific investigation, physical
[is this like hetero/homonomic?]
we don't have a comfortable intiial handle on the metnal like we do with things in the spatial-temporal world
but still can't just rule it out
mistaking your inability to imagine something for inconceivability
but there does have to be a reason or story to explain the illusion of inconceivability
is there any more to support dualism against insufficient knowledge and so imagination to conceive how it could work otherwise?
causal facts are strong evidence for mental events having physical properties
before a physical theory of sound, ascribing it a physical presence/(micro-)structure would have been unintelligible
yet sounds are causally related to the physical
- yes, but the problem of sound as related to the physical is really its phenomenological aspect more than anything � if they�d know that loud bass felt the way it does, it wouldn't have seemed so implausible
by pushing back the non-physical from the universe to the phenomena in it (laws of operation), we�re left only now with ourselves the observer and the subjectivity of the secondary qualities we perceive
led to the discovery of a phsyically describable phenomenon identifiable as sound because it had just those causes/effects
= lack of clear allowance for the possibility (of being phsyically describable) in the concept (of sound/conscious) for a positive exclusion of the possibilty by the concept
difference between sound + mental is that sound doesn't require phenomenological qualities and subjectivity to anything physical � those are features of the perception of sound not sound itself
whereas the mental requires unification of both types of properties in a signle thing
shouldn't believe what we don't understand
the problem: distinctive 1st-person/3rd-person character of mental concepts, = the grammatical manifestation of the subjectivity of mental phenomena
the subjective identity of myself at different times is not sufficient to establish the objective identity of a subject or soul
1st + 3rd person form two logically inseparable aspects of a single concept
subjective: can be accurately described only by concepts in which non-observational 1st-person and observational 3rd-person attributions are logically inseparable
the problem: how something that is an aspect/element of an individual�s subjective PoV could also be a physically-describable event in the brain which involves no PoV and no distinctly 1st-person attribution at all
zombies are illusions
is this is the end???
functionalist reductionism???
how can you argue that subjective phenomena are anything qualitatively different from physical processes??? on the basis of an attachemnt more intimate, subjectively somehow, than that I am �a pilot in a ship�
consciousness as the arbitrator over the inputs from different mechanisms and perspectives (attention/selection, linguistic resolving power � intension-sensitivity)