Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Arguing with Eliezer: Part II

I mean 'distinct facts' in the coarse-grained sens...

2008-03-31T11:13:10.039-04:00

I mean 'distinct facts' in the coarse-grained sense that it's logically possible for them to come apart, i.e. for one to hold in the absence of the other.

Indeed,no more need for philosophers to debate thi...

2008-03-31T02:57:32.798-04:00

Indeed,
no more need for philosophers to debate this issue - I've solve it.

> that you're conscious is a different fact from t...

2008-03-27T03:52:51.179-04:00

> that you're conscious is a different fact from the fact that your neurons fire in such-and-such ways.

does that say more about what one considers a fact to be than about the actual state of affairs?

For example the common saying "X is more than the sum of it's parts"

In one sense it is trivialy true ie 2 is more than "1"+"1" it is a whole new concept "2"!
But in another it is trivially false. Same principle gets more and more obscure as you face more complex issues until one has 'sentient being' vs 'a specific collection of energy spots upon a space/time membrane'

I presume there should be no issue in accepting both points of view simultaneously.

Note the difference between "arising from" versus ...

2008-03-26T11:06:46.472-04:00

Note the difference between "arising from" versus "reducing to". In the former case, we have two phenomena bound by law-like connections. In the second case, we have one phenomenon being described in two different ways. (Sane) non-reductionists will agree that neurons and such give rise to consciousness (in virtue of the psycho-physical bridging laws that happen to hold in our universe). They merely insist that the fact that you're conscious is a different fact from the fact that your neurons fire in such-and-such ways.

Hmmm to me there is no issue at all with that aris...

2008-03-26T04:04:38.886-04:00

Hmmm to me there is no issue at all with that arising from electrons and protons - in fact it's confusing to hear people say that it can't. Maybe it is the same for Eliezer.

And I find that in itself evidence I'm probably right since if the alternative was the case it should be intuitive to me but my theory has no strong opinion on whether it should be intuitive for anyone else.

So am I souless (OK maybe a little) or is my experience of self unreliable?

I am now envisaging a numerous situation where a person who believes in this sort of experience as the ultimate evidence insists that I shouldn't believe their own account of their experience because I don't experience it.

I think a danger of the shift to cognitive science...

2008-03-24T20:50:30.881-04:00

I think a danger of the shift to cognitive science that you mention -- unless perhaps it is a rigorous application of cognitive science, which is both difficult and time-consuming -- is that it can become a sort of selective obscurantism: you block arguments you don't want to consider on a basis that has nothing to do with their merits, and dismiss positions you're not interested in without rational evaluation of the position itself. As I said, I think a rigorous shift to cog. sci. would often be worthwhile -- but in a rigorously cog. sci. approach you'd be careful not to do it, because you'd recognize that there are lots and lots of potential factors that have to be considered before an adequate explanation is found, and you'd have to take the trouble to make necessary distinctions and qualifications about what this or that approach can and can't get you. What people are really tempted to do is to shift not to cognitive science but to some folksy pastiche of it, based on a mix of naive introspection, motivated reasoning, unexamined assumptions, and quick inferences based on scattered studies.