How important are dictionaries?
Offline Language changes over time. The English we speak now isn't the same as the English we spoke 100 years ago. Language varies over regions. English is not quite the same in England, Australia, and the United States because we have different dialects. It's probably impossible to stop language from changing. I'm not even sure it would be a good think if we could stop it.
The question I'm asking myself right now is what should be done when people disagree about the meaning of a word. Should dictionaries always be the final authority on what a word means? If so which dictionary has the most authority? Can people in a discussion simple agree with each other on a specific set of definitions? What happens when people can't agree? Is there any point to having an argument over what the proper definition of certain words should be? Every argument I've seen about definition on this site seemed utterly pointless.
The world is more connected now then at any other point in history. People from all over the world can connect with each other online. I wonder what affect this connection will have on language. I wonder if dictionaries will become more important or less.
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Offline BobSpence1 wrote:BennyBoy wrote:My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means.
1) That is meaningless nonsense.
2) How do 'know' what a word 'just' means???
3) Wrt the OP, dictionaries are important as records of consensual usage.
< Latin jūstus righteous, equivalent to jūs law, right + -tus adj. suffix
2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.
3) The problem with consensus, not to put too fine a point on it, is that a lot of people are dumbasses, and we don't want them making imprecise meanings for everything just because they can't be bothered to learn what they really mean. Yes, you can make refinements in the context of a conversation or debate if you're trying to express a variation on an idea: that's fine. But where there's a dispute, and someone refuses to accept your innovative use of a word, you have to go to the meaning the word HAS used, or just walk away. So if you say, "Since I don't know if anyone else has feelings, I think its better to define sentience in behavioral terms. If something acts as though it feels, that's good enough," that's fine. If anyone at all says, "That's not what the word means, and I do not accept your definition," then do you a) argue the philosophy of it and call the guy a moron, or b) just pick a different word and carry on with your experiments?
I know that some scientists will choose (a), and the reason is a belligerent one: now that a material or physicalist view has become dominant, there's an antibiotic reaction to ideas that do not fit with that world view. Next, I'll claim that I'm a sentient, feeling being, not a machine, and the inevitable reponse will be: "Show me the evidence." Case closed. Definition changed.
Lol, screw all that has transpired on this thread up to now, back to square one.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
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I have my personal theories if ya would like to discuss yours.
). And not only that, but whatever's going on in my synapses is critical to my ability to think, to experience, and to communicate via text to you. In fact, whatever's going on in my synapses is literally part of my consciousness (as a process) in a deeply fundamental way, although I have no consciousness of it.I cannot communicate to you via text what is happening in my synapses.
Such are thought experiments.
I agree with your defintition of sentience for the most part. I would say that sentience is the ablity to experience or feel. I view consciousness as a purely physical process, but I have no problems with defining senience that way. I feel this way because the word sentience convays a concept that is useful to me, and if I didn't have that word I would have to make up another word to convey the same concepts.
I disagree with what the guy said about their being no proof people have feelings. My philosphy on how people know things is a form of pragmatism were truth and knowledge are judged by their ability to make predictions. The idea that people are sentient allows me to better predict their behavior, and that ability to predict justifies my claim that other people are sentient. I know that I myself am sentient because I experience things.
Well... watch where you point that comment, it's freaking loaded!
There are a few arguments in what you just wrote, but to stick with the thread, you're correct. In that I mean, if two exoscientists are trying to agree on what would constitute as sentient life elsewhere, then his definition is relevant because you need to bring the definition to the lowest common denominator. If you're arguing about human sentience and the mechanics of it, the lowest common denominator has no relevance due to the fact that we have already established what 'sentience' or sapience we're referring to. Reducing it to the absurd minimum is being obtuse and not relevant to the discussion.
That being said, you should create a thread here regarding sentience or empiricism vs rationalism , I would like to discuss that with the likes of TG and Bob, and maybe we can all successfully ignore Jean.
Edit: mistype.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
I hav a theory from split brian studies that there may be multiple conscious events in the brain at one time with our general consciousness unaware of these other entities or events. When there is two much seizure in some epileptics the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain can be cut reducing or curtailing the seizures.
The right eye is connected to the left side of the brain and the left eye to to the right. If i were to put something in front of the subjects right eye and hold a comb in front of her she would be able to act out combing but not use the word. If I do the same thing to the left eye she can say comb but not describe what it is used for. What we think of as the "I" of consciousness, the "Me"is the combining of these processes of information ( conscious states that are separate) into one unified experience. A comb brushes the hair.
Other examples of split brain studies present a woman whose right brain loved a dress but her left brain hated it ( wonder where we get those indecisions from they battle it out). V. S. Ramachandran has an example where the right side was taught to answer yes not questions. When asked the right brain of the subject believed in god and the left side did not. For you theists will the right brain consciousness go to heaven and the left side go to hell? Just curious?
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
Hi TG,
It's always something, often not admitted. But just like Brian, you "left" (never of) Christianity because of your son's bone marrow issues. Thus another example of an emotional reaction.
I end up finding these emotional reactions when not directing discussing it. So once again, you denied the Trinity not because of the Trinity, but once again because of the "problem of evil."
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
'Purely material process' is not quite coherent. Processes are totally dependent on matter, or some analogue of matter in whatever 'realm' or higher dimensional 'reality' one imagines. But a 'process' is not a material thing in itself.
Sentience is a product of a complex process which takes place on an extremely complex material structure. It is not a 'material' thing, it is a bit like a subtle attribute of a certain category of material things. Complex, persistent structure, necessary for such complex processes to 'run', are totally reliant on matter particles.
Sentience is totally dependent on the specific organization of that material structure. Saying that structure 'causes' sentience doesn't really describe the way sentience relates to the structure. It would be better described as an emergent property of that structure. It is totally dependent on the physical mechanism, in the same way that our communication here is totally dependent on the structure of the electronic devices we are using.
Science can now increasingly tie 'feelings' to processes in the brain, by correlating the verbal reports of a person with observations of those processes.
The programs running on those devices are not material entities, they are abstractions, patterns, which can be totally described and specified in various ways, such as printed words, patterns of pits or colors on a plastic disk, or of magnetization on a spinning magnetic disk, etc. But until the state of a certain sort of 'mechanism' is configured according to that pattern, and the process is initiated, they are not manifest. Consciousness, feeling, awareness, are analogous, but more subtle, of course. 'Information' is indeed the basis of such processes and patterns/abstractions, in somewhat the same way that atoms and their properties are the basis of the physical structure of DNA molecules.
Science can study anything which is manifest to us in any vaguely consistent and detectable way. It is simply observation and testing, done within a systematic, logical framework of checking and correlation with as many other independent but relevant observations and tests, which are then used to form hypothesis which propose underlying relationships between various observed phenomena. The only things it cannot investigate are those which cannot be detected in any way, which do not affect physical objects, energy flows, or our minds.
It is not a 'material' view, it is a 'natural' view.
Meanings do indeed change. The meanings of words are related to their etymology, but not constrained by it - it is how they are currently used that defines their meaning.
I might not describe things exactly the way that guy did, but I think I would pretty much agree with him.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Hi TG,
Okay, so you denied the Trinity because it was a late development and was heresy? What? Have you heard of LSD 25. It's a CIA form of LSD a 1000 Times more powerful then regular LSD.
Genesis 19:24 we see an example of how the Trinity works. In this instance we have the 1st and 2nd persons of the Trinty both using Yahveh. The Yahveh in heaven brings the fire to the Yahveh on earth to shoot the fire towards Sodom. There are dozens of examples in the TaNaK. Not sure what you mean by late development.
Yes, Heraclitus used the term Logos, but what Heraclitus meant by logos is not what John meant. John simply used the term for relation but poured in Biblical concepts. That's like saying Virgin Records is a late idea and is heresy because virgins aren't records.
There is some emotional reason to be an atheist. It's never intellectual.
The argument regarding the logos is very old 19th century and has been refuted and dealt with many times. We can continue to discuss it. I thought it was over sometime more complex vs. the logos.
Remember TG, terms don't determine concepts, rather concepts determine terms. That is where you made your first error.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
Hereclitus used the term very weakly. But if you follow Stoic development and look at Philo of Alexandria the term is causative of superstitious people projecting divinity into a story or person. So the Johannine literature reflects the areas speculation and intensification of the hymns we find in Paul. The Jerusalem Pillars and Jesus would roll over in his grave to see what blasphemy was done in the name of a apocalyptic movement. Paul certainly did not help. And then the second and third century Neo-Platonists really went off the deep end with the trinity. John and James remained faithful to the original concept of the movement and we see the Ebionites until the early 2nd century maintaining the original Jesus movement.
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
Certainly concepts are presented by terms but a term is such that it my be a vessel for different or related concepts from one community to another. So the concept is determined by the term's context as for as exegesis. Again you must keep eye to the diachronic as well as synchronic.
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
Well, the guy is simply wrong. That is not the only definition that makes sense according to science. Psychology and psychiatry for example, deal with the feeling aspect of people all the time. Are you feeling depressed? Anxious? Angry? Etc.
Furthermore, anaesthetics can only be judged based on how well they actually do their job, which is to prevent or supprress sensation. Yes, they do this through a chemical process that can be expressed in terms of modifications to an information processing system, but none of that matters if it doesn't actually stop people from experiencing pain.
Feelings are physical, there is no doubt. Ask a neuroscientist.
I suspect he was trying to argue against the use of 'feeling' and 'emotion' as justifications for truth, as in "Well, I have no evidence, but I 'feel' that my theory is right, therefore you must accept it as scientifically justified as true." It is true that 'feeling' is not a good justification for the truth of things, but that doesn't mean science has no accurate concepts of what feelings are, physically.
Either that or he was trying to argue against 'qualia', which are mystical mumbo-jumbo 'feelings' or sensations that are defined as non-physical, and hence science cannot investigate qualia. This stems from a philosophical argument from what I consider to be 'mysterians' who are enamoured with the idea that 'everything is ultimately mysterious and we can never really know anything about consciousness/sentience with science'. These people and their arguments are a waste of anyone's time, to put it mildly. But that doesn't mean that actual physical feelings do not exist or can't be studied by science.
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Bob brings up an important point about the distinction (or in some people, the lack of distinction) between 'material', 'natural', and 'physical'. When Bob says that sentience is a process, which is 'not a material thing in itself', but then also says that 'processes are totally dependent on matter', it may sound strange, but he is not contradicting himself. Note that later he speaks of 'information', 'physical mechanisms', 'physical structure' and 'physical objects'.
The way I conceive of it is as a kind of hierarchy (actually more like a tree) which goes like this: Natural > Physical > Material. In this case, 'material' is referring specifically to matter/energy itself. The Physical encompasses the Material, but also includes 'non-material' things like forces, charges, quantum states, structures, space-time, and -- crucially -- information and processes. This view, which is what mainstream science substantiates and embraces, is called Physicalism. The wiki article is pretty good, and leads to more in-depth stuff, but you may find yourself caught up in tangential discussion of 'supervenience' and all that jazz.
I've got another post on the topic (which includes yet another video) on physicalism which attempts to cut through the jargon and wrap up physicalism into a practical tool to use/understand. It's for situations like these when people are trying to figure out the 'right' word for their view of what is often lamely called 'materialism': The word is: Physicalism
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I think materialism vs. physicalism is mainly semantics. Whether you say that a process is material, or to say that process are not material but are supervenient on material stuctures, is a pretty fine distinction when you're talking about things like sentience. But I did try to pick a word for which everyone could see the need to debate. My point really is that you have to just let a word mean what it means. We use "sentience" to refer to the feeling of conscious awareness, and we recognize sentience in others, when we try to explain to them that we are agnostics and not agnostic atheists, by the way their brows furrow.
I think the last two posts are an example where a specific debate has gone deeper than most would take it (i.e. it's been through the wringer of academia), and you end up with two schools: those who are just thinking about thought, and use words in their mundane usage, and those who have necessarily refined definitions very sharply to allow them to debate subtleties (and do dissertations).
I think in general forums, the academics have the responsibility of trying to understand what level of usage people are using, and use a bit of the ol' Socrates methodology to guide them to the point where they need more precision-- THEN pull out the academic definitions. In general, I think that's basically what people actually do, but sometimes the ad homs come a little quicker than the comprehension could. So far, I'm happy the way Bob and you are introducing ideas here.
All conscious experience has feeling somewhere in the nexus of its processing. It goes through the limbic system. Your "feeel" on that color is how it interest you, captivates you, makes you associate it with a happy warm sky, a peaceful forest or an angry blazing fire. Colors are used in teaching and hospital setting because of mood. Do not paint a room pink or orange. paint it soft green or blue. When someone says something you understand it through an unconscious processing of previous experience which entails various emotional memory experiences associated and stored with the ideas. Someone says a neutral word and a person might get upset from his stored associative feelings that contribute to the meaning and come up through the dorsel section of the stream of processing through the limbic system to an irritated thought. Say communist to an anti-communist or democrat to a republican. Say angel or devil. These words as do all thoughts carry multilayer mental processing of the neo-cortex, cortex , limbic and even the r-complex. A physicist will feel excitement with a new thought. Does this help? This is called qualia in the study of consciousness.
Mary was born with complete color blindness. Yet she had an acute gray scale ability of discernment. She could usually tell a color by comparing one shade of gray with another. This was certainly a factor that led her to major in and devote her life to neuroscience. She was an expert in the area of the brain that processed color. She could tell you all about the color red in scientific detail and point it out when she say that particular gray shade of a rose. One day she dropped a book she was carrying on her walk to work. When she bent over to pick it up she was struck by a passing car. Surgery had to be done to the left side of her brain As the surgeon repaired her brain she also removed a small lesion near the area damaged by the accident. After several days Mary woke to a world of color. The first thing she saw was the dozen roses her boyfriend had brought. The first thing that Mary said was, “So that is red!”
What she experienced as red including feelings of happiness, satisfaction and surprize is the qualia in the conscious experience not reducible to shared experience and is the you-ness, I-ness, or me-ness of the experience.
WIKI:
Qualia (play /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/), singular "quale" (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]), from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe subjective conscious experiences. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."[1] Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: "The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so." [2]
The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that they are seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
OK, I see what he did there and it really comes off as incoherent. I underlined the key bit to focus on that but the rest of the post provides the essential context.
What does he me by “the only definition that makes sense according to science”? I have seen a number of people pull that particular rabbit out of their arse over the years and it always fails to impress me.
Science is a process which develops and changes, it is not a snapshot of reality with no change permitted, nor is it something to be enshrined and held up as the unquestionable thing. Really, that is what theists do with their dusty old books.
Further, it does not even matter if any specific conception is even coherent or in agreement with any part of science, the conception itself would not be part of science apart from a very general sense which would be useless in such a context as this.
Really, I could hold to some conception which may or may not hold some traction in a discussion. There may be scientists working in a relevant area who are thinking along similar lines. However, as someone on the outside of the actual matter at hand, the conception which I would hold to would be that of a layman and as such, no science. Hell's bells but even if experiments were done that showed my idea to be quite accurate, that would not modify the fact that my idea was not, at the root of the matter, a scientific conjecture.
What would really be going on there would be that I was holding science up and claiming that what I had come up with in a non-scientific manner might be in some agreement with science. Which is really using science to justify my non-scientific opinion.
=
TG, I'm mildly curious as to whether you find the Mary's Room argument persuasive as to whether so-called qualia are non-physical and at the same time really existing.
BTW: Being 'not reducible to shared experience' a) doesn't disqualify something from being physical, depending on how you define shared experience or b) requires a meaningless definition of 'shared experience'.
The problem of qualia is an imaginary problem. We are steadily (in fact, increasingly rapidly) finding out more and more about how the physical brain represents everything from memory to meaning, and sensation to emotion. Once we discover the brain's concrete mechanisms for implementing consciousness, there will only be minor gaps to fill in our understanding.
The point is, eventually we will be able to identify 'the experience of red' in the brain, and once we do so, the mysterians will just say, "But that's just a representation! You may know everything there is to know about the physical brain's simulation of physical pseudo-consciousness, but you'll never be able to 'reduce' true qualia to that!"
And the neuroscientists will just go about their jobs, tinkering with the ways people consciously experience the world, and the mysterians will just keep on denying that science can understand consciousness.
The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, of intelligent design, of homeopathy, of 'psychics', of prayer, etc. None of it has any practical impact on reality, except for the actions of those deluded by the ideas.
Edit: I just came up with a good way of putting this, right after I hit 'post'.
Basically, neuroscience has destroyed the idea of a unified 'soul'. So, philosophers aware of this destruction via neuroscience, but still desiring a soul to exist, invented 'qualia', the 'souls' of individual neurons.
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Consciousness will be something like a property dualism in which material patterns are information agents in a similar sense as DNA. The idea of consciousness being fundamental by Chalmers is speculative but nothing to do with anything spiritual or non-physical. The assumption in such research is that awareness is as simple as the "awareness" between two electron or quarks. The type of neurological perception we see in complex organisms is not so much emergent as a "complexification" of that said awareness beyond presence, attraction or repulsion. I am enough of a pragmatist to think that the red you experience is the same as me since they are from a common evelutionary development and physical process. Human consciousness may well be emergent or simply a recursive process in which red is a conscious state experienced by another frame of consciousness linguistically based as "I". I think this is lacking in mice and cats, etc.; But the problem of qualia is not like elan vital in that it is empirically a referent of which we speak but can not communicate since it is an internal private experience.
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
Curious - how was it assessed that 'Mary' was color blind, if she could still distinguish between things of different color??
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
That is meaningless nonsense.
How do 'know' what a word 'just' means???
Wrt the OP, dictionaries are important as records of consensual usage.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
EDIT: Oh by the way if she had been born with the acuity and apart from her acquiring her acuity over the years there would be no way to determine presently her experience of gray from your red since she would not be missing out as far as she knows and would have a good functional language game to communicate with you.
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
Chalmers is a git.
I repeat: "The problem of qualia is exactly like the problem of phlogiston, of elan vital, ... etc."
Property dualism amounts to the claim that some properties are just mental and some are just physical. There's a mysterious 'mentalness' that cannot, I repeat, cannot be investigated by physics, because it is too mysterious. It is, but this distinction, defined as non-physical.
In exactly the same way that vitalists claim that some matter is just alive, and some matter just isn't. There's a mysterious 'aliveness' that cannot be detected physically, etc. etc.
There is zero evidence of property dualism, it's just mumbo jumbo.
The 'souls' of the neurons indeed.
Umm, I think you just answered your own question: It can be reduced to the quantum level. The end. The 'but' is irrelevant to reducibility. Causality is indeed an 'emergent' relationship based on the fact that macro-objects consist of ginormous amounts of quantum objects, making the whole thing an exercise in sums and averages: Statistical approximations of quantum systems. Thermodynamics.
All of which is to say that you don't agree with the mysterian definitions of qualia. In that case, the Mary problem is useless. The whole point of it is to show that there is 'something more' to experience than can be 'reduced' to physics. But the presentation of the 'problem' is so absurd. She reads books about physics, and the mysterians equate this to: 'Thus, she has all the physical knowledge of red you could possibly imagine'. Um, sorry, no. That's a bait and switch. Later, she sees a red rose and goes "Oh!" and we're supposed to be impressed that she has 'learned something new that cannot be 'reduced' to shared experience' whatever that means, which is never defined.
You say:
How is that a 'problem' of consciousness in the 'hard' way? It is a minor detail, if qualia are acknowledged as physical.
It's like saying the 'real problem' of photosynthesis is whether the light energy is first stored in chlorophyll and then put to work to make sugars, or whether the light energy directly drives a chemical reaction using chlorophyll as a catalyst. Who fucking cares? The point is that no magic vital force is required when sugars are synthesized!
Likewise, if qualia are physical, who cares if they are 'states' or 'the process itself'? The point is that consciousness has a physical mechanism. Figuring out the nitty gritty details is neurologist's research problem, compared to the astounding fact that people like Chalmers (not to mention billions of theists) grasp desperately to hold on to their imaginary 'souls'.
DNA does not require property dualism to do its job. Information is just information, there isn't 'life' information and there isn't 'mental' information. It's all just information. Informational structures build upon themselves, and you get complicated things like life happening, and even more complicated things like consciousness happening. No. Magic. Required.
He would deny his non-physicalism, but if you actually listen to what he says and read what he writes, he defines entities in such ways that they are non-physical by definition. There is no getting around this. It is the only way for any form of dualism to work.
What you call 'complexification', I call 'emergence'. If you like, I'm a reductionist emergentist. I don't think emergence is incompatible with reduction, and it is useful to hold theories that are approximations of very complex probabilistic systems, such as organisms and minds.
Well, I'm rather a pragmatist myself, and I remain agnostic on that issue. In fact, I think I lean towards each person experiencing things in their own unique ways, due to fetal and infant brain development being essentially a stochastic/probabilistic process of learning from environment. I do not think there is a gene for 'seeing red a certain way' or 'the seeing-red part of the brain'. How would such a gene evolve? It only matters that you and I both respond to various wavelengths of light in consistent ways, but it doesn't matter how that experience is implemented in the brain. If I saw green whenever you saw red and vice versa, as long as I call my green "red" and my red "green", and see green/"red" fruits as yummy and red/"green" vegetables as healthy to eat, then evolutionarily, my genes for vision are exactly as functional as yours.
It like, why are my fingerprints different than anyone else's? Does it really matter? As long as my finger tips are able to grip things easily, a random finger print is just as good as any other.
Depends on what you mean by 'communicate'.
For example, I cannot communicate to you what any of my neural synapses are doing. I'm simply unaware of those details. They are outside of my consciousness. And yet, there IS something going on in there (I hope!
). And not only that, but whatever's going on in my synapses is critical to my ability to think, to experience, and to communicate via text to you. In fact, whatever's going on in my synapses is literally part of my consciousness (as a process) in a deeply fundamental way, although I have no consciousness of it.
I cannot communicate to you via text what is happening in my synapses. But, if we had a super-techo brain scanner, or even just a modern-day probe electrode, we could observe what was happening in one of my synapses, and we could record that activity, and then we could communicate it to you by a simple data file.
It may even be the case that it just so happens that that particular neural synapse was the key synapse responsible for giving me a conscious experience of red. And so the data file we sent to you would literally be a communication of my personal, internal, 'private' experience.
So, no, I do not see this 'problem' with qualia. If they are physical, which is about as certain as anything, then they can be detected. If they can be detected, they can be recorded. If they can be recorded, they can be communicated.
You may say (as I imagine someone like Chalmers would), "But that's just a data file, you haven't really 'shared' or 'communicated' your experience of red!!!?!"
To which I say, "Well, with our super-techno brain zapper, I can located your synapse that happens to be in charge of your own personal experience of red, feed in a translated version of this data file, and induce you to experience precisely the same shade of red as I experienced. Whether you think qualia are uber-mysterious or not."
Perhaps. It remains to be seen. I'll boil down my view to one simple question: Do you believe that it is in principle realistically possible that we could one day develop precise enough technology to detect, record, copy, simulate and reproduce a truly conscious mind that contains all your memories, your personality, and everything that makes 'you' 'you' (except, obviously your body), and flip a switch and thing thing will be a true replica of your mind, including the ability to 'consciously' 'experience' 'qualia' of the same sort that you do?
If you answer yes, then you agree with my view at its essence. If you answer no, you don't.
That about sums it up I think.
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And that's why dictionaries are important.
< Latin jūstus righteous, equivalent to jūs law, right + -tus adj. suffix
2) Look at its etymology, and decide if the changes in its evolution were justified.
3) The problem with consensus, not to put too fine a point on it, is that a lot of people are dumbasses, and we don't want them making imprecise meanings for everything just because they can't be bothered to learn what they really mean. Yes, you can make refinements in the context of a conversation or debate if you're trying to express a variation on an idea: that's fine. But where there's a dispute, and someone refuses to accept your innovative use of a word, you have to go to the meaning the word HAS used, or just walk away. So if you say, "Since I don't know if anyone else has feelings, I think its better to define sentience in behavioral terms. If something acts as though it feels, that's good enough," that's fine. If anyone at all says, "That's not what the word means, and I do not accept your definition," then do you a) argue the philosophy of it and call the guy a moron, or b) just pick a different word and carry on with your experiments?
I know that some scientists will choose (a), and the reason is a belligerent one: now that a material or physicalist view has become dominant, there's an antibiotic reaction to ideas that do not fit with that world view. Next, I'll claim that I'm a sentient, feeling being, not a machine, and the inevitable reponse will be: "Show me the evidence." Case closed. Definition changed.