Whenever our sciences leave us with an arbitrary starting point , this should be an impetus to start asking ‘why’ questions.
— Joshs

But to say it's arbitrary is to already frame it as requiring a reason (but lacking one). 'Arbitrary' doesn't make any sense in the context of things not even requiring a reason. — Isaac

What circumstances do you think require a reason via those that do not? Some are perfectly happy with the current status of quantum theory , and others think it is lacking a deeper reason , or as Lee Smolen says, a deeper ‘why’, and so is incomplete.
What would we be saying about the nature of an event or fact such that it would be exempted from requiring a reason? Put differently, what kind of reality is it that cannot be potentially construed in an alternate way, so that we come to see it’s role within an order that did not exist to us previously?

I don't see how. In a multi-verse theory (which I make no claims to understand I should point out), we would have one speed and other universes would have another speed. That doesn't in the slightest answer the question why we have the speed we have, it only says that others don't. — Isaac

I’m not saying that placing the constants of our universe on an evolutionary spectrum removes all traces of arbitrariness in their numeric values. What it does is diminish the arbitrariness by placing these values within a larger order. This is analogous to the origin of species before and after Darwin. Pre-Darwin, the answer to the question ‘Why are there different species’ was , because God made them arbitrarily unique in themselves. Beyond this, no deeper inquiry was attempted. After Darwin, the deeper ‘why’ question could be answered ‘ because each is the product of an overarching process that allows us to relate one to the other via temporal genesis. Are there still arbitrary differences from one species to another? Of course, but the concept of species in itself is , since Darwin , much less arbitrary than prior to Darwin.

alternative mechanisms don't require even a question of 'why?' let alone an answer. One can simply say 'it needn't be that way'. All it takes to shift paradigm is an understanding that things need not be looked at the way they are, that grounding assumptions can be questioned. none of those questions need be 'why?' they could be 'is it?' — Isaac

What youre describing doesn’t sound like paradigm change so much as minor adjustments with an ongoing theory, which deals with questions of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’.

‘Is it’ suggests to me invalidation or disproof. We ask ‘is it true’ and answer yes or no. But for Kuhn , there need be no invalidation in order to investigate new orientations. The question isn’t ‘is it right’ or ‘does it work’ but ‘how does it work’ ? Don’t we choose one paradigm over other because changing the way we look at things ‘solves more puzzles’, as Kuhn put it? It seems to be that choosing the way that works by solving more puzzles, albeit differently, amounts to finding a why where there was none before. One cannot solve more puzzles without making correlations, connections and unities where they did not exist before. This is what a why question does, it is a ‘meta’ -how question .

I approach the "first-person nature of experience" from the perspective of the difference between "inner and outer". — Metaphysician Undercover

That's what Bernardo Kastrup says. I think it's right, although I hadn't considered it from the perspective you suggest regarding the expansion of space. :chin:

They just do. — Isaac

It baffles me that you think any of these questions are unaskable, that they "just are". What a strange, pre-scientific mindset, like answering a question with "because god willed it". A few simple google searches will disabuse you. Sure, the physical constants may well be beyond our ken, but that doesn't stop us from asking.

We could give an evolutionary account, some natural advantage to consciousness. Random changes in neurological activity one time resulted in proto-consciousness which gave an evolutionary advantage to the creature and so it passed on that genetic mutation. There...is that satisfactory, and if not, why not? — Isaac

It is not satisfactory, because it answers the wrong question. The question is not, "why did consciousness arise in evolutionary history?" Rather, "by what mechanism does specific neurological activity give rise to consciousness?". Similar to how you can ask "By what mechanism does an engine, carburetor, wheels, etc, assembled as a car, drive?" "It just does", "God wills it", does not answer either.

It is much more problematic trying to explain consciousness without reference to physical processes At the very least if conciousnsss is software it needs hardware.

It is much more problematic trying to explain consciousness without reference to physical processes — Edmund

True.

The hard problem is just more masturbation. — neonspectraltoast

That's one way to get rid of a "hard" problem.

Whatever you're going on about, it has nothing to do with the hard problem. — frank

What exactly do you think the so-called "hard problem" is asking for?

I approach the "first-person nature of experience" from the perspective of the difference between "inner and outer". If we allow the fundamental empirical principle that some things are experienced to come from inside oneself, and others from outside oneself, we can understand that the third-person perspective cannot give us any observation of the inside. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean inside and outside the body, no? My experience of anything internal to the body is not accessible to others. to be sure, so there is no possibility of identifying common objects of "inner" experience, as we would do with "external" objects. Is that what you mean?

That said, my experience of "external" objects is not accessible to others either; there is just the possibility of identifying, via reportage, common features between the experiences of different people.

What exactly do you think the so-called "hard problem" is asking for? — Janus

The "easy problem" refers to explaining functions of consciousness like how memory is laid down, how the visual cortex works, stuff like that.

The "hard problem" refers to explaining the experiences that accompany function. Why is there an experience that accompanies sight? Why aren't we like computers that see, process visual data, and respond per protocols, but without any accompanying experience?

Science has the conceptual framework to address the easy problem. It lacks that framework to address the hard problem. To make progress, the realm of the physical will have to expand to include subjectivity. At first, the addition will be along the lines of what gravity originally was: just a name for something we know about. Adding gravity as a thing to be explained by science was the first step in creating theories about it. At the time, some people objected to including gravity because it was thought that this was an injection of mysticism into science. Fortunately, flexible minds prevailed and progress began. Same thing here (one hopes).

The "hard problem" refers to explaining the experiences that accompany function. Why is there an experience that accompanies sight? Why aren't we like computers that see, process visual data, and respond per protocols, but without any accompanying experience? — frank

Right, I've read Chalmers (although years ago when at University) and I understand the basic distinction between functional and experiential consciousness, but that's not what I'm asking.

I'm asking what proponents of the "hard problem' think an explanation of why, for example, "there (is) an experience that accompanies sight", could possibly look like.

The problem as I see it, is that consciousness is (primordially) non-dual, and it is only our models and explanations of it that are inevitably dualistic, given as they are in language which is necessarily dualistic (i.e. couched in terms of subject and object).

So, I am yet to be convinced there is a coherent question there.

So, I am yet to be convinced there is a coherent question there. — Janus

Doesn't sound like you're likely to be.

Doesn't sound like you're likely to be. — frank

Are you? Do you believe a question should be considered to be coherent if we have no idea what an answer might look like?

Do you believe a question should be considered to be coherent if we have no idea what an answer might look like? — Janus

That's what we did with gravity.

Science has the conceptual framework to address the easy problem. It lacks that framework to address the hard problem. To make progress, the realm of the physical will have to expand to include subjectivity. — frank

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. We artificially split it off it and now are trying to append it back on like a new object.

The hard problem is just more masturbation.
— neonspectraltoast

That's one way to get rid of a "hard" problem. — Janus

:rofl:

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. We artificially split it off it and now are trying to append it back on like a new object. — Joshs

Nice. I've been pondering lately the notion that there's some quantum shenanigans at the heart of consciousness.

What do you think about the "eye can't see itself" issue? Is it ultimately futile to look for a theory of consciousness?

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. — Joshs

:clap:

Do you see any relationship with this and Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'?

What do you think about the "eye can't see itself" issue? Is it ultimately futile to look for a theory of consciousness? — frank

See The Blind Spot of Science:

Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.

Not a good analogy.

It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Yes, exactly. Do you agree with that?

What I gathered from Chalmer's argument is that no amount of science can approach why consciousness is possible as whatever it is. The assumption that such a possibility can be directly associated with our experience assumes that they must be connected. And that assumption is what Chalmers is directly challenging.

Yes, exactly. Do you agree with that? — frank

:100: It's what I've been trying to argue for all along. The problem is one of perspective. Naturalism starts from the presumption of the separation of subject and object. From a methodological point of view, that is perfectly sound - when you are indeed studying objects. But humans are not objects - they're subjects of experience. That is precisely the distinction which the 'eliminativists' seek to get rid of - hence the attempt to describe human subjects as 'robots' or as 'aggregatations of biomolecular structures', and not as beings per se.

That is precisely the distinction which the 'eliminativists' seek to get rid of - hence the attempt to describe human subjects as 'robots' or as 'aggregatations of biomolecular structures', and not as beings per se. — Wayfarer

Yes, but that's not what the hard problem is about. It's about identifying phenomenal consciousness as a thing to be explained. Does the blind spot extend to that as well?

Well, I'm arguing that they're two different aspects of the same overall problem. What I'm saying is that David Chalmer's rather awkward expression of 'what-it-is-like-ness' is really just a way of referring to 'being'.

When Chalmers said 'Facing Up to the Hard Problem', what he's saying is that science can't describe 'being' (or 'what it is like to be' something) because it only deals with objects that can be understood in third-person terms. His paper is explicitly about what can't be described in those terms, namely, subjective experience. Whereas, as I said before, the eliminative materialists argue as follows:

In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. — Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science

So, from Chalmers' perspective, there is something that the eliminativists are not seeing. And I'm saying, what it is that they are not seeing corresponds with 'the blind spot of science'. It's another aspect of the same basic issue.

(Incidentally, this also means that 'the hard problem' is not a problem at all outside that particular context. It's simply a kind of rhetorical device.)

I see.

I agree with this, but I don't see why it is a problem. Science is looking in from the outside. That's how it works. If we can look at every other phenomenon in the universe with science, why would we not be able to look at consciousness that way? — T Clark

It's a problem because we can never truly see the inside of an object. So sense observations of an object are always observations of the outside of things. No matter how we divide the object into parts, or peer at those parts through Xray or MIR, we are always looking at the parts as objects themselves, and we are looking at them from the outside. However, with subjective first-person experience, we actually get real observations of the inside of an object, oneself. Therefore, unlike the usual scientific observations which cannot observe the inside of an object, first-person conscious experience gives us real observational information from the inside of an object.

So, sure we can look at any phenomenon in the universe with the scientific method, but we cannot see the inside of any object that we look at with the scientific method. However, we can directly experience the inside of an object through subjective first-person experience, so this is the route we need to take toward understanding the inside of things. And, as I mentioned, with the discovery of phenomena like spatial expansion it becomes very clear that we need to understand the inside in order to get a grip on reality.

I think it's right, although I hadn't considered it from the perspective you suggest regarding the expansion of space — Wayfarer

The expansion of space is a difficult issue to wrap one's head around. I think it calls for a two dimensional time. But consider that if space expands, it must expand from every point outward. This means that there must be a multitude of such points with an expansion around each. And since the structures we know exist in the expanded space, the points must be connected somehow through the inside, in order to support coherent structures in the outwardly expanded space.

You mean inside and outside the body, no? My experience of anything internal to the body is not accessible to others. to be sure, so there is no possibility of identifying common objects of "inner" experience, as we would do with "external" objects. Is that what you mean? — Janus

The point was that the only way to observe the inside of an object is through the first-person conscious experience. The methods of science cannot observe the inside of objects. Then I gave the reason why I think it is important to develop an understanding of the inside of objects, in our quest for understanding reality

The expansion of space is a difficult issue to wrap one's head around. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Perhaps one's head would need to expand correspondingly.

The point was that the only way to observe the inside of an object is through the first-person conscious experience. The methods of science cannot observe the inside of objects. Then I gave the reason why I think it is important to develop an understanding of the inside of objects, in our quest for understanding reality — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not clear how what you say here relates to what was being discussed. We can't see the inside of objects unless we break them open, then we can. We can observe the cellular and/ or molecular structures of wood, stone or steel and so on, and it is science that has given us the instruments that enable us to do that more comprehensively than the unassisted eye will allow.

Naturalism starts from the presumption of the separation of subject and object. — Wayfarer

Language itself is based on this presumption. All our discursive understandings of the world, and even of ourselves, are dualistic. "Subject and object", "cause and effect", "substance and attribute", "mind and matter" and so on.

Indeed. But there are philosophies that explore the limits and the transcendence of discursive analysis. After all philosophy is the attempt to understand the meaning of being.

The function of insight gives a transcendental content that, when reduced to an interpretive system, becomes subject ot the relativity of subject-object consciousness. Therefore, there can be no such thing as an infallible interpretation. Thus we must distinguish between insight and its formulation. — Franklin Merrell Wolff (quoted in Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin)

It's a problem because we can never truly see the inside of an object. So sense observations of an object are always observations of the outside of things. No matter how we divide the object into parts, or peer at those parts through Xray or MIR, we are always looking at the parts as objects themselves, and we are looking at them from the outside...

...So, sure we can look at any phenomenon in the universe with the scientific method, but we cannot see the inside of any object that we look at with the scientific method. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is true of many things science studies. We don't see electrons, protons, quarks. We look at them by smashing them together and watching the parts spin off. We can't see the inside the sun, but we look at neutrinos and the results of spectroscopic analysis. We can't see inside black hole and neutron star collisions, but we can look at gravity waves. We can't see much more than a couple of miles into the Earth, but we can look at seismic and gravimetric data. We learn about things by looking inside them all the time - x-rays, cat scans, mri. There's no reason our minds should be any different.

The expansion of space is a difficult issue to wrap one's head around. I think it calls for a two dimensional time. But consider that if space expands, it must expand from every point outward. This means that there must be a multitude of such points with an expansion around each. And since the structures we know exist in the expanded space, the points must be connected somehow through the inside, in order to support coherent structures in the outwardly expanded space. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but it is my understanding that the expansion of the universe leads to galaxies moving apart, but features within galaxies, e.g. stars, do not. The Earth is not moving away from the sun.

The point was that the only way to observe the inside of an object is through the first-person conscious experience. The methods of science cannot observe the inside of objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I've noted, this is clearly not true.

We can't see the inside of objects unless we break them open, then we can. — Janus

No, that's the problem, breaking an object in two allows us to see the outsides of two objects, not the inside of one. Every time we take something apart, we remove the parts from their proper place as a part of a whole, such that they are no longer parts of a whole, but are each a separate object, a whole.

Therefore we have two distinct perspectives. A part receives its function, and its being, its very nature as a "part" by existing as a part of a unity. Therefore there is a relation of necessity between the part and the whole, the part has no being without the whole. But a whole is not necessarily a part of anything. So the necessity is a one way street. Because of this, every time we take apart an object to look inside it, and look at a part of it as if it is an object itself, a whole itself, we do not see the relation of necessity which the part had with the whole, prior to being dismantled, because the newly formed object (whole), now has no necessary relation as part of a larger unity. So we don't see it properly as a part, we see it as a whole. And something is missing from what we see, that is what makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. This inclines us to misunderstand the order of necessity, and the nature of causation in general. On the other hand, when we look inward at the first-person experience we see the causation more correctly, by the cause of our own actions as an outward process towards an external necessity.

We learn about things by looking inside them all the time. — T Clark

But what you describe is not "looking inside" things. It is looking at the outside of things and making inferences about what is happening on the inside through theories and logical inference. We see effects on the outside and make inferences about the internal causes. So you claim that we look inside objects, and you give examples, but your examples obviously do not support your claim.

I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but it is my understanding that the expansion of the universe leads to galaxies moving apart, but features within galaxies, e.g. stars, are not. — T Clark

This is how spatial expansion is commonly modeled, but it's very problematic. How could we create a boundary, even in principle, between the space which is inside a galaxy and not expanding, and the space which is between galaxies and is expanding. There would have to be two different types of space, the space with massive objects in it, which doesn't expand, and the space without massive objects in it which does expand, along with an obvious boundary between the two. But that's really just a poor representation, and what is really the case is that physicists do not at all understand the relationship between space and massive objects. I think that's what the famous Michelson-Morley experiments demonstrated to us.

This is how spatial expansion is commonly modeled, but it's very problematic. How could we create a boundary, even in principle, between the space which is inside a galaxy and not expanding, and the space which is between galaxies and is expanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

Problematic or not, astronomers have measured the red and blue shifts of stars and even planets within the Milky Way, our galaxy. They are not moving toward or away from each other. According to what I've read, gravity between parts of an individual galaxy is strong enough to overcome any local expansion.

physicists do not at all understand the relationship between space and massive objects. I think that's what the famous Michelson-Morley experiments demonstrated to us. — Metaphysician Undercover

The Michelson-Morley experiments measured the speed of light in different directions. They didn't have anything to do with gravity or the expansion of the universe.