From: SMTP%"ghrosenb@phil.indiana.edu" 14-MAR-1996 15:21:01.29 To: STAPP CC: Subj: Re: Reply to Hayes 5 From: "Gregg Rosenberg" Subject: Re: Reply to Hayes 5 To: klein@adage.Berkeley.EDU (Stanley Klein) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:18:09 -0500 (EST) Cc: phayes@cs.uiuc.edu, A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk, STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov, brings@rpi.edu, keith@imprint.co.uk, klein@adage.Berkeley.EDU, mckee@neosoft.com, patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au In-Reply-To: <9603082346.AA27371@adage.Berkeley.EDU> from "Stanley Klein" at Mar 8, 96 03:46:03 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5511 Hi Stan, I'm sorry about the delay in replying, but I've been out of town. > I expect that your predicted 75 - 25 split is probably close to correct for > the people on these email discussions (the minority siding with Clark and > Hayes that the Hard Problem isn't a real problem). I do suspect that among > scientists in general (not just the engineers or AI types that you mentioned) > the percentages would be reversed. Yes, that's probably right. > I think that a good goal for the present discussions is to try to isolate why > there is such a sharp difference. What fundamental metaphysical assumptions > are separating you from Clark or Pat. As has become kind of obvious, ontology involves certain kinds of meta-categories like 'identity', 'entailment', 'aspect', 'property', and so forth. Also, issues of meaning come into play in ontological questions. I think it is hard for scientists to believe that meaning or concepts really can make a difference to the truth or evaluation of an ontological claim. I also think part of the difficulty is that certain ordinary meta-concepts like 'identity' aren't well explored by scientists in their working lives. The truth-conditions on such claims are not so obvious as many people, even many philosophers, believe. They do tie in with issues of meaning and what concepts are, with ideas about what 'properties' are, and what an entailment is. If one doesn't frame the issues from within a reasonably well-developed framework for understanding these 'metaphysical' issues, it is hard to separate out empirical from conceptual questions, or to see the ontological connections between them, or consequences of them. > Gregg, what do you think of my position: > > First, I agree with you and Chalmers that I can't imagine how the neural > activity produces the realm of qualia. The jump in category seems too > great. I see two possible solutions. > > 1) I believe the quantum duality can provide a metaphysical basis for > two separate ontologies that could possibly be mapped onto the > subjective and the objective worlds. This is a wonderful nonreductionist > formalism but it doesn't really satisfy me as to how the particular > feel of a quale comes about. Well, I personally am a little wary of actually calling upon quantum effects to explain cognition, although I think there might be more subtle ways that QM could be relevant. Still, I think even if one wants to incorporate phenomenology into QM, it still has to be put in as a fundamental kind of thing. I don't see the possibility of deriving the existence of feeling from anything else, or at least not from bare statements about effective causation. For causal statements to be true, one only needs certain kinds of counterfactuals to hold. I think it is obvious that one cannot derive the existence of feeling from the mere fact that some counterfactuals are true without any further bridge law or postulate. It might possible to get a very harmless kind of dualism from this: a dual aspect theory where the physical or effective description captures the counterfactual structure of the world, and the phenomenal information is about the content which instantiates that structure. This is a dual aspect theory, where the two aspects are simply those of structure and content. In general, though, the presence of feeling will always be a primitive, and we shouldn't expect to 'explain' it in terms of something *else*, but to 'place' it relative to other things. Henry seems to recognize this, as experience shows up as a fundamental postulate in his theory despite the fact that he can give independent arguments for the existence of *something* that plays the role he hypothesizes experience plays. That is, Henry has two separate claims: 1) Something must actualize the wave function 2) Experience plays the role, in our world, of the actualizer As far as I can tell, (2) is not entailed by (1). It is a *further* fact, over and above (1), that experience is the actualizer rather than something else. > 2) When the NCCQ are discovered, all of a sudden our imaginations > might be stimulated into seeing how the "hard problem" can be tackled > (why does a particular quale have its particular fee). > How can David be so sure that this isn't possible. Well, when we discover the NCCQ I think it will suggest nice laws that we might want to generalize. I think it will even tell us a whole lot about why our qualia-spaces have the organizational structure that they do. But the difference in category will still be there, so the neural information won't entail the fact that things feel any way at all (not without a *further* hypothesis that the neural activity really is an NCCQ), and even less that they feel some specific way (why not inverted qualia? Structure is preserved, but content changes. Wouldn't the NCCQ 'explain' the color space on inverted earth just as well as the one we actually have? I expect so. After all, all the contrasts and distinctions that exist in our color space will be reflected in the inverted space, and the processing will reflect only these contrasts and distinctions. Nowhere will it give us the info about the exact phenomenal content.) --Gregg -- Honesty in academia _____ / \ | | Gregg Rosenberg | --)(-- C _) D'ohh! Will philosophize for food. | ___\ / | / __) /_ \__/ / \ / \