From: SMTP%"ghrosenb@phil.indiana.edu" 14-MAR-1996 16:06:44.28 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 19:04:08 -0500 (EST) Cc: klein@adage.Berkeley.EDU, A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk, STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov, brings@rpi.edu, keith@imprint.co.uk, mckee@neosoft.com, patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au, phayes@cs.uiuc.edu In-Reply-To: <9603142334.AA07894@adage.Berkeley.EDU> from "Stanley Klein" at Mar 14, 96 03:34:15 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: 3509 > Let me ask a different question. Do you think that scientists can work > fruitfully on the easy questions (figuring out the NCCQ) without having > to worry about the hard one (why does blue have the feel it does). I think that scientists actually *should* work on the 'easy' questions without worrying about the hard questions. That's because they are not so easy, and because once we answer them we will know what we need to know about how the brain functions. After we have that information, I imagine whatever is special (and there will be something special) about conscious processing will be obvious. And it will be obvious even without worrying about what is and is not phenomenal, as I suspect the functional story alone will reveal differing kinds of processing activity, with the kind that corresponds to consciousness standing out for functional reasons alone. For instance, if quantum effects are relevant, we won't need to argue from consciousness to them: we will find them necessarily in trying to give the functional story. If we don't need them in the functional story, I'd be very hesitant to postulate them based on speculation about phenomenology. My recommendation to science is: figure out how it works. Once we have that story, theories about the hard problem will suggest themselves, and finding laws to generalize from the human case will be another activity altogether. In the meantime, as a philosopher I'm happy to speculate based on what we do know now, and hopefully have a solid and supportive metaphysical framework ready for interpreting the empirical results when they do come in. The only place where the 'easy' problem/'hard' problem distinction comes into the working life of scientists right now is in curtailing some of the more ambitious claims. Don't worry about whether you've discovered an 'identity' or not, just talk about the interesting functioning that must be going on. That's plenty, and plenty interesting. If someone presses you about what this has to do with feeling or subjectivity, just admit that the exact relation is not clear but maybe someday it will be. I don't see the burning need for scientists to trip themselves over subtle linguistic issues, or to try to construct speculative metaphysical frameworks. Of course, let me qualify that advice by emphasizing that I am only saying that scientists *as scientists* should not be concerned with those things. But scientists are also human beings, and we human beings need to philosophize, we need to put our work and knowledge into perspective. Scientists are no different from the rest of us in this respect, and I welcome scientist's attempts to philosophize. Their contributions can be valuable. All I ask is that we recognize that philosophy is not science, and that lots and lots of people have been thinking hard about these things inside philosophy. We have a technical vocabulary that is hard to explain, just like scientists do; and we have usually developed the concepts we use more thoroughly than people outside the discipline have. Our discipline contains more internal dispute than a mature science does, but our disagreements are usually subtly based. The ideas on all sides need respect. --Gregg -- Honesty in academia _____ / \ | | Gregg Rosenberg | --)(-- C _) D'ohh! Will philosophize for food. | ___\ / | / __) /_ \__/ / \ / \