(no subject)

[proximoception]

I'm not really sure what Nagel's deal is lately. Is "natural teleology" really any different than Dennett's "forced moves"? Beyond the ridiculously misleading repurposing of the concept of purpose - since all we have the right to infer about influences on phenomena outside of existing conceptions of materiality is that they're, y'know, outside. There's a difference between (e.g.) a potential for consciousness implicit in reality that the matchstick of matter randomly struck into life and an already somehow conscious force actively waiting for embodiment. I'm starting to think he's an agnostic in the worst sense, someone trying to convince himself he can eat his life and have it too.

At the least he's one of the many people who hates reductionism along a given line so much that he falls into a different reductionism - rounding slightly differing philosophical friends down to categorical enemies. A repulsion that not infrequently backs one into the arms of the real enemies of the good.

Comments

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how similar (from what I can gather, which I should admit from the outset is not much) Nagel's "natural teleology" is to Kant's concept of "purposiveness of nature" -- precisely because Kant's notion seemed to entail exactly what Nagel is trying (in vain) to argue against. Kant thought that you had to assume a kind of unity (I will not go so far as to call it a reducibility) to nature in order to understand it. He might be wrong about that, but it also seems like this is what the materialist camp is aiming to do, and that's fine. They should keep trying to explain consciousness the way they have been. That's the only way it will become obvious that it's wrong. It's not like people are going to stop wondering about consciousness because a stubborn subset of eliminativists have managed to pretend it doesn't exist.

I also think that he's (Nagel) right about them, overall. Consciousness is a big gaping hole in the entire project. The problem is that I don't think there's much anyone can conclude from this -- other than our sense of materialism almost certainly has to be wrong, or at the very least is centrally incomplete. And I think he's even right that this includes Darwinism, provided you accept that consciousness in the "hard problem" sense is not adaptive, which I don't think it can be. But I suppose a premise of "I have no idea what's going on, and neither do these guys," doesn't make for a very attractive pitch. One has to grasp for something more in order to sell a book. Apparently.

The other thing I don't understand is the appeal to "common sense". This unnecessarily cedes ground to the reductionist. The problem isn't about the "improbability" of consciousness in the face of "common sense"; flipping a coin and having it land perfectly on its edge is highly improbable, and repeated demonstrations of this might trouble our "common sense" about how coin tosses operate, but most of the phenomenon itself -- the movement of the hand, the mass of the coin, the force of gravity, the work of angular momentum -- all of these things are things that web asically understand. An "improbable" event is still an event you can basically explain. We can't explain jack shit about consciousness (again, in the "hard" sense). I don't know why Nagel would water-down that fact.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Presumably because he'd like to, or anyway would like to stress how for all we know it stops us from explaining jack shit about anything else. Agnosis has its own religious qualities, consolations.

I think "not adaptive" is one of the crux areas where it's important to be clear about what we mean. Consciousness was adapted by evolving creatures, in that before them we don't see evidence of it anywhere, and it proved adaptively more valuable than not, with animals able to make pronounced use of it surfing their niches better - in each of these senses is adaptive. But it's unclear why it could have been, i.e. what it was adapted from. "Emergent property of matter" seems less of a copout than the alternatives - it neglects only the story of what matter is to consciousness, rather than vice versa. But Nagel doesn't make sufficiently clear that this story, if at last irreconcilable with the other, is untellable, even to oneself. Presumably he's clearing space for mysticism, for some last ditch religion that gets to deny it's one.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Well, this gets to the heart of the confusion, because what you mean by "consciousness" here is not what I mean by it. By "consciousness" I do not mean information processing, abstract thought, language, things which presumably could be accomplished by other animals and machines, processes which are almost certainly adaptive, even if we might not be sure exactly how or why they evolved. All of that is fine.

By "consciousness" I mean "why it is that we have information processing and experience it". High-end recording studio software can certainly process audio information, no doubt in very sophisticated ways, but I don't believe for this reason that there is something for which it is like to be recording software, i.e., that it is "hearing" the music it processes. That our information processing, or rather I should say a part of our information processing (and a very small part, if Dennett and many cognitive psychologists are to believed) also "appears" to us as an experience, as opposed to what appears to a machine (which is to say -- presumably -- nothing) -- this is unexplained. It does not add any new functionality to the processes involved, since there is no function which might be equipped which requires it also to be a phenomenon for an "I" (and I will add that even if the "I", particularly with all its Western attributes, is in some sense an "illusion", it is still a first-person illusion, and that is all we need for it to be hugely problematic!) That is what I mean by non-adaptive. There does not appear to be any story we can tell about human intelligence, language, etc, which requires there to be an experience of the information we process and manipulate. And so if consciousness in this "hard" sense -- separated from all the functional attributes of a mind -- has no adaptive purpose, then how can we say that it evolved?

One answer is that it's an accident, some kind of functionless byproduct. This is probably the most intuitive answer to me, because it doesn't claim that it's adaptive, but even so it's not an answer that can be accepted without evidence, and we have no evidence for it. There is simply no explanation whatsoever for how it is that matter becomes sentient in the first place. We can confuse consciousness with information processing, as Dennett likes to do, but the problem still remains: what does the "experience-of" being a mind, or thinking machine, have to do with manipulating information? It doesn't matter how sophisticated we want to get. No one has been able to show, or even hint at, a functional role for consciousness itself. No "top-down" cognitive behavior (something some people simply assume is identical to consciousness itself) requires there to be an experience-of top-down thought, and this is probably our best candidate.

The other answer is mystical or pseudo-mystical, i.e. panpsychism or hylopathism, the idea that because we are matter, and we are sentient, that all matter must be sentient or have the capacity to be. Rocks, thermostats, earthworms, zebras, humans, computers -- all are simply points on a spectrum. This isn't a horrible guess given our options (it at least admits we have a problem), but until we can actually unearth a Planck unit of consciousness in matter and show roughly how it works, it's all just bullshit.

And then you have religion proper: substance dualism, angels, the afterlife, and so on. I'm not even going to go there, as we might as well be talking about the fucking Pope at that point.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I was being unclear above, but I don't see where we're disagreeing. I endorse everything you're saying.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

I think I took your explanation of adaptation as an endorsement of it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

My gnomic tendencies annoy even me when I revisit my writing.