(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]

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.