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Old 12-05-2019, 05:21 PM
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davidm davidm is offline
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Default Re: Where does a thought go?

Where does a thought go? Where does it come from? What is a thought? It seems to be a kind of quale — in the category of the sensation of the color red, the smell of a rose, the prick of a thorn — but not quite in that category, either. Yet qualia are equally mysterious — this is the elaboration of David Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness.

Chalmers’ hard problem is a refutation of functionalism — the idea that thoughts, and qualia, are reducible (and irreducibly so) — to measurable electrochemical signaling in our brains, which can be observed and mapped. According to the functionalist, that is all you have to do — map the observable activity in the brain, and you have explained thoughts and qualia!

Isn’t this confusing the map with the territory, though?

Distressingly, it seems that this empty functionalist account is all that many scientists need. It’s like quantum physics: shut up and calculate. Who cares what quantum means?

There is an old school of philosophy dating at least to Berkeley (though he superfluously brought God into the picture) called metaphysical idealism, in contradistinction to metaphysical naturalism or metaphysical supernaturalism. This holds, put bluntly, that brains supervene on minds, rather than minds supervening on brains, as naturalism holds. The extreme form of this doctrine is that the world consists of nothing but mental states, and mental states are all that has ever existed or could exist. Interestingly, no finding of science, that I am aware of, can distinguish between metaphysical naturalism and metaphysical idealism.

I once had an exchange on this topic with the biochemist Larry Moran at his Sandwalk blog. He derided me as an idiot for believing qualia exist at all. Nope, I don’t see red, smell a rose, feel the prick of one of its thorns — it is all just electrochemical activity, full stop!

He wasn’t even arguing that thoughts and qualia are an emergent property of matter, the way that water emerges from hydrogen and oxygen. Yet even to argue in this emergentist way strikes me as empty phraseology. We know exactly how water emerges from hydrogen and oxygen. What we do not know is how the experience of wetness (quale) emerges from hydrogen and oxygen in combination. Yet according to Moran and others, there is literally nothing to explain, because wetness does not exist!

Another issue is that thoughts often (always?) come unbidden, which uncomfortably suggests that we may be deterministic machines. After all, if thoughts are unbidden, then “we” are not responsible for them. I put “we” in scare quotes, because if we are our thoughts, as certainly seems to be the case (no homunculus in the driver’s seat), then “we” are not responsible for what we think. OTOH, the compatibilist would contend that “we” are responsible for whether we choose to act on “our” thoughts, or not, but this a very fraught issue.

Nice to see an actual philosophy post in the philosophy forum.
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