thomblake comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 08 January 2010 12:18PM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 13 January 2010 08:05:28AM -1 points [-]

So your problem is that the two things lack a primitive resemblance?

They lack any resemblance at all. A trillion tiny particles moving in space is nothing like a "private shade of homogeneous pink", to use the phrase from Dennett (he has quite a talent for describing things which he then says aren't there). And yet one is supposed to be the same thing as the other.

The evidence from neuroscience is, originally, data about correlation. Color, taste, pain have some relationship with physical brain events. The correlation itself is not going to tell you whether to be an eliminativist, a property dualist, or an identity theorist.

I am interested in the psychological processes contributing to this philosophical choice but I do not understand them yet. What especially interests me is the response to this "lack of resemblance" issue, when a person who insists that A is B concedes that A does not "resemble" B. My answer is to say that B is A - that physics is just formalism, implying nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it describes, and that conscious experience is giving us a glimpse of the intrinsic nature of at least a few of those entities. Physics is actually about pink, rather than about particles. But what people seem to prefer is to deny pinkness in favor of particles, or to say that the pinkness is what it's like to be those particles, etc.

Comment author: thomblake 14 January 2010 08:45:55PM 0 points [-]

It might behoove you to examine Luciano Floridi's treatment of "Levels of Abstraction" - he seems to be getting at much the same thing, if I'm understanding you correctly. To read in in a pragmatist light: there's a certain sense in which we want to talk about particles, and a sense in which we want to talk about pinkness, and on the face of it there's no reason to prefer one over another.

It does make sense to assert that Physics is trying to explain "pinkness" via particles, and is therefore about pinkness, not about particles.