bryjnar comments on Does functionalism imply dualism? - Less Wrong

-1 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 31 January 2012 03:43AM

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Comment author: bryjnar 31 January 2012 11:10:17AM 4 points [-]

You constantly elide between the property of being green and the experience of something green. Which leads to the ancient mistake of saying that whatever constitutes your experience of something green must itself be green. Admittedly you put this enormous red herring in the mouth of your opponent, but it's totally unwarranted nonetheless.

e.g.

Such a theory will necessarily present a candidate, however vague, for the physical correlate of an experience of color. One can then say that color exists without having to add anything to physics, because the color just is the proposed physical correlate.

The happy materialist might say: but those aren't the things which are truly green in the sense you care about; the things which are green are parts of experiences, not the external objects.

You also then essentially just say "But qualia! Intentionality! They're so real! There must be something more!", i.e. the same argument dualists have been making since the dawn of time, and that any attempts to dissolve the question have failed, since

all you have to do is attend for a moment to experience itself, and then to compare that to the picture of billions of colorless atoms in intricate motion through space, to realize that this is still dualism.

Furthermore, all the arguements you use are pretty much applicable across the board, and don't particularly relate to functionalism, so I think it's disingenuous of you to say that you're arguing for "functionalism implies dualism" rather than simply "dualism is true".

Downvoted.

Comment author: Automaton 31 January 2012 10:53:22PM 0 points [-]

JJC Smart responds to people who would conflate experiences of seeing things with the actual things which are being seen in his 1959 paper "Sensations and Brain Processes". Here he's talking about the experience of seeing a yellow-green after image, and responding to objections to his theory that experiences can be equivalent to mental states.

Objection 4. The after-image is not in physical space. The brain-process is. So the after-image is not a brain-process.

Reply. This is an ignoratio elenchi. I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain-process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain-process. It is the experience which is reported in the introspective report. Similarly, if it is objected that the after-image is yellowy-orange but that a surgeon looking into your brain would see nothing yellowy-orange, my reply is that it is the experience of seeing yellowy-orange that is being described, and this experience is not a yellowy-orange something. So to say that a brain-process cannot be yellowy-orange is not to say that a brain-process cannot in fact be the experience of having a yellowy-orange after-image. There is, in a sense,no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum, though there is such a thing as the experience of having an image, and this experience is described indirectly in material object language, not in phenomenal language, for there is no such thing. We describe the experience by saying, in effect, that it is like the experience we have when, for example, we really see a yellowy-orange patch on the wall. Trees and wallpaper can be green, but not the experience of seeing or imagining a tree or wallpaper. (Or if they are described as green or yellow this can only be in a derived sense.)

The theory he is defending in the paper is an identity theory where brain states are identical to mental states, but the point still holds for functionalist theories where mental states supervene on functional states.

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