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RichardChappell comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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You can probably give a functionalist analysis of computation. I doubt we can reductively analyse "thinking" (at least if you taboo away all related mentalistic terms), so this strikes me as a bedrock case (again, like "qualia") where tabooing away the term (and its cognates) simply leaves you unable to talk about the phenomenon in question.
It sounds like "thinking" and "qualia" are getting the special privilege of being irreducible, even though there have been plenty of attempts to reduce them, and these attempts have had at least some success. Why can't I pick any concept and declare it a bedrock case? Is my cat fuzzy? Well, you could talk about how she is covered with soft fur, but it's possible to imagine something fuzzy and not covered with fur, or something covered with fur but not fuzzy. Because it's possible to imagine these things, clearly fuzziness must be non-physical. It's maybe harder to imagine a non-fuzzy cat than to imagine a non-thinking person, but that's just because fuzziness doesn't have the same aura of the mysterious that thinking and experiencing do.
Erm, this is just poor reasoning. The conclusion that follows from your premises is that the properties of fuzziness and being-covered-in-fur are distinct, but that doesn't yet make fuzziness non-physical, since there are obviously other physical properties besides being-covered-in-fur that it might reduce to. The simple proof: you can't hold ALL the other physical facts fixed and yet change the fuzziness facts. Any world physically identical to ours is a world in which your cat is still fuzzy. (There are no fuzz-zombies.) This is an obvious conceptual truth.
So, in short, the reason why you can't just "pick any concept and declare it a bedrock case" is that competent conceptual analysis would soon expose it to be a mistake.
No, I'm saying that you could hold all of the physical facts fixed and my cat might still not be fuzzy. This is somewhat absurd, but I have a tremendously good imagination; if I can imagine zombies, I can imagine fuzz-zombies.
More than that, it's obviously incoherent. I assume your point is that the same should be said of zombies? Probably reaching diminishing returns in this discussion, so I'll just note that the general consensus of the experts in conceptual analysis (namely, philosophers) disagrees with you here. Even those who want to deny that zombies are metaphysically possible generally concede that the concept is logically coherent.
On reflection, I think that's right. I'm capable of imagining incoherent things.
I guess I'm somewhat skeptical that anyone can be an expert in which non-existent things are more or less possible. How could you tell if someone was ever correct -- let alone an expert? Wouldn't there be a relentless treadmill of acceptance of increasingly absurd claims, because nobody want to admit that their powers of conception are weak and they can't imagine something?
I don't beleive anyone has regarded thinking as causally irreducible for at least a century. Could you cite a partially successful reduction of qualia?
Read the parent of the comment you're responding to.
It depends on what you mean by 'thinking', but I think the view is pretty widespread that rational relations (like the relation of justification between premises and a conclusion) are not reducible to any physical relation in such a way that explains or even preserves the rational relation.
I'm thinking of Donald Davidson's 'Mental Events' as an example at the moment, just to illustrate the point. He would say that while every token mental state is identical to a token physical state, and every token mental causal relation (like a relation of inference or justification) is identical to a token physical causal relation...
...nevertheless, types of mental states, like the thought that it is raining, and types of mental causal relations, like the inference that if it is raining, and I don't want to get wet, then I should bring an umbrella, are not identical to types of physical states or types of physical causal relations.
This has the result that 1) we can be assured that the mind supervenes on the brain in some way, and that there's nothing immaterial or non-physical going on, but 2) there are in principle no explanations of brain states and relations which suffice as explanations of anything like thinking, reasoning, inferring etc..
Davidson's views are widely known rather than widely accepted, I think. I don't recall seeing them beign used for a serious argument for epiphenomenalism, I can see how they could be, if you tie causality to laws. OTOH, I can see how you could argue in the opposite direction: if mental events are identical to physical events, then, by Leibnitz's law, they have the same causal powers as physical events.
Dennett: Consciousness Explained.
That was elimination.
Yes, that sometimes happens when you reduce something; it turns out that there's nothing left. Nobody would say that there is no reductionist account of phlogiston.
I would. Reduction and elimination are clearly different. Heat was reduced, phlogiston was eliminated. There is heat. There is no phlogiston.
Only minorly. We could just as well still talk about phlogiston, which is just negative oxygen. The difference between reduction and elimination is just that in the latter, we do not think the concept is useful anymore. If there are different "we"s involved, you might have the same analysis result in both.
Not very menaingfully. What does that mean in terms of modern physics? Negatively ionised oxygen? Anti-oxygen? Negatively massive oxygen?
Well, that's a difference.
Is it minority opinion that reductive materialism and eliminative materialism are different positions?
"The reductive materialist contrasts the eliminativist more strongly, arguing that a mental state is well defined, and that further research will result in a more detailed, but not different understanding.[3]"--WP
That is the reductionist account of phlogiston. The grandparent didn't claim that everyone would agree that there is a reduction of phlogiston that makes sense. The result of reduction is that phlogiston was eliminated. Which sometimes happens when you try to reduce things.
This is what the grandparent was saying. You were in agreement already.
It;s an emlimination. If it were a reduction, there would still be phlogiston as is there is still heat. The reductive explanation of combustion did not need phlogiston as a posit, so it was eliminated. Note the difference beteen phlogiston, a posit, and heat/combustion, which are prima-facie phenomena. Nobody was trying to reductivley explain phlogiston, they were trying to explain heat with it.
I disagree.
So in this case, in your view, subjective experiences would be reduced, while qualia would be eliminated?
I am not saying that all posits are doomed to elimination, only that what is elemintated tends to be a posit rather than a prima facie phenomenon. How could you say that there is no heat? I also don't agree that qualia are posits...but Dennett of course needs to portray them that way in order to eliminate them.
I don't think I understand what you think is and isn't a "posit". "Cold" is a prima facie phenomenon as well, but it has been subsumed entirely into the concept of "heat".
That may be so (though I agree with Peter, that reduction and elimination are different), but regardless Dennett's actual argument is not a reduction of qualia to more simple terms. He argued (mostly on conceptual grounds) that the idea of qualia is incoherent. Even if elimination (in the manner of phlogiston) were reduction, Dennett's argument wouldn't be a case of either.
OK, I think I agree with this view of Dennett. I hadn't read the book in a while, and I conflated his reduction of consciousness (which is, I think, a genuine reduction) with his explanation of qualia.
If we cant even get a start on that, how did we get a start on building AI?
I'm not sure I follow you. Why would you need to analyse "thinking" in order to "get a start on building AI"? Presumably it's enough to systematize the various computational algorithms that lead to the behavioural/functional outputs associated with intelligent thought. Whether it's really thought, or mere computation, that occurs inside the black box is presumably not any concern of computer scientists!
Becuase thought is essential to intelligence. Why would you need to analyse intelligence to get a start on building artificial intelliigence? Because you would have no idea what you were tryinng to do if you didn't.
I fail to see how that is not just a long winded way of saying "analysing thought"