mitchell_porter2 comments on Righting a Wrong Question - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2008 01:00PM

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Comment author: mitchell_porter2 10 March 2008 02:16:11AM 2 points [-]

It looks like the basic recipe for complacency being offered here is:

Something mysterious = Thoughts about something mysterious = Thoughts = Computation = Matter doing stuff = Something we know how to understand.

But if you really follow this procedure, you will eventually end up having to relate a subjective fact like "being a self" or "seeing blue" to a physical fact like "having a brain" or "signalling my visual cortex".

It seems that most materialists about the mind have a personal system of associations, between mental states and physical states, which they are happy to treat as identities (e.g. mental process X is physical process X', "from the inside"), and which are employed when they need to be able to interpret their own experience and their own thinking in material terms.

If you keep asking why, you will need to justify these alleged identities. In fact, if you really keep asking why, in my experience the identities appear untenable and based on a crude and radically incomplete description of the subjective facts, and you end up being interested in metaphysics, from both sides, material and mental.