Opening Overview Video of:
This should get you to the this year's introductory video (which seems to be just audio):
and this should get you the PDF of the PPT
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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
2:06 lecture recording: Isn't it still tending towards dualism to say you used up all of the casual degrees of freedom with the easy problem. That would imply that we can go beyond the land of causation. Isn't feeling identical to a certain brain state, can we not make use of the causality twice, just like we can explain biology as systems, chemistry, and hypothetically physics though we don't because it gets hard. Don't we always use the most relevant level of detail for the problem? Obviously in practice its rare to match up a brain state to a sensation, and the results don't generalize.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm confused about the question of causality here. Are we saying that generalized causal laws cannot be established, or that causality isn't at play in certain questions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "using causality twice."
DeleteIf A causes B, yes, A can also cause C: Gravity can make an apple fall, and also make a dish fall, shattering it. But the causality there is clear: we know how and why it's causing both: falling and shattering (the shattering needs a bit more detail about surfaces and materials).
Similarly, the brain may be -- in fact surely it is -- causing you to pull your hand out of the fire and to feel pain. (We all believe that, if we are not dualists.) But the causality for the pulling is clear: we know how and why the brain causes your hand to withdraw from fire (easy problem). But we do not know how or why it causes you to feel pain (hard problem). (Nor even why it would need to, once we already know how it causes your body to do what needs to be done.)
The analogy with the multiple levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology does not help solve the hard problem. Those are multiple "easy levels: a glass of water has the macro level of fluidity, and the micro level of hydrogen and oxygen models, just as a reflex has the macro level of the bodily movement and the micro level of the nerve impulses. Those are, quite transparently, levels of structure and function. How is feeling a "level" of structure or function?
Everything would be fine if feeling were a fundamental causal force, like gravitation. But all evidence is that it isn't. All there is is the usual structure and function of matter and energy -- and that's what we use to explain why and how organisms can do everything they can do. What's left to explain how and why they feel? (It's also easy to see the Darwinian adaptive value of the things organisms have evolved to be able to do: what adaptive value does feeling add, if it is not an independent causal force of its own?)
So if you (with some miracle) could say "these are the brain processes responsible for feeling," how does that fall under easy/hard problem? It does not explain how they elicit feeling, but it also doesn't explain what we do.
Deleteif you know you can feel, then you know it. when you pose the question to yourself, you will know it is true that you feel. Someone else could pose the question, and you could be deceitful and pretend to be a robot. But if you don't feel (MIT wasn't good enough), and i pose the question, you could genuinely answer yes or no because either way, you are not really introspecting to get the answer. You can't pose the question to yourself, not really. you can't even know that feeling is a thing that must happen in order to feel.
ReplyDeleteAbigail, you are partly re-discovering the Cogito here. If you don't feel, it's not just that you don't "know" whether or not "you" are feeling: you don't know anything at all, because there is no you; there is just a chatting robot, like a rock, except able to do and say anything a person can do or say.
DeleteAnd if there could be such a Turing Robot (a zombie), and we could know it didn't feel (which we can never know, because of the other-minds problem), then MIT would not have "failed": It would have proved that feeling is completely unnecessary for anything! It would remain only to explain how and why we are not zombies too. That explanation (if there were one) would then be the solution to the hard problem.
By the way, the Turing Robot, whether or not it was a zombie, and whether it told the truth or lied, could not tell us anything we cannot already tell one another. For example, if it was a zombie, it would nevertheless say exactly the same thing any of us could say. (That's Turing Indistinguishability.) I don"t know whether Isaure is a zombie, but just go ahead and read anything she posts henceforth, and first interpret it as if she were sentient, like us, and then as if she were a zombie: No difference, no matter what she says. That's Turing Indistinguishability. And if she said she was a zombie and could not feel a thing, you would still have no idea whether it was true. (And you would not feel free to kick her. That's the power of the Turing Test -- and evolved mammalian mind-reading and morality)