Here’s A Post About Hard Problem Of Consciousness, Since @argumate And @foolishmeowing Have

Here’s a post about Hard Problem of Consciousness, since @argumate and @foolishmeowing have talking about it lately:

I think it’s a mistake to view the Hard Problem as unique to materialism. Idealism can’t answer it either, and generally doesn’t try to. IMO, the problem is not really about matter, but about description or explanation.

(I also don’t think it’s unique to “formal” systems or approaches, except in a sense so broad that any philosophy that could ever be done is “formal,” because it involves strings of words and/or arguments.)

The Hard Problem is very similar to the problem of existence – “why is there something rather than nothing?” Both of these are questions about what “animates” or “turns on” any given description – what makes a description (such as a formal system) more than “mere words on a page.” This is a distinctive class of problem because any familiar kind of explanation would simply become part of the description, and thereby be subject to the exact same problem.

If you add some sort of “existence-maker” mechanism to your description of what exists, you’re still open to the objection that the entire description, existence-maker and all, could just as well be an inert logical structure, without the extra magic of existence. This is a pretty familiar, standard point in the context of the existence question, but in discussions about consciousness, the analogous point tends to get buried under arguments about whether or not there is more of a problem for certain kinds of description – “material” or “formal” or “functional” ones, or whatever.

It seems to me that this is a problem for descriptions, period. If you look at the various dualistic and idealistic systems that have been proposed, they tend to be, well … systems: descriptive accounts of what is supposed to exist (some or all of it mental/spiritual), along with some arguments about why we should assent to the description, but nothing inherent in them to light the flame and turn these descriptions necessarily into the realities they talk about. These systems do claim that the flame is in fact lit, but they generally treat this as self-evident via Descartes’ cogito or similar. At least one mind/spirit exists (by cogito), and here are some things it can conclude a priori about other existents – Leibniz’s various principles, McTaggart’s theory of determining correspondences, or whatever – and we’re off to the races.

These can be perfectly fine theories of what mind/spirit is, insofar as it exists, but they simply do not touch why/how it exists: you need the spark of a cogito to get things started, and the cogito doesn’t leave you any less in the dark about why there’s an existing mind (instead of there not being one). It just convinces you that there is one. And once you’ve decided to work within a frame where that is taken as given, you’ve given up on Hard Problems. These theories only “explain” the ineluctable experiencey-ness of experience in the way that the observation “as a matter of fact, something exists” explains why there is something rather than nothing – which is to say, not at all.

It seems intuitively clear to me that these Hard Problems are unanswerable, because they ask for something that is incompatible with what we take to constitute an “answer” to a question. They ask for an argument that some description is necessarily animated, that there’s no mystery about how it becomes more than words on a page because there is something impossible about the merely-words version of it. But such an argument is either:

(1) An argument for purely logical necessity, i.e. necessity within the terms of the description, in which case the necessity property is just one more fact about the description and could be as “mere” as the rest, or

(2) An argument that the description gets necessarily lit up by the animating fire of something else that already has it, in which case we need some initial spark to start things up, one that is not explained within the terms of the description. Generally this spark is supposed to be “obvious” / a priori, but the fact that we have a priori knowledge of something doesn’t constitute an explanation of why we have that knowledge, so this doesn’t get the job done.

More Posts from Psyxe and Others

psyxe

4 years ago

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psyxe

7 years ago

I am coming for all the monsters that ever touched him, I am coming for all the ones who twisted his stars into shadows, They turned him into a nightmare, So I’m going to be theirs.

and they’ll never wake up // k.s. (via worthystevie)

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psyxe

8 years ago

Emil Doerstling: Preußisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happiness in Love) – Gustav Sabac el Cher und Gertrud Perlig.

Gustav Sabac el Cher (10 March 1868 - 4 October 1934) was an Afro-German imperial bandmaster in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, August Albrecht Sabac el Cher (born in 1836 in Kurdufan, now Sudan) had a long and remarkable career as a valet to the Prussian Prince Albert, was one of the first representatives of African diaspora in Berlin and together with Anton Wilhelm Amo, one of the first socially integrated Afro-German citizens.

Sabac el Cher was good at the violin and had a prominent career as a bandmaster and played for the royalty of Europe. He stopped in 1909 to work instead as a freelance conductor. In the 1920s he even worked in the then-new radio broadcasting business. He was loyal to the Kaiser and welcomed the rise of fascism until the appearance of the Nazis on the political scene. In 1933 his restaurant business was condemned by the Nazis and it was forced to close after a short time. He died in Berlin at 66 years old, in 1934. The Kaiser sent his condolences from his exile in Holland.

In this painting (1890) Gustav Sabac el Cher wears a Prussian infantry uniform. He was probably one of the first Africans to do so. He married Gertrud Perlig in 1901 and they had two sons together. Reportedly Sabac el Cher’s grandsons were unaware of their mixed-race ancestry until they were contacted by historians in 1999 as they tried to find the story behind this beautiful and light-hearted portrait.

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

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psyxe

4 years ago

If you read the big CHAZ/CHOP post I made in early June, most of this won’t be new to you. But I wanted to share it.

I don’t agree with everything in the video, especially not the jumps to attribute malice to the SPD when mere incompetence is a plausible explanation. The guy is clearly pushing a particular angle, and the timeline jumps quickly from one event that makes SPD look bad to another, almost implying that nothing except those events took place.

But the concrete facts he does report – those all happened. And the tone of the video captures how I felt about them then, and still do.

(I want to draw particular attention to the June 20 shooting and the claim that the cops were met by a violent crowd. The “body cam video” mentioned is not some obscure thing you have to look up a database – the SPD provided that footage in their official post about the incident, the same post that mentions a violent crowd. Do they … just think you’re not going to watch the video???

All this stuff was like that. Stuff that feels to me like a carrier wave for a fundamental message, reiterated again and again: I know I don’t have to make sense. No one cares if I’m lying. I have sovereignty and so I create reality. I cannot be held responsible for my actions, because I am the one-who-holds-responsible. Morality and law are things for you mortals, not me.)

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psyxe

9 years ago

Buy a shirt; help old dogs have a home

Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary provides a home for senior dogs that cannot find people to adopt them—a real home, with beds

and couches for them

and love and vet care and a large property to roam on with custom-made boardwalks with ramps to make it easy for the dogs that have trouble with stairs. They also provide temporary and permanent foster homes for many more, with a unique thing called Forever Fostering, where people within 100 miles of the Sanctuary can foster a dog forever, with all veterinary care and medication paid for.

They have around 20 dogs living in the Sanctuary, including blind pug Bugsy, who had to have his eyes removed.

three bonded pairs, such as Harley and Smily, surrended to a shelter when their lifetime owner had to move into an assisted living facility, which the Sanctuary took in together so they would not be separated

and new bffs

And they’re having a t-shirt sale to raise funds to keep taking care of these old dogs that have been abandoned or are too old to be considered “adoptable.” And you should give them your money.

Buy a nice shirt. Help a nice dog.

Signal boost this, and I will buy a shirt for someone randomly chosen from the list of people who reblog this post.

https://www.bonfirefunds.com/life-is-good-at-ofsds

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psyxe

4 years ago

Instead of the “anti-racist” hamster wheel, how about this?

From Campaign Zero.

Angry? Support state and local legislation, like a bill in New York to repeal a law that hides police misconduct records from the public. Or vote for politicians who appoint appellate judges who have reasonable interpretations of qualified immunity. Or rigorous police training that lasts more than a few short months.

But that’s booooooooring and requires compromise and working with people who disagree with you on some issues but not others, and, let’s face it, wheels-of-governance aesthetics < protest aesthetics.

But by all means “Say her name” until you’re blue in the face. Venmo your favorite grifter. Then go amplify some more voices to your friends, who are amplifying the same voices right back at you. Rinse and repeat.

It’s not about you. It’s not about madly scrubbing your horrible permanent stain on center stage like Lady Macbeth. Your “Work” means nothing.

Unless you’re a cop, judge, juror, or politician, your precious feelings and internalized whatevers are a distraction, not the source of the problem. The number of unarmed black men killed by people (police or civilian) who wouldn’t have done so had radical-pose “amplification” reached them is zero.

You. Are. Playing. A. Game. With. Your. Friends. Nothing more.

Anyone who says otherwise likely either has something to sell you or is under the influence of someone who does.

So take that guilt money and send it to the most boring swing-district state legislature candidate you can find who will sign on to reform legislation with a chance of passing in your state. Also, if you go on and on about how you are racist and will never be un-racist and vow to never get off the hamster wheel of shame but you don’t know who is running for judge where you live, fuck you and the liberal arts degree you rode in on.

Save lives, not your soul.

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psyxe

7 years ago

Today, In Public Speaking Class

The professor was giving us protocols for formal interaction. He said it was important to introduce people of higher rank first when introducing multiple people. As an intuitive Socialist, I was annoyed by all of these, since everyone is a comrade. However, some of these were worse than others:

The order, by rank and status, was as follows:

Bishops before priests

Prime ministers before cabinet ministers

Bosses before employees

Teachers before students

Parents before children

Men before women

…What the serious fuck

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psyxe

9 years ago

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psyxe

4 years ago

"Francis" makes me think you might be a Catholic — a Franciscan monk, to be exact. Is this true, or are you just a big fan of Sir Francis Drake?

I might be a Catholic, but I don’t actually go to friars — the closest I’ve ever been to being a monk was an 18-hour lay nun called Rose. (I’m way into fantasy novels, so that’s probably a common background.)

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psyxe

6 years ago

I think one of the best names of a real-world geographical location is “the Inaccessible Pinnacle of Sgùrr Dearg"

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