'Tis true, 'tis true.

Enforcer, *why* do you hold to the belief that there are things 'we are not made to know'? That way, madness lies.

I'm watching with interest to see what happens if we ever meet another intelligent species... should be some interesting discussions then

As long as the Americans don't get there first and blow them to smitherenes!!

(Sorry for any offence caused to any Americans here!!)

Neil, why do you continue to misconstrue what I am saying? It isn't that we are not made to know something - rather that what we know includes some (by definition) non-physical facts.

We cannot know the physical constitution of consciousness if consciousness is not physically constituted.

I would enter this argument with some insightful comments, but I am better at constructing a good science argument (its part of my job) than a good faith-based one, hence I will keep out of this discussion until either:
a) I have constructed a response which will move the argument on and provoke further thoughts and re-analysis of all our belief-sets, or
b) The discussion has moved away from this onto something where I don't feel capable of adding something, or
c) Someone has been compared to Hitler (hopefully won't happen).

Bizarely I find myself mid-way between AndrewR and Enforcer, but clearly not on the same plane is either. How is this?

What is a subjective fact? How can something be true only for a given perspective?

I would venture to suggest that you have answered your own question.

1. Subjective fact. But are you claiming that there is no subjective experience? You can if you like, but that would seem rather bizarre to me. It amounts to pronouncing us non-conscious.

2. How? By not being a physical fact.

So you're claiming that, for example, if I experience, say, happiness then that is a subjective fact, because it is personal to my own experience.

I, on the other hand, maintain that there are physical stimuli which made me feel happy and that even though it may not be feasible at present to isolate them they do, none the less, exist.

The experience, for example, of me recalling a happy memory causes physical reactions in my brain which exist in an objective sense. Just because a scientist can not stick a microscope in my ear and watch the memory play does not mean that it is magically detatched from the physical world.

Subjective facts:

Let's say a group of scientists probe and analyse the brain of Smith until they have completed their enquiry. What they arrive at is a complete description of what has to be going on in the brain - physical facts (P) - for Smith to be having a conscious experience of blue (B).

(P) and (B) have been experimentally correlated.

But still there is the complete set of physical facts (P) and in addition, an experiential fact (B). (B) is subjective in the sense that it is experienced by only the person in that brain state. It doesn't mean anything to say that the other scientists share the experience, because it is the experience of a particular subject - subjective. Because of this, it can never belong to any set (P).

I am claiming that your take on this represents correlation, rather than identification.

So would you say that the reaction between sodium and water is subjective because only sodium and water experience it?

It is not, the reaction can be observed and its causes explained.

Likewise the vast number of reactions that are required to produce consciousness can be observed and, potentially, even predicted*. There is no subjective magic element which makes us conscious which is not represented in physical reactions.

* Of course, we already do a pretty good job of this prediction at the macro-effect level. For example, we can predict fairly well what will happen if, say, we tell the wife we've been banging her sister.

No, and that is an excellent way to see what I am saying. Physical (objective) events and states of affairs might be thought of as having a 'subjective' aspect to them, in some sense, but not in the sense I mean. Think of an entirely mechanical (and unconscious) robot. You shine a light in its eyes and it processes the information much as we do. Finally, it registers the fact that it is 'seeing' red light. These processes are 'subjective' - they are happening only within the robotic 'subject'.

The difference is that the physical description of what the robot is doing is the complete description. There is nothing about the process that only the robot can experience.

I'm lost now - if we build a robot that can detect when a light is being shone at it and report what colour that light is, which is fairly trivial, do we then have a subjective system?

If we improve it so that it can also recognise music is that subjective?

If it then is enhanced to be able to taste food or hold a conversation or be self-aware where does this become, in your definition, subjective?

My argument is that however cleverly we construct the robot it's still just a clever robot and nothing it does has a mystical element ... and we are also just very clever robots. Our ability to subjectively experience things is an illusion, along with our free will.

Ah - OK. That makes things clearer. You are taking the only possible position a physicalist could reasonably take (in my opinion) by denying the subject matter of the enquiry. Eliminative Materialism is the jargon.

I agree that if it is true that we are no different from these sophisticated robots then we have no subjectivity in the sense I am using the expression. The problem then is what sort of illusion this could be.

Is your experience of pain illusory? If you feel intense toothache - in what respect are you mistaken about that?

Pain is still a physical response within the brain. With the right knowledge one's brain could be stimulated to believe that it was experiencing toothache.

You said that conscious experience (e.g., of pain) is illusory. What does that mean - that when we take ourselves to be consciously experiencing pain we have a false belief that we are doing so? It seems clear that we can be wrong about the physical source of an experience of pain, but about the experience itself?

BTW, back on topic, this is the sort of thing that makes me cringe.

What I am saying is that what you see as a subjective non-physical event I see as an objective physical one, just one of such complexity that it's easier, natural even, to regard it as being beyond the physical.

Whatr a most amusing website! initially he claimed that his score for a partial viewing of Dogma was enough, then after many E-mails he decided to view the whole thing and lowered the "CAP" score. So infact at first he was talking utter rubbish...

So would you say that how you see the colour blue, for example - how it looks to you in your own consciousness - is an immensely complex quality?

What I want to distinguish between is (a) how it looks to you (subjective) and (b) the possible causes of how it looks to you. I can agree with you that the cause might be immensely complex, and objective, but the experience itself is simple and subjective.


Imagine that science has arrived at a complete understanding of the physical state (P) which precipitates a particular conscious experience (B). There would have then to be a law acknowledged which links the two. It would be the (P) <--> (B) Law. That is a correlation law. It doesn't analyse (B) in terms of (P). It just correlates the two. You still have the problem of what constitutes (B). And as physics stands, and as you said, there can't be any physical states which are not objective states.

But the experience is simply a manifestation of the physical complexity.

Seeing the colour blue kicks of certain physical reactions which cause our brain to say, "Hey, that's blue", but nothing takes place outside of normal physical laws.

My original point, 500 posts ago, was that if you believe that, somehow, what happens in the brain does transcend normal physics then you are taking a religious viewpoint.

I think we should probably agree to differ on this, then. Certainly you are not alone in saying that conscious experience is either illusory or purely physical in all respects, so I am not suggesting that I am obviously right and you wrong. All I was doing was trying to explain the way I see things. My view is that conscious experience eludes physics completely. It has a subjectivity which physical phenomena cannot.

Regarding religion, I still haven't said a word about it. Perhaps you are suggesting that in order to support my position I would need to call on a belief in God? I can't see that at all. My only interest is in how complete a physical account of the mind can be.

Sometimes you are one of the funniest people ever Neil



What is this? Barnacle with incorrect grammar? We should try to find out.



I disagree - the experience isn't subjective and it certainly isn't simple. We, as humans, have been taught that the colour blue is called 'blue'. Therefore, when we see blue, certain physical effects happen in our brain, drawing from our memory to remember that the colour is called 'blue'.



Obviously we don't understand this properly, but how do you know we cannot analyse B? The 'conscious experience' is, at the simplest level, a lot of chemical reactions in the brain. That is all it is. If it isn't, there must be some other force, for want of a better word, which causes us to have the experience B. To quote Barnacle, pish, and likewise, tosh.

At the simplest level, all emotions etc. are simply chemical reactions. Just very complicated chemical reactions. Lots of them too.

But you have the continuous assumption that consciousness is *not* physically constituted. Yet the main piece of evidence suggests that it must be; have you ever seen consciousness in the absence of a physical brain?

I'm saying we don't know enough about it; you're saying we *can't* know about it. I don't see why there should be a limit to knowledge.

I admit to amusing myself in my responses; you have not claimed 'not meant to know' but frankly, that's the attitude that your conclusions lead to.

Me: we don't know; keep looking.
You: we can't know; don't bother.

Oh well - time to quit, I think. I started out by drawing attention to a property of conscious experience (as I believe) which by definition physical phenomena cannot have. This leads to the inference that conscious experience is not physical. Nowhere have I assumed that something intelligible cannot be achieved, and nowhere have I brought religion into it.

Interesting how emotive this stuff can be!

I just don't think that's true though? At the end of the day the brain is still a physical thing; albeit it a very complicated thing. Thusly the emotions/experiences are also physical, stored in a chemical form in the brain.

You might turn out to be right, but at this stage you are just assuming that everything is physical. I am trying to present an argument to show that it is not. Anyway, that's it for me.

Not quite, but if you wish to maintain that something in the operation of the brain somehow transcends mere mundane physical interactions then you need to give a name to the state created, and the most likely one is "soul".

I would see consciousness, with the ability to take a subjective view, as an emergent property of a complex physical system. If you wish to make it more than mere physics you are suggesting some kind of mystical aspect to the universe which, by your own statements, can not be explained by science.

This is a religious viewpoint, whether or not you attribute a god to it.

Well I don't want to mock your beliefs, Andrew, but if they are as you indicate you are far closer to acknowledging God than I am. I was thinking more in terms of reviewing our preconception about 'the physical' being restricted to the objective. Much neater.

But here is another possible way to express what I am saying. I have already said it more or less, but here goes:

Suppose a bunch of scientists investigates Smith's brain state when he says he is experiencing pain, and suppose they exhaust the physical details of that state. They then pronounce that this is all there is to the state of pain. By definition, they have established all the physical details by objective investigation, and since they are physicalists that has to be everything, for them. OK, fine.

Now one of them remembers that Smith feels pain, and chips in with "...oh, and this is what it is like to be Smith in pain". He kicks one of his colleagues in the head to induce a similar sensation in him.

My claim is that the moment he introduces the concept of 'what it is like to be ...' he has overstepped the bounds of physicalism. For a physicalist there is the physical brain state to be in, but there is no additional 'what it is like to be' in that state. The concept is meaningless to a physicalist, since he has already exhausted all the facts. That's why he is forced to be an eliminativist - deny that there is any such experience.

I am not denying that there is a subjective experience of feeling pain, I'm saying that experience is based on physical interactions in the brain which are, potentially, discoverable and repeatable.

They are, in fact, based upon entirely objective measures. That they produce a subjective experience ("ow, that hurts a lot", "Arg! That's even worse") does not suggest that to understand or explain *why* they happen requires a subjective viewpoint.

If, for example, our scientists replicate the reactions in Smith's brain that happen when they kick him in the shin and then blindfold him and repeat the reactions then Smith can not tell if they are really kicking him in the shin, or merely making him feel that he is being kicked in the shin because his subjective experience is the same.

That is the scientific point of view. If you believe that there is something inherent in the brain which makes such observation and repetion impossible then you add are adding a mystical dimension which I do not believe exists.

OK, forget the pain that Mr Smith feels when he is kicked in the shin (the "Ow, that hurts a lot" pain) - how about the pain that Mr Smith feels when his best mate AndyW decides to kick him in the shin for no apparent reason? How subjective/objective is that pain?

To Mr Smith he feels betrayed and disolusioned that someone who he regarded as a mate seems hell bent on causing him pain purely for his own pleasure. For AndyW, he sees nothing wrong in what he did as it was just one of those merry japes that mates get up to between each other.

All of the subjective experiences that the brain can provide are the result of physical reactions. Nothing happens in there which is not the result of physical reactions. This is why we can use something as base as chemicals to alter something as 'subjective' as our emotions.