Psychologic, the current argument in philosophy is precisely about whether or not an empiricist, scientific mode of investigating the mind can ever solve the "hard" problems of consciousness (as opposed to the soft problems--how cognition in the brain works, how the brain assimilates language, how brain chemistry affects emotions, etc.). It is at best naive to decide at the outset that only a scientific account will do before examining whether such an account can in principle actually provide an answer.

If it cannot--and there are strong arguments that it can't--then one must find some other way of talking about consciousness. The dualist positions of philosophers like Donald Davidson and David Chalmers are one attempt at this. So are the non-reductive physicalist ideas of John Searle or Thomas Nagel. In a similar vein, one could perhaps revive the panexperientialist philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, as some have begun to do.

Finding a non-scientific way of talking about consciousness is not mere "speculation" as opposed to evidence-based reasoning. Those make the attempt formulate the strongest arguments they can based on the best premises they believe they have. In doing so, they open themselves up to substantial objections and counter-arguments which may indeed entirely defeat their positions.

I am very tired, so this post may be extremely error-ridden.

Notes as I proceed through the video:

Uh-oh. QualiaSoup's first point seems quite wrong-headed. He claims that "non-physical substance" illegitimately smuggles in the physical concept of "substance." But here I think he's problematically confusing our everyday colloquial use of the word "substance" with the philosophical meaning(s). To speak of a substance in philosophical jargon is merely to say that the "substance" is that which underlies all other properties of a thing and make it what it is. Thus, Spinoza was able to say that there is only one substance, underlying all materiality but not itself material. Leibniz made a somewhat similar claim, but allowed for the existence of an infinite number of substances called monads.

Second, even if it's true that speaking of a "non-physical substance" requires an analogy from physical substance, it's not at all obvious that this is problematic. Insofar as the non-physical shares some subset of properties with the physical, or has similar but somewhat different properties, one may legitimately borrow physical language to speak of it. The substance dualist might easily accept that there is some shared subset of properties.

Next, QS claims that substance dualists often conflate mind, soul, and consciousness without substantiating argument. This is either a straw man or an attack on the very weakest defenders of substance dualism. Waste of time making this point.

Next, QS offers an apparently coherent account of the public and private access of "physical" and "mental" events respectively, as against the dualist argument that such an account seems impossible. However, it is not at all obvious that he genuinely succeeds. A robust dualist argument would proceed under the assumption that the contents of the mind can be inferred perfectly from the contents of the brain (this is acceptable even under substance dualism). Even under such conditions, it is not obvious that the processes so identified are identical to my conscious experience. It has been argued even by atheist physicalists like Thomas Nagel that there is something in subjective experience uncaptured by physical accounts. As Nagel says in his most famous essay, even the most robust physical theory seems incapable of telling us what it would be like to be a bat. A dualist account might provide us with a coherent way to deal with this problem in a way that physicalism is incapable of.

Next, some nonsense about split brains. Yawn. No ground is going to be gained or lost for dualism on these grounds; the most QS can show is that a monist account is equally capable of accounting for such phenomena. I suppose he's correct that this can't be used as a good argument against

Next, a discussion of replacement of all one's cells every seven years. Not only is it not the case that this happens, but this would be a particularly bad argument for dualism. Is QS just going after the easy objections to his position and leaving alone the strong ones?

Next, damage to the body causing changes and/or damage in mental functioning. So what? Under substance dualism, there must be reciprocal causal relationships between the brain and the mind. This kind of thing is just what one expects under substance dualism.



This may be QS's most poorly argued video. At the most compelling point in the video, QS offers an apparently coherent account of private and public access which, if the dualist position is correct, should not be at all likely, if even possible. And, to be sure, there are philosophers of mind who will agree with him, such as Daniel Dennett. Yet there are just as many who will not, including very prominent philosophers like David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel. At every other point, he is either wrong or irrelevant.

"We're getting there slowly but surely. "

As you probably know there is that significant ongoing debate between people like David Chalmers and others and those you reference. Chalmers, or perhaps Jaron Lanier, would say that's still taking the easy question for the hard.

http://consc.net/chalmers/

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sposo2 is correct.
there is no proof.not in any definitive sense.
there is only conjecture and suspicious coincidence,which leads to more questions which have not been answered satisfactorily.
this is where spoco and i diverge.
history has shown us that those who rule will exploit it's own citizens for it's own machinations,even if that device is wholesale slaughter.
read Zbigniew Brzezinski:
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategic-Imperatives/dp/0465027261
or chalmers johnson:
http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Consequences-American-Project/dp/0805075593/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253120736&sr=1-1 (to give you context)

no body? then there is no case.
the REAL question to start with,and this can be verified,documented and is blocked at every turn,is the WHO and the WHY.
this has never been answered fully or even in part and what we were told has been proven to be not only false,but laughable.
let's start there.
so i cant blame anybody being suspicious of the governments accounts for 9/11.
their answers on these two questions have been suspicious from the start in their inaccuracies and outright lies.
try to avoid the physics and possible demolition of the trade towers.
not because your questions are invalid,but because the physical evidence is no longer there and to attempt to argue the validity of a government conspiracy with no physical evidence puts you in the hole at the beginning.
ask WHO and WHY.
even playing field.

Ok... I still see this line as completely arbitrary. How are our actions not "probabilistic events?" The amoeba is operating off the same basic principals. It's exerting energy to maintain certain ion concentrations. It's moving matter in order to seek out food, and even flexing its pseudopods along the shortest path between food sources in proportion to their delivery frequency. There is even a paper showing that it will respond to periodic stimuli (such as cold shocks at particular intervals) with predictive changes of behavior. How is that any different?

Further, comparison and recall? Why is memory necessary for experience? For the successful completion of certain cognitive tasks, sure, but I keep needing to remind you that isn't what we're talking about here. As for comparison, it's happening everywhere all the time. Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws. I think the problem here is that your thinking is boxed into the human sensory modalities. As far as I'm concerned an electron is sensing an electrical field in the same way I am sensing visual band EM. It just can't image it as well, and thus can't respond to complex patterns at much distance. Again, not to diminish that extraordinary decrease in entropy, but I don't know why it should be so fundamental.

Also, to be clear, I've never claimed that what I'm looking for is something immaterial. I just believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. Being matter, and conscious, I have no reason to think otherwise. Again, this consciousness is distinct from "thinking". It's the sheer fact that there is a phenomenal experience, not the particular nature of those phenomena. You've presented me no evidence that I should only expect phenomenal experience in a complex organism, as you have no test for phenomenal experience. This is why Chalmers, and others, have argued that consciousness is not necessarily best studied by traditional english empiricism. It's wholly inadequate to investigate the phenomenon. A better solution might draw on Eastern traditions of meditation, for instance. Many monks, including the Dali Llama have been interested in cooperating.

But you have made a claim, that for some particular X, P(X) > P(!X). On the basis of that statement, and the assumption that you are rational, I draw the conclusion that you have some concept of what X is, or at least what its consequences are, otherwise you are making a non-sequitur claim.

I do have some very general concept of what x is, but not such a certain idea that I would ever make a claim like P(X) > P(!X). That is, unless you toe a hard Bayesian line, and accept that my claim is completely a subjective degree of belief. Otherwise, my claim was something like "I believe that P(X) > P(!X)". Something you shouldn't really care to contest, but I'll defend my priors against your priors till you're blue in the face. I won't be bullied by the tyranny of some arbitrary model selection criteria.

Yes you SAID that, but if you MEANT something by it, it would be useful to state what. You say that consciousness ≠ thinking, but you maintain vagary on what it is, not defining your terms does not strengthen your position.

Likewise when you claim I am theist, without defining the deity, you undermine your own argument. That's why I'm an agnostic. I can't make claims about undefined terms.

From wikipedia:

The term hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers[1], refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomenon. Hard problems are distinct from this set because they "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".

"Thinking", would fall under the easy problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a concept that is difficult to put into words, but I've found most humans share this sense. That is, we experience coherent unitary stream of multi-modal sensation. There is no physical reason for that. There are only physical correlates of aspects of these experiences. There is no unitary locus. It's the equivalent of saying that your graphics card is conscious because the registers contain an internal representation of whatever is being displayed. It's nonsensical unless you posit consciousness in the first place.

You know full well the ball is not "responding", it is effected, objects which don't have the capacity to act don't have the capacity to react. You are just avoiding the consequences of the obvious by conflating terms.


I respectfully disagree. Before I can explain further, I'd need to know what you mean by act. Am I "acting" if a series of billiard balls bounce off each other in my head leading to my hand moving? Obviously, the process is much more complicated involving semi-permeable membranes, electro-chemical gradients, allosteric processes involving ion-channel gating, sensory transduction, passive and active cable properties attenuating electrical signals, neurotransmitters, resonating macro-circuitry, etc... In the end, however, it's still billiard balls. Granted, I'm able to overcome much larger energy barriers than a single billiard ball, but I'm still running down the free-energy hill, as all physical processes are.

the white house keeping its distance is the best foreign policy move i have seen from the white house in?..god,feels like forever.Iran has many pro-american constituents,but not from the mullahs.right now islam is so incredibly fractured it is a powder keg.i know i am just stating the obvious,but something has to be done and it wont help if its from an outside source,it has to come from within.

thats why i was cheering the protesters when they bogus election blew up in the mullahs faces.they may have restored some order after many deaths (nede being the most prominent)and many imprisonments but the word is out.now its just a matter of time.my hope is that the west stays out of it.there is a time to offer the hand of assistance,now is NOT that time.it would be too easy for iranian leaders to pounce on that and propagandize it to their own machinations.

if i had to point to a group to blame it would be the neo-liberals,now known as neo-conservatives.mrFisk posted an amazing doc today concerning just that topic so its fresh in my mind.i started paying attention to these guys around 2002,did some research and found an almost hidden group of empirialists who were pretty upfront about their goals.PNAC is a document i have posted about ever since.these guys mean business.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-New-American-Century

one more point.
while much is addressed in this documentary.it's prudent to know why Iran has a problem with the US.it was not just ONE thing,it was many.
but the two biggest,i feel anyways.
was the CIA/SAS backed coup of democratically elected(yes,iran used to be a democracy,until we showed up)mossadeq so that a much more "west-friendly" dictator in the form of the shah could be installed.(mossadeq kicked BP out of iran to nationalize the oil fields).
the second of course was the espionage game played with both iran and iraq to keep the region unstable and therefore unlikely to consolidate and take over oil production,THEIR oil production.that war lasted NINE years and the US played both sides.
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book called the grand chessboard.its an eye-opener on foreign policy,and explains many of the reasons why the US what they did.they were not exactly altruistic reasons.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard
the consequences of such actions?
chalmers johnson has the amswer:blowback
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson
interviews here:
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=chalmers+johnson
brzinzski here:
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=Zbigniew+Brzezinski

In reply to this comment by guitarwolf:
*promote
where joo been man?
thankies for the promote bud.
empire and over-reach?
thought you were more a music man?
no matter,its a great vid,C johnson is the man!
namaste.

great find kulpims!
i been following chalmers for awhile,now i have new people to check out..thanks!

^ Quite true. I tend to agree more with David Chalmers than Daniel Dennett re consciousness http://consc.net/chalmers/ or Jaron Lanier, e.g., when it comes to questions about AI.

>> ^bcglorf:

Thank you for your reply.

You made it clear that I may have made an error in my previous comment. I think I should clarify that what I meant by "personal transport" was light vehicles for personal uses, as is the minivan or motorcycle used to get to work, the store, not transportation in general, which I view as a different, though not unrelated, problem. Moving freight, airplanes and battleships requires different solutions (in my opinion) then the problem of getting your kids to the hockey game.

I think we agree that the transition from oil is an important issue. You seem to believe that better batteries (and electric engines) will solve every facet of every issue facing the end of oil, and that this will result in little or no social or political change or turmoil. While I deeply wish that the next century comes to be shaped after your expectations, I do not believe it will be so. I do not believe that batteries alone will solve the coming crisis. Even if energy storage technology was to rapidly become what we would need it to be, where would the energy come from if the source for more then half of our current use was to vanish? Replacing that energy by renewable means will require a huge amount of investment and several decades to implement.

What I see coming, is a myriad of interwoven problems of which the central spine is energy use. All of them are have energy use at the at the root of their problem. This is because oil has done more then just let people drive their cars around cheaply. Cities are no longer shaped after people's needs, but to suit the demands of the automobile. There has been a great deal of optimism in investing in electric cars to allow people to continue to access modern cities as they have been constructed.

"When people say that they want to go to the electric car, I love it! But remember, they say 'car' not 'truck.' A battery won't move an 18 wheeler. The only thing that will move an 18 wheeler is foreign oil, diesel and gasoline, and our domestic natural gas." -T. Boone Pickens (on The Daily Show)

However continuing to access these cities will get more difficult when costs of energy begin to come down from the bubble of cheapness that I and most of the people I know have grown up in.

"Consequently these (cities) will be places that nobody wants to be in. These will be places that are not worth caring about. We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the united states today, when we have enough of them we will have a nation that is not worth defending. -James Howard Kunstler on "The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

Even if cities are reshaped for the new economy of energy, there is debate on what that will be. Some people believe that there will be a magic-pill cure, like super batteries that will allow life to continue as normal. This will not be the case.

"The central delusion that we're seeing right now is the idea that we can magically come up with a rescue remedy to continue running the interstate highway system and all the other accessories and furnishings of the happy motoring system. I happen to think that we're going to be very disappointed about that. In fact there are a lot of intelligent thigns we can do, but one of the least intelligent things we can expect is that we can continue happy motoring. You can demonstrate that you can run cars on hydrogen, cow shit and fried potato oil, but can run 230 million cars and trucks on it? Forget about it.

And then you get into political questions, like if driving becomes something only for the elite. Right now 4% of americans can't drive for one reason or another. What happens when that number becomes 13% or 27% of the people do you think that's going to be politically okay? It would create huge resentments and grievances against the people who can still do it." - James Howard Kunstler

But when I said that personal transportation is not the biggest issue, I meant it. People will be less concerned with their car or the "happy motoring system" if they are hungry.

"Food prices are rising and they're about to soar. There have been a lot of rising grain prices that have not been passed on to the consumer, they're about to be. High food prices always create political peril, as we've known since the French revolution at least.

The era of cheap food is over in this country, just as the era of cheap oil is over as well. (...) The old fix, ramping up production is not going to work this time, because cheap food depends on cheap energy, something we can no longer count on. Without reforming the American food system, it will be impossible to make progress on the issues of energy independence, climate change and the health care crisis because the way we feed ourselves is that the heart of all those three problems.

Let me explain. The food system, uses more fossil fuel and contributes more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere then any other industry. Between 17 and 34 percent. Meat production alone is 18 percent." -Michael Pollan, on The End of Cheap Food.

So when faced with the choice between fuel for their cars and fuel for their bodies, some will choose to fuel the car, leaving others to go hungry. And when people are hungry, they turn to first to the government for solutions. Governments know that they will need to bring resources to appease a population and avoid that political peril they have known about since the French Revolution. Remember that wars are always about resources.

"How curious, that the First World War is never taught in our schools as an invasion of Iraq. (...A reaction to) the Berlin-Bagdad railway, which commenced construction in the years leading up to the first world war," with the goal of bringing oil from Iraq to Germany. (-Robert Newman, A History of Oil)

"Oil is what drives the military machine of every country. It provides the fuel for aircraft, the ships the tanks for the trucks. The control of oil is indespensible. When you run out if your army stops." -Chalmers Johnson, Why we fight.

Oil is more then just a transportation issue. Riding the bus won't help much. The bus runs on gasoline, just like your car.

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Grayson Chalmers bringing my adolescent years to life... So cool