Consciousness 2: Phenomena

Philosophers often use the word “phenomena” to refer to appearances.  Here is some text quoted from Wikipedia:

In modern philosophical use, the term ‘phenomena’ has come to mean what is experienced as given. In Immanuel Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (1770), Kant theorizes that the human mind is restricted to the logical world and thus can only interpret and understand occurrences according to their physical appearances. He wrote that humans could infer only as much as their senses allowed, but not experience the actual object itself. Thus, the term phenomenon refers to any incident deserving of inquiry and investigation, especially events that are particularly unusual or of distinctive importance.  According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, “Modern philosophers have used ‘phenomenon’ to designate what is apprehended before judgment is applied.”

Kant’s point of view appears to have been that our investigation of the world begins with appearances, or phenomena.  What Kant saw as noumena, or the world in itself, was not accessible to us.  We would have to make do with phenomena.

Consciousness 1: How is experience possible?

The Chalmers “hard problem” has to do with experience.  It seems that many people think of experience as something that requires explanation.  I never thought of it as a particular problem, perhaps because the way I am looking at consciousness is different from the way others look at it.

Chalmers was particularly concerned with explaining why experience has the particular form that it has.  Why do red things have the particular appearance that we experience.  I won’t be addressing that in this post, though I plan to revisit it in the future.  The concern, for today’s post, is why do we have any experience at all.  Or, in the terminology that Chalmers uses, why are we not zombies.

Consciousness 0: An introduction

I’ve decided to attempt to explain consciousness.  I might not succeed, but it is worth a try.  The way that I look at consciousness is very different from the way that most people look at it.  And that make communication difficult.

I won’t be saying much about conciousness in this introductory post.  But I do plan to get into more detail in future posts in this series.  As a warm up, you might want to watch this youtube video, where Alva Noe gives his ideas:

• Why is consciousness so baffling?

My way of looking at it is somewhat along the lines that Noe suggests.

When you watch that, you might get the impression that Noe is being a tad mystical.  Perhaps that’s what one can expect from a philosopher.  But, then, if you read Maturana and Varela, you might get a similar impression.  However, Maturana and Varela are not philosophers, they are biologists.  For that matter, some people who read J.J. Gibson, on his ecological theory of perception, think that he is appealing to magic.  However, Gibson was a down to earth experimenter in perceptual psychology.

That you might get a mystical impression is partly a reflection of the difficulty of discussing this topic.  And one of the reasons it is difficult, is that people have many preconceived notions about consciousness.  So an attempt to explain consciousness that does not fit with those preconceived notions is going to be difficult to follow.

I have said enough for now.  I will get into more detail in future posts.

Is science a religion?

The answer, of course, is no.  However, others often claim that it is.  Take, for example, this quote, which I am copying from a recent post at the Don Hartness blog:

Another reason that scientists are so prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion.

Those words are not from Don Hartness himself.  He quotes them for a book, and is not completely clear on whether he agrees with them.

To be fair, the author apparently uses “religion” to refer to a world view.  That makes it hard to know what he means.  I don’t much like this talk of “world view.”  As best I can tell, the “world view” language is something that theists use to delude themselves that their rejection of a lot of evidence is okay because others do it too.

Truth and axioms in mathematics

There’s been some discussion of truth in mathematics in the comments to my previous post.  Here, I want to expand a little on my view and express puzzlement at the idea that axioms are themselves true or false.

In response to a question, said “Actually, I take axioms to be neither true nor false, and I take the truth of mathematical theorems to be relative to the assumed axioms.”  Let me restate that in terms of the Peano axioms for ordinary arithmetic.

1. The Peano axioms are neither true nor false.  Rather, they are definitional statements.  They define that part of mathematics known as Peano Arithmetic (or PA, or simply arithmetic).
2. Theorems proved in PA are true in a relative sense.  Their truth is relative to the PA axioms.  They are true as used within PA, but perhaps not even meaningful outside of PA.

Why I don’t like philosophy of mathematics

I recently posted a link to an explanation of the philosophy of mathematics.  While I thought that Balaguer’s explanation was very good, I also remarked that I don’t find the philosophy of mathematics to be useful.  In this post, I’ll say why I don’t find it useful.

Toward the end of his explanation, Balaguer presents the following argument for platonism:

1. Semantic platonism is true–i.e., ordinary mathematical sentences like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ and ‘3 is prime’ are straightforward claims about abstract objects (or at any rate, they purport to be about abstract objects). Therefore,
2. Mathematical sentences like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ and ‘3 is prime’ could be true only if platonism were true–i.e., only if abstract objects existed. But
3. Mathematical sentences like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ and ‘3 is prime’ are true. Therefore,
4. Platonism is true.

Balaguer, who says he is a fictionalist and not a platonist, questions step 3 in that argument.  However, it seems to me that step 2 is already mistaken.  People simply do not use “true” in the way that step 2 supposes.

What philosophy of mathematics is about

Found via a reference at the M-Phi blog, here a pretty clear statement on what the philosophy of mathematics is all about:

• A Guide for the Perplexed: What Mathematicians Need to Know to Understand Philosophers of Mathematics (Mark Balaguer)

This does, indeed, seem to capture much of what philosophers of mathematics are studying.  However, it fails to persuade me that such study is useful to mathematicians.

Obese legislation

Richard Posner, in a post about the proposed immigration reform, writes:

It is an unreadable 880 pages in length (legislation has become obese in tandem with the increasing obesity of the population).

Emphasis added, to highlight the part that I found both amusing and true.

Why the hard problem is hard

In short, the hard problem is hard because it is bogus.

The “hard problem” here refers, of course, to what David Chalmers has referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness.”  There was a recent post about this at the Rationally Speaking blog.

• Why the problem of consciousness won’t go away (Guest post by Michael Lopresto)

Lopresto starts by talking about location problems, and the “problem” of locating consciousness in the physical world:

My project here is to ask whether it’s possible to locate consciousness in the physical world. That is, can we locate phenomenal properties in the physical world? My thesis is that given our conception of the physical world, it is in fact extremely difficult to locate phenomenal properties within it.

Talk of “phenomenal properties” already sounds dubious to me.  For sure, philosophers have long used the word “phenomena” to refer to sensory experience.  But what is it that is supposed to make sensory experience a kind of property?

The intelligibility of the world

As I recently mentioned, I intend taking some quotes from Nagel and presenting my position.  I’ll start with a comment on intelligibility:

The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind. (p. 17 of “Mind and Cosmos”).

When I look at that quote in my Kindle software, I see a note that 94 readers have highlighted that particular text.  So this is not merely Nagel’s opinion.  It is a view that is enthusiastically shared by a number of readers.