The hard problem of consciousness

It has been a while since my last post.  And that’s because I have been struggling with a hard problem.

No, not the Chalmers hard problem.  I have my own hard problem.

The easy problem of consciousness:

The easy problem, for me, has been in understanding consciousness.  When I say “easy”, I do not mean trivially easy.  It has been difficult at times.

The hard problem of consciousness:

For me, the hard problem of consciousness has been attempting to communicate my understanding to others.  And, thus far, I have not found a successful way of doing that.

On truth

In a recent post at the the PeacefulScience forum, I wrote:

What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.

Most people find this hard to swallow.  They probably see it as obviously wrong.  But they don’t point out where I went wrong, probably because they are unable to determine that.

Alternative math

Jerry Coyne posted this video at his blog:

Presumably Coyne was making a point about alternative truths.  The video clip is quite exaggerated.  I don’t expect anything like that to actually happen.   But, of course, exaggeration is often a good way of making a point.

Sharing concepts with the culture

In my previous post, I discussed carving up the world.  The idea is that we carve the world and give names to some of the parts into which we carve.  Those named parts become the concepts that are part of the true statements we make about the world.

In an earlier post, I indicated that how we carve up the world needs to be a social convention.  And the naming that we use also needs to be a social convention.  That these are social conventions is what allows us to communicate with one another.

In this post, I will be discussing how these social conventions can be established.

The culture

By the culture we mean, roughly speaking, the society and the social practices of people within that society.

We cannot share  things with the culture until there is a culture.  Picture the problem for young child.  She needs to learn how to carve up the world in order to fill her world with details.  So the need to carve up the world starts before the child has much of a world.  In particular, the child needs to start carving up the world before she can become aware that she is part of a society.  In other words, the carving up must begin without access to any carving conventions from the culture.  The child must initiate carving by herself, and not wait until she learns what are the social conventions.

Conventionalism

A while back, I indicated that I would start posting about my own ideas on philosophy.  But I have not posted much since then.  This is an attempt to resume that effort.

My own philosophy appears to be a variety of conventionalism.

I have previously stated that I am a behaviorist.  That does not change.  I see social conventions as, primarily, behavioral conventions.  A simple example is the convention that we should drive on the right side of the road.  This is a convention about behavior.

What is conventionalism?

According to Wikipedia:

Conventionalism is the philosophical attitude that fundamental principles of a certain kind are grounded on (explicit or implicit) agreements in society, rather than on external reality.

Conventionalism appears to be controversial within philosophy.  There is fairly broad acceptance that language is conventional, though there are disagreements about that, too.  Henri Poincaré was conventionalist about geometry, which seems right to me.  Some have argued that mathematics is conventional.  That is more controversial, and many philosophers believe that Quine refuted that position in his “Truth by convention”.  I’ll not that I disagree with Quine, and perhaps I’ll discuss that in a future post.

Eye view philosophy

I recently made a blog comment where I mentioned “God’s eye view philosophy,” which I contrasted with “Organism’s eye view philosophy.”  Here, I want to expand on that comment.

Roughly speaking, the idea of a God’s eye view philosophy, is that we should attempt to look at the world as we might presume that a God might see it.  It is important to note that one need not be religious to hold a God’s eye view philosophy.  It suffices to think of a metaphorical all-seeing God.  There need be no commitment as to whether such a God is possible.  One could be an atheist, and still hold to a God’s eye view philosophy.

With an organism’s eye view, we instead try to look at the world as it might appear to a biological organism.  So what we call “a bird’s eye view” would be a particular case of that, where the organism is a bird.  We humans are, of course, biological organisms.  So, in some sense, it must be that we really are taking an organism’s eye view.

Convention (7) – Relativism

When I mention my ideas about the role of conventions in science, I am often accused of being a relativist or a social constructionist or a post-modernist.  Those seem to all be related.  I am not any of those.  Today’s post will look at why my ideas about conventions do not have any relativist implication.

What am I

I’ve just said that I am  not a relativist or a social constructivist or a post-modernist.  So perhaps I should say something about what I am.  It’s not easy to say what I am, because my views don’t fit any of the standard labels.

In his book “Science and Relativism“, Larry Laudan presents a discussion between four philosophers of science, whom he labels as a positivist, a realist, a pragmatist and a relativist.  I disagree with all four of them.  For each of them, there are places where I agree with what they say.  But, overall, I do not see science the way that any of them see it.

Convention (6) – Essentialism

Today I want to look at “essentialism” as a possible alternative to the use of conventions.  And then, toward the end of the post, I’ll briefly consider some other possible alternatives.

With today’s post, I will continue to use the hypothetical that I introduced in my previous post.  That is to say, I will assume that small animals are classified into two species, which I shall call “cats” and “dogs”.  There is no assumption that I am talking about what we usually call “cats” and “dogs”.  I’m just borrowing those names for convenience.

Essentialism

The idea of essentialism, is that what makes an animal a cat is that it contains the essence of cathood.  Likewise, what makes an animal a dog is that it has the essence of doghood.  The name “essentialism” comes from this reference to essences.

Convention (5) – objections

In this post I’ll respond to some of the objections raised by John Wilkins, as best I understand them.  John raised objections during our discussions in comments to his blog post “Are species theoretical objects“.  I want to be clear that I am not picking on John.  It is my impression that many philosophers have similar views, and I have come across that sort of disagreement in discussions elsewhere.

I’ll start with a quote from that discussion, which I think reasonably summarizes John’s position.

As to conventions, again we may mean different things. I am basing my understanding on a read through of Lewis’ Conventions a while back. Consider correctly driving on the left side. Yes, if we all did the same things we’d all be driving on the left, but there is no fact of the matter which is best, left or right. In the same way, we may all choose to classify using the same conventions, but there need be no fact of the matter tracked in virtue of it being a conventional classification. If all we are doing is following conventions, then the ranks or categories so constructed are flatus vocus. There is nothing “out there” that is being tracked.

Convention (4) – Biological species

This series of posts on convention originated with my comment to a post by John Wilkins, that I see species as being determined by convention.  See the first post in this series for links.  John disagrees with me, and gave reasons for his objections.  I plan to discuss those objections in the next in this series.  Today’s post will discuss why I take the designation of species to be conventional.

Categorization

Biological classification is an example of categorization.  I take categorization to be a dividing up of the world into manageable parts.  This is often described as “carving the world at the seams.”  However, there aren’t enough seams to account for how we carve up the world.

As an example, consider the dividing of the USA into fifty states.  Some of the state borders are along rivers.  Some are survey lines.  We could perhaps think of rivers as natural diving lines, or seams, except that we often don’t use them even when rivers are available.

Convention (3) – why we need conventions

In this post, I shall give a couple of examples to illustrate why we use and need conventions.

3D Space

For the first example, consider 3-dimensional space as discussed by mathematicians and scientists.  We usually represent objects in space in terms of coordinate axes.  We typically use an x-axis in the left-right direction, a y-axis in the forward (away from me) direction, and a z-axis which is vertical.

The first thing to notice about this choice of axes,  is that the choice is rather arbitrary.  When I am at home, the x-axis is in a north-south direction, because my desk happens to face east.  And at work, where my desk faces roughly north, the x-axis is close to an east-west orientation.  The direction of the vertical axis also changes with location, due to the curvature (the spheroidal shape) of the earth.