We live in a virtual reality . This virtual reality (VR) is nothing but information – much like a multiplayer VR computer game. There is no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information. The larger consciousness system is the only thing that is fundamental – all else is virtual. This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of.
@thelovitcenter "no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information" "This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of"
Just in case there are any eliminativists here who think this is nonsense, my background is physics and I can confirm that this is in fact the case. Just google "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" and "digital physics" if you doubt this.
Eliminative materialism is impossible if the matter has itself has been eliminitivized.
@hellomate639 "if you think that is a so-called "scientific fact.""
Really? Go ask Anton Zeilinger, (the inventor of quantum teleportation) David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd (quantum computer scientists) and Lee Smolin (loop quantum gravity theorist). Trust me this isn't "new age crap" or "quantum mysticism," as you are thinking. You haven't done your homework. A lot of people say this at first, until later on, and they end up agreeing.
"Scientifically proven fact"? Seriously? You want me to buy that.
Sounds like someone went off in their interpretation somewhere. Scientists often make philosophical statements, so it's pretty important not to confuse what is philosophical and what is scientific.
@hellomate639 There's no other way to reasonably explain the experiments. You could argue superdeterminism, but that's like arguing that God put all of the fossils in the ground to test the faith of creationists.
And then there's quantum gravity. GR treats gravity as bent space-time, thus to explain GR in terms of something more fundamental, you need to go beneath space-time -which gets us to the "universe as computer" idea from a different angle.
The universe being a computer is a hypothetical idea, not a proven idea.
And I think you're misinterpreting what quantum physicists would mean by that. They wouldn't mean to say that the universe is truly a computer that would have been made by some other being. They'd only mean (and in purely philosophical terms) that the universe is made up of information (mass and energy being function of information), and I can conceptualize that idea and it's not a scientific fact.
Furthermore, it doesn't rule out eliminative materialism. In fact, I'd say it would rather support eliminative materialism, since supports of that philosophy generally support the idea that the conscious experience is an informational process that doesn't depend on matter.
In fact, you solve many problems that dualism brings up by conceptualizing the mind itself as information and not as the brain itself.
EDIT: that doesn't depend on matter being an actual physical object.
I can understand why many physicists would look at the universe as being a purely informational process. It's not a proven thing at all, but it's a fascinating idea.
It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion. We conceptualize it physically, but really it's a function of matter to not move in relationship to other matter.
@hellomate639 "rather support eliminative materialism"
Well no, because it gets rid of the matter. Thus there's nothing deep down to eliminitivize the mind to. It's kind of weird, it's a kind of scientific monistic idealism like that.
"It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion."
I know I've done that before. It gives you a cool way of looking at the world.
Yes, it does support it because eliminative materialism bases itself on the idea that the mind itself is information and not the brain. That is, it solves the paradox that you can replace every electron and atom in the brain bit by bit without the person being a different person.
Even if it turned out that reality wasn't "material" it would still be physical and mechanistic. It's just that our sense of what is mechanistic and physical would change.
@hellomate639 Well not "physical" properly speaking, because remember here this is a kind of monistic idealism we are dealing with, but yes it would still be mechanistic, the mechanisms would be more akin to "programs of information" than "material machines" though.
This would be key to solving the mind/body problem as unlike with matter, information has a phenomenal/mental quality to it. You could then have consciousness with something like Integrated Information Theory.
@thelovitcenter "no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information" "This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of"
Just in case there are any eliminativists here who think this is nonsense, my background is physics and I can confirm that this is in fact the case. Just google "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" and "digital physics" if you doubt this.
Eliminative materialism is impossible if the matter has itself has been eliminitivized.
We live in a virtual reality (Pysical Matter Reality). This virtual reality (VR) is nothing but information – much like a multiplayer VR computer game. There is no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information. The larger consciousness system is the only thing that is fundamental – all else is virtual. This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of.
Well of course you can't see the mind. The mind is phenomenal. You by definition can't see the non-empirical aspects of the brain empirically. This is just positivism crudely applied to the mind/body problem.
Science wants/demands consciousness to be physical — to be constrained by the little picture rule-set – to be reduced to physical causality. It doesn’t work that way – that is illogical. The subset cannot contain or explain the superset. Science is doomed to fail at taming the paranormal and must be relegated to “observing phenomena” that exits beyond their control until they change their fundamental beliefs.
Consciousness is fundamental and is a self modifying evolving digital information system which is finite and imperfect. Physical reality is a virtual reality There are many virtual reality frames, we exist in several of them. Evolution criteria, Love, and spiritual growth are all defined in terms of entropy a measurable quantity,
There is no such thing as an objective reality – all reality is interpreted.The paranormal is perfectly normal.
Consciousness is fundamental and is a self modifying evolving digital information system which is finite and imperfect. Physical reality is a virtual reality There are many virtual reality frames, we exist in several of them. Evolution criteria, Love, and spiritual growth are all defined in terms of entropy a measurable quantity,
There is no such thing as an objective reality – all reality is interpreted.The paranormal is perfectly normal.
You just used physical/technical terminology (digital information system, virtual reality, entropy) to describe consciousness, yet in your previous comment you claimed that consciousness can't be reduced to the physical. Way to contradict yourself.
Never heard of this woman before, but from what I hear here, I think I just may just have a new mentor.
"The answer to those questions will come out of the science, ... it's not going to come out of a philosopher analyzing a concept and using pure reason. Because it's a question of fact."
if someone isn't going to sit around to discover new things, then SCIENCE won't progress xD, SCIENCE is progressed by humans, who sit around and think PATRICIA!!!
Besides that... I like her straightforwardness, but she shouldn't be so harsh on "folk psychology" though. They had different perceptions in the past, they will have different perceptions in the future.
The Churchlands are always very interesting to listen to, and it's unfortunate that their views get misrepresented all the time: My philosophy prof called them "the husband and wife couple who says that love doesn't exist!"
Well it turns out my prof was a libertarian-free-will dualist, so it's no wonder he felt threatened by the Churchlands and felt the need to misrepresent them
Response to commenters, not video: OMG, Science is not a magic wand. It is simply the process of observing, hypothesis formation, and hypothesis testing. That's it. Anything presupposed for any of those steps is not really science. Science could also be construed as the body of inductive knowledge derived from this scientific process. Am I correct?
i see many got ticked about simplification of humans as species. Im sure thats the right approach. Simplifying means taking off that mystical sugar-coat and realizing what we really are. Besides, doesnt even matter what we think - we are and will be bio-chemical mechanisms on the fundamental level. Putting a "special" label does us no good. Positive decision is to understand what we are, not to create what we are not.
Here we have someone who doesn't have credentials in neuroscience making guesses about what neuroscience will be like in the future, while not citing any sources, and calling it philosophy while claiming philosophy can't solve anything about the mind.
Materialism in general is offensive to many. The idea that we are merely a collection of atoms is an intolerable idea for the vast majority of people. Morality is not something we discover, it is merely a by-product from various electro-chemical reactions in the brain.
Good video, but "There is only the physical brain" is not a scientific discovery, and this is the only thing I don't like about this lady, the way she always seems to mix up her personal state of mind (which is atheism I guess) with the real facts of science. She is talking "as scientist" (she's well known for that), and in this function she must not defend philosophical / ontological naturalism, just speak from a methodological naturalism point of view. That's where science goes, no further.
I wonder what kind of things we will be talking about when we consider all our experiences to be nonsensical illusions. What will we talk about after we eliminate our experiences of red/blue, the taste of apples, the warmth of family, and my desires and intentions toward these things and the rest of life from our conversation and our reality?
I've translated the above passage into Churchland's language:
"Since condition g and brain state x, brain state y. Brain state y demands condition h."
She is an eloquent speaker. The day we teach to the universities and schools of the world that the entirety of the humanities can be reduced or eliminated with the rise of pure chemical-physics explanation, that will be a good day.
@HumanChemistry101 Is your professional bias so impertinent that you would actually like to see other, successful disciplines eliminated? I noticed you said "chemistry-physics," so as to include your own field. Don't you think you're being too conservative in your reductionism, though? Let's acknowledge that chemistry is disposable, too. It's ultimately reducible to mathematical physics, just as biology is ultimately reducible to chemistry and psychology is ultimately reducible to biology.
@ElasticGiraffe You're right about that: everything in the universe is reducible to the fundamental particles and forces whose movements are described by the laws of thermodynamics. The humanities will some day be reduced to this basic understanding.
@HumanChemistry101 Scientific method is a product of philosophy, not of science itself, and natural science was called natural philosophy in its early days. The philosophy of empiricism spawned it and allowed it to blossom. In your zeal to see the humanities "reduced or eliminated," I hope you take this into consideration.
Yeah, the only Churchland stuff I've read is a little bit of Paul's, and his ideas about the theory-ladenness of "experience", how we perceive no primitive "phenomena" or immediate "impressions" but rather act on theories that may be more or less deeply entrenched in the mind — that a new theory can be more than inference, can be experienced as a new set of perceptions — this is pretty fun, and doesn't square at all with this "of course the phenomenon doesn't go away" talk.
And just for the sake of full disclosure, to reveal any biases (conscious or not): I am a theist. That said, I've never yoked my understanding of the "soul" in a mind-body separation. Also, I'd like to clarify that I'm really not a dualist - I just see the emergent issues in a fully-materialist account, and acknowledge that it is incomplete.
I'm sorry, but I have to tentatively side with Chalmers in this debate. The Churchlands, Dennett, and other materialists have steadfastly resisted acknowledging the Hard Problem - they seem far too ready to employ Occam's Razor (and its many philosophical permutations.) I do believe that, eventually, we will build a purely-physical account of consciousness. However, even then, it won't do service to how WE experience and internalize consciousness. And therein lies reductionism's ultimate limit.
Eliminative Rationalism posits that common-sense ontology is wrong. Negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and other counterintuitive notions in advanced mathematics show that empiricism (folk-logic) is flawed. Complete descriptions of reality will be purely mathematical, disproving folk-logical notions of matter and proving that only minds are real.
Nature is pure war with every man against another. Fear of death is the only way to keep the peace, so man is civilized by the threat of violence against him for transgressions upon his neighbor.
Nature does not care. Nature does not need human permission. Nature is the only eternal victor. Nature kills everything.
Human dissatisfaction with mortality is what leads the fearful to reach out for some eternal ideal.
13.7 billion yrs ago the universe appeared. Matter cooled and condensed, stars ignited to forge heavy elements, supernovae seeded the galaxy. 9.2 billion yrs after the bang, the Earth formed. Starshine made organic molecules reproduce, compete and evolve. 2.5 million yrs ago an apelike creature started to use tools. Humans walked on the moon and now approach immortality. A small part of the cosmos, the human mind, reflects on itself and the universe becomes self-aware. Explain that!
13.7 billion yrs ago the universe appeared. Matter cooled and condensed, stars ignited to forge heavy elements, supernovae seeded the galaxy. 9.2 billion yrs after the bang the Earth formed. Starshine made organic molecules reproduce, compete and evolve. 2.5 million yrs ago an apelike creature started to use tools. Humans walked on the moon and now approach immortality. A small part of the cosmos, the human mind, reflects on itself and the universe becomes self-aware. Explain that.
Imagine if you were born inside a car, grew up driving it, and had no exposure to anything else. When the car broke down, funny creatures came and after a little while everything worked again. Imagine from your perspective trying to explain why the car just stops moving on occasion. Oh the theories you'd spin! But would you ever be able to actually tease out the reality of engine, transmission, wheels, and gas? It wouldn't be easy.
But what has anyone gained from reducing mind to brain function, alone? I just don't see any advantages in it.
To understand a TV show you don't need to understand the functioning of the TV set. In fact, if you confuse TV functioning for the TV show itself you would not only be distracted but probably way off track!
Being insulted is not a scientific argument. Scientific research is confirming materialistic theories, whether we like it or not. I think diseases, catastrophes, misery whatever is insulting tot mankind, but is is part of it.
Prof. Churchland is one of the pioneers in a new understanding of mankind. Brilliant!
Scientific theories are confirming that there are physical elements to a lot things. They have not disproven anything though. One can still believe in neuroscience and be a dualist. The brain gets damaged and certain thoughts cannot be thought about (to use an example). That does not mean that they do not exist, they just cannot manifest themselves. BTW, as far as mind/brain goes, I am a dualist. As far as consciousness/brain goes, I do not know what I am.
Hmmmm, I thought philosophy gave up on approaching issue by pure reason in the 17th century. But if Churchland thinks otherwise who is anyone else to disagree.
Maybe you feel her philosophy "cheapens humanity" because you have an overly inflated conception of mankind. If the history of science is any indicator, it's highly unlikely that future scientific discoveries will conform to our pre-scientific intuitions about mankind, and so we should be ready/willing to revise them.
Are her children pieces of meat? Yes. But they are pieces of meat that can experience love, appreciate Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, etc.
@LennyBound Well, if materialists are claiming that our mental states ARE material brain processes, then the question should be: In which sense do they use the word "are"?
If it's meant to be a conjugation of "to be" in the sense of an ontological statement, then you should first have a solid theory of an ontology that can deal with the undeniable "being" (putting beside the question, in which sense we use this...) of consciousness. You say, that human beings can make experiences: (continues...)
@LennyBound I would add: By the fact, that we are experiencing it, we can not deny it's "existing" (how unclear this term is was my concern to ask for a new theory of ontology) in some way. Coming back to Materialism: material qualities like length, width, height, weight are not capable of describing the essential qualities of undeniable consciousness. I hope some day we will be able to accept a kind of monism, that is neither mind or body but an ontology of both (must-read: Spinoza!)
@LimboJimbo That is more or less what I'd like to see as well. While I don't agree with Spinoza's dismissal of phenomenology (see my biases below!), I do think that modern epistemology is too myopic and ill-equipped to deal with consciousness. But maybe that's just my inner pessimist speaking.
@LennyBound yes but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate, or appreciating Beethoven and Dostoyevsky is to be preferred over appreciating Bieber or Danielle Steele. In a materialist universe, there is no reason to prefer anything to anything else. That is why we are cheapened by materialism.
@motomambo It depends on what you mean by "reason." If you're conceiving of having a "reason" as dependent on a non-physical mind, then you're presupposing dualism and begging the question against the materialist. If, however, you don't think that reasons are necessarily dependent on a non-physical mind, then I see no reason why such reasons can't be accommodated within a materialist framework.
@LennyBound In short, I think that there are reasons to prefer love over hate, Beethoven over Bieber, but they have nothing to do with a non-physical mind. If you think such reasons require that dualism be true, please give me some rationale as to why.
@LennyBound Nothing to do with a non-physical mind? That seems a bit weird. Wouldn't it be more sensible to say you prefer Beethoven over Bieber not because of something in the brain but because it is more highly valued culturally and it is the function of the brain to integrate us into our environment, i.e. socialisation? I don't see how value can arise out of the physical. There is no value in nature/the physical. Rather meaning seems to be a social construct. Hardware/software. Thoughts?
@motomambo "but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate"
Love is a label we attach to a type of extremely positive value judgment. Similarly, hate is a label we attach to extremely negative value judgments. To suggest that there is no reason we should prefer love over hate is therefore just a contradiction in terms. Such feelings *are* the reason we prefer things, at least on the conscious level.
@motomambo Ultimately I suppose you're just unwilling to accept the fact that value judgments, meaning and reasons are necessarily subjective. This is patently obvious from your examples. How on earth could it be the case that Beethoven had more value than Bieber independently of any observer? Why would it be good for us if it could? Why should we accept, or want, this external standard when we are perfectly capable of valuing things ourselves?
@motomambo For that matter, what exactly is it about Beethoven that makes it valuable to humans if you exclude its emotional effect on humans or imagine it to be neutral or negative for selected individuals?
Is it morally wrong to be bored by Beethoven? Can you really be mistaken about being bored by Beethoven and consequently not valuing it? Or does that indicate that someone is a defective human if they ever made such a call?
@LennyBound "But they are pieces of meat that can experience love, appreciate Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, etc."
Love, appreciation, and contemplation don't exist, they are just illusions the brain plays on us. Well they do exist -but not as themselves. They are really neural patterns, nothing more.
@LennyBound Ok, so the question I have is, how do we distinguish between a neural pattern BEING the phenomenal state and a neural pattern CORRELATING to a phenomenal state.
This is the crux of the problem, and it can't be solved by neuroscience -neuroscience only tells us about the empirical. It can't distinguish between these two scenarios with science alone.
@JohananRaatz You make a good point. I am going to use the "phenomenal state" of dreams. Isn't the mere fact that we actually dream rather than just experience our neural circuits when we sleep a significant event? Does not this mere fact point out TWO/DUAL elements at work (the neural circuits and the dreams themselves)?
@metaldude82 To quickly interject with my 2 cents, I do not believe so because (as we still know very little about sleep) it's entirely possible that DMT creation and dreams are a necessity or even completely accidental way for us to be protected from taking in too much information or something of the like, as the brain tries to work out what is and isn't worth storing.
@JaydedWun Ok, I see your point. But, I do not see how it changes anything that I said because I am not denying that there is a neural correlate with dreaming.
An insult would give itself to the world of value, humanity and what you want to call the 'mind.' For a long time, we have relied on illusory constructs to make sense of the world . Where's your mind? There's definitely more evidence to suggest what we want to call the mind is owed to material processes than there is for the existence of this thing you call your self-awareness. I hated EM for the same reasons, but between Dennett and the Churchlands, the arguments are way better.
You know the idea of the static Universe was once a much better argument as well. Daniel Dennett and The Churchlands have motivations. They are part of a semi-religious order called the Brights Movement. Their agenda is to abolish any belief in a God and the human soul. Getting the truth from Dennett or the Churchlands is like getting advice from a used car sales man at a used car lot.
Logic, not rhetoric! I don't know physics. Static universe-- what does that prove? That theories fail? I guess you're right. It is impossible to logically prove that the "mind" doesn't exist-- the absence of proof for something doesn't entail its negation. Science has shown that 'mental' processes yield physiological reflexes. Can you admit that thought has a material manifestation?
Copernicus' heliocentrism "cheapened humanity", that's hardly an argument against it. Are you a young earth creationist too, or are you actually unaware of where this pathetic Inherit the Wind rhetoric leads?
@roymondlafonte I believe in the scientific method. The scientific method requires something Eliminative Materialism don't seem to think they need, and that is EVIDENCE.
Humans can make personnel choices that can effect the universe. We are NOT material objects. Our lives are NOT predetermined. The human spirit is EVIDENCE that we have a soul/spirit. As it is written in the humanist manifesto, humans have a "God like" ability control thier lives and the world.
@samayoa95 "What things look like at first glance" is not evidence. It's observation, and may or may not have significant interpretations with predictive power.
We have "evidence" that we have a soul in the same way that we have "evidence" the sun goes around the earth - just LOOK AT IT. Fortunately for science, just-look-at-it is not evidence.
@znodester Eliminative Materialism is false not because of "What things look like at first glance," but because of the deeply thought out philosophies of human free will. Humans have the ability to determine their future and change the physical universe. The only explanation for this is a non-physical aspect of the human spirit. Eliminative Materialists want us to ignore this. I believe we as scholars should not let militant atheists discourage our studies of the humanity.
Philosophy tends to utilize facts in order to hypothesize the better likelihood of an unknown. It can't be answered by the question or the rational hypothetical answer, but it helps propel the search for the fact by thinking about things in many ways based on the logic and probability of those ways.
"...bear in mind that these are empirical questions [...] the answers to those questions will come out of the science, it's not going to come as a result of a philosopher thinking long and deep [...] using pure reason, because it's a question of fact"
Philosophy is not just about the acquisition of empirical knowledge, but about analysis of ordinary discourse, whether its inquiries of ethical conduct, or just analysis of the logical structures of protocol sentences by using logic. Point of philosophy is not obvious because of several philosophers inability to implement philosophy to practical use.
@prgalois The point of philosophy is to get scientists searching for answers to these empirical questions in the first place. If you like, the philosopher frames the question, and the scientist answers the question (as best as possible). Conversely, when a scientist makes a discovery, they report the data and how it fits with current theories, whereas the philosopher takes the leap to contrive contextual meaning to the data to show what wisdom, if any, can be gained from the knowledge as such.
@prgalois Philosophy has reached some truths before science has. With logic we light the way for science, atoms were theorized by the Greeks. Also ethics is pretty much in the purview of philosophy.
@prgalois It makes philosophy of mind look a bit foolish, but philosophers of mind like Churchland and others would relate these facts to traditional philosophical questions. The possible unseating of the a priori in philosophy of mind by no means actually unseats philosophy itself. If one of the roles of philosophy is a conception of ourselves, then the philosopher use the facts of neuroscience to edit our conception of ourselves.
In physics we dont even understand what time is so there is not much chance of understanding the brain. In my video The Paradox of Schrodingers Cat an artist view Time has symmetry and geometry could this explain the human brain and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
Did she say that the immaterial conscious is 'spooky stuff'? Wow, what an ass. Pure materailistic thoguth destroys the foundation of logic in itself. If the material world is all that exists, and there are no immaterial laws like that of the laws of Logic, Reason, and Mathematics; why should one even think that anything they perceive (even the science inw hich they try to prove this) is true at all? It's a self refuting thought if one applies Kantanian criticism.
ha ha, what a joke this woman is... how does she "know" that there is no "soul"? is it because she can't see it? is it because we don't have equipment to detect it?
i think it is silly for people to assume what she believes.
Patricia Churchland is hardly a joke. She has written several academic text books and dozens of academic articles on the Philosophy of Neuroscience and the mind.
She never said she knows there is no soul. She said the data seems to suggest there is no soul. I think she is right! There is no evidence suggesting we have souls, and there is growing evidence suggesting that all mental phenomena is only brain activity.
I think it is silly for people to assume that your opinion matters!
I hope my statement that it is silly for people to assume your opinion matters did not come across as rude as it may have seemed. What I mean is that compared with Patricia Churchland regarding the Philosophy of the Mind your opinion matters very little. There is no comparison!
She thinks there is much to learn about the mind and that brain sciences seem very promising, where you believe College Professors and biological evolution are jokes! Again, there is no comparison; hands down!
When you say that data suggest there is no soul, you're saying that either its her damn opinion and not fact, or that evidence refutes the idea of the soul. So, in this case, it means it's her damn opinion, and opinions are valueless according to what you say, unless they are an authority (which I can just cite Kant or other more improtant philsoophers to make her opinion valueless).
The soul is immaterial, one cannot prove or disprove the existance of the soul scientifically, but one can philsoophically ponder of its existance, and it some sense can be proven through logical necessity.
Neuroscience rules out most of the reasons that people believed in a soul in the first place. "just because you can't "see" a soul doesn't mean it's not there." What reasons do you have to spiritualize matter? Because it makes you feel better?
What Churchland does not address (and EMists never do) is the difference between the neuro-correlates of consciousness and consciousness itself. There is a difference between the subjectively experienced color of red and the accompanying brain process.
Firstly EM is fundamentally about fifty years old, and practically only fifteen years old. It is a relatively new Theory of the Mind. EM is the Theory of the Mind that contends that some of the ways we think about and talk about certain mental phenomena, like consciousness, intensionality, and beliefs are wrong and should be reduced into simpler more accurate language or eliminated as a concept and replaced with better explanations of the mental phenomena in question.
Churchland thinks that the language used to talk about consciousness should be reduced to language that expresses data from current and future brain sciences.
Dennett thinks that what we think of by consciousness is just bits and pieces of information processed through electro-chemical brain activity.
Ramachandran thinks that a sense of self and ones own self co-evolved, and being linked to language use entails that to talk of one is talk of the other.
The color red! Qualia vs brain perceptions of wavelength?
What is the difference? What reasons are there to assume that consciousness (whatever that is) is other than mere brain activity? What reasons are there to assume that any mental experiences are other than just physical activity? Is it hard to imagine that consciousness is not something outside of brain function? What color is red to someone who has died? Red is a wavelength that when perceived looks red!
For the difference between qualia as first person experiences and wavelength (or is it frequency? scientists don't know) see Ramachandran. A blind physicist can know all that a sighted physicist knows about wavelengths but has no idea at all what the sense color red is.
I am quite sure that Churchland urgently desires that language about consciousness should be reduced to language about the brain. That's the whole problem. There is a real, ontological difference between first persona and third person accounts of our experiences.
Also, I didn't ask you about a sense of self. I was talking about the sense color red. You don't have to have a sense of self to percieve qualia. Further, it may indeed be the case that a wavelength is the physical occasion for a perception of a color but that doesn't make them the same thing.
Consciousness is not a mental phenomenon! Consciousness never presents itself to us like the sense color red does and so is no kind of phenomenon at all. Phenomena are those things which are present to consciousness.
Red is a wavelength that when perceived (through the functioning brain) looks red! A blind physicist who knows everything about wavelengths does not know what it is like to perceive red (because part of her brain does not function the way it does in the rest of us). That Ramachandran correctly thinks that qualia (of red, for example) and wavelengths are different is not in question; Ramachandran maintains that qualia (personal experience) co-evolved with our brain.
Perceiving red seems to be merely a product of the properly functioning brain. Wavelengths (light) enter our eye which trigger electro-chemical activity which trigger electrical signals to the Occipital Lobe for further chemical segmentation, reconstruction, and processing activities before triggering electrical signals that are cross-referenced with other sensory and motor signals before finally triggering electrical activity in the Forebrain causing perception and qualia.
It seems that the qualia (or the personal experience) of red is just as much a function of brain activity as any other electro-chemical activity in the brain. Again, what is seeing red if is not done through ones functioning brain? Mary, the blind physicist, cannot see red because her brain does not function like it does for those of us who can see red. It is not like the perception of the color red is somehow a product of something outside of brain activity. If so, then what is that stuff?
The stuff could be something like a formless hologram.
The generation of such a red depends upon the brain, upon the eye... even upon a red truck. But the red truck is not the mind (hologram), nor the eye, nor the brain.
The concept of qualia is the concept of the first person experience of the aboutness of something. I think you are asking how does the concept of qualia fit in with an Eliminativists' view of the mind. First, it is important to note that we are all Folk Psychologists by default of the circumstance that Natural Language (English in our case) is the only tool available to everyone (with the ability) to talk about our minds, desires, beliefs, qualia, etc (whatever they are).
Also, I feel that a third person account of our desires, beliefs, qualia, and probably many other aspects of what we call our mind will be a drastically different story from our first person account and that this story will be told through the generalizations drawn from the scientific data of brain-states. It may turn out that current concepts of qualia, for example, will be scientifically reduced or eliminated and replaced with other concepts which better explain why apples seem red to us.
I meant to say Abstract Language and not Natural Language. English is an example of an Abstract Language and birds chirping may be an example of a Natural Language.
This exposition only works on the assumption that materialism is fact.
It seems that what the speaker says about traditional mental concepts (will, etc) can equally apply to the concepts in materialism - e.g that all is reducible to matter-energy.
But this is what is at issue, so Churchland begs the question.
Not only that but if you consider Godel's second theory of undecidability how can a brain be reduced to it's functional parts without something outside of methodological materialism validating what is going on.
Gödels second incompleteness theorem must be taken in context with the first as it is the proof Gödel used to show that there are some things which are true that could never be shown to be true. EM is not Scientific Reductionism! The idea is not that knowing of all the parts of the brain will explain mental phenomena anymore than knowing all the parts of a bike could explain bike-riding. EM is also not Scientific Functionalism! The idea is not that knowing how parts of the brain function
. . in relation to other parts of the brain explains why there is the mental phenomena anymore than knowing how bike parts function in relation to a bike explains why one would want to ride a bike. EM regarding the mind is the position that incomplete theories of the mind should be reduced or consolidated into a more inclusive explanation of the mind or should be replaced with a better, simpler, explanation of the mind. EM is the position that so-called mental-states may be mere brain-states!
Eliminative Materialism (EM): if everything in human minds is based on completely mechanical processes, there can be no such thing as truth or knowing. Think about it: an insane person's brain is- according to EM- equally mechanical as a sane person's. In fact, there is neither sanity nor insanity according to EM. In the end, EM says that everyone lives in their own reality, and no one is right about anything. This seems quite untenable.
I think you're greatly misunderstanding the position. The EM advocate believes that knowledge and truth exist, but that they are represented internally through physical states of the nervous system. Certain physical states more accurately represent the world and are therefore explanatorily superior, whereas less accurate internal representations distort reality and are therefore inferior.
Simply put, adopting a materialist account of the mind in no way leads to subjectivism or the denial of mental illness. In fact, just the opposite. As a result of the pioneering work done in neuroscience, we are only now coming to understand the neurobiological basis for mental disorders as well as what constitutes healthy brain-functioning.
@LennyBound So EM is basically representational theory of mind? Do most EM hold onto Representational Theory of Mind? It seems to me to current be the best theory of mind...
EM is the theory of the mind that predicts that through neuroscience, experimental psychology and philosophy will yield a far better understanding of mental phenomena and of predicting behavior than Folk Psychology has been. It is not the position that our beliefs, what we hold to be true, our individual perceptions, etc will disappear or diminish in significance in our own experiences; only that these phenomena will be more generally understood from a scientific point of view!
Think about it! Through experimental psychology differences become known between the sane and not. Through neuroscience accidental or genetic damage to areas of the brain are correlated with function and qualia (or experience). Through creative philosophy a broader more general picture of the data can be formed. It is through the science that a better understood of our mind will be attained in general terms. This better understanding will enrich us with more truth and knowledge, not less!
Scientists, theologians and philosophers all have a common underlying link: they are all correct and can find the proof to back them if so desired. In fact, no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs. If you change your core belief structure and replace it with another, you are at present right still. Ego guides us in this respect. You may be able to admit you were wrong in the past, but presently your construct of reality is true. Those who believe differently are wrong.
Haha, I can't actually tell whether or not you're being serious.
You state that "no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs," but then go on to say "those who believe differently are wrong." You must see the contradiction here. No?
eliminative materialism is an appropriate name because it's a shitty philosophical position
palebluedot4ev 2 weeks ago
did she use "eliminative" word even once?
wuzzbud 3 weeks ago
there are a lot of STUPID comments in here.
ineedanewhead 2 months ago 2
@ineedanewhead
Agreed. Stupid comments all over the place, as well as trolls arguing from some pseudo-philosophical new age garbage.
hellomate639 2 weeks ago
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TheServiceWeb 5 months ago
So our ability to reason is just an illusion? If I cannot trust Reason, I will go to religion. Now a new question: Which religion?
samayoa95 5 months ago
@samayoa95 Christianity so there is redemption.
ISurvivedOaklandCo 3 months ago
We live in a virtual reality . This virtual reality (VR) is nothing but information – much like a multiplayer VR computer game. There is no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information. The larger consciousness system is the only thing that is fundamental – all else is virtual. This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of.
thelovitcenter 8 months ago 2
@thelovitcenter "no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information" "This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of"
Just in case there are any eliminativists here who think this is nonsense, my background is physics and I can confirm that this is in fact the case. Just google "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" and "digital physics" if you doubt this.
Eliminative materialism is impossible if the matter has itself has been eliminitivized.
JohananRaatz 3 weeks ago
@JohananRaatz
You're another troll that is full of shit all arguing for the same point of view.
Your background cannot be in physics (unless you suck at it horribly) if you think that is a so-called "scientific fact."
hellomate639 2 weeks ago
@hellomate639 "if you think that is a so-called "scientific fact.""
Really? Go ask Anton Zeilinger, (the inventor of quantum teleportation) David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd (quantum computer scientists) and Lee Smolin (loop quantum gravity theorist). Trust me this isn't "new age crap" or "quantum mysticism," as you are thinking. You haven't done your homework. A lot of people say this at first, until later on, and they end up agreeing.
JohananRaatz 1 week ago
@JohananRaatz
"Scientifically proven fact"? Seriously? You want me to buy that.
Sounds like someone went off in their interpretation somewhere. Scientists often make philosophical statements, so it's pretty important not to confuse what is philosophical and what is scientific.
hellomate639 1 week ago
@hellomate639 There's no other way to reasonably explain the experiments. You could argue superdeterminism, but that's like arguing that God put all of the fossils in the ground to test the faith of creationists.
And then there's quantum gravity. GR treats gravity as bent space-time, thus to explain GR in terms of something more fundamental, you need to go beneath space-time -which gets us to the "universe as computer" idea from a different angle.
Just look up "it from bit."
JohananRaatz 1 week ago
@JohananRaatz
The universe being a computer is a hypothetical idea, not a proven idea.
And I think you're misinterpreting what quantum physicists would mean by that. They wouldn't mean to say that the universe is truly a computer that would have been made by some other being. They'd only mean (and in purely philosophical terms) that the universe is made up of information (mass and energy being function of information), and I can conceptualize that idea and it's not a scientific fact.
hellomate639 1 week ago
@JohananRaatz
Furthermore, it doesn't rule out eliminative materialism. In fact, I'd say it would rather support eliminative materialism, since supports of that philosophy generally support the idea that the conscious experience is an informational process that doesn't depend on matter.
In fact, you solve many problems that dualism brings up by conceptualizing the mind itself as information and not as the brain itself.
hellomate639 1 week ago
@hellomate639
EDIT: that doesn't depend on matter being an actual physical object.
I can understand why many physicists would look at the universe as being a purely informational process. It's not a proven thing at all, but it's a fascinating idea.
It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion. We conceptualize it physically, but really it's a function of matter to not move in relationship to other matter.
hellomate639 1 week ago
@hellomate639 "rather support eliminative materialism"
Well no, because it gets rid of the matter. Thus there's nothing deep down to eliminitivize the mind to. It's kind of weird, it's a kind of scientific monistic idealism like that.
"It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion."
I know I've done that before. It gives you a cool way of looking at the world.
JohananRaatz 1 week ago
@JohananRaatz
Yes, it does support it because eliminative materialism bases itself on the idea that the mind itself is information and not the brain. That is, it solves the paradox that you can replace every electron and atom in the brain bit by bit without the person being a different person.
Even if it turned out that reality wasn't "material" it would still be physical and mechanistic. It's just that our sense of what is mechanistic and physical would change.
hellomate639 1 week ago
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JohananRaatz 4 days ago
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@hellomate639 Well not "physical" properly speaking, because remember here this is a kind of monistic idealism we are dealing with, but yes it would still be mechanistic, the mechanisms would be more akin to "programs of information" than "material machines" though.
This would be key to solving the mind/body problem as unlike with matter, information has a phenomenal/mental quality to it. You could then have consciousness with something like Integrated Information Theory.
JohananRaatz 4 days ago
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@thelovitcenter "no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information" "This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of"
Just in case there are any eliminativists here who think this is nonsense, my background is physics and I can confirm that this is in fact the case. Just google "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" and "digital physics" if you doubt this.
Eliminative materialism is impossible if the matter has itself has been eliminitivized.
JohananRaatz 3 weeks ago
@thelovitcenter
LOL.
"Scientific fact." What bowl of new age pseudo-philosophy crap are you eating out of?
And just to note, I'm undecided on dualism vs. monism. Your post just shows that you're uneducated.
hellomate639 2 weeks ago
We live in a virtual reality (Pysical Matter Reality). This virtual reality (VR) is nothing but information – much like a multiplayer VR computer game. There is no physical reality, and no physical brain – both are virtual – just information. The larger consciousness system is the only thing that is fundamental – all else is virtual. This is a scientific fact that Ms. Churchland is unaware of.
thelovitcenter 8 months ago
Well of course you can't see the mind. The mind is phenomenal. You by definition can't see the non-empirical aspects of the brain empirically. This is just positivism crudely applied to the mind/body problem.
JohananRaatz 8 months ago
beautiful theory i like it.
libbeingcool 9 months ago
If she has a dog I bet it's a boston terrier.
GreatUnwashedMass 9 months ago
14 religious folks watched this and told themselves more lies about how the world works.
octispie 9 months ago
Science wants/demands consciousness to be physical — to be constrained by the little picture rule-set – to be reduced to physical causality. It doesn’t work that way – that is illogical. The subset cannot contain or explain the superset. Science is doomed to fail at taming the paranormal and must be relegated to “observing phenomena” that exits beyond their control until they change their fundamental beliefs.
thelovitcenter 9 months ago
@thelovitcenter Sorry man, it is what it is.
20cigarrosconfiltro 9 months ago
@20cigarrosconfiltro
Scientifically derived facts.
Consciousness is fundamental and is a self modifying evolving digital information system which is finite and imperfect. Physical reality is a virtual reality There are many virtual reality frames, we exist in several of them. Evolution criteria, Love, and spiritual growth are all defined in terms of entropy a measurable quantity,
There is no such thing as an objective reality – all reality is interpreted.The paranormal is perfectly normal.
thelovitcenter 9 months ago
Scientifically derived facts.
Consciousness is fundamental and is a self modifying evolving digital information system which is finite and imperfect. Physical reality is a virtual reality There are many virtual reality frames, we exist in several of them. Evolution criteria, Love, and spiritual growth are all defined in terms of entropy a measurable quantity,
There is no such thing as an objective reality – all reality is interpreted.The paranormal is perfectly normal.
thelovitcenter 9 months ago
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20cigarrosconfiltro 9 months ago
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20cigarrosconfiltro 9 months ago
@thelovitcenter Sorry, why waste my time. It is what it is.
20cigarrosconfiltro 9 months ago
@20cigarrosconfiltro
I am sorry I don't understand, what would you be wasting your time with?
thelovitcenter 9 months ago
@thelovitcenter
You just used physical/technical terminology (digital information system, virtual reality, entropy) to describe consciousness, yet in your previous comment you claimed that consciousness can't be reduced to the physical. Way to contradict yourself.
xknowledgeisfreex 8 months ago
6:14-6:51, so good
musiclover041591 9 months ago
Never heard of this woman before, but from what I hear here, I think I just may just have a new mentor.
"The answer to those questions will come out of the science, ... it's not going to come out of a philosopher analyzing a concept and using pure reason. Because it's a question of fact."
Blackmark52 10 months ago
if someone isn't going to sit around to discover new things, then SCIENCE won't progress xD, SCIENCE is progressed by humans, who sit around and think PATRICIA!!!
Besides that... I like her straightforwardness, but she shouldn't be so harsh on "folk psychology" though. They had different perceptions in the past, they will have different perceptions in the future.
EVERYTHING IS UNIFIED AND CONNECTED
ouniquian 11 months ago
The Churchlands are always very interesting to listen to, and it's unfortunate that their views get misrepresented all the time: My philosophy prof called them "the husband and wife couple who says that love doesn't exist!"
Well it turns out my prof was a libertarian-free-will dualist, so it's no wonder he felt threatened by the Churchlands and felt the need to misrepresent them
theocean1973 1 year ago
@theocean1973
What a bastard
GnomesAmok 1 year ago
Response to commenters, not video: OMG, Science is not a magic wand. It is simply the process of observing, hypothesis formation, and hypothesis testing. That's it. Anything presupposed for any of those steps is not really science. Science could also be construed as the body of inductive knowledge derived from this scientific process. Am I correct?
stearnslectures 1 year ago
i see many got ticked about simplification of humans as species. Im sure thats the right approach. Simplifying means taking off that mystical sugar-coat and realizing what we really are. Besides, doesnt even matter what we think - we are and will be bio-chemical mechanisms on the fundamental level. Putting a "special" label does us no good. Positive decision is to understand what we are, not to create what we are not.
eleminatus 1 year ago
Here we have someone who doesn't have credentials in neuroscience making guesses about what neuroscience will be like in the future, while not citing any sources, and calling it philosophy while claiming philosophy can't solve anything about the mind.
Wow.
vaguelyhumanoid 1 year ago
Materialism in general is offensive to many. The idea that we are merely a collection of atoms is an intolerable idea for the vast majority of people. Morality is not something we discover, it is merely a by-product from various electro-chemical reactions in the brain.
Keysteeze 1 year ago
Good video, but "There is only the physical brain" is not a scientific discovery, and this is the only thing I don't like about this lady, the way she always seems to mix up her personal state of mind (which is atheism I guess) with the real facts of science. She is talking "as scientist" (she's well known for that), and in this function she must not defend philosophical / ontological naturalism, just speak from a methodological naturalism point of view. That's where science goes, no further.
jcmmanuel 1 year ago
I wonder what kind of things we will be talking about when we consider all our experiences to be nonsensical illusions. What will we talk about after we eliminate our experiences of red/blue, the taste of apples, the warmth of family, and my desires and intentions toward these things and the rest of life from our conversation and our reality?
I've translated the above passage into Churchland's language:
"Since condition g and brain state x, brain state y. Brain state y demands condition h."
judenschnitzel 1 year ago
She is an eloquent speaker. The day we teach to the universities and schools of the world that the entirety of the humanities can be reduced or eliminated with the rise of pure chemical-physics explanation, that will be a good day.
HumanChemistry101 1 year ago
@HumanChemistry101 Is your professional bias so impertinent that you would actually like to see other, successful disciplines eliminated? I noticed you said "chemistry-physics," so as to include your own field. Don't you think you're being too conservative in your reductionism, though? Let's acknowledge that chemistry is disposable, too. It's ultimately reducible to mathematical physics, just as biology is ultimately reducible to chemistry and psychology is ultimately reducible to biology.
ElasticGiraffe 1 year ago
@ElasticGiraffe You're right about that: everything in the universe is reducible to the fundamental particles and forces whose movements are described by the laws of thermodynamics. The humanities will some day be reduced to this basic understanding.
HumanChemistry101 1 year ago
@HumanChemistry101 Thank you for re-asserting what you said previously without actually responding to my comments. >.>
ElasticGiraffe 1 year ago
@HumanChemistry101 Scientific method is a product of philosophy, not of science itself, and natural science was called natural philosophy in its early days. The philosophy of empiricism spawned it and allowed it to blossom. In your zeal to see the humanities "reduced or eliminated," I hope you take this into consideration.
ElasticGiraffe 1 year ago
Why am I this set of neurons though? Why am I not a set of rich, attractive Beverly Hills living neurons?
scribb7 1 year ago
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samayoa95 1 year ago
@NegaitveHalo
Yeah, the only Churchland stuff I've read is a little bit of Paul's, and his ideas about the theory-ladenness of "experience", how we perceive no primitive "phenomena" or immediate "impressions" but rather act on theories that may be more or less deeply entrenched in the mind — that a new theory can be more than inference, can be experienced as a new set of perceptions — this is pretty fun, and doesn't square at all with this "of course the phenomenon doesn't go away" talk.
roymondlafonte 1 year ago
Perhaps she is saying that normalcy is the brain, and what it is.
phillipsmerritt 1 year ago
And just for the sake of full disclosure, to reveal any biases (conscious or not): I am a theist. That said, I've never yoked my understanding of the "soul" in a mind-body separation. Also, I'd like to clarify that I'm really not a dualist - I just see the emergent issues in a fully-materialist account, and acknowledge that it is incomplete.
Mood1ndigo 1 year ago
I'm sorry, but I have to tentatively side with Chalmers in this debate. The Churchlands, Dennett, and other materialists have steadfastly resisted acknowledging the Hard Problem - they seem far too ready to employ Occam's Razor (and its many philosophical permutations.) I do believe that, eventually, we will build a purely-physical account of consciousness. However, even then, it won't do service to how WE experience and internalize consciousness. And therein lies reductionism's ultimate limit.
Mood1ndigo 1 year ago
Eliminative Rationalism posits that common-sense ontology is wrong. Negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and other counterintuitive notions in advanced mathematics show that empiricism (folk-logic) is flawed. Complete descriptions of reality will be purely mathematical, disproving folk-logical notions of matter and proving that only minds are real.
ScaleBerb 1 year ago
Nature is pure war with every man against another. Fear of death is the only way to keep the peace, so man is civilized by the threat of violence against him for transgressions upon his neighbor.
Nature does not care. Nature does not need human permission. Nature is the only eternal victor. Nature kills everything.
Human dissatisfaction with mortality is what leads the fearful to reach out for some eternal ideal.
SirWinstonChurchill 1 year ago
13.7 billion yrs ago the universe appeared. Matter cooled and condensed, stars ignited to forge heavy elements, supernovae seeded the galaxy. 9.2 billion yrs after the bang, the Earth formed. Starshine made organic molecules reproduce, compete and evolve. 2.5 million yrs ago an apelike creature started to use tools. Humans walked on the moon and now approach immortality. A small part of the cosmos, the human mind, reflects on itself and the universe becomes self-aware. Explain that!
mrfpercival 1 year ago
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13.7 billion yrs ago the universe appeared. Matter cooled and condensed, stars ignited to forge heavy elements, supernovae seeded the galaxy. 9.2 billion yrs after the bang the Earth formed. Starshine made organic molecules reproduce, compete and evolve. 2.5 million yrs ago an apelike creature started to use tools. Humans walked on the moon and now approach immortality. A small part of the cosmos, the human mind, reflects on itself and the universe becomes self-aware. Explain that.
mrfpercival 1 year ago
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mrfpercival 1 year ago
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mrfpercival 1 year ago
Imagine if you were born inside a car, grew up driving it, and had no exposure to anything else. When the car broke down, funny creatures came and after a little while everything worked again. Imagine from your perspective trying to explain why the car just stops moving on occasion. Oh the theories you'd spin! But would you ever be able to actually tease out the reality of engine, transmission, wheels, and gas? It wouldn't be easy.
GreatUnwashedMass 1 year ago
But what has anyone gained from reducing mind to brain function, alone? I just don't see any advantages in it.
To understand a TV show you don't need to understand the functioning of the TV set. In fact, if you confuse TV functioning for the TV show itself you would not only be distracted but probably way off track!
CoolidgeUSA 1 year ago
If there is no pysical faculty of "the will" then how can we reach any scientific conclusions about it's influences?
Dalychomsky 1 year ago
Being insulted is not a scientific argument. Scientific research is confirming materialistic theories, whether we like it or not. I think diseases, catastrophes, misery whatever is insulting tot mankind, but is is part of it.
Prof. Churchland is one of the pioneers in a new understanding of mankind. Brilliant!
mvessche 1 year ago
Scientific theories are confirming that there are physical elements to a lot things. They have not disproven anything though. One can still believe in neuroscience and be a dualist. The brain gets damaged and certain thoughts cannot be thought about (to use an example). That does not mean that they do not exist, they just cannot manifest themselves. BTW, as far as mind/brain goes, I am a dualist. As far as consciousness/brain goes, I do not know what I am.
metaldude82 1 year ago
Ugh. She just doesn't get the point of talking about mental states. The mind is the brain, such a nonsensical statement.
waaatwat 1 year ago
Hmmmm, I thought philosophy gave up on approaching issue by pure reason in the 17th century. But if Churchland thinks otherwise who is anyone else to disagree.
brokennarcissist 1 year ago
Why does Patricia Churchland reject mind/body dualism?
tazzy755 1 year ago
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samayoa95 1 year ago
Maybe you feel her philosophy "cheapens humanity" because you have an overly inflated conception of mankind. If the history of science is any indicator, it's highly unlikely that future scientific discoveries will conform to our pre-scientific intuitions about mankind, and so we should be ready/willing to revise them.
Are her children pieces of meat? Yes. But they are pieces of meat that can experience love, appreciate Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, etc.
LennyBound 1 year ago 34
@LennyBound well put lenny. I don't pay those appeals to emotion and slippery slopes any attention.
OrderoftheWhiteHand 1 year ago
@LennyBound Well, if materialists are claiming that our mental states ARE material brain processes, then the question should be: In which sense do they use the word "are"?
If it's meant to be a conjugation of "to be" in the sense of an ontological statement, then you should first have a solid theory of an ontology that can deal with the undeniable "being" (putting beside the question, in which sense we use this...) of consciousness. You say, that human beings can make experiences: (continues...)
LimboJimbo 1 year ago
@LennyBound I would add: By the fact, that we are experiencing it, we can not deny it's "existing" (how unclear this term is was my concern to ask for a new theory of ontology) in some way. Coming back to Materialism: material qualities like length, width, height, weight are not capable of describing the essential qualities of undeniable consciousness. I hope some day we will be able to accept a kind of monism, that is neither mind or body but an ontology of both (must-read: Spinoza!)
LimboJimbo 1 year ago
@LimboJimbo That is more or less what I'd like to see as well. While I don't agree with Spinoza's dismissal of phenomenology (see my biases below!), I do think that modern epistemology is too myopic and ill-equipped to deal with consciousness. But maybe that's just my inner pessimist speaking.
Mood1ndigo 1 year ago
@LennyBound yes but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate, or appreciating Beethoven and Dostoyevsky is to be preferred over appreciating Bieber or Danielle Steele. In a materialist universe, there is no reason to prefer anything to anything else. That is why we are cheapened by materialism.
motomambo 11 months ago
@motomambo It depends on what you mean by "reason." If you're conceiving of having a "reason" as dependent on a non-physical mind, then you're presupposing dualism and begging the question against the materialist. If, however, you don't think that reasons are necessarily dependent on a non-physical mind, then I see no reason why such reasons can't be accommodated within a materialist framework.
LennyBound 11 months ago 2
@LennyBound In short, I think that there are reasons to prefer love over hate, Beethoven over Bieber, but they have nothing to do with a non-physical mind. If you think such reasons require that dualism be true, please give me some rationale as to why.
LennyBound 11 months ago 2
@LennyBound Nothing to do with a non-physical mind? That seems a bit weird. Wouldn't it be more sensible to say you prefer Beethoven over Bieber not because of something in the brain but because it is more highly valued culturally and it is the function of the brain to integrate us into our environment, i.e. socialisation? I don't see how value can arise out of the physical. There is no value in nature/the physical. Rather meaning seems to be a social construct. Hardware/software. Thoughts?
dmsrmf 6 months ago
@motomambo "but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate"
Love is a label we attach to a type of extremely positive value judgment. Similarly, hate is a label we attach to extremely negative value judgments. To suggest that there is no reason we should prefer love over hate is therefore just a contradiction in terms. Such feelings *are* the reason we prefer things, at least on the conscious level.
Gnomefro 10 months ago
@motomambo Ultimately I suppose you're just unwilling to accept the fact that value judgments, meaning and reasons are necessarily subjective. This is patently obvious from your examples. How on earth could it be the case that Beethoven had more value than Bieber independently of any observer? Why would it be good for us if it could? Why should we accept, or want, this external standard when we are perfectly capable of valuing things ourselves?
Gnomefro 10 months ago
@motomambo For that matter, what exactly is it about Beethoven that makes it valuable to humans if you exclude its emotional effect on humans or imagine it to be neutral or negative for selected individuals?
Is it morally wrong to be bored by Beethoven? Can you really be mistaken about being bored by Beethoven and consequently not valuing it? Or does that indicate that someone is a defective human if they ever made such a call?
Gnomefro 10 months ago
@motomambo For us, the reasons are in the nature of homo sapiens. We may be matter, but we are sentient matter.
20cigarrosconfiltro 9 months ago
@motomambo The mind is intrinsically valuable. That's a reason to value organisms with minds vs inanimate objects like chairs.
Drgamedood 5 months ago
@LennyBound "But they are pieces of meat that can experience love, appreciate Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, etc."
Love, appreciation, and contemplation don't exist, they are just illusions the brain plays on us. Well they do exist -but not as themselves. They are really neural patterns, nothing more.
JohananRaatz 7 months ago
@LennyBound Ok, so the question I have is, how do we distinguish between a neural pattern BEING the phenomenal state and a neural pattern CORRELATING to a phenomenal state.
This is the crux of the problem, and it can't be solved by neuroscience -neuroscience only tells us about the empirical. It can't distinguish between these two scenarios with science alone.
JohananRaatz 7 months ago
@JohananRaatz You make a good point. I am going to use the "phenomenal state" of dreams. Isn't the mere fact that we actually dream rather than just experience our neural circuits when we sleep a significant event? Does not this mere fact point out TWO/DUAL elements at work (the neural circuits and the dreams themselves)?
metaldude82 4 months ago
@metaldude82 To quickly interject with my 2 cents, I do not believe so because (as we still know very little about sleep) it's entirely possible that DMT creation and dreams are a necessity or even completely accidental way for us to be protected from taking in too much information or something of the like, as the brain tries to work out what is and isn't worth storing.
JaydedWun 4 months ago
@JaydedWun Ok, I see your point. But, I do not see how it changes anything that I said because I am not denying that there is a neural correlate with dreaming.
metaldude82 4 months ago
@LennyBound In that case, "pieces of meat" is the wrong description.
metaldude82 4 months ago
@samayoa95
An insult would give itself to the world of value, humanity and what you want to call the 'mind.' For a long time, we have relied on illusory constructs to make sense of the world . Where's your mind? There's definitely more evidence to suggest what we want to call the mind is owed to material processes than there is for the existence of this thing you call your self-awareness. I hated EM for the same reasons, but between Dennett and the Churchlands, the arguments are way better.
teknolojik 1 year ago
@teknolojik Thank you for the reply, teknolojik.
You know the idea of the static Universe was once a much better argument as well. Daniel Dennett and The Churchlands have motivations. They are part of a semi-religious order called the Brights Movement. Their agenda is to abolish any belief in a God and the human soul. Getting the truth from Dennett or the Churchlands is like getting advice from a used car sales man at a used car lot.
samayoa95 1 year ago 2
@samayoa95
Logic, not rhetoric! I don't know physics. Static universe-- what does that prove? That theories fail? I guess you're right. It is impossible to logically prove that the "mind" doesn't exist-- the absence of proof for something doesn't entail its negation. Science has shown that 'mental' processes yield physiological reflexes. Can you admit that thought has a material manifestation?
teknolojik 1 year ago
@samayoa95 so does ad hominem.
Tazwegian 1 year ago
@samayoa95
Copernicus' heliocentrism "cheapened humanity", that's hardly an argument against it. Are you a young earth creationist too, or are you actually unaware of where this pathetic Inherit the Wind rhetoric leads?
roymondlafonte 1 year ago
@roymondlafonte I believe in the scientific method. The scientific method requires something Eliminative Materialism don't seem to think they need, and that is EVIDENCE.
Humans can make personnel choices that can effect the universe. We are NOT material objects. Our lives are NOT predetermined. The human spirit is EVIDENCE that we have a soul/spirit. As it is written in the humanist manifesto, humans have a "God like" ability control thier lives and the world.
samayoa95 1 year ago
@samayoa95 "What things look like at first glance" is not evidence. It's observation, and may or may not have significant interpretations with predictive power.
We have "evidence" that we have a soul in the same way that we have "evidence" the sun goes around the earth - just LOOK AT IT. Fortunately for science, just-look-at-it is not evidence.
znodester 1 year ago
@znodester Eliminative Materialism is false not because of "What things look like at first glance," but because of the deeply thought out philosophies of human free will. Humans have the ability to determine their future and change the physical universe. The only explanation for this is a non-physical aspect of the human spirit. Eliminative Materialists want us to ignore this. I believe we as scholars should not let militant atheists discourage our studies of the humanity.
samayoa95 1 year ago
@samayoa95 Your intelligence of your self-awareness is composed of nothing but logically nonsensical intuitions.
Alexdurrant7 5 months ago
@Alexdurrant7 "nothing but logically nonsensical intuitions."
Including that part of our self-awareness which is our "intuition" of the laws of logic themselves I suppose! Right?
LOL ;-D
JohananRaatz 3 weeks ago
she is very good...
gergsar 1 year ago
Philosophy tends to utilize facts in order to hypothesize the better likelihood of an unknown. It can't be answered by the question or the rational hypothetical answer, but it helps propel the search for the fact by thinking about things in many ways based on the logic and probability of those ways.
dyzziedyazn 2 years ago 7
"...bear in mind that these are empirical questions [...] the answers to those questions will come out of the science, it's not going to come as a result of a philosopher thinking long and deep [...] using pure reason, because it's a question of fact"
Patricia Churchland
So what's the point of philosophy?"
prgalois 2 years ago 13
Good question.
LennyBound 2 years ago
Epistemology, Aesthetics and Ethics ... based on works from other disciplines... It is about time for philosophy to stop being an isle!
RobertoCha 2 years ago
"So what's the point of philosophy?"
Many great philosophers have asked the same question!
58694003 2 years ago
Philosophy is not just about the acquisition of empirical knowledge, but about analysis of ordinary discourse, whether its inquiries of ethical conduct, or just analysis of the logical structures of protocol sentences by using logic. Point of philosophy is not obvious because of several philosophers inability to implement philosophy to practical use.
jamesellis33 1 year ago
@prgalois Philosophy has other regions of thought to consider. Political philosophy in particular.
EclecticSceptic 1 year ago
@prgalois The point of philosophy is to get scientists searching for answers to these empirical questions in the first place. If you like, the philosopher frames the question, and the scientist answers the question (as best as possible). Conversely, when a scientist makes a discovery, they report the data and how it fits with current theories, whereas the philosopher takes the leap to contrive contextual meaning to the data to show what wisdom, if any, can be gained from the knowledge as such.
etwascool 1 year ago 2
@prgalois Philosophy has reached some truths before science has. With logic we light the way for science, atoms were theorized by the Greeks. Also ethics is pretty much in the purview of philosophy.
Dunkhelzan 1 year ago
@Dunkhelzan
"atoms were theorized by the Greeks"
no actually by Buddha first.
VegasSkateCulture 1 year ago
@prgalois Among many other things, it is a role of philosophy to concern about questions of *value*.
Antonielly 1 year ago
@prgalois @prgalois Among many other things, it is a role of philosophy to concern about questions of *value*.
Antonielly 1 year ago
@prgalois It makes philosophy of mind look a bit foolish, but philosophers of mind like Churchland and others would relate these facts to traditional philosophical questions. The possible unseating of the a priori in philosophy of mind by no means actually unseats philosophy itself. If one of the roles of philosophy is a conception of ourselves, then the philosopher use the facts of neuroscience to edit our conception of ourselves.
cutmewithyoursun 9 months ago
@prgalois
That's the point of eliminative materalism. To remind those other philosophers, that what they are doing is pointless. lol
xknowledgeisfreex 8 months ago
@prgalois “Philosophy is what you do when you don’t yet know what the right questions are to ask.”
-Daniel Dennett, philosopher (“in response to the question, What is philosophy?”)
zhimbo 7 months ago
Comment removed
zhimbo 7 months ago
Interesting video
In physics we dont even understand what time is so there is not much chance of understanding the brain. In my video The Paradox of Schrodingers Cat an artist view Time has symmetry and geometry could this explain the human brain and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
nickharvey7 2 years ago
0:40
Did she say that the immaterial conscious is 'spooky stuff'? Wow, what an ass. Pure materailistic thoguth destroys the foundation of logic in itself. If the material world is all that exists, and there are no immaterial laws like that of the laws of Logic, Reason, and Mathematics; why should one even think that anything they perceive (even the science inw hich they try to prove this) is true at all? It's a self refuting thought if one applies Kantanian criticism.
ogirv101 2 years ago
ha ha, what a joke this woman is... how does she "know" that there is no "soul"? is it because she can't see it? is it because we don't have equipment to detect it?
i think it is silly for people to assume what she believes.
CapnnOrdinary 2 years ago
Patricia Churchland is hardly a joke. She has written several academic text books and dozens of academic articles on the Philosophy of Neuroscience and the mind.
She never said she knows there is no soul. She said the data seems to suggest there is no soul. I think she is right! There is no evidence suggesting we have souls, and there is growing evidence suggesting that all mental phenomena is only brain activity.
I think it is silly for people to assume that your opinion matters!
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago 2
I hope my statement that it is silly for people to assume your opinion matters did not come across as rude as it may have seemed. What I mean is that compared with Patricia Churchland regarding the Philosophy of the Mind your opinion matters very little. There is no comparison!
She thinks there is much to learn about the mind and that brain sciences seem very promising, where you believe College Professors and biological evolution are jokes! Again, there is no comparison; hands down!
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
@JohnHasSeriousQ:
When you say that data suggest there is no soul, you're saying that either its her damn opinion and not fact, or that evidence refutes the idea of the soul. So, in this case, it means it's her damn opinion, and opinions are valueless according to what you say, unless they are an authority (which I can just cite Kant or other more improtant philsoophers to make her opinion valueless).
ogirv101 2 years ago
again, how would one search for evidence of a soul? what equipment would one use? just because you can't "see" a soul doesn't mean it's not there.
don't let your semantics get in the way of seeking and knowing Truth.
CapnnOrdinary 2 years ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
@CapnnOrdinary:
The soul is immaterial, one cannot prove or disprove the existance of the soul scientifically, but one can philsoophically ponder of its existance, and it some sense can be proven through logical necessity.
ogirv101 2 years ago
Neuroscience rules out most of the reasons that people believed in a soul in the first place. "just because you can't "see" a soul doesn't mean it's not there." What reasons do you have to spiritualize matter? Because it makes you feel better?
orlaithmcaree 2 years ago
@orlaithmcaree
Or have I misunderstood your position? Channels that look like sockpuppet accounts are always suspect.
If I have mistaken you for a theistic dualist, then please accept my sincere apologies.
Archaenum 2 years ago
@JohnHasSeriousQ:
"Patricia Churchland regarding the Philosophy of the Mind your opinion matters very little"
Kant regarding the Philosophy of the mind, Patricia's opinion matters very little. Appeal to authority fallacies are a joke.
ogirv101 2 years ago
Comment removed
davidsanders98 2 years ago
What Churchland does not address (and EMists never do) is the difference between the neuro-correlates of consciousness and consciousness itself. There is a difference between the subjectively experienced color of red and the accompanying brain process.
davidsanders98 2 years ago
Firstly EM is fundamentally about fifty years old, and practically only fifteen years old. It is a relatively new Theory of the Mind. EM is the Theory of the Mind that contends that some of the ways we think about and talk about certain mental phenomena, like consciousness, intensionality, and beliefs are wrong and should be reduced into simpler more accurate language or eliminated as a concept and replaced with better explanations of the mental phenomena in question.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
Churchland thinks that the language used to talk about consciousness should be reduced to language that expresses data from current and future brain sciences.
Dennett thinks that what we think of by consciousness is just bits and pieces of information processed through electro-chemical brain activity.
Ramachandran thinks that a sense of self and ones own self co-evolved, and being linked to language use entails that to talk of one is talk of the other.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
The color red! Qualia vs brain perceptions of wavelength?
What is the difference? What reasons are there to assume that consciousness (whatever that is) is other than mere brain activity? What reasons are there to assume that any mental experiences are other than just physical activity? Is it hard to imagine that consciousness is not something outside of brain function? What color is red to someone who has died? Red is a wavelength that when perceived looks red!
Hope this helps.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
For the difference between qualia as first person experiences and wavelength (or is it frequency? scientists don't know) see Ramachandran. A blind physicist can know all that a sighted physicist knows about wavelengths but has no idea at all what the sense color red is.
davidsanders98 2 years ago
I am quite sure that Churchland urgently desires that language about consciousness should be reduced to language about the brain. That's the whole problem. There is a real, ontological difference between first persona and third person accounts of our experiences.
davidsanders98 2 years ago
Also, I didn't ask you about a sense of self. I was talking about the sense color red. You don't have to have a sense of self to percieve qualia. Further, it may indeed be the case that a wavelength is the physical occasion for a perception of a color but that doesn't make them the same thing.
davidsanders98 2 years ago
Consciousness is not a mental phenomenon! Consciousness never presents itself to us like the sense color red does and so is no kind of phenomenon at all. Phenomena are those things which are present to consciousness.
davidsanders98 2 years ago
Red is a wavelength that when perceived (through the functioning brain) looks red! A blind physicist who knows everything about wavelengths does not know what it is like to perceive red (because part of her brain does not function the way it does in the rest of us). That Ramachandran correctly thinks that qualia (of red, for example) and wavelengths are different is not in question; Ramachandran maintains that qualia (personal experience) co-evolved with our brain.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
Perceiving red seems to be merely a product of the properly functioning brain. Wavelengths (light) enter our eye which trigger electro-chemical activity which trigger electrical signals to the Occipital Lobe for further chemical segmentation, reconstruction, and processing activities before triggering electrical signals that are cross-referenced with other sensory and motor signals before finally triggering electrical activity in the Forebrain causing perception and qualia.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
It seems that the qualia (or the personal experience) of red is just as much a function of brain activity as any other electro-chemical activity in the brain. Again, what is seeing red if is not done through ones functioning brain? Mary, the blind physicist, cannot see red because her brain does not function like it does for those of us who can see red. It is not like the perception of the color red is somehow a product of something outside of brain activity. If so, then what is that stuff?
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
The stuff could be something like a formless hologram.
The generation of such a red depends upon the brain, upon the eye... even upon a red truck. But the red truck is not the mind (hologram), nor the eye, nor the brain.
balrenun 2 years ago
I'm fascinated by the concept of qualia. I've read up on it a little but would love to hear your interpretation of it.
mach1man22 2 years ago
The concept of qualia is the concept of the first person experience of the aboutness of something. I think you are asking how does the concept of qualia fit in with an Eliminativists' view of the mind. First, it is important to note that we are all Folk Psychologists by default of the circumstance that Natural Language (English in our case) is the only tool available to everyone (with the ability) to talk about our minds, desires, beliefs, qualia, etc (whatever they are).
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
Also, I feel that a third person account of our desires, beliefs, qualia, and probably many other aspects of what we call our mind will be a drastically different story from our first person account and that this story will be told through the generalizations drawn from the scientific data of brain-states. It may turn out that current concepts of qualia, for example, will be scientifically reduced or eliminated and replaced with other concepts which better explain why apples seem red to us.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago 2
I meant to say Abstract Language and not Natural Language. English is an example of an Abstract Language and birds chirping may be an example of a Natural Language.
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
But you can be an eliminative materialist without eliminating qualia. Churchland is an eliminativist about propositional attitude states, not qualia.
orlaithmcaree 2 years ago
This exposition only works on the assumption that materialism is fact.
It seems that what the speaker says about traditional mental concepts (will, etc) can equally apply to the concepts in materialism - e.g that all is reducible to matter-energy.
But this is what is at issue, so Churchland begs the question.
Ontologistics 2 years ago
Not only that but if you consider Godel's second theory of undecidability how can a brain be reduced to it's functional parts without something outside of methodological materialism validating what is going on.
Materialism is flawed any way you look at it.
rusty2029 2 years ago
Gödels second incompleteness theorem must be taken in context with the first as it is the proof Gödel used to show that there are some things which are true that could never be shown to be true. EM is not Scientific Reductionism! The idea is not that knowing of all the parts of the brain will explain mental phenomena anymore than knowing all the parts of a bike could explain bike-riding. EM is also not Scientific Functionalism! The idea is not that knowing how parts of the brain function
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
. . in relation to other parts of the brain explains why there is the mental phenomena anymore than knowing how bike parts function in relation to a bike explains why one would want to ride a bike. EM regarding the mind is the position that incomplete theories of the mind should be reduced or consolidated into a more inclusive explanation of the mind or should be replaced with a better, simpler, explanation of the mind. EM is the position that so-called mental-states may be mere brain-states!
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
Eliminative Materialism (EM): if everything in human minds is based on completely mechanical processes, there can be no such thing as truth or knowing. Think about it: an insane person's brain is- according to EM- equally mechanical as a sane person's. In fact, there is neither sanity nor insanity according to EM. In the end, EM says that everyone lives in their own reality, and no one is right about anything. This seems quite untenable.
versus79 2 years ago
I think you're greatly misunderstanding the position. The EM advocate believes that knowledge and truth exist, but that they are represented internally through physical states of the nervous system. Certain physical states more accurately represent the world and are therefore explanatorily superior, whereas less accurate internal representations distort reality and are therefore inferior.
LennyBound 2 years ago
Simply put, adopting a materialist account of the mind in no way leads to subjectivism or the denial of mental illness. In fact, just the opposite. As a result of the pioneering work done in neuroscience, we are only now coming to understand the neurobiological basis for mental disorders as well as what constitutes healthy brain-functioning.
LennyBound 2 years ago 2
But then truth isn't truth in the understood sense - it's a collection of particles. Is a stone truth of the fact that 1 + 1 = 2?
forestloves 2 years ago
@LennyBound So EM is basically representational theory of mind? Do most EM hold onto Representational Theory of Mind? It seems to me to current be the best theory of mind...
1Void0Infinity1 1 year ago
EM is the theory of the mind that predicts that through neuroscience, experimental psychology and philosophy will yield a far better understanding of mental phenomena and of predicting behavior than Folk Psychology has been. It is not the position that our beliefs, what we hold to be true, our individual perceptions, etc will disappear or diminish in significance in our own experiences; only that these phenomena will be more generally understood from a scientific point of view!
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago 3
Think about it! Through experimental psychology differences become known between the sane and not. Through neuroscience accidental or genetic damage to areas of the brain are correlated with function and qualia (or experience). Through creative philosophy a broader more general picture of the data can be formed. It is through the science that a better understood of our mind will be attained in general terms. This better understanding will enrich us with more truth and knowledge, not less!
JohnHasSeriousQ 2 years ago
Scientists, theologians and philosophers all have a common underlying link: they are all correct and can find the proof to back them if so desired. In fact, no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs. If you change your core belief structure and replace it with another, you are at present right still. Ego guides us in this respect. You may be able to admit you were wrong in the past, but presently your construct of reality is true. Those who believe differently are wrong.
DTK5689 2 years ago
Haha, I can't actually tell whether or not you're being serious.
You state that "no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs," but then go on to say "those who believe differently are wrong." You must see the contradiction here. No?
LennyBound 2 years ago