Colin McGinn on New Mysterianism

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McGinn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mysterianism

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Colin McGinn
• New Mysterianism
• Consciousness
• Philosophy of Mind
• Panpsychism
• Qualia
• Hard Problem of Consciousness

[simplic10]

Thanks for posting!

He says: "Physics won't tell you the intrinsic nature of electricity."

What possible answer could there be to that question anyway? "Electricity is a bunch of springs"?

Am I crazy in thinking the intrinsic nature of electricity *is* its behaviour?

As Einstein used to say "distance is what you measure with a ruler."

[LennyBound]

Hear Hear!

[AutodidacticPhd]

heh, I knew you were on our side *wink*

BTW, how goes things? I haven't heard from you in forever.

[LennyBound]

Pretty good. Working as a TA at a community college and in the process of applying to grad schools. We'll see if I get in anywhere.

[atlasspike]

Thank You for posting this. I greatly enjoyed it.

[xlxraidersxlx]

@simplic10 but that's what he's saying, our minds cannot grasp certain physical things, such as the intrinsic nature of electricity, so we could not even phathom that question

[AutodidacticPhd]

"justified true belief"

Well, like many attempts to neatly categorize and codify the fuzzier concepts in common use, I find this definition of knowledge to be laced with more than a little semantic jiggery-pokery. Generally, if I'm referring to problems of "what CAN be known", I'm talking about knowledge in a collective sense... on an individual basis though, I think the lines between ideas like belief, knowledge, etc are fuzzy at best, and likely to remain so... perhaps for good reason.

[AutodidacticPhd]

...via some form of Turing Complete Machine (however inefficient that reproduction might be), and thus completely bound by Godel. The crux of the matter is how important the analogue aspects of brain function are (it goes without saying that the digital aspects are perfectly suited to electronic simulation), and whether they can be reduced to a discrete approximation without serious loss of functionality... which I would venture is possible.

[AutodidacticPhd]

"However, I could be persuaded that our "natural language" is formaliseable, at the cost of undecideability or inconsistency."

Alas, I hadn't quite considered this, and it does present serious problems. While I can have thoughts which are not perfectly described by language (eg: a description or equation of a sphere is not a sphere itself), if you are a complete material with regards to the brain, then you have to consider the possibility that its activity is reproducible...

[andreaandrewmilne]

Dear ADPhd,

Nice point. And Gödel is not my forte either. Now, I don't say the entire world is a symbol system, let alone a formal symbol system, though also I don't say it isn't, just to equivocate :-)

However, I could be persuaded that our "natural language" is formaliseable, at the cost of undecideability or inconsistency. Like those Oz characters, the Dialetheists, Graham Priest et al, I don't wet my knickers at true contradictory statements. So, inconsistency is not inherently fatal.

[andreaandrewmilne]

There is a tasty entry on Dialetheism in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. The crux of the matter is finding a model of semantic inference that stops trivial inference of all statements from a single occurrence of a contradictory statement. Read the article and see how it might be done.

[andreaandrewmilne]

So, I find myself able to persist in the cheekily confident hypothesis that we will not in fact prove limits to our knowledge, if by limits to knowledge is meant the ability to construct a well-formed sentence in some language, for which we cannot decide even one truth-value.

You will infer that for me knowledge is, most of the time, a procedural facility.

Using the ever-popular Freddie Hot Ayer definition of knowledge as "justified true belief"....

[andreaandrewmilne]

..... the "belief" component is the possible truth content of the statement, and the "justification" component is the validity of the procedure used to decide a particular truth-value. The "true" component flows from the decided truth value being in some sense "affirmative" rather than "negative", a categorisation that allows for models with N truth values, where N>2.

Sounds good, but the catch is a non-question begging definition of "valid procedure".

Regards, andrea

[AutodidacticPhd]

Groovy! Good luck to you... alas, I won't be worrying about grad school too seriously for another year... my damn Math concentration is taking for-bloody-ever to get traction.