Tales from Shopping Period: PL152 Consciousness

[paulhope]

This happened today. It was awesome. Paraphrased:

Professor Chris Hill: The paradigmatic example of a qualia is a kind of bodily sensation, like pain

Comments

[paulhope]

All the direct realist need to claim is that these aren't veridical, and to posit a very real difference between the quality of these two experiences.

I'm glad you came out and said this, since Putnam seems to want to both not commit himself to this position and take stabs at those who think they have similar enough quality at the same time. It's confusing.

If you've ever hallucinated or had a dream, it's very easy and intuitive to understand that there is a difference between even your most realistic dream and your everyday perceptions.

I don't think the debate would exist if it were that easy. It seems to me that the major difference between the phenomena of realistic dreams and those of veridical perception (to the extent that it can be described that way, which is questionable, IMHO, but that's a tangent) is one discovered retrospectively and has to do with coherence with other experiences. (It's a relational, not intrinsic, property) There have been times in my life, however, when I've had very real confusion over whether an experience I've had was actually or only dreamed.

I say all this because as far as I can tell, the dream argument just needs to establish that indirect perception, if you want to call it that, is hard enough to distinguish from direct perception to reak epistemological havoc. And aside from the assertion that we can somehow magically tell which is which when faced with perception (which--as we know during a realistic dream in which we are convinced of a false reality, we can't do), I don't see how the direct realist gets away from the problem.

[paulhope]

1. I've been mostly reading books by him, not papers, which is invigorating if you like what he says and frustrating if you don't, since he invariably refers to his papers for more details about his arguments and leaves the rest pretty thin. That said, I found Ethics Without Ontology inspiring when I read it last summer. He's got a great section on the "Third Enlightenment" of pragmatism that transcends second-Enlightenment thinking and also runs circles around postmodernist critiques of progress. I'm in the middle of The Threefold Cord, which tackles realism and then some philosophy of mind stuff--that might be more up your alley.

2.

However, the real world is permanent and exists as it does independent of your mental states.

While (based on your recent post on metaphysical realism), the "independent of mental states" property seems to be one we can safely ascribe to the real world by virtue of its definition, what makes you so confident, I'm not sure the permenance assumption is safe to make without begging the question.

When I was talking about coherence or continuity as a relational property, I think I was thinking in terms of it being a relation among different moments or episodes. I could be wrong here, but I think there's some evidence that legitimizes the discretizing of experience in this way based on how long things stick around in working memory.

If you think about experience the world kind of like the guy from Momento, except remembering each episode and trying to figure out which ones cohere with which others, then you might be able to pick out the largest coherent set and isolate the rest, calling them dreams.

But my point is that one particular experienced moment or episode does not have the continuity property intrinsically. So I can, in principle, ask of an instance of perception in isolation "Is this real?"

3.

Do your dreams involve all of your senses the way veridical experience does?

I don't think it's fair to say that my everyday phenomenological experience includes all five senses at once. This is related to the discussion about qualia and awareness we're having in philosophy. We might have this illusion because we rapidly shift attention from one sense to another, but I'd say that most of the time our real qualitative experience is more limited.

As a more concrete argument against the 'five senses' supposition, often we won't notice a particular stimulus unless there's a change. This is also something that occurs on the biological level, well before it reaches higher-order stuff--neurons that fire when we initially perceive a particular color eventually stop firing if the stimulus doesn't change. That's why you can stare at a red dot for a long time, then turn away and see a green dot on white wall where it doesn't really exist.

If so, tell me; I'm going off my own experience here. I can always, always, always tell I'm dreaming.

Yeah, so I normally can't tell I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming. And sometimes I have dreams in which I wake up from a dream, am sure I am experiencing reality again, and then wake up from that second dream.

That said, I've heard there's a particular condition where people "feel like they're dreaming" even when they aren't. I'm not really sure what they're describing.

On the other hand, does it really matter if a particular individual's dreams are particularly vivid or not? I kind feel that this might be a case where theoretical possibility is enough.

4. If the direct realist makes the distinction between object perception and fact perception, then I think that opens up the epistemological problems again. If object perception isn't sufficient for me to have correct fact perception, then it seems like I can have evil demons and brains in vats all over again.