Gertie wrote: ↑December 5th, 2022, 7:08 pm
Well Davies thinks conscious experience is fundamental in the irreducible sense as I understand him. And that's reasonable imo because either experience can be reduced to fundamental particles and forces (and explained in that way) or it can't. And there is no apparent way for physicalism to reduce or explain experience in principle. (The Hard Problem). Just asserting experience is the same thing as neural interactions or an emergent property of neural interactions isn't an explanation. How many quarks are in a taste of ice cream isn't something physicalism has a way of addressing except by such assertions.
While Davies clearly says he thinks consciousness (the experiencing subject) is "fundamental" --- which it is, in my second sense --- I'm not sure he thinks it is because it is not reducible to physical phenomena.
But we need to dwell for a moment on the meaning of "reducible." All that means is that one vocabulary cannot be "translated" into a particular other. It is a linguistic limitation, not a scientific or ontological one. The reason for that is that most of the terms for mental phenomena, "qualia" terms, are simple, primitive. They are terms used to denote a property, but have no denotable properties of their own by which they can be described. As a result they can only be taught ostensively (that is why no one can tell Mary the color scientist what she will experience when she leaves her black-and-white room). In addition, the referents of those terms are inherently subjective --- the term "red," for example, does not refer to some "abstract entity," "redness." It refers instead to the particular sensation YOU experience when beholding something that reflects light in the "red" portion of the spectrum. There is no way to tell whether that sensation is the same for you and me --- and it doesn't matter whether it is, as long as we both apply the term to objects reflecting or emitting light in that range of wavelengths. Qualia are just the tokens by which the brain represents to itself the arrival of various signals over sensory channels. They are
sui generis; private, undescribable and unanalyzable. They need only to be distinguishable to serve their function.
It is just not possible to analyze or reductively explain phenomena that is both primitive and subjective. Such things are beyond the reach of empiricism. You can't reductively explain something that can't even be described, much less publicly observed.
The Hard Problem is a pseudo-problem. Explaining consciousness does not require that the terms for conscious phenomena be linguistically reducible to or "translatable" into physical terms. Explanation consists in providing causes for effects, not reconciling vocabularies.
Now, reducibility is necessary WITHIN a physical theory (or any "nomological-deductive" theory). That is nothing more than the demand that the terms of the theory be well-defined and the theory consistent. For example, if our theory postulates a substance called "water" in the external world we postulate (in order to escape solipsism), and further postulates certain forces and particles as the fundamental compositional elements of that external reality, then "water" must be reducible to those fundamental elements. But we postulate that external world and construct a theory of its composition and structure in order to explain our experiences --- to supply a
cause for them, to set forth the necessary and sufficient conditions for the appearance of that explicandum. Those experiences are not part of the theory. There is no need to be able to reduce the terminology of the explicandum to that of the explicans; only a need for reducibility among the components of the explicans.
But . . . if we can never know whether they are, what is the point of entertaining them?
Sure, that's the bottom line. But just look at the standard model. We're presented with this in your face world of unimaginable complexity, and some boffins can all but explain it on a tee shirt, make incredibly detailed predictions, cure microbial diseases, land on the moon. That shouts we're in touch with the ontological reality in some way.
To be sure. But "being in touch" (which I take to mean there is some relationship between experience and "reality") is no more than we assumed at the outset, when we postulated an external world to supply a cause for experience. The precise nature of that world and thus that relationship is unknown, and will forever remain a mystery. As Quine and others have pointed out, many possible theories can explain the same phenomena:
"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a manmade fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total
science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole . . .
"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."
W.V.O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
https://www.theologie.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ff ... uine51.pdf
(That is a classic paper well worth reading)
