I believe I can 'do meaningful philosophy' of mind by using as a basis what the people who study the brain tell us about it, just like you.
- That is really good to know! So what is your opinion about your philosophy when you yourself stated that your "knowledge of science is laughable"?
And as far as I'm aware, this amounts to noting mind-body correlations, in ever greater detail. If you have evidence of neuroscience providing an explanation for the mind-body problem, a bridging mechanism or somesuch which doesn't boil down to 'when the brain does X a person experiences Y', give me the link, and I'll notify the Nobel Prize committee.
-First of all we will never have a Nobel Prize awarded for the "mind-body proplem. Science doesn't address problems-product of 17th century bad philosophy based on fallacious reasoning(argument from ignorance and poisoning the well, teleology).
Neuroscience provides evidence well above Strong Correlations on how the brain achieves those mental states. By understanding how the brain does it, we understand that the mind-body problem was nothing more than an "intuition pump".
You may reject the "when the brain does X a person experiences Y" but the fact is that if our brain doesn't interact with our environment during our childhood and doesn't do X no one would be able to experience Y.
Its also a fact that if we tamper brain's X (or pathology does that for us) we observe a person experiencing Z(not Y). So a brain is a Necessary and Sufficient condition for Y to be experienced...but not only that, we can even predict,intervene and correct a Z experience by fixing X thus reestablishing Y! This is an important aspect of our epistemology on the subject.
Your argument resembles every supernatural claim that ignores documented and verified Causal Mechanisms and tries to keep the magic by assuming additional ontological causality beyond our observations on the basis of "this doesn't looks sufficient to me".
i.e. Its like a theist who accept evolution but keeps asserting god's role behind the observable phenomenon. Its like asserting the existence of a "Ghost mold" responsible for the shape of a liquid in a cup, just because "shapeablity doesn't sound like a property matter can display.
-"I didn't ask how the brain does what it does, I asked for a scientific explanation for why what the brain does correlates with experiential states. This is a straightforward question. If you don't have an answer, if current science doesn't have an answer, just say so. Then we have a shared starting place to to explore what that might mean, which is philosophy of mind territory. "
-Well "why'' teleological questions are not serious philosophical or scientific questions , at least when they do not address intention and purpose in a thinking agent's behavior. We are talking about Nature and how a biological structure produces such properties. The "why" question is irrelevant on this "problem".Things in nature happen without teleology in mind.
The electron produces photons without a "why", our brain interprets the energy carried by different wavelengths of light as different colors without a "why" , the water has strange properties in all three states without a why etc etc.
I don't know WHY people in 2021 still use teleology to create mysteries!
What is important is that we have established STrong Correlations between an environmental or organic stimuli and the produced brain function.
The Scientific Literature and evidence are overwhelming. They are way too Sufficient that allow us to have Technical Applications in Medicine.
As Anil Seth argues in the following essay, Philosophers and Scientists might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be, by distracting people with those "why" questions.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem ... e-real-one
-"To clarify - I mean what physics tells us using the scientific method about about the universe, what it's made of and the forces which result in processes. Would you be happier if I used the Materialist Model? So how about a serious response."
-I am not sure that you understand the differences between Metaphysical Worldviews like Philosophical Naturalism,Materialism, Physicalism and the Epistemic Acknowledgement of Methodological Naturalism that is used in Science!
Science DOESN'T accept materialistic or physicalistic assumptions in its frameworks! It acknowledges that our Methods have limits in evaluating, observing and testing the World, IF of course our goal still is to produce Objective Descriptive Frameworks! Those limits confine our frameworks within the naturalistic realm either we like it or not (Pragmatic Necessity)
Science doesn't say that non materialistic or non naturalistic are wrong! It only studies the phenomenon within the realm it manifests and evaluates if the observable natural mechanisms are necessary and sufficient to account for the phenomenon. In the case of the Mind, the observed brain functions are not only necessary and sufficient, they even enable us to produce Technical Applications, Diagnostics and Predictions (Instrumental value!).
Sure maybe a transcendent realm could be the source of those states, but none of our observations render this assumption necessary or sufficient and "why" questions are not a good excuse to introduce them in to our Philosophy.
-"That's a big claim. OK, lets break it down."
-Sure it is. Its as big as our groundbreaking foundings on how the brain achieves all those different states.
First what do you mean by ''causing'' and ''producing'' here? That mental experience is not actual brain processes themselves, but a different kind of thing created by brain processes?
-All mental experiences, conscious or unconscious are the product of brain function like hardness is the product of the molecular structure of a granite even if we will never find hardness in an individual atom or molecule of the rock. Its our brains interacting with numerous stimuli per second, one of them reaching a crucial threshold by arousing our Central Lateral Thalamus beyond "return".... resulting to a conscious experience.
So Mental Experiences are not "things". They are processes occurred by the continues interaction of our brain functions with our organic and environmental stimuli.
Or that mental experience simply is brainstuff (eg 'pain IS the firing of C fibres), or an emergent property of brainstuff in motion, or... ? (These are the sort of questions an actual explanation would answer, using physics, QM or some other model).
-Mental experiences are the product of brain functions. Metabolic molecules provide the energy to different modules of the brain where a giant complex network connects the stimuli, the area responsible for awareness and the rest brain modules responsible for reason,memory/past experiences,pattern recognition, prediction, symbolic language etc providing the Mental conscious experiences with "Content".
And how has whichever claim you're referring to been proven beyond noting that when physical brains perform particular processes, particular mental states manifest? Link please. "
Well a simple example is the technology (from 2017). By observing the brain function of individuals through fMRI scans , we can accurately (~85% more than ...a married couple lol) decode their complex conscious thoughts. The patterns emerging in those brains display Empirical Regularity and External limitations in relation to the stimuli or the produced thought.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news- ... ughts.html
But that is just one example out of thousands of studies that establish Strong Correlations between brain mechanisms and mental properties.
Just search "how the brain does" in the large database of studies (
https://neurosciencenews.com/) and you will be flooded with an overwhelming number of results on how the brain achieves many of the properties of the mind.
-"Sure. This isn't contoversial, except the term 'responsible for' would be better replaced by 'correlated with' pending an explanation of the relationship between the physical and mental. We know there is a mind-body relationship whereby specific physical brain states correlate with specific mental states. So clearly brain processes possess the necessary and sufficient conditions for mental states to manifest. "
-Sure, Correlations are the ultimate evaluation we can have in explaining causality. Science establish Strong correlations and goes beyond them when we establish the Sufficiency and the Necessity of a mechanism in relation to the manifestation of a phenomenon.
As a great Frenchmen allegedly responded to Napoleon. "There is no need for such a hypothesis" specially when the current framework address all our questions...(except "why" questions). So "correlations" is the way to go and the moment to assume external agency is only if it is detected or verified.
We can not exclude anything, but it is irrational and useless to waste time in assuming additional insufficient sources since we can not remove the brain from the equation.
-"We also assume this isn't the case with a computer or a toaster or a rock. But we can only make that assumption because their behaviour doesn't look conscious to us. It's assumption based on analogy to known conscious beings with particular behavioural features and them not having an organic brain which we know has the necessary and sufficient conditions."
-No, science goes deeper than behaviour. It can investigate the mechanisms for their capability to be aroused by external stimuli (be aware of their environment) and even compare them with known mechanism that are known to be responsible for establishing conscious states. So its not just an assumption. Its an evidence based conclusion on the highest of standards. If a physical structure, is unable to receive, process and react to external or internal stimuli or doesn't have some kind of homeostasis that could drive its emotions(be aware of self),and a processing unit that could reason those emotions in to feelings and meaning then it is nonsensical to talk about conscious computers and toasters. This is our current knowledge and our Null Hypothesis and Default position should be defined by it.
-"It can only be an assumption based on analogy/similarity because we don't know what those necessary and sufficient conditions are. And we don't know what the necessary and sufficient conditions are because we don't have an explanation for why physical brain processes correlate with mental experience."
-Of course we know. Philosophy might ignore them but in science we understand the necessary conditions for an entity to be conscious and the brain and behavior(a processing unit that manages and processes environmental and organic stimuli) are the conditions to beat.
Now,asking "Why" the physical brain processes correlate with mental experiences is like the "why" questions made by 5 year olds. "why the kitten drinks milk-because it is hungry- why the kitten is hungry- Because it is growing- Why the kitten is growing etc etc". Eventually this barrage of why questions ends to a nonsensical answerable question, because it isn't a why question in the first place. This is where Philosophy of mind has being with this why question.
The serious question is HOW the brain does it and we are working on connecting the dots of this "mystery" .
-"See the problem? If we had a scientific explanation for the mind-body relationship we would know the necessary and sufficient conditions, be able to predict mental experience arising as a result of certain brain processes in humans, chimps and mice, but not computers or rocks."
-We have an explanation or better a description on how the brain produces mind properties, but that explanation has nothing to do with that "why" question. Well we are able to predict mental experiences....its this thing called
Marketing for example. People have been making money by predicting other people's mental experiences. We have drugs and diagnostics that find the problem and address problems in our mental experiences.We produce painkillers and sleeping pills and antidepressants and we prescribe them based on the symptoms.
The facts of reality doesn't support your statements.
-"We'd be able to build a consciousness-o-meter to detect the necessary and sufficient conditions in lieu of our inability to detect mental experience, for example to see if some sophisticated AI has mental experience rather than relying on them convince us by passing a Turing test displaying behavioural similarity. But we don't have that kind of explanation."
-The links I provided show that we are in a good position in detecting and decoding peoples conscious experiences. Here are two more recent breakthroughs on the area responsible for our conscious states.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/tiny- ... sciousness
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/neuro ... -explained
-"How the brain does what it does is an in principle answerable question within current materialist scientific paradigms, no problem. The legitimate question remains - if a materialist model of the world which is what the scientific method arrives at (the standard model of particles and forces) can't/doesn't address mental experience, what other scientific approach does? That's really my question to you, and you dodge it."
-This is a subject you should discuss with materialists. Science doesn't do metaphysical worldviews. Science studies natural mechanisms and establishes strong correlations(necessity and sufficiency) between the mechanism and phenomena.(as I already explained).
NOW Standard models and particles and forces have nothing to do with a BIOLOGICAL PHENOMENON. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain...not of particles and forces.
You need to study biological systems in order to understand how conscious states are achieved by the brain. Particles are unable to display far less advanced properties (like liquidity,hardness,wetness,toxicity, elasticity, combustion etc) so searching for answers in particles or forces is unscientific.
This is the problem of a epistemically isolated Philosophy. The questions made are not even wrong or relevant. They are nonsensical.
-"If you don't believe it's a legitimate question - specifically why not? Presumably you don't believe that noting the correlation between turning the truck engine on and it moving is a scientific explanation of why the truck moves. There is a whole materialist explanatory paradigm underlying that. I'm similarly asking you what you believe the scientific explanation is for the mind-body correlation."
-I think I already addressed the problem of "why" teleological questions when we address natural phenomena, (not behavior.)
Science offers naturalistic explanations, not because it accepts the indefensible materalistic worldview, but because the brain is all we can observe and study. We start from the brain and we try to find out if the mechanisms of the system are necessary and sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
So its Pragmatic Necessity that limits us to Naturalistic frameworks since we can test and falsify them by observing the brain.
We can not start by assuming a source beyond the realm we are able to investigate and we can not assume an additional realm a. without objective evidence and b. without a real need since our observations render the brain sufficient and necessary to explain our mental properties.
Making up a "why" teleological question is not proper philosophy and not enough to allow invisible realms in our frameworks.
