Does sweetness exist, really, or does it only taste that way to us?

[JohnDamian]

Dennett’s point is that “cute” is a product of whatever it needs to be for evolutionary reasons, and this runs counter to common intuitions that there is something “intrinsically cute” about the baby. It’s not cute because it has “cuteness” as a discrete part of its nature (see for example, the way an electron has “spin” as an intrinsic property, by contrast), it’s just cute because biologically it’s imperative that a baby be endearing and enticing toward affection – “cute”. If babies had spiky horns and slimy scales, we’d find that just as cute, under a different run of the tape of evolution.

The baby is cute because “cute” is a composite; composites are the product of a intellection; and are predicated of a subject in quid; but only predicated accidentally – for the production of a composite is an accident; and cannot either individuate essentially or individuate ultimately; because the accident is not inhered.

In this sense cuteness is predicated in quale accidentale; wheras when we predicate redness of a thing; we predicate it in quale quid; even if the redness is accidental; because the redness is inhered; wheras the cuteness as a composite is relational and not inhered; but perscribed.

 

[Betterave]

Let’s try to keep this simple:

Wasn’t it you that said this, a few posts back?

Originally Posted by Betterave
I think you badly misunderstand the nature of the problem here. It is not that “no amount of physical facts can accurately portray, e.g., sweetness”; it’s that no amount of physical facts even begin to portray sweetness, including, obviously, an fMRI scan.

(my emphasis)

That’s the (1) I provided, right there. Are you repudiating that quote, then? That’s what’s in dispute. Perhaps qualia can be materially explained, and the physical phenomena.

-TS

You construed my argument thus:
1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia. (emphasis added)
2. “redness” is a quale
Ergo: Material descriptions cannot account for “redness”.

First question: How did you manage to get this argument out of my statement? That is not logically possible!

Second question: What is (1)? Answer: 1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia - i.e., very clearly *not *what you bolded above!

I know you love the saying “the easiest person to fool is yourself”…

 

[Betterave]

I should address this too, since it’s important that you understand how BTQ works:

That’s not the problem. The beg to the question is (1), where (1) is supposed to be the “ergo”, the product of the syllogism. From the Wikipedia entry on "begging the question":

“Begging the question (or petitio principii, “assuming the initial point”) is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise.”

“(1)” indicates premise 1, “ergo” indicates conclusion, so when you write, "(1) is supposed to be the “ergo”, no that is wrong. (1) is never suppose to be the “ergo” - that is begging the question. Your statement: “The beg to the question is (1),” is perfect nonsense.

This is (1) – the premise that qualia cannot be explained material is the “initial point”, and you’ve assumed it up front. The provisional assumption of the truth of the premise is fine, that’s what makes a syllogism work, but it’s a fail when the premise is the conclusion, the object of investigation.

In the argument you provided, however (wherever you got it from), the conclusion was different from the premise. What you should have said is that you think that premise 1 is false, not that the argument begs the question.

Here I am not disputing the soundness of the premise, and don’t need to for making the case on begging the question. I’m just showing that you’ve assumed your conclusion in the premise.

First, remember that you are showing that YOUR argument did whatever you say it did - I did not make the argument in question (this is called a straw man, if you’re keeping track). Second, you are wrong about YOUR argument - it is valid and non-question-begging. It just happens to be irrelevant and made up by you and falsely attributed to me (i.e., a straw man).

 

[Touchstone]

Let’s try to keep this simple:

You construed my argument thus:1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia. (emphasis added)
2. “redness” is a quale
Ergo: Material descriptions cannot account for “redness”.First question: How did you manage to get this argument out of my statement? That is not logically possible!

Second question: What is (1)? Answer: 1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia - i.e., very clearly *not *what you bolded above!

Very clearly NOT? Here’s my rendering of your claim:

1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia.

Here’s yours:

no amount of physical facts even begin to portray sweetness

You’re just referring to “sweetness” in particular here, rather than my general “qualia”. But unless you are saying that “sweetness” is not just representative of the general “qualia”, this is the same claim. “No amount of physical facts can begin to portray” == “material descriptions cannot account” for the same thing in both case: qualia.

Readers can decide for themselves if your rendering and mine are the the same claim.

Moving forward, though, it’s easier to just let you state your case directly. Can material descriptions potentially account for qualia? If your answer is “yes”, then I have no idea what “no amount of physical facts even begin…” would mean, but no matter, the question remains open for you, which is all that’s important to the point being disputed. It’s NOT a beg to the question if you allow that some “amount of physical facts MAY portray sweetness”. I’d be fine with that.

I know you love the saying “the easiest person to fool is yourself”…

You did fool me with “no amount of physical facts can begin to portray…”, I grant. I took that to be a statement of the impossibility of physical facts portraying sweetness. I will have to wait until that statement gets unpacked a little more fully I guess, to see what you meant by that.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

“(1)” indicates premise 1, “ergo” indicates conclusion, so when you write, "(1) is supposed to be the “ergo”, no that is wrong. (1) is never suppose to be the “ergo” - that is begging the question. Your statement: “The beg to the question is (1),” is perfect nonsense.

Here’s a simple example that will demonstrate the complaint I gave:

1. All swans are white.
2. This animal is a swan.
   Ergo, this animal is white.

Ok, there’s perfectly nothing wrong with this syllogism in terms of its form – it’s valid, and any denials of 1) or 2) as sound would simply shift the focus to the support and evidence for 1) or 2).

The beg to the question enters when the issue at hand is the premise. If we are investigating if all swans are indeed white – the syllogism above begs the question – that’s what “the question” in “begging the question” refers to, the *petitio principii. *You’ve nudged right up to getting this, in saying "(1) is never suppose to be the “ergo” – yeah, that’s the substance of my complaint to you about begging the question. You took the disputed conclusion, matter in question, and made it an assumption.

If I misunderstood, I stand to be corrected, and would be happy to hear that physical facts (material explanations) may be provide accounts for sweetness in particular, or qualia generally. Is that the case? An answer to that should clear this right up?

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

No, that wouldn’t be at all analogous. The features of the baby that the human mind construes as “cute” exist – they are objective phenomena, and a baby, unobserved by anyone else is just as cute then as it is a moment later when someone comes into the room and gets her out her crib, admiring her cuteness. The basis for our deciding “big eyes are cute” is not because there’s some “intrinsic cuteness” to big eyes, but rather that is a salient feature that has evolutionary rewards attached to it.

In what way do the features of a baby that is cute exist as objective phenomena, if they are only perceived by us in the first place due to evolution? The two sentences I’ve bolded above cannot coincide on your view. How is it that a baby can be cute, without a person seeing it as cute, and yet at the same time be true that the only reason we sense it as cute is due to evolutionary impulses?

touchstone:

If I suggest that “sometimes, the desire is to choose against our typical desires, just for a change”, then we could agree that just because that is chosen it is by definition our strongest desire. If you define “strongest desire” as “that which one chooses”, than your point is trivially true. But beyond that, nature is fuzzy and unpredictable at low levels – Laplacian determinism imploded with the advent of QM. If some of our choices just draw on, or tip due to stochastic features in our cognition, we are free in the “unpredictable” sense, free in the “can’t apply a deterministic model and get routinely accurate prediction” sense. But, that’s more than warranted here for so far off topic.

If you deny free will, your tautological point does not follow. This is because in order to actually choose between desires, instead of being chosen by them, a faculty of choice, independent of conflicting desires must be present. If it is itself simply a stronger desire which overrides a lesser desire, then it is not truly free to do otherwise and is not truly a choice.

Furthermore, being unpredictable does not make an agent free. Even if a person’s personality, so to speak, cannot be routinely applied to a deterministic model to get consistent results, it does not mean the person is free, particularly if you acknowledge in the first place that perceptions and desires arise from evolution which is a purely materialistic process. “Predictability” has no causal or explanatory power. A thing happens how it happens due entirely to physical law on a materialist worldview. “Predictability” is like saying “chance did it.” Such a proposition does not follow on your view, since chance has no causal power either. It is equivalent to saying “we don’t know how x occured because we cannot derive x consistently in any deterministic model.” But again, that does not mean that x happened freely. It only means that you don’t know how it happened. Indeed, on the materialist view, chance cannot exist. The idea of an unpredictable person being free when squared with materialism is like saying “if I dump 100 coins onto the ground, the outcome of heads to tails is unpredictable and thus free.” Yet the outcome, while it may be unpredictable to us, is not unpredictable in itself. If all the physics were accounted for, we could know with absolute certainty how many coins would be heads and tails, which would be what, etc. This is because, on materialism, everything that happens is caused to happened determinately.

touchstone:

Leaving that aside, here’s an important question: so what?

I noted it only in passing, and did not use it as an argument against your view (although I did use it above to refute your example of tautology.)

If you wish to maintain there is no free choice, go right ahead. I make no claims to be able to prove there is or is not free choice either way.

touchstone:

Would the baby appear “cute” to an approaching boa constrictor, for example?.. If “cuteness” is not a mental construct serving evolutionary priorities, but is instead an intrinsic feature of the baby, the “cuteness” of the baby is just as manifest to the boa as the human…If the boa doesn’t find the “cute” baby (our view) cute, then we have a defeater for our intuitions of “intrinsic cuteness”

It does not follow that, simply because a boa constrictor does not detect x, x therefore does not exist. Again, it need not be the case that, in order for x to exist, x must be sensed to exist. On such a line of thinking, I could say that, since I cannot sense or detect my neighbor’s house at night time, it therefore does not exist. The boa may lack the capacities to detect x, yet that does not mean x does not exist. It only means that the boa cannot detect the existence of x. Dogs, for example, hear higher frequency sound waves than humans are able to. Yet, just because we cannot detect them does not mean dogs have a “defeater” for thinking higher sound waves do not exist. This is the same error I was pointing out to you earlier.

It does not follow at all that, since we humans detect “cuteness”, “cuteness” is therefore dependent on our detecting it to exist. This is tantamount to saying that, since a blind man cannot see the television, the television therefore does not exist. Again, the existence of a phenomena does not have to be known to exist, in order to exist.

 

[Touchstone]

In what way do the features of a baby that is cute exist as objective phenomena, if they are only perceived by us in the first place due to evolution?

The size of the eyeballs for a baby, relative to the rest of the body, is objectively the same for any observer, be it human or alligator. But “cuteness” obtains in the brain of the human, not in the baby, as a concept that integrates (among other things) the large eye size of the baby. Attachment to our babies for care, feeding, training, and security is a huge evolutionary advantage, so that is why babies are “cute” - those who find them cute tend to be the ones whose babies survive and themselves reproduce. The brain-states in humans that correspond to “cute” are just as physical and objectively real as the baby’s eyeballs.

The two sentences I’ve bolded above cannot coincide on your view. How is it that a baby can be cute, without a person seeing it as cute, and yet at the same time be true that the only reason we sense it as cute is due to evolutionary impulses?

The features we identify as “cute” exist in the baby. The concept of “cute” as the collection of those features in a way that compels us (or just impels us) toward affection, nurturing, etc. A book has no inherent meaning, physically. It’s an arrangement of matter and into a symbolic format that, combined with an equipped reader (someone or something that can map the symbols to something else) yields a message of some, carries some semantic cargo. If the book has no human reading it, does it contain the message still? Well, like the baby, the book has all the (name removed by moderator)ut signals needed, but the “cuteness” or the “meaning” is in the interpretation of those signals. And that interpretation is just as real and physical as a phenomenon of the brain as any other real phenomenon, but it’s in the brain and not in the baby or the book.

Evolution put cuteness in the baby, because it punishes detachment from our offspring. The features that make up “cute” are just coincidental to the priority of babies being cute.

If you deny free will, your tautological point does not follow. This is because in order to actually choose between desires, instead of being chosen by them, a faculty of choice, independent of conflicting desires must be present. If it is itself simply a stronger desire which overrides a lesser desire, then it is not truly free to do otherwise and is not truly a choice.

You’re arguing by definition right here – see “then it is not truly free…”. It may not be “truly free” by some definition – yours, here – but that’s the point. This is a tautology that is at odds with options available. For instance, if we take away “outside cause” and “randomness” for choice, what do you have left? What is this ‘true freedom’ made of? If it can be sourced to some influence, then it’s not “truly free” in your definition. If it cannot be sourced to some influence, then it is randomness, for this is the very definition of randomness: without discernible pattern, plan or purpose.

That’s way more than can be worked through in one responding paragraph, but that’s where the tautology becomes a problem.

Furthermore, being unpredictable does not make an agent free. Even if a person’s personality, so to speak, cannot be routinely applied to a deterministic model to get consistent results, it does not mean the person is free, particularly if you acknowledge in the first place that perceptions and desires arise from evolution which is a purely materialistic process.

Wholly agree. That’s randomness. But “free will” I note, is not allowed to be randomness, for any and all who I’ve talked to as defenders of “supernatural free will”.

“Predictability” has no causal or explanatory power.

Predictability has no causal power, but it is a powerhouse of explanation. If I know the predictability of trajectory physics, I can explain how to throw a baseball into the strike zone. I can also explain why that is the case, that this much force must be applied in this direction, etc., based on the predictability of the dynamics I derive through observation. Outside of theology (and including that, too, theology is just unaware), there are no ultimate explanations – it’s category mistake as a term, so no, predictability is not any ultimate explanation, but just a practical, local one.

A thing happens how it happens due entirely to physical law on a materialist worldview. “Predictability” is like saying “chance did it.” Such a proposition does not follow on your view, since chance has no causal power either. It is equivalent to saying “we don’t know how x occured because we cannot derive x consistently in any deterministic model.” But again, that does not mean that x happened freely.

We don’t know if any causal factors lie behind random phenomena, else we wouldn’t call it “random”, as that’s what random means. But that is distinct from “causally predetermined”, which doesn’t at all comport with “free”. Free connotes independence, and “determined” aligns with dependence. Randomness and indepedence are not the same concept, but randomness is, by definition, independent of causal dynamics (else we wouldn’t call it “random”).

It only means that you don’t know how it happened. Indeed, on the materialist view, chance cannot exist.

No, it can, and very much appears to be a fundamental feature of reality. If stochastic processes obtain at the very lowest levels of physics, that’s how reality is. There’s nothing immaterial about it, or otherwise problematic for a materialist.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

The Exodus:

The idea of an unpredictable person being free when squared with materialism is like saying “if I dump 100 coins onto the ground, the outcome of heads to tails is unpredictable and thus free.” Yet the outcome, while it may be unpredictable to us, is not unpredictable in itself.

Perhaps, but not clear. If you ask a physicist, even such an event may reduce to one coin (or more) tipping one way in its bounce or another based on random quantum effects, meaning that a perfect “rerun” of the scenario could produce different results. But that would only obtain in cases where the physics worked out in such a way that, say, Brownian Motion played a role in choosing between divergent paths. For many physical setups and launch configurations, there may not be any such dependence on the random jitters of physics at low levels, and the scenario is predictably repeatable. But this is not obviously or necessarily the case.

In some scenarios, the outcome is unpredictable in itself. This is physics.

If all the physics were accounted for, we could know with absolute certainty how many coins would be heads and tails, which would be what, etc. This is because, on materialism, everything that happens is caused to happened determinately.

No, that’s not the case at all. Physics, as best we understand it, has randomness built in at a fundamental level, not as simply “what we don’t yet”, but as “what can’t be known, in principle”. There’s a huge difference there, as we’re not talking about ignorance but about fundamental indeterminacy, a level of indeterminacy that is impenetrable to anyone and anything “in the system” as we are.

Materialism is not determinism, and especially hard determinism. Laplacian determinism is a novel bit of scientific history on the junk heap of failed ideas. Physics doesn’t work that way at all. To understand physics in a way that coheres and performs is to accept indeterminacy at the lowest levels, pure probability functions that resolve in real-time as opposed to simplistic effects of causal determinants.

It does not follow that, simply because a boa constrictor does not detect x, x therefore does not exist. Again, it need not be the case that, in order for x to exist, x must be sensed to exist. On such a line of thinking, I could say that, since I cannot sense or detect my neighbor’s house at night time, it therefore does not exist. The boa may lack the capacities to detect x, yet that does not mean x does not exist. It only means that the boa cannot detect the existence of x. Dogs, for example, hear higher frequency sound waves than humans are able to. Yet, just because we cannot detect them does not mean dogs have a “defeater” for thinking higher sound waves do not exist. This is the same error I was pointing out to you earlier.

See above. There is, once again, no question of existence here, but only confusion about the location of the phenomena. The signals exist in the baby, the electron patterns that reify “cuteness” as an interpretation of those signals exist in the human brain. If no one is looking at the baby, her eyes are just as big as ever, but the “cutifier” from those percepts we have when we look at her is in our brains, not in the baby. It’s the “where” of cuteness and its provenance that Dennett is pointing to, and which overthrows our “common sense”, as science has a habit of doing.

It does not follow at all that, since we humans detect “cuteness”, “cuteness” is therefore dependent on our detecting it to exist. This is tantamount to saying that, since a blind man cannot see the television, the television therefore does not exist. Again, the existence of a phenomena does not have to be known to exist, in order to exist.

I’ll keep trying. The phenomena of “cuteness” is a brain phenomena. When the baby is not being observed, the baby remains what it is, and so does the concept of “cute” in any would-be human observer. Cuteness isn’t like the concept of “television” (I used the spin of an electron) in that by television we are referring to the physical object itself. “Cuteness” would be analogous to “entertaining” in terms of the TV. The entertainment doesn’t inhere in the TV, but is a mental construct we put on top of the concept of the physical object. The baby has this feature and that, which are inherent to the baby, just as the screen, knobs and dials of a TV are features of a TV, part of its physical makeup. “Cute” for the baby and “entertaining” for the TV are real phenomena, too, but as brain-states for humans (and maybe my dog, regarding the TV, who occasionally seems quite fascinated by the moving images on my TV). “Cuteness” and “entertaining” are both real and physical phenomena, but they obtain in brains, not in the baby or the TV.

The baby is what it is, it’s not cute or uncute in and of itself. The TV is what it is, neither “entertaining” or “not entertaining” in and of itself. These are concepts humans (and perhaps other minds) develop as a contextualized interpretation of the thing observed, baby or TV.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

The features we identify as “cute” exist in the baby. The concept of “cute” as the collection of those features in a way that compels us (or just impels us) toward affection, nurturing, etc.

I’m not debating that nothing occurs in the brain when we know phenomena. You keep using this point - which has never been debated - to try to substantiate the claim that therefore there is nothing instrinsic to various phenomena. But this just simply doesn’t follow. Your boa constrictor example, which you offered as your reasoning behind your claim was fallacious. You are simply making an assertion, on equal terms with the assertion that “cuteness exists intrinsically in the baby.” You’re not standing on firmer ground that someone who claims the opposite.

(As a side note, if you push this issue far enough - i.e. that certain concepts do not exist outside the brain - then you will be led to the Kantian dilemma of trying to determine which concepts do and why. You can arbitrarily give explanatory or existential power to concepts which are derived solely from the senses, but, what will soon be found is that the senses depend on the intellect to know those concepts. And what do you do about concepts which transcend the senses? Existence, for example - where does that fall? Love? Justice? Could you formulate some sort of exhaustive list of concepts that really exist and those that exist “only in the evolutionarily driven organ of gray matter”? I don’t intend this to be a point to be debated however; just an observation.)

touchstone:

For instance, if we take away “outside cause” and “randomness” for choice, what do you have left?

This is exactly my point. It is your tautology that breaks down. I’m not the one maintaining that humans are “free” in a purely materialistic universe.

touchstone:

But “free will” I note, is not allowed to be randomness, for any and all who I’ve talked to as defenders of “supernatural free will”.

Having free will is based on the doctrine of human beings having a spiritual soul. It has nothing to do with arbitrary randomness, and hence your parallel, which is off topic to begin with, does not follow.

touchstone:

Predictability has no causal power, but it is a powerhouse of explanation. If I know the predictability of trajectory physics, I can explain how to throw a baseball into the strike zone. I can also explain why that is the case, that this much force must be applied in this direction, etc., based on the predictability of the dynamics I derive through observation.

My point, again, still stands. Predictability does not *do *anything. Thus, whether or not an agent is “predictable” or not can offer no ground for believing the agent is “free,” as you tried to maintain earlier.

touchstone:

Outside of theology (and including that, too, theology is just unaware), there are no ultimate explanations – it’s category mistake as a term, so no, predictability is not any ultimate explanation, but just a practical, local one.

Although this is also irrelevant, I note in passing that theology does not claim that reason alone exhausts the domain of reality.

touchstone:

We don’t know if any causal factors lie behind random phenomena, else we wouldn’t call it “random”, as that’s what random means.

It does not follow at all that a cause is causally random just because you don’t know what that cause is. All you can say is that the cause is “unknown” but this hardly means it is inherently random in its nature or causal power. I may as well say that, if I get a stomach ache, there is really no reason why I’m getting one, since it could be a random phenomena that has no causal agent behind it.

Also, if you make the statement that “we don’t know if ***any ***causal factors lie behind phenomena” then you have lost the right to be a scientist at all. The unquestioned assumption a scientist can never abandon is that all things happen for a cause,even if that cause may be currently unknown. This principle is actually what brought people out of the age of superstition. Hundreds of people sick on a boat did not mean the gods were upset,but rather that a parasite had been carried aboard by rats. A rainstorm destroys a village, not because Poseidon is raging, but because the pressure in the atmosphere is such and such. It’s odd that moderns who have taken this line do not see this glaring contradiction: they accuse religious people of being irrational, believing in things without evidence, etc; and yet they claim at the same time that things can happen without any cause whatsoever.

Following your train of thought, it would be reasonable to conclude that things can pop into being out of nothing for no reason whatsoever. I ought not be surprised, for example, if, while in my living room watching tv, a horse suddenly popped into existence and blocked my view.

Furthermore, if you want to take this like - we don’t know if any causal factors lie behind phenomena - you certainly have no right to criticize religion, since such a claim requires more faith than any dogma.

 

[The_Exodus]

touchstone:

No, it can, and very much appears to be a fundamental feature of reality…There’s nothing immaterial about it, or otherwise problematic for a materialist.

If you subsribe to the above school of thought - that things can happen without a cause or that things can happen with a cause which is intrinsically beyond our power to know - then you are not a materialist. At least in the traditional sense of the term. You are, in fact, a supernaturalist. If physical causes don’t explain phenomena, what do? Non-physical causes? Sounds an awful lot like spirituality or the supernatural. But anyway that point is superfluous, since, regardless of what you call such a view, it is now more clear what the meaning behind the name is.

Also, your following post addresses some issues by invoking a given physical theory of reality. But Brownian physics or any other is only as good as the assumptions out of which it operates. So your rebuttal amounts, in the end, to “things happen without a cause, and we just do not know how, nor can we.” You’ve abandoned rationality at this point. If such systems operate out of the premise that things can happen for no reason, then no further argument can be had.

Such a philosophy leads to the schools of the absurd. Reason has no business with irrationality, I’m afraid. I’ll give you the floor and let you talk all you want about how things happen without causes.

 

[The_Exodus]

If you subsribe to the above school of thought - that things can happen without a cause or that things can happen with a cause which is intrinsically beyond our power to know - then you are not a materialist. At least in the traditional sense of the term. You are, in fact, a sort of radical supernaturalist. If physical causes don’t explain phenomena, what do? Non-physical causes? Sounds an awful lot like spirituality or the supernatural. But anyway that point is superfluous, since, regardless of what you call such a view, it is now more clear what the meaning behind the name is.

Also, your following post addresses some issues by invoking a given physical theory of reality. But Brownian physics or any other is only as good as the assumptions out of which it operates. So your rebuttal amounts, in the end, to “things happen without a cause, and we just do not know how, nor can we.” You’ve abandoned rationality at this point. If such systems operate out of the premise that things can happen for no reason, then no further argument can be had.

Such a philosophy leads to the schools of the absurd. Reason has no business with irrationality, I’m afraid. I’ll give you the floor and let you talk all you want about how things happen without causes.

 

[Betterave]

Very clearly NOT? Here’s my rendering of your claim:
**1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia. **no amount of physical facts even begin to portray sweetness

You’re just referring to “sweetness” in particular here, rather than my general “qualia”. But unless you are saying that “sweetness” is not just representative of the general “qualia”, this is the same claim. “No amount of physical facts can begin to portray” == “material descriptions cannot account” for the same thing in both case: qualia.

Readers can decide for themselves if your rendering and mine are the the same claim.

That’s correct, TS, about my argument not essentially involving sweetness or redness. But here is how you actually rendered my claim:

1. Material descriptions cannot account for qualia. (emphasis added)
2. “redness” is a quale
Ergo: Material descriptions cannot account for “redness”.

You rendered it as an ARGUMENT. Do you understand the difference?? So you again failed to answer my question (correctly):

**First question: How did you manage to get this [syllogistic] argument out of my [simple] statement? That is not logically possible [and butchers the sense of what I was saying]!

Moving forward, though, it’s easier to just let you state your case directly. Can material descriptions potentially account for qualia? If your answer is “yes”, then I have no idea what “no amount of physical facts even begin…” would mean, but no matter, the question remains open for you, which is all that’s important to the point being disputed. It’s NOT a beg to the question if you allow that some “amount of physical facts MAY portray sweetness”. I’d be fine with that.

If I say “no amount of physical description of redness will make a blind person to see redness” and you reply that you think I am begging the question, I’m afraid I will have to say that you are mistaken: I am not saying something that could possibly be false, therefore I am not begging the question. If you don’t understand this, it can only be because you don’t understand the meaning of the terms being used.

You did fool me with “no amount of physical facts can begin to portray…”, I grant. I took that to be a statement of the impossibility of physical facts portraying sweetness. I will have to wait until that statement gets unpacked a little more fully I guess, to see what you meant by that.

No, TS: when you interpret the claim “no amount of physical facts can begin to portray sweetness”, to make a claim for “the impossibility of physical facts portraying sweetness”, this is a case where you are not likely to be fooling yourself (so in this case you apparently fooled yourself about fooling yourself). You are fooling yourself when you think that you need not have any grounds for denying the claim. Wanstronian appears to have a much better grasp of the problem here than you. Please refer to his comments and distinctions and my reply to those comments.

 

[Betterave]

Here’s a simple example that will demonstrate the complaint I gave:

1. All swans are white.
2. This animal is a swan.
   Ergo, this animal is white.

Ok, there’s perfectly nothing wrong with this syllogism in terms of its form – it’s valid, and any denials of 1) or 2) as sound would simply shift the focus to the support and evidence for 1) or 2).

The beg to the question enters when the issue at hand is the premise. If we are investigating if all swans are indeed white – the syllogism above begs the question – that’s what “the question” in “begging the question” refers to, the *petitio principii. *You’ve nudged right up to getting this, in saying "(1) is never suppose to be the “ergo” – yeah, that’s the substance of my complaint to you about begging the question. You took the disputed conclusion, matter in question, and made it an assumption. - NO, I did no such thing!]

If I misunderstood, I stand to be corrected, and would be happy to hear that physical facts (material explanations) may be provide accounts for sweetness in particular, or qualia generally. Is that the case? An answer to that should clear this right up?

-TS

Hopefully you’ve got the message by now, but I’ll repeat it for like the sixth time: Yes, you misunderstood - you made up an argument and attributed it to me. I did not beg the question; you made up a straw man.

 

[Touchstone]

I’m not debating that nothing occurs in the brain when we know phenomena. You keep using this point - which has never been debated - to try to substantiate the claim that therefore there is nothing instrinsic to various phenomena. But this just simply doesn’t follow. Your boa constrictor example, which you offered as your reasoning behind your claim was fallacious. You are simply making an assertion, on equal terms with the assertion that “cuteness exists intrinsically in the baby.” You’re not standing on firmer ground that someone who claims the opposite.

Yes, I am. We can locate “cuteness” in the brains of humans. We cannot locate that same “cuteness” in the minds of other observers. If “cuteness” obtains in the baby, it is there as a property as available to the alligator as it is to the human. This is our reasoned basis for locating “cute” in the mind of the beholder (not to mention the evolutionary rationale for that being the case, as well).

(As a side note, if you push this issue far enough - i.e. that certain concepts do not exist outside the brain - then you will be led to the Kantian dilemma of trying to determine which concepts do and why.

I don’t think this is the challenge you suppose. We just ask whether the distinguishing elements obtain objectively – to any and all observers (even instruments, for example – a . If that fails, and we understand that some observers identify the phenomena while others can’t we have grounds to see that as subjective --dependent on the mind of the observer in question.

You can arbitrarily give explanatory or existential power to concepts which are derived solely from the senses, but, what will soon be found is that the senses depend on the intellect to know those concepts. And what do you do about concepts which transcend the senses? Existence, for example - where does that fall? Love? Justice? Could you formulate some sort of exhaustive list of concepts that really exist and those that exist “only in the evolutionarily driven organ of gray matter”? I don’t intend this to be a point to be debated however; just an observation.)

I think you are just struggling with the distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ here?

This is exactly my point. It is your tautology that breaks down. I’m not the one maintaining that humans are “free” in a purely materialistic universe.

I’m not maintaining such here, myself.

Having free will is based on the doctrine of human beings having a spiritual soul. It has nothing to do with arbitrary randomness, and hence your parallel, which is off topic to begin with, does not follow.

It’s another thread, but “spiritual soul” doesn’t get us any closer to a meaningful concept of “free”. Any spiritual causes are causes, and deterministic to the extent they are. Or else they are random. What other options are there?

My point, again, still stands. Predictability does not *do *anything. Thus, whether or not an agent is “predictable” or not can offer no ground for believing the agent is “free,” as you tried to maintain earlier.

My claim is not that predictability is causally effective, but rather just descriptively effective. If something is independent of some rule or force, and this shown by its unpredictability with respect to that rule or force, we understand it to be “free”. This is easy to understand by considering the converse; if we see some variable as controlled by rule or force, it is “not free”, but “controlled”, or “constrained”.

It does not follow at all that a cause is causally random just because you don’t know what that cause is.

That’s precisely what we mean by “random” – the cause is not known, there is no discernible purpose, pattern or plan in view. We don’t know what we don’t know, so “random”, if it’s random at all, is as random as it gets for us, epistemically.

All you can say is that the cause is “unknown” but this hardly means it is inherently random in its nature or causal power. I may as well say that, if I get a stomach ache, there is really no reason why I’m getting one, since it could be a random phenomena that has no causal agent behind it.

Yes, but that avoids the rigor that goes into the features of physics that are considered “random”. For example, we don’t have to look far to see plausible causes for such a symptom that would be non-random. That “de-randomizes” the case in a way the phenomena in physics that are deemed as random cannot be. There are no plausible alternatives in the cases physics consigns to “random”. If the equivalent of “stomach virus” was available, that would be the verdict.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

The Exodus:

Also, if you make the statement that “we don’t know if ***any ***causal factors lie behind phenomena” then you have lost the right to be a scientist at all. The unquestioned assumption a scientist can never abandon is that all things happen for a cause,even if that cause may be currently unknown.

The search never stops, but that is a different issue. If what we have at the moment is “no discernible purpose, plan or pattern”, then we classify it as “random”. We’ve discovered many non-random factors underneath phenomena that were once supposed to be random, but doesn’t make the things we classify as random any less random. Unless we commit upfront to a perfectly Laplacian hard determinism in the universe, we allow that some features of nature may be fundamentally random. We push the envelope of knowledge as far as we may, but what is left is “causally undefined”.

This principle is actually what brought people out of the age of superstition.

No, randomness is not magic or intensional at all. It’s the opposite of the witch-doctor mentality, and is foreign to our “someone did it” design-centricity in our psychology that underwrites superstition and magical thinking; see the long history of “faeries”, “pixies”, “demons”, “angels”, “leprechauns” and other design agents that account for otherwise-unexplainable events and circumstances.

In any case, “superstition” is a product of credulity, the lack of reasoned knowledge. What physicists identify as “random” comes at the exhaustion of all available reasoning and knowledge toward causes. It’s not credulous.

Hundreds of people sick on a boat did not mean the gods were upset,but rather that a parasite had been carried aboard by rats. A rainstorm destroys a village, not because Poseidon is raging, but because the pressure in the atmosphere is such and such. It’s odd that moderns who have taken this line do not see this glaring contradiction: they accuse religious people of being irrational, believing in things without evidence, etc; and yet they claim at the same time that things can happen without any cause whatsoever.

If you can’t identify a cause, what are your options? Make something up? That’s more credulous, and more unreasonable. Physicists say something fundamentally different than the credulous masses – “it’s unknown”. Look at what you provided in contrast: “the gods are upset”, “Poseidon is raging”. This is the opposite, and religious approach – to refuse to acknowledge unknowns as unknowns and make stuff up: “Goddidit”. You have (unwittingly?) taken up the cause of the “Poseidon is raging” crowd in saying “God created the universe”. Physics just says “the cause is unknown”, and that’s that, until such time as a pattern, plan or purpose can be identified.

Following your train of thought, it would be reasonable to conclude that things can pop into being out of nothing for no reason whatsoever. I ought not be surprised, for example, if, while in my living room watching tv, a horse suddenly popped into existence and blocked my view.

That’s not what our experience and the physics model that is built on it provide for, though. The “no reason whatsoever” happens at quantum levels, and no matter how random events may be at that scale, when the probabilities combine at macrophysical scales, such an event would be surprising in the extreme. It’s technical possible in current models, for person to walk through a solid wall, unscathed. It’s just fantastically improbable, so improbable that one can’t reasonable expect to ever see such a thing. Nature gets more and more uniform and predictable as the scales get larger, and we exist at very large (and therefore predictable) scales with respect to the Planck length.

Furthermore, if you want to take this like - we don’t know if any causal factors lie behind phenomena - you certainly have no right to criticize religion, since such a claim requires more faith than any dogma.

We don’t know any causes for some quantum phenomena, in their particulars, but this just probabilities in action. It doesn’t require any faith at all – it’s just the default state of not knowing any better. We aren’t clarivoyant, so we are saddled with unknowns. But it is a different stance to just acknowledge our position epistemically and say “it’s unknown”, than to say “there must be a cause”, or “God did this”, or “there must be no cause”. We don’t know, and aren’t afraid to admit it, even as we chase explanations and answers that justify it as a “known” in the future.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Hopefully you’ve got the message by now, but I’ll repeat it for like the sixth time: Yes, you misunderstood - you made up an argument and attributed it to me. I did not beg the question; you made up a straw man.

Getting to the point of my post there, which you ignored:

**Physical facts (material explanations) may provide accounts for sweetness in particular, or qualia generally. **

Yea or nay?

That will tell me if I understood you or not.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

We can locate “cuteness” in the brains of humans. We cannot locate that same “cuteness” in the minds of other observers.

This is again the same fallacy I addressed earlier. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence - i.e. an argument from ignorance. An alligator can indeed come by and not sense “cuteness,” but it does not therefore follow that “cuteness” does not exist.

touchstone:

If “cuteness” obtains in the baby, it is there as a property as available to the alligator as it is to the human.

Not if the alligator lacks “cuteness”-sensing ability. The argument you’re constructing runs thusly: Alligators cannot sense “cuteness,” therefore, it cannot be an instrinsic property of a baby.

There may in fact be all sorts of properties intrinsic to phenomena that cannot be sensed by us or any other creature on the planet. But it is fallacious to conclude that because of this, therefore there are not such instrinsic properties.

touchstone:

It’s another thread, but “spiritual soul” doesn’t get us any closer to a meaningful concept of “free”. Any spiritual causes are causes, and deterministic to the extent they are. Or else they are random. What other options are there?

Spiritual causes must be causes, but they may, in themselves, have causative power independent of any agent outside their own being - i.e. they are truly free, since the reason for their actions ultimately terminate in their own being. Again though, this is another thread.

touchstone:

My claim is not that predictability is causally effective, but rather just descriptively effective.

Then you have proven my point: namely, predictability does not do anything, but is just a word we use when we don’t know precisely how or why a thing happened. Yet it does not follow from that that therefore there is no reason why the thing occured. Indeed, to argue this would be to adopt irrationality.

touchstone:

That’s precisely what we mean by “random” – the cause is not known, there is no discernible purpose, pattern or plan in view.

Again, saying “the cause is not known” is very different from saying “there is no cause”. You must either say that “there is no cause” and become irrational, or say that “there is a cause, we just don’t know what it is” which, on a materialist worldview, concludes in determinism.

All this is merely a recapitulation of the points made in my previous posts.

 

[Touchstone]

If you subsribe to the above school of thought - that things can happen without a cause or that things can happen with a cause which is intrinsically beyond our power to know - then you are not a materialist. At least in the traditional sense of the term. You are, in fact, a supernaturalist. If physical causes don’t explain phenomena, what do? Non-physical causes?

It’s an unknown. From a materialist standpoint, there may be underlying (material) causes that remain undiscovered, or fundamental randomness may obtain. There’s nothing “supernatural” in either of those, at least as long as we don’t relax our “I don’t know” for “Poseidon is raging” temptation.

Sounds an awful lot like spirituality or the supernatural. But anyway that point is superfluous, since, regardless of what you call such a view, it is now more clear what the meaning behind the name is.

Ok, that’s good. It’s not a controversial usage, and this is what is meant in the practice of science (and information theory, which is an area I work and and have worked in professionally).

Also, your following post addresses some issues by invoking a given physical theory of reality. But Brownian physics or any other is only as good as the assumptions out of which it operates. So your rebuttal amounts, in the end, to “things happen without a cause, and we just do not know how, nor can we.” You’ve abandoned rationality at this point. If such systems operate out of the premise that things can happen for no reason, then no further argument can be had.

We can’t know, empirically, facts outside of our universe. But that limitation does not apply inside, or at least in the same way. What we identify as random is liable to “de-randomization” at any point if we can identify pattern, purpose or plan for the phenomena. As I said above, science doesn’t ever concede permanent ignorance so long as the basis for knowledge (empirical observation and (name removed by moderator)ut) exists.

It’s rational, rule based, and maintains the integrity of scientific epistemology. To do otherwise would be a problem – make up a story that is ungrounded in the evidence? What do you suppose would be the rational response to a lack of knowledge, beside saying “we don’t know”, and aiming at future development of that knowledge?

Furthermore, such a claim (e.g. “happens for no reason”) is always liable to further argument – just supply your reason, then? The supply of reasons in the absence of science knowning a reason is conspicuous? Do you know why this particular decay event happened at precisely this time for this isotope? Have at it, then! It’s open to challenge. Neither you nor anyone else has any purchase on this reason at all, or you’d be a household name!

Such a philosophy leads to the schools of the absurd. Reason has no business with irrationality, I’m afraid. I’ll give you the floor and let you talk all you want about how things happen without causes.

Well, let’s start with the particular timing of decay events for unstable isotopes. Tell me, what is the cause of that event, at that time? Pick any particular decay event you like.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

The search never stops, but that is a different issue. If what we have at the moment is “no discernible purpose, plan or pattern”, then we classify it as “random”. We’ve discovered many non-random factors underneath phenomena that were once supposed to be random, but doesn’t make the things we classify as random any less random. Unless we commit upfront to a perfectly Laplacian hard determinism in the universe, we allow that some features of nature may be fundamentally random. We push the envelope of knowledge as far as we may, but what is left is “causally undefined”.

This is nothing to the purpose and is an evasion: do you hold all phenomena have causes or not?

touchstone:

No, randomness is not magic or intensional at all.

If you hold that things randomly happen for no reason at all, then that’s as magical as it gets.

touchstone:

If you can’t identify a cause, what are your options? Make something up?

You certainly don’t abandon the principle of causality, as your randomness logically leads to.

touchstone:

You have (unwittingly?) taken up the cause of the “Poseidon is raging” crowd in saying “God created the universe”. Physics just says “the cause is unknown”, and that’s that, until such time as a pattern, plan or purpose can be identified.

The existence of an uncaused cause, a prime mover, can be proven by demonstration using sense perception, the law of contradiction and cause and effect. This was done 2000 years ago by Aristotle, and is continued to be proven today, despite the fact that most in academia lack the intellectual bravery to honestly read Aristotle’s Metaphysics or a majority of his works. But anyway, this is irrelevant to the discussion.

touchstone:

That’s not what our experience and the physics model that is built on it provide for, though. The “no reason whatsoever” happens at quantum levels, and no matter how random events may be at that scale, when the probabilities combine at macrophysical scales, such an event would be surprising in the extreme.

So you are in effect saying “things can happen for no reason, but only very very small things.” No matter how much you shrink it, this claim still undermines science and leads to irrationality.

 

[The_Exodus]

It’s an unknown. From a materialist standpoint, there may be underlying (material) causes that remain undiscovered, or fundamental randomness may obtain. There’s nothing “supernatural” in either of those, at least as long as we don’t relax our “I don’t know” for “Poseidon is raging” temptation.

I agree with this. If we ever don’t know, we should always seek to find out. My whole point though is that, if you admit some sort of “randomizing” principle which does not have any cause behind it, then you have effectively said, not “I don’t know” but “there is nothing to know.” If that’s the case, what is all your research for?

I bet you anything, no matter how many physicists say things can have no reason behind them, they seek to find out more about this non-reason; how it happened, where it came from, what changes it underwent, etc. But if things can have no cause, there is no "it’ to research. The entire field of quantum mechanics is sitting on one huge branch and sawing it out from under themselves at the same time.

touchstone:

It’s rational, rule based, and maintains the integrity of scientific epistemology. To do otherwise would be a problem

Precisely. And this is why it is absurd to claim that “there is no cause” as opposed to “we don’t know a cause.”

“What do you suppose would be the rational response to a lack of knowledge, beside saying “we don’t know”, and aiming at future development of that knowledge?”

Search as honestly and thoroughly as possible for the reason for a given phenomena; but never abandon the first principle (which is axiomatic) of science that everything *has *a cause. Or put another way: ex nihilo nihil fit - from nothing nothing comes (meaning metaphysical nothingness).

touchstone:

Well, let’s start with the particular timing of decay events for unstable isotopes. Tell me, what is the cause of that event, at that time? Pick any particular decay event you like.

This very question illuminates your faith in science in the first place, a faith which I share, which leaves me so puzzled that you claim that “things happen for no reason or cause” or that “something can come from nothing.”