DARWIN's DOUBT - The End of Darwinistic Materialism

[MorpheusSandman]

How does that apply to the "hard problem of consciousness"? What's wrong with asking "What is Consciousness?"?

Since when does "science doesn't know everything right now" equate to there being a "hard problem?" I'm quite certain that when we're able to fully map the human brain and understand how everything works such questions will only exist in the minds of people who don't like materialistic answers. Dennett's response to the whole thing seems dead on, to me.

[The Atheist]

Just because we have a word like "consciousness" and create a "mind-body duality" doesn't mean they're actually coherent questions.

Music to my eyes!

No, it's not just about the amount. I agree we may disagree over what constitutes extraordinary, but I simply think of "extraordinary" as meaning "something that almost certainly wouldn't happen if the proposition was untrue," and the more unlikely something is to be true, the more unlikely that its confirming evidence would be encountered.

I think you're overcomplicating things to a large degree. You're ascribing probabilities to unknowns, which just doesn't work. Take a look at the bit I bolded; you're talking about probabilities that are just unknown. You're saying it wouldn't happen if the proposition were untrue - but you can't give a probability for it until it is known.

Smacks of too much Dawkins.

You think its truthfulness is irrelevant so you accept anecdotal evidence on the basis that "it doesn't matter."

No, I'm not saying I accept it, I'm saying that it isn't worth knowing. For the purpose of conversation and interaction with other people, I will conditionally take words at face value, but I'm not accepting them as factual.

To me, it has no truth value at all, so I don't give it one.

The basis you accept it on is really immaterial to my initial point.

Actually, it's the only bit that matters.

As for the last bit, would you not be willing to accept a bet on the basis that it was true? Let's say I offered a wager of $100 that your friend does what he does for a living.

Sure, because I have physical proof of that.

If you're asking whether I'd accept a bet on what he said he'd done that day was true, no.

One problem with the "irrelevant" argument, though, is that so many relevant beliefs can flow from the same place that irrelevant ones do. Yes, maybe your specific case is irrelevant, but can you really say you've never accepted any relevant propositions as being true on no better evidence? I can't say for sure I haven't. Human brains are not good at keeping up with their beliefs and what assumptions/bases they rest on.

Well, I can say with 100% confidence I haven't accepted anything on such flimsy evidence since my early teens at least.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "rules of evidence" being constant.

Really? I am surprised. Physical, testable, verifiable. You even called it scientism above, although I prefer the term scientific scepticism.

What are the "rules for eye witness evidence?"

There's only one:

That it is least-reliable form of evidence available. As it happens, I've conducted literally hundreds of tests with thousands of people to show how utterly useless they are at giving accurate eyewitness accounts.

Also, math isn't really "evidence" per say but a model of reality for which we can often construct tests that we consider to be evidence. But Godel had a little something to say about the completeness and consistency of mathematical models.

I think you mean "per se".

I didn't say maths was evidence, I said it was constant. Maybe that was a little ambiguous. The hypotenuse is always the sum of the square of the other two sides; a circle's area is always pi x D. Godel is talking about maths being inconsistent in analysis, not computation, which is constant. (Douglas Adams channeled Godel beautifully.)

Well, I'd say we have evidence that we feel something for other people that we call "love." As to what that feeling actually is and what causes it, that's another matter. This is what I've been arguing about with YesNo in the Big Bang thread, that feeling/experiences are evidence only for feelings and experiences, not the ontological assumptions we make based on them (IE, there's an inferential leap from saying "I feel love" to saying "love is X".)

On this, we agree entirely - a perfect example of what I mean by people giving it credit for more than the sum of its parts.

[The Atheist]

Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion?

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

[The Atheist]

I'm quite certain that when we're able to fully map the human brain and understand how everything works such questions will only exist in the minds of people who don't like materialistic answers.

There's another one I've been banging my head against brick walls with for years.

Unfortunately, the list of people who don't like materialistic answers is very, very long.

[MorpheusSandman]

You're ascribing probabilities to unknowns, which just doesn't work.

You may not can give precise probabilities, but you can certainly estimate based on related and relevant knowns. I should know because I do this all the time in my profession of online poker. Whenever I play with a new player I don't just say "well, he's an unknown so I can't assume any probabilities about his actions," I say "I'll assume some basic things based on playing with many players and then adjust them based on what I see from him." Let's take something like the existence of God. We can easily put God into the category of "things man has imagined to exist before they have unanimous sensory or scientific proof of their existence." If you consider things in that category, the vast majority of them we have still not found any evidence/proof for despite the attempts, which would suggest that most don't actually exist (Bayes tells us this: if X didn't exist, you'd expect to see no evidence for X; but if X did exist, then you'd only expect to see no evidence for X some of the time).

What's more, every time we learn and discover new things, this makes the existence of those entities less likely as it's one less thing we don't know. So we have to assume that since our ignorance is shrinking (by how much we're not sure, but it certainly is), that the probability of their existence is shrinking as well. By how much precisely? Well, there's where the estimating comes in. Of all the things in that category, about the only thing I can think of we once imagined to exist and ended up being right about was atoms. So that would be one thing amidst how many that we still have no evidence/proof of? You could further adjust such probability by considering other conditional probabilities ala Bayes. Assuming God was real, there would be some probability besides zero for which he would've revealed himself to us in a completely unambiguous and objective manner. OTOH, if he didn't exist we'd have precisely what we have, a lot of people making claims about him without proof or solid evidence.

One could continue to do this for a good long while, and it would all lead to a point where you'd have to assign the probability of God's existence a really low number. We could debate (a lot) over precisely what that number is, but to say we can't make some kind of educated guess is just wrong. After all, if you disbelieve in God then you have to believe that the evidence favors the proposition that "God doesn't exist," and unless you are absolutely certain about that non-existence, then you'd have to simply say that the evidence favors some extremely low probability (even if you're not precisely sure what it is) that's enough for you to say "I don't believe he exists."

For the purpose of conversation and interaction with other people, I will conditionally take words at face value, but I'm not accepting them as factual.

You may not accept them as factual when pushed (like I'm doing), but I bet your brain in those moments doesn't consciously think "Hmm, how likely is what they're saying actually true?" Our brains make short cuts, and one of those short cuts is polarizing things (like beliefs) as non polarized things creates chaos in the system and takes too much processing power. So I'm guessing that when you're dealing with those people your brain is polarizing away their statements as "true," and you probably only question that "true" in a situation like this, where you have a pesky online guy bugging you about it. What's more, even with that pesky online guy bugging you about it, you have to realize that, based on what they've said, you've assigned some kind of imprecise probability to those statements being true. I asked you what you'd wager on one of their statements, which should give you a good idea of how truthful you really think they are. Trust me, when you make a living assigning probabilities to such things, you gain an appreciation for how it works in all situations, how difficult it is, how artful it is, how to better be more precise about it, and the dangers of assuming too much or too little.

To me, it has no truth value at all, so I don't give it one.

You may not have given it one, but don't mistake that for it not having one. That's the mind projection fallacy.

If you're asking whether I'd accept a bet on what he said he'd done that day was true, no.

So if I laid you $100 to your $1 you wouldn't bet on what he said he did that day was true?

Well, I can say with 100% confidence I haven't accepted anything on such flimsy evidence since my early teens at least.

Color me skeptical.

Really? I am surprised. Physical, testable, verifiable.

But what are even the rules of evidence for those things? You do realize that verificationism (a kind of logical positivism) has been out of favor in scientific philosophy for a good long time now, right? Most people today prefer Popper's notion of falsifiability. I prefer the Bayesian take on falsifiability. Nonetheless, I can't think of any "rules of evidence" for any of these things as different fields of science have different ways of handling and assessing tests and evidence. I mean, history is a very different can of worms than physics, which is a very different can of worms than biology.

That it is least-reliable form of evidence available.

OK, but precisely how (un)reliable is it?

I didn't say maths was evidence, I said it was constant.

Ok, but evidence is not constant, not in any way remotely similar to math (and even with math it's only constant within a set of parameters). Math only remains constant because as a model it seems to match what we experience and, what's more, it allows us to predict and constrain experience quite precisely. Evidence is really what tells us how to adjust our models. If what we experienced (evidence) didn't match what our model told us to expect (math), then the problem may be with one or the other, we wouldn't always be sure which. The math of General Relativity is very precise, and it seems to accurately model what we experience of physics in every day life (and beyond), but that mathematical model breaks down inside black holes and other extremely small scales. So is the problem with the model or in the evidence, or, more precisely, is it how we're looking at the evidence? Physicists aren't sure yet.

[mal4mac]

Since when does "science doesn't know everything right now" equate to there being a "hard problem?" I'm quite certain that when we're able to fully map the human brain and understand how everything works such questions will only exist in the minds of people who don't like materialistic answers. Dennett's response to the whole thing seems dead on, to me.

Chalmers seems dead on, to me. This seems a really hard problem, to me. I don't even see how science could begin to answer it. You are making a big assumption when you think that science, however broadly conceived, will ever have an answer.

Are you really sure we can fully map the human brain? The Ordnance Survey can't even make a great job of mapping my locality, so I'm not holding out much hopes.

Do you really think we will ever understand how everything works?

You seem to have raised science up to the level of a God who can and must explain everything, if you just click your heels and wish hard enough. Not that I'm saying science will *certainly* never explain everything, of course, I don't want to fall into the same error as you, in the opposite direction.

[The Atheist]

You may not can give precise probabilities, but you can certainly estimate based on related and relevant knowns. I should know because I do this all the time in my profession of online poker.

Not compatible in any way with the scenario I gave.

No matter who plays or how they play, you're dealing with an insanely small set of probabilities, against real unknowns, which have infinite probabilities.

What's more, every time we learn and discover new things, this makes the existence of those entities less likely as it's one less thing we don't know. So we have to assume that since our ignorance is shrinking (by how much we're not sure, but it certainly is), that the probability of their existence is shrinking as well. By how much precisely? Well, there's where the estimating comes in.

Not at all - there's no need to estimate, not that it's even vaguely possible.

The statement that originally started all this was the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and all claims for god are super-extraordinary, because they posit an entity that can suspend the laws of physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics at will.

Yet I don't believe it requires extraordinary evidence, just some evidence.

I think we're approaching the same question from opposite ends - you're trying to assess the probability of something occurring, while I'm sitting back and say "show me the evidence", until which time I'm happy to ignore the hell out of it.

Think Russell's teapot.

You may not accept them as factual when pushed (like I'm doing), but I bet your brain in those moments doesn't consciously think "Hmm, how likely is what they're saying actually true?"

You'd lose that bet.

So if I laid you $100 to your $1 you wouldn't bet on what he said he did that day was true?

That bet, I would take in an instant. This is where your understanding of probabilities is flawed - gambling probabilities don't work in the real world because they are limited. And while I might not be a professional gambler, I have worked as a bookmaker in the past, so I do have rather a complete understanding of probabilities and odds.

I'd take 10:1, but nothing less, which should give you an indication of how seriously I treat casually-obtained information.

You do realize that verificationism (a kind of logical positivism) has been out of favor in scientific philosophy for a good long time now, right? Most people today prefer Popper's notion of falsifiability. I prefer the Bayesian take on falsifiability.

Falsifiability doesn't affect the status of evidence, because if it's false, it's not evidence any longer.

OK, but precisely how (un)reliable is it?

How long is a piece of string? The unreliability is related to each individual. Some are better than others, and people can be trained to be more observant, but there isn't a singular measure of the probability of eyewitness reports being reliable. Sensible people just ignore them entirely; pity the courts don't take that approach.

Ok, but evidence is not constant, not in any way remotely similar to math (and even with math it's only constant within a set of parameters).

Well, we're going to have to disagree here, because I believe evidence is entirely constant. Like god, until there's evidence to show otherwise, I won't worry too much about it, and I don't think the next bit is a problem at all:

The math of General Relativity is very precise, and it seems to accurately model what we experience of physics in every day life (and beyond), but that mathematical model breaks down inside black holes and other extremely small scales. So is the problem with the model or in the evidence, or, more precisely, is it how we're looking at the evidence? Physicists aren't sure yet.

Correct: we don't know. I have confidence that CERN and other projects will answer the questions in time, along with dark energy/matter, but there is as yet no suggestion that what happens at sub-atomic levels actually affects the molecular level and above in ways that are not constant, or consistent with relativity.

[mal4mac]

I have confidence that CERN and other projects will answer the questions in time, along with dark energy/matter, ...

Which questions? You seem to imply *all* questions! Why do have such belief in science? Just because you've lost faith in God that doesn't mean you need to have faith in something else, like a heap of metal in Switzerland. It's suggested we will need a particle collider the size of earth's orbit to test some of the ramblings of string theorists, and even that is far away from answering *all* questions. I doubt CERN or similar projects will do anything to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Will we have enough time to answer the questions before something kill us all? Aren't there always further questions?

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't even see how science could begin to answer it.

Well, maybe that's just your lack of imagination and why you're not a great scientist! Answering seemingly impossible questions is kinda the domain of science, you know. Plus, the whole "I don't see how" argument is nothing but an argument from incredulity fallacy.

You are making a big assumption when you think that science, however broadly conceived, will ever have an answer.

I don't see why that's a big assumption. One merely has to look at how far we've come in just the past few hundred years since the dawn of modern science. If that's how much we've learned in a few hundred years, how much do you think we'll know in 1000 years?

Are you really sure we can fully map the human brain?

I don't see why not. The human brain is a just a complex physical organ with a very large number of small physical objects (particles) moving along other physical constructs like synapses. We already know a great deal about how much of it works, and with the advent of quantum computing I don't see why we'd have difficulty modeling/mapping the rest.

Do you really think we will ever understand how everything works?

I don't know about "everything." I'm skeptical of our ability to know much about other universes/worlds if they exist, but I'm not about to bet against us knowing anything specific, since some very smart people have looked very stupid in the past whenever they've said "we'll never know about X." I mean, less than 400 years ago the motions of the planets was a complete mystery to man, one that many thought would and could never be solved. People couldn't even imagine how to go about asking about it... yet, look what happened.

You seem to have raised science up to the level of a God who can and must explain everything, if you just click your heels and wish hard enough.

I don't know why you think I'm doing this, I'm merely saying that our current ignorance on a subject doesn't create a "hard problem" that is somehow incapable of being solved. As I said, human history is full of such problems that WERE solved, and certainly not by the people talking about what "hard, impossible problems" they were.

[The Atheist]

Which questions? You seem to imply *all* questions!

I don't see how you come to that implication when I was specifically discussing quantum physics and mentioned CERN, which is exclusively studying sub-atomic physics.

Nothing to with anything outside that very narrow field of study.

Why do have such belief in science?

I get asked that a lot, so I'll give you the standard answer:

I turn on my power switch each morning, turn on the computer, both of which do exactly the same thing every day, thanks to science. I then watch the sun's rays arriving here exactly 8 minutes & 20 seconds after it left the sun, just the same as it has for the past 4 billion years. I then go and drive my car, use a cellphone and write stuff on my screen which I then broadcast around the world on the internet.

When science stops working, I'll stop having confidence in it.

Just because you've lost faith in God that doesn't mean you need to have faith in something else, like a heap of metal in Switzerland.

I don't know where you get the crazy notion that I have faith in anything. I trust scientists to publish results and have them reviewed by their peers, but I don't have faith in them.

I have a high confidence level that the results achieved so far at CERN (and other LHCs) shows that they can crack the questions they're working on.

It's suggested we will need a particle collider the size of earth's orbit to test some of the ramblings of string theorists, and even that is far away from answering *all* questions. I doubt CERN or similar projects will do anything to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Will we have enough time to answer the questions before something kill us all? Aren't there always further questions?

As you can see from above, most of what you've said here doesn't apply, but like Morpheus, I don't have a problem with consciousness, so I can't see too much work needed there. Some humans are conscious, some are not. C'est la vie.

Will something kill us all? Indubitably. I don't imagine we will seriously challenge the reign of the dinosaurs, let alone genera that have existed virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

(And yes, there are an infinite number of questions, so they cannot all be answered. It must be noted though that many of them won't be worth asking, far less answering.)

[MorpheusSandman]

No matter who plays or how they play, you're dealing with an insanely small set of probabilities, against real unknowns, which have infinite probabilities.

You're basically just exalting our ignorance and saying that we can't make any probabilistic inferences based on what is known combined with some hypothetical conditionals about how things might be if they were one way or another, and this is just false.

The statement that originally started all this was the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and all claims for god are super-extraordinary, because they posit an entity that can suspend the laws of physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics at will.

Yet I don't believe it requires extraordinary evidence, just some evidence.

Ok, but if you encountered strong evidence for a being that suspended the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, and math, how would that evidence NOT be extraordinary? The whole idea of God being "extraordinary" is that it is outside the realm of "ordinary" physics, biology, chemistry, etc., so any evidence FOR that "extraordinary" being would also have to be "extraordinary" in order to suspend/transcend those "ordinary" laws, no? What's more, because those things are so ordinary, because they seem to hold in every facet of our life, the entire reason we set God's existence at a low probability is because if all of those laws were suspended/transcended, it would be the very first time in our existence that such things happened!

So what can one say for the probability argument? Well, something along the line of Bayes: If God doesn't exist, then these natural laws would hold all the time and never be broken; if God does exist, there's some non-zero probability that we'd see those natural laws suspended/transcended in order to give us evidence of his existence; so, because the evidence we do have fits the former proposition 100%, and the latter proposition some undefined non-zero percent of the time, it decreases the likelihood of the latter proposition that God exists. We don't know HOW much it decreases it, but it's clear that the evidence on its face favors the former.

...you're trying to assess the probability of something occurring, while I'm sitting back and say "show me the evidence", until which time I'm happy to ignore the hell out of it.

Think Russell's teapot.

No, I'm not trying to access the probability of something occurring, I'm merely showing that because those things which would provide evidence for something like God don't occur, we can make certain ill-defined probabilistic arguments against God's existence. Further, we can show that if those things were to occur, they would be probabilistically unlikely, ergo extraordinary. One doesn't have to define the probabilities exactly to say some general truths about propositions via Bayes. Russell's Teapot is easily addressed via Occam's Razor, which is itself a mathematically supported probabilistic argument. One could have some (entirely useless!) fun figuring out how probable it is that a teapot could ever come to orbit the sun!

This is where your understanding of probabilities is flawed - gambling probabilities don't work in the real world because they are limited... I'd take 10:1, but nothing less, which should give you an indication of how seriously I treat casually-obtained information.

I don't know what you mean by "gambling probabilities." What makes "gambling probabilities" any different than "real world probabilities?*" Plus, proof that such things do work in the real world is here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030...seller=&sr=1-3 Besides, if you're saying you'll take "10:1" then you are basically saying you think your friend's story is trustworthy more than 9% of the time. So, congrats! You have just put a probability (range) on real world event, and you've made your beliefs pay rent (literally!). You could also press this to really think about at what point you'd expect to start losing money over such bets. However, I must say that if you don't have any more confidence than that in your friends on casual information, I think you need more trustworthy friends!

*Your "real world" probabilities sounds like the Frequentist interpretation of statistics, and I've been talking about Bayesianism. Bayesians and Frequentists are mortal enemies! You may be thinking along the lines of Callidore in the Big Bang thread that the probability of a coin landing on either side is ACTUALLY 50/50 (frequentist), as opposed to the ACTUAL probability being 100/0 and the 50/50 just being an expression of our knowledge of the coin (its two sides) and ignorance of the deterministic physical processes (Bayesian). Probabilities are ALWAYS an expression of our combined knowledge and ignorance, which is why I feel comfortable in talking about probabilistic arguments for things like God's existence even when there are so many unknowns. Under Bayes, we can take what we do know and show how that favors propositions for and against God's existence, even if we can't assign the probabilities precisely.

Falsifiability doesn't affect the status of evidence, because if it's false, it's not evidence any longer.

Falsifiability doesn't mean something was proven false, it means something is capable of being falsified: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability If you apply Bayes to Falsifiability what you get is evidence that favors or disfavors the likelihood of a prior proposition.

but there isn't a singular measure of the probability of eyewitness reports being reliable.

Well, not a single one, no, but you could find an average and then get more precise with people who are demonstrably better and worse at it.

I believe evidence is entirely constant.

Would you not say we had good evidence for thinking the Earth was flat until we discovered evidence that it wasn't?

Correct: we don't know.

Right, but either way it goes to show that either math or our evidence is not consistent (or, perhaps incomplete rather than inconsistent).

there is as yet no suggestion that what happens at sub-atomic levels actually affects the molecular level and above in ways that are not constant, or consistent with relativity.

Actually, all the evidence we currently have favors the notion that the "Molecular level and above" behave precisely how we'd expect if Quantum Mechanics worked consistently all the way up. So far, we've managed to put 2424 particles (AFAIK) in superposition without finding any "split" between the quantum and macro worlds. The problem of quantizing GR is a slightly different problem, though, because GR is local, deterministic, and real, while the classic interpretations of QM are none of these things. If you look to the interpretations that ARE those things, even though they offer the possibility of reconciliation with GR, there are no signs as to how that would happen (yet).

[mal4mac]

Answering seemingly impossible questions is kinda the domain of science, you know.

Mostly it isn't. For instance, "Is there life on Mars?" is a current scientific question of great interest to many people, but it's certainly possible to see how it might be answered.

Plus, the whole "I don't see how" argument is nothing but an argument from incredulity fallacy.

"I don't see how" is often used in science circles, and is usually met with a nod and a, "let's try something else, then". So it's a perfectly valid, and useful, argument.

I don't see why that's a big assumption. One merely has to look at how far we've come in just the past few hundred years since the dawn of modern science. If that's how much we've learned in a few hundred years, how much do you think we'll know in 1000 years?

The way things are going we might not even know how to open the can of soup we dig out of the rubble.

I don't see why not. The human brain is a just a complex physical organ with a very large number of small physical objects (particles) moving along other physical constructs like synapses. We already know a great deal about how much of it works, and with the advent of quantum computing I don't see why we'd have difficulty modeling/mapping the rest.

Getting a detailed map down to the levels of individual elementary particles may be an intractable problem. I certainly think it's worth attempting to get more and more detailed maps, though, even if the finest level of detail can't be obtained. I don't think you need a "we can solve everything" attitude to do the best science.

For instance, CERN is providing a map of particle interactions at the finest detail possible today. But each map involves, and can only involve, mapping a few particles. How could you do that for a brain? Stick a brain in a planet size super-super-collider? There might be some ethical problems

Even if civilisation survives for a million years, and maps of ultimate detail are made, I still don't see how that would solve the "hard problem". OK, I'm not the greatest scientist conceivable, so I might have limited vision, compared to the "super Einstein" who actually solves the "hard problem". I give you that

I don't know about "everything." I'm skeptical of our ability to know much about other universes/worlds if they exist, but I'm not about to bet against us knowing anything specific, since some very smart people have looked very stupid in the past whenever they've said "we'll never know about X."

I'd never say that, or believe it. I'd only ever go as far as saying, "I don't see how we'll ever solve X". I might say that from a position of little knowledge in a forum, but actually have considered the "hard problem" at some length, in the company of Chalmers, McGinn et.al, which gives a harder edge to this particular, "I don't see how we'll ever solve X".

By the way, Dennett was caught lying about Chalmer's views, very naughty!

http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/...t_changes.html

Chalmers allows that Dennett might have forgotten what Chalmers said, but I think he's just being nice. On this particular topic, with this particular philosopher, Dennett should have really checked his facts carefully. This shows a remarkable lack of wisdom (i.e., at least momentary stupidity) on Dennett's part, if nothing else.

[MorpheusSandman]

Mostly it isn't. For instance, "Is there life on Mars?" is a current scientific question of great interest to many people, but it's certainly possible to see how it might be answered.

Ummm, OK, I really don't see what that has to do with what I said. Past civilizations would've asked a seemingly impossible question like "How could we get to Mars?" while now we actually do now how to get there, so we're asking different questions about Mars.

"I don't see how" is often used in science circles, and is usually met with a nod and a, "let's try something else, then". So it's a perfectly valid, and useful, argument.

No, it's not a "perfectly valid" argument as it's a logical fallacy. In science there are unknown questions for which "we don't know/see how..." is already assumed and their job IS to figure out the how. They don't go around repeating the fact that they don't currently know! It would be like a football coach going "I don't see how we can get into the end-zone against that defense!" Well, THAT'S HIS JOB to figure out how!

The way things are going we might not even know how to open the can of soup we dig out of the rubble.

Global apocalypse is always a very real possibility, but I'm assuming that that hasn't happened. There's no reason to assume science will regress, or we'll know less then than now.

Getting a detailed map down to the levels of individual elementary particles may be an intractable problem. I certainly think it's worth attempting to get more and more detailed maps, though, even if the finest level of detail can't be obtained. I don't think you need a "we can solve everything" attitude to do the best science.

Such detailed maps just require greater computing/processing powers, and we already have quantum computing, so it's only a matter of developing it even further. There are already people working on things like Friendly AIs (Eliezer Yudkowsy, whose Lesswrong blog I link to constantly, researches Friendly AI for a living). I don't know what you mean by a "we can solve everything" attitude. I didn't say anything about that, all I said was that a "science doesn't know something yet" doesn't equate to an argument that "science will never know about that something," especially in light of the history of such things.

Even if civilisation survives for a million years, and maps of ultimate detail are made, I still don't see how that would solve the "hard problem". OK, I'm not the greatest scientist conceivable, so I might have limited vision, compared to the "super Einstein" who actually solves the "hard problem". I give you that

Remember that Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge. What he meant by that is that knowledge can only tell you about what is, but it can't help tell you about what we're unsure of. Einstein's imaginative way of thinking about problem is what provided his biggest breakthroughs, so, yeah, it does require a great imagination to solve such problems. I mean, I'm not a great scientist either, so I can't "envision" a solution either, but I consider my ignorance and lack of imagination as a statement about myself and my limitations, not as a statement about those problems. As Yudkowsky says, a blank spot on a map (our understanding) doesn't correspond to a blank spot in the territory (reality).

By the way, Dennett was caught lying about Chalmer's views, very naughty!

http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/...t_changes.html

Chalmers allows that Dennett might have forgotten what Chalmers said, but I think he's just being nice. On this particular topic, with this particular philosopher, Dennett should have really checked his facts carefully. This shows a remarkable lack of wisdom (i.e., at least momentary stupidity) on Dennett's part, if nothing else.

I doubt seriously Dennett would've knowingly lied in an interview that was going to be published. What would be the point since he would know someone would point it out to Chalmers? Nonetheless, I still think Dennett is right on the issue.

[mal4mac]

... like Morpheus, I don't have a problem with consciousness, so I can't see too much work needed there. Some humans are conscious, some are not. C'est la vie. (And yes, there are an infinite number of questions, so they cannot all be answered. It must be noted though that many of them won't be worth asking, far less answering.)

So you don't have an interest in the "hard problem of consciousness". But many people do have such an interest. So why do you think that questions about it are not worth asking? Is it that you see consciousness as an epiphenomenon. So just as the steam coming from a steam train is of no interest to most passengers on the train, you are not interested in consciousness? Watching & thinking about the steam does not entertain you, or improve your journey in any way. Again, fair enough. But some other passenger might watch the steam and find a way to make a better steam engine. So in ignoring the epiphenomenon of consciousness you might be missing something.

Also, surely any such fundamental questions about the mind are worth asking? Thinking about every kind of basic question has been key to civilisation's advance since Aristotle.... and he certainly thought a lot about the mind/soul, even devoting a book or two to the subject. So how can you just dismiss the "hard problem" so easily?

There *are* an infinite number of questions, but surely the "hard problem" is a really big question, the biggest on the frontier between subjective consciousness and brain science. All the fuss made by Dennett, Chalmers, et.al. about it surely indicates there is a big question here. A question up there with "What is dark matter?" Penrose, for instance, has looked at both areas and spent a lot of time on both questions; and I don't know of any physicist who has dismissed the "hard problem" so readily.

[mal4mac]

They don't go around repeating the fact that they don't currently know! It would be like a football coach going "I don't see how we can get into the end-zone against that defense!" Well, THAT'S HIS JOB to figure out how!

I think your example doesn't work, the situation is more like the coach saying "I don't see how we can get into the end-zone but the quarterback making a long pass!" A perfectly admissable statement, but he then better add, something like, "but I can see how we can get there by him making a short pass". In the same way a scientist might not see how to proceed in one way, but he better see how to proceed in another way, or lose his job. As science is more difficult, he's allowed to shift goal as well, to aim for the hamburger stall rather than the end zone, say.

Remember that Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge. What he meant by that is that knowledge can only tell you about what is, but it can't help tell you about what we're unsure of. Einstein's imaginative way of thinking about problem is what provided his biggest breakthroughs, so, yeah, it does require a great imagination to solve such problems. I mean, I'm not a great scientist either, so I can't "envision" a solution either, but I consider my ignorance and lack of imagination as a statement about myself and my limitations, not as a statement about those problems. As Yudkowsky says, a blank spot on a map (our understanding) doesn't correspond to a blank spot in the territory (reality).

But there might be a blank spot in the territory. You can't know until you cross that territory.

I doubt seriously Dennett would've knowingly lied in an interview that was going to be published. What would be the point since he would know someone would point it out to Chalmers? Nonetheless, I still think Dennett is right on the issue.

Maybe he was tired, or being a bit flip. I can't see why Chalmers would give away all his ground to Dennett, then take it back! I don't see how he can withstand Chalmers' attack, here for instance:

http://consc.net/papers/moving.html#2.1

Key sentence:

"Dennett might respond that I, equally, do not give arguments for the position that something more than functions needs to be explained. And there would be some justice here: while I do argue at length for my conclusions, all these arguments take the existence of consciousness for granted, where the relevant concept of consciousness is explicitly distinguished from functional concepts such as discrimination, integration, reaction, and report."