🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec14.033936.11786@cs.su.oz.au> danny@cs.su.oz.au (Danny) writes:
>In article <1992Dec12.230911.24220@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>>
>>he himself takes, at least to some extent).  In that case, the question
>>of whether something is conscious or not is epistemically indeterminate,
>>although consciousness itself is ontologically real.
>
>This is where I draw the line!  I'm enough of a pragmatist/logical positivist
>that I don't believe it *means* anything to talk about something being
>ontologically real but epistemological indeterminate!!  Now where did I put
>that Razor? :)

Well, to take the old chestnut of qualia, how do you objectively determine
that what I see as red is the same sensation of colour as what you see
as red?  How do you know that I don't see red things as being blue?  As
far as I (and most philosophers) can tell, there is no objective criteria
to rule out the possibility of "inverted spectra".  Yet, presumably you
agree that I do *in fact* have a sensation of colour, and that this could
in principle be different from yours, even though we respond behaviourally
in exactly the same way.  This is a case of something real (namely experience)
being inaccessible to objective observation.  I would argue that *all* of
consciousness is like this.  

>>This may not be a satisfactory state of affairs for those who want
>>answers to everything, but it is also certainly no justification for
>>then defining consciousness in a way that is epistemically accessible
>>but wrong, as I take it Searle believes that functionalists have done.
>
>Ummm...  I'd rather have a theory that worked a bit, that we might learn
>something from disproving, than bury my head in the sand and say "we
>cannot know".

I'd rather have a theory that was right, even if it meant we cannot know.
If you want to "learn something", isn't it more efficient to study the
"something" rather than an intractable problem?  (You must have supported
the space program primarily because of its spinoffs like Velcro and Tang :-)

>We MUST know, we SHALL know.

Why?  No law says that all of the universe has to be explicable.  Look at
quantum phenomena...

- michael