From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Wed Mar 02 2005 - 17:25:57 GMT
Matt,
Scott said:
... So the epistemological
problem resurfaces as the problem of how did language (which requires
consciousness) come about.
Matt said:
I've mixed and matched the posts into one about consciousness and one about
metaphysics. I guess what I don't understand is how you escape the problem
and how I get caught in it. I see it as either we both do, or neither of us
do. You say that everything is language, but I would then think that you'd
need a distinction between the language a rock uses and the language humans
use and an explanation as to how humans came to be.
Scott:
As far as the existence of rock language goes, that is what Barfield's
"Saving the
Appearances" is all about. The so-called animist could listen to rocks. We
can't. That is because consciousness has been evolving, from a state he
calls original participation to one he calls final participation -- "final"
being relative -- not an eschatological finality, but the ending of our
current state, where participation is unconscious. In other words, the
Cartesian split of reality into matter and mind was only possible because
our consciousness has lost its perception of the mental in nature. Nature
mystics are either throwbacks to original participation, or lookaheads to
final participation.
Now this can easily be dismissed as esoteric, which it is, but Barfield's
book contains the argumentation for taking it seriously.
As to how humans came to be, recall that I argue that time is a product of
consciousness, so all questions about origins become problematic. And all
answers are likely to be esoteric or mythical, since we cannot understand
change without time.
Matt said:
As Paul commented,
"Human spoken and written languages, to Scott, seem to be special cases of
something ubiquitous." I see this distinction as the same distinction
pragmatists use. We don't see a hard-line distinction between language and
reality, mainly because we don't see language as something special. We see
it as a tool for coping with reality, like cilia or an arm.
Scott:
To this I answer with Peircean triads. The actions of cilia and arms can be
thought of in Peircean seconds, but language requires thirds. Also, the
actions of cilia and arms can be imagined to take place by automata, but
language requires consciousness. (Which leads to...)
Matt said:
The only
explanation we need for the creation of language is an anthropological one
(not cognitive science, as you suggested elsewhere). You say language
requires consciousness, but as far as pragmatists like Dennett and Rorty are
concerned, consciousness is internal to (or coextensive with) language,
which was the general thrust of Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Granted
that philosophers like Nagel and Searle replied that Dennett wasn't so much
explaining consciousness as he was explaining it away, but pragmatists
aren't sure why we can't do that.
Rorty says that "it seems reasonable for Dennett to reply that explaining
something away-explaining why we do not have to make a place for _it_ in our
picture, but only for the belief in it-is often a good thing to do. The
road of inquiry would have been disastrously blocked if we had forbidden
this move to the Copernicans or to those other seventeenth-century thinkers
who attacked traditional beliefs about witches. On Dennett's account, we
believe that there is phenomenology, and we believe in qualia, because we
adopted a certain set of metaphors for talking about people, just as
Aristotelians believed in solar motion, and witch-hunters in witches,
because a certain picture of the cosmos held them captive. . But if we can
explain people's linguistic and other behavior with the help of other
metaphors . then we are relieved of the obligation to explain qualia."
("Daniel Dennett on Intrinsicality," in Truth and Progress)
As far as I can tell, you haven't explained consciousness either. You've
noted the futility of explaining it, put a black box around it saying it
will always remain mysterious and unexplained, and then made it ubiquitous
so that we can still have it without explaining it. But the question
remains: there must be a difference between rocks and humans, so what is it?
Scott:
I haven't explained consciousness because I don't think it needs explaining,
since it is primary. To me, Dennett's argument is a squabble between
materialists, so I look on it the way an atheist will look on a theological
squabble over the two natures of Christ. That is, the materialist imagines a
prior world without consicousness, and so consciousness needs explaining (or
explaining away). I deny that prior world, and treat consciousness as that
by which all else needs explaining. In particular, one needs to explain how
it is that we have come to be able to imagine a world without consciousness.
Barfield explains that.
The reason I listen to Barfield, and reject the materialists' squabbling is
that both parties ignore what materialism is based on. When (to generalize)
one asks "is there more to qualia than brain-states" this is ignoring that
brain-states are qualia. All natural science, except quantum physics,
consists of finding spatiotemporal patterns of qualia. So if one looks to
find the principles of perception in qualia, one is looking to explain
perception by what perception produces, namely spatiotemporal activity.
Quantum physics, however, has gone beyond qualia, and what does it find?
Wave/particle duality, uncertainty, and non-locality, all of which can be
summed up as an arena where the Newtonian/Einsteinian laws of absolute space
and time do not apply. So even without a knowledge of quantum physics, the
materialist psychologist can be seen as trying to explain the cause of
perception in terms of perception's effects, which is circular. Quantum
physics then adds to this that what the materialist thought was rock-bottom
reality -- spatiotemporal activity -- isn't.
Now the pragmatist materialist does not like to speak of such things as
"rock-bottom reality", but in basing their accounts of language and
consciousness on Darwinism, they are buying in to what I am criticizing in
the previous paragraph.
Matt said:
As far as I can tell, your answer will have the same status as the
pragmatist answer. We both note the futility of explaining consciousness,
neither of us attempt to explain it, and then we both erect pragmatic
distinctions to sort out the differences between stuff like rocks, books,
and people.
Scott:
I don't see it as the same, since I have replaced the question "how does the
world make consciousness" with the question "how does consciousness make
worlds". This may be just as futile, but it is a reversed mindset.
But I agree that within this immaterialist view, the differences between
rocks and humans will be pretty much pragmatically handled: we interact with
them in different ways. What the reversal does is make room for other
possible ways of knowing rocks and humans, meaning mystical or esoteric
ways.
Matt said:
This is what I see at the bottom of Pirsig, too. You've commented elsewhere
that Pirsig's problem will be that we need to have consciousness to have
value. I completely agree with this point. However, I've thought for a
long time that one of the consequences of Pirsig's redescription of reality
in terms of Quality is that the locus of consciousness (amongst a number of
other troublesome philosophical concepts, like intention and free will) is
now ubiquitized, much the same as you've done. Any particular thing that we
bundle together and name, like a rock or a person, is a locus of
consciousness. This is the same move Dennett makes in saying that people
are "centers of narrative gravity." Pragmatists follow Quine in thinking
that a "self" is simply a web of beliefs and desires and that the only
distinctions we have in that web and between webs are pragmatic ones. Rorty
generalizes Dennett's point and says that we should think of _all_ objects
as centers of descriptive gravity. So, again, I think the only distinctions
you can deploy at this point to distinguish common sense things like the
difference between humans and rocks are the same distinctions that Pirsig
and pragmatists like Dennett and Rorty can deploy.
Scott:
When I read Dennett's notion of the self as a "center of narrative gravity"
I was struck with the similarity of that view to that of pre-Mahayana
Buddhism. The Middle Way is in part a reaction to that, seeing a
Dennett-like view as being on the field of nihility. It needs to be rejected
(so the Middle Way proclaims, and I agree) just as the substantial self view
needs to be.
Matt said:
I don't see that Rorty, for one, has ignored them [theologians and such].
It is always a good idea
to have people with a wide range of reading and engagement and to urge more
of that, but so far as I can see the people I rely on do. Rorty taught a
class on the philosophy of religion once and couldn't see the difference
between the Dewey of A Common Faith and the liberal theologian (both as
social democrat and proponent of liberal theology) Paul Tillich's Dynamics
of Faith. Rorty has been in conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre (a modern
day Thomist) for years, let alone West and Stout. (I see Stout as a leader
in bridging the divide. He's been working for years on the interconnections
between Rorty, MacIntyre, and the theologian Stanley Hauerwas.) And
recently Rorty has written several things concerning Gianni Vattimo, a
Catholic philosopher who takes religion very seriously. They have a book
that just came out (The Future of Religion) with essays by the two of them
and a conversation between them.
Scott:
Very interesting, and I should apologize to Rorty. As it happens I've just
been reading MacIntyre's *Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry*. There is a
blurb on the back cover from Rorty, and it would be lovely to listen in on
their conversation. Thanks for the names.
- Scott
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