From: Joseph Maurer (jhmau@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 20:27:15 GMT
On Wednesday 2 March 2005 10:21 AM Scott writes to Matt:
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.
Matt:
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)
Matt:
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 itwill
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.
Scott:
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.
Scott:
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.
Hi Scott, Matt and all:
What an interesting Conversation! "I haven't explained Consciousness because
I don't think it needs explaining, since it is primary." I know of three
other authors who have started with this premise. George Gurdjeff in
*Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson: All and Everything*, Patrizia
Norelli-Bachelet in the *Gnostic Circle*, and Frank Herbert in *Destination
Void*! Sleep is a mechanisms for moderating Consciousness.
Gurdjieff proposes a science of consciousness based in a law of three, and a
law of seven. War, like when the Taliban blew up the statue of Buddha, has
destroyed all significant remnants of past civilizations. People are asleep.
A sense of morality has been entirely lost. With an emphasis on 'being
Partdolg-duty' consciousness can be regained. Pirsig's emphasis on an
evolution of three moral levels has legs.
Norelli-Bachelet writes the we are asleep owing to cosmological influences
from a cycle of earth's revolution around the sun of 311,000 years. People
were more awake when they built the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Frank Herbert focused on a threshold for 'attention' to moderate a
consciousness of everything all at once, when he tried to show how to build
a conscious-computer-driven ship.
My bad, my interpretations instead of quotes from the authors.
Joe
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