Hi melatonin-
melatonin writes:
Hameroff gets a pretty hard time, heheh.
Hameroff, I'm afraid, is actually not all that smart. His site has some real howlers about the evolution of consciousness. For example, while he suggests that it is perfectly conceivable that zombies (identical behaviorally but without consciousness) could exist, he says organisms without consciousness wouldn't be motivated to survive and reproduce (uh, then I guess they wouldn't be behaviorally identical, would they now).
I also find Penrose's contribution to the ORCH/OR model pretty uncompelling. His Godelian arguments had been trounced about a decade ago, and he never rehabilitated them.
melatonin writes:
I tend towards the idea that Dennett et al. are correct in that the 'hard problem' will dissolve with continued advances. The 'why' questions are always going to be raised, but with time it will fade. Cognitive-Affective neuroscience/neuropsychology/neurophysiology will just continue on pretty much ignoring the grand philosophical arguments.
I agree - pretty much. Despite my run-in with Crash here about making grand philosophical arguments of his own (there absolutely must be nothing but neural transmitters that explain consciousness!), I've tended toward Denettian functionalism for most of my life (which means, of course, that neurotransmitters actually don't explain it at all!!!).
On the other hand, I read something by Stapp about QM uncertainty and will, and I can't dismiss the possibility entirely that there is a micro-macro coupling in our brains and that
something that guides waveform collapse. Then I go back over the whole Chinese Room scandal and I'm not really sure that any of the responses actually work at all. Then I read Chalmers again, and realize in my heart of hearts I do believe there is an explanatory gap...
melatonin writes:
It's all very interesting but at this point we are just piecing together the parts of the 'elephant' we focus on and I see no reason why we won't produce a valid explanation of the 'elephant' itself. But there is lots of room for philosophical analysis and hypothesis, but we need falsifiable objective approaches to apply science and that is why at this point, we will carry on regardless of the phenomenological crew.
Exactly so, and I don't know anybody who says we shouldn't.
melatonin writes:
We didn't even know what Brodmann area 10 of the PFC did less than 10 years ago, now we have a good insight into its functional nature thanks to Burgess and Frith et al. With time I'm sure we will get there.
We are getting somewhere faster than ever, that's for sure. I really want one of those SQUID helmets to wear and watch myself think.
Maybe we'll learn someday what Mary learns when she leaves the black-and-white room, and what it is like to be a bat.
Edited by aiguy, : No reason given.
Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.
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