| | Jordan,
I can identify with the first one. The second is just weird, and I don't get it. Consider the first time you ever drank beer. Beer tasted bitter. However, you grow to enjoy the taste of beer. As people say, "Beer doesn't taste to an experienced drinker the way it did the first time." Did the taste of beer change (if taste is a quale) or did your belief that beer was bitter change (the quale is invariant, but beliefs about the quale change)?
The separation of sensation from judgment is rife with problems.
Hmm. This makes the report important, but it says nothing of the actual introspection. "Says nothing"? I get the gist of you point, but I think that you take it too far. There are common sense limits to what we can admit as evidence and what we can study, regardless of whatever we believe about the material or immaterial nature of consciousness. There must be some level of immunity from claims about winged pink elephants flying behind our heads when we are not looking. From the report, we can infer something that needs to be explained.
I think that what you might be driving at is whether the feelings or experiences that we seem to have that we consider immaterial get serious metaphysical weight in Dennett's scheme. My guess is that Dennett is either agnostic or antagonistic about that: he admits that we feel that way, but because he considers dualism as currently framed a scientific dead end (the immaterial soul can never be studied), he is willing to bite the bullet and see how far analysis can get without it. He has other reasons of course, but that is the biggest one.
However, Dennett believes that there is no way to study the mind or complex rational behavior, even in computer software, without accepting that it has intentions and goals. Whether that allows for the spiritual soul that many identify with consciousness is another story. His proposal for studying the mind is to see how well the brain's functions can be understood in terms of stupider and stupider elements with their own functions until you get to the physical level. This is why he is not a greedy reductionist. He doesn't propose that culture be understood at the level of physics. He does propose that complex phenomena be studied in terms of simpler parts which can be reduced into simpler parts and so on.
I see. To be sure, if the Objectivist's criticism is valid that we can doubt the tester's self-knowledge as much as the subject's self-knowledge, and thus doubt the experiment altogether, it still doesn't follow that the Objectivist should scrap 3d-person science of conciousness. Rather, Objectivists should scrap that rationale for 3d-person science. I can see two reasonable paths they could take to retain 3-d person science.
I agree with the spirit of this, but given the common tendency in Objectivist circles to deal harshly with what sounds paradoxical or complex ("I don't care - what you are really saying is that I'm a robot ..."), your nuanced reasoning would be a major breakthrough for most Objectivists that I'm familiar with. And the Objectivist objections, in my opinion, are not without justification either, because I do not see how to reconcile some aspects of Objectivism with the view of man that is in part the result of a 3rd person science of consciousness.
(1) They could simply replace the above "fallible subject" rationale with an appeal to utility. 3d-person science has clearly gotten us quite far, and I'm not sure that "introspection science" can say the same. Ed is welcome to argue for it though. Yes, but all the philosophical implications of the success of 3rd person science of consciousness point to a scientific view of the self that Objectivists cannot embrace because of their refusal to accept paradoxes even temporarily ("Integration... integration...").
(2) They could limit the "fallible subject" rationale. They could argue that we should doubt some 1st-person accounts of the mind, but not necessarily all 1st-person accounts. They should be particularly keen to save the 1st-person accounts of the testers, so as to preserve the experiment's integrity. In my view, how someone chooses which 1st person account to accept or reject should depend on utility informed by empirics. That is, we should weigh the costs and benefits of accepting or rejecting a 1st-person account, and we should inform this cost-benefit analysis with whether such a 1st-person account has been (or can be?) falsified and whether similar 1st-person accounts have been observed under similar circumstances. Think about the way many Objectivists react to skepticism about the evidence of sense perception (an example of a refusal to deal empirically with paradox run amok). Do I need to say much more?
Just in case, please note that when I offer arguments for utility, I do not mean to imply that Objectivists (or I) think that truth is that merely that which we find useful. However, I do think Objectivists (and everybody else, including me) should think that better theories are those that we find more useful. Oh, my approach to philosophy is not about nitpicking complex ideas like truth (unless of course, the person I'm taking to is arrogantly displaying his ignorance with the history of philosophy and parading his ignorance as wisdom). Like George Santayana, I believe that some questions in philosophy are best answered by not being raised.
I agree with what you wrote.
Cheers,
Laj.
(Edited by Abolaji Ogunshola on 6/14, 4:03pm)
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