casting a circle

Originally posted by apathist
Maybe you noticed that when my experience sort of leads me to a mystical or spiritual explanation, I then retreat into a psychological explanation. Or maybe enough of that didn't come out in this thread.

But the thing is that science has no viable explanation for the nature of or existence of subjective experience. That is a brute fact, lol.

I apolo ...[text shortened]... ated concepts, and definitions may help: what do you mean by psychological, spiritual, mystical?

science has no viable explanation for the nature of or existence of subjective experience. That is a brute fact, lol.

"...no viable explanation for the nature of ... subjective experience"

and

"...no viable explanation for the ... existence of subjective experience"

You make these two claims and both are false.

Not enough people appreciate that science, for all its stunning achievements, is not that old and has plenty of unsolved problems. I do not concede that science is futile unless and until it answers every last question in the universe. That is even less the case when people complain that science has no answer to questions that are poorly formulated, expressed in nonsense language, or that are by their very nature unsuitable for scientific debate (such as, say, questions of aesthetics).

In order for science to resolve a question about "the nature of subjective experience," we would first have to agree upon an accepted explanation of what this means. Experimental psychology has no difficulty working with subjective experience every day of the week. Nueroscience uses brain scans to examine what is happening in the brain and correlate this with "subjective exprience." What you imagine to be a "viable explanation" would very much depend on what it has to be viable for. Far from a shortage of explanations there is a plethora of them.

I suggest that before you even start to formulate a question for science to answer, you need to do some preparatory work in the realm of metaphysics and philosophy of mind in order to articulate just what your problem or your question even is. Waving around undefined and empty phrases does not amount to a substantial challenge for science to answer.

Psychological questions have been tackled and "explained" in some pretty rubbish ways over time, by scientists as much as any other group. Often, that reflects the limitiations of the methods adopted and the theories proposed. Other times it reflects misunderstandings about the matters under investigation. Different questions require different approaches and new ways of doing science keep emerging - you can expect that to continue. For example, a lot of early work was done in the context of medical practice, and was based on case histories, with all the limitations of that as a methodology. More recently, the possibilities of genetics, or the possibilities of neuroscience, have only been scratched and have huge scope for future discoveries. The reality is that there have been many different ways of doing science and investigating psychology. Some have been more productive than others.

All the time, too, behind the mechanics of science, there has been the persistence of philosophical questions and failing to address them properly often reduces science to dust. Today we get people making claims about a "gene for this" or a "gene for that" and they make the same errors as were made a century ago by people claiming there was an "instinct for this" or an "instinct for that." The words are often empty. It has taken time - and a lot of vicious argument - to establish the boundaries for what is even possible. Over and over again, psychology drifts off into politics, religion and ideology. There are things we want to believe, things we refuse to believe, and we are not always willing to allow "scientists" to be the self-appointed arbiters. When was the last time education policy in the UK or America was based on anything resembling scientific evidence and how much of that has been exposed as pseudo science?

Some scientific discoveries give the impression of being born fuly formed but the reality is typically that science is the product of effort over many years - even decades - and by a great many people, often working in quite separate fields before a link is noticed and explored.

A student entering university today can be confident that there are plenty of challenging problems waiting for fresh minds to open original lines of enquiry.

The fact that science has yet to answer so many questions is not evidence of its failings. Anyone thinking that is dull. The fact that many current scientific opinions are destined to be discarded does not make science less effective than - well, than what alternatives to science do you have in mind?

Originally posted by finnegan

science has no viable explanation for the nature of or existence of subjective experience. That is a brute fact, lol.

"...no viable explanation for the nature of ... subjective experience"

and

"...no viable explanation for the ... existence of subjective experience"

You make these two claims and both are false.

Not enough peo ...[text shortened]... make science less effective than - well, than what alternatives to science do you have in mind?

Over in the absurdism thread Lemonjello made a good post which also addressed this issue. There seems to be a notion that understanding how the brain works in some way takes away something from activities such as thinking. The possibility that subjective experience could be objectively explained is perceived as somehow subtracting something from subjective experience. As if consciousness being explainable would render us all philosophical zombies. So, yes, I think apathist's "brute fact" isn't a brute fact and I'd dispute that it's a fact at all.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Over in the absurdism thread Lemonjello made a good post which also addressed this issue. There seems to be a notion that understanding how the brain works in some way takes away something from activities such as thinking. The possibility that subjective experience could be objectively explained is perceived as somehow subtracting something from subjec ...[text shortened]... yes, I think apathist's "brute fact" isn't a brute fact and I'd dispute that it's a fact at all.

Thanks for the link. I only tend to look into a few of the many threads these days. I was reading through some of the 310 (and rising) posts on that absurdism thread and started to feel bad that I had been unfair to Lemonjello in this thread. Then I looked back through this (mercifully shorter) thread and realised that Lemonjello does not even feature here and I was being typically unfair to quite different people.

Whether an explanation adds to or detracts from subjective experience rather depends on the explanation.

A lot of people do feel threatened by the suggestion that their thoughts could be examined and explained objectively. It is one of the obstacles confronting psychotherapists. Potential clients - or their partners - fear that they may be changed in important ways. A lot of interesting issues can arise from this starting point. I think change is a reasonable objective for therapy.

Originally posted by apathist
Paganism is very eclectic. Just sharing my view here. The idea of the circle is that sanctuary is mental, the chalk or salt is by choice, all that's needed is determine your purpose and create a safe place to focus on that purpose for a while and then handle what comes next. Maybe an example:

I deal with anxiety. You worry too much, dad. Heard that alot. ...[text shortened]... eady i guess without the drama.

"I can do this". Tell me you've never said that to yourself.

Not to call anyone out, by any means, but I find myself intensely curious as to the folks behind the three thumbs southward leaning.
No one in the thread has chimed in with any overt dissent, which makes me wonder: why?
I thought your post honest.
Vulnerable, even.
What's not to like therein?

originally posted by finnegan
I do not concede that science is futile unless and until it answers every last question in the universe.
I said that science has no viable explanation for the nature of or existence of subjective experience. I didn't imply that science is futile.

That is even less the case when people complain that science has no answer to questions that are poorly formulated, expressed in nonsense language, or that are by their very nature unsuitable for scientific debate (such as, say, questions of aesthetics).
I agree. Here you confirm that subjective issues are difficult for science to address. We're talking about subjective experience itself - hard to find a more subjective issue!

Experimental psychology and neuroscience (when it includes psychology) both presume the existence of subjective experience. They do not operate with a scientific theory that allows them to demonstrate that the subjective experience (SE) exists in the first place! Because no such theory exists.

The correlation between brain activity and SE was discovered by first presuming the existence of SE and does not provide any explanation for the existence of it, or any method for detecting whether it exists. We don't even know whether it is the neuron activity itself, or the function of some inner-brain organs, or both or neither which is sufficient to produce the potential for SE.

I suggest that before you even start to formulate a question for science to answer, you need to do some preparatory work in the realm of metaphysics and philosophy of mind in order to articulate just what your problem or your question even is. Waving around undefined and empty phrases does not amount to a substantial challenge for science to answer.
You're just waving your arms around here. Typical reaction when one doesn't like a brute fact. Like a pesky gnat, innit?

Mankind, philosophy and science have struggled with this issue for a long time. I didn't invent the problem.

I guess your position is that, for example, Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness' is vacuous. But the problem he tries to elucidate is very real.

For examples. The cerebellum isn't associated with SE, unlike the cerebral cortex. Why is that? (Guess which one contains more neurons, btw).
How can we scientifically demonstrate that an ant has SE? How about the entire ant colony, or an individual neuron? Or my favorite, an ecosystem like earth with magnitudes more interconnected neurons than a human brain, lol. Or an AI machine. The hard problem exists, we do not have a solution, and that is the brute fact. There is a profound mystery here.

The fact that science has yet to answer so many questions is not evidence of its failings. Anyone thinking that is dull. The fact that many current scientific opinions are destined to be discarded does not make science less effective than - well, than what alternatives to science do you have in mind?
I did not harsh on science.

The 'alternative' is for science to continue growing past the reliance on reductionism and determinism.

The death of behaviorism and rise of cognitive psychology, for example, show that often science can make progress against difficult problems by using holistic (and probabilistic) methodology.

Btw, I like Baars' Global Workspace Theory. It doesn't directly address the hard problem, though.