18 ideas
| 6855 | Interesting philosophers hardly every give you explicitly valid arguments [Martin,M] |
| Full Idea: Notice that very few philosophers - certainly almost none of the ones who are interesting to read - give you explicitly valid arguments. | |
| From: Michael Martin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.134) | |
| A reaction: I never thought that was going to happen in philosophy. What I do get is, firstly, lots of interesting reasons for holding beliefs, and a conviction that good beliefs need good reasons, and, secondly, a really coherent view of the world. |
| 6856 | Valid arguments can be rejected by challenging the premises or presuppositions [Martin,M] |
| Full Idea: Putting forward a valid argument isn't necessarily going to succeed in getting someone to see things your way, because if they don't accept the conclusion, they ask which premises they should reject, or whether an illegitimate assumption is being made. | |
| From: Michael Martin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.136) | |
| A reaction: Valid arguments are still vital. It is just that good philosophers realise the problem noted here, and spend huge stretches of discussion on establishing acceptance of premises, and showing that there are no dodgy presuppositions. |
| 5791 | Reduction is either by elimination, or by explanation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: One sense of 'reduction' is eliminative, in getting rid of a phenomenon by showing that it is really something else (as the earth's rotation eliminates 'sunsets'), but another sense does not get rid of it (as in the explanation of solidity by molecules). | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: These are bad analogies. You can't 'eliminate' a sunset - you just accept that the event is relative to a viewpoint. If we are discussing ontology, we will not admit the existence of sunsets, but we won't have an ontological category of 'solidity' either. |
| 5799 | Eliminative reduction needs a gap between appearance and reality, as in sunsets [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Eliminative reductions require a distinction between reality and appearance; for example, the sun appears to set but the reality is that the earth rotates. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl 2.10) | |
| A reaction: A bad analogy. You don't 'eliminate' sunsets. It is just 'Galilean' relativity - you thought it was your train moving, then you discover it was the other one. You don't eliminate hallucinations when you show that they don't correspond to reality. |
| 5790 | A property is 'emergent' if it is caused by elements of a system, when the elements lack the property [Searle] |
| Full Idea: An emergent property of a system is causally explained by elements of the system, but it is not a property of the elements, and cannot be explained by a summation of their properties. The behaviour of H2O explains liquidity, but molecules aren't liquid. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: The genie is 'emergent' from the lamp, and so (in Searle's meaning) is the lamp's solidity. I agree that the mind is 'emergent' in Searle's very weak sense, if that only means that one neuron can't be conscious, but lots together can. |
| 6857 | An error theory of perception says our experience is not as it seems to be [Martin,M] |
| Full Idea: You can end up with an error theory of perception, which says our experience is not as it seems to be, as bizarre as that might be. | |
| From: Michael Martin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.140) | |
| A reaction: This is because of the clash between subjective and objective aspects of perception. It is an enticing proposal, just the sort of thing I pay philosophers to come up with. Given oddities like blindsight, I think it should be taken seriously. |
| 5792 | Explanation of how we unify our mental stimuli into a single experience is the 'binding problem' [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The 'binding problem' is how to explain how the brain binds all our different stimuli into a single unified experience of an object. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This may be the best way of expressing what philosophers call (after Chalmers) the 'Hard Question'. Large objects are held together by gravity, and small objects by electro-magnetism. We don't see a 'binding problem' in the function of a leaf. |
| 5786 | A system is either conscious or it isn't, though the intensity varies a lot [Searle] |
| Full Idea: A system is either conscious or it isn't, but within the field of consciousness there are states of intensity ranging from drowsiness to full awareness. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I think this all-or-nothing view is the last vestiges of Cartesian dualism, and is quite wrong. Heaps of neuroscience (about blindsight, subliminal awareness, neurosis etc.) says we will never understand the mind if we think it is only the conscious part. |
| 5794 | Consciousness has a first-person ontology, which only exists from a subjective viewpoint [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology, by which I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.5 App) | |
| A reaction: I think this is nonsense, and I don't think Searle believes it. He ruthlessly attacks so-called 'eliminativists', but the definition he gives here would make him an eliminativist about other minds. There is no such thing as 'first-person' ontology. |
| 5795 | There isn't one consciousness (information-processing) which can be investigated, and another (phenomenal) which can't [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There are not two kinds of consciousness, an information-processing consciousness that is amenable to scientific investigation and a phenomenal, what-it-subjectively-feels-like form of consciousness that will forever remain mysterious. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl.1) | |
| A reaction: Fodor appears to be the main target of this remark. The view that we can explain intentionality but not qualia is currently very fashionable. I am sympathetic to Searle here. Consciousness isn't an epiphenomenon, it is essential to all thought. |
| 5788 | The use of 'qualia' seems to imply that consciousness and qualia are separate [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I am hesitant to use the word 'quale/qualia', because it gives the impression that there are two separate phenomena, consciousness and qualia. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: He is trying to resist going back to 'sense-data', sitting uneasily between reality and our experience of it. Personally I am quite happy with qualia as an aspect of consciousness - just as I am happy with consciousness as an 'aspect' of brain. |
| 5789 | I now think syntax is not in the physics, but in the eye of the beholder [Searle] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me now that syntax is not intrinsic to the physics of the system, but is in the eye of the beholder. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, in that whether strung beads are a toy or an abacus depends on the user. It doesn't follow that the 'beholder' stands outside the physics. A beholder is another physical system, of a particular type of high complexity. |
| 5798 | Consciousness has a first-person ontology, so it cannot be reduced without omitting something [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology. If you try to reduce or eliminate one in favour of the other you leave something out. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl 2.10) | |
| A reaction: Misconceived. There is no such thing as 'first-person' ontology, though there are subjective viewpoints, but then a camera has a viewpoint which is lost if you eliminate it. If consciousness is physical events, that leaves viewpoints untouched. |
| 5787 | There is non-event causation between mind and brain, as between a table and its solidity [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The solidity of a table is explained causally by the behaviour of the molecules of which it is composed, but the solidity is not an extra event, it is just a feature of the table. This non-event causation models the relationship of mind and brain. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: He calls it 'non-event' causation, while referring to the 'behaviour of molecules'. Ask a physicist what a 'feature' is. Better to think of it as one process 'emerging' as another process at the macro-level. |
| 5797 | The pattern of molecules in the sea is much more complex than the complexity of brain neurons [Searle] |
| Full Idea: The pattern of molecules in the ocean is vastly more complex than any pattern of neurons in my brain. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl 2.6) | |
| A reaction: A nice warning for anyone foolish enough to pin their explanatory hopes simply on 'complexity', but we would not be so foolish. A subtler account of complexity (e.g. by Edelman and Tononi) might make brains much more complex than oceans. |
| 5796 | If tree rings contain information about age, then age contains information about rings [Searle] |
| Full Idea: You could say that tree-rings contain information about the age of a tree, but you could as well say that the age of a tree in years contains information about the number of rings in a tree stump. ..'Information' is not a real causal feature of the world. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl 2.5) | |
| A reaction: A nice point for fans of 'information' to ponder. However, you cannot deny the causal connection between the age and the rings. Information has a subjective aspect, but you cannot, for example, eliminate the role of DNA in making organisms. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |