It seems to me that I don't just have the intuition that I'm consciousness but the direct acquaintance with that fact. You can't be mistaken about the things you're directly acquainted with. That's why I think the existence of consciousness is even more obvious than, for example, moral realism.
"What Keith and Daniel Dennett press on me most often is that I’m trusting my ‘intuitions,’ which is supposed to be a problem."
TBH, after about 11 years in school for philosophy, I still don't quite know what an "intuition" is! My best sense of how we use the term comes from Dennett's _Intuition Pumps_ as a kind of considered gut reaction to a thought experiment. But, it seems unfair on the part of the illusionist or, at least, I think it mischaracterizes the realist's position. I prefer your language that our inner experience (especially our direct phenomenal concepts) is a datum, though I understand why Frankish and Dennett wouldn't use that language.
Perhaps the realist's higher-level belief that introspection presents us with reliable access to our mental life could be considered an intuition, but it's no crime (philosophical or otherwise) to be an intuition. But, I'm not aware of any serious arguments against materialism of the form "it's intuitive that p, if p then ~materialism, thus not materialism." I have, however, sometimes felt that some serious materialist philosophers flirt with arguments of the form "p is merely an intuition in support of some position, so ~p." But, perhaps that's unfair.
I think there's a much more straightforward debunking of illusionism. It's just a classic case of assuming what is to be demonstrated. It can't be reduced to a question of "being tricked into thinking" or "feeling" something, whether "representations" or anything else, as these very notions are themselves inherently mentalistic from the outset. If they weren't, they would be ruthlessly eliminated from materialistic explanation more comprehensively than the grin of the Cheshire Cat and cashed out, purely and without residue, as impersonal physical processes (not "information", mark you, a similarly illegitimate attempt to smuggle the non-physical into materialism).
You can't have it both ways. If the elements of the non-physical aren't in your supposedly fundamental ontology you can't then legitimately magic them up as part of your "proof" that they don't exist! To put it simply, according to materialism, properly analysed, you don't "think" at all. Consequently it's somewhat self-contradicting to argue that it's your thinking that's the root of the problem! But blithely assuming what is to be demonstrated in this way is a hallmark of the metaphysical grand larceny inherent in strict materialism.
Materialism is a position that is committed to a strictly physical account of reality, an account which could of course be internally self-consistent did it not subsequently attempt to appeal to strongly emergent subjective artifacts, which are neither implied by, nor available to support, a supposedly closed and complete account of purely physical evolution. But could such a constrained, impersonal view plausibly stand as a complete account of subjective reality? In judging that for yourself, you refute it thus.
Of course if you start by assuming that "(consciousness) can't be reduced to a question of "being tricked into thinking" or "feeling" something, whether "representations" or anything else, as these very notions are themselves inherently mentalistic from the outset" then illusionism will be self-defeating, assuming you mean "mentalistic" to refer to something non-physical.
No one would argue otherwise, but obviously the illusionists will want to deny this key premise of yours. To the illusionist, terms like "feeling" or "thinking" are defined in purely functional terms, which themselves are reducible to physical processes. So there's no self-contradiction there.
This isn't actually all that controversial. Many (not all) non-physicalists like David Chalmers think that it is coherent to suppose that cognition and thought is an entirely physical process, distinct from the phenomenal. Indeed, that's a key premise that Chalmers assumes in his argument for organizational invariance (https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html).
Lastly, while non-physicalists do think that there is a phenomenal dimension to feelings and other mental states that isn't captured by functional vocabulary, most philosophers agree that mental vocabulary (e.g. I'm in pain) still has an important functional component. If so, then it's totally legitimate for illusionists to use such language, provided that they are clear that they are only utilizing the functional aspect. And if you read most illusionists, they are perfectly clear on that point.
@Alex I think you're missing my key point, which is precisely that the explanation that feeling or thinking can be "defined" in purely functional terms is strictly unavailable to illusionism, at least in physicalist guise, since on physicalism the reduced substrate is *all there is*. Consequently any appeal to what such a substrate might instantiate beyond its primary elements and their fundamental relations is already, literally, an appeal to the metaphysical.
To put it more baldly, any appeal to putatively "emergent" phenomena is inherently metaphysical. Take the oft-quoted wetness of water, for example. Do we suppose that the behaviour of water depends on anything beyond the primary relations of its constituents? Not on any account of physicalism that excludes a form of strong emergence unevidenced by either theory or experiment. So, properly considered, is any manifestation of "weak" emergence other than a mentalistic phenomenon? Water feels wet precisely because *we feel*, not because its substrate is inherently "wet".
Similarly, relations between physical elements are functional because that's an aspect of how they appear to us, not because there is anything definitionally or ontologically "functional" in their physical dispositions. Consequently, any appeal to function as the source of the state in which function makes its first appearance is a classic of literally unsupported, indeed circular, argumentation.
"Similarly, relations between physical elements are functional because that's an aspect of how they appear to us," Yes.
Every philosopher of mind might be asked to write an essay: "What is it Like to be a Scientist?". Scientists share observations and use measurements to make those observations ever more accurate.
Observation is placing data in our phenomenal space and time. It is always contextual so the oxygen around trees has different relations from the oxygen surrounding a supernova. If we do not place data in our phenomenal space and time all we have is bits.
Declaring the Experience that contains our observation to be nothing is probably the least scientific position possible. Human science is shared observation.
The key issue in consciousness studies is "What is it like to be a Human"? What is phenomenal space and time like?
"I think you're missing my key point, which is precisely that the explanation that feeling or thinking can be "defined" in purely functional terms is strictly unavailable to illusionism, at least in physicalist guise, since on physicalism the reduced substrate is *all there is*."
Okay so it sounds like you're denying the assertion that functional facts about consciousness can in principle be physically reducible, even if you (presumably) accept that mental vocabulary has both a functional and phenomenal component? Is that correct?
If so, I'm not getting the argument here. Presumably the illusionist wants to say that the emergent functional property of say, pain, is physically reducible to complex micro-brain states, in the same way that wetness is physically reducible to micro-physical facts about aggregates of water molecules. Your analogy to water just presupposes that the functionalist is committed to a stronger kind of emergence, but why would they be?
Indeed it seems exceptionally plausible to me that certain functional aspects of pain (like making people recoil from the source of the pain) are purely explicable in physical terms, so I'm not seeing the hiccup here, sorry.
Edit: "So, properly considered, is any manifestation of "weak" emergence other than a mentalistic phenomenon? Water feels wet precisely because *we feel*, not because its substrate is inherently "wet""
Okay I think I understand better what you're saying now, you're not saying that functional facts in particular are an instance of strong emergence, but moreso that every kind of emergence is really a kind of extra-physical strong emergence. I think this may just be a case of terminological issue though. When scientists speak of emergent phenomena like wetness, I don't think they're talking about the "feeling" of wetness at all, but merely certain macro-properties of water. For example, the property of being able to saturate certain substances, or the property of exhibiting surface tension etc... and presumably we agree that such things are reducible and explainable in terms of lower-level physical processes (e.g. van der Waals forces).
Alex, no, I'm neither denying that functional facts are physically reducible, nor am I asserting that they are a case of strong emergence. To be clear, the latter would have to be the appearance of entirely novel physical laws, not in principle reducible to the interaction of supposedly more fundamental ones. The macro-properties of water are consequently not a case in point: they are novel only in the sense of their *unpredictability* from fundamental laws. Clearly, neither theory nor practice argue for their *physical* irreducibility to the underlying micro-physics. Consequently they are examples of *weak* emergence, which is to say they may be *explanatorily* irreducible, but nonetheless still physically reducible in principle. This is the crucial distinction I'm seeking to make.
If functional properties are novel only in the above, weak, sense, than nothing substantive has actually "emerged" in a physical system in virtue merely of our considering it under some "functional" description. How then can we coherently assert that consciousness "emerges" from function if that functional ascription is itself merely an aspect of our experience? Note that the *behaviour* of the physical system implementing a given functional schema has no causal dependency on that schema: this one-way dependency is the mark of the weak relation.
For the above reasons, I would consider functional accounts of consciousness - *on physicalism* - to be frank denialism. Even "illusion" wouldn't seem to be able to gain any purchase in the absence of genuinely novel physical phenomena. Note here that I am taking a particularly strict stance on physicalism: not merely that every macro phenomenon be physically reducible to fundamental entities and relations, but that such macro phenomena are understood as being only weakly emergent in the sense I set out above. Consequently, any claim that an example of such weak emergence, itself merely experientially differentiated from the fundamental properties of its physical substrate, be the origin of that very experience, is entirely without substance.
I'm skeptical of your second illusion claim and your supporting criterion that representations of edenic qualities still have to be reduced to physical quantities in order for such representations to be explained (found in your reply to Keith). Why does the representationalist have to accept this reductionist criterion? They aren't arguing that a physical state having a representations of properties X, somehow means that X has to be in the physical state, only that it is in the representation. Here's Dretske on this issue, " In hallucin-ating pink rats we are aware of something-the properties, pink and rat-shaped that something is represented as having-but we are not aware of any object that has these properties-a pink, rat-shaped, object. We are aware of pure universals, uninstantiated properties." (p.73) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3050525
Michael Tye also makes very similar claims. So representationalists are already committed to some kind of metaphysical relation (the awareness relation) to universals. Why not then simply say that (mis)representing phenomenal state Y consists of having a relation to the universal phenomenal property that would be instantiated by state Y? I don't see anywhere the need for the criterion that the phenomenal property has to be capable of physically existing. Presumably universals also include properties that only exist in possible worlds.
PP.S. If on the other hand you mean to say that on physicalism representational capacities still have to be physically explained, then I'm liable to think that's probably false. Physicalism is just the thesis that physical ontology is all there is (namely that phenomenal properties are never instantiated). But that doesn't commit you to the thesis that physical science has to explain representational capacities, or to the need to explain when and how brain states enter mysterious relations to abstract (non-existent) entities.
Did you read my argument for this in my reply to Keith? yes, I agree we don't need to instantiate a property to represent it. I also agree if you have Papineau-style physicalism, and so you didn't think there need to be explanatory connections between physical and phenomenal properties, then you're not going to think there need to be explanatory connections between physical and representational properties. But illusionists like Keith tend to agree with anti-materialists like me that you do need such explanatory connections. And I think to get those explanatory connections, you'd have to be able to characterise the qualities in the vocab of physical science.
Thanks Philip. I read your reply but was missing that context with the explanatory connections. I agree with you; if descriptions of qualities aren't reducible to physical vocabulary, then it would seem that we have to conclude that we don't have a physical explanation of what such a representational property is. And this (descriptive reducibility) seems to be the key difference between why we can represent most physically impossible things, but not edenic qualities.
If physicalism is indeed the thesis that physical ontology is "all there is", in what remaining sense does this fail to commit equally to the view that physical science has to explain "representational capacities"? It would surely follow that the latter must be restricted to some configuration of the explanatory elements of the former, since we have already conceded that this is "all there is". Any other conclusion is surely not "super weird", but merely inconsistent.
I have no strong opinions on this, but I think that physicalism commits you to the thesis that our conscious experience is physically reducible, and not necessarily to the thesis that all experiential or representational truths are describable in physical terms. So a complete description of the physical ontology might leave out a description of a representational truth (a metaphysical truth) but nevertheless fully describe what a representational state is as an ontological entity (a brain state). In other words, I think it’s coherent to argue that physical ontology is all there is, but that there are more facts than just the physical facts. There are also logical, mathematical, and metaphysical facts, the latter of which describe relations to (non-instantiated) properties. Of course we would still have to maintain that the metaphysical facts about representation supervene on the physical facts for this to work however.
This picture gets considerably more complicated when we ask what universals are, whether they really do exist in some extra-physical sense, and if they don’t-whether it makes sense to say that non-existent stuff can participate in relations. But I don’t see any incoherence here on the surface level.
@Alex It may well be coherent to argue that there are more facts than just the physical facts but it is, in consequence, inconsistent to hold simultaneously that a physical ontology is "all there is". Logical, mathematical and metaphysical facts must be physically instantiable, at least in order to be epistemically available, but they can only be *reduced* to the physical at the considerable cost of immediately disappearing from view. The unrecognised elephant that always seems to linger in the physicalist room is the simultaneous and apparently unavoidable reach for the non-physical in some form, for example, the appeal to "information" or "computation" in putatively physicalist accounts. But neither of these is itself reducible without residue to the physical, although necessarily physically *instantiable* in some form. This is surely a crucial distinction. The "program" in your computer is as elusive as the "mind" in your brain although you will doubtless find a form of instantiation in either. Indeed the very notion of explanation itself is manifestly non-physical, since ex hypothesi the factual evolution of physical states must be independent of any explanation proffered thereof.
As to whether it makes sense to say that non-existent stuff can participate in relations, I must say that unless I misunderstand you, I've rarely encountered anything that appears to make less sense. If an ontology is meant to catalogue what can and does exist, it is simply nonsense, on physicalism, to base any inference therefrom on what has been categorically excluded at the outset. Not even wrong, as the saying goes. Any coherent ontology must legitimately encompass *both* a necessary and unavoidable physical reduction *and* its equally unavoidable and irreducible residue. I don't find that physicalism, at least as typically presented, fulfills these criteria without blatant self-contradiction.
To be clear, I was responding to Goff's assertion that the illusionist is committed to his second illusion claim. I argued that there may be a form of representationalism which is compatible with:
1. physicalism
2. the denial of the second illusion claim
3. the claim that qualitative properties cannot be physical.
I wasn't saying that any representationalist actually buys into this brand of physicalism, only that they might as well given that they are already committed to a bunch of metaphysical weirdness. The above version of physicalism has the advantage for the representationalist of being consistent with the above three claims.
I don't advocate for this view however; indeed I find any metaphysical weirdness unpalatable. Personally, I think the way to avoid this trilemma is to deny Goff's claim 3, but that's a long and complicated story which I don't have the space to get into in this comment chain.
Now I certainly agree that there is tension in the above hypothetical viewpoint that I talked about, but I'm not seeing the incoherency. The representationalist is already committed to an appearance/reality gap, so that means they are presumably comfortable with the notion that there can be true propositions about the appearance of things which aren't true about the ontological reality.
As a physicalist, I think you have to accept that all the facts about consciousness are entailed by the physical facts, but not necessarily that all the facts about conscious are actually captured in the list of all the physical facts. So your complaints seem to be more directed at the representationalists' belief in the appearance/reality gap and their assumption that we can somehow be aware of experiential properties which are uninstantiated, as opposed to what I was saying.
Illusion means things are not as they appear to be. Consciousness is not the appearance of the universe to us but the fact that we experience things with our senses, and that replicates continuously, making it the closest thing to Truth and the furthest thing from illusion.
As for what consciousness is of - trivial realism; we evolved to sense the world more or less as it is bc that's most useful. Although we experience a filtered sub-set of the universe, it too replicates continuously under most conditions. There is predictable continuity between how thing x acts now and the next time we check it.
„Of course, there’s a huge debate here: some materialists think you can explain these qualities in the terms of physical science, a view I’ll explore in later posts.“
-> Would be very interested in this post😊 Is it out?
I still find this view bonkers and have yet to find my way to seeing how it is a genuine possibility. I still fail to see the illusion of illusionism. It may be a matter of language, with illusionists having a very different understanding of what an illusion is. To my way of understanding, without a conscious observer to experience it there is no illusion. I have even entertained the possibly that illusionists are 'functionally conscious' but not sentient; that they suffer from something analogous to 'blindsight'. Are you sure you give illusionism 5% credence Philip?
Gor me is evident that a complicated robot that behaved just like you and was physically exactly like you would have the same mental states as you when yoy would have mental states. Thinking the contrary is because you assume correlations between the brain and the mind are not necessary.
The argument doesn't refuses the materialism, instead, the possibility of such robot physically identical but mindless entail the possibility of the illusion of minds
Illusionism has its origins in Dennett and Kinsbourne's "Time and the observer: The where and when of consciousness in the brain" in which it states:
'What Goodman overlooks is the possibility that the brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction",for no one is looking.'
Neurophysiological measurements have since shown that the brain does indeed do the "filling in". The implication from Dennett is that this proves someone is looking. :)
I agree, and also, an illusion is something that "deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality", and would we say that this is true of consciousness? That doesn't seem right. Sure, consciousness is a certain representation of reality that is true to us, so that certain frequencies show up as certain colours (or, lower frequencies of movement in air to certain notes). But that's what consciousness is, and it does give us some view of reality.
If I hallucinate, and see a knife before me that I cut myself on, that knife is an illusion if the knife isn't really there and doesn't hurt me. So, even though consciousness can trick us, it doesn't trick us all the time. The word "illusion" that some philosophers use on consciousness and free will is just a bad choice of words.
It seems unlikely that evolution would have favoured a complex phenomenon such as consciousness if all it did was to trick us. Quite the contrary, it was consciousness that made it possible for us to construct pretty intricate models of the world around us, and of the inner worlds of the people we meet and interact with.
The question I bring to it – not your point, but the one I get stuck on – is: from what perspective is consciousness the ‘hard’ problem?
If you are playing rock paper scissors, and you ask yourself what the best play is, the answer is that it all depends on what your opponent plays, and what is best for your opponent depends on what you play, and so on. Asking what best play would be therefore has a self-reference in it, so there can’t be a right answer. Isn’t the problem of consciousness a bit like this? Treating something as a problem to be answered presupposes that you are looking at it from the outside. But it is your consciousness that is looking at your consciousness. (Hence the popularity of that elitism where other people’s minds are determined but I’m making rational judgements.) I find myself asking: if I had a fully adequate rational account of my own consciousness, how would that affect the way I think?
Not totally sure I get your point Jonathan. I think consciousness is something that objectively exists and so we need an account of how it fits into reality more generally, either one that takes it to be fundamental or one that reduces it to something else.
Philip, surely consciousness is the paradigm of the thing that precisely *does not* objectively exist? Search for it as you will in the "objective" account and you will fail to find any trace whatsoever. It is rather the uniquely subjective perspective in terms of which any purportedly objective account is manifest. In that perspective we can imagine a purely objective account of reality precisely because we can "imagine" in the first place, but this faculty cannot in itself legitimately count as evidence for the conjuring of the latter from the former, where it is so self-evidently absent and, shall we say, surplus to requirements. So why torture physicalism to yield up what it has no need of? There are only two consistent conclusions: a) accept that we have been hunting for a snark and that physicalism is closed, complete and void of consciousness, or b) physicalism is false. Since a) is manifestly bonkers, I would submit that b) is preferable.
"But all philosophical conviction is rooted in a decision to trust what seems most evident..." The history of science and mathematics is rife with examples of failed theories that were based on what seemed most evident... until the evidence changed. Newton's physics had forces acting instantaneously across distances. About the same time that Newton published his Principia, astronomy provided evidence that light traveled at a fixed speed, Maxwell developed his equations in the 1860's which had a fixed speed of propagation, then Einstein came along in 1905. Too, there's Quantum Mechanics. It requires concepts - such as negative probabilities - that are completely opposed to our intuitions. But we are forced to go there on the basis of the experimental evidence. So speculation based solely on intuition is just that: speculation.
Too, your position undermines itself. If consciousness is something that we experience for which we have the wrong explanation, then how do you determine which explanations are illusions and which are not? Maybe the "hard problem" is an illusion. Maybe the "problem" of qualia is the illusion. Maybe the reliability of your intuition is the illusion. You have no path forward.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the specific science examples. Einstein didn't dispute that light travels at a fixed speed. Rather his contribution was to understand what that implies for the rest of physics.
The crucial question is: Why should I trust my senses? My answer to that is rooted in an epistemological view that it's rational to trust what seems most evident, and thus we can trust the deliverances of the sense (without which science is impossible) because they are part of what seems most evidence. But certain intuitions then also get justified as part of what seems most evidence. So I think you need to give me some general epistemological theory which tells why it's okay to trust our senses but not okay to trust any intuitions.
To your first question, the point of the specific science examples is that they overturned intuition. To your second question, what you sense and the explanation of what you give for what you sense are two different things. Children and adults have the same sense impressions for pregnant women. But a child's intuition as to how the baby gets inside the mother, where it's located, and how it gets out is generally wrong. Adult intuition is rarely better. We have to verify our sense impressions by comparing them with other observers, both human and mechanical. We have to verify our explanations for what we sense by their ability to make accurate predictions, either by measuring what is predicted versus what is observed, or building something that works. The philosopher's penchant for showing something to be logically true usually forgets that logical truth is only relative to a system of axioms. The sum of the measures of the angles of a triangle is 180° is true only in Euclidean geometry. When a surface is curved, the sum of the angles is different. Any theory of consciousness has to work within a set of axioms that are congruent with reality - and reality doesn't tell us what its axioms are. That's why the philosopher has to measure or build something to get out of the realm of pure speculation.
With respect to your specific scientific examples, what intuition was overturned in those specific scientific examples? On the second point, you can verify your senses with other observers by using your senses (unless you're appealing to telepathy?), so it's a circular explanation. So you still haven't answered by question: Why is it okay to trust your senses?
Heavier things falling faster than lighter things. The Apollo 15 hammer-feather drop was one example of this. That the speed of light is the same for all observers in an inertial frame of reference is another. That mass curves space. That light does not need the medium of "the aether" to travel through. That what happens later in an experiment affects what happens earlier (the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment). That light goes through two slits when not observed, but one slit when observed. And so on...
I think you're confusing trusting your senses with trusting your explanation of what your senses are telling you. Anyone who watched Star Trek's TOS "The Menagerie" may question their explanations for what they sense. Someone who sees a mirage of an oasis in the desert is experiencing something, but it isn't what they hope it is. I have floaters in my eyes, so I see things that others don't. Fortunately, when I was much, much younger, my dad, being a doctor, gave me the correct explanation for what I was seeing. But, even now, sometimes I'll misrecognize a floater for an insect flying by my head. But even if I'm in a cage on Talos IV, I can drive a car to my desired location, drink a gin and tonic and get a calm buzz, eat a steak and assuage my hunger, turn a handle and open a door.
But your musings on consciousness are not like this. Yes, you experience consciousness. But your explanations for what you're experiencing lack rigor. You don't have anything to anchor your explanations. As one of many examples, the philosophical speculation around "Blind Mary" is completely rebutted by "Quantum Carol". (cf. https://twitter.com/stablecross/status/1618691223245717506).
I was asking what you were doing with you example of Einstein correcting Maxwell, and you have instead given different examples. Heavier objects falling faster is not a great example, as Galileo proved it to be false with a pure philosophical thought experiment, which demonstrated the false view was contradictory.
I'm not conflating crude with more careful uses of the sense. My question is what justifies *any* use of the senses in finding out about reality.
To your question, "what justifies any use of the senses in finding out about reality", the answer is "it's all we've got". On the one hand, my left eye can see 20/15 thanks to cataract surgery a few years ago. That sense is confirmed by measurement. On the other hand, in addition to the "floaters" previously mentioned, I have tinnitus, so my ear sensors aren't working properly. I also have idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, so the sensors in my feet aren't working properly. Fortunately, I can calibrate my sensors to know that I'm getting false readings. So, again, how do you calibrate your intuition about mental matters with the world?
The examples are all instances where intuition was overturned by experiment. If Maxwell's equations implied that the velocity of an electromagnetic wave was constant, Einstein showed that it was constant for all observers (in an inertial frame of reference). If you throw a baseball at 80 mph on a trail traveling at 100 mph, the ball will be seen to be moving at 180mph to an observer outside the train on the ground. If, instead of a baseball, you turn on a flashlight, the light won't be traveling at 100mph + c, but c - to both observers.
Galileo demonstrated that his "pure philosophical thought experiment" was correct by rolling balls down inclined planes. Murry Gell-Man's proposed eightfold way was shown to be correct by the discovery of new particles. Intuition isn't always right. It isn't always wrong.
So my question to you is, what justifies your intuition concerning matters mental? As just one of many, many examples, "Blind Mary" is shown to be wrong by experiment ("Blind Mary" is based on classical physics and the world isn't classical).
Your point that what you sense and the explanation you give for what you sense being two different things is precisely the point at issue. The problem is that no explanation whatsoever for what you sense can do the work of standing in place for the reality of *what you sense*. The latter is a primary given, whereas the former is wholly derivative on that primacy. There's no other way of dealing with this. Anything else we speculate as "explanation" (and don't fail to note the inescapably mentalistic assumption already inherent in this) must - cannot help but - be a derivative of a primarily subjective perspective. Hence it's the latter that cannot consistently be eliminated from any purportedly complete account of reality.
I don't think we're arguing the same thing. Yes, our intuition is something we sense. But two people can have the exact same external sensory input and yet come to different explanations for the sense data. One is collecting data points, the other is drawing the curve of "best fit" through the data. Neither are inherently reliable. The child who thinks a mommy eats a seed, grows a baby in her tummy, and eventually poops it out can repair their defective intuition with additional sense data. Assuming they don't let their intuition get in the way of the additional data. So how does the Phil Mind philosopher, who relies on intuition, deal with that inherent unreliability?
For example, the classic "Blind Mary" argument only works for classical physics. It does not survive quantum mechanics (because, in quantum mechanics, it is impossible to exactly know the future behavior of a physical system, which means the basis for the argument is wrong.) So, does one give up the "Blind Mary" argument, or say "quantum mechanics doesn't fit my intuition, therefore the appeal to quantum mechanics as a counter-argument is wrong?"
@wrf3 But surely the point at issue is not the veridicality of one or another intuition, but rather the existence of intuition tout court. An illusion, after all, is not a veridical experience, in the sense that it is misleading, but it is no less an *experience* for that. As for unreliability, of course that is our epistemic position, as has often been remarked, but we are all poor strugglers and must do the best we can. Nonetheless, our epistemic struggles are inescapably rooted in our primary (sensory) intuitions and consequently any putative explanation must encompass these without loss or be at best incomplete or at worst incoherent.
Surely, the point at issue is the veridicality of intuition. You may think you have the right explanation for how Penn & Teller performed an illusion; but if you watch them perform it multiple times from different angles, you just might realize your intuition was wrong.
It seems to me that I don't just have the intuition that I'm consciousness but the direct acquaintance with that fact. You can't be mistaken about the things you're directly acquainted with. That's why I think the existence of consciousness is even more obvious than, for example, moral realism.
"What Keith and Daniel Dennett press on me most often is that I’m trusting my ‘intuitions,’ which is supposed to be a problem."
TBH, after about 11 years in school for philosophy, I still don't quite know what an "intuition" is! My best sense of how we use the term comes from Dennett's _Intuition Pumps_ as a kind of considered gut reaction to a thought experiment. But, it seems unfair on the part of the illusionist or, at least, I think it mischaracterizes the realist's position. I prefer your language that our inner experience (especially our direct phenomenal concepts) is a datum, though I understand why Frankish and Dennett wouldn't use that language.
Perhaps the realist's higher-level belief that introspection presents us with reliable access to our mental life could be considered an intuition, but it's no crime (philosophical or otherwise) to be an intuition. But, I'm not aware of any serious arguments against materialism of the form "it's intuitive that p, if p then ~materialism, thus not materialism." I have, however, sometimes felt that some serious materialist philosophers flirt with arguments of the form "p is merely an intuition in support of some position, so ~p." But, perhaps that's unfair.
I think there's a much more straightforward debunking of illusionism. It's just a classic case of assuming what is to be demonstrated. It can't be reduced to a question of "being tricked into thinking" or "feeling" something, whether "representations" or anything else, as these very notions are themselves inherently mentalistic from the outset. If they weren't, they would be ruthlessly eliminated from materialistic explanation more comprehensively than the grin of the Cheshire Cat and cashed out, purely and without residue, as impersonal physical processes (not "information", mark you, a similarly illegitimate attempt to smuggle the non-physical into materialism).
You can't have it both ways. If the elements of the non-physical aren't in your supposedly fundamental ontology you can't then legitimately magic them up as part of your "proof" that they don't exist! To put it simply, according to materialism, properly analysed, you don't "think" at all. Consequently it's somewhat self-contradicting to argue that it's your thinking that's the root of the problem! But blithely assuming what is to be demonstrated in this way is a hallmark of the metaphysical grand larceny inherent in strict materialism.
Materialism is a position that is committed to a strictly physical account of reality, an account which could of course be internally self-consistent did it not subsequently attempt to appeal to strongly emergent subjective artifacts, which are neither implied by, nor available to support, a supposedly closed and complete account of purely physical evolution. But could such a constrained, impersonal view plausibly stand as a complete account of subjective reality? In judging that for yourself, you refute it thus.
David,
Of course if you start by assuming that "(consciousness) can't be reduced to a question of "being tricked into thinking" or "feeling" something, whether "representations" or anything else, as these very notions are themselves inherently mentalistic from the outset" then illusionism will be self-defeating, assuming you mean "mentalistic" to refer to something non-physical.
No one would argue otherwise, but obviously the illusionists will want to deny this key premise of yours. To the illusionist, terms like "feeling" or "thinking" are defined in purely functional terms, which themselves are reducible to physical processes. So there's no self-contradiction there.
This isn't actually all that controversial. Many (not all) non-physicalists like David Chalmers think that it is coherent to suppose that cognition and thought is an entirely physical process, distinct from the phenomenal. Indeed, that's a key premise that Chalmers assumes in his argument for organizational invariance (https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html).
Lastly, while non-physicalists do think that there is a phenomenal dimension to feelings and other mental states that isn't captured by functional vocabulary, most philosophers agree that mental vocabulary (e.g. I'm in pain) still has an important functional component. If so, then it's totally legitimate for illusionists to use such language, provided that they are clear that they are only utilizing the functional aspect. And if you read most illusionists, they are perfectly clear on that point.
@Alex I think you're missing my key point, which is precisely that the explanation that feeling or thinking can be "defined" in purely functional terms is strictly unavailable to illusionism, at least in physicalist guise, since on physicalism the reduced substrate is *all there is*. Consequently any appeal to what such a substrate might instantiate beyond its primary elements and their fundamental relations is already, literally, an appeal to the metaphysical.
To put it more baldly, any appeal to putatively "emergent" phenomena is inherently metaphysical. Take the oft-quoted wetness of water, for example. Do we suppose that the behaviour of water depends on anything beyond the primary relations of its constituents? Not on any account of physicalism that excludes a form of strong emergence unevidenced by either theory or experiment. So, properly considered, is any manifestation of "weak" emergence other than a mentalistic phenomenon? Water feels wet precisely because *we feel*, not because its substrate is inherently "wet".
Similarly, relations between physical elements are functional because that's an aspect of how they appear to us, not because there is anything definitionally or ontologically "functional" in their physical dispositions. Consequently, any appeal to function as the source of the state in which function makes its first appearance is a classic of literally unsupported, indeed circular, argumentation.
"Similarly, relations between physical elements are functional because that's an aspect of how they appear to us," Yes.
Every philosopher of mind might be asked to write an essay: "What is it Like to be a Scientist?". Scientists share observations and use measurements to make those observations ever more accurate.
Observation is placing data in our phenomenal space and time. It is always contextual so the oxygen around trees has different relations from the oxygen surrounding a supernova. If we do not place data in our phenomenal space and time all we have is bits.
Declaring the Experience that contains our observation to be nothing is probably the least scientific position possible. Human science is shared observation.
The key issue in consciousness studies is "What is it like to be a Human"? What is phenomenal space and time like?
See https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/our-reality for a full explanation.
"I think you're missing my key point, which is precisely that the explanation that feeling or thinking can be "defined" in purely functional terms is strictly unavailable to illusionism, at least in physicalist guise, since on physicalism the reduced substrate is *all there is*."
Okay so it sounds like you're denying the assertion that functional facts about consciousness can in principle be physically reducible, even if you (presumably) accept that mental vocabulary has both a functional and phenomenal component? Is that correct?
If so, I'm not getting the argument here. Presumably the illusionist wants to say that the emergent functional property of say, pain, is physically reducible to complex micro-brain states, in the same way that wetness is physically reducible to micro-physical facts about aggregates of water molecules. Your analogy to water just presupposes that the functionalist is committed to a stronger kind of emergence, but why would they be?
Indeed it seems exceptionally plausible to me that certain functional aspects of pain (like making people recoil from the source of the pain) are purely explicable in physical terms, so I'm not seeing the hiccup here, sorry.
Edit: "So, properly considered, is any manifestation of "weak" emergence other than a mentalistic phenomenon? Water feels wet precisely because *we feel*, not because its substrate is inherently "wet""
Okay I think I understand better what you're saying now, you're not saying that functional facts in particular are an instance of strong emergence, but moreso that every kind of emergence is really a kind of extra-physical strong emergence. I think this may just be a case of terminological issue though. When scientists speak of emergent phenomena like wetness, I don't think they're talking about the "feeling" of wetness at all, but merely certain macro-properties of water. For example, the property of being able to saturate certain substances, or the property of exhibiting surface tension etc... and presumably we agree that such things are reducible and explainable in terms of lower-level physical processes (e.g. van der Waals forces).
Alex, no, I'm neither denying that functional facts are physically reducible, nor am I asserting that they are a case of strong emergence. To be clear, the latter would have to be the appearance of entirely novel physical laws, not in principle reducible to the interaction of supposedly more fundamental ones. The macro-properties of water are consequently not a case in point: they are novel only in the sense of their *unpredictability* from fundamental laws. Clearly, neither theory nor practice argue for their *physical* irreducibility to the underlying micro-physics. Consequently they are examples of *weak* emergence, which is to say they may be *explanatorily* irreducible, but nonetheless still physically reducible in principle. This is the crucial distinction I'm seeking to make.
If functional properties are novel only in the above, weak, sense, than nothing substantive has actually "emerged" in a physical system in virtue merely of our considering it under some "functional" description. How then can we coherently assert that consciousness "emerges" from function if that functional ascription is itself merely an aspect of our experience? Note that the *behaviour* of the physical system implementing a given functional schema has no causal dependency on that schema: this one-way dependency is the mark of the weak relation.
For the above reasons, I would consider functional accounts of consciousness - *on physicalism* - to be frank denialism. Even "illusion" wouldn't seem to be able to gain any purchase in the absence of genuinely novel physical phenomena. Note here that I am taking a particularly strict stance on physicalism: not merely that every macro phenomenon be physically reducible to fundamental entities and relations, but that such macro phenomena are understood as being only weakly emergent in the sense I set out above. Consequently, any claim that an example of such weak emergence, itself merely experientially differentiated from the fundamental properties of its physical substrate, be the origin of that very experience, is entirely without substance.
Philip,
I'm skeptical of your second illusion claim and your supporting criterion that representations of edenic qualities still have to be reduced to physical quantities in order for such representations to be explained (found in your reply to Keith). Why does the representationalist have to accept this reductionist criterion? They aren't arguing that a physical state having a representations of properties X, somehow means that X has to be in the physical state, only that it is in the representation. Here's Dretske on this issue, " In hallucin-ating pink rats we are aware of something-the properties, pink and rat-shaped that something is represented as having-but we are not aware of any object that has these properties-a pink, rat-shaped, object. We are aware of pure universals, uninstantiated properties." (p.73) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3050525
Michael Tye also makes very similar claims. So representationalists are already committed to some kind of metaphysical relation (the awareness relation) to universals. Why not then simply say that (mis)representing phenomenal state Y consists of having a relation to the universal phenomenal property that would be instantiated by state Y? I don't see anywhere the need for the criterion that the phenomenal property has to be capable of physically existing. Presumably universals also include properties that only exist in possible worlds.
P.S. I'm not a representationalist
PP.S. If on the other hand you mean to say that on physicalism representational capacities still have to be physically explained, then I'm liable to think that's probably false. Physicalism is just the thesis that physical ontology is all there is (namely that phenomenal properties are never instantiated). But that doesn't commit you to the thesis that physical science has to explain representational capacities, or to the need to explain when and how brain states enter mysterious relations to abstract (non-existent) entities.
I agree that this is super weird, and its not the brand of physicalism I would endorse, but I think it's what they genuinely believe (see Papineau's critique: https://www.davidpapineau.co.uk/uploads/1/8/5/5/18551740/against_representationalism_about_conscious_sensory_experience.pdf for more details).
Did you read my argument for this in my reply to Keith? yes, I agree we don't need to instantiate a property to represent it. I also agree if you have Papineau-style physicalism, and so you didn't think there need to be explanatory connections between physical and phenomenal properties, then you're not going to think there need to be explanatory connections between physical and representational properties. But illusionists like Keith tend to agree with anti-materialists like me that you do need such explanatory connections. And I think to get those explanatory connections, you'd have to be able to characterise the qualities in the vocab of physical science.
Thanks Philip. I read your reply but was missing that context with the explanatory connections. I agree with you; if descriptions of qualities aren't reducible to physical vocabulary, then it would seem that we have to conclude that we don't have a physical explanation of what such a representational property is. And this (descriptive reducibility) seems to be the key difference between why we can represent most physically impossible things, but not edenic qualities.
If physicalism is indeed the thesis that physical ontology is "all there is", in what remaining sense does this fail to commit equally to the view that physical science has to explain "representational capacities"? It would surely follow that the latter must be restricted to some configuration of the explanatory elements of the former, since we have already conceded that this is "all there is". Any other conclusion is surely not "super weird", but merely inconsistent.
@David
I have no strong opinions on this, but I think that physicalism commits you to the thesis that our conscious experience is physically reducible, and not necessarily to the thesis that all experiential or representational truths are describable in physical terms. So a complete description of the physical ontology might leave out a description of a representational truth (a metaphysical truth) but nevertheless fully describe what a representational state is as an ontological entity (a brain state). In other words, I think it’s coherent to argue that physical ontology is all there is, but that there are more facts than just the physical facts. There are also logical, mathematical, and metaphysical facts, the latter of which describe relations to (non-instantiated) properties. Of course we would still have to maintain that the metaphysical facts about representation supervene on the physical facts for this to work however.
This picture gets considerably more complicated when we ask what universals are, whether they really do exist in some extra-physical sense, and if they don’t-whether it makes sense to say that non-existent stuff can participate in relations. But I don’t see any incoherence here on the surface level.
@Alex It may well be coherent to argue that there are more facts than just the physical facts but it is, in consequence, inconsistent to hold simultaneously that a physical ontology is "all there is". Logical, mathematical and metaphysical facts must be physically instantiable, at least in order to be epistemically available, but they can only be *reduced* to the physical at the considerable cost of immediately disappearing from view. The unrecognised elephant that always seems to linger in the physicalist room is the simultaneous and apparently unavoidable reach for the non-physical in some form, for example, the appeal to "information" or "computation" in putatively physicalist accounts. But neither of these is itself reducible without residue to the physical, although necessarily physically *instantiable* in some form. This is surely a crucial distinction. The "program" in your computer is as elusive as the "mind" in your brain although you will doubtless find a form of instantiation in either. Indeed the very notion of explanation itself is manifestly non-physical, since ex hypothesi the factual evolution of physical states must be independent of any explanation proffered thereof.
As to whether it makes sense to say that non-existent stuff can participate in relations, I must say that unless I misunderstand you, I've rarely encountered anything that appears to make less sense. If an ontology is meant to catalogue what can and does exist, it is simply nonsense, on physicalism, to base any inference therefrom on what has been categorically excluded at the outset. Not even wrong, as the saying goes. Any coherent ontology must legitimately encompass *both* a necessary and unavoidable physical reduction *and* its equally unavoidable and irreducible residue. I don't find that physicalism, at least as typically presented, fulfills these criteria without blatant self-contradiction.
To be clear, I was responding to Goff's assertion that the illusionist is committed to his second illusion claim. I argued that there may be a form of representationalism which is compatible with:
1. physicalism
2. the denial of the second illusion claim
3. the claim that qualitative properties cannot be physical.
I wasn't saying that any representationalist actually buys into this brand of physicalism, only that they might as well given that they are already committed to a bunch of metaphysical weirdness. The above version of physicalism has the advantage for the representationalist of being consistent with the above three claims.
I don't advocate for this view however; indeed I find any metaphysical weirdness unpalatable. Personally, I think the way to avoid this trilemma is to deny Goff's claim 3, but that's a long and complicated story which I don't have the space to get into in this comment chain.
Now I certainly agree that there is tension in the above hypothetical viewpoint that I talked about, but I'm not seeing the incoherency. The representationalist is already committed to an appearance/reality gap, so that means they are presumably comfortable with the notion that there can be true propositions about the appearance of things which aren't true about the ontological reality.
As a physicalist, I think you have to accept that all the facts about consciousness are entailed by the physical facts, but not necessarily that all the facts about conscious are actually captured in the list of all the physical facts. So your complaints seem to be more directed at the representationalists' belief in the appearance/reality gap and their assumption that we can somehow be aware of experiential properties which are uninstantiated, as opposed to what I was saying.
Illusion means things are not as they appear to be. Consciousness is not the appearance of the universe to us but the fact that we experience things with our senses, and that replicates continuously, making it the closest thing to Truth and the furthest thing from illusion.
As for what consciousness is of - trivial realism; we evolved to sense the world more or less as it is bc that's most useful. Although we experience a filtered sub-set of the universe, it too replicates continuously under most conditions. There is predictable continuity between how thing x acts now and the next time we check it.
„Of course, there’s a huge debate here: some materialists think you can explain these qualities in the terms of physical science, a view I’ll explore in later posts.“
-> Would be very interested in this post😊 Is it out?
I still find this view bonkers and have yet to find my way to seeing how it is a genuine possibility. I still fail to see the illusion of illusionism. It may be a matter of language, with illusionists having a very different understanding of what an illusion is. To my way of understanding, without a conscious observer to experience it there is no illusion. I have even entertained the possibly that illusionists are 'functionally conscious' but not sentient; that they suffer from something analogous to 'blindsight'. Are you sure you give illusionism 5% credence Philip?
Gor me is evident that a complicated robot that behaved just like you and was physically exactly like you would have the same mental states as you when yoy would have mental states. Thinking the contrary is because you assume correlations between the brain and the mind are not necessary.
The argument doesn't refuses the materialism, instead, the possibility of such robot physically identical but mindless entail the possibility of the illusion of minds
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Illusionism has its origins in Dennett and Kinsbourne's "Time and the observer: The where and when of consciousness in the brain" in which it states:
'What Goodman overlooks is the possibility that the brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction",for no one is looking.'
Neurophysiological measurements have since shown that the brain does indeed do the "filling in". The implication from Dennett is that this proves someone is looking. :)
Both the phi illusion (Muckli et al 2005 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030265, Larsen et al 2006 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16839290/) and the cutaneous rabbit illusion (Blankenburg et al 2006 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040069) are accompanied by the filling in of brain activity to represent the "illusory" motion.
The original base of Illusionism is gone. Why does it continue?
Although illusionist philosophy is a quite defensible proposition, it is deeply unsatisfying.
It lacks any explanatory power, or a way forward to explore.
I am a little puzzled by Goff saying he is not Materialist though.
Is not Panpsychism a wholly materialist philosophy?
( Perhaps the next post will explain )
I agree, and also, an illusion is something that "deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality", and would we say that this is true of consciousness? That doesn't seem right. Sure, consciousness is a certain representation of reality that is true to us, so that certain frequencies show up as certain colours (or, lower frequencies of movement in air to certain notes). But that's what consciousness is, and it does give us some view of reality.
If I hallucinate, and see a knife before me that I cut myself on, that knife is an illusion if the knife isn't really there and doesn't hurt me. So, even though consciousness can trick us, it doesn't trick us all the time. The word "illusion" that some philosophers use on consciousness and free will is just a bad choice of words.
It seems unlikely that evolution would have favoured a complex phenomenon such as consciousness if all it did was to trick us. Quite the contrary, it was consciousness that made it possible for us to construct pretty intricate models of the world around us, and of the inner worlds of the people we meet and interact with.
The question I bring to it – not your point, but the one I get stuck on – is: from what perspective is consciousness the ‘hard’ problem?
If you are playing rock paper scissors, and you ask yourself what the best play is, the answer is that it all depends on what your opponent plays, and what is best for your opponent depends on what you play, and so on. Asking what best play would be therefore has a self-reference in it, so there can’t be a right answer. Isn’t the problem of consciousness a bit like this? Treating something as a problem to be answered presupposes that you are looking at it from the outside. But it is your consciousness that is looking at your consciousness. (Hence the popularity of that elitism where other people’s minds are determined but I’m making rational judgements.) I find myself asking: if I had a fully adequate rational account of my own consciousness, how would that affect the way I think?
Not totally sure I get your point Jonathan. I think consciousness is something that objectively exists and so we need an account of how it fits into reality more generally, either one that takes it to be fundamental or one that reduces it to something else.
Philip, surely consciousness is the paradigm of the thing that precisely *does not* objectively exist? Search for it as you will in the "objective" account and you will fail to find any trace whatsoever. It is rather the uniquely subjective perspective in terms of which any purportedly objective account is manifest. In that perspective we can imagine a purely objective account of reality precisely because we can "imagine" in the first place, but this faculty cannot in itself legitimately count as evidence for the conjuring of the latter from the former, where it is so self-evidently absent and, shall we say, surplus to requirements. So why torture physicalism to yield up what it has no need of? There are only two consistent conclusions: a) accept that we have been hunting for a snark and that physicalism is closed, complete and void of consciousness, or b) physicalism is false. Since a) is manifestly bonkers, I would submit that b) is preferable.
"But all philosophical conviction is rooted in a decision to trust what seems most evident..." The history of science and mathematics is rife with examples of failed theories that were based on what seemed most evident... until the evidence changed. Newton's physics had forces acting instantaneously across distances. About the same time that Newton published his Principia, astronomy provided evidence that light traveled at a fixed speed, Maxwell developed his equations in the 1860's which had a fixed speed of propagation, then Einstein came along in 1905. Too, there's Quantum Mechanics. It requires concepts - such as negative probabilities - that are completely opposed to our intuitions. But we are forced to go there on the basis of the experimental evidence. So speculation based solely on intuition is just that: speculation.
Too, your position undermines itself. If consciousness is something that we experience for which we have the wrong explanation, then how do you determine which explanations are illusions and which are not? Maybe the "hard problem" is an illusion. Maybe the "problem" of qualia is the illusion. Maybe the reliability of your intuition is the illusion. You have no path forward.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the specific science examples. Einstein didn't dispute that light travels at a fixed speed. Rather his contribution was to understand what that implies for the rest of physics.
The crucial question is: Why should I trust my senses? My answer to that is rooted in an epistemological view that it's rational to trust what seems most evident, and thus we can trust the deliverances of the sense (without which science is impossible) because they are part of what seems most evidence. But certain intuitions then also get justified as part of what seems most evidence. So I think you need to give me some general epistemological theory which tells why it's okay to trust our senses but not okay to trust any intuitions.
To your first question, the point of the specific science examples is that they overturned intuition. To your second question, what you sense and the explanation of what you give for what you sense are two different things. Children and adults have the same sense impressions for pregnant women. But a child's intuition as to how the baby gets inside the mother, where it's located, and how it gets out is generally wrong. Adult intuition is rarely better. We have to verify our sense impressions by comparing them with other observers, both human and mechanical. We have to verify our explanations for what we sense by their ability to make accurate predictions, either by measuring what is predicted versus what is observed, or building something that works. The philosopher's penchant for showing something to be logically true usually forgets that logical truth is only relative to a system of axioms. The sum of the measures of the angles of a triangle is 180° is true only in Euclidean geometry. When a surface is curved, the sum of the angles is different. Any theory of consciousness has to work within a set of axioms that are congruent with reality - and reality doesn't tell us what its axioms are. That's why the philosopher has to measure or build something to get out of the realm of pure speculation.
With respect to your specific scientific examples, what intuition was overturned in those specific scientific examples? On the second point, you can verify your senses with other observers by using your senses (unless you're appealing to telepathy?), so it's a circular explanation. So you still haven't answered by question: Why is it okay to trust your senses?
Heavier things falling faster than lighter things. The Apollo 15 hammer-feather drop was one example of this. That the speed of light is the same for all observers in an inertial frame of reference is another. That mass curves space. That light does not need the medium of "the aether" to travel through. That what happens later in an experiment affects what happens earlier (the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment). That light goes through two slits when not observed, but one slit when observed. And so on...
I think you're confusing trusting your senses with trusting your explanation of what your senses are telling you. Anyone who watched Star Trek's TOS "The Menagerie" may question their explanations for what they sense. Someone who sees a mirage of an oasis in the desert is experiencing something, but it isn't what they hope it is. I have floaters in my eyes, so I see things that others don't. Fortunately, when I was much, much younger, my dad, being a doctor, gave me the correct explanation for what I was seeing. But, even now, sometimes I'll misrecognize a floater for an insect flying by my head. But even if I'm in a cage on Talos IV, I can drive a car to my desired location, drink a gin and tonic and get a calm buzz, eat a steak and assuage my hunger, turn a handle and open a door.
But your musings on consciousness are not like this. Yes, you experience consciousness. But your explanations for what you're experiencing lack rigor. You don't have anything to anchor your explanations. As one of many examples, the philosophical speculation around "Blind Mary" is completely rebutted by "Quantum Carol". (cf. https://twitter.com/stablecross/status/1618691223245717506).
I was asking what you were doing with you example of Einstein correcting Maxwell, and you have instead given different examples. Heavier objects falling faster is not a great example, as Galileo proved it to be false with a pure philosophical thought experiment, which demonstrated the false view was contradictory.
I'm not conflating crude with more careful uses of the sense. My question is what justifies *any* use of the senses in finding out about reality.
To your question, "what justifies any use of the senses in finding out about reality", the answer is "it's all we've got". On the one hand, my left eye can see 20/15 thanks to cataract surgery a few years ago. That sense is confirmed by measurement. On the other hand, in addition to the "floaters" previously mentioned, I have tinnitus, so my ear sensors aren't working properly. I also have idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, so the sensors in my feet aren't working properly. Fortunately, I can calibrate my sensors to know that I'm getting false readings. So, again, how do you calibrate your intuition about mental matters with the world?
The examples are all instances where intuition was overturned by experiment. If Maxwell's equations implied that the velocity of an electromagnetic wave was constant, Einstein showed that it was constant for all observers (in an inertial frame of reference). If you throw a baseball at 80 mph on a trail traveling at 100 mph, the ball will be seen to be moving at 180mph to an observer outside the train on the ground. If, instead of a baseball, you turn on a flashlight, the light won't be traveling at 100mph + c, but c - to both observers.
Galileo demonstrated that his "pure philosophical thought experiment" was correct by rolling balls down inclined planes. Murry Gell-Man's proposed eightfold way was shown to be correct by the discovery of new particles. Intuition isn't always right. It isn't always wrong.
So my question to you is, what justifies your intuition concerning matters mental? As just one of many, many examples, "Blind Mary" is shown to be wrong by experiment ("Blind Mary" is based on classical physics and the world isn't classical).
Your point that what you sense and the explanation you give for what you sense being two different things is precisely the point at issue. The problem is that no explanation whatsoever for what you sense can do the work of standing in place for the reality of *what you sense*. The latter is a primary given, whereas the former is wholly derivative on that primacy. There's no other way of dealing with this. Anything else we speculate as "explanation" (and don't fail to note the inescapably mentalistic assumption already inherent in this) must - cannot help but - be a derivative of a primarily subjective perspective. Hence it's the latter that cannot consistently be eliminated from any purportedly complete account of reality.
I don't think we're arguing the same thing. Yes, our intuition is something we sense. But two people can have the exact same external sensory input and yet come to different explanations for the sense data. One is collecting data points, the other is drawing the curve of "best fit" through the data. Neither are inherently reliable. The child who thinks a mommy eats a seed, grows a baby in her tummy, and eventually poops it out can repair their defective intuition with additional sense data. Assuming they don't let their intuition get in the way of the additional data. So how does the Phil Mind philosopher, who relies on intuition, deal with that inherent unreliability?
For example, the classic "Blind Mary" argument only works for classical physics. It does not survive quantum mechanics (because, in quantum mechanics, it is impossible to exactly know the future behavior of a physical system, which means the basis for the argument is wrong.) So, does one give up the "Blind Mary" argument, or say "quantum mechanics doesn't fit my intuition, therefore the appeal to quantum mechanics as a counter-argument is wrong?"
@wrf3 But surely the point at issue is not the veridicality of one or another intuition, but rather the existence of intuition tout court. An illusion, after all, is not a veridical experience, in the sense that it is misleading, but it is no less an *experience* for that. As for unreliability, of course that is our epistemic position, as has often been remarked, but we are all poor strugglers and must do the best we can. Nonetheless, our epistemic struggles are inescapably rooted in our primary (sensory) intuitions and consequently any putative explanation must encompass these without loss or be at best incomplete or at worst incoherent.
Surely, the point at issue is the veridicality of intuition. You may think you have the right explanation for how Penn & Teller performed an illusion; but if you watch them perform it multiple times from different angles, you just might realize your intuition was wrong.