Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> Why should we _want_ to "conceptualize the infinite"? Carrol
>
> ----------
>
> Well, let's see... It's very tempting to play with this kind of
> question, but I'll answer it seriously.
>
> Because the methodology (calculus) for conceptualizing the infinite is
> used to design, run, and theorize most of the industrial and
> post-industrial world.
Precisely, calculus _does_ conceptualize the infinite! Why shouldn't we be content with that conceptualization? Discontent with it just leads to an infinite regress of why questions. The activities you mention seem to be carried out quite successfully both by religious people and by secularists, atheists, etc.
Later Joanna wrote:
> "The question of God/Religion/Metaphysics" includes a ton of questions: for
> example, "What is the good?" "Is it possible to be good without also being
> free?" "Is there such thing as evil?" "Can we step out of our own
> conditioning?" "Is there intelligence without language?" "Is happiness
> nothing other than the satisfaction of material needs?" "What is the
> relationship between the finite and the infinite?" "What is the relationship
> between the one and the many?" "What is the relationship between life and
> death?" "What is consciousness?" These are all very, very important
> questions. The fact that these questions exist does not necessarily mean that
> they must also have answers. Let's say most of them are koans.
Now I agree with Miles as to most of these questions: Why ask them? (Except as leisure-time entertainment.) But at least one of them is a question that can be asked, and possibly answered, in scientific terms: What is Consciousness? Consider the following:
*******Much has recently been written about the subject of consciousness, thanks to the revival of interest in disciplines as various as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and neurobiology. Of these various fields of research the one that I think is most likely to have important long-term results is neurobiology, where the race to solve the problem of consciousness is now on.
What exactly is the problem and how exactly do we suppose we can solve it? Our ultimate scientific objective is to find out how exactly the brain causes all of our conscious states and where and how exactly those states exist and function in the brain. I cannot overstate the importance of this project. If we had a full theory of exactly how subjective states of consciousness come into existence and function as parts of the real world it would be one of the most stunning scientific achievements of all time. Why can't the brain scientists answer this question? It sounds like a standard scientific problem. Finding a causal basis of consciousness in the brain sounds no more mysterious than finding the causal basis of disease, inherited traits, or any other biological phenomenon. It turns out however that it is extremely difficult to do.
Part of the difficulty stems from the sheer technical problems of studying a system of a hundred billion or so neurons stuffed into the skull. But there are also some conceptual or philosophical obstacles. I used to think that philosophers should clear the ground so that we can get a clear statement of the problem and then get out of the way and let the neuroscientists take over and solve the problem. I still think that is exactly what should happen, but it turns out that the neuroscientists have been brought up on the same mistakes as the rest of us and these can stand in the way of the investigation.
First of all we have to get clear about what consciousness is. It is sometimes said that consciousness is "hard to define." But if we are just talking about a definition that identifies the target of our research, rather than giving a scientific analysis of the sort that typically comes at the end of an investigation, it does not seem to me that consciousness is hard to define. Consciousness consists of states of awareness or sentience or feeling. These typically begin in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep and go on all day until you go to sleep or otherwise become "unconscious." According to this definition dreams are a form of consciousness. Self-consciousness, in the sense of having a second-order consciousness about your own consciousness, for example worrying (second order) about your pain (first order), is not required as part of the definition of consciousness, though for human beings it is quite common.
Some of the salient features of consciousness so defined are these: All conscious states are qualitative in the sense that there is something that it feels like, a qualitative feel, to be in that state. (Some authors use the word qualia, singular quale, to identify these qualitative experiences.) Conscious states are also subjective in the sense that they only exist as experienced by some human or animal subject; and in nonpathological cases, they always come to us as part of a unified conscious field. That is, we don't just have the qualia of the taste of coffee in our mouth, the slight headache, and the sight of the landscape out the window; rather we have all of these as part of a single unified conscious experience. Moreover, conscious states are typically about something. Thinking about Bill Clinton, seeing a tree outside my window, and feeling thirsty are all about something. In philosophy this "aboutness" is called "intentionality." It includes more than just intending in the ordinary sense, in which I intend to go to the movies, but also beliefs, hopes, desires, fears, perceptions, emotions, etc. If I have a conscious state of anxiety, where I am not anxious about anything in particular but just generally nervous, my state is conscious but not intentional.
Conscious states, so defined, are real and irreducible; you cannot get rid of them. But consciousness as intrinsically subjective, qualitative, unified, and intentional is an embarrassment to a certain old-fashioned materialist conception of the world, and there have been many attempts to get rid of it by denying its existence or pretending it was something else. Behaviorism said that consciousness was nothing but publicly observable behavior; physicalism said it was nothing but physical states of the brain; functionalism said it was just a causal mechanism mediating between input stimuli and output behavior; and Strong Artificial Intelligence said it was no more than a number of computer programs that happen to be running in the brain but could be implemented in any sufficiently complex hardware. One has only to state these views clearly for their implausibility to seem obvious. Future generations considering late-twentieth-century intellectual life will surely wonder how serious and intelligent people could have believed such stuff.
I have criticized all these views at length elsewhere,[1] and for the purposes of this essay I am going to assume, as does the author of the book under review, that they have all been thoroughly discredited and that we can get on with the project of explaining consciousness as a real neurobiological phenomenon, caused by brain processes and realized in the brain. ***** (NYRB, Jan. 13, 2005, "Consciousness: What We Still Don't Know.")
We don't know what consciousness is -- yet; and we may never know. If so, then we will simply have to live with that. In any case there is nothing about consciousness that requires any reference to "The question of God/Religion/Metaphysics."
Carrol
PS. Of course anyone can engage in any private thought they choose to engage in, and they may try to get others to accept it even, but there is no reason that others should feel at all required to respond -- again, with the qualification Jeffrey makes, that responding may be good leisure-time recreation. Marxist "orthodoxy" has been that religion will only disappear when social relations become (more or less) transparent.