ThinkBlog

Wear sunscreen.

I spent yesterday with Jeremy at Folly Beach and didn’t put on anything. I figured, eh, it’s so windy and we’ll only be out there for a little while.

I now have red-to-purple first degree burns on my front side, and interestingly, it’s predominantly my right side that is affected. So the track of the sun is marked on my body. Or something.

… is too whiny, screamy, and loud. This isn’t because I’m getting older (though I concede I may be in denial), but because when I turn on the radio to listen to something, I’ve been inundated for the past eight years with soloists screaming about how they hate their fathers and they hate their girlfriends and so forth. Now, I can identify. Let’s be honest. That whole father-son dynamic turns out rough in a lot of cases. My own father and I are on good terms now; and most ex-girlfriends are either vaguely tolerant, altogether apathetic, or have forgotten me (though those, too, have been messy). But people, lighten up. Or grow up.

The loudness isn’t a matter of the instrumentation—it’s about how there is no longer any conception of dynamic range. To find that, you have to look to epic metal.

You’re not going to believe the amount of good stuff from this class. By the time I’m done going through all the stuff in the books and notes posting on here … well, you’ll see.

Meanwhile, final is finally DONE.

Done. Final Exam: 3 parts, a long essay, myriad hand-cramps, and too much thinking. More later. Meaning, this weekend.

New color scheme, updated everything down to the cellpic3.gif (now a PNG, created with the GIMP, in true OSS style!). Let me know what you think.

Massive update! I’ve spent the past few hours doing a complete reinstall of phpBB on ThinkForums. It is now version 2.0.20, with several MODs for you users out there: Multiple BBCode, Word Count, User Notes, Forum Watch, Lots o’ Smilies.

User Notes—you can now add notes to your profile, just on the side, where no one (not even I) can see them! You can watch forums instead of merely topics. The flag MOD wasn’t reinstalled; and a bunch of others have been left off, but the difference is speed.

I’ve left the subSilver theme intact, with no others. It’s just too much work to keep up with more than one theme, since most MODs are only tuned for the default. Nevertheless, I’m looking into switching the hideous blue-green/orange color scheme to something … less … obscene.

This is from a presentation I gave in my philosophy seminar class. The question, I think, is relevant for more than academic exercise; but here, have a look at the text of the handout first [which follows; or you may download the PDF—117KB].

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It seems the history of philosophy has been characterized by the rise (and fall?) of overarching metaphysical systems:

Presocratics:	4 elements constitute all (with one as prime, e.g., Heraclitus & fire)
Plato:	The relation of Being, Forms, and Matter (also Middle & Neoplatonists)
Aristotle:	Prime mover gives rise to all things
Stoics:	Logos permeates all, is all
Origen:	Scripture : tripartite meaning, corresponding to man (body — soul — spirit)
Anselm:	“that than which nothing greater can be conceived;” fides quaerens intellectum
Leibniz:	World consists in self-contained, “windowless” units—monads!
Kant:	Narrowed focus of metaphysics—science informs us where pure reason fails
Hegel:	History has a progressive pattern; all is dialectic
Heidegger:	We as Dasein are all intimately familiar with Being; all interconnected…

Yet now we seem to have entered into an epoch of uncertainty about whether metaphysics is possible at all. Rorty says it’s all conversation, that philosophy qua Philosophy is meaningless, that all is relative. Gadamer concedes that a better hermeneutical understanding is still limited by the asymptotic impenetrability of objective truth-out-there apart from interpretation. Randian “objectivism” dismisses truth-out-there altogether, declaring the supremacy of sense-perception.

Now it seems we’ve returned to a wholly negative reworking of Socrates’ method: from “I don’t know (and neither do you!) but perhaps we together through dialogue can come to an agreement about the nature of reality” to “I don’t know and neither do you—nor can we know—the end. Let’s have a nice sit-down chat about how great America is and is not, but don’t dare make any absolute claims about anything. Except not making absolute claims.”

Are we going to see a resurgence of metaphysicians? Can we make any more ontologically certain claims about the nature of reality apart from resorting to relativism, subjectivism, or other (essentially) absolute claims of ultimate ignorance? Will we (we who?—us, of course!) decide again that by conversation we can achieve some absolute knowledge and re-start the Socratic process over?

The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle. —Heraclitus

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Now, the discussion took a turn toward science almost immediately. And that’s right, in an important sense: what the ancient metaphysicians were trying to accomplish—an explanation of how the world is constituted—has been answered in large part by scientific inquiry and technological advancements, especially in the last two hundred years. But it seems that all the disciplines that inquire about the nature of reality are fragmented now, into little factions of empiricists (scientists and analystic philosophers, e.g., Quine), rationalists and poets (Continental philosophers), linguists (and lingua-relativist philosophers like Rorty), &c. So. My question is, will we ever come to an overarching theory of reality that doesn’t try to be politically correct and take into account all the little nuances of people’s potentially-hurt feelings? This, I think, ultimately comes down to a contempt for that attitude in scientific study that equates HOW the world works with WHY it is that way. And philosophers in the American tradition have done nothing to help the system (Rorty, I would say I don’t mean to pick on you, but man, I do, because your emasculation of truth is utterly ridiculous).

Discuss!

For those of you without RSS readers or the desire to use them! This has been a long time coming, and I finally hammered out (most of?) the kinks. Click on the “Subscribe” link in the left sidebar to be taken to a page that will allow you to subscribe to ThinkBlog via email.

Also now working the kinks out of the archives system, so there will soon be a page with all the articles on ThinkBlog from August 2003 forward will be easily accessible by date and title. Stay tuned!

On Conscious Experience, by Fred Dretske

1. “[S]uppose S sees a speckled hen on which there are (on the facing side) 27 speckles. Each speckle is clearly visible. Not troubling to count, S does not realize that (hence, is not aware that) there are 27 speckles. Nonetheless, we assume that S looked long enough, and carefully enough, to see each speckle. In such a case, although S is aware of all 27 speckles (things), he is not aware of the number of speckles because [that] requires being aware that there is that number of speckles (a fact), and S is not aware of this fact.”

2. This passage is talking about the possibility that we can be conscious (that is, aware—for Dretske the terms are interchangeable) of things in a way that is fundamentally different than our awareness of facts. When S looks at this visible side of the hen, his attention is not directed toward the fact that there are twenty-seven speckles on this particular hen; but he is nevertheless aware of all of the speckles simultaneously—aware of their existence as things to be perceived. This becomes a crucial distinction for Dretske in his argument against higher-order thought processes—i.e., introspection—as being meaningfully explanatory of consciousness.

3. In order to understand what Dretske is trying to do with this article, it is important to know what he is arguing against. He objects to the idea that consciousness can be explained by a higher-order mental state that is directed at lower states: it is this theory of introspection as constitutive of consciousness that leads, e.g., Rosenthal, to argue that conscious states are those of which we are conscious. Dretske insists this is not the case, and sets up his argument in the following way.

In the introduction to the article, Dretske argues that while it sounds odd to the aforementioned higher-order theorists of consciousness to say that it is possible to have a conscious experience that one is not conscious of having, there is nothing contradictory about this claim. The first distinction he draws in fleshing out this conclusion is that distinction between awareness of facts and awareness of things. For Dretske, awareness of things is that which occurs in us when we become perceptually aware of items in our environment: the stereo, the computer, the music; and awareness of facts is a kind of “awareness that”—taking the form of my being aware that the computer is playing music through the stereo. This kind of awareness takes form in the statement, (1) “S sees (hears, etc.) x (or that P) => S is conscious of x (that P),” but goes on to differentiate between awareness of facts and of things, such that in the case of awareness of facts, one is by definition able to speak about that thing in one’s awareness. Thus in the above quotation, S sees (becomes perceptually aware of) the speckles on the hen, but is not aware that there are 27 speckles. It is for this reason Dretske introduces statement (2), such that for all concrete objects x, “S is conscious of x =/> S is conscious that x is F.” From this foundation, Dretske goes on to argue that the intransitive sense of “consciousness” is implied by, and indeed given rise by the transitive sense—that is, for any x and P, (3) “S is conscious of x or that P => S is conscious (a conscious being)” and therefore, (4) this means S is in a conscious state. Consciousness, then, is not directed toward things, or toward our awareness of our perception of things; rather, our perception of things makes us conscious of the world around us. Furthermore, Dretske uses a couple of examples from the realm of visual perception to illustrate the point: in looking at two slightly different pictures or objects, he says, people are thing-aware that there is a difference; but they are not aware of the fact that actually makes two objects or pictures differ. From this point, he says, we can deduce that one can be conscious of a thing without having transitive (metacognitive, introspective) consciousness of it. After two visual examples, he argues this point from experimentation with monkeys, in which they were thing-aware of different sized boxes, but only fact-aware of the abstraction “INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE” after learning to discriminate more carefully between the boxes. After tying up some loose ends in the fourth and final section of his article, Dretske concludes that fact-awareness (belief) is conscious not because the person is metacognitively aware of that fact, but because the belief is “a representation that makes one conscious of the fact (that P) that it is a belief about.”

On Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, by Joseph Levine

1. “When we imagine a possible world in which a phenomenon is experienced as pain but we have no C-fibers, that is a possible world in which there is pain without there being any C-fibers. This is so, argues Kripke, for the simple reason that the experience of pain, the sensation of pain, counts as pain itself. We cannot make the distinction here, as we can with heat, between the way it appears to us and the phenomenon itself.”

2. Here Levine is referring to the difference between statement (1), “Pain is the firing of C-fibers” and statement (2), “Heat is the motion of molecules.” There is a certain way of conceiving of heat that is purely empirical; it is that phenomenon in the world which causes certain events (expansion and excitation of molecular clouds, boiling of water, &c.), on the one hand. On the other hand, heat feels to us in a certain way. There is, however, a way of explaining away the difference between what heat is and how it feels to us, by virtue of the fact that heat or its lack causes sensations in our physical bodies in a certain, predictable way—indeed, in the same way that it causes expansions of gases, and so forth. This is not the case with (1): that we could explain pain in terms of the firing of C-fibers tells us nothing about the subjective experience of pain as such, and because we can imagine a possible world in which the firing of C-fibers is not necessary for pain to exist, pain itself can exist apart from C-fibers. The differentiation between the sensation we call pain, and pain itself, is null: when we have begun talking about the one, we necessarily talk about the other. For this reason, there is an explanatory gap between the materialist way of explaining consciousness and the way in which we subjectively experience pain. Statement (1) seems contingent to us intuitively, whereas one can be disabused of the notion that (2) is contingent by explaining that the same thing that is explained by the motion of molecules is that which causes the sensation of heat to us.

3. Levine’s starting point in this article is Kripke’s argument that, firstly, all statements of identity in which both sides are true are necessarily true in all possible worlds; and secondly, that since a world can be conceived of in which statements of physical activity and psychological activity (viz., consciousness) are different, we must deny the materialistic necessity that psychological activity is reduceable to physical claims. Levine thinks that Kripke’s argument does not so strongly support a metaphysical claim as to the nature of consciousness, but that it does present a troubling epistemological problem. For the sake of argument, Levine essentially accepts a materialistic premise for the nature of the mind, but says that there is an explanatory gap between objective, empirical statements about neurophysiology and how we conceive of and subjectively experience what those statements purport to describe. He goes on to explain that this is a problem not only for strictly physical materialists, but also for functionalists as well, citing Ned Block’s argument that it is conceivable that for statement (3), “To be in pain is to be in [functional] state F,” an organism or even an entire nation of people, could corporately realize state F without actually being in pain. That this is logically possible is, for Levine, a strike against the abstraction of functionalist descriptions; as is the hypothesis that two people could share identical functional states but experience different sensory qualia, the so-called “inverted spectrum” hypothesis. None of this, even the functional description of states, helps us to understand the way something feels subjectively. Indeed, even if we restrict “pain” to being that which is subjectively felt when there is that sort of experience as C-fibers firing, that “makes the way pain feels into a brute fact,” and doesn’t tell us anything about why pain actually feels the way it does. In answer to this problem, Levine suggests that it is only highly organized physical systems that exhibit this kind of ambiguity; nevertheless, since the human mind is one of those systems, that (1) could be metaphysically factual while remaining epistemologically inaccessible. In the addendum to the article, Levine merely reiterates the dichotomy between physical description and subjective experience.

On Epiphenomenal Qualia, by Frank Jackson

1. “We find out perhaps that Fred’s cones respond differentially to certain light waves in the red section of the spectrum that make no difference to ours and that this leads in Fred to a wider range of those brain states responsible for visual discriminatory behaviour. But none of this tells us what we really want to know about his colour experience. […] We have all of the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. It follows that Physicalism leaves something out.”

2. Jackson is arguing against the Physicalist, materialistic account of consciousness by saying that there is something fundamentally different between a physical account of consciousness and what we, as individuals, know subjectively to be true insofar as our own experiences are concerned. This so-called “knowledge argument for qualia,” as the first section of his article is entitled, is that there is something left unaccounted-for in the traditional physicalist account of consciousness. Jackson also wants to argue that this will remain the case, regardless of what scientific advances are made in the empirical investigations into consciousness. In order to make his point, Jackson uses the example of aforementioned Fred, whose discrimination of colors serves as a thought experiment. There is for Fred as much difference between two different shades of red as there is for most human beings between blue and yellow; the colors themselves are utterly distinct. Therefore, to Fred, we are colorblind. We can analyze the frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum in which those reds—red1 and red2—fall, and we can even have an absolutely detailed description of the optical apparatus in Fred (e.g., extra cones, &c.), and how his brain, his optic nerves, his eyeballs, and the colors red1 and red2 are all interacting. But, says Jackson, we nevertheless do not thereby have all of the information about Fred’s “color experience.”

3. Continuing in this first section of the article, Jackson puts forth his knowledge argument by continuing with Fred. He makes the further point that, upon Fred’s hypothetical donation of his body to science, and upon the transplantation of his optical system into another, it can then be said that we know more about Fred’s experience than the physicalist picture of what was occurring in his brain and body could take into account. He then develops this with a further example of Mary, a woman reared in a black-and-white room, who has learned everything there is to know (factually) about the physical account of the world and the way human beings are constructed to interact with it. Jackson’s position is that, upon Mary’s leaving the room and being exposed to all the rich colors of the world, there will be something that she learns that she did not know before. Jackson points out in the addendum to Epiphenomenal Qualia that “what Mary did not know” is, by virtue of the what, the important question—and not the type of knowledge that Mary had, since she had all necessary knowledge as described by the physicalist schema. Jackson then differentiates his argument from the modal argument and Nagel’s “what it is like to be” argument—the former being something like the Cartesian deduction that we can imagine a consciousness outside of body and therefore must be more than body, along with the more modern idea of zombies, physiologically operative beings that nevertheless lack consciousness; and the latter mostly by merely calling into question whether having enough imagination to conceive of the way it is to be a bat is really a challenge to physicalism at all. In the final section of his article, Jackson defends the claim that there is nothing about qualia that make a difference in the physical world—and thus escape the purely physical account of consciousness. On the first case, taking a cue from Hume, Jackson argues that possibly, both qualia and that which is behaviorally explainable are due to “happenings in the brain,” but are not causally linked. On the second, qualia come about via evolution as inconsequential appendages, irrelevant to survival, as resulting from the crucial develpment of rationality. Thirdly, Jackson mentions the problem of other minds, and that we can infer qualia from others’ behavior, just as we link behavior and qualia in ourselves. Ultimately, says Jackson, it is altogether too optimistic to believe that physicalism accounts for consciousness altogether—even though its appeal is obvious, in giving us an account of our place in the grand scheme of things.

It was the best of unhappy endings; nothing was thrown, including insults and objects; I really think there’s a good shot at friendship as long as we’re looking at Jesus and not ourselves. Nevertheless, there’s much to think about, much to work on—and new opportunities for “a closer walk with Thee.”

Men’s Health Cardio Center. Don’t think you have what it takes to start a running regimen? Frankly, you may be right—but this can help you change that! Everything from absolute beginners to marathon training.

By the way, the most common complaint I hear—and have heard out of my own mouth—is that, even when one has the motivation, our knees hurt. I understand. It can take about two weeks of really careful training before you see any improvement in muscle strength or endurance, or in weight loss. Don’t let this discourage you! The connective tissues have to be strong enough to support the anticipated gains in muscle (and thereby the facilitation of weight loss, if that’s your goal). It takes time. Meanwhile, take an MSM + Glucosamine supplement if you’re blood type O+, and MSM + Glucosamine + Chondroitin if you’re any other type (some O+ typed people have reported greater inflammation with chondroitin). If you have severe pain, try Celecoxib, or something with less impact on the lower joints, like swimming. But now’s the time. With six to eight weeks of training, you can be ripped and ready for action on the court, at the gym, and at the beach.

Need more motivation?

Let’s be square for a minute. The reason I haven’t posted since the sixth is because of the workload of this semester, though I have in store many, many seeds of posts on which I’ll be expounding after Monday—after I’ve turned in five of the six final papers I have left and begin studying for exams. But as it stands, to be frank, I’m broke, and I just shelled out ~$100 for the annual upkeep of ThinkBlog and ThinkForums.

I feel like a public radio station during pledge drive season asking for donations, but the fact is, if you’re inclined and able to give, I’d be most grateful. I enjoy doing this, and I’ve never asked for anything like donations before, but AdSense has earned me all of $0.83 this month, and I’d be most grateful for any sort of buffer between now and getting a serious job at the end of this semester. Donations of any amount—literally—will help out a great deal.

Thank you for your time and consideration; please pardon the intrusion to your feed reader if you were expecting a substantial update!

Your friendly ThinkBlog author,
Michael Phillips

P.S.—That said, all things being equal, I’ll eat ramen and continue blogging, of course, free of charge for all the Web!

Not just for men, but hosted by MensHealth.com (one of three magazines to which I subscribe, and the only one that doesn’t deal with theology):

Weight loss tips.

Links to nutrition facts from many, MANY major fast food and semi-fast-food restaurant chains.

Just in case, all that confusion between American and European date standards? That’s already been solved; have you adopted the ISO nomenclature?

Americans: “April 5, 2006.” Europeans: “5 April 2006.” Now, Frankly, the Europeans make more sense, IMHO, but the ISO standard goes from greatest to least value: “2006-04-05 03:02:01″ in the YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss format. This has caused a lot of confusion on tech sites, where people report (and mis-report) dates because they can’t all agree on a standard.

In Geekdom, there are perennial debates that carry as much weight as religious discussion: Emacs versus vi, Linux versus BSD, and so forth. One of these debates concerns the desktop platforms of choice. I use and prefer KDE, but GNOME has long been a favorite among Linux users for its sleek interface.

Well, now, behold:

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), the consortium dedicated to the adoption of Linux, and freedesktop.org, the open-source project focused on interoperability for X Window System desktops, announced the technology preview of the first set of common interfaces for the GNOME and KDE Linux desktops, today at LinuxWorld in Boston.

(From DesktopLinux.com)

Glad tidings to be sure! As it stands, each one looks backward and ugly in the other (that is, GNOME programs called while the user is under the KDE desktop will look, well, awful), but this common API is the first step in integrating the two. I agree with those who say that the difference between the two has been hurting the conversion to Linux by mainstream Windows users: it’s too complicated to try to figure out the difference, and because there’s such a polarized opinion base on this matter, it just confuses those who might otherwise be willing to give Linux a shot.

Good for psychology students: brush up on your sensory knowledge.

Security searches on Google.

There are more, but they deserve their own posts….