Spearmint

Thanks, I hadn't read that before. I would agree with Peikoff (although I would question his dismissal of behaviorism, since behaviorism isnt so much the denial of the existence of consciousness, but the claim that since consciousness cannot be measured other than in terms of its effects, it is not a proper object of scientific study. I probably do disagree with behaviorism, just not for the quoted reasons). However, although philosophy cannot make claims regarding how consciousness is caused or how it interacts with the body, certain statements made by philosophy dictate to an extent how scientific enquiry must proceed, and serve to put constraints upon its results. If philosophy says that consciousness and volition exist, then any scientific explanation of the universe must be compatible with both consciousness and volition. I do not think that determinism satifisfies this condition.

I haven't responded to this thread for a while, because Capitalism Forever appears to be making the exact same points that I would have However, the segment of your poste quoted above seems to be the part that I dont understand. Regardless of whether you choose to study consciousness independently of physical processes (and I do believe that this is how the two phenomenon should be studied), it seems that some kind of indeterminism is inevitable on the physical level. I am currently sitting here typing this post. I just stopped now, and raised my right arm out of choice, causing the physical matter composing my arm to move abount 20 inches into the air. Before I done this, you could not have predicted this movement regardless of the physical information at your disposal. If we could somehow roll back time to before I raised it, there remains the possibility that I would choose not to do so, and this time the matter composing my arm would not rise. In other words, matter would have acted in two different ways, given the same initial circumstances. Does this not logically lead to indeterminism? We can agree that the cause of this matter rising was my volition and we can agree to treat the conscious cause seperately from the physical cause, but the fact remains that either my arm goes up or it doesnt, and a repeated run of this 'expiriment' may yield a different outcome. Although its slightly off-topic, my current (although by no means fixed) stance on this is to abandon determinism in the context of matter composing structures with volitional consciousness - I can think of no reason why global determinism is a logical necessity, nor how indeterminism is in conflict with either identity or causality. If it were being claimed that indeterminism was a result of metaphysical randomness or some similar phenemenon then I would agree to dismiss it out of hand, but as long as it is being made clear that indeterminism is being proposed as a consequence of the immediately verifiable existence of volition, there seems to be no problem from a purely philosophical standpoint (although obviously science may eventually rule out this possibility).

In my opinion, the main problem lies in how most people seem to go about forming their concepts of 'man' and 'woman'. It's hardly a controversial fact that gender roles tend to vary across cultures, and it seems to me that a lot of people have had a look around Western society over a very small period of time (maybe ~300 years or so), made a couple of observations about how men and women act, and decided to universalise what they noticed into some kind of 'essential nature of Womanhood/Manhood'. In reality, any genuine attempt to claim that there are specific 'essential biological difference' between men and women would have to be based on evidence that goes significantly beyond "how people acted in the West between the years of X and Y". Not only this, it would have to involve psychological evidence gathered in laboratories, in addition to the purely historical claims. Basing your argument on one particular era of history misses the point, as in doing so you have lost the ability to distinguish between biological differences, and differences imposed by the structure of society. I have yet to encounter any real examples of universal evidence for significant 'innate' gender differences, and I seriously doubt that the majority of those making the claims have either. If there is one thing that the events of the 20th century should have taught us, it is to be immediately sceptical of those who claim that two groups of people are 'essentially different' without providing significant evidence for these assertions other than a flippant "you can notice it all around you". I dont particularly like using the race comparasion for several reasons, but I shall use it anyway since it seems to be vaguely relevant here. If I were to look over the last 2000 years of history, I could probably find just as much 'evidence' that Negroids are 'essentially different' from Caucasians as you could that women are 'essentially different' from men. I could probably also find evidence to support the claim that one of these races is naturally 'dominant', while the other is 'submissive', and I could conclude from this that these two races should play differing roles in today's society. Would this make my claim true, or my conclusions justified? I certainly hope not, but to me this appears to be very similar to what the "men are intrinsically different from women" crowd seem to have done.

IQ tests certainly measure _something_. What that 'something' is though, is up for debate. It certainly doesn't seem to be 'intelligence' in the way most people use the word (although admittedly I think the word 'intelligence' is vague enough to be considered almost meaningless in the majority of instances).

What do you mean 'slightly more skill'? Zero remains zero, regardless of what you multiply it by. Winning (consistently) at poker requires very large amounts of skill, whereas winning on a lottery requires none whatsoever. I'm not sure how poker works in a casino, but if it were set up in a way when the odds were significantly against your winning and it became a game of pure luck, I wouldnt say that money from that was 'earned' either.

I largely agree with this: http://leader.linkexchange.com/X1654284/showiframe? etc I would certainly not look down on someone because he earned his wealth by playing poker, as opposed to running a business, and I would also say that he has earned his wealth equally. However, I would obviously not think that someone who had won $10 million in a lottery (or inherited it from a dead relative) had earned this money. The key difference is the use of skill. Anything that you are able to procure through (non-immoral) use of your skill and talent has been earned, regardless of whether this skill is related to poker, chess, computer programming, business management, or basketball.

Is there a context to this? "Hardcore pornography" can mean anything from pictures of erect penises to women having sex with horses.

I'm confused by this, can you clarify please? If the conclusion is fallible then surely it isnt 100% certain by definition? Maybe 98-99% certain, but not 100%. If we were 100% certain that someone was guilty, then it wouldn't be possible for him to be proven innocent at a later date. Since this isnt the case in the vast majority of trials (maybe it would be in the odd few where the crime was carried out in public in front of a large number of witnesses), we clearly dont have the 100% certainty which would be required to justify the death penalty.

Well yes, information would be any collection of data which is meaningful to an intelligence. However, if I go over to my bookshelf and pick up a random book, I know in advance that what I find in it will be information (as in my consciousness will process the data contained within in an informative way). Similarly, I know that when I view the internet, I am going to receive information from it. If a non-conscious entity contains data which we know a consciousness will interpret as information, I dont really understand the problem with saying that said entity contains information. I do understand where youre coming from, but I'm not sure theres a need for such a strong dichotomy. edit: Just to make things doubly clear, I do agree with you that "information isnt out there in the world". What exists in the world is data - information is a result of the processing of data by an intelligence. My point is that when we _know_ a certain collection of data is going to yield information to a consciousness, it seems acceptable to say that the data contains information (you could also say it 'is' information, but I dont like that for several reasons). In any case, I think that we definitely need a word to identify data which we know/think is meaningful (or likely to be meaningful), as opposed to data in which we have so far found nothing of meaning nor have reason to believe that we will. The two concepts are very dfferent, and hence deserve seperate names. Since the word 'information' has been adopted by many to describe the first, it seems easier to just stick with it.

Can a book contain information? If I write down information onto a piece of paper, can we not say that the paper has information written on it? Likewise if I enter information into a word processor, can we not say that the word processor document contains information? When I close the word processor down, does the information remain in the computer? If not, where does it go? If we can still call it information, then surely the computer is 'processing information' when it performs operations on it. Surely we can sensibly talk about non-conscious entities storing a representation of consciously interpreted/derived information without suggesting that the non-conscious entity is somehow 'self-aware' while manipulating it.

I would assume that it's fairly common for Philosophy professors to make claims like this not because they believe them, but to make their students think and thus encourage the formulation of arguments against them. The Philosophy professor should ideally want to teach both philosophy and critical thought rather than to force his own beliefs onto the class, and if 'pretending' to hold a position that he can personally find flaws in can help further this aim, so be it. As to the topic, I am pro-choice and have no real opinion on the death penalty.

Yes, exactly. Some would claim that they arent so much throwing out concepts, as they are advocating that all concepts must be reducible to percepts, but in practice I believe this works out to be the same thing. I'm certainly not advocating the positivist position, I was just outlining it because I think that is what Nagel's paper was attacking, and thus it helps to put it into context.

double post

I dont think it's so much a case of 'minutiae', as it is a very strong arguement against the 'uploading and transferral of a human' ever being theoretically possible. I agree with you that the ability to 'not die but by one's own hand 'should certainly be something to strive for, but I have serious philosophical objections to proposals which revolve around treating consiousness as if it were nothing more than an incredibly complex computer program, simply because of the vast number of apparent paradoxes such an idea appears to create. Would the computer containing this backup copy of 'you' actually be conscious? If we could write a program where someone could sit at the computer have a conversation with your stored consciousness, would we say that you 'are' 'actually' the computer? I recall reading about a thought-experiment proposed by Douglas Hofstadter involving a very large book containing a complete description of Einstein's brain. Anyone reading the book could theoretically ask einstein any question they desired, simply by flicking through the book and following the instructions provided. Would we say that book was self-aware or conscious?

Have you considered the immediate problems which seem to flow from this idea? Would the backup actually be 'you'? Consider, for instance, that you got lost in the woods one day and your family, assuming that you had died, decide to restore 'you' from the backup. Howver, since you were only lost and not dead, you find your way home one day, only to be confronted with 'yourself'. Can we really say that this backup 'you' is actually you? If your family decides that it only wants one argive99 and agrees to kill you and keep the backup, can we really say that 'you' havent died?

I agree with you completely, and I suspect that Nagel would too. Bear in mind however that this is not the position he is arguing against - his target is the positivist-inspired crew who claim that there is no meaningful difference whatsoever between being deaf as it is described in observational terms like you mention, and what a deaf person 'actually experiences'. According to several proponents of this view, any statement which cannot be reduced to observational terms is inherantly meaningless, and thus talking about the 'actual experience' of a deaf person beyond that which your apparatus could measure would be 'metaphysical nonsense' which has no place in science. This is what (I think) Nagel is taking exception to, rather than claiming that our inability to experience a bat's world in non-observational terms somehow constitutes a hole in our knowledge.

Noone is debating the existence of consciousness here. The meaning of the word 'consciousness' is defined ostensively to refer to that which you experience 'internally' (as you said), the existence of your own consciousness is self-evident, and the consciousness of other humans is deduced logically from the fact that they physically resemble you and act in a way similar to how you would act. The denial of any of this is fairly irrational. The problem arises when the claim is made that something non-human, such as a computer (or a bat), is conscious. In this case, what you have is something that appears to act in exactly the same way as we would expect a human to act yet we know that it is not human. Behaviorists claim that since there is no way for us to empirically measure what an entity such as a robot 'actually' experiences in the subjective first person sense (if anything), we should treat something 'being' conscious and something 'behaving' as we would expect a conscious entity to act, as being identical. In other words, the idea of the consciousness of other beings (ie not your own consciousness, which you experience directly and can hence verify yourself) should be described in purely measurable empirical terms, since we lack the ability to move beyond these. Any attempt to posit that a being other than yourself 'is actually' conscious rather than just behaving consciously is meaningless, since we could never tell these apart (according to the behaviorist). Consider a robot in star trek or whatever that acts exactly like a human, in every measurable way. Now, there seems to be a question of whether this robot 'actually is' conscious and has first person experiences in the way we do, or whether it is just a complex non-selfaware machine that is mindlessly processing data to simulate human behavior. The behaviorist would deny that this is a valid question to ask, since the two alternatives are functionally identical, and no experiment could tell them apart. Nagel's point (as I read him) is that there _is_ a very significant difference between the two possibilities, even if we lack the ability to ever differentiate between them.

While it is a nonsense to use the fundamental inexperiencability of life 'through the eyes of another' as part of a general attack on human knowledge, this does not mean that we should dismiss the notion that other things _are_ having experiences in a way that is inaccessible to us just by observing their actions from our own perspective. Would you agree that what is experienced by the bat is fundamentally different from anything that we could describe by observing it, and learning about its actions? To take a more relevant example, and one which will perhaps soon have real-world implications, consider the question of a computer (or robot, if you prefer) which could 'simulate' the behavior of a conscious human mind in every way. The behaviorist would claim that the fact that this computer is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human (in terms of passing Turing tests, and any other test you might want to invent) is enough for us to say that it is conscious. Nagel's point would be that we could not make this claim simply from the observation of its actions; there will always exist a 'what is it like to be a computer' that we cant answer - ie we can never really know if a given computer (or robot) is actually conscious, since we have no way of experiencing the world 'from its perspective' (or even knowing if it actually _has_ a perspective). The keypoint is there is a significant difference between actually 'having' experiences from the point of view of the experiencer, and the observence of these experiences from a neutral third person P.O.V, and this difference is often ignored in contemporary cognitive science/philosophy of mind (cf Turing Tests). It is certainly possible to recognise this difference without committing oneself to the Kantian view that all knowledge being contextual invalidates the possibility of ever obtaining 'true' 'objective' knowledge (which would somehow be gained withuot the use of consciousness or experience)

sorry, double post

Surely "what is it like to be a bat' was intended as a thought experiment, not as an actual question to be answered literally. I doubt Nagel was actually concerned with what a bat experienced - I think he was using the analogy to highlight the apparently ignored difference between what a living entity 'actually' experiences, and a purely behaviouristic description of that entity's experience in terms of observable space-time events. In this sense, it seems intended as an attack on the reductionist view that mental states can be completely reduced to measurable empirical phenomenon. Your dismissal of it as being 'arbitrary' seems to be missing the point; there certainly seems to be something meaningful which the question serves to highlight. If you think that the 'bat' question seems too far-fetched even as a thought experiment, then ignore it and concentrate on the 'intelligent, rational aliens' paragraph, which seems to be making the same point in a perhaps more sensible manner:

Yes, I agree. I can understand the desire to restrict the phrase 'Objectivism' to solely the body of work written/approved by Rand, but it also strikes me as irritating that there isnt a name to encapuslate the work produced "in the Objectivist tradition", by those drawing upon Rand's principles and applying them to areas which she never wrote about explicitly (or expanding upon those she did). I'd like to a word like "Randian" to describe this, but I know that she explicitly disapproved of this. It seems odd that we do not have a word to refer to the collectivel body of work currently being produced by people like Peikoff/Binswanger/etc, which has obviously been influenced heavily by Rand, and represents a valid concept as a whole. I partially agree here. Calling something emergent seems to be the latest way of saying "we have no idea where this comes from" - it's almost the substitution of a lack of explanation for an explanation. I was using the term to indicate a 'structural' property - ie one that comes as a result of the structure of matter, rather than as a result of the properties of the indiviual 'pieces' of matter composing its structure. However, I'm not sure that even this is meaningful, since you could perhaps argue that all properties are 'structural' in this sense (atoms do not appear to the human eye as 'red', nor could you eat your dinner with individual molecules etc etc). Could you please clarify what you mean here? It seems to be the essentail point of this matter, and I'm not sure that I fully grasp what you are trying to say. I assume your claim is that the mind does not stand in the same relationship to the brain as (say) life does to its components, or computers do to electromagnetic phenomenon, but what is the nature of this difference? Is there any evidence for it? I'm also not entirely sure what you mean by the last sentence. I can understand that theres a difference between saying that the brain is casually required for the mind and sayng that the mind is caused by the brain (as an analogy, being near is a swimming pool is a casual requirement for me to go for a swim, but it is certainly not the cause), but in this case it seems to leave a blank over what causes the mind. I assume that something has to 'cause' it, and the research showing that poking about in relevant parts of the brain can induce conscious states seems like fairly strong evidence that the brain does indeed fill this cause (although I suppose you could also say that this is an example of the brain _affecting_ consciousness rather than _causing_ it). Agreed, poor choice of words on my part. I should rephrase to say that the mind 'controls' parts of the brain (the nature of which 'parts' these are would obviously not be a question for philosophy). I''m not sure that I understand this either. Yes, once consciousness has made its choice the resulting processes are fully deterministic, but prior to making this it could not be possible to predict which choice could be made - ie you could not predict _which_ chain of physical processes would be initiated. If my 'focusing' resulted in stream-of-casual-physical-processes A, and my non focusing caused stream-of-casual-physical-processes B, then surely it would not be possible to predict whether A or B would occur, regardless of your knowledge of the universe? Also wouldnt there have to be indeterminism here, in the fact that either A or B could occur from the same starting state (ie the state of atoms in my brain prior to me making my choice), and the same result would not be guaranteed if we were to somehow repeat this position, since I would be able to choose a different alternative to that which I chose the first time?

I haven't read IOE for some time, but I'm sure I can remember a comment in the appendix along the lines of "I am talking about _rational_ mathematics, ie that which existed before Russell", or something similar. Perhaps he is referring to that?

Do you have any specific objections to Cantor's work, in the sense of flaws that you can find in it? The idea of 'different levels' of infinity follows logically from the definition of sets, functions and cardinality; its not really something that you can argue with, unless you have a problem with those definitons. Personally I think that the mathematical notion of 'cardinality' is translated somewhat imprecisely into the English word 'size', and this is where a lot of the problems stem from. I agree that it doesnt make much sense to talk about "different sizes of infinity" in the standard English sense of the word, but talking about 'greater cardinality' in the sense of the non-existence of an injective function from one infinite set to another seems sound.

I dont think I buy this, and it seems to run contrary to Objectivism. The purpose of man's goal directed actions is not just his survival, but his happyness - there is far more to the life of a rational entity than just the mere sustainment of its existence. Just because an immortal would have no physical needs (in the sense of maintaining its life) does not mean that it would have no psychological needs - the motivation to perform actions to increase its happyness should still be there. As an example, consider someone who inherits 500 million dollars at a young age. This person has no 'life sustaining' need to work or produce for the remainder of his existence - he has more money than he will ever be able to spend. The concept of 'maintaining his life' simply does not apply here - this person has all the food, shelter, security and medical aid that money can buy. If your argument were correct, there would be no need for this heir to be productive, and he would just spend his days snorting cocaine off the bellies of hookers. In reality, this is obviously not the case. Why?

I'd say it's highly unlikely, given the lack of support they'd be likely to receive from the rest of the world. I would imagine that small countries such as poland rely quite heavily on trade with other countries, and embracement of laissez faire doesnt seem particularly compatible with the membership of bodies such as the EU. edit: just noticed there's an article on capmag today about this: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3694