Pat Hayes writes:
Let me sketch a way that I think things may have gotten confused. [...] -NO, no, Im sure you really are having a grey-hand-experience, if thats what you say you can see. But now we have taken a dangerous step. As soon as we start to talk about the experiences as real things in themselves, all kinds of problems start.
But who does regard experiences as real things in themselves, if that means they're real and thingish in the same way as cats, hydrogen, electrons, etc? It certainly doesn't follow that someone regards them in that way just from their talk of "having experiences" and the like. And if they don't regard experiences as real things (in that sense), then we shouldn't see their talk as talk of experiences as real things.
I think we need to be very careful before concluding that someone else is guilty of a pernicious reification, because it may be that we are adding the reification in our interpretation of what they said when that isn't what they meant at all. After all, we can see reification whenever nouns are used, if we want.
Moreover, property dualists (such as Chalmers) are talking about non-reducible non-physical _properties_. Properties, even physical properties, have an odd kind of "existence" in any case. But perhaps these non-physical properties are really physical properties in disguise, so to speak. The way to show that is to provide a reduction: show how the non-physical properties can be fully accounted for in physical terms (rather as we suppose that liquidity can be).
Clearly we must avoid the homuncular fallacy of saying that we see our seeings and hearing our hearings and so on. [...] So if we allow talk of experiences de re, we dont experience them: rather, we *have* them, or they are *part of* our experience, or some other such locution. [...]
This then raises the question of what IS this odd relationship between us and our experiences? It would seem to have be both much more intimate and more secure than between us and the world we see: we don't hear or see or anything else these 'experiences', we just *have* them.
It's important to note that someone can go that far without going on in the way suggested by the rest of your paragraph.
They are all we have, in fact: our senses can only deliver experiences, and we now have to re-engineer reality from these private bits and pieces. That reconstruction could be wrong and our 'perceptions' faulty: but there cannot be any doubt about the actual experiences. We KNOW them; and moreover we know them TOTALLY: there can't be any other, nonexperiential, aspects to them that could be detected some other way. It follows therefore that they cannot be identified with any neural event inside our brains, since we don't know very much about those at all. (This argument from Henry Stapp)
For instance, it's far from clear that our senses can deliver only experiences. A signal reaches the brain, let's say, and then various things happen in the brain. Why suppose that's all concerned with providing experience and with nothing else?
It's also far from clear that we know experiences totally. For instance, I may believe that I see things in sharp detail over a greater angle than is in fact the case. Am I supposed to somehow know the truth here, despite having a contrary belief?
But if we do know experiences totally, what we know is experience considered only as such. It doesn't follow from that that experience cannot have any other aspects or that it cannot be an aspect of ordinary, physical things.
This ontological category has acquired an almost magical security. These things are irreducibly mental, irreducibly private, known only to ourselves, known utterly, and playing therefore (almost by definition) no functional role. All in marked contrast with the other, solid, stuff out there: a different world!
If there are such _things_, and we are talking about those things, then they must have a functional role. So it looks like the "thing" position can be attacked directly.
But this entire mystery may be simply the result of having made one small ontological error.
That may account for some cases, but someone can think there's a mystery without making that error. (They may be making some other error, of course.)
No one knows how to account for experience entirely in physical terms. That's the problem. That's why there's a mystery. Maybe the mystery will be solved. Maybe a convincing physical account of experience will come along (as it did for life). Your're right that we should not regard experiences as objects. But avoiding that ontological error does not let us see how to account for experience in physical (or, for that matter, functional) terms.
Many people who think experience is a hard problem are not even property dualists. They talk about experience being a problem because they want to keep that problem in view, against the efforts of people who think it's already been solved or wasn't a real problem in the first place.
-- jeff
jcs-online
menu