Hong Kong Liberal Religious Forum

Subjectivity is the experience of objectivity
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... ivity.html

The above blog entry quoted this very interesting book:

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Owen Flanagan
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/de ... &tid=11293
Preview: http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=4cq ... t&resnum=3

No one, dualist, naturalist, or pan-psychic, has yet explained consciousness... What we can say for certain now is that a naturalist picture fits much better with the rest of science than any known dualist or immaterialist view. Of course, the naturalist must accept the burden of showing how, using only natural resources, he proposes to explain phenomenal consciousness. Here is how.

Token neurophysicalism is the view that each and every mental event, each and every experience, is some physical event or other -- presumably some central-nervous-system event. Type neurophysicalism is the view that each kind or type of experience, e.g. "seeing a red cube" or "believing that [snow is white]," each kind or type of event -- be it perceptual, emotional, or a belief -- is realized in "pretty much the same way" by each member of the species that has the relevant experience.

...What matters is that each and every experience supervenes in some strong sense on a brain state. We can accept the truth of token neurophysicalism, and thus reject all immaterialist views that deny it, while resisting the conclusion that the essence of a mental event is revealed completely or captured completely by a description of its neural level realizer.

The reason is as follows, and it applies uniquely to conscious mental events: Conscious mental events are essentially Janus-faced and uniquely so. They have first-person subjective feel and are realized in objective states of affairs. As John Dewey said, "given that consciousness exists at all, there is no mystery in its being connected with what it is connected with."

Speaking counterfactually, water would be H2O and gold would be the substance with atomic number 79 even if there were no subjects of experience, no sentient beings, in the world. Objective realism is true of water and of gold.

But even if a conscious-mental-state token (say, your experience here and now of seeing these words on this page) is realized, and realized necessarily, in some complex neural process n in you, it is not the case, speaking counterfactually, that n could occur in a world without subjects.

Specifically, n could not and would not occur in a world in which you were not reading these words.

...The asymmetry between water and gold, on the one side, and conscious mental events, on the other, can be said to come to this: the nature of water and gold is essentially objective -- it is completely objective, ergo objective realism. The nature of conscious mental events is such that despite being perfectly natural, objective states of affairs, they have as part of their essential nature the subjective feel they have.

Call the basic idea subjective realism. Subjective realism says that the relevant objective state of affairs in a sentient creature properly hooked up to itself produces certain subjective feels in, for, and to that creature. The subjective feel is produced and realized in an organism in virtue of the relevant objective state of affairs' obtaining in that organism.

The subjective feel is, as it were, no more than the relevant objective state of affairs obtaining in a creature that feels things.

...For many it produces a mental cramp to think the thought that mental events are neural events but that their essence cannot be captured completely in neural terms. Such is the power of objective realism, a doctrine that is true for most of the things and types of things in the universe but that is not true for experiences.

The cramping can be eased, I propose, by accepting that the subjective realist is claiming nothing mysterious. It is simply a unique but nonmysterious fact about conscious mental states that they essentially possess a phenomenal side.

[UURN] From the UURN mailing list:

I've never had a problem with meaning so don't view it as "hard".

Here we are, the only intelligent like we know of, in a vast natural
universe. So as I see it any meaning is that which we introduce.

The physicist Steven Weinberg wrote the following in the chapter "What
about God?" in "Dreams of a Final Theory". An outstanding chapter from my perspective:

"In my 1977 book "The First Three Minutes" I was rash enough to remark
that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems
pointless." I did not mean that science teaches us that the universe is pointless,
but rather that the universe itself suggests no point. I hastened to add
that there were ways that we ourselves could invent a point for our lives,
including trying to understand the universe. But the damage was done: that
phrase has dogged me ever since. Recently Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer
published interviews with twenty-seven cosmologists and physicists, most of whom
had been asked at the end of their interview what they thought of that
remark. With various qualifications, ten of the interviewees agreed with me and
thirteen did not, but of those thirteen three disagreed because they did not
see why anyone would expect the universe to have a point. The Harvard
astronomer Margaret Geller asked, "...Why should it have a point? What point?
It's just a physical system, what point is there? I've always been puzzled by
that statement." The Princeton astrophysicist Jim Peebles said, "I'm willing to
believe that we are flotsam and jetsam." (Peebles also guessed that I had
had a bad day.) Another Princeton astrophysicist, Edwin Turner, agreed me but
suspected that I had intended the remark to annoy reader. My favorite
response was that of my colleague at the University of Texas, the astronomer
Gerard de Vaucoule, said that he thought my remark was "nostalgic." Indeed it
was---nostalgic for a world in which the heavens declared the glory of God."

Don H.