Are sensations mind dependent?
Since Galileo and continuing through Descartes and Locke is the assertion that sense qualities only exist in the mind or soul of perceivers and are not really out in the world. Berkeley also accepts mind dependence and therefore draws the conclusion that since all we know about the world is sense qualities than the whole world must be mind dependent.
But there is no strong argument for believing in this mind dependence. Galileo needed to only say that the color of a falling object is irrelevant to its place in physics, not that it has no color. In distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities Locke needed to only say that certain spatial configurations and movements of matter had the power to create sensations but not that the sensations have to exist "in us".
If certain configuations of matter cause certain sensations then objects are really colored as naive common sense realists claim. However, the view is also compatible with indirect realism for the brain is continuous with the matter of the world and so as the world may be colored so may be a visual field within the brain. Then sense qualities are created through psycho-physical laws that existed before the evolution of brains and those laws biological evolution did not invent but employed.
I speculate as to what these psychophysical laws may look like by ignoring (for now) the seperate problem of subjective awareness and considering qualities as purely physical.
see https://philpapers.org/rec/SLESTU
But there is no strong argument for believing in this mind dependence. Galileo needed to only say that the color of a falling object is irrelevant to its place in physics, not that it has no color. In distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities Locke needed to only say that certain spatial configurations and movements of matter had the power to create sensations but not that the sensations have to exist "in us".
If certain configuations of matter cause certain sensations then objects are really colored as naive common sense realists claim. However, the view is also compatible with indirect realism for the brain is continuous with the matter of the world and so as the world may be colored so may be a visual field within the brain. Then sense qualities are created through psycho-physical laws that existed before the evolution of brains and those laws biological evolution did not invent but employed.
I speculate as to what these psychophysical laws may look like by ignoring (for now) the seperate problem of subjective awareness and considering qualities as purely physical.
see https://philpapers.org/rec/SLESTU
Comments (47)
Nevertheless, it does look as if plants have some type of sensation, or at least, behave as if they do. Perhaps sensation is somewhat broader than what we take it to be.
Or perhaps they're not, and they do depend on mind.
I had a quick look, and I am already a direct realist, so of course you are right. I like the analogy of watching the game on a black and white tv. I can remember watching snooker on a black and white set. The commentators had some work to do describing the game. :razz:
We know, 'because science', that eyes sample the sea of photons and we know also that there is a continuum of wavelengths. One makes a spectrum of the light from a star, and finds therein a huge amount of information, that one cannot see directly, and this huge amount of information is potentially available at every point in the visual field. The human eye takes 3 somewhat overlapping samples and we know, 'because biology', that other life forms take more or less samples at each point and see more or less colour-wise. The more different samples, the more information, up to the limits of the divisibility of the spectrum. And yet still, with all this understanding and agreement about how vision works, there is this disagreement - which has to be, surely, about how we choose to think about it, because the reality the physics is already agreed? And how did that happen?
Quoting lorenzo sleakes
I don't know if the brain, or any living organism, is 'continuous' with matter in that sense. Certainly the fundamental material elements in both are all those of the periodic table but the differentiators for living organisms are the ability to maintain homeostasis, to retain information in the form of memory, to act intentionally, and so on. There is nothing on the level of physics or chemistry alone which accounts for those attributes of living organisms (which is the principle insight behind biosemiotics).
you are stating current dogma, but in both cases mine and yours there are no currently known laws through which the sensation red or pain springs into existence. Your view is of a hypothetical ncc (neural correlates of consciousness), mine a hypothetical universal correlates of qualia. So in both cases science is incomplete and something new is needed. But in your case biological evolution generated something radically new. My view is more consistent with what we mean by physical law in that it existed earlier in the evolution of the world and highly complex things like billions of neural signals dont generate simple elementaries like a patch of red. My view, a kind of panqualityism has the same motivation and is consistent with panpsychism in its attempt to avoid a miraculous radical emergence of the mental from the physical under the most recent highly complex circumstances.
Evolution employed existing laws, didnt create new ones. Animal evolution is limited to existing rules and can't for instance invent gravity because it would be beneficial to not fly off the planet.
On the contrary, I've stated a demonstrable biological fact (re: cell biology). Feel free to refute it with more than mere speculation.
Are you saying that matter and mind are merely useful fictions and dont really exist? I would agree that sensations are epistemologically primary - all of our knowledge is based on them. But then we can theorize that matter and mind are real in that matter lies behind and helps make sense of sensations and mind is real in its capacity to experience them. Hume and then James in his radical empericism attempts to eliminate mind as a thing in itself and view it as merely a sequence of experiences. But to me it is more common sense to see mind as something distinct - a capacity to experience. In panpsychism matter and mind end up being the same thing which includes a capacity to experience. Other minds cannot be directly perceived but are inferred as the hidden cause behind teleological activities.
What, you come here asking for proof? What's up with that?
:nerd:
A sensation is by definition something created in the mind.
Definition of "sensation" from Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
[i]a. A mental process (such as seeing, hearing, or smelling) resulting from the immediate external stimulation of a sense organ often as distinguished from a conscious awareness of the sensory process
b. Awareness (as of heat or pain) due to stimulation of a sense organ
c. A state of consciousness due to internal bodily changes[/i]
Definition of "sensation" from Dictionary.com (former Oxford LEXICO):
[i]1. The operation or function of the senses; perception or awareness of stimuli through the senses.
2. A mental condition or physical feeling resulting from stimulation of a sense organ or from internal bodily change, as cold or pain.[/i]
I have just brought up two standard references, although one can find a lot more.
It is very clear the sensation is a mental phenomenon.
So, at least for me, the answer is yes, sensations are mind dependent.
If I call them fictions, then I have a burden of proof. But it seems plain they are hypothesized entities, theoretical constructs. Sensations are fundamental and unarguable. If I'm a brain in a vat, then the matter I experience doesn't really exist but the sensations unarguably do. Mind is our name for an hypothesized entity that experiences sensations. Mind and matter are theoretical constructs; they are hypothesized entities, which may or may not exist in reality.So, if someone says sensations are mind dependent, then they are explaining the undeniable (i.e., sensations) in terms of theoretical constructs (mind and matter) which may or may not exist in reality. Explaining the certain in terms of the uncertain seems a risky strategy.
The common sense view also says the Earth is flat and stationary.
Sensations are by definition mind-dependant. As it is and as it was, it represents another layer of abstraction inserted between what is sensed and what is doing the sensing, leading some to believe that we somehow sense sensations and nothing besides.
Sensations, like impressions, perceptions, qualia, feelings, etc. arises from the inability to be objective about one's own body and its interaction with the rest of the world. A noun-phrase serves rightly to fall upon the subject: our body, its parts, the things we come into contact with; but considering the predicate as a subject forces us to use another noun, making a nothing into a thing in the grammar and in thought. it's place in the grammar subverted, the body is excised from consideration, replaced as it was with a pseudo-object. it isn't long before these objects get their own predicates and we are half-way into believing that these things can and do exist.
Better to realize this and be comfortable with this linguistic discrepancy, or to repudiate the use of the term entirely, which is exceedingly difficult.
You are free to define "sensation" however you wish.
For me, sensation is primary. It's what I actually experience. It's reality.
Mind, on the other hand, is a concept that describes the hypothetical experiencer of sensations.
Do you experience experience? Or sense sensations? Its like saying that I walk a walk. In any case, it feels like were multiplying zeroes, at this point.
:100:
Sensations are what I directly, immediately experience.
Mind and matter are ideas which make my sensations coherent.
If sensation is reality, what are you sensing?
Sight, taste, touch, smell, sound
You are sensing sensations. You see sight. You smell smells. Its not reality because it doesnt apply to anything in reality. All weve done is taken a predicate, abstracted it, added a suffix or modified it in some other way, and moved it to the object position, holding it up as reality. Soon it will be a subject where it can do its own things and have a life of its own, all at the expense of what performed the action and whatever objects the action was performed upon in the first place.
a mindless sensation is a blue sky before anybody sees it and a thunder clap with nobody around to hear it.
yes .. sense data is the foundation of all theory. Matter and mind are such theory. But somewhere in your theory there must also be a place for sense-data itself. When did this foundation of everthing we know first appear in the universe? How does it relate to the other theories in a coherent whole. In my theory it is a product of matter which minds can then become aware of.
Sensations (or sense data) IS reality.
They are what I directly and immediately know to exist.
Ideas such as mind, matter, ego, etc. are concepts.
In a mirage, the idea of water arises in my mind but there is no corresponding reality of water.
They are not reality because they cannot be instantiated. They are without a referent. If I ask you to represent your abstraction with a single instance of it, you cannot point to anything but yourself, which is not a sensation or an experience or a sight or a taste as far as I can tell. I am left to observe only your words.
I don't understand. What can't be instantiated? The visual perception of white or black? The auditory perception of the rain? The odor of food cooking? In what sense is the sense data delivered by my five physical senses not instantiated?
:up: This sums it up pretty well unless you believe rocks have feelings.
not rocks...but maybe amoebas do...with no nervous system
Is that directed at me, in response to my last reply???
I don't think mindless sensations are coherent. The sky isn't blue when nobody sees it. It's not any color. What it is are scattering photons, some of which are perceived as blue on a sunny day for creatures with eyes and nervous systems like our own. One thing that makes the blue sky impossible as a mindless sensation is that we only see a small fraction of the electromagnetic radiation when looking at the sky. It would not look blue if we could see the microwaves or radio waves.
I'd argue that the dichotomy is false in the first place, even from a scientific point of view. Minds are ostensibly created by, and part of, nature. Sensations of color, depth, scent, etc. are all natural phenomena. The mental/physical dichotomy was created in the early modern period to help the natural sciences bracket off a whole off a whole set of philosophical questions so that progress could be made on the problems that were proving soluble. It's high time for that firewall to come down, but unfortunately it has become a calcified dogma something accepted uncritically and defended with religious zeal.
Corpusclarism, or approximations of it, also seem to be naive, arising long before science and persisting in the face of contrary evidence from the sciences.
Empiricism gives pride of place to sensation. The models of our world that empiricism has produced has shown that at least the substance of these sensations is dictated by natural phenomena. That is, the Hard Problem may remain, we do not have a good answer for "from whence sensation?" but the fact that changes in the environment can dictate changes in sensations, or that changes in the nervous system likewise affect sensation, even holding the environment constant, is as well established as anything. When you turn the light out, you can't see; likewise, when your eyes or visual cortex are damaged, you also cannot see.
Science has had to become like an eye trying to see itself. Notably for this analogy, that is something that is quite possible in the natural world; the eye can see itself using a reflection. Science is, in part, a system based on observations through which we try to untangle the how and whys of those same observations. Where things go awry is when dogma declares that such sensations, the ones upon which all empiricism rests, are illusions, somehow unnatural. That is, as you say: "objects are really colored." Yes, this is a fact of the natural world.
What is interesting to me is that people seem to have an easy time dismissing scent, an ancillary sense for humans, as clearly illusory. "Shit smells bad to us and good to flies because scent isn't real." However, abstractions of space-time, e.g., volume, etc., based on a combination of visual, tactile, and vestibular sensations, are taken as iron clad facts of reality. It seems to me that, if we were dogs, we might go the other way on scent.
What is key though is that these senses help reinforce a unified model of reality. Senses appear to be used to cross check each other; when we can't tell if a flower is real or plastic by looking at it, we stroke and sniff it. This is why, while a mild degree of synesthesia seems adaptative, we still have extremely distinct sense impressions from different systems after billions of years of evolution (i.e., no one mistakes hearing for seeing) one sense can cross check the veracity of another.
There is no intrinsic reason to preference one sensory-based model or another. When we say "color is an illusion, the reality is photons moving through space," this is merely substituting an explanation of a reality in terms of an experience that only exists in one sense (color for sight) for a new model based on the sensation of movement through 3D space, something we experience primarily through three reinforcing senses.
Corpusclarism, allegedly dead in science, but seemingly very much alive, is the substitution of multiple models based on different types of sensory experience for a unitary model derived from the 'experience of / an analogy to', discrete objects in motion, something experienced in three senses. Thus: "Everything is objects in motion, sense experiences inessential to conceiving of objects in motion are illusory." Hence, "color is an illusion, volume and velocity are not."
I have to think that something unique to our biology (e.g., that our natural model of spacetime comes from multiple senses) is the motivation here because the entire concept of "discrete objects" has been challenged by physics, corpuscularism itself rebutted, and yet it remains the dominant way to envision the world. Not only that, but the concept is as old as written philosophy. It didn't take scientific revelations to make people buy into it, the position arose ascientifically at the dawn of philosophy (e.g., a world of atoms, elements, Platonic solids, etc.), and has remained in vogue despite countervailing scientific findings. That is, it seems to me that such views are also naive forms of understanding.
What do we replace this seemingly inborne tendency with? That is a harder question. But it seems to me like a whole description of any given phenomena needs to include our sensation of it. Information, in the sense the term is used in physics, exists relationally. The current dogma involves an unnatural amputation of one half of the relation and the substitution of a magical, unnatural, "eye that sees things-in-themselves," in its place. Thus, neuroscience can inform our understanding of the illusory nature of things like color, but apparently not about the models that we have built atop those self-same illusory sensations?
A good start would be to try to knock down the tendency towards reduction that corpuscular thinking generates. A common view is that, not only is "color," not "real," but so to social status, recessions, etc. And yet a recession causes massive, observable physical changes across the globe, so in what way is it not "real" in the same sense that rocks are real?
Recessions are real, but they are incorporeal, a term from Augustine's day that is worth resurrecting. Incorporeal doesn't necessitate "non-natural" or "non-physical," although I will allow that the word is often used that way today. It means simply "lacking a body." (Corpus - Latin for body; "in" a Latin prefix for "un" or "not.")
Where is a recession located? In physical changes spanning the globe: in unfinished houses in Florida, in empty grocery shelves in Sudan, in government databases trillions of digital logic gates and in uncountable neurons and (natural) mental sensations. It exists substrate independently, in information that is naturally isomorphic vis-a-vis its encoding. That is, it is incorporeal, lacking a discrete body.
Color is likewise incorporeal, it exists in patterns of neuronal activity, in the physical make up of stop signs, in the electrical currents powering lighting traffic lights, etc. It is impossible to study the science of marketing, traffic, the economics of entertainment, zoology, religious symbolism, etc., all natural phenomena without reference to color. Major problems in the social sciences could be resolved if it was acknowledged that, not only are the objects of study complex and emergent, but also incorporeal, but incorporeal in a way that does not entail that they are "less real," or "non-natural."
A view that was overturned by careful observations, i.e., by sensory experience. Note though that the new view, of a sphere in space rotating on its axis, moving through space around a larger sphere, is also a conception based in sensory experience. To be sure, more sophisticated models look at the system in purely mathematical terms, but mathematics itself is a discipline where visualization is more important than most. The axioms that ground proofs often come from appeals to (seemingly) essential truths about our visual or temporal-spatial sensations. That is, we accept Euclid's axioms because we cannot visualize their violation coherently.
Sentience is a fuzzy term. But, to your point, slime molds demonstrate intelligence when solving mazes, respond to stimuli, etc. without a nervous system. An interesting behavior of slime molds is that, when food runs scarce, numerous individuals will link together and form a migrating colony that can walk. Essentially, it is a composite body, a unity that appears to utilize a composite sensory system. As the name "acellular slime molds" suggest, a subset don't even have proper cells.
Problem solving wise, they can do some neat things. People have used them to solve Hamiltonian path problems (e.g., the traveling salesman problem), a class of problem that gives digital computers a hard time. Although, DNA and RNA have also been used to "compute" answers to these problems by creating selection pressures that privilege shorter paths, but we don't think of those molecules as conceivably having any sort of sensory experience.
Seems to me like an assertion that will only get murkier as AI advances. Organisms lacking nervous systems nevertheless have sensory systems, so I don't see why the nervous system should be the deciding factor here.
If the core conceit of computational neuroscience is correct, then sensation is the result of sensory organs working in concert with computational processes. "Conscious" sensation would simply entail some given level of complexity and a "global workspace" in which sensory data is gathered and re-presented to another layer of holistic computational processing. On this view, there is no reason why a sufficiently complex digital apparatus, or a primarily digital apparatus utilizing some biological components for parallel processing, could not experience conscious sensation.
But that makes sensation an information process, and such processes are generally considered to be substrate independent. So, if that conceit is correct, and it appears to be the number one theory, then you can theoretically build a mind that experiences sensation out of extremely well-crafted steam pipes that have been set up such that they mimic the informational structure of a human brain.
In any event, until there is a good theory for what exactly causes sensation, this is an isolable debate (i.e., something more specific than "very complex information processing/computation processes," where "complexity," "information," and "computation," are all terms which generate hundreds of articles about how poorly defined and vague the currently are.)
Saying "brains create color" is like explaining that "batteries produce electrical current" without any reference to a closed circuit, or explaining that "magnets attract (or repel)" without any reference to what it is in the related objects that are involved in either attraction or repulsion. It seems hard to explain how the physical process of evolution came to involve the "non-physical" trait of color as well.
A brain in a vacuum isn't going to experience anything. The sensation of color results from an interaction between the sensory system and the environment. Color being "created in the brain" sounds like something ex nihilo; the environment creates the brain and the brain and the environment, together, create color, right?
But how is this unlike any other physical phenomena? My tires don't "create friction," friction is generated by the interaction of my tires and the road, and friction is itself a composite phenomenon. Covalent bonds aren't created by electrons, or by the molecules they define (except tautologically), but by the interaction of EM forces vis-a-vis relevant set of electrons and protons.
All physical processes are relational. Imagine any physical entity in a vacuum (allowing for the sake of argument that such a thing can truly exist). What does it do except in respect to other parts of itself? If the entity is undividable, it doesn't do anything, it effectively has no traits, while if it is a composite entity, we can only define its physical interactions in terms of processes between parts of the whole.
This seems confused. If color only exists in sensation, then the sky has no color without the possibility of sensation existing, no? How can the sky have a color "of-itself," when color is necessarily something that occurs relationally? That's like an electron having a negative charge without relation to the field of which it is a part or any existent positive charge. If the entire universe is just one electron, charge is meaningless, undefinable. If color doesn't exist without an observing entity then does EM charge, isospin, flavor, mass, etc. not exist when there isn't an ongoing relevant interaction?
The sky observably does have a color. Common denials of this fact generally hew to a reductive line, even if this commitment to reduction is not made explicitly (something which has become more common as reduction has increasingly fallen out of favor). The relationship between a system that experiences color and the object that has color is ostensibly a natural one, even in most dualist ontologies. On the face of it, there is some sort of causal relationship between the colored object, the experience of color, and a source of light.
The claim that color isn't real, "because it is really just different wave lengths of light reflecting off an object and interacting with photoreceptors that in turn produce a pattern of neuronal action potentials," requires that:
A. If something can be reduced to something else in an explanation it is somehow "less real" than the things it reduces too.
B. Everything can be effectively reduced to some fundamental unit of reality, else this devolves into an infinite regress where nothing is real because there is always some lower level of being that negates the reality of the higher. If physical limitations place an epistemological limit on how basic the entities we can know of can be that is above the ontological basement, then we only ever deal with "non-real" entities in the first place.
C. Contained in B is the assertion that no information is lost in this reduction, which clashes with the relational nature of physical phenomena. For example, my coffee mug is hotter than the table it is sitting on. I can reduce this statement into an analysis of the relevant systems' composite parts, but by the time I reduce it down to individual molecules I have lost the concept of heat. How can a molecule have velocity in relation to nothing but itself? Thermodynamic systems do not contain heat, heat is defined by a boundary condition.
None of these points seem particularly well established. Again, I think this flawed way of reasoning is a biproduct of the human sensory system itself (see above). Hence why it predates anything resembling modern science by millennia and remains remarkably robust even in light of evidence against such a view (e.g., why should we think things are really just the motions of smaller things anymore when we have evidence that these apparently fundamental smaller things are really fluctuations of a field and only definable in terms of the entire field, the part explained by the whole, or why believe in the aforementioned fields if they can be reduced to information theoretical datum?)
Cars are bodies in motion. They stop at red lights and begin moving again when a green light appears. Galileo bracketed dynamics to a set of simple problems, but we now look at physical systems much more holistically precisely because this gives us a better understanding of the world and allows us to make better predictions about it. The change in motion of cars due to color is part of any holistic explanation of traffic patterns.
I never said otherwise. I criticized the presupposition that sensation and mind are completely distinct 'things'. Seems to me that the former are part of the latter in such a way that complex minds such as ours evolved - over enough time and mutation - from simple sensation(s). In other words, without sensations there could be no minds.
Quoting lorenzo sleakes
Quoting 180 Proof
haha! This is the kind of exchange that's pervasive here in the forum. :lol:
To say "you have proven nothing" is ignoratio elenchi (failing to see the point of @180 Proof's response).
I agree that the sensations that we experience are nervous system-dependent. But the question is how. Are you elimitative and believe the actual sense-data "red" is nothing but the nerve signal? If not then how does the nervous system create such sensible qualities. There are some theories but I dont think science has gotten very far in discovering such NCC.
Most believe that colors never existed until brains created them for the first time ever. Maybe its right but I question it: the idea being that behind the yet to be discovered NCC are deeper psycho-physical laws that may not be nervous system dependent.
This is a scientific problem and not a question philosophers alone can answer, or even pose adequately, insofar as philosophy's domain is conceptual-interpretive, not theoretical-testable.