Temp

October 30, 2013

AJ Harmond

Scruton has thinly veiled disdain for a number of the continental thinkers he talks about, but he seems to recreate the common interpretation of these major thinkers' work. Of course, the complexity and obscurity that continental philosophy tends towards makes greatly nuanced argument common within them, so I would say his reduction, naturally, misses some of their strength.

Before I get into my major analysis of the Nagel and Dennet readings I will say this: I really do not enjoy Dennet. I find him to be rather pompous at times, and he is, along with his colleague Richard Dawkins, probably one of my least favorite public intellectuals. And I believe that he completely obfuscated the eventual conclusion in Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by emphasizing the thought experiment without engaging in Nagel's later introduced ideas. I also believe that there is a core problem with Dennet's argumentation about how we understand what it is like to be another being/species.

First off, I find the important point of Nagel's piece is that, even as a physicalist, we do not have the resources to explain the origination of mental events even if we can find the corresponding physical event. Dennet seems to reduce mental events to their physical correlate, cutting off the importance of Nagel's ideas. In fact, I would say Dennet himself explains the problem but misses the point. We can agree that when a bat receives the sonorous signal returning to him, during echolocation, his brain does act exactly like the receiving portion of the police officer's radar gun. This is the physical event. Now, at this point Dennet merely moves onto more physical events: the processing done by the bats brain, the maneuver that follows from the newly received information, etc. But what he misses the phenomenological (and I hesitate to use this word, I do not intend to use it in any precise sense) quality of the mental event. In fact, it appears Dennet abolishes the possibility that a bat could even have a mental event. There are two problems with this move in Dennet's description. First, it falls into the same problem that Nagel describes a la trying to act like a bat. We could probably draw certain parallels between bats' and other animals' brain functions, even humans', but that does not describe the mental experience of being a bat. More importantly, this anthropocentric move that Dennet dismisses, even glorifies, underlies the more major problem in Dennet's reductionism.

The major problem I have with Dennet's thinking comes about when he talks about studying bats in the same way we objectively study humans. If we are to study the two in the exact same way then there are two routes: to admit Nagel is correct, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, or (as this is clearly not a possibility for Dennet) we must accept studying humans through the eradication of their subject. (At least for the duration of the experiment. The word eradication is probably stronger than it needs to be; obviously the subject is never actually destroyed, so to speak) This is because if we are going to study bats and humans in the same manner we must pay attention to the common ground between the two: the physiological facts that we can empirically record. Now here is the real trick: if we are treating humans as completely physical along with the bats, then who is running the experiment? This will at first seem like a ridiculous objection; I just admitted the subject is never actually eradicated. But how can one seriously approach physicalism if they cannot account from mental events? The interpretation of our information gathered in physical experiments are only interpreted in actions that could be described as mental events. Here we move from the problem of anthrocentrism (only humans can think/have mental events so we should just treat them as a slightly special case) to a transcendental scientism (there is a transcendental subject of science who is interpreting the physical occurrences through its mental events). The Kantian terminology here is purposeful: For all the vainglorious posturing of someone like Dennet (and I believe most other analytic philosophers are more humble) they are still stuck in the logic of the transcendental subject. Dennet has left the “Audience in the Cartesian Theater” only to become a “Spectator in the Kantian Stadium”. He can only make his arguments based on reason but his physicalism reduces the mental capacity of reason to a physical event.

This is not to say that Dennet's scientific observations are not sound; I am not saying that bats might be reasoning creatures. I am merely pointing out a disjunction in his stance and the very philosophical tools that he uses to come to these conclusions. I believe that Nagel's position is much more faithful to its own ontological presuppositions. This argument is also rather unrefined, so I am sure it will be pretty unclear.

Samantha Olsen

The Jones reading focuses on the philosophical view of Phenomenology as described by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology is the act of getting back to the things themselves as they are presenting themselves to me. Descartes separates everything into matter, extension or mass, and to minds, immaterial. Husserl denies the dualism between immanence and transcendence or the idea and the object and tries to fuse them together. According to Husserl, Descartes moves too fast in automatically believing that I exist by thinking that experience happens within the mind. Husserl believes that the experience is outside of the I and the object and only through expericane do I emerge. This is supported by his thinking that the mind interprets the experiences instead of having them itself.

If I see the tree, according to Husserl, I need to bracket off and doubt the I and the tree. What is left is the act of seeing or the experience. Because the experience is happening outside the mind and being interpreted and perceived by the mind we can believe we exist. To understand objectsd we must allow them to appear in their full essences and since experience puts us in direct contact with things and essences can only be given to me through perspective, we need to get back to the experience and alllow things to emerge from themselves.

In my Phenomenology course, Professor Bradley had the class go out to Manito Park to do a study of the essences the Japanese Gardens and the English Gardens give us and how it is presented in each. Our class came to a few unified conclusions that the English garden relies on sight to give off its essence of harmony and order where as the Japanese garden uses both sight and hearing (hearing from the pond) to give off harmony also but less order. You can get a small glimpse of this just google searching generic English and Japanese gardens. Professor Bradley forced our class to step back and allow the gardens to appear to us.

Thomas

What is it like to be a Bat?

In “what is it like to be a Bat?”, Nagel argues that consciousness had essential to it a subjective character, a what it is like aspect. He states, “An organism has conscious mental state if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.” His critics have objective strongly to what they see as a misguided attempt to argue from a fact about how one represents the world (trivially, one can only do so from his own point of view) to a false claim about the world, that it somehow has first personal perspectives built into it. On that understanding, Nagel is a conventional dualist about the physical and the mental. This is, however, a misunderstanding: Nagel’s point is that there is a constraint on what it is to possess the concept of a mental state, namely, that one be directly acquainted with it. Concepts of mental states are only made available to a thinker who can be acquainted with his own states; clearly, the possession and use of physical concepts has no corresponding constraint. Nagel is most widely know within the field of philosophy of mind as a advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, be satisfactorily explained using the current concepts of physics.

While Nagel is sometimes categorized as a dualist for these sorts of remarks, he is more precisely categorized as an anti-reductionist. Nagel writes: “ … I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strong divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails 0 simply in virtue of our mental concepts – that the system is conscious.”

Avel Diaz=

What is consciousness? Is it the ability to think or speak, think or feel pain? Surely, much has been discussed about the nature of consciousness and how we as philosophers are to perceive it. The article by Thomas Nagel elaborates on the complexity of conscious analysis. Moreover, that consciousness exhausts all the accounts of it by those who have sought to explain or provide a logos of what consciousness entails. Reductionism, as Nagel argues cannot adequately provide a satisfactory account of consciousness as reductionists aren’t infallible enough to not mistakenly exclude any significant information regarding consciousness. I find this, one of the examples given by Nagel to be of great interest. If reductionists seek to reduce complex organisms into the sums of their parts, and if they are to provide accounts of the causality of those parts, that is, to explain how certain precedents are followed by certain consequences, how then are they to thoroughly explain consciousness if consciousness is intangible and immaterial? If I am understanding Nagel’s criticism correctly, this is an interesting point to consider about consciousness and how difficult it is to understand it. I too agree with Nagel, and how “consciousness exhausts their analysis,” specifically because there is more than one way to view and analyze consciousness. One of the significant theories that has helped me understand consciousness is the one by William James; namely, his stream of consciousness. Within this theory, readers can apprehend that consciousness is always changing, just as Heraclitus proposed that everything in the world is changing. It makes no sense to try and analyze consciousness by analyzing only its parts because it is a whole which must be examined phenomenologically