Episode 25, Philip Goff and David Papineau Debate 'Can Science Explain Consciousness?' (Part II)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2017
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
Everything you could need is on www.thepanpsycast.com! Please tweet us your thoughts at www.twitter.com/thepanpsycast. In the words of David Chalmers, "The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience." Debating the question, 'Does physicalism address the hard problem of consciousness?' are Philip Goff (www.philipgoffphilosophy.com) and David Papineau (www.DavidPapineau.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even if we buy into this metaphysics of, as you put it intrinsic natures giving substance to the roles revealed by |
| 0:24.2 | science. I don't see how it helps with the problems that you were saying pushed you away from |
| 0:31.3 | physicalism. So that's one issue. The second issue, I find this metaphysics of intrinsic nature is very strange. |
| 0:40.1 | So let me just do those two things in order. |
| 0:43.6 | As you're seeing it now, so in a sense, the experiences are one and the same as things going on in the brain, |
| 0:55.3 | but they aren't one and the same as so much with the roles described by science, |
| 1:01.1 | but the intrinsic underlying natures that fill those roles. |
| 1:06.6 | But I presume that even on your account, when I have visual experience, this is in terms of the intrinsic natures underneath the physics, a complex thing. |
| 1:20.6 | I take it that you don't want to deny that it involves complexes of neurons in the visual cortex and so on. |
| 1:29.9 | It's just that you're not interested in the things so described, |
| 1:32.9 | but the intrinsic natures that fill the neuron. |
| 1:36.6 | But then the experience, the visual experience, turns out to be a complex thing with internal structure. |
| 1:43.7 | I think this is called the grain problem. |
| 1:45.5 | So on your account, since phenomenal concepts are completely revelatory, you ought to be |
| 1:52.1 | able to see that a visual experience is a complex thing with a rather fine grain structure, |
| 1:58.3 | but we don't. |
| 1:59.6 | So it looks like the problem that pushed you away from |
| 2:02.8 | simple-minded physicalism is still there on your account. So that was one problem with your position. |
| 2:08.5 | Second problem, do we really want to buy into this business of intrinsic natures behind the roles |
| 2:16.0 | discerned by physics. |
| 2:17.5 | So on your view, I don't know, let's take the mass role or the electron role. |
| 2:22.1 | In your view, physics tells us that there's a quantity that bodies have, that is proportional |
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