Posted: Sep 07, 2018 3:47 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:A quote attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Lord Rutherford's is “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” . I like it in reference to anecdotal evidence we get from thinking about our own mind. This is the stamp collecting part. All of us have plenty to say about our supposed inner worlds and I do think it legitimate to collect these stamps.
Unfortunately we have a lot of amateurs doing the collecting, like really really lots of amateurs and all of them are absolutely convinced that they are the epitome of professionalism when it comes to their own inner view. Philosophy is riddled with this disease of first person access and most famously this starts with that clueless hack René Descartes.
Undeniably we have something to study here. We all have some stamps. We all have shit happening inside of our heads and we all have an opinion about how this is proof of god or the supernatural or some other crazy notion like 'science can't x'. We have a thing for which we would like some explanations.
If we have a bottle of table salt in front of us we have a thing that we think we can explain. We look into sodium and chlorine and ionic species and then crystal formation and many other aspects in the realm of physics. Surprisingly no one says "science knows nothing about table salt".
How do we get to the same place with this first person mind thing? We point at the salt, how do we point at the mind?
One silly approach is to become overly attached to the spook we call 'consciousness'. We all know what a conscious mammal looks like and what an unconscious mammal looks like. Somehow many of us have come to believe that we can attach a -ness to that idea and have a thing worthy of pointing out. A candidate stamp.
I believe that the C with the -ness is just a spook that amounts to no more than an 'undigested bit of beef'. It is not a useful stamp. We have other words like attention, thought, and aware that are sufficient to describe our inner stamps.
So first, what is the thing to which we want to point and ask of science that it explain for us?
While I generally agree with this sentiment, or at least the conclusion, I think you are getting hung up in reification, which is what those who propose consciousness is a thing also do. Things are products of mind. Naming is a way to begin to make models.