Quote:
Originally Posted by dnlgfnk
Standard reply of modern philosophy of science which doesn't question the origins (Descartes, et.al., wanting to quantify nature in order to control it, so rejected qualia [subjective experience]).
That is, give the 3rd person, objective mathematical description of nature ("Red is wavelengths") sans the 1st person , conscious subjective experience of it ("Red is...[fill in the blank for everyone's conscious, unique experience of that shade of color]").
Like Dennett, you assert everything as utterly knowable from a physicalist presupposition. Like Dennett, one must explain away consciousness and subjective experience (qualia) in order to do so.
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Reminds me of a line from Shakespeare's
Love's Labors Lost, "They have been to a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps."
"Quale" is a word that did not exist 100 years ago. By boxcar's standards that means it is not a word at all. For all intents and purposes it is another religion.
Consider this. If you appeal to religion to explain anything then the explanations you get are going to depend on what time in history and what place on the planet you trace that religion to.
On the other hand
science is independent of time and geography. It always leads to the same answers. Should we ever be visited by aliens from another planet their science will be the same as ours, the only difference being that they will certainly be far more advanced than we. But their religion, if they have one, will certainly be different.
While it is true that our scientific journey has lead us down some blind alleys (e.g., the Aristotlean view of motion, the Ptolemaic view of cosmology, the miasmic theory of disease, the aether theory of waves) the fact remains that
science is self correcting.- Test ideas by experiment and observation.
- Build on those ideas that pass the test.
- Reject the ones that fail.
- Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
- Question everything.
Science has given you the car you drive, medical care that has extended your life, the computer on which you post in this forum, etc., etc., etc.
So science does not have to "explain away" consciousness, rather it seeks to explain it, and I am confident it will ultimately succeed. And science has explained origins (the big bang, evolution, etc.)
The religious do not hesitate to use the products of science but the truth is that science scares them. And it scares them for two reasons: (1)they don't understand it and (2)they feel threatened by it. They feel threatened by it because it assaults their ego, they want to believe that they were created in the image of a god rather than descended from an ape. They don't want to believe that psychiatry and drugs can alter behavior. Indeed, some do not even want to accept the existence of mental illness. At least one characterizes an accident that destroyed a significant portion of a person's brain as "a bad hair day."
