Sorry this took so long, but I kept reading further in hopes of getting to something more meaty to talk about before my first post on this subject. I’m through 3 chapters and it has essentially only been basic definitions and a few thought experiments.

My first comment is that I always forget that I’m not actually interested in philosophy of consciousness. What I associate to phil. con. (my abbreviation from here on out) is not what the typical philosopher associates to it. I tend to view all of philosophy through the lens of philosophy of language. So I usually start form some sort of premise about how language is more primary and fundamental than consciousness. Now lets try to figure out how it is that language brings about consciousness. Of course, this is not at all how the book goes about it. In fact, I think the opposite assumption is implicit here. So needless to say, the book isn’t as interesting to me as I would have hoped.

The one argument that was presented right at the beginning that I had heard before but forgotten that was pretty interesting was about debunking the “brains in a vat” idea. Basically this goes back to Descartes who wanted to know if there was any way we could tell if we actually existed or if our brains were bodiless in a vat somewhere and scientists were just stimulating certain neurons to make us think we were people (well, so Descartes’ description was a little different, but this is the modern Matrix-esque interp). Essentially we don’t have to go through the trouble that Descartes went through to debunk this possibility. The standard sort of pragmatic argument is that it just isn’t possible for any reasonable interpretation of the term “possible”. The amount of computer power needed to do this would encounter a combinatorial explosion for even the simplest experience of the world. Thus, it is not possible we are being tricked (so before a torrent of arguments fill my replies, I watered it down, try to fill in the details yourself before arguing).

Other than that the only sort of important terms that might show up in later posts have to do with phenomenology. All of chapter 3 is essentially devoted to this. Essentially it is a method of philosophy of consciousness developed by Husserl that tried to remove subjectivity. I really don’t want to go into this much, since I feel like it won’t play much of a role later and it is giving me flashbacks of my 20th century philosophy class when we had long tedious arguments about the method of “bracketing”. Overall, what you should know is that it played a huge role in influencing major philosophers and schools of thought on philosophy, but in general is highly criticized and probably has been overtaken by neuroscience studies and interpreting them.

My one complaint so far is that the results of thought experiments (which play a major role in this book) are very skewed by leading questions. I don’t doubt that the visualization of X was harder than Y, but coming to that conclusion before asking, “Wasn’t visualization of X harder than Y?” would have been more convincing for your argument. I’m not sure if any were that bad, and I should look a specific one up, but I don’t really feel like it now.

My guess is that the next chapter is on a rejection of Husserl’s phenomenology, and then hopefully it will get into some of the crazy things our brain’s do from a neuroscience perspective. That could make things more interesting.

I’ve been running a very unscientific experiment for awhile now. It has produced some very interesting results that I can’t seem to explain. So every time my cat comes up to me and wants to jump on my lap (several times a day for at least a month I’ve been running this), I try something new. I either look near her, or don’t look at her at all, or look at her eyes, or some variation. The point was that I noticed she seemed to only make the jump when after we made eye contact.

Recently I’ve tried to be very specific about the different between looking near or at a different part of her body vs making eye contact. It may be my imagination as hardcore scientists would probably tell me, but I’m am quite convinced that she understands the difference between eye contact and non-eye contact.

Here is why I don’t understand this. Even if we make a huge leap and grant full out consciousness to cats (probably an overkill assumption), I still can’t explain it. Humans understand eye contact because they are aware that that is where sight comes from. I can see of no scenario in which a cat can come to the realization that eyes are where sight and recognition come from.

The only explanation I can come up with is that she is getting up there in cat years, and so has developed a conditioned response through years of experience that eye contact means that I am paying attention to her. As a good Pavlovian, we could say that she doesn’t have to have any idea what the cause is or why it works, it is merely a conditioned reaction.

Anyone else that might know something about animal behavior want to take a crack at this one?

So I guess I’ll just do a single post on each of the four topics that this blog is on to give an overview of my interests in that area. Here goes for philosophy.

I have lots of interests here, since I believe this is probably the main way in which each of the subjects cross-over. First off: Philosophy of Consciousness. This is a sort of minor philosophical interest with major intersection potential with physics/quantum mechanics. Is consciousness necessary to collapse a probabilistic wavefunction?

A major interest would be Philosophy of Language. How does language affect how we perceive things and think about things? Is mathematics a language? Do different languages make it easy to understand certain concepts in math? Does changing the language of math make it easier to solve certain problems? I think even the uninitiated would answer definitive “yes”s to these last two questions, but why and how? This leads to my next interest.

Philosophy of Aesthetics. Technically this is what my undergrad thesis was in. It is definitely the most elusive of my interests (we’ll see why in the next paragraph). This clearly is about how philosophy and art coincide. Can mathematics be considered an art form? Combining the phil consciousness, language, and aesthetics: how does changing the language of math affect how we think about problems and how we perceive the beauty of problems. Eventually I’ll post either all of or parts of my thesis which is a gigantic exploration of that question.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I started as an analytic philosopher. This is essentially philosophy done solely on clearly defined terms and logical manipulation/arguments using these terms. I have since become more of a continental philosopher . This is more of showing artistically why things must be true. Terms are usually considered to be more ambiguous, and arguments not as logical (hence a “lower” form of philosophy).

Here is why I not only think that continental philosophy is not “lower”, but is actually a much higher form of philosophy. Suppose you want to argue for Wittgenstein’s view of language. You could do this in a 300,000 page rigorous logical argument, but you probably wouldn’t convince very many people. In fact, even those that you do convince would probably still not know why it is true, just that it is true from a logical perspective. Compare this to reading David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. Not only would you become convinced of the truth of Wittgenstein’s argument, you would see why it must be true in your life.

Ah…This is a rant for another day, though.