Well last night the interwebz was set aflame because of a dress. Yes, it's a fab dress. But more importantly, people throughout the country could not agree on the color of the dress.
I won't speculate here about what color it is (it was blue and black), but rather I want to focus on what this tells us about the mind and consciousness.....woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo *explodes*.
Qualia
We need to lay out a few definitions. Qualia is subjective experience/sensations. They are the experiences your self conscious self (your "ego", or your "I"). So everything I feel, touch, here-all experiences of my consciousness are "qualia". The sensation of redness, the feel of the cold wind, my emotions-all of the experiences.
Leibniz Law
(I posted this in an earlier blogpost about consciousness)
Who was Leibniz? Well, he's an old dead dude. But he came up with a lot of neat math stuff...you know, Calculus? He was one of the key people in advancing mathematics to the modern place. He was also a kick-butt philosopher. He came up with a very intuitive law called "Leibniz Law" (-_-). It goes like this:
Let A be some entity/property/process. A = whatever placeholder you want it to be.
If A = A, then whatever is true of A will be true of A. Shocked? It goes on.
If A = A, whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of A. Shocked yet? Just wait.
Really quick, we need to understand what philosophers mean by "possible worlds". Possible worlds are the way the world could have been, or the way the world may be. They are semantic tools for philosophers to describe possibility. So, for example, if I say "it's possible that in the future, I may buy a dog", I can say that because in my mind, that's a perfectly coherent scenario. That is, there is nothing internally contradictory about the possibility that I may buy a dog sometime in the future. Thus, because this is possible, there is a possible world where I own a dog. Let's make one more application. Suppose I say "it's possible that God exists." That's because I can envision that as a possible scenario in my mind, and there's nothing logically incoherent about that possibility (all attempts to prove God to be logically incoherent have been abject failures). Hence, there is a possible world where God exists. This is the essence of modal logic-the logic of possibilities. So let's apply that Leibniz Law. If A = God, whenever I talk about God, God must be God in all possible worlds (duh). I can't envision any non-God entity and call that God (duh). So here's what that means for Leibniz's Law:
If A = A, then whatever is true of A will be true of A.
If A = A, then whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of A.
If A = A, in all possible worlds, A will always be A.
This is intuitive enough. As a side note, if something is true in all possible worlds, it is necessarily true. That is to say that there is no other possible way it could have been. For example, take 1 + 1 = 2. We could have had any symbols we wanted to represent that, but as for the concept itself-one object plus another object equaling a consistent quantity of two objects-there is no other way the world could have been. One object could never have equaled two objects, etc. Back to Leibnuts, suppose you have A and B. If someone claims they are identical, then this is what should follow:
If A = B, whatever is true of A will be true of B
Whatever is possibly true of A will be possibly true of B
In all possible worlds, A = B
Felica and Her Fancy Dresses
Okay, so Felicia is wearing a blue and black dress that everyone thinks is white and gold or whatever. She insists "nah foo. You been dranking all dat drank." But everyone else in the party swears she's wearing a white and gold dress. So she whips out a bazooka and says "DON'T BE LYIN' TO ME. I WILL END YOU."
Well, how can Felicia determine whether the others are just screwing with her? Is it possible?
Let's say Felica (and her loyal posse) wants to test what everyone really sees. How is she to do this?
"Put them all under a brain scanner, and tests their brain patterns!" says physicalist Patty (hehe). Well, Felica does that. And she realizes something. "I know jack-diddly-squat about what they're actually seeing!" It's possible, for all she knows, that they could be having a particular brain pattern and yet they'd be seeing something completely different than her.
Braainzzzz
Here's the trouble. Felica could know all the physical facts about the brains of these guests (hostages?) at her party (she happens to have 5 PhDs in science, and so has one in neuroscience), and still she'd know nothing about what they're seeing. If they said "I really do see white and gold!"-they very well may be! It's possible.
Let me come at this from the perspective of Zombies. David Chalmers, a philosopher, came up with the idea of philosophical zombies (p-zombies). These are people who look just you and me, have the brains of you and me...but there's a catch. These people have no subjective experience. They have no consciousness-they're just pieces of meat reacting to electrical signals. These entities are conceivable-there doesn't seem to be anything about the existence of these beings that is logically incoherent. In fact, for you all you know, I could be one....whoa.
This is where the fun begins.
1.) It's possible that p-zombies exist (they are conceivable-I could be one for all you know)
2.) There is a possible world where p-zombies exist. (Modal possibility)
3.) You could learn all the physical facts about the p-zombies' brains, and that wouldn't tell you about there subjective experience (because they have none)
4.) There is a possible world where physical facts don't equal mental facts (since you could learn the physical facts about the p-zombies' brains, and that wouldn't tell you about their subjective experience)
5.) Conclusion: Mental facts and physical facts are not identical (since if they were, they'd be identical in all possible worlds, and everything that is possibly true of one would be possibly true of the other. Also, if they were identical, learning everything about physicality should yield everything about mentality, since they're supposedly identical. Leibniz Law's a butt face. bam.)
Now, I am not suggesting there is no correlation between Brain States (BS) and Mental States (MS). There undeniably is. However, I'm suggesting that the assumption of our culture, which wants to reduce MS to BS (hehe) is flat out wrong. MS isn't identical to BS.
Let's contextualize this. Felica is contemplating these things and constructs an argument.
1.) If MS = BS, then whatever is true and possibly true of MS should be true and possibly true of BS (Leibniz Law)
2.) She could learn all she wants about BS, and still not know about the MS of her guests
3.) There's something possibly true of MS (you can't learn everything about it by learning everything about BS) that's not possibly true of BS (you obviously would learn everything about BS by learning everything about BS)
4.) There's something possibly true of MS that's not possibly true of BS
Conclusion: MS ain't BS by Leibniz Law (hehe)
Concluding Thoughts
Felica realizes that materialism/physicalism (the assumption that everything in reality reduces to matter/space/energy/time and the rearrangements of it-i.e everything can be described in terms of the natural) is wrong. So she lets her guests go and becomes an idealist (if you have no idea what that is, I'll tell you when you're older. Or click on my post on consciousness that I wrote in November)
Consciousness is undeniably correlated to brain states...but correlation sure has heck doesn't equal identity. More than that, we've learned something interesting from Felicia. Consciousness emphatically isn't reducible to brain states. Consciousness isn't identical to stuff going on inside your head. However, that means the physicalist assumption of our culture is wrong.
Further Resources
This blog post was more philosophical in nature...but if anyone is interested in how I view the interaction between mind and matter, see here. This to me goes far in explaining why people see different things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBsI_ay8K70
Edit: One of my friends has informed me: The idea of zombies did not originate from Chalmers. It was around during the time of Rene Descartes. So p-zombies go back waay before Chalmers.
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