POPc Participant William’s 1st Post (partially in response to Lucy):
I don’t why it’s a problem for materialism either! It’s not like our experiences are hallucinations or not real. At any rate, it seems like it’s impossible to reduce everything to purely natural processes anyway, there has to be some sort of consciousness that wrestles with and translates phenomena into some physical law. I don’t know how we’d ever be able to get rid of this “being” that inevitability experiences, and who’s intuitions, sensations, and will are so often beyond just the mere scope of facts.
POPc Participant William’s 2nd Post:
So, I learned what a quale is with Adam See. I especially remember the banana thought experiment he used. Something like, “if a person in a room knew everything about bananas ever, would an actual encounter with a banana add to that person’s knowledge?” Well, the answer seemed obvious to me. Of course that person attained some form of knowledge; perhaps a practical knowledge or an intuition? It seems as if these real aspects are quale. Plus, I figure there is a stark difference in just knowing everything about say, a person (maybe mom), and actually experiencing that person. How can anyone justify the non-existence of quale? Hum, back to the thought experiment, and to be fair, I am still trying to imagine a person with the eternal knowledge of bananas!
POPc Participant William’s 3rd Post:
At this last POPc meeting, we got to speak about nominalism and what it meant for a notion of subjectivity. It was really cool!! Somehow our conversation ended up being about whether there was really an inner dimension of consciousness, or whether (in line with the changing nature of reality for nominalists) we were webbed within, or reflections of others. I like the latter possibility a lot more. I can’t even imagine uttering even the word “I” without it referring to some sort of “we” that conditions even our singular possibility for speech. I mean, if after all, language is what draws our attention to objects in the world, makes images memorable, and translates things into intelligible terms, we can’t ever think of such pointed and shared language in the singular. Maybe, from this line of thinking, consciousness is just a multiplicity of many contingent beings overlapping one another at any instance in time or space – or as Dr. Shottenkirk put really nicely in more concrete terms: perhaps “I” is just one circle on a sort of venn diagram that is intersected by many other “I’s” that themselves constitute another circle in a whole web of relations. Hum.
Shottenkirk’s Response to William:
Dear William,
A quale (yes, the plural really is qualia, but I like the less pretentious ‘quales’ much better!) is a funny little thing. Different people have used the term differently of course, but Goodman intended it to be both anti-platonist, as a quale is a particular and all reality can be understood in terms of quales, and he also intended it to be phenomenalist instead of physicalist. This last point has to be understood historically, and it might really interest you, because it was a debate within the analytic world in pre-war and post-WWII Europe, which of course had some affect on the development of continental philosophy. The physicalists (such as Carnap **), argued that the atomic starting points of experience were objects, and that the particulars in the world could be reduced to the experience of objects.
The subjectivity of experience is important to you, and you are right to focus on that. It is difficult though (as you know) to give an account of subjective experience while still giving an account of knowledge, as the latter seems to carry with it demands for public and intersubjective experience. Your knowledge of a banana or of your mom can’t be the kind of knowledge we want to call (shared) knowledge. So how does private knowledge fit into that picture?
This is the way the conundrum has been set up. But of course this is only truly a conundrum if we think of the subjective and the objective as cleanly bifurcated. I think you have a good sense of the alternative view. If, alternately, there is a murky boundary – always being renegotiated and redefined – between my inner private awareness and the consensual communis opinio, then we don’t’ have quite the confusion. The difficulty comes not only when we see the subjective and the objective as two mutually exclusive enclaves, but as two static and worlds, each unable to impenetrate the other.
You write, I mean, if after all, language is what draws our attention to objects in the world, makes images memorable, and translates things into intelligible terms, we can't ever think of such pointed and shared language in the singular.” I think it is also the way art functions. And I think much of that centers around the pleasure of learning something, particularly learning something about someone else’s view. I’ve been working (as you know as you’ve been so helpful in discussions!) on a new book, and this is something I’ve written for that:
Our desire to learn and the pleasure we get when we correctly identify something or when we solve some problem is no secret in philosophy. Many philosophers have commented on this, from Aristotle in his first sentence of the Metaphysics where he writes, “All men by nature desire to know” (Aristotle. Metaphysics 689 The Basic Works of Aristotle Ed. Richard McKeon (NY: Random House, 1941), to C.S. Pierce’s much quoted sentence, “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.”[i] To not know something causes us anxiety, whereas to believe we know (of course quite distinct from actually knowing) gives us real satisfaction. This fact is a great motivator. Correctly identifying an object, figuring out a difficult problem, recognizing a pattern, etc., are sources of pleasure for us not as a result of some kind of conditioning to which we’ve been subjected but, arguably, instinctually so. Each of us, so it seems, are hard-wired to enjoy getting things right. Knowing gives us pleasure and, in turn, the desire for pleasure motivates learning.”
What we know is what others have shared with us. I’m glad you’ve shared your thoughts with me, and I’m glad you’ve been my student. I wish you the best on your Fullbright and the rest of your intellectual journey!
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