I completely agree with the perpetual question “why and how do we feel” being reminded to “Dan” over and over. I thought about that question and I don’t think we can get close to explaining how but I am going to try to give my explanation of why. I think that without feeling there wouldn’t be any purpose and without purpose there wouldn’t be any advancement for humans as a race. There wouldn’t be any purpose to wanting to be the best at something or to want to stand out from the mass, there wouldn’t be something that pushes us to strive for that better image of ourselves and we wouldn’t be so attached to our ego. In some way it would be better since it is this attachment that is the source of our suffering but where would be the source of our motivation? When I think about it, we could be just programmed to try to be the best, and achieve our goals in order to continually strive forward but something would be missing, and still think that would be purpose and meaning in life. There wouldn’t be any colours in life everything would consist of a single shade of grey.
“how and why do we feel ?”
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the perpetual question “why and how do we feel” being reminded to “Dan” over and over. I thought about that question and I don’t think we can get close to explaining how but I am going to try to give my explanation of why.
I think that without feeling there wouldn’t be any purpose and without purpose there wouldn’t be any advancement for humans as a race. There wouldn’t be any purpose to wanting to be the best at something or to want to stand out from the mass, there wouldn’t be something that pushes us to strive for that better image of ourselves and we wouldn’t be so attached to our ego. In some way it would be better since it is this attachment that is the source of our suffering but where would be the source of our motivation? When I think about it, we could be just programmed to try to be the best, and achieve our goals in order to continually strive forward but something would be missing, and still think that would be purpose and meaning in life. There wouldn’t be any colours in life everything would consist of a single shade of grey.
Harnad makes one point in this entire article ie. that a heterophenomenology, rather than explaining consciousness, sidesteps it, pretending that it doesn't exist (through its neutral stance), and thus fails to explain how/why we have feeling. Harnad is absolutely right, no matter how many correlations we find for felt states, it will only allow us to predict felt states, not explain why/how we feel them. But I would like Harnad to give us an example of something being explained in its how/why and not merely predictive at its core. No matter how strong the theory is, it is always a collection of functional correlates (this happens when that happens when this happens when that happens and so on). Harnad slips out of this in describing gravity as a function explaining a function, unlike with consciousness (or feeling) where function is trying to describe feeling (something somehow of a different nature than functional properties). Gravity is a feeling. That this occurs when two bodies of differing mass are close to each other is a functional correlate of the feeling of gravity, not an explanation of how/why we feel gravity. The only reason gravitational theory makes sense is that it is commensurable with our feelings of gravity. But it does not explain how/why two bodies of differing mass would create this force. Thus, the causal mechanism. the how/why that Harnad is looking for and doesn’t believe is possible to know, is not possible to know anywhere or with anything, yet we come up with theories that explain the functional correlates in a satisfying way. Why can’t heterophenomenology lead us to the same theorization on the functional correlates it finds? Could we not rule out certain theories of feeling with the discovery of different functional correlates? Thus while Dennett is wrong in being optimistic that through a purely functional exposé of the brain, we will understand consciousness, I don't see what Harnad's point is other than to make sure we understand the limitations of this. An objective science will only understand the objective aspects of being human (what we do/the functional aspects), or the easy problems. Chalmer's sad attempt to create a science of the hard problem just leads him away from the how/why of feeling/subjectivity and back into a science of the easy problem. But its truly all we have to understand feeling, or at least to approach it. Yes Harnad, we will never know the why/how of feeling, but we also will never know the why/how of anything so why should that stop us from trying to anyways?
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