[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[Eric Charles]

Glen,
I'm running out of ideas where to go with this. I believe that I do
understand the so-called "hard problem", but I reject it as based on faulty
premises. Nick has routinely, over the two decades or so that I have known
him, demonstrated a hard-headed inability to hold nimbly and work with
premises that he believes to be deeply faulty. On rare occasions I have
seen him do it, but it is rare, and never with this particular subject
matter. Based on other conversations around similar subject matter, I
suspect that Nick ultimately thinks it is immoral to believe in the hard
problem, and that is part of his inability to hold it nimbly.

At any rate: Nick and I deeply believes that there are no valid questions
about psychology that are not properly understood as empirical questions
about behavior. So either Chalmers has asked an invalid question, or he
doesn't understand his own question's researchable implications. There is
no third option.

William James was the only philosopher on Wittgenstein's book shelf when
the latter died. The former anticipated the latter, and both cut this
challenge off at the pass: Chalmers is talking about something that we can
talk about, or he should be quiet. There is no third option. If it is a
thing we *can *talk about, then we can go about the business of science
with regards to it.

Now, you *do *have an opportunity to use Peirce against us here. When
Peirce got around to categorizing types-of-inquiry / types-of-science, he
divided up what I would call psychology into several different categories,
spread throughout his schema, and I suspect that in doing so he leaves room
for a "hard problem." It is annoying, and I believe it is inconsistent with
the direction he was headed in his earlier philosophical works. My guess is
that he still harbored too strong a loyalty to Kant, and followed Kant in
the long-standing philosophical tradition of frantically throwing
scientific psychology under the nearest bus in an effort to pretend that
certain challenges inherent in all scientific endeavors are solely problems
for psychology..... but that is either the heart of the matter or a
complete tangent... and as I can't tell which.... I'm going to stop for
now.

Does any of that get us anywhere?

Best,
Eric

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 1:44 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hm. I can't quite parse this, but don't want to ignore it.
>
> I'm not convinced that Chalmers' naturalistic dualism is at all different
> from Peirce's real/extant distinction. From that perspective, Chalmers'
> dualism and Nick's monism are irrelevant to whether or not Nick understands
> the hard problem. What one thinks is actually the case can be unrelated to
> one's taxonomy of possible cases. ("There are many like it, but this one is
> mine.")
>
> I can admit, however, that any one formulation of the hard problem may
> *seem* very different from another formulation. But the mere rejection of a
> lexicon (e.g. "Chalmers-esque") is not a rejection of the problem being
> outlined. If category theory has taught us anything, it's that problems can
> seem quite different, but really be about the same thing. The very fact
> that we can have the discussion we're having is an indication that there is
> a "hard problem" and that it can act as a foil for choosing one's rifle.
>
> On 5/2/20 6:12 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > To paraphrase Nick's answer:
> > Yes, of course we /can /build such a machine, so long as you agree to
> treat "enjoy" and "think" and "feel" in the way that I do, and NOT as
> Chalmers or the other dualists would. My approach does not contain a
> Chalmers-esque hard problem.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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