David, I think you have misunderstood a number of things:
(1) The most important is the ontic/epistemic distinction: Distinguish been what there really is (ontic) and what we can know about what there really is (epistemic), e.g., what we can observe or measure. Although it was fashionable for a while (though one wonders how and why!), it will not do to say “I shall assume that what I can observe and measure is all there is and can be.” Not if you want to address the question of the explanatory gap, rather than simply beg it!
(2) Observation and measurement also have to be looked at much more rigorously. In the most natural sense of “observe,” only seeing creatures observe. A camera does not “observe,” it simply does physical transduction, producing a physical “image” (on the film) which, again, is simply another object that has some properties (which in turn are analogs of some of the properties of the object from which the light entering the camera originated). The seeing person who looks at the image on the film is the one who observes, not the camera.
The same is true of measurement: A thermometer does not “measure” temperature; people measure temperature. The thermometer itself simply implements a physical interaction, in which its mercury rises to a certain point on the (man-made) scale, which can then be read off by a seeing, observing, measuring human. The user is the one doing the measuring, not the thermometer.
But there is no reason to be quite this rigid: There is not much risk in talking about instruments doing the measurements, rather than the users of the instruments, just as long as we do not read too much into “measuring.” Ditto for “observing.” In particular, we must on no account make the mistake of treating this instrumental sense of measuring and observing as if it were felt measuring and observing, because then, again, we are simply begging the question of the explanatory gap and the feeling/functing problem.
In the instrumental sense of “measurement,” we can say, for example, that unattended temperature sensors in the arctic transmitted their “observations” to computers, which analyzed them and produced a result, which (correctly) predicted global warming and the destruction of the biosphere in N years. And that event would be the same event if humans were already extinct and the arctic sensors and computers were running on auto-pilot. But what would it mean?
(Remember that I have a radically deviant view, not the standard one, on the subject of the relation between feeling and meaning: I think only felt meaning is meaning; without feeling all one has is grounded robotic functing (and semantic interpretability). So even if, after the extinction of humans, the arctic sensors and the computers transmitted their data to robots that then took the requisite steps to avert the global warming and save the biosphere, that would all still just be physical transduction and nothing else — except, of course, if the robots actually did feel — but in that case it would be irrelevant that they were robots! They might as well be us; and all the observing and measuring is again being done by feeling creatures, and the feeling/function gap is as unbridged as ever!)
(3) Your third equivocation in what follows below, is in the weasel-word “experience” — which can mean felt experience, as in our case, or, used much more loosely and instrumentally (as with “observing” and “measuring”) it can merely mean an event in which there was again some sort of physical interaction. Whether the event was one billiard ball hitting another, or a camera snapping a photo after all life is gone, or a computer receiving the bits and applying an algorithm to them — these are all pretty much of a muchness. There’s no “experience” going on there, because of course it’s only really an “experience” — rather than just an event or state with certain functional properties — if it is felt (by someone/something).
And that (and only that) is what this discussion is all about, and has been, unswervingly, all along (for those who grasp what the explanatory problem at issue is).
DC: “‘telekinesis’ is abhorrent because it suggests there are nonphysical phenomena which influence the comings and goings of material things.
Ordinary (“paranormal/psychic”) telekinesis is not “abhorrent,” it is simply false, in that all evidence contradicts it. All seemingly telekinetic effects keep turning out to be either due to chance or to cheating.
And as for (what I’ve called) “telekinetic dualism” — that too is not abhorrent. It is perfectly natural, indeed universal, to believe and feel that our feelings matter, and that most of what we do, we do because we feel like doing it, and not just because functing is going on, of which our feelings are merely correlates — correlates of which we do not know the causes, and, even more important, correlates which themselves have no effects of their own, and we cannot explain how and why they are there at all. (That, yet again. is the f/f problem and the explanatory gap.)
DC: “To suggest…momentum, position and fields… might be influenced by ‘feeling’ seems ludicrous.”
It is not ludicrous; it is simply false.
DC: “However, suggesting that momentum, position or fields can create phenomena that are not measurable by measuring the momentum, position and field is just as serious a problem as suggesting said phenomena influences those measurements”
How did we get into “measurability”? We can measure momentum today that was too minute to measure yesterday. Maybe there’s still momentum we can’t measure, or don’t even know about. This is the ontic/epistemic error: What there is (and isn’t) in the world owes nothing, absolutely nothing, to what human senses and instruments can or cannot “measure.”
Moreover, the f/f problem and the explanatory gap have nothing to do with the limits of human senses or measuring instruments. They have to do with the fact that we feel, yet we cannot explain how or why, because all evidence is that feelings, though they are there alright, have no independent causal power. They are just inexplicable correlates of the things that really do have causal power (functing). Hence the mystery about why everything is not all just unfelt functing: Why are some functions felt?
DC: “If you don’t want to accept telekinesis, then why accept the corollary which is that objectively measureable properties produce phenomena that are not objectively measurable?“
I have no problems whatsoever with the very real possibility that measurable properties may also have unmeasurable effects. The problem is that that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem of explaining how and why some functions are felt. It is not immeasurable effects of functing that are the problem; it is the fact that some functing is felt. (And although feeling is not, strictly speaking “measurable,” it is certainly observable — indeed, it is the only thing that is unproblematically observable! (It is no wonder that — in struggling with their own “explanatory gap” — philosophers of quantum mechanics have made something of a cult out of human observation, as being the mysterious cause of the “collapse of the wave packet” that separates our punctate world from the continuously superimposed smear it would be if there were no people to read off the outcome of a geiger-counter experiment! But, alas, this is just piling mystery atop mystery…)
DC: “If you can’t measure it, don’t accept it.”
There’s the barefoot operationalism, again. This may be useful advice to an experimental physicist — if not to a superstring theorist — because all they deal with is functing anyway, whether measurable or unmeasurable. But it is just question-begging if you are trying to explain how/why organisms feel rather than just funct.
DC: “Earlier you suggested that experience/qualia/feeling are measurable by the subject and reportable, but are not causal or perhaps are epiphenomenal. Could you…clarify this?”
(First, why the needless synonyms “experience/qualia/feeling” when feeling covers them all and is problem enough?)
Second, I did not say feelings are measurable. (I think physical properties and feelings are incommensurable, and that measurement itself is physical, functional.) I said our feelings correlate with functing. We say (and feel) “ouch” when our skin is injured, not when it is stroked, or randomly; we say (and feel) a sound is louder when an acoustic amplitude increases, not when it decreases (or randomly). So the correlation is definitely there.
But this does not help explain why (or how) tissue damage and acoustic amplitude change is felt, rather than functed. If our neurons simply fired faster when we were hurt, or when a sound got louder, and caused our muscles to act accordingly, but we did not feel, then we’d still have the psychophysical correlation (stimulus/response) — including, if you like, JND by JND psychophysical scaling — but no correlated feeling. So the question naturally arises: what’s the point of the feeling?
I also don’t think I am measuring anything when I feel, or report my feeling. I am simply feeling. When I say “more” or “less,” I am saying this feels like more and that feels like less. The psychophysicist is doing the measuring (not I): He is measuring what I do (R) and comparing it to the stimulus (S) and noting that they are tightly correlated. I am just saying how it feels. As I said in my reply to Arnold Trehub: apart from the S/R correlation, there is not a separate “sentometer” to measure the feeling itself; it’s not even clear what “measuring a feeling” would mean. Nor, as I said, am *I* “measuring” what I’m feeling, in feeling it, and acting upon it. I’m just feeling it, and acting on it. And there is a tight correlation between what happens outside me (S), what I feel, and what I do (R). There better be, otherwise I would come from a long line of extinct ancestors. But the co-measurement is only between S and R, which are both functing and unproblematic. It feels as if I am drawing on feelings in order to generate my R, but how I do that is rather too problematic to be called “co-measurement” in any non-question-begging sense of measurement. So although the feeling is correlated with S and R, they are not commensurable, because the feeling is neither being measured, nor is it itself a measure, or measurement.
You also seem to be misunderstanding “epiphenomenal”: Epiphenomenal does not just mean “unimportant or unmeasurable side-effects.” It means (1) an effect that is uncaused, or (2) an effect that has no effects. I am a “materialist” in that I am sure enough that feelings are caused by the brain, somehow (i.e., they are not uncaused effects (1)); I simply point out that we have no idea how feelings are caused by the brain (and we never will). But the real puzzle is not that: the real puzzle is why feelings are caused by the brain, since feelings themselves have no effects (2). They are functional danglers, which means that they are gaps in any causal explanation.
There is one and only one epiphenomenon (unless QM has a few more of its own), and that is feeling: Caused (inexplicably) by the brain, feelings themselves (even more inexplicably) cause nothing — even though it feels as if they do.
DC: “You don’t want experience to influence anything physical. You don’t want there to be an unmeasurable influence on any material comings and goings.”
First, this has nothing to do with what I do or don’t want!
Second, rather than equivocate on “experience,” can we please stick to calling it feeling!
Feelings have no independent causal power, not because I don’t want them to, but because telekinetic dualism is false: there is no evidence for feelings having any causal power, and endless evidence against it.
And whereas there can certainly be unmeasurable effects, one cannot invoke them by way of an explanation of something without evidence. Besides, the problem with feeling has nothing to do with measurability; it’s their very existence that is the problem. And even if they were completely uncorrelated with anything else (the way our moods sometimes are), they would still defy causal explanation.
DC: “As an example, we might consider a computer being used to control some process such as the launching of a rocket. One might say the computer has a causal influence over this process, albeit an epiphenomenal one.”
Why on earth would you want to say the influence was epiphenomenal? This is a perfectly garden-variety example of causal influence!
DC: “One might take the position that everything above the molecular level is epiphenomenal, and certainly philosophers have suggested exactly this.”
Philosophers say the strangest things. If everything about the molecular level is “epiphenomenal,” we have lost the meaning of “epiphenomenon” altogether.
And that’s just fine. I get not an epsilon more leverage on the inexplicability of how and why some functions are felt if I add that they are “epiphenomenal”!
DC: “computers, circuits or transistors are… all part of a causal chain from atomic and molecular interactions to rocket launch.”
Indeed they are. No causal gaps there. It’s with feelings that you get the causal gap that lies at the heart of the explanatory gap.
DC: “you’re suggesting that experience is not part of that causal chain. Experience/qualia/feeling can not play a part in any way in this causal chain.”
First, can we just stick with the one term “feeling”? The proliferation of synonyms just creates a distraction, and what we need is focus, and to eliminate everything that is irrelevant.
The evidence (not I) says that feelings have no independent power to cause anything. All the causal chains on which they piggy-back mysteriously are carried entirely by (unproblematic) functing.
DC: “What I don’t think you’re suggesting is that feelings are epiphenomenal in the same sense as the computer’s causal influence is epiphenomenal”
(1) I don’t for a minute think a computer’s causal influence is epiphenomenal. It’s causal influence is causal!
(2) I would suggest forgetting about “epiphenomena” and just sticking with doing, causing and feeling.
(3) All evidence is that feelings do not cause anything, even though they feel as if they do. All the causation is being done by the functing, on which the correlated feeling piggy-backs inexplicably.
(4) The inability to explain feeling causally is the explanatory gap.
DC: “let’s suggest that the experience of the color red can be reliably measured by a person.”
Alas we are back into ambiguity and equivocation.
It feels like something to see red.
The feeling is correlated with wave length (and brightness and luminosity), as psychophysics has confirmed.
Persons don’t measure. They feel, and respond (R). Psychophysicists measure (S and R).
S and R are reliably correlated, and since R is based on feelings, we can say feelings are reliably correlated with S too (even though, strictly speaking, S and R are commensurable, but neither is commensurable with feelings).
The human subject, however, is not measuring, but feeling, and doing.
DC: “a digital camera can take light and convert it to a digital pattern which can be reconverted to wavelength using just three pixels on a computer screen. The intensity we observe from each pixel is interpreted and converted to color inside the brain. I doubt anyone would say that the experience of color exists at any step of the process between recording the color red using the camera and the reproducing of the color at a computer screen.”
No, the feeling (sic) of seeing color occurs in the brain of the feeling subject. Not before or after in the causal (or temporal) chain.
(And why the computer? Let the stimulus be color. No need for it to be computer-generated color. If the digital-camera/computer is used instead as an analogy for the seeing subject, rather than the stimulus, the answer is that there is no feeling in the camera or the computer.)
DC: “let’s say we had a device which could reliably measure the experience of red. A human is just such a device if experience reliably correlates to function/behavior.”
David, with this “assumption” you have effectively begged the question and given up (or rather smuggled in) the ghost (in the machine): Until further notice, the only devices that have experiences (feeling) to “measure” are biological organisms. If you declare some other device to feel by fiat, you’re headed toward panpsychism (everything and every part and combination of everything feels) which is not only arbitrary and as improbable as telekinesis, but is probably incoherent too.
No device can measure a feeling (sic); it can only measure a functional correlate of a feeling. And a human subject feels the feeling; he does not measure it.
DC: “Now, if this internal measurement is reliable, then let’s assume we can similarly produce this experience computationally.”
You’ve lost me. There is no internal measurement going on, just feeling. And it is “reliable” inasmuch as it correlates with S and R.
It is of course the easiest thing in the world to replace a human — feeling, say, sound intensity — by a computer, transducing sound intensity, in such a way as to reproduce the human S/R function.
Trouble is that in so doing you have not solved the f/f problem but simply begged the question — which is, let me remind you: How and why are we not also like that unfeeling device, transducing the input, producing a perfect S/R function, but feeling nothing whatsoever in the process?
DC: “Let’s assume our computer’s transistors can produce this reliable correlation and report dutifully the experience has been accomplished. If this is possible, then that computer… has physically measured the phenomenon in question and produced a physical report.”
You seem to think that the f/f problem is getting a device to produce a reliable psychophysical detection (S/R) function: It’s not. The problem is to explain how and why we are not just devices that produce a psychophysical detection (S/R) function: how and why we feel whilst we funct.
(And this is not about measurement, but about explaining the causal role of feeling in human functing.)
DC: “If the measurement of the experience is reliable, then that measurement can be (must be) converted to a physical signal so that it is reportable, else it is not reliable. So if the measurement of experience is reliably reported, then something can be done with that signal. The signal can be interjected into a causal chain…”
I’m afraid you have left the real problem long behind as you head off into this measurement operationalism that begs the question at issue, which is not about reliable “measurement” but about felt functing.
DC: “We can have an if/then statement in our computer which says, If Xperience = RED then “SCRUB LAUNCH”. In this way, qualia/experience/feeling is interjected into the causal chain.”
You really think feeling is just a matter of an if/then statement in a computer program? Would a problem with a solution as trivial as that really have survived this long? If the physical substrate of feeling were (mirabile dictu) if/then statements in a computation, there would still be (as with the perpetuum mobile) that niggling little problem about why the if/then statements were felt rather than just functed…
DC: “Unless I’ve screwed up somewhere, which is entirely possible, the bottom line is that experience/feeling can be a part of the causal chain if it is internally measurable (subjectively measurable) and as long as that measurement is reliable.”
I regret to say that you have indeed screwed up at a number of points, big time! I’ve tried to point them out. They begin with your operationalism about “measurability,” they continue with the equivocation on “experience” (felt experience? how/why felt, then, rather than just functed?), and your (arbitrary) equation of feeling with “measuring,”
DC: “One might still claim this influence is epiphenomenal as I’ve defined epiphenomenal above using the rocket launch example.”
As you’ve defined epiphenomenal, epiphenomenality is so common that it casts no light at all on the special case of the causal status of feeling.
DC: “We can explain everything a computer does by examining the function of each transistor and circuit. The experience for a computer therefore is merely functing.
Here the equivocal word “experience” has even led you to saying something that is transparently false or absurd if stated in unequivocal language: “The feeling for a computer is merely function” i.e., the computer does not feel, it merely functs. (And our problem — remember? — was not computers, but *us*, ’cause we really do feel, rather than just funct, like the computer…
DC: “Experience can not be proven to reliably correlate inside a computer, and in fact, experience is never needed to explain anything a computer does.”
For the simple reason that (replacing the weasel-word “experience”) the computer does not feel. (Hence we are not just computers, or like computers in that crucial respect.)