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How can anyone with a shred of decency believe that deliberately causing suffering to the innocent creatures that are the symbol of Christ’s suffering can be the way to atone for Christ’s suffering?

The insightful March 8 essay on Hungary’s Self-Destructive Demons, by poet/journalist Thomas Orszag-Land described the complex and sinister relationship between the stunning success of Viktor Orban’s opportunistic megalomania and his unscrupulous exploitation of the unreconstructed cultural affinity of the Hungarian populace for the ugliest and most vicious forms of denial, scapegoating and xenophobia. 

Apart from a couple of points on which it (forgiveably) goes a bit over the top (about the potential for kingship and the triple “junk” quote), Orszag-Land’s March 8 essay is temperate, timely and telling, and has since been not so much overtaken as confirmed by events, with the self-ratification, by Orban’s supermajority, of the constitutional amendment self-indemnifyng Orban’s new constitution from oversight by the constitutional court.

Orszag-Land raises the interesting hypothesis that although Orban has successfully used his supermajority (as well as the pork-barreling of the electorate, party faithful and oligarchs) to entrench his power far beyond the possibility of reversal even under any ordinary electoral majority defeat by the (shamefully and self-destructively divided) democratic opposition, he may yet be undone by having profoundly alienated the only forces that can sustain the dictator of a small, poor country in modern times: either powerful international economic interests or the support of powerful surrounding nations.

And there is another potential contingency: Orban is not stable. He has already demonstrated himself to be a psychopath, has already been showing signs of mounting paranoia, is rumored to be under treatment for bipolar disorder, and seems to be less and less aware (or perhaps less and less in control) of the fact that Hungarian is translatable into any other language — and diffuses at lightning speed in today’s online era — so that his so far successful double-talk (in contemptuous jingo for his compatriots and sugary demagoguery for the rest of the world) may yet prove his undoing, impelling his hitherto intact cult following to jump ship out of self-interest, rather than to continue to sink with their leader, as his antics become more and more dissociated and pathological. 

Hungary is not, after all, North Korea (and not just because it lacks China to prop it up, come what may).

Vegans.

Bless them for abstaining from the horrors most people uncaringly impose on innocent animals.

But I wish they were less interested in trading tasty recipes than in righting animal wrongs.

After all, it’s because of the uncaring drive to satisfy their tastes — and not because of the needs of survival or health — that people keep imposing those horrors on innocent animals.

On 2013-02-18, at 9:09 AM, Consciousness Online [Richard Brown] wrote:

Hi Stevan, your recent comment (below) has not been approved. It is not relevant to the session. This session is not about the hard problem of consciousness (or the mind body problem). That debate has (more than) run its course in your session from two years ago. Thank you for you understanding.

Richard: Are you joking? Did you watch the video we were supposed to comment on?

This is getting a little ridiculous. I think your theoretical preferences are getting the better of your objectivity.

Of course this is about the mind/body problem. Of course it’s about the “hard” problem. What on earth else do you think it’s about?

I’ve just about had it now with this arbitrary dismissiveness.

And I don’t appreciate the remark about “more than running its course”.

Restore my commentary or kindly take me off the list and send me no more messages about “Consciousness Online.”

I don’t have the time to write focussed, substantive commentaries only to have them rebuffed because they don’t meet someone’s tastes or preconceptions.

Stevan

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COUNTING THE WRONG CONSCIOUSNESS OUT

Stevan Harnad

[Commentary on Dan Dennett on “On a Phenomenal Confusion about Access and Consciousness“]
Yes, there was a phenomenal confusion in doubling our mind-body-problems by doubling our consciousnesses.

No, organisms don’t have both an “access consciousness” and a “phenomenal consciousness.”

Organisms’ brains (like robots’ brains) have access to information (data).

Access to data can be unconscious (in organisms and robots) or conscious (in organisms, sometimes, but probably not at all in robots, so far).

And organisms feel. Feeling can only be conscious, because feeling is consciousness.

So the confusion is in overlooking the fact that there can be either felt access (conscious) or unfelt access (unconscious).

The mind-body problem is of course the problem of explaining how and why all access is not just unfelt access. After all, the Darwinian job is just to do what needs to be done, not to bask in phenomenology.

Hence it is not a solution to say that all access is unfelt access and that feeling — or the idea that organisms feel — is just some sort of a confusion, illusion, or action!

If, instead, feeling has or is some sort of function, let’s hear what it is!

(Back to the [one, single, familiar] mind/body problem — lately, fashionably, called the “hard” one.)

More prior commentaries here.

To comment further, please go to Philpapers.

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ILL-JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF
Organisms with nervous systems don’t just do what needs to be done in order to survive and reproduce. They also feel. That includes all vertebrates and probably all invertebrates too. (As a vegan, I profoundly hope that plants don’t feel!)

There’s no way to know for sure (or to “prove”) that anyone else but me feels. But let’s agree that for vertebrates it’s highly likely and for computers and today’s robots (and for teapots and cumquats) it’s highly unlikely.

Do we all know what we mean when we say organisms feel? I think we do. I have no way to argue against someone who says he has no idea what it means to feel — meaning feel anything at all — and the usual solution (a pinch) is no solution if one is bent on denying.*

You can say`’I can sorta feel that the temperature may be rising” or “I can sorta feel that this surface may be slightly curved.” But it makes no sense to say that organisms just “sorta feel” simpliciter (or no more sense than saying that someone is sorta pregnant):

The feeling may feel like anything; it may be veridical (if the temperature is indeed rising or the surface is indeed curved) or it may be illusory. It may feel strong or weak, continuous or intermittent, it may feel like this or it may feel like that. But either something is being felt or not. I think we all know exactly what we are talking about here. And it’s not about proving whether (or when or where or what) another organism feels: it’s about our 1st-hand sense of what it feels like to feel — anything at all. No sorta’s about it.

The hard problem is not about proving whether or not an organism or artifact is feeling. We know (well enough) that organisms feel. The hard problem is explaining how and why organisms feel, rather than just do, unfeelingly. (Because, no, introspection certainly does not tell us that feeling is whatever we are doing when we feel! I do fully believe that my brain somehow causes feeling: I just want to know how and why: How and why is causing unfelt doing not enough? No “rathering” in that!)

After all, on the face of it, doing is all the Blind Watchmaker really needs, in order to get the adaptive job done (and He’s no more able to prove that organisms feel than any of the rest of us is).

The only mystery is hence how and why organisms feel, rather than just do. Because doing-power seems like the only thing organisms need in order to get by in this Darwinian world. And although I no more believe in the possibility of Zombies than I do in the possibility of their passing the Turing Test, I certainly admit frankly that I haven’t the faintest idea how or why there cannot be Zombies. (Do you really think, Dan, that that’s on a par with the claim that one hasn’t the faintest idea what “feelings” are?)

*My suspicion is that the strategy of feigning ignorance about what is meant by the word “feeling” is like feigning ignorance about any and every predicate: Whenever someone asks what “X” means, I can claim I don’t know. And then when they try to define “X” for me in terms of other predicates, I can claim I don’t know what those mean either; all the way down. That’s the “symbol grounding problem,” and the solution is direct sensorimotor grounding of at least some of the bottom predicates, so the rest can be reached by recombining the grounded ones into propositions to define and ground the ungrounded ones. That way, my doings would contradict my verbal denial of knowing the meanings of the predicates. But of course sensing need not be felt sensing: it could just be detecting and responding, which is again just doing. So just as a toy robot today could go through the motions of detecting and responding to “red” and even say “I know what it feels like to see red” without feeling a thing, just doing, so, in principle, might a Turing-Test-Passing Cog just be going through the motions. This either shows (as I think it does) that sensorimotor grounding is not the same as meaning, or, if it doesn’t show that, then someone still owes me an explanation of how and why not. And this, despite the fact that I too happen to believe that nothing could pass the Turing Test without feeling or meaning. It’s just that I insist on being quite candid that I have no idea of how or why this is true, if, as I unreservedly believe, it is indeed true. It’s an ill-justified true belief. Justifying it is the hard problem.

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FEELING BY FIAT

@Richard Brown: “felt representing (i.e. consciousness) occurs when one represents oneself as being in some other representation in a way that seems subjectively unmediated… There is no equivocation here; the claim is that feeling (i.e. consciousness) consists in a certain kind of cognitive access. What’s the argument against this view? That there can be these kinds of representations without feeling? That is called begging the question.”

The argument against this claim is that it is an ad hoc posit: an attempt to solve a substantive problem by definition.

My critique is on-topic (access vs. feeling), the matter is far from settled, and neither your comments nor mine prevent Dan or anyone else from responding.

Much of what passes today for verse
is more for cruciverbalists
— stay: that just means lovers of crossword puzzles —
than seekers of sounds and sentiments
repaying the time to reflect and rehearse

Losing the ones
you love the most
loosens your desperate
bear-hug on life

“Science” — testing truth experimentally — is certainly preferable to telling and believing tall tales.

But that’s not enough to fill the gap the tall tales fill.

The tales are not just about what’s true but about what’s right. They mostly get that wrong too, but that’s where the real work lies — and “science” does not show the way.

Banging on about tales of hell-fire being worse than rape is not showing the way.

Nor is scolding elderly church-goers.

“Science” is psychopathic, or at best autistic and actuarial. Ethics is incomparably more important: A planet where people are doing right, even if they are believing tall tales, is infinitely better than a scientistic juggernaut driven only by experimental facts.

And that fact is not a “scientific” one.

All agree that speculations, even if they come from mathematics that seems to make sense, still need evidence in order to be believed. And a lot of the speculations about multiple “universes” seem to be beyond observational evidence, at least for now.

But it seems to me that some of the puzzlement comes from calling these hypothetical entities multiple “universes,” of which “ours” is also a “universe.”

What is a universe? If there can be multiple galaxies then why can’t there be multiple entities that are bigger than galaxies and include galaxies? Let’s call them “sub-universes,” and let’s say that (hypothetically) they may resemble one another in various ways, but be “out of touch” (out of observational reach) of one another. That makes them more like some of the unobservable microcomponents (like strings and unbound quarks) that are much less far-fetched than the notion of there being more than one “universe.”

(That said, I think the multi-sub-universe consisting of all the possible histories since the Big-Bang is too far-fetched to take seriously no matter what we call it. — I also think the notion of multi-sub-universes does not really give us any insight into either the probability or the “inevitability” of life.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rjphfKI661k

[M]embership of the [Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA)] ‘requires a commitment to the nation, a certain ‘national sentiment’.’ Artists who criticise the government abroad are not eligible for membership…“

2012-12-23

 

 

 

 

 

 

If this “national sentiment” Diktat reaches the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) it will be my pleasure and a historic honour (indeed an obligation) to step down rather than just gazing passively in appalled disbelief.

[Resigned MTA: October 8 2016]

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