I read the whole review through to the end which (given my terrible attention span) should say how well you've written. Interestingly, Chalmers has already featured your review of the book on his website (which is how I found it).
"at some point in the coming century our virtual realities will become indistinguishable from the non-virtual universe underlying them" .... at this point I must simply call it "quits" and retire to some unknown cave in a distant land and never be seen from again.
I love your scathing language. I can't help it. This kind of veneration of virtual reality is so depressing. Worse than depressing. And even though, as you say, we will never truly be presented with this choice, so many people do inhabit virtual reality every day already. Philosophers are supposed to help people climb out of the cave, not justify living there.
I’m taking a philosophy of mind course this fall at my university and my professor assigned this book and a book called Brain-wise by Patricia Churchland. Can’t wait to read this giant tome of category errors. Thanks for the review Dr. Hart!
I'm not a specialist in this area but I assume Chalmers thinks psyches are mathematically compressible structures. If in fact he even distinguishes psyches/minds from their contents.
I think Greg Evan once wrote a short story about being trapped in a V.R. You could tell it was simulated because if you went for a walk the scenery would start repeating itself.
Mario Crocco (neurobiologist/philosper) has written about simulation and causality...stating that causality cannot be simulated!
'Screens have often worked in brain-mind models as instruments to predicationally tailor a distinctionally posited reality whose unique change is alteration and where waitings are sheer hermeneusis, but such a scenario is untenable. Observation includes the observer’s own causation while architectures of forms exclude it. If the said “intramental movie” were a cinematographic creation or videogame, its totalness or literary sufficiency would be anything but enough to account for observation: contents’ architecture does not suffice. Upon their effects, foreign efficient causation and foreign freedom must be included.'...
'Thus this sort of imprisoning screenplay “supernaturally projected into our soul” can no longer misrepresent the time elapsing and the present as artifacts of a subjective perspective. This “screenplay” ought to include real novations: namely, other experiencing sources of real innovative actions, or finite inceptors. This requisite graining fractures the “gnoseocapsule.” The act of turning one’s attention inward and observing what is going on in one’s own mind is unstable, and acquires knowledge of time-arrowed extramentalities. Experience is thus found to occur at a plurality of extramental dates and sites.'
Well, this led to me reading basically everything published in TNA about philosophy of mind for the past ten years, from which I mainly concluded that I don't really understand the topic at all, and I'm not sure anyone else does either.
"After all, any sober phenomenology of the full range of mental acts discloses a host of necessarily unified features that are almost by definition irreducible to a mere integration of diverse mechanical parts and discrete functions, and that no process of computation could reproduce . . ."
The role of what you call the mereological fallacy in the work of Chalmers et al. is (I think) the central point. I do hope that, in your forthcoming book, you'll distinguish proper emergence from the magical variety in a way that makes that distinction crystal clear to your readers. I, for one, can see it, but I don't think I could adequately articulate it (see my previous comment about the mouse trap). Which means I don't really understand it. But I would like to.
"Syntax in the abstract is always only an artificial distillate of the complete language of signs that generated it; it cannot produce a semantics because it is ontologically dependent upon semantics; and it functions only as always already oriented toward the system of signs for which it has been encoded."
This is a point that Wittgenstein makes in the Tractatus. Might I recommend the work of James Conant on this? See his "The Method of the Tractatus" (one of the best articles on the Tractatus), especially Section XII, as well as his recent "Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language," which corrects some of Conant's earlier mistakes regarding Wittgenstein's conception of 'signs' (as opposed to what Wittgenstein calls symbols).
You're the reason I know about and have read anything in that journal. Especially thankful because it means I could make my World Religions students read this article on elephant souls: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls.
I read the whole review through to the end which (given my terrible attention span) should say how well you've written. Interestingly, Chalmers has already featured your review of the book on his website (which is how I found it).
"at some point in the coming century our virtual realities will become indistinguishable from the non-virtual universe underlying them" .... at this point I must simply call it "quits" and retire to some unknown cave in a distant land and never be seen from again.
I love your scathing language. I can't help it. This kind of veneration of virtual reality is so depressing. Worse than depressing. And even though, as you say, we will never truly be presented with this choice, so many people do inhabit virtual reality every day already. Philosophers are supposed to help people climb out of the cave, not justify living there.
I’m taking a philosophy of mind course this fall at my university and my professor assigned this book and a book called Brain-wise by Patricia Churchland. Can’t wait to read this giant tome of category errors. Thanks for the review Dr. Hart!
Always illuminating!
I'm not a specialist in this area but I assume Chalmers thinks psyches are mathematically compressible structures. If in fact he even distinguishes psyches/minds from their contents.
I think Greg Evan once wrote a short story about being trapped in a V.R. You could tell it was simulated because if you went for a walk the scenery would start repeating itself.
Mario Crocco (neurobiologist/philosper) has written about simulation and causality...stating that causality cannot be simulated!
'Screens have often worked in brain-mind models as instruments to predicationally tailor a distinctionally posited reality whose unique change is alteration and where waitings are sheer hermeneusis, but such a scenario is untenable. Observation includes the observer’s own causation while architectures of forms exclude it. If the said “intramental movie” were a cinematographic creation or videogame, its totalness or literary sufficiency would be anything but enough to account for observation: contents’ architecture does not suffice. Upon their effects, foreign efficient causation and foreign freedom must be included.'...
'Thus this sort of imprisoning screenplay “supernaturally projected into our soul” can no longer misrepresent the time elapsing and the present as artifacts of a subjective perspective. This “screenplay” ought to include real novations: namely, other experiencing sources of real innovative actions, or finite inceptors. This requisite graining fractures the “gnoseocapsule.” The act of turning one’s attention inward and observing what is going on in one’s own mind is unstable, and acquires knowledge of time-arrowed extramentalities. Experience is thus found to occur at a plurality of extramental dates and sites.'
Mario Crocco, unpub. version of 'Palindrome.'
Well, this led to me reading basically everything published in TNA about philosophy of mind for the past ten years, from which I mainly concluded that I don't really understand the topic at all, and I'm not sure anyone else does either.
"After all, any sober phenomenology of the full range of mental acts discloses a host of necessarily unified features that are almost by definition irreducible to a mere integration of diverse mechanical parts and discrete functions, and that no process of computation could reproduce . . ."
The role of what you call the mereological fallacy in the work of Chalmers et al. is (I think) the central point. I do hope that, in your forthcoming book, you'll distinguish proper emergence from the magical variety in a way that makes that distinction crystal clear to your readers. I, for one, can see it, but I don't think I could adequately articulate it (see my previous comment about the mouse trap). Which means I don't really understand it. But I would like to.
"Syntax in the abstract is always only an artificial distillate of the complete language of signs that generated it; it cannot produce a semantics because it is ontologically dependent upon semantics; and it functions only as always already oriented toward the system of signs for which it has been encoded."
This is a point that Wittgenstein makes in the Tractatus. Might I recommend the work of James Conant on this? See his "The Method of the Tractatus" (one of the best articles on the Tractatus), especially Section XII, as well as his recent "Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language," which corrects some of Conant's earlier mistakes regarding Wittgenstein's conception of 'signs' (as opposed to what Wittgenstein calls symbols).
Method of the Tractatus, Part 1: https://humstatic.uchicago.edu/philosophy/conant/Method+of+Tractatus+Published+Version+Part1.pdf
Method of the Tractatus, Part 2: https://humstatic.uchicago.edu/philosophy/conant/Method+of+Tractatus+Published+Version+Part2.pdf
Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language: https://www.fagi.uni-leipzig.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/document.pdf
Thank you!!