From:	SMTP%"A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk" 14-MAR-1996 16:41:20.47
To:	STAPP
CC:	
Subj:	Re: Reply to Hayes 5

Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 00:37:03 GMT
From: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
Message-Id: <19672.199603150037@wallace.cs.bham.ac.uk>
To: klein@adage.Berkeley.EDU
Cc: STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov, brings@rpi.edu, ghrosenb@phil.indiana.edu, 
    keith@imprint.co.uk, mckee@neosoft.com, patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au, 
    phayes@cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Reply to Hayes 5


> Let me ask a different question. Do you think that scientists can work
> fruitfully on the easy questions (figuring out the NCCQ) without having
> to worry about the hard one (why does blue have the feel it does).

I think scientists, bless them, will continue to explore connections
between neural structures and processes and all sorts of other things
whatever philosophers say. And they will discover interesting things.

There's always a minor niggle that if you have not defined X precisely
the search for its correlates among phenomena of type Y may be bogus
(since people using different definitions will find different
correlates).

But such niggles can always be eliminated by looking more closely at
exactly what correlations were discovered (When subjects say so and so
their brains are doing such and such, or whatever).

I have been too busy the past few weeks to join in these discussions. I
have a theory about why both sides are right (first expressed, I think,
in my paper for a 1971 conference on philosophy and psychology:
`Physicalism and the Bogey of Determinism' (and replies to criticisms)
in S.C. Brown (ed.) {\em Philosophy of Psychology,} Macmillan 1974.
I have no copies of the paper, and I expect the book is out of print.

The idea is to slightly generalise Frege's distinction between sense and
reference.

He pointed out (claimed some would say) that even when X = Y the sense
of the expression on the left can be different from the sense of the
expression on the right (his example was "the morning star is the
evening star"). I take the sense to be something to do with how X and Y
are identified, recognized, conceptualised. (That's admittedly vague,
but making it precise is not a simple task.)

The same thing can happen if two people use THE SAME expression to refer
to something. The sense of "the morning star" as used by *me* may not be
the same as the sense of the same expression as used by *you*.

Frege discussed cases like "I", and "you" and an individual's name used
both by the individual and others, in his late paper, The Thought, A
Logical Enquiry. Such cases forced him to abandon his earlier claim that
the sense (Sinn) was just as public and objective as the reference
(Bedeutung).

Anyhow I think a lot of what's going on when people say the experiences
are not identical with their neural implementations is related to the
fact that in general a Sinn and the corresponding Bedeutung are not
the same thing (bizarre exceptions are expressions like: "The sense of
this expression".)

Moreover, when you talk about a Sinn (e.g. a way of identifying,
recognising, detecting, discriminating something) then that Sinn will
become a referent of a new expression which has its own Sinn, which is
something different from the original Sinn. This process can continue
indefinitely. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, you'll get to a Sinn
which is something private to an individual. (Logically private, not
empirically private.)

The people who are disputing the identity claims are, I think,
unwittingly focusing on something which is very like a Sinn, whereas the
people who argue for the identity claims are talking about the ultimate
referents or about the underlying implementation. Both are right!

Exactly the same thing occurs when we think about information processing
in computers. Two computers C1 and C2 connected to a number of networks
may both detect that the network N3 is overloaded. But C1's way of
referring to or identifying N3, it's "view" of the network (its Sinn) is
different from C2's, and both are different from N3, and both are also
different from whatever it is in each underlying physical machine that
implements the ability to refer to a network and detect its properties.

C1's way of identifying this network is something private. It cannot be
shared by anyone or anything else. It has all or most of the properties
of things like my experience of this table (which is something different
from yours, and from the table, and cannot be shared with anyone else.)

We could describe it as C1's experience of N3, for short.

If C1 also happens to be a self-monitoring system it may discover, for
example, that its experience of N3 is unreliable as a guide to the real
state of N3 (just as I can discover that my experience of an picture of
a line with two arrow-heads is an unreliable guide to lengths of lines
in the picture). So C1 can start talking about its experience of N3
(EN3). And so it goes on.

Of course some of you will say that that's not a *real* experience. But
that just begs the question. I claim it's as real as any experience I
have.

But I told you I was a mutant. I guess there's nothing to stop a zombie
being a philosopher?

Cheers.
Aaron