Consciousness
Question:
Given what I perceive as a long-standing skepticism of scientific progress in the understanding of consciousness, whether Chomsky has seen any promising shift toward good ideas in this domain.
Noam Chomsky says:
"That's worth thinking about it for a moment. In recent years consciousness has been called the hard problem - the real serious problem of philosophy and science. We might look at a little bit of history here. If you go back to the seventeenth century, there was a hard problem - it was motion. Motion was what was called the hard grok in philosophy - philosophy meaning science. We can't comprehend it.
Turns out it was right. We couldn't comprehend it. And we still don't comprehend it - not in the sense in which Galileo, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, the other great founders of modern science - wanted to understand things. For them, intelligibility and understanding meant constructing a mechanical model for it. And mechanical model meant something with gears and levers and cranks and so on - something like what was being produced all over Europe at that time by highly skilled artisans, and were amazing people with their imitations of human beings, and duck digesting, the fountains at Versailles, and so on. And the - what was called the mechanical philosophy, meaning mechanical science, that was the basis for the scientific revolution - held that the entire world must be a massive machine of this kind. And there was a problem of explaining motion within that system. That was the hard grok.
Then Newton came along and said "It's hopeless." Newton's theory crucially involved outforces that cannot be captured within the mechanical philosophy. Newton didn't believe it. He spent the rest of his life trying to overcome it. He regarded it as an absurdity that no person of scientific intelligence can possibly accept. Leibniz and others agreed. They accused him of reintroducing the occult properties of the despised neo-scholastics. And he didn't disagree. That's why his Principia is a mathematical theory - not a physical theory. He was crucial on that - "I don't have the physical explanation. I just have something that works." So we can understand the theory, but we cannot grasp what it's talking about. What's important, just to keep it brief, is that the hard grok in philosophy was abandoned. It was recognized that we cannot comprehend - we cannot gain an intelligible universe modeled on our - that meets our standards of - intelligibility. So it was abandoned. And science just reduced its goals to finding intelligible theories. I think the same is true of consciousness."
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