Ed Buckner writes,
Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.
I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.
However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.
That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.
It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.
The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.' A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.
Here is Sellars fils in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.
It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem — the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.
BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.
Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct. He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity. When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time — a series of temporally extension-less moments — the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is)
) And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:
Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'
But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.
Now we are rejecting the view that the scientific image is a mere 'symbolic tool' for finding our way around in the manifest image; and we are accepting the view that the scientific account of the world is (in principle) the adequate image. Having, therefore, given the perceptible qualities of manifest objects their real locus in sensation we were confronted with the problem of choosing between dualism or identity with respect to the relation of conscious sensations to their analogues in the visual cortex, and the above argument seems to point clearly in the dualistic direction. The 'ultimate homogeneity' of perceptible qualities, which, among other things, prevented identifying the perceptible qualities of physical objects with complex properties of systems of physical particles, stands equally in the way of identifying, rather than correlating, conscious sensations with the complex neural processes with which they are obviously connected.
But such dualism is an unsatisfactory solution, because ex hypothesi sensations are essential to the explanation of how we come to construct the 'appearance' which is the manifest world. They are essential to the explanation of how there even seem to be coloured objects. But the scientific image presents itself as a closed system of explanation, and if the scientific image is interpreted as we have interpreted it up to this point the explanation will be in terms of the constructs of neurophysiology, which, according to the argument, do not involve the ultimate homogeneity, the appearance of which in the manifest image is to be explained.
We are confronted, therefore, by an antinomy, either, (a) the neurophysiological image is incomplete, i.e. and must be supplemented by new objects ('sense fields') which do have ultimate homogeneity and which somehow make their presence felt in the activity of the visual cortex as a system of physical particles; or, (b) the neurophysiological image is complete and the ultimate homogeneity of the sense qualities (and, hence, the sense qualities, themselves) is mere appearance in the very radical sense of not existing in the spatiotemporal world at all.
Is the situation irremediable? Does the assumption of the reality of the scientific image lead us to a dualism of particles and sense fields? of matter and 'consciousness'? If so, then, in view of the obviously intimate relation between sensation and conceptual thinking (for example, in perception), we must surely regress and take back the identification or conceptual thinking with neurophysiological process which seemed so plausible a moment ago. We could then Ague [argue] that although in the absence of other considerations it would be plausible to equate conceptual thinking with neurophysiological process, when the chips are all down, we must rather say that although conceptual thinking and neurophysiological process are each analogous to verbal behaviour as a public social phenomenon (the one by virtue of the very way in which the very notion of 'thinking' is formed; the other as a scientifically ascertained matter of fact), they are also merely analogous to one another and cannot be identified. If so, the manifest and the scientific conception of both sensations and conceptual thinking would fit into the synoptic view as parallel processes, a dualism which could only be avoided by interpreting the scientific image as a whole as a 'symbolic device' for coping with the world as it presents itself to us in the manifest image.
Is there any alternative? As long as the ultimate constituents of the scientific image are particles forming ever more complex systems of particles, we are inevitably confronted by the above choice. But the scientific image is not yet complete; we have not yet penetrated all the secrets of nature. And if it should turn out that particles instead of being the primitive entities of the scientific image could be treated as singularities in a space-time continuum which could be conceptually 'cut up' without significant loss – in inorganic contexts, at least – into interacting particles, then we would not be confronted at the level of neurophysiology with the problem of understanding the relation of sensory consciousness (with its ultimate homogeneity) to systems of particles. Rather, we would have the alternative of saying that although for many purposes the central nervous system can be construed without loss as a complex system of physical particles, when it comes to an adequate understanding of the relation of sensory consciousness to neurophysiological process, we must penetrate to the non-particulate foundation of the particulate image, and recognize that in this non-particulate image the qualities of sense are a dimension of natural process which occurs only in connection with those complex physical processes which, when 'cut-up' into particles in terms of those features which are the least common denominators of physical process — present in inorganic as well as organic processes alike — become the complex system of particles which, in the current scientific image, is the central nervous system.
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