THE MYTH OF QUALIA - JUD EVANS - ATHENAEUM LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY

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THE MYTH OF QUALIA
JUD EVANS




Copyright  ©  October 2008  Jud Evans.  Permission granted to distribute in any medium,
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THINKING MEAT
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These are actors highlighting our human cruelty to animals


THE MYTH OF QUALIA
         JUD EVANS


Humans are animals - evolved organisms - embrained thinking animals comprised of meat like any other primate. Humans have a fleshy brain but there are no pseudo-dualistic  brain states, no qualia, no mind, consciousness, properties, ontological differences or existential modalities.

Such useful fictions are modern leftovers from primitive folk psychology born of historical ignorance. What exists are active, thinking, functional creatures with thinking brain-meat. If you happen to meet a qualia-freak - ask him or her to put their so-called soul-stuff where their mouth is and prove that qualia exists and then stand back and watch them begin to flannel and obfuscate evasively. Humans have had to create some form of words to explain and describe their constantly changing thinking brain-meat. We have invented words to describe all kinds of (what we call) actions and movements both neurological and somatic. We have done this in order that we can create and communicate statements that represent information regarding existential aspects of our body-brain and modalities of the body-brains of others.


There are two different approaches to painful tissue or bone - the primitive  motivational-affective component which is concerned with painful tissue as something nasty to be avoided, and the evolutionarily more recently acquired sensory/discriminative ability to identify exactly where the painful flesh, tissue or bone is located and respond appropriately.

Lexico-symbolic descriptive words like mind, consciousness, feelings, qualia, etc. does not exist in themselves - that is meaningful word-symbols cannot be found in the world either inside or outside of human body-brains - we exist as living lexicons, the printed words in books and libraries contain meaningless symbols which only become meaningful when they are scanned by embrained humans.

The words on a signpost which read:  LONDON CITY CENTRE - 10 MILES  are meaningless daubs of dried paint until a human comes along and reads them.  At that instant the words become meaningful TO THE HUMAN READER CONCERNED.  The words we invent for any form of description do not suddenly burst into meaningful existence just because we vibrate our voice-box as we force air over it to make sounds. If no other person is present the words are only meaningful to the utterer of those words. 

If human toe-meat is damaged when a brick falls on it - it starts to exist as a painful toe the condition of which the sensory cortex area of the brainmeat becomes aware of electro-chemically via the nerve circuitry.  Just because we invented a word pain does not mean that pain exists in the world or in the toe - the word pain itself has no nominatum  - it just means that because of certain tissue damage the toe exists with injured tissue or bone rather than the manner in which it existed before the brick fell on it.

Human bipeds with painful toes exist as mobile organic units become neurologically changed and conditioned by the painful toe-flesh. The body's repair system consists of a continual process of replacing worn-out and damaged tissues. The ability to repair itself includes life preserving systems for combating infection and disease together with the ability to grow and to repair broken bones and damaged body parts without outside help. Damage to a body-part needs to be recognised and assessed by the human holism as a potential threat to its successful survival and therefore organisms have evolved a irritated-tissue change modality as part of the initial-injury phase which accompanies the cellular repair operation of our damage control system in order that the organic unity can continue to function normally. Most of this circuitry which transmits damage alerts to the brain is involved in affective pain, with extensive connections to the reticular system of the brainstem. The lateral thalamus is thought to be mainly concerned with discriminative pain, the medial with "affect/motivation".

Pain in the periphery - One might think that once we moved out to the periphery, things might become more simple. Not so! Most tissues are well provided with specific pain receptors called nociceptors. Formerly it was thought that painful stimuli were detected through overstimulation of receptors for other modalities. This is incorrect. The quality of the pain perceived on stimulation of nociceptors seems to depend on the site of stimulation, and the nature of the fibres transmitting the sensation. Even in the periphery, there is a distinction between the sharp immediate pain ("first pain") transmitted by A delta fibres, and the prolonged unpleasant burning pain mediated through the smaller unmyelinated C fibres.

Nociceptors have numerous different receptors on their surfaces that modulate their sensitivity to stimulation. These include GABA, opiate, bradykinin, histamine, serotonin and capsaicin receptors, but the various roles of these receptors are poorly characterised.

The most fascinating aspect of pain perception in the periphery is that normally most nociceptors lie dormant. Inflammation sensitizes this vast population of nociceptors, making them far more sensitive to stimulation (hyperalgesia). Hyperalgesia may be primary (felt at the site of stimulation, related to sensitization of the neurones innervating that area) or secondary (felt at a site remote from the original injury, and probably related to NMDA-mediated "wind-up."

Jud Evans and The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy acknowledges the much respected work of  Lara Hopley and Jo van Schalkwyk the principal authors of the above quotation from The Anaesthetist website - and points out that they may not necessarily agree with his ontological analysis of qualia in general or pain qualia in particular.
(Pain Physiology - http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/pain/Findex.htm#pain3.htm)


The representation of the entity-threatening condition of the painful toe is electro-chemically mapped by data-transmission circuitry specially evolved to convey information concerning the damaged toe to the central nervous system. In terms of the requirement for  remedial action there is nowhere else to map it to in the foot. To have developed the brain in an exposed area such as the feet would have not met the evolutionary requirements necessary for a fleshy bipedal organism to have survived, multiplied and evolved to become the most dominant living organism on earth.

Functionally a foot is in too much of an exposed position right down there near to the ground for it to have its own colonial or ancillary brain. The toe contains its own reactive data feeder cells or nociceptors which send the information as system alarm signals regarding any physical trauma to the specialized areas for awareness and cogitation situated up in the head, out of harm's way of the entity's locomotory action with its attendant exposure to the hazards of locomotion down below.

The condition of the damaged toe, [condition meaning: the way the toe exists at that moment in time] as represented to the neural network as pain is name we have given to this protective, neuro-physiologically nodalised alarm system. If no such alarm system had developed (as when the signals are suppressed or bracketed out in the case of a modern anaesthetically accompanied surgical amputation of the toe) – then the neural network would be unaware that the relevant chunk of painful flesh had been crushed until the effects of the drug wears off or the patient is able to look down at his foot and see that the toe is no longer attached to his body.

In a surgical removal of the painful toe tissue where no chemical supressant of the toe-brain communication is administered, the electro-chemical periphial condition system alerts the thinking brain-meat that the painful toe tissue threat has been replaced by a painful cut tissue threat in the area where the cut was made to sever the toe.

The neural network is then aware of the painful cut tissue. All of these physiological processes concern physical (matergic = matter+ energy) entities which can be impinged upon with surgical instruments (knives,etc.)  and chemical inhibitors and absolutely no primitively conceptualised, dualistically imagined transcendental or paranormal souls, spirits or occult qualia characteristic of primitive folk-medicine and ontologically challenged folk philosophy are involved.  Those who think differently must provide evidence then book their flight to Stockholm to pick up their Nobel Prize for Services to Occultism.

If our bodies start to exist in a manner that we call running, that does not mean that running exists - it is simply a way we have of describing (to others) a running body. We do not need to use our language TO OURSELVES if we are running or if we see someone else running We simply register the object in the way that it exists at the moment we witness it - we do not need to convert what we see into words for our own benefit, and we only do that if we decide to tell somebody what we saw.

Following my understanding of eliminativism – which really means the way I look at things – for I only take the ideas of others as guides rather than gospel – I reject the suggestion that there actually exist physiological 'feelings' pertaining to, or involving pleasurable or painful sensations. I therefore consider it apodictically obvious that the claim that the 'pain' when we stub our toe - or the 'pleasure' when we experience orgasm, or any other so-called 'somatic feelings' or 'qualia' we undergo are bio-chemically definable and measurable 'objects' is a fiction.

For my version of eliminative determinism what is really being measured is the electro-chemical sensual signals whose modulation and intensity represent courier-coded information about the traumatic or pleasurable condition of the originative object-flesh or meaty tissue from which it comes as heralded messages via the nerves as mediated by the neuronal networks of the central nervous system.

The embodied brain or embrained body (take your pick) needs to know of the painful toe-meat so that automatic damage limitation adjustments can be made
(survival-wise) by the human holism. The painful toe's pain is NOT transported to the brainmeat - you do not get to know about the painful toe-meat in your head - you do not feel the painful toe in your aware brain, the complete holism senses it and is aware of it because the whole system has been breached and the body carries out its own systems-survey. That is NOT to say, eliminativistically speaking that a system exists - what exists is a systematised holism.

In ontological discussion if someone uses words like qualia, mind, consciousness, brain-states, properties, essences, existential modalities and other such transcendentalist occult terms WITHOUT CONFIRMING THAT THEY ARE EMPLOYING THEM MERELY AS USEFUL FICTIONS, then that is enough for that person to be considered a transcendentalist. Such a person is espousing (either ignorantly of deliberately) a noxious infantile dualism which is only different in the manner and DEGREE of harm it causes from the idiots who steered the aircraft into the side of Twin Towers.

In the present era of weapons of mass destruction - each hypostasising financier, each small town abstractionist, each academic reificationist is either an ingenuous perpetuator of an insidious reality-unconnectedness upon which most of the troubles of mankind are based, or, if a deliberate disseminator of ontological dualism, a culpable constituent in the savage, uncomprehending behemoth of a primitive mordacious transcendentalism that threaten western civilisation.



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