Reviews for Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment

The average rating for Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-31 00:00:00 Timmy Marlar This is an extremely interesting analysis of "qualia" that cuts much deeper than the usual philosophical treatments. Clark takes as a departure point the famous essay by Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?" Nagel's central point is that materialist theories of the mind don't account for subjective experience--the "what it is like" to be something. Like many mainstream philosophers, Nagel sees no way of making scientific progress on this problem, and establishing what he provocatively calls an "objective phenomenology" (i.e., a rigorous scientific method for determining "what it is like" to be something). Clark's book brilliantly answers this challenge. Using some very subtle conceptual and scientific analysis, he shows how the laboratory techniques of psychophysics can be used to precisely analyze the "what it is like." At the heart of his approach is a statistical method called Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) which enables reconstruction of the "quality space" of an arbitrary sensory modality. These quality spaces are constructed by having a subject evaluate the relative similarity of pairs or triples of stimuli. The technique works a lot like reconstructing the map of a country from a list of the distances between its cities. In the final chapter of the book Clark discusses the perennial topic of "spectrum inversion," and his progress towards meeting Nagel's challenge. The chapter is superb--scientifically well-grounded and literally the best material I've ever read on qualia. It's true that Clark does not solve Chalmer's "hard problem." But his method does solve all the "structural" problems of sensation, and that's a huge step forward. As he puts it, it gives us a "purchase on alien phenomenology." Only two issues come to mind: First, Clark's MDS method is incredibly labor intensive, and plagued by problems of combinatorial explosion. That limits its utility in practice, although perhaps those problems can be overcome by testing large populations of subjects statistically (sacrificing accuracy, but lessening the burden on individual subjects), or, even better, through direct examination of neural tissue. The second issue is Clark's total neglect--like almost everyone in the field--of the master sense modality: touch. But those are nitpicks. This book is *must read* on the issue of qualia.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-14 00:00:00 Corey Hilton Clark offers a straightforward response to those who argue that qualitative aspects of experience (qualia) are fundamentally subjective and therefore in principle not subject to scientific explanation. His response is to grant that there are fundamentally subjective aspects of experience, but point out that not only is it not in principle impossible to give a scientific explanation of such aspects, but that there in fact ALREADY IS a scientific study of such aspects, namely psychophysics.