Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
I have been watching videos and reading a little bit about the hard problem of consciousness and also about qualia. It seems like philosophers are discussing how the physical can create our experiences, or our consciousness. This is what I assume is called the "explanatory gap".
As someone with a computer science background with a little experience with AI & machine learning, I was wondering whether or not consciousness can be simulated and what that would "mean"?
I was about to submit a discussion post called "Can consciousness be simulated" but I saw that a post with the same exact name and pretty much the same content was made 2 years ago.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6539/can-consciousness-be-simulated/p4
So after a bit more reflection on questions like why does consciousness, this universe, or even existence "exists", I began to think that maybe it's our understanding of consciousness that makes the problem seem "hard".
I now think that asking why consciousness exists is like asking why does the number 2 exists. And asking how the physical/material could create* our conscious experience is like asking how when we put 1 + 1 in the calculator, it creates* the number 2.
* create meaning bringing to existence
What is everyone's thought on this subject?
As someone with a computer science background with a little experience with AI & machine learning, I was wondering whether or not consciousness can be simulated and what that would "mean"?
I was about to submit a discussion post called "Can consciousness be simulated" but I saw that a post with the same exact name and pretty much the same content was made 2 years ago.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6539/can-consciousness-be-simulated/p4
So after a bit more reflection on questions like why does consciousness, this universe, or even existence "exists", I began to think that maybe it's our understanding of consciousness that makes the problem seem "hard".
I now think that asking why consciousness exists is like asking why does the number 2 exists. And asking how the physical/material could create* our conscious experience is like asking how when we put 1 + 1 in the calculator, it creates* the number 2.
* create meaning bringing to existence
What is everyone's thought on this subject?
Comments (483)
Consciousness and what they call the hard problem gets discussed here a lot. No reason not to do it again. As for the earlier post with the same name, at two years, the statute of limitations has definitely run out.
I have found the subject frustrating enough that I usually don't participate in consciousness discussions. One suggestion - define the terms you mean to use well. Good luck.
Welcome to the forum.
It's a kind of distortion or forgetting of history that this is called the "hard problem". During the enlightenment when Descartes, Hume, Kant and the like were producing masterpieces, the hard problem was "motion", that is the movement of objects. Newton was astonished that he could not give a physicalistic account of gravity.
For whatever reason, the "hard problem" of motion has been forgotten in terms of people even knowing it used to be a problem at all. Gravity's inconceivability has just been accepted. Now we have this specific articulation of the hard problem, which at the time of the 18th century had to be admitted, by some anyway: that matter thinks.
Yes Chalmers pointed to a hard problem, but we should not forget that gravity, electromagnetism, free will, causality and indeed a great portion of philosophy are hard problems too. Perhaps by contextualizing this issue, it will seem less specifically puzzling.
After all, we are acquainted with experience much better than the world out there.
The point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, is that first-person experience is not within the scope of objective, third-person descriptive analysis. So it deflates the expectation that the mind is something which can be explained by or reduced to scientific explanation, because scientific analysis is always conducted in the third person.
[quote=David Chalmers; http://consc.net/papers/facing.html]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel ('What it is like to be a Bat') has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
And the issue is, experience is had by subjects. And subjects, in this sense, can't be made an object, in the sense that brain and cognitive functionality can be. It's too near to us for us to know it. This leads to the 'blind spot of science' argument.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
Once you understand this, many issues are resolved, but it takes quite a bit of work to understand it.
Yep. He just meant it's hard because science doesn't have the conceptual tools to answer it (but maybe that's changing).
Explaining functions is the easy problem (because it doesn't require new concepts)
But sometimes I wonder if we can ever step outside consciousness so as to explain it.
:up: That's it, in a nutshell.
Sometimes I also wonder if we can ever step outside of explanation so as to explain the world. Meaning, there is an inherent idealism to our making sense of the world, whatever the world is.
But a connection between the two is obviously there. If I experience whatever conscious quality, then there is a material counterpart in the brain. The person looking at my brain, however he thinks that to do, can describe it materialistically. But there must be a non-materialisic ingredient of matter by means of which I have the conscious experience. I can hear music inside my head, or outside my head, in which case the materialistic outside has to be considered too. The materialistic view is a subjective image though, existing in the mind of who looks at me materialistically. So there must be more to matter than matter only.
I mean if you as yourself can step outside of your own experience to look at yourself. No. Me neither for myself.
We can try to trick ourselves into thinking than when another person is analyzing our experience via fMRI or some personal behavioral reports (I see a brown dog, I see a blue fish, etc.) that these reports are outside experience, as in a "objective view", or a view from nowhere.
But we don't do that, what the neuroscientist or psychologist is doing is analyzing how certain aspects of the other persons experience affects there own experience.
Russell has a nice quote about this somewhere.
EDIT:
Here, it's worth a look:
https://books.google.com.do/books?id=VEB9AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=bertrand+russell+what+the+physiologist+sees+is+by+no+means+identical&source=bl&ots=ce7mXSFUS4&sig=ACfU3U3dvNp32LYUjSsMtsR_Jp3DVNvjfA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5udGGlunzAhXxTDABHTKSC5wQ6AF6BAgfEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false
Last paragraph of pp.152 to halfway through pp.153, quite brief, but to the point.
I can't copy it and typing it would be too long.
All solutions to problems are material solutions. What other kind(s) of solutions can you offer an example of? Sure, there are other fantasies and speculations, but they are of dubious coherency; although as exercises of the creative imagination they may not be without value; they cannot be counted as explanations, because a good explanation should be testable.
If all solutions are material, then either there will (or at least could) be a material solution, or else the question is ill-formed in the first place.
Exactly!
Schopenhauer said the Law of Explanation (our perception that everything has to have a cause) is part of a process of pulling a united world apart. Is that what you mean?
A lot of philosophical analysis comprises questioning what seems obvious to you. You're phrasing the question in terms of an assumed framework of understanding, that 'the brain' is the source of the explanation you're seeking. But, for one thing, I would question the sense in which the brain *is* 'a material thing' at all. The brain is the most complex phenomenon known to science, there are more neural connections than there are stars in the observable universe. Teams of thousands have spent tens of years on single aspects of understanding that. And the brain is embodied in a organism, in the nervous system, the biosphere, and within a cultural and linguistic matrix, also. Considering it as an object in its own right occludes all of those fundamental aspects of its operation.
Materialist theory of mind all begins with some version of the idea that the mind is a product of interactions in the physical brain. And it does seem obvious that this must be the case to a lot of people. But I'm questioning that.
I think the way to frame the problem is this: that science generally proceeds in terms of what can be known objectively, or put another way, by analysis of objects and the relationships between them. That is why physics is the paradigm for so much else in science and even philosophy, which is what 'physicalism' means.
So it is natural to ask, what kind of object or substance can consciousness be? What kind of thing, or stuff, is it? But I'm saying that it's not an object of any kind, it simply can't be accomodated within that overall epistemological framework. It's not an object, it doesn't objectively exist. But because modern culture is so reliant on that implicit subject-object framework, it can't come to terms with this fact. That's why modern thinking is generally convinced that only what exists 'out there somewhere', in time and space, can be real. That is what leads to 'eliminative materialism', the idea that there really is no such thing as consciousness per se.
Consider the nature of meaning. Human consciousness, which is linguistic, abstract and rational (to some degree anyway) is constantly navigating by a process of judgement. In what sense are judgements physical? When you grasp something, some idea, the light bulb goes on, you see what it means - is that a physical process, in any sense? Sure, it might have physical consequences - if you grasp something awful, you might get an adrenal reaction, something wonderful can produce endorphins. But what is that 'act of insight'? I think assuming that understanding the nature of judgement, the human faculty of discerning meaning, is something that science is closing in on, is a category mistake. There's a profound misunderstanding at the basis of it. That is 'the hard problem' of consciousness.
And this even has, in some sense, scientific acknowledgement. Have a read of this section of a scientific paper on the neural binding problem. It specifically acknowledges the hard problem of consciousness.
I mean that we come up with mental models of the world, and then tend to treat those models as the world itself, forgetting that they're our explanations, not the world. But yes, causality can be considered part of that, as Hume noted.
Here I totally agree. Philosophy should be a means to set us free from the tyranny of Truth as practiced by science. I don't need philosophy though to set me free from my own truth. It seems pretty obvious to me in a non-scientific way.
I don't assume the brain to be the explanation of consciousness. If you read well, I said that scientific materials I'm does. And science is materialialistic.
I proposed there is some extra, non-materialistic ingredient of matter, though I can't explain what (and in that sense consciousness just can't be explained, however your urge to explain it, and for the better so; it would take away it's beauty and mysteriousness).
I wrote there is a correspondence between the two. If you look at my brain you look at it materialistically. Which you can question, but I assume this. I pull you in my truth, so to speak. Outside of the brain, you can see the difference, although a working brain, by it's very nature can't ever be grasped materialisically, scientifically, in its whole, although science makes different, until now very disassociate, cut-up, reduced (or holistic), abstract, invasive, attempts to explain it. It will never ever succeed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why the hell should I consider the nature of meaning in relation to consciousness. If you can explain well, then I know what you mean, whatever it's "nature' (your suggestion is a typical bow to science, which is looking for "nature" too).
Quoting Wayfarer. That's what you think. It can be pretty the contrary to all of these three! Let me tell you.
:up:
What "consciousness"? If it is "immaterial" "nonphysical" or "super-natural", then, not only is it inexplicable, it's also non-evident in a scientific sense too. Assuming that, what are you (idealists, mysterians & pan-whatchamacallits) even talking about when you talk about "consciousness" ("experience" "qualia" etc)? The explanatory gap is a scientific problem, not a philosophical aporia, because it concerns explaining facts of the matter which philosophy does / can not; therefore philosophers can only propose woo-of-the-explanatory-gap nonsense (e.g. panpsychism, substance dualism, subjective idealism) that only begs the question of one unknown with a further (metaphysical? magical?) unknowable. As suggested already by , this latest "hard problem" is a DOA anachronism that confuses, even occludes, far more than it clarifies or informs research.
A facet of the spirit (a more proper term) [I]is that it's conscious/unconscious[/I] (the reason why 'spirit' is a more proper term; consciousness is an aspect; numbness, power, head-level mental experience, body-level physical experience, etc. Other aspects).
I'm going to use the term spirit to represent what you factorised as consciousness.
In theory the spirit is inconceivable but interactable. Facets of the spirit can be pointed out and lines can be drawn between them, we can paint pictures and scenes can be created. However, we cannot conduct any science on the whole of the spirit, as we can't on the whole of nature.
Science; a process of study and exploitation of objects/subjects for intellect.
We cannot study or exploit the spirit for intellect - chaos involved makes selecting / naming what exactly it is impossible - scientific harmony is impossible. We can make concise the experience, of spirit, but never the product.
Analogous to a map being part of its own territory.
Does that mean there's an information horizon somewhere?
Consciousness simply can't be explained. Only experienced.
There is an information horizon in the sense you can't envision you whole brain, as the image is part of the brain.
To whom? It's obvious to everyone, but it's an object for no-one. Very simple. This doesn't beg any question, it just sets an in-principle limit for what can be ascertained by objective means. Hence it is a philosophical reflection, rather than a 'falsifiable hypothesis' of any kind. You have to learn to live with knowing you don't know in respect of this issue.
Quoting Janus
What about solutions to mathematical conjectures? Are they included?
Which accords with what I’m saying.
Awesome. What a fantastic quote.
Many thanks! :)
Which would mean science in general suffers from a kind of locked-in syndrome.
It's not just that a theory of consciousness would be affected by that.
But what about philosophy? Isn't it also projecting models?
Quoting SophistiCat
The "we" an inner homunculus? If not, why the restriction?
Curious......how much of this Russell do you support? Re: is the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory, true?
Quoting Wayfarer
Spatiotemporal analysis (with evidence):
Say, my supper is locatable, left-to-right, movable, breakable (i.e. object-like), my experiences thereof occur, come and go, are interruptible (i.e. process-like).
• Suppose x is defined as non-spatial, "outside of space". Well, then obviously x is nowhere to be found, no place. Cannot have any extent, volume/area/length, not even zero-dimensional (like a mathematical singularity).
· A demarcation: objects are spatial, left to right, front to back, top to bottom, locatable, movable, breakable (under conservation).
• Suppose x is defined as atemporal, "outside of time". Well, then x was/is nowhen, no simultaneity. No duration involved, cannot change, can't be subject to causation, can't interact, inert and lifeless (at most).
· A demarcation: processes are temporal, come and go, occur, interruptible (interaction/event-causation).
The closest to non-spatiotemporal in the literature seems to be abstracts, like sterile inhabitants of Platonia.
Minds partake in the world, interact, both ways, are active, are in fact parts of the world. It's a hallmark that minds are temporal, process-like; experiences come and go, occur, are interruptible.
Some entertain the notion that consciousness is a container (e.g. of experiences) that can be empty, yet the only evident container is the body.
Note, though, there is a sort of space-time duality here (distinct from substance dualism). Mind isn't object-like, that'd be a category mistake, rather mind is more clearly process-like.
We do know some things, but we don't know exactly what it all is, and, perhaps more pertinently, we don't know what it can all do together. Mystifying isn't a particularly good response as such.
The general orientation.
That what the physiologist sees is not the brain of the subject "neutrally", but instead that what he's actually seeing are the effects of his own experience (the physiologist, that is) reacting when looking at the behavior of another persons brain. But even here the physiologist is not "seeing" the experience of the patient.
I think that using "physical" and "mental" so frequently can be a bit confusing. I prefer to use Strawson's terms "non-experiential" for matter and "experiential" for mental.
Quoting Woody Allen, My Philosophy
Thank you
Very interesting quote from Nagel. I am not well read on philosophy or even history so this is very insightful.
Quoting GraveItty
What if this connection is just a sort of coincidence?
Quoting Wayfarer
This is along my line of thinking. We know consciousness exists and we also can see how it cannot be explained materialistically, so maybe all we can do as philosophers is interpret what this means. I don't think interpretations can count as a scientific proof but maybe it gives insight on the reality beyond what can be explained physical. Sort of how the different interpretations of quantum mechanics can help us understand reality in a different way.
Quoting 180 Proof
Isn't the issue that there is nothing to explain the gap between physical and experience? And in that case I think we should consider philosophers interpretations on the matter. By definition these can be sufficient explanations.
Quoting GraveItty
Why is that?
What do you all think about the following thought experiment:
Imagine a physical universe of space and time exactly like ours in which all of the same laws of physics apply and all of the same events occur but in this universe there is no conscious "experience". Meaning that there are plenty of books and discussions between philosophers and scientists about consciousness and experiences but no real "observer" in any of these scenarios.
Information flows in from the environment. Or to be more precise, a bunch of sensations flow into the brain from ongoing contact with the environment, and the brain has to make sense of that. Some would argue this is done in a predictive or Bayesian manner.
We're not looking out at the world as it is, we're interfacing with it in a way we can makes sense of.
Because all explanations have the consciousness as subject matter. They don't have access to the consciousness itself. There is no knowledge of the consciousness itself. You have to feel it on the inside, experience it. So no explanation can be given. You can construct theorize endlessly about its context though. Say the matter it's in (the neural structures in the case of things like vision, thoughts, memories, sound, itch, spacetime awareness) or its function, or it's origins, but the stuff itself is not explained. That's why it's called the hard problem. Outside of it you can see the difference (matter(, inside you can feel it (consciousness, even when you see things outside of your body).
Oh, you can imagine a world like you do, but it is just a soul depleted world, you have extracted the matter of the universe only, without its content, and placed it in an Imaginary world.
How will you ever explain the colors you see, the sounds that you hear, or the feeling of music that makes you cry? Apart from their function and reasons of having them? How do you explain blue? In a sense I litterally explained it here in the sense that you know what blue is. Can a blind man ever experience it? It is said so. A blind man can even be afraid in the dark, or see motion when he sees black only. But I doubt if he can experience blue. Maybe an abstract concept of it. If he has no neural correlate for it, it's questionable, if not impossible. Blue is no concept.
Ok, that’s fine. Russell is saying the development of a certain point of view for the distinction between mind and matter, gives an illusory result. The development of a different point of view may be sufficient to relieve the illusory distinction, but it may just as well raise another one.
Which begs the question....why does the necessarily given need to be developed?
As respectable and informative your writing is, it still doesn't explain my conscious feeling of pain. How can it. The conscious pain cannot be explained. A scream explains it too. Litterally. It ex plains, shouts out.
I was asking about the alleged restriction of "everything that we can directly observe". What is (or what did Russell mean by) direct observation? Is it,
Quoting Marchesk
?
Because if one isn't careful, they will begin to think that they are looking directly at a brain and believe that non-mental activity (neuronal and electrochemical activity) is mental activity.
But the physiologist hasn't touched the mind.
He has interpreted the data and is giving reports based on his own experiential activity, not on some activity outside his experience, which presumably would be non-mental.
This experiment supposes soul and matter can exist independently from each other. Maybe they can, but in that case your mentioned world cannot exist.
I don't believe that the world/scenario that I mentioned is more or less imaginary than the one we currently live in. Nor do I think it makes a difference in explaining colors, sounds, and all other experiences because these things are not explainable by the "matter" in the first place. This is why I proposed the thought experiment.
When I give this scenario a bit more thought, all of the colors, sounds, feelings, and other experiences that I feel, actually seems more explainable.
Isn't it the same world the? How can a material brain, body, and universe exist without the creature seeing, for example, colors, or the world around them? Faces would have no meaning as there is nothing to express.
They wouldn't see colors, they would just react to wavelengths of light in a certain range. We have this question with robots and various light detectors. Do they see color? Only in the sense that they detect a frequency of light we see as red. If that sounds weird, then ask yourself what colors a radio telescope sees.
The p-zombie argument is that all the neural and biological activity could take place in principle without there being experiences of color, sound, pain, etc. And that's because the neural, biological, chemical and physical descriptions don't make use of colors, sounds and pains. They're completely abstract descriptions, because that's how we do science. We abstract away from our creature-dependent sensations.
Yes I suspect it is the same world then. My position is that thinking that a material brain, physics, and universe needs an experiencing creature to see colors, hear sounds, etc, is just an assumption. @Marchesks comment explains how that would look.
Quoting Marchesk
This is the first time I am hearing of the philosophical zombie argument so thanks for referencing this. I think I'll start reading up on this to see what other philosophers have to say about this.
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes I agree. But not everything is solvable, not everything is a problem, and I suppose that not everything is physical. I also would not use the word speculation, but rather interpretation. I think philosophical interpretations of reality can move us in a certain direction and have application in real life. I think the interpretations of consciousness especially will be really important in the next few years in society especially with the growth of artificial/computational intelligence and machine learning.
The feeling of pain is placid, mental pain is loss and all phsycial pains are gain related.
Physically, rapid-gain is enough to distract, misdirect or beguile a playmaker.
Mentally, mass-loss is enough to distract, misdirect or beguile a playmaker.
The spirit doesn't feel pain but has the burden of experiencing mental and phsycial pain.
Psychological solutions, or are therapists completely worthless?
Example?
Ok. Thanks
Oh well, I suppose I'll have to mostly agree with you in some other thread.
So do you see phenomenal consciousness as essentially being an emergent property of the brain's processing capabilities? Details to be understood in the fullness of time via a scientific approach?
Right, no comprehensive explanations.
My comments at least (612641, 612834) are just about delineation.
Giving up (or mystification) not really warranted, and epistemophobia is irrational.
[sup]Pop: Neuroscientists Have Followed a Thought as It Moves Through The Brain (Jan 18, 2018)
Paper: Persistent neuronal activity in human prefrontal cortex links perception and action (Dec 18, 2017)
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Distracting can help, but mostly it's a process of telling the intrusive thought (something along the lines of): hello irrational thought, I'm not going to fear you.
Who says it's unsolvable?
I think it is. I think scientists can study this for a thousand more years and still not know how minds are produced by brains. This is because there's no way to verify other minds exist. You can only be certain that your own mind exists. So, if a scientific theory predicts that that clump of matter over there is conscious, how are we going to verify it? That seems like an insolvable problem.
Quoting frank
All the mysterians do - Chomsky, Penrose, McGinn, etc
I think McGinn just expresses pessimism. He doesn't really say it's unsolvable, does he?
Yes. I think there has been progress in recent decades explaining the emergence of "phenomenal consciousness" by the likes of neuroscientist-philosopher Thomas Metzinger (re: self model theory of subjectivity) et al.
I,m not sure what you mean by a comprehensive explanation, but that's not the one I'm looking for. You can't comprehend color just as I can. You can give it a contextual meaning just as I can. Maybe color is a necessity to see the difference between different materials, as is usefull in a Dawkinsian approach to evolution. Maybe it corresponds to different wavelengths of a small range of the solar electromagnetic field. Maybe it is a huge collective parallell traveling of electric spike potentials on a least resistant path on the forrest of the intricate and madly complex and orderly chaotic neuronal structure in the visual cortex. Operating on its own or stimulated by the retina, formally, dynamically (temporally), non-linearly, and holistically structured in the larger context of that same neuronal structure. I comprehend color, and so do you. We both know what blue is. No question about it. But do you understand what it is? No. It's a hard problem
I had one all written up, it I couldn’t access proper references to support it. I have some books by Russell, just not pertaining closely enough to this topic. And, of course, without them, my recourse is the inevitable cognitive prejudices, which, while loosely pertinent, isn’t fair.
Ok. Fine. Regarding this......
Quoting Manuel
.....in a nutshell, the professional already is careful, due to an irreducible given, and the commoner doesn’t need to be, due to mere disinterest, so why the necessity to develop the distinction between mind and matter.
I fancy myself a hard Mysterian: this problem cannot be practically solved.
With greater perspective could come a more common sensical assumption. But we don't know, at this juncture, where we are or what we're made of. We see the Earth as still and it's hurtling through space. We see hard matter and liken it to something called "the physical" and at the same time know it's all in flux.
It isn't saying anything to say that the mind is physical anyway, because we don't know what the physical is.
The best we can do is tinker with it and exploit its resources and capabilities. We cannot, ever, in my view, precisely dictate what it is. Is everything mundane or completely abstract? There's just no way of dictating this.
It's the vocabulary he chose to use, as do many other philosophers, accompanied by the usual connotations people tend to have when they use them.
The important distinction, the one which I think is intelligible is to associate matter with "non-mental" and mind with "mental". It is claimed that matter is not mind, I don't agree but, that's the vocabulary we are stuck with.
The idea would be that the physiologist studies (non-mental) matter, as seen in brains. This is the famed "third person perspective." Then the physiologist presents us an objective report on the observed phenomena, in this case the (non-mental) brain.
What Russell is saying using this contentious vocabulary, is that the physiologist is actually not studying (non-mental) matter, he is studying how his mind reacts to a supposedly "objective" thing. So it's a mental construct on the occasion of a stimulus.
We don't get to study (non-mental) matter anywhere, unless we could literally get out of our bodies. We just have to postulate its existence.
Ah, would that it were, would that it were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npvQ3M3WaPA
I do. Whatever formal explanation you give to the color blue, it's no explanation of the color blue itself. "Das Ding an Sich" can't be known. Only experienced from within.
We do not postulate anything. If you can see and touch a thing you have to be far off to even think about the possibility that it might not "exist". That is the problem with undirected reflections and witty, but mindless, efforts. If e.g. social constructivism tells us that we can construct the "reality" of things it is clear that we can construct an idea of things that makes it impossible to say anything about
it. Given we can - why should we do it?
Where is step B? Where is the negation of the negation? What should be the difference between empirical science and philosophy be, if it loses itself to it's objects (e.g. "truth")?
Yes. The representational cognitive system intrinsic to the human condition, writ large. Really difficult to theorize, or even speculate, its negation. It is still necessary to account for that “objective” thing, otherwise representations have no ground, the well-worn yet hardly acknowledged, “we are presented with the absurdity of an appearance, without that which appears...”. (Not Russell)
My contention is only that there is no need to develop a distinction between mind and matter, because the absence of that distinction, is impossible, with respect to our human system of rational agency. It follows that without the development of a distinction, any illusory predicates assignable to it, disappear, which is where this whole dialogue began.
Granting that doctrinal conclusion, mind and matter are already necessarily distinct, Russell’s neutral monism, which says mind and matter are indistinguishable, re: “Analysis of Mind”, 1921, is invalid, for it reduces ultimately to the paradoxical conclusion that whenever one is conscious he is aware of his own brain, (secondary literature, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, Vol.7, pg 241. Sorry).
Logically, it’s quite simple: develop theories of mind, develop theories of matter, the distinctions between them fall out as a consequence.
The only way around this, such that neutral monism is viable, is to defeat the theoretical predicates sufficiently enough to falsify the representational cognitive system. As far as I am aware, Russell didn’t take that bait. But he did wrap, or rather, smother, himself in language, which is just as ill-begotten.
Anyway.....as I said. My only contention.....
Not at all.
[quote=Wikipedia] In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.
The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".[/quote]
As I've shown already in this thread, the hard explanatory problem has scientific validation, namely, that of the subjective unity of consciousness, and how to account for it in neurological terms. This is one aspect of the well-known neural binding problem, which is how to account for all of the disparate activities of the brain and body can culminate in the obvious fact of the subjective unity of experience.
[Quote=Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem(s);https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3title]As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.
There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.
But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.[/quote]
Your continual invocation of 'woo of the gaps' only illustrates that you're not grasping problem at hand. It's a hard problem for physicalism and naturalism because of the axioms they start from, not because there is no solution whatever. Seen from other perspectives, there is no hard problem, it simply dissolves. It's all a matter of perspective. But seen from the perspective of modern scientific naturalism, there is an insuperable problem, because its framework doesn't accomodate the reality of first-person experience, a.k.a. 'being', which is why 'eliminative materialism' must insist that it has no fundamental reality. You're the one obfuscating the problem, because it clashes with naturalism - there's an issue you're refusing to see which is as plain as the nose on your face.
'Speculative woo-of-the-gaps' is at bottom simply the observation that there are things about the mind that science can't know, because of its starting assumptions. It's a very simple thing, but some guy by the name of Chalmers was able to create an international career as an esteemed philosopher by pointing it out.
[quote=Philip Goff] Perhaps the most important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of natural science. But he felt able to do this only after he had revolutionised our philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers smelt sweet. But it’s hard to see how these sensory qualities – the redness of tomatoes, the spicy taste of paprika, the sweet smell of flowers – could be captured in the abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an equation capture what it’s like to taste spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter.
Galileo’s solution to this problem was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul. The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers but in the soul of the person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika but in the soul of the person tasting it. Even colours, for Galileo, aren’t really on the surfaces of objects but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter had no qualities, then it was possible in principle to describe it in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics.
But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory qualities. Rather he took them to be forms of consciousness residing in the soul, an entity outside of the material world and so outside of the domain of natural science. In other words, Galileo created physical science by putting consciousness outside of its domain of enquiry.[/quote]
But now naturalism has 'forgotten' that it has made this move and tries to account for 'the soul' - which of course it denies the reality of - in amongst the mindless objects which it has deemed the only real entities. Hence the whole argument.
Quoting RogueAI
Quoting Janus
Quoting RogueAI
Saying that a mental state is a mental state is tautologically true, of course, but tells us nothing. It is only if we can determine that something is really something else that it is not immediately obvious that it is, that we can be said to have discovered something.
I prefer to say, with Spinoza, that the mental and the physical are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. So, the mind and the brain/ body are not different things; we are embodied minds or enminded bodies depending on which perspective you want to take. But this should not be taken to be advocating pan-psychism.
We conceive of inanimate objects as 'brute matter' but objects appear only in the "mental/ physical" act of perception. So we can think of what is perceived as either a mind-independent object or a mind dependent perception, and neither conception, on it's own, will be right. In this we approach the limits of language.
That's my take on it. anyway.
This would be more compelling if materialists had some idea of what consciousness is and how brains produce it. Let me ask you: suppose science is still stumped on consciousness 1,000 years from now. Would you still think all there is is matter?
You may be right.
I agree with Wayfarer. Nobody is wooing any gaps.
If you are, then you are. It surely is not the fault of some neuroscientist, that most of philosophy were unable to reach a synthesis on ontological difference.
Rudolph Steiner.
Oh. Wait. Nobody here is.
Never mind.
Well, yeah. :lol:
It's very conceivable that we could peep into the experiences of other humans and animals. It happens in science fiction all the time.
We postulates things all the time, not only in science but in day to day life too.
I agree that something exists. I can't prove it. Human knowledge doesn't work with "final proofs". It's that I think there are better reasons for believing that something exists independently of me than there good reasons for thinking that nothing does.
Quoting Mww
Ah, I see. The terminology can get really tricky, but I'll be willing to grant that there is some kind of natural inclination to distinguish mind or soul from everything else. It's the way we naturally view the world, "folk" psychologically, as it were, not that I'm enamored with that term.
But no substantive problem here, on my part.
Quoting Mww
Correct on the part of him saying that we aware of our brains, through experience. But, as I understand it, Neutral Monism is not so much that mind and matter are indistinguishable. Neutral Monism is the idea that world is neither mental nor physical as we understand these terms.
Quoting Mww
Sure, his use of words can be problematic. But his point about neurologists examining brains is correct, in my view. There is no view from nowhere.
I agree with you that there needs to be something which grounds the phenomena we are interpreting. It's just that we can't go directly to these grounds.
Or Swedenborg, or Madame Blavatsky, or Gurdjieff, or Aleister Crowley, or Eliphas Levi, or Sri Aurobindo, or Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, or Bubba Free John, or Gautama, or... countless others...in fact anyone who claims to be determining the indeterminable.
The issue here might be that one man's woo is another's dogma.
Or it's a clash of dogmas.
:100:
In Spinozistic terms, nature or God (as substance) is neither mental nor physical, but mental and physical are distinguishable attributes of substance.
No question. But I wonder if some expressions of dogma are preferable to others. I would rather wrestle with a Catholic dogmatist than one from Islamic State.
We don’t need to go directly to those grounds. They come to us, as undetermined, but determinable, somethings, by means of perception. We can’t know the thing represented by its phenomenon directly, that’s true, but it is nonetheless directly presented to us.
Quoting frank
"Panpsychism" isn't woo? "Substance dualism"? :roll:
Quoting Wayfarer
And again, you prove my point by incoherently (in this case) invoking philosophical criteria when referring to a problem even an idealist like you, Wayf, acknowledges is empirical. Oh I grasp this topic – which is outside your supernatural ("new age") ambit – just fine. :sweat:
:100:
Or it could be said differently as "there is nonetheless a direct presentation (as in "a making present) via us".
That's a very sensible way of thinking formulating the problem, actually. :up:
Quoting Mww
What do you mean by directly presented?
I see a tree, it's a representation. It's grounds are unknown to me, I follow this far.
What's directly presented here?
This makes more sense.
A list of the uninvited?
————-
Quoting Janus
Perhaps, but then comes the notion that we are necessary causality for empirical realities. And if subjectivity is true, there can be no account for why a dog isn’t sometimes a ‘57 DeSoto.
There is a making present via us, but it isn’t perception.
Well, your experience happens to you (as also set out above). They're part of your (ontological) makeup when occurring.
Another aspect: I can't (even in principle) experience your self-awareness, since then I'd be you instead. Self-awareness is indexical. This stuff is pervaded by self-reference. And happenings (temporal).
We can still chit-chat about the world, though, including self-awareness. Meaningfully, too. Or we'd have no forums. :)
That's probably because Catholics don't burn heretics at the stake anymore.
Substance dualism is Descartes. How did that enter the conversation?
Is panpsychism woo? I don't think so.
Existence is woo as far as I'm concerned.
Sorry! I meant that you can comprehend color... Just as I can. It's blue.
I think that is a meaningless expression. It transposes the discussion into an inappropriate frame of reference.
Quoting Marchesk
Right on. We're made of it.
Depends on your chosen epistemological theory. Your eyes don’t tell you there’s a tree, they only tell you there’s an object. If your eyes don’t tell you anything but that there is an object, it is up to the cognitive system to render that something into that which can be known as one thing. And that rendering is called phenomenon. Platonic knowledge that (there is a thing present), not yet epistemic knowledge of (what the thing is).
———-
Quoting Manuel
Nope. We see.....sense..... something directly. It isn’t a tree until the intellect gets done with it, somewhere downstream in the mental process. Even get a tickle on the back of your neck, and sometime between energizing your arm to swap it, you flash on a big fat bug you’re about to splatter all over yourself? Same conditions for any and all perceptions; you perceive the sensation, but have no immediate knowledge of its cause.
I agree, it is a collaboration between us and the world (which are not separate except per conceptual distinctions) so yes the making present via us is not merely perception.
Quoting Marchesk
Good point.
I think it makes sense, in different senses, to say it both is and is not a tree prior to the cognitive workings.
Gotcha.
Good stuff. :up:
But if you follow this out to its logical end, that which is present via us, can only be because of us, which makes the collaboration internal, eliminating the world from it entirely. Entirely, post-perception, that is.
That's a bizarre comment. Existence is the very most commonplace. It is the attempt to answer the ill-formed question: "what is existence" that leads to all kinds of woo.
Yes, and the notion of a tree is an intersubjective agreement, unlikely to be a concept we would acquire unassisted.
Before cognitive workings, yes, we could say that. But if the prime human pursuit is knowledge, to say that and include the cognitive workings, we must abandon the principle of identity. There may be two senses, but only one ends in knowledge. Possible knowledge.
I don't think the notion of internality is helpful here. Certainly the presencing or presenting of the world to us would not be without us, but it would not be without the world, either. So, the conclusion would seem to be that it is neither internal nor external or it is both internal and external; one or other of that dialectical pair is deployed alone usefully only in certain local contexts, not globally. That's my take anyway.
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” ? Ludwig Wittgenstein
Agreed. WE would not require an unassisted conception, but somebody did. Which reduces to, every conception was somebody’s unassisted baby.
Does a Conscious Mind actually exist? Yes. A conscious mind exists physically as a material object. You can see it. I see my conscious mind every day when I shave.
A conscious mind exists in space and time and exists in the form of arrangements or patterns of brain cells inside of a human head. It is lodged in that big, wide bump just above the eyes which is called "a pre frontal lobe".
That bump is a conscious mind.
The conscious mind is bone encased, The conscious mind is made of human brain cells or more accurately as patterns of brain cells.
A conscious mind can be cut out of a person's head with a scalpel and thrown into a waste basket.
It is a well known fact that there are men who are alive today that have had their conscious minds amputated and the enclosing skin pulled back and sewn together again. This surgical operation is a last resort operation used to save the lives of people who have brain disorders like brain cancer inside the cells of their prefrontal lobes.
Afterwards these men can live happily but can no longer use words.
I am not speaking figuratively. I am speaking literally. I am stating well know facts.
But the following may be original.
Please look at some of the words I just spoke. Look at the word "figuratively". Look at the word "am". look at the word "speaking".
Where did I find these words? I found them in a big word storage box located somewhere inside of my prefrontal lobe called "my vocabulary".
They were detected and stored and turned into sound waves or typed words by my conscious mind. That's what my conscious mind is there for. To work with words.
When I was born I had a word box but it was empty. The first word I learned and stored in that box probably was the word "Mama".
Part of my growing up was the learning of new words. Since I love reading books, usually for pleasure, and I also speak Spanish I have stored well over a thousand words in that box.
Only humans have conscious minds. No animal has that bump.
What do conscious mind cells look like?
They look like bloody lard. The cells themselves are made largely of fat with some carbohydrates and proteans.
I have eaten such brain cells with lots of lemon and salt in Calf Brain recipes.
Well, so what have I done here??
I have asked my conscious mind to tell me what a conscious mind is and it did. Great!
Conscious minds were evolved in the human race (and only in the human race) very recently, perhaps less that a half million years ago.
But that is another story. For later.
Consciousness. That is another, and far more difficult question. I tend to agree with Leteltty. Later.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you saying that it is knowledge of a tree (tree of knowledge :wink: ) only because of us? Again there would be no knowledge without us, granted, but there would be no knowledge without the tree, either, no? Or perhaps I have misunderstood?
I don't see any inconsistency there. Existence is commonplace until we try to explain it; at which point ti becomes mystical. Woo is the attempt to make the mystical commonplace, or the indeterminable determinate as I think I said earlier. The mystical is the indeterminable. In another sense the mystical, the indeterminable, is already commonplace, but not the commonplace of the determinable.
Working from the proposition, “present via us....”, internality is not only helpful with respect to theoretical predicates, it is absolutely necessary for epistemic operations. Via “US” makes it so.
Necessity is not sufficiency. The world and us are each necessary, but neither in itself is sufficient. This with regards to perception alone. The world is neither necessary nor sufficient for pure a priori cognitions, under the assumption there are such things.
The world would seem to be necessary for there to be a priori cognitions as far as I can tell. If I remember correctly Kant acknowledged that the synthetic a priori requires the schooling of prior experience, even though it can be thought of as being independent of the the empirical world in the sense that, once in place, further experience need not be consulted. So, once we have experienced (and gone on to conceptualize) space and time, for example, we can then know that all experience must be spatial and temporal.
I fully agree! What is the self? I'm aware of it and see him in the mirror. :smile:
Yep. Think about it. What was it before it was a tree? And that thing, why is it a “tree” and not some other named thing? That thing always was a thing, it just wasn’t a tree until some human said it was.
Besides, if it always was a tree, why do we have to learn it as such? Why didn’t we already know it as tree before having to be instructed about it?
Yes, for their proofs, their empirical validity. Not for their construction, which are merely logically non-contradictory. Logic alone cannot teach us facts of Nature.
I don't think the question has any real sense. It might have been a configuration of microphysical particles or energy fields, but then even that is part of our experience. But it doesn't follow that it is nothing sans our experience. And whatever it is it obviously reliably manifests to suss and animals as what we would call a tree. So its manifestation as a tree depends on both its percipients and on its own structure, whatever that might be. You say it was a thing, but that too is as conceptual, even though obviously broader, a category as "tree". So it wasn't called a tree until some human named it such, but neither was it called a thing until some human named it as such.
Quoting Mww
But how could we have logic without empirical experience? take the logical idea of identity. We recognize things because they are (relatively) invariant. If there were no relative invariance in the things we perceive then there would be no identity, no idea of identity (and obviously no us and no life, either).
But talking about the "neural binding problem" does not shift to an inapproprate empirical frame of reference (i.e. what your guru Chalmers calls "an easy problem of cognition") when discussing the allegedly philosophical "hard problem of consciousness"? :shade: Your hypocrisy, Wayf, is only exceeded by your conspicuous lack of grasping what's at issue here. :brow:
[edit: this is directed to those who accept the narrative of phenomenology]
I'd like to pick up from here.
The issue I want to talk about is not the scientific mapping, or the lack thereof, of subjective experience.
Not the measurement either. Those aren't the problems. The issue is that the mind, under phenomenology, is not allowed to have presuppositions -- presuppositions of the cause of the sense impressions. We both know that images reaching our retina can be measured. We also know that quantum entities aren't always perceivable, with or without our senses or an instrument. But in both cases, we aren't allowed to admit those facts in our narrative.
Tell me, does that sound complete to you when it comes to the subjective experience? It only takes a grain of sand to know the world out there. (Not sure if I'm using this saying correctly from the William Blake poem). Our connection to the outside world requires only a grain of sand. Phenomenology engenders an unsettling feeling in any one contemplating this problem.
I'd say, do not artificially cut off the narrative about the subjective experience by banning presuppositions of the material world. Let the subjective experience extend to the cause. Let us stabilize our idealization of the world by confirming that the material world exists.
I'm not satisfied with the "it's all a matter of perspective" statement. There's got to be something more compelling that this.
Which is why "things-in-themselves", or the "thing in itself", or whatever specific variety of this idea one ends up using, can be helpful in thinking about this.
Or at least I find it very useful.
That's my metaphysical bane.
You could even argue that it's kind of in Plato with his ideas. There's something about objects as they appear to us that seem incomplete, in some important respects.
I know, it's kind of life trying to think about the largest possible number, or something. But it's fascinating.
Materialist philosophy of mind is that the mind is a product of physical transactions, neurotransmitters, and the like. One of the Enlightenment philosophers expressed it (crudely) as 'the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile'. That I take to be the forerunner of the idea that the mind ('consciousness') is an 'emergent property' of the brain. So I was objecting to putting it in those terms as it is seems inevitably reductionist. It is reducing the discussion to neurological terms, again.
Chalmers is not 'my guru'. His 'facing up to the hard problem' is a canonical text in philosophy of mind, for the reasons given.
The issue of the subjective unity of experience is a different matter. The unity of conscious experience is an undeniable fact of experience, a priori. But that excerpt I quoted spells out that 'there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene' - that 'illusory detailed scene' being 'conscious experience'. So it's indicating that, whatever the nature of that is, it is NOT accounted for by neuroscience.
Quoting Caldwell
Did I talk about phenomenology? I'm sorry, but I can't understand the rest of what you said.
Hmm... Are you made by someone seeing...sensing...something, which then becomes you, once their intellect gets done with it...? Or, are you referring to someone's perception alone, rather than you?
The idea from your post fits perfectly in what I wanted to say. If you're not talking phenomenology, then I am. And I'm using your idea to illustrate the problem with phenomenology. Also my post wasn't primarily directed at you, but to those who lean towards phenomenology.
'Supernatural' is a very loaded word. It denotes the boundary between 'rational, sensible, scientific', and 'obscure, mystical, occult', right? Notice the responsese? The references to 'woo', to the occult? That what I call 'handrail naturalism' - gives you something to hang on to. That's why I so often refer to Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. But, don't mention the war.
Although now you've brought it up, I have to mention the 'Copenhagen Interpretation'. As we saw earlier in the thread, the outlook that gave rise to 'the hard problem of consciousness' was a consequence of Galileo's division of the world into objective (primary) and subjective (secondary) qualities. This held good for a long while, but the discovery which really made its shortcomings clear was the discovery of 'observer problem' in early 20th century physics. Another contributor put it very well in an earlier thread.
Quoting sime
The idea is fascinating just because it is so hard to get a purchase on. The one thing I think we are entitled to say is that the world in itself must be energetically "carved at the joints" more or less isomorphically with the ways we perceive it. It's hard to imagine how a rich world of diversity, invariance and change could manifest out of an amorphous mass of whatever.
I don't think so --that it's undeniable or obvious or given.
If this is along the line of bachelors don't have wives, then that's no fun. But I'm afraid it might be. Contingent inherited linguistic habits accepted as the most eternal and solid fact there is perhaps. Parmenides, adjusted. There is a hole, one hole, through which the world shines.
The 'experience' gestured at seems to be private in principle. Are we all supposed to check our intuitions (or similar) and make sure our 'conscious experience' is unified? If we need to check, it's not a priori. Also, we'd have know way to know if we were 'looking' at and talking about the same thing.
I suggest what I find a more plausible alternative. The supposed unity of the mind is stolen from the unity of the body. It doesn't seem efficient to reward & punish this or that half or quarter of a body. So we also don't offer praise & blame to a multitude of spirits all forced to take turns with the eyes and mouth. One is one around here.
Mass, size and distance, for example, are not relative to perspective.
Yes, overall, but not initially. By the time we get to the experience of molecular structure, trees, as such, are already presupposed. Experience of constituency follows from experience of the object to which the constituency belongs.
Quoting Janus
An object of perception can never be nothing, so....
Quoting Janus
Yes.
Quoting Janus
We could, without experience, iff the human cognitive system is itself logical. We think logically for no other reason than that’s the mandate of the system with which we are equipped. Which explains why we can never use logic to explain logic, insofar as a necessary condition of a thing cannot at the same time be an explanatory device for that thing. Maybe why we don’t know how the brain presents subjectivity.
Whitehead had a point, philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. Got to go back and reread some of his works sometime...
Quoting Janus
Yes, something like that appears to be the case. With hard work, we are able to discern the structure of things, but what gives the thing it's structure we just don't know.
Quoting Janus
And most of it isn't even concrete, as in that you can touch it with your hands.
Hell, if dark matter and dark energy actually exist, we aren't even made of the stuff most of the Universe is made of. It's wild.
True. From my perspective, I am not sure what other word to use to get across the idea - of something that transcends the natural world.
That seems reasonable, but then the 'machinery in itself' of the human cognitive system is also, in the final analysis, noumenal, part of the "great whatever" (to borrow a phrase from the moniker of a departed member of TPF).
So, if logic is intrinsic to the structure of the human cognitive system, and we have no reason to believe that we are any more separate from the "great whatever" than a tree is, then we could reasonably infer that the cosmos is, always already, prior to human experience, logically structured, or "conceptually shaped" as John McDowell puts it if I remember correctly.
The whole dialectic I’m involved in concerns perception, so I’m not sure what you’re asking. No one ever senses “me”, and nothing sensed is ever “made”, so......help a brutha out here?
That’s the very trap I referred to. If it is the case that the human system operates on logical structure and conceptual shaping, it then becomes the proverbial “transcendental illusion” to suppose systems not anything like ours, operate the same way. Just because some method is an absolute necessity for us doesn’t warrant that method’s infliction anywhere else.
But you’re right in a way. We can infer anything we like, as long as we have sufficient reason. Problem is, we could never have sufficient reason, with respect to the cosmos in general. Hell.....we don’t know hardly anything about it, so what warrant do we have for supposing its antecedents?
If 'natural' is taken to be synonymous with empirical. But there's always the question of what gives rise to the empirical. What is the nature of existence?
Indeed.
Sure, but. all other things being equal, we have no more warrant to suppose that they don't operate the same way than that they do. Add to that the inconceivability that an amorphous 'great whatever' could give rise to a world of diversity, invariance and change, and I think we actually have more warrant to suppose that the cosmos operates along more or less the same principles as we do, than we have to suppose that it doesn't. But I guess, in the final analysis. it remains a matter of taste.
The nature of things as we experience them is certainly physical or material. Those very words have been created to denote the way things are as we experience them. So nature is what we experience. Naturally, we suppose that things have their own nature independently of how we experience them, but that nature is not certainly decidable. So in that sense that imagined nature is (whatever it is) the supernatural or the metaphysical (leaving aside whatever woo-ish baggage those terms have managed to accumulate over time).
Is it possible to hold a position that isn't metaphysical?
As per idealism, everything is mental, everything exists only in the mind. If so, an apple on a plate on a table, which all of us can see qualifies as observing the mind, objectively, from a third-person point of view (@Wayfarer). There is no hard problem of consciousness.
That's what they say. But it's swapped with the hard problem of idealism...
Meanwhile: David Chalmers since home with a bottle of wine lamenting the fact that they never mention "the hard problem". :yikes:
Whaddaya mean?
There's a purely subjective aspect to consciousness (qualia as a catch-all) which science, being objective, is incapable of handling.
Can I show that this "purely subjective aspect to consciousness" can be observed objectively?
An interesting side to idealism is that all things exist because God is continually and simultaneously, 24×7, thinking (perceiving) about all things. In a sense then, as Stephen Hawking once said, we're reading "God's mind." We have now a third-person point of view of God's mind.
Coming to our own minds, wouldn't we gain the same third-person perspective into each other's minds; after all, we got into God's head, quite literally I might add.
Well, you need to be able to accept idealism is true, which comes with its own problems.
:up:
But isn't nonphysicalism close to idealism, close enough to be clubbed together?
Why do you have to accept idealism?
Metaphysical and supernatural are Greek and Latin terms, respectively, which are essentially synonyms. 'Supernatural' is more of a boo word because naturalism is defined specifically to exclude anything considered supernatural.
'Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation.' It's distinguished from methodological naturalism which only considers those kinds of principles, but makes no claim that there is 'nothing but' those principles. In other words, metaphysical naturalism is generally another name for scientific reductionism, whereas methological naturalism is another name for regular scientific practice.
Mind you this all begs the question of what the scope of the term 'natural' implies. Augustine said 'miracles are not against nature, they're against what we know about nature'. And the concept of what is natural changes all the time (per Hempel's dilemma). But in practice, 'naturalism' is the hard-nosed attitude that science is the only reliable arbiter of what is real, and that anything outside that is 'woo-woo' (sometimes with the concession that religious ideas might be ennobling or edifying.)
Who does?
Bearing in mind that Hawking was a life-long and extremely vocal atheist.
Yes, I think that is a key question.
I've tended to consider myself a methodological naturalist not a philosophical naturalist.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I pretty much agree - this describes me.
Based on my position, what options do I have for words to describe the supernatural?
Yeah, Hawking's comment is like how atheists (still) use "OMG!" as an expression of surprise/shock.
Nevertheless, idealism, if true, seems to make the hard problem of consciousness a cinch to solve - the world out there (objective) is simply the world in here (subjective). We do get a third-person perspective on other minds.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well as one of the resident idealists, I can't disagree, but I get the sense that most of what people say about idealism is based on misunderstanding it. But I'll refer back to my earlier posts in this thread, this one and the one after.
A vocal atheist? Are you joking? Says the computer voice:
"Ahas shahientists, we thary to fihind out what ihis the nature of tha maahaath mind of God"
So he believes in God. He is a mathematician. Which is not unreasonable from Hawking's humble POV.
I'm not sure I get this. When I scream OMG, to what comment of his does this correspond?
Think for example what kinds of wavelengths, to coin a metaphor from science, a yogi might be attuned to. What if, in fact, the human being is able to understand in him or herself, simply by virtue of the kind of being they are, something about the Universe, which can be found by no other means. What if, in fact, h. sapiens has a role to play as the Universe coming to understand itself. These kinds of ideas are actually beginning to percolate even in the scientific community - 'the view of Cosmogony and evolution of living systems that we are beginning to approach here is neither a Neo-Darwinian ‘blind watchmaker’ materialism nor a theistic creationist view' (from here). A completely new take on the meaning of science, religion, and philosophy might be emerging. (It is, after all, the Age of Aquarius.)
Hate to dissappoint you, but no, Hawkings was a committed and lifelong atheist. You can read about it here.
Quoting Tom Storm
Maybe! My younger sister's husband, a bit younger than me, has suddenly transformed from a DPP (which he still is) into a published writer. Poetry and now short stories.
Who says I'm disappointed? Why should I be? I feel pity for the poor man It's his own fault he is an atheist. Luckily I know better. I don't understand though why he says that God is a mathematician. Probably because he considered himself as one. All bow to the wheelchair God!
This is indeed the fact! How else can I understand you, or the physical world?
Yeah, that universal consciousness, mindful matter nonsense has been around as long as man has succeeded in persuading himself toward contradictions. Methinks self-consistent speculation doth far surpass under-powered conviction. But at the end of the day, we are left with the reality that although reason is necessary for our knowledge, it is at the same time the source of inquiry for which there is no possibility of knowledge.
Taste, indeed, at least for the initial premises in a dialectical argument. Accepting a conclusion predicated on mere taste, is just lazy, wouldn’t you agree?
However, science, the study and exploitation of objects/subjects, must include both study and exploitation. A painting of our studies is not exploiting that subject matter, and will not suffice as knowledge.
Great post! :up: Clarified some of my doubts on the hard problem of consciousness specifically that it's about the explanatory gap between physical theories and consciousness.
The way I see it, materialistic explanations are of 2 kinds:
1. Explanatory materialism: A phenomenon/object is explained in terms of materialism e.g. lightning is an electric discharge between and from clouds.
2. Eliminative materialism: This is my area of interest. Depending on probably the way a theory is crafted, certain questions/concepts stop making sense of are nonsensical. Daniel Dennett's claims that consciousness is an illusion is of particular interest to me. I haven't read his original work on that topic but in the videos I saw of him conveying this point of view are more beating around the bush rather than a clear-cut statement with an argument to back it up.
An example of the eliminative method would be category mistake kinda dismissals - what does the bark of a dog taste like? This question is declared as nonsensical. Similarly, consciousness my not be amenable to a physicalist/materialistic description and so might be rejected as meaningless. This, you might already notice, is the hard problem of consciousness - forget an explanation, we can't even translate consciousness in materialistic/physicalist terms.
One intriguing facet to the problem is Wittgensteinian. His beetle-in-a-box gedanken experiment suggests that pure subjective experiences (consciousness for example) are such that we may simply be engaged with the issue at a synactic level - we can formulate grammatically correct sentences on consciousness - but when it comes to semantics (what we mean by "consciousness"), all bets are off.
Wittgenstein claims, rightly so in my opinion, that not only is it possible that there are different things in each one of our boxes but that it's possible that our personal, private boxes could actually be empty (eliminative materialism, p-zombies).
Either you get it or you don't.
How informative!Then I get it. Hawking just commented in his usual, science-indoctrinated way. Even with a mechanized voice, hiding him from an unconscious fear of gods, elevating himself to a god-like status. "God is a Mathematician". While in fact he ment: "Yo! I'm the master! The master Math. Dig that! And now listen y'all! It's me who makes the call! Time to see, that, I'm the math!" My math math math. Mad mad mad. OMM!"
Explanatory gap :point:
The 1% DNA difference between chimps and humans explains/does not explain the difference between a chimp mind and a human mind.
Focus on the word "God" in OMG! and Hawking's statement.
I just did!
Oh, that. Nothing more than speculative metaphysics. One man’s garden is another man’s wasteland.
Would it be fair to characterize changes in embraced style, approach and sensibility over the history of the arts a matter of change in taste? If so , then Kuhn’s argument comes down to claiming that the history of science is a matter of changes in taste.
Fair assessment, yes.
Quoting tim wood
Kuhn speaks of the then-accepted view of the difference between artistic taste and scientific change.
“The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”
Kuhn goes on to critique the above view:
“Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)
Yep. Different kinds of judgement. Or, judgements predicated on different kinds of conditions.
So when I say "operate the same way we do; I am not referring to nature 'having a mind' whatever that could mean, but to its being logically structured.
We don't have any way to find out the answer to that by scientific investigation, obviously, so we are left with what would be the more plausible or coherent view in light of our experience and understanding. So, the problem that McDowell was concerned with was how our sensorially apprehended world could possibly justify our assertions about it if it were not always already conceptually shaped. So, he wants to collapse Kant's distinction between sensibility and understanding, claiming that our intuitions (in the Kantian sense of the term) are conceptually shaped through and through.
When I say "matter of taste" I mean it in the sense of judgement; analogous to the way that aesthetic judgement is not merely like preferring apples to oranges.
As I said, I don't hold a firm position on the matter, but if pressed I would lean towards McDowell's view.
The conditions can’t be all that different. Otherwise, scientific and artistic movements ( Renaissance , Enlightenment, Modern and postmodern) wouldn’t be interwoven in the interdependent way that they have been throughout history. If one really were ‘agile and capable of pivot on a dime’, and the other ‘entrenched and not easily subject to change’ they would create entirely independent cycles of change , which they dont.
You beat me to it! Of course aesthetic taste does not change that way, but is driven by gradually shifting paradigms, even more obviously than scientific movements are.
Because maths has been so uncannily powerful at predicting the structure of the Universe. It's a well-known trope in Western philosophy even amongst those who are otherwise atheist.
Quoting TheMadFool
I've always thought Daniel Dennett's claims so patently nonsensical that I can't understand why anyone entertains them. But whenever I say that I'm told I don't understand it or haven't read him so I don't bother any more.
Quoting Janus
There's been nothing 'gradual' about the pace of development since the industrial revolution. Back in the Old Stone Age, it took half a million years for the form of the stone ax to evolve.
Quoting Janus
great minds think alike
But not an accepted trope among many atheists, specifically those who understand the inseparable relation between empirical objectivity, logic and mathematics and their genesis in constructive activities of an intersubjective community. For them saying that math is uncannily powerful at predicting the structure of the universe is like saying that a musical
score is uncannily powerful at predicting the sound of the music it scores.
You're probably thinking more about technological advancement than changes in scientific theories. Changes of aesthetic paradigms in the arts have been gradual in comparison to fads and fashion for example.The point is, in any case, that "taste" as I was using the term, does not "change on a dime".
Quoting TheMadFool
It is tedious to see the same misunderstandings of Dennett's standpoint from people who haven't read his work. He does not claim that consciousness is an illusion, but that our sense that our intuitive understanding of what it is soundly based is illusory. Can you see the distinction there?
Hmmm. This is "the given".
I mean, would you say that sense-data or "qualia" aren't "already shaped"? I don't know if I'd call seeing blue or listening to a flute playing conceptual, but it seems to be a given.
I have no idea what you mean by "a misstatement not justified by any history of science or of thought", but in any case it is not an "absolute presupposition" but rather a conclusion. Go and read McDowell if you want to find out about his idea.
Quoting tim wood
Changes of style do not equate to changes in aesthetic judgement, obviously. People, variously, still like ancient, medieval as well as modern art and literature. This is even true in the world of fashion, although it may be less so.
They’re not all that different; they’re only different in two ways.
Quoting Joshs
Of course they do. Aesthetic judgements switch at the drop of a news cycle, or the newest gadget, or supposed slight from a passer-by; discursive judgements are bound by the knowledge relative to the times. Two different kinds of cycles of independent change.
Right. But Hawking is famous for saying in his Brief History of Time, that science was seeking to 'know the mind of God' (it's practically the only thing a lot of people remember about that book, which was famous for being bought but not read.) Einstein likewise - and he wasn't atheist, but certainly not conventionally religious. He frequently referred to 'the old one' or 'Spinoza's God'. Even Dawkins acknowledges a scientific or philosophical conception of God, although it's obviously of little existential significance to him.
I'm interested in Husserl's philosophy of arithmetic, but I've never gotten around to studying it. (But I have just ordered this courtesy an Amazon birthday gift card.)
Quoting Janus
He says that our normal understanding of ourselves as agents is an illusion generated by the unconscious cellular processes operating according to the demands of adaptation. 'Unconscious competence', he calls it. He says it over and over, it's hard not to understand it.
How the mind brings order to observation:
Obviously impossible. This thought-experiment throws into relief the way the mind organises conceptions even in the apparent absence of observers. Usually this role is implicit but it doesn't mean it's not operative.
Do you think he was successful?
Wouldn’t matter either way; it’s beside the point.
Quoting Janus
And that’s the point. In light of our experience and understanding. But I understand what you’re saying.
I'm not convinced that McDowell's idea that the world is always already conceptually shaped can be exhaustively understood, but then neither can the idea that it is fundamentally physical or mental . So, I see McDowell's conclusion as a kind of deflationary minimalism that says that if we want to claim that our judgements about the world and our understanding of the world must be somehow warranted by actuality, then we are committed to the view that the world must be fundamentally conceptual in some way that exceeds our grasp or at least our ability to explicate.
Right, you're just repeating what I have said in different words. Our understanding of ourselves as agents (or of what consciousness is) is an illusion. That is not to say that consciousness is an illusion, but that our intuitive "folk" understanding of its nature is. Likewise it is not to say that our agency is an illusion, but that our intuitive understanding of what it consists in is. Do you see the distinction now?
I am not sure what the purpose of the quoted passage was meant to be (or where it came from). The fact that the environment can be seen from different viewpoints and at different scales doesn't seem to speak to anything but the reality of a perception-independent environment to be seen from different viewpoints and scales.
And what are the background discursive , valuative conventions ( knowledge relative to the times, as you put it) that makes such things as ‘news cycles’ and ‘technological gadgets’ comprehensible in the first place?
You are aware that an entire movement within the arts argues that what art is in the first place is cultural critique. Not that it should be but that whatever an artist for their own ostensive reasons decides to create of aesthetic value addresses and in some sense differentiates itself from a set of culture conventions., whether that is what they have in mind or not.
Every aesthetic or other kind of judgement that we make, no matter how trivial, gets its sense form a larger set of shared social values, and at the same time reinterprets those values.
Of course , I didn’t have in mind trivial aesthetic judgements , but the range of artistic expressions that you will likely to find if you walk into your local modern art museum or gallery. If you talk to those artists, you will find all sorts of complex underlying assumptions they share with the larger scientific community and which inform and direct their work.
You mean it wouldn't matter if panspychism were true or that it wouldn't matter whether we thought it to be true?
Quoting Mww
Some likes and dislikes may change overnight just like some ill-considered opinions (I won't deign to call such opinions "discursive judgements", just as I wouldn't call such fickle likes and dislikes "aesthetic judgements").
Quoting Joshs
:up:
I've never not seen it.
Quoting Janus
I'm questioning the coherence of the idea of anything being 'perception independent'.
Why you keep defending him, I will never understand but it's tiresome to keep having the same pointless argument over and over, so I promise not to say anything more about it.
You may disagree with Dennett's assertion that our introspection-based intuitive assessments of what consciousness is are not reliable, and you may disagree that science will ever be able to answer the question of what consciousness is and how it originated, and I have no argument with your right to hold such opinions, my objection is to misrepresenting Dennett or any philosopher.
I actually disagree with the latter opinion myself, because I think the questions "what is consciousness?" and "how is it possible for consciousness to emerge from the physical?" are ill-formed and based on ill-informed views. Those kinds of questions seem to me like asking similarly ill-formed questions such as 'what is matter?' and 'how is it possible for material objects to exist'.
And yet these questions keep getting asked again and again. It reminds me of Heidegger's response to Kant's well-quoted lament:
“It still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.” Critique of Pure Reason, B519. "
"The “scandal of philosophy” is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again."
This is not an argument that is tiresome; what is tiresome is to have to keep correcting the same misunderstanding over and over. And re the quote from the BBC; whoever said that obviously shares the same misunderstanding. If you are going to quote something quote something from the horse's mouth to support your apparent view that saying our misunderstanding of what consciousness is is an illusion, and saying that consciousness itself is not real are one and the same.
You'll enjoy this, I'm certain. ;)
https://www.academia.edu/37649217/Dunking_Dennett
Smells like ordinary language philosophy. :chin:
Well, if you can tell me what Dennett says consciousness is, then there's no issue. Dennett takes Strawson to be his most vocal critic and said that Strawson would have been a good candidate to include in Consciousness Explained:
"I thank Galen Strawson for his passionate attack on my views, since it provides a large, clear target for my rebuttal. I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/
Strawson clearly states what he thinks consciousness is: ."..experience that has a certain qualitative experiential character."
Dennett says this is not true.
It's a part of it. But all he's saying is that Dennett is using the word "consciousness" in such a way that it excludes what most people take consciousness to be.
The difference between saying "I am seeing the blue sky" and saying "it seems like as if the sky you're looking at is blue, but in reality it's "bad theorizing" " is a huge difference.
Most people don't think about consciousness the way philosophers do. And I think it's wrong to insist on a "usual definition".
Depends on which philosopher you have in mind. But let's grant that.
By granting it, you are going to have to justify why you are using the (now) technical word "consciousness" to mean something else besides the usual meaning of the word.
This is what physicist do when they use terms like "energy", "mass", "velocity", etc.
If you can't do that, then I don't see why we should use a technical definition, because it doesn't modify on our usual way of using the word, so it doesn't really serve a purpose.
Quoting Manuel There are also different ordinary definitions of consciousness. Do we also need justification for one definition over the other?
Dennett denies that zombies are possible or even conceivable, so Strawson's assertion that Dennett really thinks we are all zombies is not accurate. What he does say is that there is no coherent distinction between us and zombies, because anything that was physically constituted as we are would experience the same as we do.
"Can we really imagine zombies? Daniel Dennett thinks those who accept the conceivability of zombies have failed to imagine them thoroughly enough: ‘they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition’ (1995, p. 322. Marcus 2004 makes a related point; see also Woodling 2014). Given his broadly functionalist model of consciousness, he argues, we can see why the ‘putative contrast between zombies and conscious beings is illusory’ (325. See also his 1991; 1999). Consciousness is ‘not a single wonderful separable thing … but a huge complex of many different informational capacities’ (1995, 324. Cottrell 1999 supports this approach).*
*From here
From the Strawson paper:
[i]“Are zombies possible?” Dennett asks. “They’re not just possible”, he replies, “they're
actual. We're all zombies” (1991: 406). Here his view seems very plain. His view is that
we’re not conscious at all in the ordinary sense of ‘conscious’. He adds a footnote—“it
would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of
context!” (1991: 406)[/i]
I take Dennett to mean that if we accepted for the sake of argument that zombies are possible, then we would all be zombies (just because they are physically identical to humans). And that's what he means by saying it would be an act of intellectual dishonesty to take this out of context (in other words to claim that he believes zombies are really possible, and that we are all zombies).
Strawson says that Dennett's view is that we are not conscious "in the ordinary sense of conscious"; which I think should be taken to mean not in the sense of being conscious that we intuitively (and by implication, naively) believe in, and of course there is no problem accepting that is Dennett's view, since he explicitly endorses it..Just as naive realism is prereflectively common, so it goes with naive idealism too.
Not for every single word. That would take forever an be pointless. No, in philosophy we try to clarify or elucidate the phenomenon in question: free will, idealism, compatibilism, psychic continuity, etc.
That's why we have these topics being discussed, we want to understand them better.
Quoting Wheatley
We not infrequently say what we mean by consciousness: we say we mean personal experience, of the fact that it allows us to see qualia, etc.
For the ordinary usage of a word, we usually don't introduce clarifications, that's why it's ordinary usage. It doesn't mean that we are using the word optimally. But in ordinary usage, we usually get what the other person is talking about. Not always, of course. But, often enough.
We had a thread on Strawson's panpsychism a little while back, which I'm also highly sceptical of.
My position is very simple - mind is real and immaterial. Therefore materialism is false.
Quoting Janus
OK then, if not zombies, how about robots?
- Daniel Dennett speaking with The New York Times
Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable? I think it's perfectly obvious. Science is inherently restricted or limited to what can be objectively known. And, as subjects of experience, humans are out of scope for science.
It's true that experience covers many areas.
The one area in which it is not prone to doubt, for most people anyway, is that we have experience, we experience things: colours, sounds, smells, novels, movies, music, etc.
A zombie wouldn't have these capacities, it would just behave as if it experienced these things. But we can do that with AI, it's says nothing about experience, because behavior is only data, not a theory.
Quoting Janus
If he doesn't accept it, good. If he does and he says that we are indistinguishable from Zombies, then the single most important aspect of being a human being is rendered illusory.
Quoting Janus
Correct. But I don't see how any theories offer a more accurate account that our intuitions, in this case.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which would be fine, if it made any sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
This paper has nothing to do with panpsychism at all. I agree with you, I don't think it holds up.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that mind is real. And that "materialism" is false if it implies scientism.
We can put immaterialism aside for now.
It's all good.
But I digress, dipshit talking here, carry on.
That said, I'd posit experience, or qualia, is primary and all thought is just gymnastics. You can't explain consciousness as it utterly defines itself through experience rather than logic.
I don't think Dennett means we are robots in the sense of lacking any experience. He thinks experience and consciousness are real, and are functions of organisms such as ourselves that are unimaginably complex molecular machines. What he does deny, as far as I understand him, is qualia. We experience things, and those things have qualities or better, are qualitative, but there is no quale over and above that.
Much of the way we think about these things depends on the way we habitually talk about things. For example, we taste beer, that tasting is the experience; there is no experience of the taste of beer apart from that. The fact that we can talk about the taste without talking about the beer doesn't entail that there is some quale "the taste of beer" over and above tasting beer, just as there is no redness apart from red things.
Another common example is that we all talk about having a body and having a mind; which fosters the notion that there is soul independent of the body (and of the mind?). ( That said we someimes even talk about having a soul; what's up with that? :chin: ). It is simpler and seems more accurate and less problematic to say that we are embodied minds or enminded bodies.
Quoting Janus
That 'special spark' is exactly what is being denied:
----
Quoting Janus
You don't think Dennett means anything he says, because if you thought he did mean anything he actually says, then you would flee screaming from it. :lol:
Make no mistake - Dennett seems a nice person, civil, educated, and so on, but his "philosophy" so called is utterly soul-destroying and a symptom of "the decline of the West".
hmm... This seems very similar to the discussion I had with @Banno earlier. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/607745 I guess it's just a matter of discussing philosophy the right way. (conduct? :chin: ) Thanks for your time. :smile:
C'mon Wayfarer, taking what I said out of context like that is "an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty".
But, in any case I don't flee screaming from the idea that we are unimaginably complex molecular robots, and I could never take seriously the idea that we don't experience anything ( which I know Dennett does not espouse) so nothing to flee from there. I expect nothing from this life other than the challenges and joys presented by the living of it. I neither affirm nor deny there is an afterlife; I am profoundly indifferent to the question; I like to cross my bridges when I come to them or fail to cross them when I don't. :wink: I disagree that Dennett's philosophy is soul-destroying to anyone who doesn't feel a need to believe in an immortal soul.
Also I think the "decline of the West" is political, social, economic and ecological, and hence a spiritual decline in a certain sense, but definitely not in the way you mean it. I think Dennett is an important subtle and creative thinker, even though I don't agree with all aspects of his thought (those that I am familiar enough with to have an opinion about, of course). You should try reading his work some time. Even if you feel you hate his ideas, remember the old adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer": it pays to know really well what you seek to oppose, and who knows, if you maintain an open mind, you may even find you agree with him about certain things.
It isn't a strawman. Dennett went on record to say that consciousness is an illusion. I find that interesting by the way. It gets my juices flowing, not that I have anything to show for it.
Of course it's an illusion. In the litteral sense. An illumination inside of matter. He thinks it's an illusion in the sense that it's not real. That it's all matter and we are deceiving ourselves in claiming it to be real. That it's just a necessary aid in a complex structure like the brain with which we interact while engaging in the physical world. How can a dog be unconscious when searching for a lost bone? She can't. He is a materialist though, claiming there is nothing more than matter. And in that sense, consciousness is an illusion. But who says this is true? Luckily, not for me!
And typically nothing directly from Dennett to support your claim. Reviews of Dennett by others are not definitive in establishing just what it is he wants to say. I don't take your view on the matter seriously on account of the fact you haven't read him apart from anything else, and the fact that even mention of his name sends you into an hysterical attitude of self-righteous dismissal doesn't help.
Quoting TheMadFool
If you want to support that assertion then quote directly from Dennett.
[quote=David Bentley Hart]Not that this is very surprising. After five decades, it would be astonishing if Dennett were to change direction now. But, by the same token, his project should over that time have acquired not only more complexity, but greater sophistication. And yet it has not. For instance, he still thinks it a solvent critique of Cartesianism to say that interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics. Apart from involving a particularly doctrinaire view of the causal closure of the physical (the positively Laplacian fantasy that all physical events constitute an inviolable continuum of purely physical causes), this argument clumsily assumes that such an interaction would constitute simply another mechanical exchange of energy in addition to material forces.[/quote]
I think Hart has misunderstood the problem of causation for mind-body dualism as first set forth by Elisabeth of Palatinate. It's not that only that the laws of conservation of energy would be violated but that physical theories are sufficient to explain phenomena, including the mental. An immaterial mind would be as unnecessary as God was to Laplace's theory as immortalized in his statement "I had no need for that hypothesis", a reply to Napoleon's query "where is God in your theory?"
[quote=Wikipedia] So, as Dennett wryly notes, he is committed to the belief that we are all philosophical zombies (if you define the term "philosophical zombie" as functionally identical to a human being without any additional non-material aspects)—adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation.[/quote]
Unless it decides to take a course of action. Which material object created the computer you're writing this on?
Reading your reply again, you've entirely missed the point, and the implied irony, of the passage you have quoted.
Too bad Wikipedia ain't good enough for you, Janus!
Implied irony? Where?
Good day Janus
[quote=David Bently Hart]And then, also, there are those more than abstract — in fact, transcendental — orientations of the mind, such as goodness or truth or beauty in the abstract, which appear to underlie every employment of thought and will, and yet which correspond to no concrete objects within nature. And so on and so forth.[/quote]
Morality has an other-worldly feel to it! The laws of nature are not aligned with morality. In fact morality goes against the grain - why is being good liking walking uphill? Unnatural! Nonphysical! Kant might be relevant.
Commit the most heinous crime imaginable and you will, at no point, violate the (physical) laws of nature. No wonder God!
[quote=David Bentley Hart]This problem, moreover, points toward the far more capacious and crucial one of mental intentionality as such — the mind’s pure directedness (such that its thoughts are about things)[/quote]
I couldn't grasp this so-called aboutness. What is it exactly? Thanks.
[quote=David Bentley Hart]eliminativism: Whatever cannot be reduced to the most basic physical explanations cannot really exist.[/quote]
Reminds me of @Alexandre Harvey-Tremblay's theory of everything (he has a thread on it if you're interested). I asked him whether his theory had anything to say about free will and his response was to task me with expressing free will mathematically. If that couldn't be done, free will was nonsense. Consciousness is an illusion! :chin:
[quote=David Bentley Hart]But, alas, his story does not hold together. Some of the problems posed by mental phenomena Dennett simply dismisses without adequate reason; others he ignores. Most, however, he attempts to prove are mere “user-illusions” generated by evolutionary history, even though this sometimes involves claims so preposterous as to verge on the deranged.[/quote]
This user-illusion concept really interests me. From a physicalist perspective, true, what's really going on are nerves and synapses switching on/off (bioelectricity). However, here I am, try as hard as I might, I can't actually become conscious/aware of these events. All I get to "see" is the finished product - I see houses, people; I smell perfume, fart; I taste sugar, salt; and so on. It is like a standard desktop GUI furnished with relvant icons we can manipulate at will (most of the time). This however begs the question does it not? An indication of that is the word "illusion".
That's not what's going on. It's electrical storms going on on the lightning- and fractal-like neural network. This electric storm gives rise to consciousness. Electric charge being a concept not understood intrinsically by modern physics.
Maybe not 'irony', then. But he's commented that Dennett says 'no philosopher before Descartes is of any consequence'. He then briefly recapitulates philosophy before Descartes where he says this:
'The mind', here, is the Greek term 'nous'. And I know it's regarded as archaic by a lot of people, but I am immensely sympathetic to that understanding. Then, he says, Descartes' dualism is 'a chimera', which is a mythological creature with a lion's head on a goat's body - emphasising the artificiality of Descartes' dualism. So he's saying that Descartes' philosophy is itself problematical. But then he says:
So, he's saying that Descartes' dualism, which is from the perspective of earlier philosophy is already 'a chimera', is the basis for Dennett's materialism, which says, either try and defend the Cartesian 'res cogitans' - the 'ghost in the machine' - or accept that only matter is real.
After that, he then says that Dennett thinks that 'interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics' - which, given what he says above, he plainly thinks is a specious argument.
Quoting TheMadFool
Are you familiar with the work of Franz Brentano? I won't try and break it down here.
You've said that Strawson was wrong about Dennett. Well, John Searle is wrong in exactly the same way. (My comment in brackets.)
[quote=John Searle]To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. (which is exactly what Strawson says, also!) For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist?[/quote]
Of course Dennett doesn't say that 'consciousness is an illusion' in so many words, but it is the only reasonable surmise as to the implication of his ideas, which is that mind, or even being (as in, human being) is an illusory consequence of the co-ordinated activity of cellular and molecular processes which alone are real. He's a materialist, right? That's what materialism says. These processses, taken singly, are unconscious and purely molecular - but they collectively generate what we understand as 'consciousness'. He says this over and over, in every book, practically in every paragraph, in fact, it's the only thing he says, yet somehow, it's one thing that you can't acknowledge that he says. And these critics of his, Strawson and Searle, are his peers, they're not mugs. So if you keep saying that they, and I, 'don't understand what Dennett is on about', then I again suggest the shoe should really be on the other foot. And that is my last word to you on it, I promise!
:up: You say it better than me but electrical storms remind me seizures/epilepsy.
That depends. Some visions, thoughts, and dreams can be pretty stormy. Luckily, soft cool summer breezes have their place too.
Consciousness - to be aware and alerted of the universe - is not something I can be concise about.
Thus, there is no intellectual discussion to be had; years of attempted discussions support this.
You can, however, understand consciousness, but science there is impossible.
Can I take a specimen of someone's consciousness? Can I produce a model?
However, what bothers me is this: The hard problem of consciousness actually does not refute physicalism since it doesn't prove consciousness is physically inexplicable. All it does is show existing scientific methods can't access the what it is like to be conscious facet of consciousness. It's like saying that a ladder (science) is too short to reach the roof (consciousness) and not that if we ever get our hands on a longer ladder (improved and more sophisticated science) we still won't be able to give a physical explanation for consciousness including the what it is like to be conscious of it.
In short, the hard problem of consciousness is more about the limitations of our tools (science) than anything special about consciousness. Though the intention was to score a point for nonphysicalism, the hard problem of consciousness is simply a critique on physicalism.
In this context, let's be firm in saying the builder and the home-owner are totally different - one builds the house (consciousness) - one experiences the house (consciousness).
0. The builder does not own the house, the home owner does not build the house.
1. The home-owner cannot re-build the house lest he first deconstruct it, in which case he becomes a builder.
2. The builder cannot experience the house as a home.
3. To understand each others perspectives one must first lose their original role.
Consciousness may be knowable by a creator entity or is walled-out by nature(given creator entities are void).
Knowledge of consciousness is on the right side of the subject matter, but the subject of consciousness - from the hypothesised left side - is unknowable.
If I build my own house, I change roles.
The past cannot be unwound, we do not have consciousness creators but it's hypothesis-able. A good house or?
This is a confusion of what I said, but can be clarified somewhat, in that it is entirely possible that aesthetic judgements are not comprehensible at all, between separate subjects each in possession of his own. Case in point.....some guy wears his hair in some weird-assed configuration, and when I see it, I say to myself....wtf’s that guy thinking!!! He and I each apprehend his hair style as a personification of his character; he judges it cool; I judge it stupid. Aesthetic judgements, each.
Confusing, in that understanding is the “background discursive valuation conventions” which grounds the knowledge of its time, but that has nothing to do with the way one feels about news cycles and the newest gadgets. There is a vast disconnect between the comprehension of what a news cycle is, and the personal impression it makes on a subject’s condition.
————-
Quoting Joshs
No, I’m not, but that’s ok, cuz I don’t care about entire movements or cultural critiques. I grant their reality, but assign them to social anthropology, whereas my sole personal interest is epistemological metaphysics.
Quoting Joshs
For which there is no reasonable justification, which reduces that entire proposition to a mere personal aesthetic judgement, in this case yours because it’s your assertion. Although he may, there is no reason to suppose an artist always, creates in order to address, or distinguish from, cultural conventions, re: Chihuly glass. Now, if the artist declares he intended to differentiate from cultural conventions, the empirical confirmation resides, but then the claim he made not have had that in mind, becomes false.
————-
Quoting Joshs
Some do, insofar as some material which reason uses in the formation of them, is obtained in a social environment. To say EVERY judgement so arises, makes explicit no judgement is possible WITHOUT a larger set of social values, which is quite absurd, for then it is necessarily the case I cannot make the determination of left-turn/right-turn on a split trail, in the backwoods of the Allagash wilderness, when in fact, I have perfect authority to make an purely aesthetic judgement (left turn looks pretty nice, think I’ll wander thataway for awhile), or a discursive judgement (I know the tent’s set up to the right and my knees are killin’ me).
———-
Quoting Joshs
Good, because there aren’t any, in philosophy. They abound, in detriment to the discipline, in social anthropology and empirical psychology, the various and sundry pitiful examinations of human weaknesses, as opposed to the internal understanding of its powers.
Yes, it's a big part. But the terminology is cleared so that the discussion becomes fruitful.
One thing is to be in similar terminological area, that is agreeing on what we are talking about, another thing is the phenomena meant by the use of the word. What matters to me is the issue at had: is experience what we have or is it illusory in some manner.
I think it should be evident that we have experience, as we think we have. Our intuitions are correct in this point.
Let's try to get clear about which explananda sit on either side of the alleged "gap". Unfortunately there's a lack of uniformity in the relevant terminology, and persistent disagreement about the underlying philosophical issues.
Chalmers puts it like this (in his influential 1995 paper, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"):
(Here are links to the cited papers by Nagel and Levine.)
Quoting Flaw
By definition a simulation is not the genuine article. For example, a computer simulation of an ecosystem or star system is not a genuine ecosystem or star system, even if it's a very accurate and useful model.
It seems there's no reason to suppose that packing more and more information-processing functions into a program would ever yield the sort of "subjective character" of experience that's said to generate the hard problem of consciousness.
John Searle has provided influential arguments along these lines dating back to 1980. He offers a brief and amended presentation of his views in a handy little 1997 book, The Mystery of Consciousness.
:cheer:
They aren’t, likes and dislikes alike .......see what I did right there??......are the objects of judgements. They are that to which the judgement pertains. That an attitude regarding some like or dislike, such that altering from affirmation to negation with some relative ease, says nothing about the format under which the end result manifests. That you at one time like cauliflower, then at some later time dislike it, may indeed be a fickle assessment of cauliflower, but the judgement by which the change was even possible, cannot be said to suffer that same quality.
That you like cauliflower now, but dislike it later, are each nonetheless aesthetic judgements. That you are fickle with respect to your feelings regarding cauliflower over time, does not carry over to the fickle-ness of the judgements regarding the stuff, insofar as each judgement arises simultaneously with, and necessarily representative of, the feeing.
A clue to the difference between aesthetic and discursive judgements.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/
If it was that simple - "Pain feels like firing of the C fiber." Now what?
To me such problems seem to be made up. It doesn't matter which viewpoint one takes on this. Whether working with a "reflection of mind in itself" or with a "reflection of matter in itself" - it is still _just_ a reflection.
What larger cultural norms shape your response to someone else’s hair style? Until the beatniks and the hippies( let your freak flag fly) , 20th century mores concerning the range of hairstyles considers acceptable ran within fairly strict limits. Remember when classical
musicians were called long-hairs, or men with beards were considers intellectuals? They stood out against a backdrop of conformity in style. Normal was considered aesthetically proper. Today, we have grown up within a larger worldview concerning aesthetics like hairstyle and clothing choice such that the new conformity is non-conformity, self-expression, thinking outside the box. So in the first place , when you encounter someone with a ‘weird-assed’ hair configuration, your having been raised in a post 60’s milieu means that encountering individualism in fashion is built into our expectations when we walk down the street. We may never have seen a particular configuration , and it may be particularly extreme with respect to what we’ve seen before , but we have an interpretive slot to put it into thanks to our upbringing that someone living in the 1950’s would not have. What they would consider immoral or psychological deviance we would
recognize as just their personal expression. Beyond this most general cultural background , what will inform your aesthetic reaction to someone more particularly would be your relation to subcultural groups. You are more likely to react with nonchalance or enthusiasm if you are a member of an avant-garde theater or art group, for instance.
As far as news cycles are concerned, one’s belong to larger cultural worldivews has much more to do with interpreting news that. simply recognizing it as news. Why do you think there are today such polarized news sources (fox, brett art, new york times)? Because how one interprets the news, and whether one even considers it news vs propaganda, is a function of the cultural worldview one identifies with.
Quoting Mww
What are you doing on a trail in the first place? There is a background context of relevant goals and purposes out of which emerges your decision rondo a hike in a particular place. Each of your subordinate decisions in preparation for, on the way to, and on that hike are i forms by those larger concerns, expections and understandings(what a hike means for you, what style , length, speed you prefer, what you want to get out of the expereince, whether you like to go alone).
By the time you have arrived at that fork in the trial, all of that background contributes to your decision about which side to turn. The contribution of this background becomes obvious if you are with a friend and they choose differently than you. Let’s say you both are trying to get back to the campground before dark. Your background of navigation knowledge comes into play, including your practice of use of maps, compass, sun , memory, which may be different from your friend’s.
The two of you may not be in a hurry and instead the choice of direction may have to do with your sense of which direction will be most enjoyable. In that case background knowledge comes into play. You may have an intuitive ‘feel’ that one direction has more possibilities than the other, but this feel doesn’t come out of thin air. Your years of prior experiences hiking comes into play in an implicit sense ,including the look of the terrain , type of foliage, amount of sun, proximity to water, among many other facts of information. All of this background is at the ready and you draw from it in making your decision.
"I am denying that there are any such properties [qualia]. But… there seems to be qualia.”
A bit later on Dennett states that, concerning colors and their subjective effects “colors…are: reflective properties of the surface of objects…” (Dennett, D. 1991 p.372)
Qualia, in contemporary analytic philosophy are instances of subjective experience. The subjective aspects of qualia are according to Dennett, due to evolution: “…there were various reflective properties of surfaces, reactive properties of photopigments, and so forth, and Mother Nature developed out of these raw materials efficient, mutually adjusted “color”-coding/”color”-vision systems, and among the properties that settled out of that design process are properties we normal human beings call colors.” (p.378)
Dennett says “…lovely qualities cannot be defined independent of proclivities, susceptibilities, or dispositions of a class of observers, so it really makes no sense to speak of the existence of lovely properties in complete independence of the existence of relevant observers.” (p.380)
So, sure, we can't say that qualia are independent of observers, true.
But then, aside from the things postulated by science, we can't postulate anything absent observers.
But he's denying qualia, clearly.
Such accounts would need to provide some criterion by which we could distinguish artificially produced instances of genuine consciousness from mere simulations; or would need to show that anything that counts as a simulation of consciousness is necessarily an instance of genuine consciousness.
Along those lines, I might ask for a criterion to distinguish information-processing systems in general from conscious information-processing systems.
And again -- those accounts are highly controversial.
Before asking for a criterion one would have to justify the distinction. How do you prove that there is a difference at all?
PS: I guess a promising approach would be:
We cannot create intelligent robot-slaves while maintaining a good picture of ourselves if we would take that possibility for real, so they cannot be conscious. In principle. Problem solved.
That has worked a few times in history and will work a few times more, wouldn't it?
When you oppose consciousness and mere simulation, genuine consciousness and artificial consciousness, you are already denying the functionalist thesis. According to the functionalist, anything that satisfies certain functional criteria of being conscious just is conscious.
If you examine two copies of "Moby-Dick" in a book store, would it be right to say of each of them: "This is the novel 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale' by Herman Melville," or should you rather say: "Here is one copy of 'Moby-Dick,' and here is another?" Well, there isn't the right way to talk about books, is there? It depends on what you want to say and how you want to say it. Is there the right way of talking about consciousness?
That reminds me on "Neuromancer"
"Are you sentient?"
"Well, if you ask me, then: yeah, I am! But I guess that is one of those philosophical problems."
Which is totally right: It just doesn't matter. Case will switch off the deck and he is gone.
Trust me....not a single one. The sole relevant criterion, in this case, is....that hair style’s affect on my inner sense. Technically, my subjective condition. Conventionally, how it makes me feel.
And the same principle applies with respect to the news, and everything else. You may be correct in general, and perhaps even with respect to my response. But it is not necessary for me to respond at all, thereby eliminating any shape it may have, and as I said, I’m only interested in the general as far as my particularity within it.
It's not the "only reasonable surmise"; it's a surmise based on certain assumptions that Dennett rejects. What we experience is what we experience, and only a fool or a mad person could deny that. Dennett doesn't deny that we experience, and that it seems as it does. It is a "consequence of the co-ordinated activity of cellular and molecular processes" according to Dennett, but not an illusory consequence; it is a real consequence and to say otherwise would make no logical sense. It is our intuitive ideas of what consciousness is, which are language-driven reifications; that consciousness is something non-physical and completely independent of the physical that is the illusion he refers to.
As I said I take him to be denying that there are experiential entities, qualia, over and above the qualities that we find in things. I don't see how Dennett could seriously be thought to be denying that there are qualities that we routinely encounter and are aware of; tastes. colours, textures and so on. To deny that would be insane, and I don't believe Dennett is insane. As with consciousness, I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language.
What is "over and above" the qualities we find in things? Is there anything like that? All we can say about the world is going to be related to whatever happens to interact with our cognitive capacitates and sensations.
Clearly Dennett is smart, speaks well, gives good examples. But he's leaving plenty of room for doubt when he says "there seems to be qualia".
Quoting Janus
What is the colour experience red, aside from our experience of it? We can proceed to speak of wave-lengths, but that's not colour experience.
I would say that what we think about those things we find is over and above them.
Quoting Manuel
What exactly do they take him to be denying? Perhaps their interpretations of Dennett's thoughts are based on assumptions he doesn't share; in which case they would be bound to misunderstand him.
Quoting Manuel
I think he is right to acknowledge that there seem to be qualia. But red colour experiences are nothing more than seeing red things; there are no red quales, even if there might seem to be; that is what I take Dennett to be saying. According to our investigations there are electromagnetic wavelengths that give rise to seeing coloured things in suitably equipped percipients, but those wavelengths are not themselves consciously experienced, obviously.
Then I am embarrassed for not making it clear I wasn’t talking about flavor.
I believe there is reason to suppose that a program can yield experience. We understand that our brains are information-processing system comprised of neurons that have functional properties. This is sort of the foundation of neural networks in machine learning. I think it's reasonable to suppose that one day a very advanced / trained artificial neural network will be accustomed to self-reflection and discussing their own "experiences" and how things "look" to them. I don't think we should distinguish the physical process of the neurons in our brains to that of transistors.
Also, John Searle's argument seem to say nothing about the simulation of the mental state or of an explosion. A simulation of an explosion may or may not be an explosion.
They take him to be saying that he denies consciousness. Dennett always says, he's not, and adds "Consciousness exists, obviously, but it's not what most people think it is." So Dennett and those I mentioned must be talking about two different things.
Yeah, red or sour or music is nothing more than things we perceive as red, things that taste sour and things that sound like music, but I find them to be very important.
Honestly, it doesn't matter much to me, in the sense that I find other people much more interesting than Dennett. I think you are interpreting him a bit too charitably, but that's fine. I could be misunderstanding him like others.
It looks to me like Dennett style approaches, shared to some extent by the Churchlands and even more radically by Rosenberg, try to step over "the hard problem". But there's plenty of hard problems in philosophy, not "only" experience.
Dunno - if the experience is thought as some kind of "detector", does that notion make sense? Given: the vocabulary is obviously different.
Quoting Manuel
Good. :up:
The phenomenological perspective seems like the most constructive way to look at consciousness imo as it does away with dualism (or rather 'brackets' it out) rather than get sidetracked with this extrinsic question. All I see that has come from dualistic posturing is the empty idea of panpsychism (empty because it doesn't really say anything much other than 'we don't know!').
The point being we understand well enough what happens when we jump just as we understand well enough what being conscious means. Anything beyond this is not really in our scope yet so it's mostly guesswork until better concepts and experience comes along.
We're quite capable of viewing the brain and we're gaining a better understanding of how items like awareness and authorship function via our neural networks.
ANYTHING else on this subject is more about constructing different lingual terms to frame and segment the perceived problem and/or blind speculation where wishful thinking often dooms sensible ideas thoughts on the matter.
Daniel Dennett: 'No, it isn't. A properly elaborated third-person description will leave nothing out. So there is no "hard problem" at all.'
That's the debate in a nutshell. I agree with Chalmers. I think Dennett is a classical illustration of what has been called elsewhere 'the blind spot of science' (1, 2, 3.)
Quoting I like sushi
:up: That is exactly what Husserl set out to do, as I understand it. But I also think phenomenology is much better accepted in European philosophy than in Anglo-American philosophy.
A coupla points:
1. Yep, there's a what it is like to be conscious we can't ignore. This is inaccessible to another person. So, if I were a scientist researching consciousness, my research would ineluctably be incomplete.
However, I don't agree with the characterization of this issue as the "hard" problem of consciousness. To me, that description would've made sense if and only if it's the case that there's something inexplicable, in physical terms, about consciousness. That, I'm afraid, isn't the case.
If a scientist could find a way to observe the first-person subjective side of consciousness, the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness doesn't preclude a physical explanation.
So, the "hard" problem of consciousness does not rule out physicalism. All it does is show us a limitation of scientific methods/techniques. So, it's not the case that nonphysicalism is true, it's just that physicalism can't prove itself. To then conclude that nonphysicalism is true or that there's something to it is an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
2. What about empathy and the golden rule? It appears that a person can gain knowledge/insight into another person's state of mind. In other words, a third-person point of view of a first-person point of view.
But that is an assertion, not an argument.
Quoting GraveItty
Illusions are errors in consciousness. Only a sentient being capable of judgement can be subject to them.
So if I hear a piece of music and my consciousness errs, the music is an illusion only? I consider the music very real! Maybe the physical part of the music can be wrongly interpreted, that's true. It is an illusion that the sound pattern is an infinite sum of mutually orthonormal cosine waves. As a member of mankind, a sentient being, I can indeed judge if my interpretation errs.
What about the so-called "hard" problem proves that nonphysicalism is true.
Sunt magnopere ab invicem
Anima in materia
Refert circa animam
Et donum divinum
Ultimum dualitatem
Subridens corpus tertium
Sancta Trinitas
Yes, and I think a plausible explanation of that is we have evolved over billions of years from single-celled organisms who have had to struggle against environmental forces and other organisms in order to survive; so things primordially matter to organisms and have come to matter to us in ever more complex ways, ways in which things could never matter to a computer; in fact nothing at all matters to a computer. It seems reasonable to think it is the mattering or significance of things that is at the heart of subjectivity.
Quoting Mww
OK, then I am not sure what you were trying say with the post I responded to, exemplified by what I've just quoted above. You seem to be claiming that liking or disliking the flavor (or texture, it doesn't matter) of a food is an aesthetic judgement rather than being merely a bodily reaction. In my view an aesthetic judgement always carries a discursive dimension, and I don't see a discursive dimension being involved in simply liking or disliking foods. (That is not to say there cannot be more complex culinary judgements that do involve some discourse, of course—first course, second course or main course :wink: ). But again, perhaps I have misunderstood you.
Are you suggesting that we experience the effects of things prior to cognitive experience. If so, that would not be conscious experience, though. Sorry, beyond that guess, I'm not sure what you're getting at; can you explain a little?
Yes, there does seem to be a lot of wishful thinking that serves to obfuscate in these matters. Some people just won't allow that we could be material beings; it seems such a thought is just not emotionally acceptable to them.
What about when a group of top international chefs get together for some food tasting? Do you think that their rich background as taste creators comes into play in determining their preferences, and that , like artistic and musical taste , their preferences were developed and shaped within a discursive community of foodies?
Isn’t that why there are shared preferences and fads for certain flavors and combinations of flavors in given periods and places? Salsa has replaced ketchup as the preferred condiment in the U.S., due to the influence of the hispanic population. Now is this different than the expanded interest in latin music?
Is that an actual quote from Dennett: did he actually say that?
If he did say exactly that, then the obvious critique would be that a third person account is not a first person account; so by definition a third person account cannot include a first person account without being something more or other than just a third person account. So, I cannot see how Dennett could be claiming that a third person account could include a first person account; I doubt he would claim something so obviously absurd, so I conclude that he must mean something else, and we would need to see the context to find out what that is.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Janus
I think you may have missed the part in brackets (or maybe you replied before I added it since it was an edit).
:up:
Do you agree then that there are phenomena in the universe (first-person experiences) that cannot be described by an objective third party?
This is a common mistake found in posts in perception/phenomenology threads.
Try to be clear about what it is you're referring to.
Are first-person experiences a thing? I think they are. If they are, then you are admitting there is some thing in the universe that cannot be described by another observer.
I'm saying there is a class of things (mental states) that cannot be described by observers other than oneself.
I am thinking about the experience as form of recognition. As with all forms it cannot really be separated from it's content. Therefor I think it is too lax to take the form as content for it's own when talking about such topics.
Take music as an example - there are different aspects to it:
- When listening there are judgements like "I like that song", "It reminds of another song" and so on.
These are judgements about the music.
- Then there is the aspect of the musicians who make the music who might have another view on it which is concerned with how to make it. Those are thoughts about their doings or activity.
- Then there is the physical side of things, e.g. sound waves. This plays a big role when reproducing or transporting the music.
Now, when talking about music you cannot subtract the sound-waves easily as this is what the musicians(or record) produces. In a certain way the subjective judgements about the music in the first point are the most distant from what the music _is_ - they are dealing with an effect they have on the subject.
Then, are you an observer or the perceiver? Mental states, as a phenomena, are supposed to be latent (in philosophical term) to the perceiver, but an objective account by an observer, if it could be observed at all.
I think you mean, if the perceiver is eating an apple, he is not perceiving the mental states, but the qualities of the apple -- color, shape, taste.
Nonsense. If I don't perceive you, you still exist.
As I would like to say so myself -- I did not create a bullshit account so I could log in to this nonsense!
Quoting RogueAI
I don't know what you mean by "thing" there. I would say experience is not a thing, although it involves things. To describe an experience you describe the things involved in that experience.
I think I understand what you are saying but I'm not seeing how it relates to what you originally were responding to, here:
Quoting Janus
You were - in consequence - saying that, when I play guitar, that I am not hearing my play. That is what I deemed objectionable. The form of hearing what I play has the activity of my fingers, the vibration of the strings and the sound-waves as content.
I don't disagree with what you say there, but what I said doesn't bear on that at all, as far as I can tell.
Okay, another try: You take the synthesis of form and content and say the content was not experienced, as if we were talking cause-and-effect. But that is not the relation between form and content.
All I was saying was that wavelengths of electromagnetic energy are not consciously experienced; meaning that we don't see wavelengths, we see coloured things. To put it another way, prior to scientific investigations people had no idea that colour was the result of different electromagnetic.wavelengths.
But that is the same as saying when looking on a piece of paper (form) with a text written on it (content), the content was not experienced. It doesn't matter if you are able or unable to translate the text as we are not dealing with it's meaning.
I don't see how what I said equates to that at all.
In any case in your example what distinction are you making between content and meaning? If I'm reading text in an unfamiliar language I would surmise that there is a content or meaning there, but I don't know what it is. How then could I be said to have experienced it?
Exactly. The "meaning" here would be the "thing" that you try to put in first place.
Again I don't know what you want to say here.
I have a poor memory but here's what I managed to get ahold of :point:
[quote=Wikipedia]David Chalmers first formulated the problem in his paper Facing up to the problem of consciousness (1995).[/quote]
Abstract nonsense sense even more. You created a bs account to ventilate an abstract missing intelligence, depleted of any humanity and respect for others. To ventilate a sense of abstract divinity showing a sense of abstract detachment from human reality. I have read some stuff of yours, as most others. Most of you, and luckily there are exceptions, are science aging freaks, without having actual knowledge, well maybe in that abstract greedy modern phony philosophical way,, without truly wanting to understand each other or trying to really know something. That's not what philosophy looks like. I have eagerly looked around here, and found truly interesting stuff. But as the abstract philo imperative says, all thought here here seems to be reduced to an abstract system. Without content. Showing any true physics or math or science, except tiring endless references to the both. Linger on, in your abstract, phony philosophy way. Linger on in your abstract beauty, your abstract no humor derived jokes (an inconsisteny). I set up as many bs accounts as I like, and I realize what you are doing. You are joining forces with other abstract minded phony philosophers, to get rid of someone who more in his mind than just abstract bs, to which modern philosophy is reduced. Linger on in your reality detached world. If I was standing near you I would gave you a wake-up slam in the face. Djeeezus, the envy that radiates from you and most of your fellow "philosophers". No signs of intelligence, no signs of being fun, no humanity left, except abstract definitions of it and quibbling about it. If philosophy is reduced to this...well, then luckily I will not call myself a philosopher. I will help on setting up bs accounts. This forum is the best way for coming to know closer the modern western way of thinking. The abstract way. I don't see philosophy as a part of it luckily. You gave me even more material to use. I'm thankfull for that! You confirm my substance. What a great argument you gave on my comment. If reality is just a perception, the hey, what do you care? Just close your eyes and all will be gone.
But how do you _know_ it not just a matter of words? You see light and dark. If we had called those radiation then radiation would be experienced?
Quoting Janus
As is plain to see, I made no mention of, nor did I mean to implicate, the mere sensation of the taste of a thing, with an aesthetic feeling of like (pleasure) or dislike (displeasure) of (in) it. I chose cauliflower because it is more apt to resonate with the course of the dialectic. My fault, I suppose, insofar as such mundane examples of cauliflower in your case, and hairstyles in Josh’s case, didn’t get my point across. I was initially going with beheadings, or some such that invokes a very authoritative aesthetic judgement, yet without the burden of experience confusing the view.
The mode of intuition with respect to the flavor of an object, is every bit the sensation as vision, but whereas vision has the chance of synthesis with a veritable plethora of conceptions, that is, the formulation of a rational discursive judgement from which a cognition follows, such that the subject can then report exactly what he has seen, the sensuous phenomenon of empirical taste, or flavor, has no proper manifold of conceptions, no more than the physiology of that sensuous mode permits, hence no definitive reportable cognition, from which occurs that the subject reports no more than a general subjective condition, re: tastes good, I like it/tastes bad, I don’t like it, or some mediation between those extremes, but without a categorically intelligible understanding for it.
—————
Quoting Janus
Exactly. Avoidance, or partaking, without any conscious thought at all, because of the above, re: you simply may not be able to report on exactly why you avoid the unpleasant dislikes and partake of the pleasant likes. Hence, the burden of experience with respect to the phenomenon of taste, as opposed to the purely subjective aesthetics of it. Now, the common rejoinder is, the like or dislike of a thing presupposes the thing, which is true, but presupposing the thing does not carry the implication of forming a cognition as to what the thing is. Re: “here, taste this/what is it/never mind, just taste it/JEEESSUSSS, that’s disgusting!!!!!!
Quoting Janus
Which supports your assertion that “fickle likes and dislikes” are not aesthetic judgements. As the example immediately above shows, on the other hand, aesthetic judgements as to pleasure/displeasure may arise without any discursive judgement as to its object. That most times they do, but that sometimes they don’t, removes necessity as a condition.
That I dislike falling off a bike because it is accompanied by the distinct possibility of pain, but that I dislike pain doesn’t require that I fall off a bike. I find pain a dislike to avoid for nothing other than I am discomforted by it. Ironically enough, there are those that feel just the opposite, in finding pleasure in circumstances for which pain should be the normative prescription. Go figure, huh?
Taken to a sufficient metaphysical reduction, we find the old adage, “there’s no accounting for taste”, to be quite true. It is the case that human aesthetics is directly correlated with subjectivity, but damned if we have the slightest explanation for it.
Same as it ever was......
I was joining you in your declaration of nonsense, not fighting against you. Too bad you missed that sarcasm against Husserl. Or was it my fault? :)
So, just to close that post -- I agree with you that it is nonsense. You certainly exist with or without me perceiving you.
Now that's out of the way:
It's good to rant. Nice to meet you. I'm Caldwell, a female.
Don't be discouraged about what you read in this forum, or any forum. It's a personal activity - take it or leave it. Find what makes you feel excited. I've been part of the philosophy forum community for a long time, and had "suffered" through grad school, falling in love, break-ups, new relationships, work politics, work toxicity, job changes, heartbreaks, happiness, contentment, disappointments, etc. I've seen the same members developed into expert interpreters of philosophy (or however you may describe them), some are very witty, sharp, and quick. It amazes me sometimes.
It takes a skill to evaluate forum posts -- what the merits are, whether they're worth responding to, or even worth engaging with. Try to be patient and understanding. Don't forget that in the music world, for example, there are a bunch of mediocre artists or musicians that are....well...mediocre and boring. But they are there, getting millions of views.
So, again, welcome. If you choose to stay, remember that your reaction to what you read here is a reflection of your personality. If you want scholarly writings, please try to access publications online -- there are tons of them, you might need to create an account or pay even. Some aren't free. But, those might satisfy what you're looking for.
The point I was trying to make is that the statements "I see a red lighter" and "I see a lighter in the 600nm spectrum" are different in that the second one is more precise and much more complex. It remains to be shown that the first does actually name something else. A single individual is as unlikely to come up with the understood-by-others word "red" as with the frequency-spectrum of light by himself.
Also I fear we do not really have the same picture of the whole process. A popular concept is that light causes an effect on the nervous system which causes the experience of red, which implies a dualism. I doubt the cause-effect relation of the second part - I think the effect of light _is_ the experience.
Nor I, this:
Quoting Janus
‘Til next time. Your turn to buy.
Nature has structured the brain in such a way as to enable it to dismember a confluence of many different sensory impressions and store or encode these "members" of the whole composite impression in different ways and places in the brain or nervous system (consider synesthesia). It is also able to perceive it's own encoding in part or in whole or in combination with other elements of prior memories. The "purpose" of this is to simulate itself and it's environment within it's own neurology for general problem solving and survival.
The effect of the brain perceiving it's own neural encoding appears to that brain as qualia. In essence.. Neural encoding observing it's own neural encoding.. in a continuous dynamic feedback loop resulting in the "qualia" of a relatively unbroken chain of self-awareness (consciousness and identity).
Because the brain encodes the sense impression of "red" for example in some initially arbitrary but consistent way throughout, then when that encoding is activated again it perceives exactly the neural state that caused the brain structure for that qualia to form in the first place... thus the experience of "red" either in real time or in recall. So for me consciousness and qualia are useful illusions that the brain creates for itself to run it's simulations. We don't actually see "red", we experience what the conscious part of the our brain thinks as "red", for color as we know it in our consciousness may not even exist in the "real" external world. It is merely symbolic and representative to that neural encoding for the purposes of that encoding.
Consider also how experiments have shown that scientists can predict a persons choices seconds or fractions of a second before the person is even aware of the choice at a conscious level (illusion of free will at least at the conscious level). The unconscious brain makes choices the conscious brain does not know or understand, and then after the choice is made unconsciously the conscious mind creates it's own rationalization as to why it did what it did consistent with it's own internal running conscious narrative or inner dialog (which may have nothing to do with the real reason).
I like his approach because he admits he cannot describe it.
Quoting WayfarerOnly by physical instruments. Any physical instrument can serve as a scientific one, so maybe the distinction is unnecessary, but your choice of words seems to limit your thinking only to 'gadgetry', so to speak, as illustrated by your following comment:
But the human body (among other things perhaps) is such a physical instrument, hardly 'unthinkably powerful' and yet you assert this other domain is available to it. That means a physical device (your body) is measuring this domain somewhere. All you have to do is investigate where, which is after all a scientific endeavor. Perhaps we can build a simple device that measures the same thing.
The first thing to say about it is that it claims to bridge the objective–subjective divide. The objective–subjective divide is the problem of how to explain why an objective world has subjectivity at all: why is it that an objective world has 'given rise' to agents that possess a subjective view of the objective world?
The second thing the paper does, is provide a viable answer to the hard problem of explaining the phenomenal qualitative nature of conscious experience.
QAPEB solves these two problems by explaining how and why three distinct ontological categories have emerged and evolved. Each of these categories is tackled in separate sections and inform the title of the paper.
Section 1 explains how it is that a world of physical properties became a world of qualitative properties.
Section 2 is concerned with how it is that the world became differentiated in individual creatures in a qualitative, spatial and temporal way, and in doing so, characterises subjective conscious experience.
Section 3 explains the emergence of the realisation of self-reference and of the self-identification of ‘being-in-the-world’.
Each of these ontologically distinct levels can be thought of as characterising the objective physical world in a particular kind of meaningful way (hence being published in a journal of biosemiotics), where 'meaningful' refers to such things as qualities, space, time and belief. One of the key claims in the paper is that meaning is generated when there is some kind justification of value. Certain physical mechanisms satisfy this requirement and facilitate the generation of meaning during their interactive engagement with the environment.
What we find in each level is a different kind of physical activity that creates a different category of meaning about the world. This is why we get differentiated ontological categories and an explanation of subjectivity in objective terms.
First, Chalmers informs us that a certain aspect of consciousness - the first-person subjective awareness - is inaccessible territory for science which has always been viewed as a third-person point of view.
Second, Chalmers, this is the part where he executes the invalid inference, goes on to say there's an explanatory gap between physical science and consciousness.
Would you, for example, agree with a person who claims that because a certain other individual (science) can't do something (can't explain consciousness physically) that that something can't be done at all (there's no physical explanation for consciousness)? There maybe a perfectly good workaround; we just haven't found out what that is.
A month late, but a) :up: and b) I'd go further. The explanatory gap is itself an invalid preconception of what the answer must be, based on a prejudice against the notion that minds can be functions of lowly, base, physical stuff. It really doesn't matter what model of consciousness physics ends up with, consciousness is by definition "not that".
Quoting TheMadFool
Good point. The argument "science has failed to explain consciousness" against science's ability to explain consciousness is common enough, although I don't think that's Chalmers' argument. Rather he is placing a limit on or domain for what science can tell us. That limit really reduces to the third-person/first-person distinction but that the insistence that this distinction is not the whole story, e.g. the subjective experience of phenomena is more than a frame-transform from whatever objective description we end up with (seeing a red ball is more than the neurological activity involved in seeing a red ball from the first-person perspective). Which is just another way of insisting that mind is more than brain function.
My point is science, if there are absolute limits to science, may not be the only materialist/physicalist game in town. Another materialistic/physicalist, albeit nonscientific, perspective may be out there waiting for the right person to discover it, loads of luck a sine qua non as far as I can tell. This new materialistic philosophy/viewpoint could dissolve the first-person/third-person distinction and provide for us the window through which science can enter the domain of pure subjective consciousness and work its magic.
:100:
Sure. I guess my response to that in particular is it would probably end up being absorbed by science one way or another. It steals the good bits of everything! :rofl: The distinction between 'physical' and 'observable (in principle)' is nought from where I see, and nature in general (and conscientiousness in particular) appears at least statistically predictable. A non-scientific source of sound physicalist theory would likely lend itself to a scientific basis. But I'd be intrigued to hear otherwise.
:rofl: :up:
Your question. I don't think Chalmers is saying 'it can't be done'. I think he is saying that it is a unique problem which differentiates it from all other phenomena that science seeks to explain. The reason why it is a unique problem is because we only know of the qualitative nature of experience because we experience it subjectively. Science is good at explaining objective measurable phenomena. It has not found a way of bridging the divide between objectivity and subjectivity... but note the paper referenced in my previous post
Chalmers' argument needs a name. I call it The Burqa Argument. Chalmers is saying that because we can't see the woman in a burqa (science can't directly observe consciousness), the woman (consciousness) isn't physical. If he's not saying that, I have no bone to pick with him.
It's not that.
That may well be true. Separating definition from theory is really important. Functionlists, I allege, nearly always end up having to redefine 'consciousness' by fiat so that it is something that is amenable to functional explanation. I have no particular objection to functionalist theories of various functions! But as far as consciousness goes, I never hear an answer to the question "Why can't that function happen in the dark?" which does not involve a redefinition: "But that's just what I mean by consciousness". In which case I say "Well, OK, that's great for your definition, but that doesn't touch the hard problem then." Apo weirdly has tried to just reverse the burden of proof and to ask "why shouldn't it feel like something" without having first said why it must. And the video he linked to of course doesn't do that.
According to them. But it sure seems like that from the outside, including in Chalmers' case.
Quoting bert1
There's nothing weird about that. Neurons aren't firing in a vacuum: the central nervous system is an integrated system. Biology can only do what it can do. If it does something, then clearly it can do it. Why does the response to a red ball feel like me _seeing_ a red ball and not a blue ball or hearing a red ball or feeling a red ball...? Well, it has to integrate somehow and biology only has so many tricks up it's sleeves. For a bat, a the sound of the ball might be something it sees. For a racoon, touch is something it might see.
Oh, sure, that's a very good point. We are conscious, we know that, and we know what we experience depends on brain function, so we know that there is something it is like to be functioning brain, right? That's enough, no? There's no need to explain that in order to show it happens, we already know it happens. It's therefore up to the person who questions that fact to explain themselves first. Have I understood your point?
Those are interesting questions too, but different. "How does a brain generate conscious experience at all?" ...is a different question from "Why do particular functions feel the way they do?"
Sure I understand that might be what it looks like.
Why activity in an integrated system is integrated with other activity in that system isn't begging for an answer. The how is still interesting. We don't need to consider counterfactual senses or nothing happening at all and work from there. However the question of why certain _kinds_ of perceptions are possible at all, i.e. how they do what they do, and how we evolved them, is still of interest. And of course how species make certain senses more prominent.
Quoting bert1
There's a difference in complexity at first glance I guess, but my understanding from talking to neuro peeps like Isaac (he seems to have disappeared again) is that it's actually really difficult to separate out individual functions from overall considerations of consciousness, including non-conscious stuff. It probably isn't possible to have what we consider consciousness with just one sensor that, say, senses the intensity of ambient light (no colour or well-defined shape). Some think that language is also a necessity for consciousness (a story we tell ourselves). It's all a chaotic mess which makes it only the more intriguing to figure out how it actually works.
I was very much deterred from thinking of particular functions as in any way capable of being carved out of the whole and considered in a vacuum. It's not that they're not contributing to consciousness, rather that they do so in the context of everything else.
Quoting bert1
So does the function ever in fact happen “in the dark”? Is there any reason to believe that?
You might say you can imagine it happening in the dark. But then you would have to give positive reasons for how it could happen in the dark. Which of course you can’t.
And so we arrive at those who actually have theories that model the function in question. And they can rightfully say why it would feel like something to be modelling the world in the way the nervous system models the world.
There are good reasons for thinking that all that brain activity couldn’t do anything else but generate experience.
So yes, the burden falls back on the naysayer who can offer nothing but their disbelief.
If you consider structured matter processes just that, yes. But reality proves you wrong. I feel structured processes. If I hear a piece of music, there are structured processes going on in my brain (looking at it from the outside). But why should they be conscious experiences? Because of the very fact there is structure? I can imagine the same processes going on without a conscious experience.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
t's possible to approximately carve out conscious experiences like colors, shapes, motion, sounds, pain, thoughts, dreams, emotions, despite them being part of a coherent structure. A blind person (with the retina in good shape) who still perceives motion and misses parts of her visual system that are responsible for color, intensity of light, shape, and visual depth perception can still see, to a certain extent, moving objects. Other brain parts can partially take over. See here.
While these experiences are embedded in a larger living structure, you can still track the sub processes. If one of my visual V regions, or parts of it, give up, this will have an impact on my visual experience. Of course it's impossible to isolate visual processes and place them in a vacuum.
What do you think conscious experience is then - such that you could positively motivate this claim?
Do you not think that the structure of the ear drums, the structure of the auditory processsing hierarchy, all the rest of the brain’s structure, probably has a lot to do with the structure of our auditory experiences given the way the two always seem to be found in each other’s company?
Can you imagine a body without ears, a brain without auditory cortex, and yet there would still be auditory experience?
So I hear you expressing your doubt. I don’t see what substantiates that doubt as yet.
Can you imagine a conscious experience going on without those neurological processes? How does that work?
I see your point. A consciousness experience is not the structured process by itself, as observed in brain scans or imagined in your mind. It is, well,... the conscious experience itself. As experienced by the structured process it is attached to. So by looking at structured processes you can say if there is consciousness inside, but that doesn't explain the conscious experience. Only by considering the structured processes as the only base consciousness becomes an illusion.
We haven’t got on to how things might be better framed under a triadic and semiotic systems perspective.
The justification is that there are two different things. The material structured processes, as seen from the outside, and the conscious experiences felt on the inside. You see structured processes when observing my central nervous system, I feel the things it accompanies.
In what sense is consciousness a “thing”. Do you want to say it has substantial being? Explain to me how that works.
How long should science get a pass on failing to explain consciousness?
There are sticks and stones, noses and bones. Likewise, there are conscious experiences.The dual framing of things means indeed there are two kinds of things. Conscious experiences are irrefutably there. So are sticks and stones. They are two sides of the same medal, framed by a two-sided frame, and depending on from which side you look at the medal, the face of matter or consciousness will be seen and framed. You can look at consciousness within the frame of things or structured processes. That's usually the outside. It's you who sees the structured processes in me.You can look at the same stuff from the other side. That's usually the inside. That's me experiencing stuff. The one who looks and sees the sides of the medal lies in between.
About another 1,400 years seems reasonable.
So there are two kinds of descriptions, not two kinds of “things”? There is epistemic duality but not ontological duality?
I want to be clear what you are committing to.
Quoting Cartuna
You lost me there.
I get that there is a third person description and a first person description. There is what we tell each other about the “world” as understood from an imagined “God’s eye” view. And then there is what we tell each other about “our selves” as also understood as … well here it gets fuzzy.
Somehow we introspect and report qualia. There is the redness of red. There is experience that is separate from the world that is being experienced. And a self that is itself seperate from those experiences. We are now in some homuncular regress of worlds, experiences and experiencer.
Yet for you, there is this analogy of a medal with two sides. You can see it from both its sides, and yet not both sides at once. And yet - wonderfully - they are really the one thing, the one medal, bound, fused, unseparated.
It is just that there is the inside and the outside view of this two faced medal. This also is how we should understand an ontology motivated by the analogy of a medal with different inscriptions to tell us we in fact are seeing two sides of one thing. Or something like that.
I don’t feel this is going that well for you. Perhaps you can clarify further.
"For decades, the idea that insects have feelings was considered a heretical joke – but as the evidence piles up, scientists are rapidly reconsidering."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem
The problem for this (and any theory that posits that some assemblage of matter can have subjective experience) is how do you test it? How do scientists verify that insects can in fact feel things? They can't. Theories of consciousness are, in principle, unverifiable. This seems an insoluble problem.
Does science, in principle, verify or falsify its hypotheses?
And would neuroscience talk about the feelings of insects in terms of them being composed of similar matter to humans - some matching proportion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, other trace elements? Or would the arguments have to be made in terms of having significantly similar "neural structure"?
Sorry to be nit-picky. But folk so often use the Hard Problem as something to hide behind. They want to avoid the arduous work of actually being intimately familiar with what the science of mind has to say. It is so much easier to stand outside and agree not to even bother to try.
Two kind of things belonging to the same stuff. They are inseparable. So actually there is a unity. On the outside the stuff is material, on the inside, it's consciousness. On the boundary, they are one and the same. The degree of consciousness depends on the structured matter involved.
It certainly tries to. Good theories make testable predictions.
Quoting apokrisis
Any physical theory of consciousness is going to have to make claims regarding whether certain arrangements of matter are conscious or not. Claims of that nature (that arrangement of matter a,b,c has property x) are testable. If the claim that some computer has property "is conscious" can't be tested, that would be a problem.
So there is just the one "stuff". You are making some kind of panpsychic claim in regards to your ontological commitments?
Come on, be clear.
Quoting Cartuna
This formula of words now brings you closer to my Peircean semiotic account - the ontology I am happy to commit to as the motivation for theory-spinning.
On the one side is matter - or the Brownian mechanics of dissipative structure. :razz:
On the other side is mind - of the Bayesian mechanics of modelling structure.
The central issue is then the one already well familiar in theoretical biology - Howard Pattee's symbol grounding problem. How does a molecule become a message?
And biology has also found the answer over the past decade or so. Genes code for motor proteins - Brownian ratchets. At the nanoscale of material physics, there is a "magic" convergence of all forms of energy - elastic, mechanical, electrostatic, chemical, thermal. They all happen to have the same scale - a physical equivalence that allows them to be "costlessly" switched from one form into another. All biology has to do is build the switches - the molecular machines that ratchet work for free from doing the switching.
So this the boundary between a-bios and bios, physics and life - a zone of criticality that just happens to exist for appropriate mixtures of molecules in a watery solution in a typical range of temperatures for a planet like ours.
Life was an accident waiting to happen. It just needed a coding mechanism - RNA. The coding system needed to be able to produce nanoscale switches or entropic ratchets - enzymes. The rest was evolutionary history.
And what goes for life also went for mind. Genes model their worlds at one level of semiotic engagement. Neurons took it to a new level of the same essential world modelling process.
As science, this is all so new that hardly anyone has heard about it. But an excellent primer is Life's Ratchet by biophysicist Peter Hoffmann.
Anyway, there is a theory of mind I reject - panpsychism - because it is the kind of theory that just conflates to create its unity. As a theory, it fails by being "not even wrong".
Then there is a theory of mind I endorse - pansemiosis. And I could write a whole book about that. :nerd:
And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind? It works reasonably enough in terms of the new things it allows us to do.
Which of these standards do you want to hold mind science to?
Quoting RogueAI
You are demanding truth. And yes, that is impossible. Get over it.
Science promises pragmatism. And so one suggested test of artificial consciousness is the Turing proposal. Interact with the machine and see if it behaves exactly like all the other meat puppets that surround you - the people you might call your family and friends, and to whom you pragmatically grant the gift of being conscious.
You will never know whether it is actually true that you Mom has a mind. But for all practical purposes, I'm sure you act as if you believe that to be the case.
I wanted to write that. Luckily I didn't. You have found it yourself!
Here I partially agree. Once the first protein structures had formed from amino acids, their tendency to grow and pass on their life, created the need to economically pass on their proteins. RNA-like stuff did the job.
For some reason, you didn't want to save me the trouble.
Well there are plenty of panpsychics and other variations of the same on this forum. You don't have to hide.
Quoting Cartuna
The current best guess theory of abiogenesis involves RNA making RNA, as RNA does an adequate job of both being an informational mechanism and a structural mechanism. A circlet of RNA makes a tunnel that can bond organic crap like polyesters and polypeptides. It can do enough on both sides of the coin to get the party started.
Later, life evolved a sharper epistemic cut. The roles of storing the genetic information and controlling the metabolic dissipation got divided into DNA and protein. The roles became too specialised for a single form of matter to do both.
You have to have a clean separation to have an effective coming together. A metaphysical unity of opposites as the Pythagoreans used to say.
You could* figure out the brain produces it and you still wouldn't know how it relates to, for instance, time.
*You couldn't because you'd have to implicitly, magically, grant the brain universal perspective.
Thanks. And I picked up that you have formal training in maths and physics. Shame you didn't seem to want to go further with the ontic structural realism angle on that.
See James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for the philosophical rallying cry on that front a few years back.
Quoting Cartuna
Proteins can’t have existed first. That fact is written into the architectual history of the molecular machine that synthesises all proteins - the ribosome.
See this New Scientist article explaining that - http://revjimc.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-very-first-living-thing-is-still.html
But in brief, the ancient heart of the ribosome is the tunnel that bonds the peptides. And this is still constructed of RNA. Then as the ribosome became better at making structured protein, it used those new generations of protein to improve its own protein-manufacturing structure.
At first it just tacked on simple polypeptide noodles. Then peptide sheets. Then peptide helices.
So the ribosome is its own fossil record for how life started with RNA as the first catalyst. And then each improvement is also the manufacturing material for the next step in its home renovation project. Each new wing of the ribosome reflects the new protein possibilities it had achieved.
Thanks for all the great stuff you write! I come back later. Before leaving, I quoted this piece, because that's essentially the chicken/egg problem. I think posing abiogenetical existence of proteins solves the chicken egg problem, while it fits rather nicely in my approach to life. I have some entropy/free energy considerations for later on (physical as well as informational). I'm off for now! Later!
So do you think it's plausible to argue that all organism are intelligent, at least in some basic or fundamental respect? Not rationally intelligent like h. sapiens, but that the capacity to respond, adapt, proliferate and so on, are attributes of intelligence on some level. And that, therefore, the emergence of living organisms is also the manifestation of intelligence - not the work of an 'intelligent designer', but an incipient tendency towards conscious existence that might plausibly begin to flourish wherever the conditions were suitable. Sure seems quite in keeping with the New Scientist article you linked. 'What is latent', my Hindu philosophy lecturer used to say, 'becomes patent'.
and that furthermore that while
[quote=The Core of Mind and Cosmos;https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/] The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – ... they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.[/quote]
My argument would be that all life and mind is semiotic. And so that means they have pragmatic intelligence. As levels of encoding, they can learn - in Darwinian fashion - to live and persist in their material worlds.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well now you edge into language that smuggles in "consciousness" as its ultimate destination. And consciousness is a technical term employed by Cartesian representationlism. It presumes that the ultimate evolutionary goal might be the kind of rationalising philosopher who sits in an armchair in a darkened room just passively contemplating the facts of reality. Or perhaps more in your case, a guru passively engaged with nothingness in a tropical glade. :razz:
But if you stop short of that - if you retain the stress on pragmatic action, and avoid crossing over into a passive, sensory and static conception of consciousness - then you can see a natural arc of progression.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs, no less.
Quoting Wayfarer
For sure. I do take a Hegelian dialectical view that evolution involves historical progress. We are ascending towards some antithetical bounding limit that is a triumph over unruly disorder and the arrival at Platonic/Hegelian/Peircean perfection of some kind.
But then I also stress that this "perfection" is of the pragmatic kind. Which is the unromantic conclusion that would make the happy holist upset.
So as I have said often enough, modern humans climbed the semiotic ladder. Our world encoding machinery has become increasingly abstracted from the world it would regulate. We have genes and neurons. But we have added further semiotic machinery in the form of words and numbers.
Language organises our social worlds and gives us the habit of self-addressed speech as well. We gain self-awareness, freewill, higher emotions, recollective memories, prospective imaginations. All those good things that led us to take over the planet and start bending it to our collective desires.
Then along comes maths and the power to apply its completely abstracted view of reality in terms of technology - machines and computers.
But look at what we actually do with all this semiotic prowess. In the end, we just obey the thermodynamic imperative to entropify. We don't do anything smarter that a bacterium filling up a petrie dish and choking itself in its own material waste, starving itself to death with its own depletion of the environment's limited resources.
There is no "enlightenment" that will be made patent at the end of this evolutionary journey.
Or if there is some further step that comes after the current epoch, it will have to be one that continues the same old entropic game to its next pragmatic level. And sure, I can sketch what that means in practice. It is the obvious stuff - like realising we need to invest in recycling and renewables as a properly organised living structure is all about being "closed for material causality".
The paradox is the one I describe - the need to both entropify (that is, waste energy to heat), and yet to keep the materials that do the job locked into the system that does the entropifying.
You can't drive a car far, no matter how much fuel is available, if everything is dropping off, or dripping out, as you fly along the highway. It has to hold together to be the combustion-propelled structure that is.
Yep. This is fine as antique metaphysics. Logos and flux, order and disorder, laws and initial conditions, constraints and degrees of freedom. All ways of talking about cosmic existence as evolutionary persistence.
But what if the logos is the second law of thermodynamics?
Well it is. But maybe humans just aren't intellectually equipped to complete the technological revolution they started. Maybe burning the free lunch of a billion years of accumulated fossil carbon in a 300 year belch was a little short-sighted. And things like ecology are "just too complicated" for humanity in general to understand - in the necessary gut-felt and immediate way that would involve reversing back down Maslow's hierachy of needs. :meh:
You've got to laugh.
I see that kind of perspective as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Sorry to be hard, but hippie idealism failed for good and obvious reasons. Humanity has maths and so it builds machines. The failure of society to take a unified view of that - one that couples the subjective and objective view of reality in a pragmatic, long range, fashion - is where it all starts to go wrong.
We now run society as a machine - both a physical and intellectual one. There are transport systems and economic systems. The world that good engineering understands. Then there is the big divide that is all our culture, entertainment, consumption, social game playing.
We don't just encourage a dualistic "two worlds" approach to life, we fiercely demand it as the way humans can live with all the comforts of technology, and none of its responsibilities.
That leads to the completely predictable reckoning.
We should be busy coupling the two sides of the equation. Again, the simple and obvious stuff. Just bring in the carbon tax already. Connect consumerism and population growth to its environmental consequences. Etc.
But things are rolling too far and too fast. Smart folk will already be factoring in generalised collapse into their future models.
So if you want the complete Hegelian arc of biosemiosis, this is my summary.
History has always worked this way. The invention of photosynthesis nearly killed all life on earth because free oxygen is a deadly toxin, while using up all the CO2 turned the planet into a global snowball.
Photosynthesis might at first seem a miracle source of free energy - just point your leaves at the sun and flourish. But only 1% of life - bacteria eking out an existence in the small pools of meltwater that lingered in the ice-over tropics - survived this catastrophic innovation.
Life had to complete the job and evolve the inverse of photosynthesis, which is oxygen consuming and CO2 excreting respiration. After a few hundred million years things began to recover with that.
The Gaian material cycle was closed once more. One organism's waste was another organism's food. By complementing each other this way, a new global metabolic economy could be established - one with much more evolutionary complexity because the whole biotic game had been shifted up a gear to be driven by the "boundless" renewable energy of the Sun.
So biosemiosis is indeed a theory of everything when it comes to life and mind on Earth. The latent will be made patent.
Imagine if we did crack fusion. And the world hasn't collapsed into generalise chaos before we do. What kind of social beings would we have to be to flourish in that kind of world - where AI will also be as real as it is going to get?
How do we invent the culture, the politics, the mores, the institutions, that might intersect a future that is a step beyond the fast-failing now?
My argument is that the only framework is the one nature has always known. One way or the other, nature will fix things its way.
It will be quite hard for us to actually kill the planet. What's another half billion years for the re-emergence of something more complex than a world of cockroaches and weeds? The Sun won't burn out until another 7 billion years after that.
Yep. You got to laugh. :cry:
Tests and observations are evidence. Evidence is used to confirm/disconfirm theories.
Quoting apokrisis
The same standards for all theories. Relativity theory has been confirmed to the nth degree at this point. I expect a physicalist theory of mind to also make testable predictions that result in it being highly confirmed. Why should a theory of mind be any different? Are minds special? Do theories of minds somehow run into an epistemic wall? I think minds are special, and I think science will continue to have nothing to say about the mind-body problem, and the failure of science so far to explain how matter can produce consciousness doesn't surprise me. I predict it will continue. Science will never be able to explain consciousness. It can't even define it.
Quoting apokrisis
The Turing Test is not a test for consciousness, but let's say it is. If something passes the Turing Test, we should assume it's conscious? OK, does it then have rights? Can you deactivate a machine that passes the turing test? Beat it with a sledgehammer when it malfunctions? Degrade its performance so it can't pass the test anymore and then do what you want with it? Recycle it? What obligations do we have to things that pass the Turing Test?
Quoting apokrisis
We assume each other are conscious beings because we're all built roughly the same way. That assumption doesn't cut it with machines. At what point should we assume machines have minds? Do you think anything that passes the Turing Test should be assumed to have a mind? What about chess programs that are superior to humans? Do they have minds? What about an AI that passes Turing Tests 90% of the time? 75%? 50%? If we don't develop a theory of mind that makes testable predictions (and we won't), we're going to be in trouble before too long.
Thank you for these tutorials in the philosophy of science. But you might want to check your facts.
Quoting RogueAI
Of course. In the same way that all theories have to be motivated by a counterfactual framing - one which could even in principle have a yes/no answer.
So are all minds the result of a mush of complicated neurology found inside skulls? As a first step towards a natural philosophy account of consciousness, does this feel 99% certain to you.
If not, why not? Where is your evidence to the contrary?
Does poking this delicate mush with a sharp stick cause predictable damage to consciousness? Well ask any lobotomy patient.
And so we can continue - led by the hand - to where neuroscience has actually got to in terms of its detailed theories, and the evidence said to support them.
Quoting RogueAI
Bully for you. And I'm sure you are in the majority. It is the view built into our standard-issue culture, after all.
After a couple of thousand years of organised religion and several centuries of the romantic recoil from the squalid horror of technology, this is the operating system that got installed during your manufacture. The factory settings.
Quoting RogueAI
All good moral questions. How do you answer them?
Quoting RogueAI
I thought it was because we all act the same way. Roughly. Within engineering tolerances.
You might need a neuroscience degree, along with an MRI machine, to tell if a person is indeed built the same way.
You know. Verified scientific knowledge and not merely social heuristics.
Quoting RogueAI
Certainly not.
But if it could get drunk and kick over the board in a fit of pique, then I might start to wonder.
Quoting RogueAI
Oddly, it is commonly claimed that humans do have an evolved theory of mind. We are genetically equipped to understand others as other selves taking part in the same collective social game.
That is why a Turing machine test feels like any kind of good test at all. We believe we can instinctively tell when we are engaging with some aspect of the material world that also is animate and mindful.
Of course that is also how folk arrive at the conclusion the weather gods, or the poker gods, are against them. A generalised animism was quite a tough cultural habit to unlearn.
Which is the tendency of everything to become less organised. And evolution goes against that.
Quoting apokrisis
A good start would be a culture based on something other than consumption and endless economic growth.
Quoting apokrisis
Thomas Nagel
is not a hippie.
Quoting apokrisis
'Consciousness' was coined by Ralph Cudworth, one of the Cambridge Platonists. But 'consciousness' and 'intelligence', as general attributes of organic nature, might be almost synonyms, mightn't they?
As I've said before, the major problem with the Cartesian depiction of 'res cogitans' was its tendency to 'objectify' it as a 'spiritual substance', which is oxymoronic right from the outset.
This is not clear: "And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind?"
What does "they" refer to? Tests? Tests don't make claims.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm strongly in favor of idealism. I think the explanatory gap is evidence that science can't solve the hard problem. The gap will grow and grow and people will eventually abandon the scientific approach to "solving" consciousness. There's nothing to be solved because matter doesn't exist.
Quoting apokrisis
There's an idealist explanation for why poking a brain causes changes to mental states. If you poke a dream brain, the dreamer alters the dream. That's clunky, I admit, and begs the question of why a dreamer would modify their dream when their dream brain is poked, but it IS a non-materialist explanation for why changes to brains results in changes to minds: it's all part of the dream. And as evidence for my assertion that it's all a dream, I'll keep pointing out that we keep running into the hard problem and science keeps not solving it. It's not even close to solving it. There's not even a coherent framework for what an explanation for consciousness will look like. Neuroscience can keep piling up neural correlates to mental states, but that hasn't solved the hard problem, and it won't in the future. There's not going to be an Aha! moment where we get x amount of neural state-mental state correlations, and suddenly grasp the answer to the mind-body problem.
Quoting apokrisis
I can't. But then, idealists are very much the minority. Nobody expects idealism to solve anything. I think there's a day of reckoning for physicalism, though. Science has been solving these technical problems for a long time now. But it's going to fail people in this area (machine consciousness), and it's really going to come as a shock to a lot of people. This is still a society very much in love with scientism.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe. But we all also have brains, hearts, lungs, etc. A liquid nitrogen cooled computer the size of a room that passes a turning test is not going to resemble a person at all. People aren't going to assume it has a mind. Getting people to go along with machine rights isn't going to be easy, esp. when the scientists just shrug when people ask them if the machines are conscious.
They embody claims. So they proclaim, if you like.
Quoting RogueAI
Of course. And how does that square with what you also seem to believe about the mess of neurons in people’s heads and the inability of robots to have minds as they are somehow the wrong kind of stuff, or the wrong kind of material structure?
Quoting RogueAI
No. It is a simple enough materialist account.
Quoting RogueAI
This is going nowhere. :mask:
No. Evolution works by accelerating the ambient rate of entropification. It gets the second law to its destination faster.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep.
In addition, evolution works _because_ of the second law, not in spite of it. A little knowledge, etc.
If it was a simple enough account, we wouldn't be posting in yet another "problem of consciousness" thread, yet here we are.
If I explain what's in my backyard, isn't that most likely a good explanation of what's in my yard, or do you need to test it. There are plenty of good explanation we use everyday that don't need testing. This gets back to the notion that somehow if science can't do experiments to confirm one's claim, then it can't be knowable, or it's somehow not real knowledge.
What if your life somehow depended on guessing correctly that there is a tree in my yard? Would you just take my word for it if I said there wasn't, and my answer would get you killed? Wouldn't you want to verify my answer?
But my life doesn't depend on guessing correctly, if it did then things would be much different in terms of what we know.
I was pointing out that in certain circumstances, just telling someone what's in your back yard doesn't cut it as a good explanation. As the stakes go up, the need for verification increases.
Of course there are exceptions where we need to verify someone's account of things, but my point is, that there are many instance of knowing that don't involve the perspective of science.
That's true, but not applicable here. If I tell you I've solved the hard problem, you wouldn't just take my word for it.
I missed this. How do you know chess computers don't have minds?
Quoting Flaw
Totally different! Numbers are created by Man. Consciousness is not. Numbers are mathematical objects used to count, measure, etc. Consciousness is a state.
Quoting Flaw
Totally different! We are asking how, calculate etc., using our mind. Conscious experience means that we are aware of that.
Quoting Flaw
I cannot be sure what the subject is after some point in your description of your topic. For one thing, I cannot see anything referring to "Solution to the hard problem of consciousness", which is the title of your topic. What kind of solution are you referring to or aiming at?
This is not true. Numbers are not created by man. As you saw in my original post, "create" means to bring into existence. If man did not exist, the abstract concept of numbers would still exist, just not the word. Also to point out that numbers as a mathematical object is different than consciousness as a state doesn't change anything. Both can be viewed as mathematical objects in which operations or events can be performed. In fact, in computers, numbers, states, and even rasterized images all come in the same form (bits).
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I was trying to make an analogy with A) a calculator adding 1 + 1 to get 2 and B) physical material creating consciousness. I am sure nobody believes that the number 2 gets "created" when we add 1 + 1 in a calculator. It seems obvious. However some people believe that physical material can "create" consciousness. My argument is that both numbers and consciousness are abstract.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
There isn't any "solution" proposed in my post. It was really meant to be click-bait. Rather the approach that I take to the "hard problem of consciousness" is that our understanding of consciousness might be lacking something. The question on how the physical can "create" consciousness is absurd to me. It is like asking how when we put 1 + 1 in a physical calculator, we "create" the number 2. Because we know that's now how "creation" and "existence" works.
I hope that clarifies my argument
Ya, you're right, it isn't applicable to the hard problem. I was just addressing something Janus said as a side issue.
Concepts are thought and created by us. They are not created and exist by themselves or by some supernatural being.
Quoting Flaw
I do. And I believe other people do too. Number 2 is created (produced, calculated) by the calculator, which has been programmed by us to do that. Then it is created a second time, as it is displayed on a LED or other display.
(BTW, do not abuse the words "nobody" and "everyone" so easily.)
Quoting Flaw
Well, you succedded. I took the bait! :grin:
Quoting Flaw
True.
True, but the referents of those concepts may well exist without us. The universe seems to count (conservation laws, quantum field theory) without a concept of mathematics. There are an exact number of atoms in the universe right now that does not depend on some of those atoms being arranged to make humans.
Mathematics, even in its basic counting-on-fingers variety, was developed to describe features of our environment. It's generalised and abstract now, but in application still refers to quantities of actual things that exist, not just thoughts we have. It's unlikely we'd have developed an original mathematics that did not reflect the world: it's a pragmatic language.
Yeah, that's my mistake.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I don't disagree with this at all, depending on how we define "create" and "2". I am guessing my usage of create is just different - bringing something into existence that did not exist before.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Agreed, but when the number 2 is displayed on an LED, it is no longer a concept of "2". This is by definition.
Overall, I think language/semantics can provide barriers in us understanding each other. Yet ofc we wouldn't be able to understand each other without it. Dissecting your post (and others as well) just helped broaden my way of looking at things. So thanks for sharing.
True.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not true. The physical universe doesn't count. There's nothing "out there" that calculates. It's us who do. There are three trees in a garden, but the garden does not know about that. It doesn't even know it is a "garden" with trees. If we cut one of them, there will remain two trees. The garden will not say, "Oh my, they have cut one of my trees! Now I have only two!". Well, except maybe in poetry and storytelling! :smile:
Physics and its laws (conservation laws, quantum field theory) do not exist without us. Physics is a science created by us in an attempt to understand how the physical universe "works" ("works", as a figure of speech, of course).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
True, except one thing, if we want to be precise: Mathematics do not refer to quantities or anything else. It's created and used by us to refer to these things. :smile:
I agree. Do you think simulations can exist without anyone observing them?
I was referring to physical laws, like conservation laws, second law of thermodynamics, etc. The mathematics we invent that deal with quantity are to describe laws that deal with quantity. Nature "knows" how much energy and momentum to give a body after collision. (Not really "knows", but is constrained thus.)
If he's right that the physical universe doesn't count (and I think that's true), then presumably brains can't count (I also agree).
This is the way I also use the word myself. :smile:
Quoting Flaw
Right. It's an object (consisting of pixels on the LED). Only that the part of the calculator (machine) that does the computing does not even know that the number "2" is displayed, There's another part of the calculator that gets the result of the calculation and displays it on the LED. Moreover, the result "2" means aboslutely nothing to either the computing or the displaying parts of the machine. They are just constructed (H/W) and instructed (S/W and F/W) to do their jobs! :grin:
Quoting Flaw
Thank you too!
Don't count on it!
I see what you did there!
I suppose you are referring to computer simulations ... I also suppose that such a simulation is "playing" right now w/o anyone watching (observing) it. Well, for one thing the simulation does not exist (by itself, as such), anyway. What exists is a computer "playing" a simulation and w/o knowing it plays a simulation. It is us who call it a "simulation". As TV can "play a program" w/o anyone watching. It is us you call it a program
But this is too obvious.So you maybe mean something else?
I think it's obvious, but I've seen raging arguments between people who think computers can simulate things with no one observing the computer vs. people who think that without an observer, a computer simulation is just a bunch of pixels and sounds. I fall in the latter category.
Well, nature has no mind and conscience so that it can know anything. So I can't see how else this "knows" can be interpreted. If you remove this feature and just say that the nature is "constrained by forces, etc.", then yes, it works for me. :smile:
by Lori Dajose , California Institute of Technology
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors—such as moving our limbs, responding to fear and other emotions, and so on—is an incredibly complex puzzle for neuroscientists. But now, fundamental questions about the neuroscience of behavior may be answered through a new and much simpler model organism: tiny jellyfish.
Caltech researchers have now developed a kind of genetic toolbox tailored for tinkering with Clytia hemisphaerica, a type of jellyfish about 1 centimeter in diameter when fully grown. Using this toolkit, the tiny creatures have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated. Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal's neural activity as it behaves naturally. ...
With a new genetic toolbox, researchers can view jellyfish neurons as they light up in real time. ...
Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal's entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on "eating" even without the rest of the animal's body.
This decentralized body plan seems to be a highly successful evolutionary strategy, as jellyfish have persisted throughout the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?
After developing the genetic tools to work with Clytia, the researchers first examined the neural circuits underlying the animal's feeding behaviors. When Clytia snags a brine shrimp in a tentacle, it folds its body in order to bring the tentacle to its mouth and bends its mouth toward the tentacle simultaneously. The team aimed to answer: How does the jellyfish brain, apparently unstructured and radially symmetric, coordinate this directional folding of the jellyfish body?
..., though the network of jellyfish neurons originally seemed diffuse and unstructured, the researchers found a surprising degree of organization that only became visible with their fluorescent system.
"Our experiments revealed that the seemingly diffuse network of neurons that underlies the circular jellyfish umbrella is actually subdivided into patches of active neurons, organized in wedges like slices of a pizza," explains Anderson. "When a jellyfish snags a brine shrimp with a tentacle, the neurons in the 'pizza slice' nearest to that tentacle would first activate, which in turn caused that part of the umbrella to fold inward, bringing the shrimp to the mouth. Importantly, this level of neural organization is completely invisible if you look at the anatomy of a jellyfish, even with a microscope. You have to be able to visualize the active neurons in order to see it—which is what we can do with our new system."
Weissbourd emphasizes that this is only scratching the surface of understanding the full repertoire of jellyfish behaviors. "In future work, we'd like to use this jellyfish as a tractable platform to understand precisely how behavior is generated by whole neural systems," he says. "In the context of food passing, understanding how the tentacles, umbrella, and mouth all coordinate with each other lets us get at more general problems of the function of modularity within nervous systems and how such modules coordinate with each other. The ultimate goal is not only to understand the jellyfish nervous system but to use it as a springboard to understand more complex systems in the future." ...
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-jellyfish-mind.html
It "knows" kind of like a computer would know, but without a programmer (that we know of, unless you're a creationist). And what we know about it, how we encode that in mathematics, derives from nature. We count, but only because nature does, in that it accounts for quantity, which is what counting is.
As an example, let's say energy, information, momentum, and other properties weren't conserved. You couldn't count anything. You go to count your fingers... 1... 2... None, because your fingers are gone... Start again, although now your fingers are spoons... 1... 2... 3. That's it, three spoons. Except now they're pencils, and there's 127 of them. Oh, now you don't exist. Start again should you re-exist. 1... 2... 2 and a quarter... 1...
It's in this sense that arithmetic reflects reality's accounting for quantity -- it's conservation laws -- it's counting.
You could find the law though to which the non-conserved energy obeys. There has to be some law of this kind of energy as the non-conserved energy develops deterministic. Also non-conserved entities count, but it's us who do the counting. Computers don't know anything. They are just structures of zeros and ones derived from a physical memory, from the outside pushed around on straight conducting wires, by the same kind of memory-based structures of zeros and ones on a physical memory (quantum computers are not fundamentally different). The computer clock determines the time between successive pushes. Leading to the desired final state of zeros and ones on a physical structure. This is not how nature works. There are no zeros and ones, no programs, no initial and final states. It's one process going on from time zero. Hence computers can never be consciousness by definition.
Can a collection of electronic switches be said to know anything? Doesn't that seem absurd?
Sorry, I missed your response earlier. If I am inclined to take your word for what's in your backyard, then I would count your explanation as a good one, and would probably not require that i see for myself. The point is that such an explanation is testable; whereas claims about NDEs and their implications for the postmortem existence of consciousness are not. If you report an NDE and I am inclined to believe you are not only telling the truth about what you experienced, but that you are also free of any confirmation bias, then I might accept your report as a good explanation; but I could not test it even if I wanted to.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Doesn't seem absurd to me.
If we use the standard definition, how could a collection of switches have a justified true belief about anything? How would that work?
The usage of the word was explained in the same post it was employed. If your question is: "Pretending you meant something else, what did you mean?", you can pretend I've answered it as you see fit.
Sorry, I totally skipped this: "(Not really "knows", but is constrained thus.)"
Sorry!
I am a panpsychist. I don't think any functions happen in the dark. But for the emergentist, yes, because all functions, prior to the modelling relation that you suggest entails consciousness, do happen in the dark. You are an emergentist. You think the vast majority of functions happen in the dark. But some don't. That fact is a curiosity that requires explanation. Yet you find there is no burden of proof on the emergentist, or more particularly, your brand of emergentist.
Quoting apokrisis
Great! The problem of consciousness is solved. What are the reasons you refer to?
It can be no other reason than that there is consciousness.
Err no. I’ve specifically ruled out supervenience and the like.
So the hard problem of motion, which was made explicit with the discovery of gravity, we've never understood but have accepted, otherwise, physics would've stayed stuck.
Yeah, the brain - matter - so constituted gives occasion for the emergence and formation of experience. Given how non-substantial matter is, it should be less puzzling that thoughts can arise in the brains of certain creatures.
We start with experience, the bigger mystery is not "subjectivity", that's given, but the world.
That will stay a mystery always. Even when God made it. The problem with gravity is how masses and energies between them make each other know how to move. Posing just a curved space (and thus curved time) isn't enough. How does space know how to curve? Gravitons? But then again, how do they convey their information to spacetime. As gravitons are send out and absorbed by masses, why does spacetime curve?
I think we basically reach a point in which we cannot discover the "ultimate aims" of nature, that is a final explanation or cause. We can go so far as we can posited a good relational theory. Likely related to the way we think as a species.
It is certainly related to how people think. I think we can discover the ultimate workings of nature, but the very image of looking for causes in a material world is theoretically bound to people. Different people have different ideas about aims of nature. The idea of a nature independent of us is precisely what it is: an idea. Different cultures have different realities. There is no one and only reality, though a realist will say there is. There is more than one reality though and clinging to one makes it in general hard to believe in others (especially the reality based on science, which, if you believe in it, is in fact the same as believing in god). Still, they are there.
I think I'm using this distinction too much, and it perhaps strays from the intended use, but, I think Sellars' distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image is roughly correct, or at least a good step in the right direction of a fundamental distinction.
What you say about different realities would apply to the way we make sense of the world intuitively, but not the way the mind-independent world works. I think there is a way the world works mind-indpendently, and physics gets us as close as we can to know what it is. But I don't think physics reaches the final causes of things, it is beyond what physics is intended to do.
But if you are comfortable or believe that there is only mind and no external, independent of us, world, then what you say may be easier to accommodate.
You get me wrong. The external world is not mind dependent. Everyone who claims to have on objective, mind-independent idea on reality is right. There simply is no one and only reality, however western thought based on science makes us believe. I don't say it's all in the mind, I say it's all there. It depends who you ask. Do you think physics doesn't want to explore the fundamentals of reality? I think it can find out.
Well, now it depends on what you mean by reality. Do you mean everything ranging from human beings, ideas, Gods, to a rock onto a novel? There's little of explanatory depth when the range is so wide.
If you mean by reality what's fundamental to things and the universe, then physics will tell you a good deal about it, they do and are examining the fundamentals of reality. I just don't think we can pierce "the bottom layer", as it were. This is the area in which some physicists begin saying things like like certain particles arise out of nothing.
Or that the "nothing" we use doesn't exist. I think these are different terms that may signal a point of no further depth of insight. I may be wrong.
Yeah, my use of reality is confusing not? I say there are different realities and then I say physics can discover the fundamentals of reality. I have my "own" view on reality though, of which I think it exists independently. It's material, yes, but contains consciousness at the same time (where others see material processes only). Like physical reality. But you can always ignore that reality. And see a universe with gods, like in ancient Greece. Or you can see epicycles, or astrological facts. Or novels only. Or women only. Or love only. Etcetera. You can't say that some are in the mind and others are real. Of course you can think that. There are obviously things going on in the mind only, but only if you make the distinction in the first place. And there is a distinction. Confusing?
It's not clear to me. You can speak of this topic as you wish, that's not a problem.
We agree on physics.
I think you are using reality in the sense of including everything, which invites all kinds of views and perspectives. This view will depend on our proclivities, inclinations, preferences and biases. It's not so much as I can say you are "wrong" or you say the same to me, it's related to usefulness to each person.
Fairly close. I could say you are wrong though. But only if we share the same reality. You could be wrong.
Of course.
In all likelihood, I am quite mistaken in several of my views and beliefs, maybe most of them.
:smile:
Still, you must have some belief of what exists surely for you. Even when you are not around anymore. Some rock-solid belif. Well, you "must" not, but still. Most people nowadays belief in the reality science propagates. But it's just one among many and quite intolerant towards other worldviews.
Yes. Science turned into scienticism makes for very poor philosophy, in fact, leaves most of it out.
As to the world absent people, there are vague notions I have. But it's part of the game of belonging to the human species.
I like the Monk quotation! "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light". Funny!
Vague notions come closest. Reality is like a mist in which shadows lurk, showing their face clearly once in a while.
Thanks!
That's the real truth. :wink:
That's what I think too. However I am sympathetic to people who don't think like that. I can understand it when people, especially scientists who are used to explanations of one thing in terms of something else, are suspicious of claims that a phenomenon is just a brute feature of the world that admits of no further explanation. It's just in this case I do think there are lots of very strong indications that consciousness is just brute.
With or w/o an observer, the computer does exactly the same thing: it shows pixels and emits sounds. It is us who call this activity a "simulation". The same would happen if the computer was playing a video. It is us who call this activity a "video". However, even if there is an observer watching the computer playing a simulation, but who has no idea what the computer currently does, he could not call it "simulation".
But again, this is too obvious.
However, there is something else, more important, that makes the question "Do you think simulations can exist without anyone observing them?" and the whole issue of the "simiulation-observer" fall apart: In any case, a similation cannot and does not exist, with or w/o an obsever. It's not an object. It's a process. And processes do not exist. They are actions that take place.
So, the problem of the "observer" can become meaningful only if "simulation" is replaced with some object, e.g. a tree. In this case, the question would be: "Does a tree exist without an observer?". Which can be recognized as a classic philosophical question.
Brute and wild... The problem with structured materialistic explanations is that they take out consciousness firstly and then try to put it back in the system by making the model complex dynamical and containing structùres relating to the complex dynamical stuff it is immersed in, including body. Could be useful in assigning consciousness, but not in explaining it.
Can you give an example of how nature counts?
I am afraid that you are twisting your words and/or adding meaning to them. This is totally different from what you said erlier "We count, but only because nature does" and on which I commented.
I am not interested in "chasing" you. So, that's it for me.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It was a short post, you could have read to the end. But yeah if that's too hard, the conversation is doomed.
So many threads end up like that. Doomed conversations are in the zeitgeist. It seems we cannot do better these days.
The tree still exists. But not in colors and shape and felt structure. Like the sound of thunder is still there if no one hears it. Our dependence is not dependent on counting though. Counting is a human activity Quantization is purely human, and has absolutely zero existence outside the domain of the human mind. Numbers have no counterpart in nature except in the image of physical laws we have. Physical laws are generally spoken mathematical relations between quantizible physical entities. It's the wrong way round to think these quantities have a physical existence outside the domain of math and measurement. But if investigated this way, nature has no other way to respond mathematically. It are forced answers though.
Very true. It seems the subject matter of science, especially physics, leads to such doom. Science claims to know, and those not knowing are usually frowned upon by the advocates of science, and especially physics. This division between so-called ignorance and so-called knowledge is doomed to lead to doom. The ones with knowledge, so loved by science, making the ignorant feel stupid. One of the reasons I studied physics. Nobody can call me stupid. It's stupid though to feel superior because of posossing some stupid artificial physical knowledge.
I think it's more general than that. Have seen it happen on a variety of topics, as if it was somehow becoming fashionable to diagnose a communication failure...
Originally I thought maybe it's an an effect of the US blue/red divide, but a similar collapse of societal common ground took place during the Brexit debate, and in France we had the yellow jackets episode, also with a collapse of national discussion into bickering disputes where people talked passed one another...
So what's happening? Am I just inventing a trend? Or are Western societies (or folks) getting sick of their own endless blah? Are we growing tired of always having to share the agora with others?
Maybe it's the dualistic approach while adhering to one reality as a measure for all. Yes, the yellow jackets. Burn la Bastille!
Pointing at failures of others to read what you wrote ("if you would have read what I wrote"...) merely point at the inability in the west to communucate. There is too much knowledge.
That made me laugh. I take it you are being sarcastic here.
Or take over the US Senate... People are dreaming of revolution again.
In a sense yes. I like knowledge but you can overrate it. I don't litterally mean to much knowledge but the over evaluation of it make people want to know better than others. Combine this with the fact that a lot of (scientific) knowledge is there (often rather artificial knowledge) and you get misunderstanding and vigorously pointing to it as a natural consequence.
No doubt about that. Yet, there are philosophers who doubt it. Thtat's why I said "classic philosophical question".
I also agree with the rest of your arguments, except maybe the last two statements: "nature has no other way to respond mathematically. It are forced answers though.", which I don't quite understand.
There's such a thing as information overload. There is also some truth in the saying that "science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme" (Rabelais).
People rarely know the limit of their knowledge, their blind spots are by definition unseen. Hence they tend to overestimate their knowledge, and yes, this may contribute to the phenomenon of abrupt end of conversation that I seem to notice.
And yet there is no true knowledge without such an awareness of the necessarily limited domain whence this knowledge comes and where it applies. No true data is without metadata (data about the source of the data, who collected it, when, where, how, and its limitations...); similarly it could be said that there is no true knowledge without metaknowledge (ie knowledge about the source and limits of the knowledge). No true knowledge without some doubt about knowledge.
There's an English saying about that. Something like the wise doubts while the ignorant is full of certitudes.
My preferred definition of consciousness is subjective experience. The unemotional content of subjective experience includes awareness of the environment and the self-awareness, all sorts of thoughts, but no emotional content. I am quite happy to follow Dennett as far as the unemotional content of subjective experience is concerned: that is just what being a certain kind of information processing system is like, and there is nothing more to explain. But I do not believe that feelings can emerge from pure information processing. I think that information processing can explain an 'emotional zombie' which behaves identically to a human, is conscious, but has no feelings. There is something which it is to be like to be an emotional zombie, but (as I've heard David Chalmers say) it might be boring.
Here's a couple of funny-peculiar things about how humans think and feel about feelings and consciousness.
1. In science fiction, there are many aliens and robots who are very like us but who have little or no feelings (or are they really so flat inside? read or watch more to find out!). Whether an emotional zombie can really exist or not, we seem to be very keen on imagining that they can. It is much rarer to find an alien or robot which has stronger or richer or more varied feelings than we do. (Maybe Marvin in HHGG counts.) We're quite happy imagining aliens and robots that are smarter or morally superior to us, but bigger hearts? stronger passions? Nah, we don't want to there.
2. A thought experiment that Chalmers (among others) likes is the one where little bits of your brain are replaced by computer chips or whatever, which perform the same information processing as what they replace. As this process continues, will the 'light of consciousness' remain unchanged? slowly dim? continue for a while then suddenly blink out when some critical threshold is crossed? It is the unasked question that interests me: will the light of consciousness get brighter?
For me, the fundamental question is: How does anything ever feel anything at all?
Isn't sound equivalent to colour here? Sound involves your eardrums and your brain.
Yes, indeed! I had to write the soundwaves. They are there if you don't hear them. The experienced sound is indeed equivalent to color. So the tree was there, but not in sounds and leaves whispering. :smile:
That's exactly what I think. Every materialistic approach is doomed, that is, for explaining it. The materialistic approach might say that if you poor with a long needle in your brainy world, some experiences might follow (flashing spaghetti colors maybe, or the unbased drive to move you arm when tickling the motor neurons, making you drop the needle). It can show if consciousness is involved not why (obviously, it has to be involved for making your way in the world; would be hard to cross the road without actually seeing it; you could say that that's the explanation, but that only begs the question(.
We only ask that question thanks to centuries of established Western philosophical and scientific dogma which presume a split between mind and matter, subject and object, feeling and thinking. The question should be ‘ How did we get to the point where we became convinced that experience consisted of an opposition between an inside and an outside?’ Chalmers assumes the split with his pan-psychism, while Dennett tries to pretend one side of the binary doesn’t exist , which just makes the problem more striking.
Could you say more about why you distinguish emotions from the other aspects of experience?
Could you give some examples of thoughts with no emotional content?
This is basically an answer to your first question, which maybe makes an answer to the second uninteresting.
I am a mathematician and programmer. I've worked in AI and with biologists. I think that science (mainly computer science, maths, AI) already has the ingredients with which to explain non-emotional subjective experience. We don't yet know how to put the ingredients together, but I don't think that it is mysterious, just a huge amount of work. It seems like we will one day be able to make very intelligent self-aware machines with thoughts and behaviour quite like ours. It seems that self-awareness, thoughts and behaviour are made of complex information processing, and we have a lot if ideas about how we might implement these.
However, we really have no clue about emotions. There is no theory about how to go from information processing to feelings. There seems to be no need for feelings to exist in order to produce thoughts and behaviour. Perhaps emotions will just emerge somehow, but there is no current explanation for how this could happen.
As far as the hard problem is concerned, the area of AI known as reinforcement learning is, in my opinion, the most relevant.
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Wikipedia
I am quoting these to show that something (the reward function) is used to perform the function that pain and pleasure appear to perform in brains. It is absolutely fundamental to RL that there is something that acts like feelings, but it is just a series of numbers that comes from the environment, it's just information like everything else in the system.
I am not trying to separate thoughts from feelings in brains (or programs). I am saying that we can, in principle, explain thoughts using science-as-is, but not feelings.
That's the typical attitude of many computer scientists. They forget that life and consciousness are not based on a program anywhere to be found in the brain. In the brain there is no division between a program that is stored somewhere, information stored elsewhere, and an external voltage direction the pattern of ones and zeros (input) step by step on the base of a program also stored as a pattern, and producing another kind of pattern (output). A computer can be turn off and on. The brain can't. All you do with a computer is pushing patterns of 1's and 0's into a different pattern of 1's and 0's. It's us who attach a meaning to these patterns.
They only seem intelligent because of the speed of the computer clock. But seeming is different from being. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of creating a new kind of cute little life, or a big mean one, but it's just not possible to create conscious life in a lab from microchips (or quantum stuff).
On the other hand, how does an organism exist without this epistemic cut, Markov blanket or schnitt?
It is not about scientific dogma. Science explains the semiotic process or modelling relation that makes life and mind what they are.
Hi GrahamJ.
That does seem to be a widely held belief, but I think it is a misunderstanding, in fact I feel I know it is a mistake, with almost a mathematical certainty. So I find it interesting.
Here's one way of showing what I mean by "almost a mathematical certainty".
Quoting All About Circuits Textbook
So right at the very start of the design and construction of the machine, we determine arbitrarily what shall count as a I and what stands for 0. There are all sorts of things going on in those physical logic gates, they are emitting heat, magnetic fields, perhaps vibrations, and they are in electrical circuits which pass through for example the computer fan but also the local power station, but we deem an arbitrary range of voltages in arbitrary locations to be the relevant processes.
Another way of looking at this is to say that the "information processing" in a digital computer is "observer-dependent": it's only doing computation because we say it is. Other examples of observer- dependent phenomena include money and marriage. Metals, mice and mountains are examples of observer-independent phenomena.
The mind, thought, feelings and emotions are observer-independent phenomena. You are thinking, you have a mind, you have feelings and emotions, regardless of what any outside observer says about it.
So what is going on in a digital computer is very different to what goes on in the brain/mind. Our computers are astoundingly clever inventions, but they have nothing to do with our conscious experience.
The brain isn't a digital mechanism. As well as the activity at synapses the brain is bathed with slower-acting chemicals whose effects are felt over periods of hours or days. Also there are synchronised waves of activity travelling around the brain.
Finally it makes no real sense to think about the brain in isolation from the whole body and the sensory input it provides, and also the world beyond the body, to which we are connected through our senses, in a way the computer is not.
Quoting Cartuna
What makes you guys so sure that if quantum properties are fundamental to life, allowing it to achieve the extremely fast rates of biochemical processes, something about quantumlike causality which we don't yet fully comprehend can't be responsible for consciousness?
Read at least the OP of my thread Matter and Qualitative Perception to get a general sense for how quantum physics might contribute to a model of consciousness.
For more detail, look at my recent thread Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness.
I read some of it when it first appeared, I looked again at it now, it's incoherent.
?
[math]\uparrow[/math]
? Supermind[positively nonphysical]
[math]\uparrow[/math]
Mind (phsyical/nonphsical? :chin: )
[math]\uparrow[/math]
Brain (positively physical)
Expressed relationships between electric charge, EM fields, EM radiation and the brain's molecular structure are somewhat nebulous, but that's still to be researched, no one has put it all together in a technical way yet. If you want a more detailed account that better specifies those relationships, the CEMI/Coherence field thread can provide it.
What was the most confounding section, where did I throw you?
Only neuroscientist come close to explaining and understanding what is consciousness. And it's not that hard, at all. There are synaptic transmission in the brain passing information by gray matter between brain cells. Sounds and pictures and words acquired by your auditory and visual senses get stores as memory in the brain and get accessed and used. Very, very similar to a computer, just made from organic matter and much more complex in structure.
So, "how can the physical create our experience, our consciousness" is the same question as how can the physical make the earth spin, the grass grow, your heart beat and etc. It's no different than any other problem in explaining the creation of the universe. So far humanity says It's a deterministic result that started by the Big Bang, Allah, Christ, Buddha, "some energy" or whatever. It's a physical function and Alzheimer's plaque buildup in the brain proves it so, as Alzheimer's patients lose consciousness as plaque buildup progressed to clog their brain cells.
a. the strong EM field of the brain is a global substrate largely responsible for integrating cognition via phase locking mediated in consort with voltage-gated ion channels
b. biochemical pathways blend or "superposition" into the EM radiation of this field to participate in forming percepts
c. CEMI fields are a primary source of full conscious awareness as especially synchronized, densely activated neural networks, and the ultraconcentrated radiative/biochemical blending within this type of field generates the perceptual substance of intentional attentiveness or "will", whether visual, verbal etc.
d. additional, more nonlocal field phenomena resembling quantum coherence in their integrating effects may add a further dimension to qualitative consciousness
e. EM complexes such as CEMI fields with their radiative and standing waves as well as coherence phenomena in general, including all properties of radiative/biochemical blending, can be subsumed with the term "coherence field"
I agree with you that we have to give meaning to machines. But not at the level you suggest (assigning 0 or a 1 to a voltage range), because it wouldn't help. It doesn't seem relevant at all. It's like pointing to the convention assigning a negative charge to an electron and a positive one to a proton and then claiming that this makes brains 'observer-dependent'. (I would be careful using that terminology when people want talk quantum!) AI algorithms work at a higher level.
Instead, AI researchers give meaning to their machines by doing things like:
This is the sort of way that we give a machine a 'purpose in life'.
Our own purpose in life ultimately comes from the fact that we are products of biological evolution. If and when we make communities of self-replicating machines, we will no longer have to give them meaning, for they will evolve their own.
Quoting GrahamJ
But the observer dependency applies at all levels of computation.
You have the physical machine, the steel, copper, silicon, the electric currents, all those are observer independent, in the sense that they are what they are whatever anybody says or thinks about them.
That the machine is carrying out computation is observer-dependent. We ascribe meanings to the mechanisms, but the machine doesn't thereby take on any meaning.
Quoting GrahamJ
Nothing about the physical machine changes when we ascribe meaning to the mechanisms.
We ascribe meaning to the voltage ranges in the logic gates, and at the other end we ascribe meaning to the output, which is what you are doing now as you ascribe meaning to the pixels appearing on your screen.
The voltages and the pixels don't have any meaning for the machine itself.
You are quite the preemptive skeptic! Not sure what role you are expecting rationale or practical basis to play as distinct from what I propose. I'm talking about how physical matter might fit together to produce conscious substance, a model based purely on basic facts. Excessively simple for you? Perhaps the facts are unfamiliar.