We Do Not See Objects We Detect Objects
The Big Bang happens and a new Universe is created. This Universe consists of Matter, Energy, and Space. After billions of years of complicated interactions and processes the Matter, Energy, and Space produce a planet with Conscious Life Forms (CLFs). In the course of their evolution the CLFs will need to See each other in order to live and interact with each other. But what does it really mean to See? A CLF is first of all a Physical Thing. There is no magic power that just lets a CLF See another CLF. A CLF can only Detect another CLF through some sensing mechanism which must be made out of Physical material and which uses Physical processes. There never is any kind of Seeing in the sense that we think we understand it. There is always only Detection.
So a CLF might understand that it does not ever really See another CLF, but it will still insist that it Sees the reflected Light. The CLF would be mistaken if it thinks it Sees even the reflected Light. All it can do is Detect the reflected Light. Its sensing mechanism can only produce Physical reactions, like Neural Activity, that are correlated with the reflected Light. If the reflected Light is Red the sensing mechanism will fire Neurons that only fire for Red inputs. The CLF might be able to sense that the Red Neurons are firing. So every time these Neurons fire it can report that it is seeing Red. This CLF is only sensing particular Neurons firing it is not experiencing Red like we do.
A CLF like us Sees Red as a Conscious experience and is not aware of any Neural Activity. This Conscious Red Experience is how we Detect Red Light from the external Physical World. Further investigation shows, at least for now, that the experience of Red can not be found in Matter, Energy, or Space so we must conclude that it is something that transcends these things. Let us qualify the Space we know and call it Physical Space and then introduce a new Conscious Space as the place where our Conscious experiences occur. Conscious Space might seem like a strange thing right now but someday it could be an integral part of our Scientific understanding. Since we have proposed this Conscious Space it is only natural to wonder if there is a corresponding Conscious Matter and a Conscious Energy. Maybe Red is a type of Conscious Matter, and maybe Volition is a type of Conscious Energy. But these analogies are just speculations because whatever Conscious Space might be, it is probably not going to be like any kind of Physical Space.
So a CLF might understand that it does not ever really See another CLF, but it will still insist that it Sees the reflected Light. The CLF would be mistaken if it thinks it Sees even the reflected Light. All it can do is Detect the reflected Light. Its sensing mechanism can only produce Physical reactions, like Neural Activity, that are correlated with the reflected Light. If the reflected Light is Red the sensing mechanism will fire Neurons that only fire for Red inputs. The CLF might be able to sense that the Red Neurons are firing. So every time these Neurons fire it can report that it is seeing Red. This CLF is only sensing particular Neurons firing it is not experiencing Red like we do.
A CLF like us Sees Red as a Conscious experience and is not aware of any Neural Activity. This Conscious Red Experience is how we Detect Red Light from the external Physical World. Further investigation shows, at least for now, that the experience of Red can not be found in Matter, Energy, or Space so we must conclude that it is something that transcends these things. Let us qualify the Space we know and call it Physical Space and then introduce a new Conscious Space as the place where our Conscious experiences occur. Conscious Space might seem like a strange thing right now but someday it could be an integral part of our Scientific understanding. Since we have proposed this Conscious Space it is only natural to wonder if there is a corresponding Conscious Matter and a Conscious Energy. Maybe Red is a type of Conscious Matter, and maybe Volition is a type of Conscious Energy. But these analogies are just speculations because whatever Conscious Space might be, it is probably not going to be like any kind of Physical Space.
Comments (62)
If colour is not contained within objective parameters, why does having no intrinsic properties mean it transcends? Notwithstanding your authoritative tone, particularly with your random capitalisations of particular - albeit not so important - words, you seemingly ignore any explanation of the reasoning behind the subjectivity of perceptions. Colours don't exist, but light does.
If you are going to cast aspersion on others' thought, You should be aware that you are subject to your own criticism. Light does not exist any less or more than color. Possibly you are believing that electromagnetic radiation has a more specific reference in material reality, whereas color refers to something you perhaps regard as experience. But if you are thinking that, then there is also a scientific definition of color, as specific ranges and combinations of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is just as substantive.
:-|
Quoting ernestm
Nope.
Before we start to measure the non-sensical, perhaps you could elucidate why light doesn't exist. Actually, don't.
You seem to be referring to the experience of some color in your OP, not the scientific definition, which is a specific narrow range of frequencies that are grouped under the label yellow say.
As an example, scientific definition of yellow is light between about 575-600 nm wavelength. But the experience of yellow is more like the background of my avatar, which is a completely different thing. My avatar emits little if any light in the yellow range.
Even the scientific definition requires an frame or observer, albeit not necessarily not a conscious one. The wavelength of light is not a property of a photon at all but a relation between that photon and a reference frame.
Concerning your OP, we are said to see objects. It is how the word is used in language. The fact that your reductionist description reduces it to no particular point of seeing is not evidence for your conclusion. I can similarly prove a new immaterial space necessary for photosynthesis to occur since physical plants do not photosynthesize any more than a CLF sees things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
http://study.com/academy/lesson/comparing-renaissance-baroque-use-of-light-plane.html
Or if you prefer a written account:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaroscuro
and
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/renaissance_drawings/
I know. That's why I quoted you saying light does not exist. Again, :-| .
Quoting ernestm
This is getting awkward.
Science is able to measure the Neural Correlates of Consciousness and this is the Easy Problem of Consciousness. Not to say that this is actually Easy but it seems to be Easy compared to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. All we know for the Experience of Red is 1) Neurons fire in particular places in the Brain, 2) We have an Experience of Red in our Conscious Minds. Number 1 is the Easy Problem and number 2 is the Hard Problem. The problem with number 2 is that we say we have a Red Experience but we don't take it to the next step and ask Where Is That Experience Happening? Materialists will say it's in the Brain without any real explanation of that. It is usually just a hope or a belief that it is in the Brain because they can never explain it. I have sympathy for that because everything else we know of has Materialist explanations. But I think we have come to the point where just for the sake of discussion we need to propose a new Conscious Space concept to talk about our Conscious Experiences. It serves to separate out and emphasize the truly odd character of Conscious Experience compared to what we know about the Physical World. Consciousness is in a World of its own. But ironically it is the only way we can know about the external World.
Please do not quote me out of context.
Your style is fine.
You do need to extend Quoting SteveKlinko
Different people reach that realization in different ways, and maybe it would be easier for your first example to choose an experience which is not based on sense experience, and work upwards from that, rather than downwards into material reality.
Quoting SteveKlinko
I also find this thinking too reductionist. While I understand the inclination to seek such a hypothesis scientifically, it does nothing at all to resolve the actual problems of conceptuality, and so it actually does science a disservice. Personally I find the issue of individual consciousness itself turns into a solipsistic red herring. Most of the ideas I know are not my own, but other peoples', so by the same extrapolation you refer to, I don't feel that beliefs based upon them are my own beliefs either, but rather just inserted into me, like fake limbs, by other people. I have been led to understand that is a very rare experience, but that is how I feel about them, and I feel if all the things I had learned from other people did not exist, but I had some kind of 'self consciousness' regardless, it would probably be on the level of awareness of a pet cat.
The explanatory gap arises from a failure to distinguish 'the experience of red' in its constituitive sense (i.e. the physiological events that constitute having the experience) from its intentionalistic sense (i.e. your physiology's interaction with electromagnetic radiation). Both of those different senses are disguised in expressions such as "experience of...", "awareness of...." and so on. The former is your seeing of the colour whereas the latter is the colour that you see.
Seeing is direct, not representative: you don't see your own seeing which would somehow represent a colour outside the seeing (say, an unseen colour-concept, whose relation to the experience would certainly be hard if not impossible to explain!).
If you see the colour directly, then there is no gap to explain. The colour experience is partly set by the optics, and partly by your background capacities and habits which enable you to see it.
But there is another sense, arising from association with experiences one has with red objects. These are often social. for example, red in the USA tends to mean 'danger' or 'stop,' whereas in China it has more the connotation of 'parade' or 'party'. While one certainly can explain such connections in terms of neurons, it's a rather useless pursuit. It makes more sense to think of them as abstractions, like mathematical relationships, As such these higher levels of association are between concepts, not brain cells, it makes more sense, scientifically, to use logical abstractions to define a model for those abstract relationships.
Science is only a philosophical method that creates predictive models of reality, built from interdisciplinary simplifications. Expecting the simplification to a physiological model to explain abstractions of thought is thus even wrong in scientific terms.
You can ascribe almost any meaning to a colour, because meanings are linguistic and social or cultural constructs. Colour experiences, however, are biological phenomena. There is no sense in which you could make us blind to red merely by ascribing it the meaning "invisible".
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-5151-1_4?no-access=true
But it is $30 for the chapter. I have a pretty good idea what it says, but it would take me a week to write it properly, and I have to work on my application for a Masters in philosophy, in fact I am behind working on it, so please excuse me by saying, yes I understand your viewpoint, and I wish I had more time to discuss it with you. It is certainly one of the more mystical aspects of Wittgensteinian thought, and does take some time to grasp. Reading the tractatus, red book, and blue book is helpful. Some of the refutations of other logicians in the tractatus are a little complicated, but most of the rest of all three is quite readable.
Yes, original ideas are hard to come by. But your Conscious Experience of Red is your own personal Experience. I'm only saying that my interest is in exploring exactly how do we experience Red. I think it's a good starter goal. But of course what I'm really after is the Conscious Experience of Light in general. I am interested in all the Conscious Sensory Experiences that we have. So also Sound, Taste, Smell, and Touch. But Light is the most interesting to me with Sound a close second. Thanks for the style encouragement.
As soon as the Physical Light hits the Retina it is turned into something else as it transmitted to the Cortex. It is now Nerve Impulses and Nerve Firings. I think it's pretty well established that there is no Visual Experience without Cortical involvement. So what we see is the result of Neurons Firing. We don't Experience the Physical Light directly. If you rub your eye you can see Lights.because you are stimulating Neural Firings. There is no Physical Light involved in that. Also, where does all that Light come from in your Dreams? How about after Images where you continue to see remnants of the scene you were looking at? These Lights are all internal Lights that we have in our Conscious Minds. Bottom line is that we Experience Light all the time when there is no Light there. And when we are awake the situation is the same, we are seeing our own internal Lights but now the Conscious Light we experience is correlated with external scenes you are looking at.
Those would be the Blue and Brown Books. The Red one is from Chairman Mao ;-)
Sure, the light hits the retina and thereby starts a causal chain of biochemical reactions. But you say more: that the light would be turned into "something else", and "transmitted" to the cortex. :-}
Is it physically possible even for nerves and neurons to transmit "something..." (what?) ..as if the cortex would be a TV?
I don't think it is necessary for an observer's visual system to transmit anything when there is the presence of an object and light that reflects its present features. Only the latter are necessary for the visual system to see something.
Quoting SteveKlinko
Sure, nobody says that there is no cortical involvement. But something is wrong when a supposedly "scientific" explanation of how we see things amounts to the not so scientific conclusion that we never see things but a "result" of brain activity. The skeptic nightmare is further fuled by your talk of light which omits the real objects that reflect or emit it, and the usual rhetoric on illusions or hallucinations.
Quoting SteveKlinko
Your arguments are bad because 1) it is impossible to see unconscious, in the dark, behind rubbing fingers, closed eyelids etc. and 2) they exploit the ambiguity of the two different senses of seeing light: the experience of seeing (constituitive), and the experience of the light (intentionalistic).
Quoting SteveKlinko
You're not seeing any images, including "remnants" of the scenes you were looking at. But when you see the scenes and then shut your eyes you might have the experience sustained in its constituitive sense. Like pinching your arm seeing can be sustained before the experience fades. Some recalcitrance might be a feature of the biological nature of experiences.
Quoting SteveKlinko
If we only see our own internal lights, then how could they ever be correlated to something external that we supposedly don't see? It seems inconsistent.
The long winter evenings must just fly by for you.
Actually, that is not so. 'A conscious life-form ' is a subject, in our case - we assimilate the information from an object, but we also interpret it and integrate it into our already-existing knowledge. In other words, we judge its meaning. Physical things don't do that. The assertion simply assumes 'physicalism' is the case.
Quoting SteveKlinko
What it means to see is that you are using light as a source of information about the world. We know this is true because we don't have any information about the world when there is no light. Actually, the only information we have is that there is no light symbolized by our visual field covered in black.
Yep, meaning is use :)
Quoting jkop
It is the basic function of Nerves to transmit something. I'm not sure what your question is here. The primary Visual Cortex really is like a TV screen in that there is a topological copy of patterns on the Retina reproduced on the Cortex. The Cortical version is however a highly warped version of what's on the Retina. This pattern information is Transmitted over Nerve pathways.
Quoting jkopI don't know if it's necessary or not but your visual system is doing that.
Quoting jkopThe visual system uses Nerve signals from the Retina to construct the scene we are looking at with our own internal Conscious Light. The Light scene you see is correlated to the external scene when we are awake. The Light scene you see when you are Dreaming is made out of the same Conscious Light stuff as the Light scene when you are awake but it is not correlated to any external scene. How the Visual system creates the Conscious Light scene is the David Chalmers Hard Problem of Consciousness as described in The Conscious Mind. The lack of understanding of how the Conscious Experience occurs is the Explanatory Gap as proposed by Joseph Levine in Materialism and Qualia. Maybe you are more familiar with the term Qualia in which case when I say Conscious Light it is the same as the Light Qualia. The fact that we don't know how this works yet is the 800 pound Gorilla in the Consciousness room.
Maybe I should have simply asked How do we See?, not What does it Mean to See?
It's simply not fact. Physical things are describable by physics - up to a point - conscious subjects are not. This fundamental misconception invalidates everything that comes after it.
http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/amazing-human-eyeQuoting Wayfarer
All this means is that physics hasn't described consciousness - yet. It doesn't imply that consciousness has some special quality about it that allows it to be untouched by science. That would be an description of consciousness that isn't based on any facts. It's most likely that consciousness simply hasn't yet been defined correctly.
It's not in the business of trying to 'describe consciousness'. What it describes is the motion of objects. It's amazing the number of people who don't seem to get that.
It may be that physics hasn't yet been defined correctly, of course. A Chomsky paper from the 90's called 'Language and Nature' argues that earlier similar intra-science puzzles, like how physics and chemistry can interact, were puzzled by redescribing physics and science.
I'm into J J Gibson's 'ecological approach' at the moment. He argues that his approach is non-dualistic and even makes playful reference to ecological physics. This is on the basis that for an animal to perceive an object is for it to see the 'affordances' available from the object, i.e. the natural world is a vast network of mutual relations of affordance, an approach derived from gestalt psychology.
Did you read The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception? Gibson is the most philosophical of all the psychologists. My understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics, of Kant's epistemology, and of the inseparability of practical and theoretical reason, are conditioned by Gibson's concept of an affordance.
What organ is that? What signals would it use?
Yes, in fact I'm deep into the secondary literature because I'm hoping to write a student paper on the relationship of affordance and 'familiarity'. It is such a clear and different way of understanding, the notion of affordances, just because it does cut through stale distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity. And actually it's a bridge between analytic and Continental philosophers, because members of both schools are interested, and everyone gets to quote Heidegger :)
Saying, What Organ is that, is just asking the basic question how does Consciousness work. We don't know yet. There's probably no Physical type of Organ involved.
Regardless of whether we call it an organ or inner light, what signals does it use? If it is using the same signals as the visual system, then whence the addition of "inner light" that is supposedly "looking" at the alleged construction or "result" of the visual system?
Right, so why are you stuck in dualism?
Direct realism is a better assumption as defended by Searle, or Putnam.
Perception has no interface between the brain's causation of becoming aware of what you see, and the causal chain to what you become aware of; the latter sets the conditions for what you will perceive.
The visual system does not produce a "result" that would be "looked" at by some inner homunculus. Instead it produces the looking-part of the experience, whereas the present features of the external object sets the conditions of what the object-part of the experience will appear like. For example, if a door is open, then it will be an open door that you see. Looking at some result of your own brain events would amount to blindness or hallucination.
The main problem with Direct Realism is that there never is any explanation of how we directly experience things. Even if Direct Realism is true there is a Huge Explanatory Gap between saying we Directly Experience the world and explaining how that happens.
But, it's a huge and unresolved argument. It's not as if physicists have agreed on what it means - they don't agree at all. The existence of 'the observer effect' is a great unresolved mystery. Here is an essay on it.
When the appearance that you see is the external object that you see there is no gap to explain.
The gap arises by assuming dualism, it was invented by dualists, and it is incoherent to speak of a gap under the assumption of direct realism.
That said, there are neuroscientific questions to explain, but they are not philosophical questions.
Good essay. I think that Quantum Mechanics could be the key to understanding Consciousness. The effect of Consciousness has always been part of some interpretations of QM theory.
Then I would want to know what the mechanism or process is that facilitates this Direct Seeing of objects. If you can not show me a convincing mechanism or process then that is a big Gap in understanding. You can't just say it's true without an explanation.
It is called 'direct' because there is nothing by way of which the objects are seen, neither a process nor a mechanism, so there are no such things to explain.
The seeing, however, is a causation of biochemical processes in the brain, and that's the short explanation of how the capacity to see works. Its detailed explanation is the subject for empirical research.
Oh yes they are. How do you get from ions being passed across synapses, to meaning? Is meaning in a general sense, something that can be understood through neuroscience? When a scientist says that this data means or entails that fact, where in the objective data is that interpretation itself to be found? I say that it's never found in the data but always supplied by an act of interpretation or declaration on the part of the researcher, of what the data means.
This is borne out by the fact that much or all of the early optimism about how neuroscience could 'explain' the nature of thought has collapsed in the face of the vast amounts of information collected over decades of research. It was thought in the 60's and 70's that the emerging neuroscience would quickly reveal how the 'brain creates thoughts' but it has proven incredibly complicated. (See Do You Believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch?, and Your Brain is not a Computer.)
And besides, the processes of reasoning, are themselves required to form any conclusions about 'what the brain does'. At every step in the analysis requires judgement - and where in the data are 'the seat of judgements' to be found? Judgement is internal to the process of thinking, it's not an external or material process at all. This is one reason why the chimera of 'explaining thought' has always receded in front of the advance of neuroscience. You're basically looking for something like the plot of a movie in the circuits of the television that's playing it; it's a species of category error.
It seems like you have a big process in the Brain function. And it seems like you say empirical research will be needed. Sorry if I am still not quite following because it seems like you say the empirical research is going to provide an explanation some day.
Relatively simple and small organisms can see, recall, so it should be fairly clear that the conscious awareness that is the seeing doesn't require "a big process in the Brain function".
Whatever is left to explain on how seeing arises from biochemistry is not the big explanatory gap that arises from assuming dualism or representational perception, because a direct realist does not make the latter assumptions.
Quoting Hilary Putnam
We don't know what any other organism sees or does not see. But if it is a Conscious type of seeing then there is a Big Explanatory Gap that needs to be filled even if the organism has a more simple Brain.
Ok forget Dualism, how exactly does seeing arise from biochemistry?
Your skepticism arises from the assumption that each organism would see their own sensations instead of the objects in our shared environment.
Quoting SteveKlinko
All seeing is conscious.
Again, the idea of an explanatory gap arises from assuming dualism or representational perception. Not so with direct realism.
Quoting SteveKlinko
Ask a biochemist or neuroscientist. It's not a philosophical question. The philosophical question is as far as I know whether seeing presents objects in your conscious awareness or represents images of what you don't see. If the latter, then your skepticism would be entailed.
That doesn't answer the question.
Right, it dissolves the question, since it makes little sense to ask "How do you get from ions being passed across synapses, to meaning?" when meanings are elsewhere.
No, it doesn't dissolve it, it dodges it. Meanings are not elsewhere in the sense that they are basic to the process of analysis of any kind of question whatever.
The problem I see with what you're saying in this thread is that you're talking about cognitive science, not philosophy. Your 'direct realism' simply takes for granted the reality of objects of perception, and then asks questions about how the sensory organs process them.