"What is it like." Nagel. What does "like" mean?
Not until six pages in does Nagel even define what "like" means. Footnote 6, "Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself."
This always troubled me. It seems his whole idea of "like" is vague or inchoherent.
This always troubled me. It seems his whole idea of "like" is vague or inchoherent.
Comments (166)
Nothing is more clear to me than what it is like to eat an apple while I'm eating an apple.
I and the fly are another at times where we are similar and same- which, is all the time within the bubble from a bubbled perspective.
We are both life- but let's not assume we know what life is, let's give it definition...
An analogy: a creator looks at all his creation as his creation, all individuals of his creation are thus, like, but from their perspective, it is how they are similar and same in a bubble(simple, really).
There are things we aren't like(are there?)- at all. They are not part of this universe.
Quoting 180 Proof
It's like other times you have eaten an apple, which is like other times you have eaten fruit, which is like eating sausages, which is like drinking, which is like other things you do with your mouth, which is like other things you do with your hands...
"What it is like to..." is usually a relation, but in Nagel it tries to become an individual, and hence a 'qual"; the result is a confusion. That's part of the criticism in Quining Qualia
The concept of the subject is a modern notion. Aristotle uses the word "subject" only in the context of grammar.
Isn't this so indicative of the conceptual confusion around subject and object; when the subject is the object?
As it stands, I'm immediately turned off any post mentioning "subject", "subjectivity", or "objectivity". Too much baggage. Too much garbage.
The experience of being you holisticaly is to have the various individual experiences of being you. Whatever your holistic phenomenal state is right now could be imagined subtracting out any particular experience. That is, I could imagine what it'd be like to not be playing on my phone and therefore not being me as I currently am.
The concept of likeness isn't complicated, awkward, or elusive. I can know what things are like and not like, even though I'm just one perceiver.
To be like something for which I have no reference, though, is impossible, like being a bat. I do know what it'd be like though not to be me insofar as I've experienced other states I'm currently not experiencing. But, to jettison the concept of likeness as incoherent because all you've ever been is you simply isn't correct.
When I read his article my reaction was, why am I supposed to know what it is like to be me?
Familiarity is not knowledge.
It's actually like eating a pear, which would be a good cross reference to use to describe to you my experience if you lacked it and needed it
Accordingly I’ll do you the courtesy of not answering your question.
Quoting Jackson
He also says that one of the major themes of the metaphysics is the analysis of the different meanings of the verb ‘to be’.
Yes, but not as a function of subjectivity.
Rein forcing my conviction that subjective and objective mark a lack of conceptual clarity.
Quoting Hanover
That, as explanations go, is not the best. Made me laugh, though.
Quoting Hanover
But one can easily imagine what it would be like to fly at night using sound to "see". So that does not seem right.
Quoting D. H Lawrence
Some people know how to use the word 'quale' and find it apt - if awkward and mootable. Some people don't know how to use the word 'quale' and find it absurd.
It remains true that the word 'quale' can be used.
It has a use - it can be used - so what's the big deal?
Why mention my name? I said nothing about quale.
I take this as distinct from what @Banno us saying. He seems to deny the subjective/objective distinction, arguing (in other threads) that reference to the experience of the cup and the cup are not to be divided into separate entities.
Here, you intentionally or not, admit to a dualism, claiming two categories, each with their distinct vocabulary. That is there are (1) cups and (2) experiences of cups, just the latter are not to be described in the language of the former.
That the whole is comprised of its parts is a pretty basic explanation.Quoting Banno
Thanks for the poem, but I think there's quite a distance between that and what the reality would be.
The big deal is that folk are mislead by misused language.
In this case, how exactly is "experiencing a red qual" different from "seeing red"? I'm not asking for an answer, since there is a plethora of posts and indeed treads on the topic. But what is germane is the common use of "like" in "What it is like to be a bat" and "What it is like to see red".
There is nothing "it is like" to see red or to be a bat; there is just seeing red, and being a bat.
Yes, agree with that.
You just don't know how or don't want to play their game.
If Wittgenstein put an end to metaphysics, why are you still playing the realism game?
Seems like a waste of your time and talents.
What is this "game?"
Language games a la Wittgenstein. Banno is the forum expert on it. It's just a sideshow to me.
Ok, thanks for clarifying.
Sure. But the game can be played. If you reject the game of chess you just stop playing it. You don't get on a soapbox about it - unless you're a very odd sort of fanatic.
This makes sense to me. Yep, it's the 'what is it like' that I find intractable.
Nagel’s most important insight is that humans aren’t bats.
The line I am taking here is more akin to Austin than to Wittgenstein; qualia as the latest incarnation of Ayer's sense-data nonsense.
And as for games, see Mary Midgley's The game game. Games is an example, not a type.
Just for my own reference, here's the article in question: What is it like to be a bat?. Nagel is arguing that consciousness is irreducible, because "what it is like o be a bat" is irreducible. While I agree with his conclusion, I think his argument is flawed; and I recall that he has somewhere pretty much agreed with that view.
Sure. Now answer the question - what is skydiving like? What would that answer look like?
What more would one expect or eccept in answer, except what it resembles.
One may not be able to say what it is like to skydive or to bat, but one might show it; in a poem, a video, or a painting; and it will not be exact nor complete, but that will not make it wrong.
Fair enough. Enjoy the game.
:wink:
Indeed, one can't put one's hand on what is being claimed.
For what it's worth, having followed your posts for too many years, it looks less and less like a game of chess and more like a chemical addiction.
Or, say, a game of chess where mate is an illegal move.
A perennially retreating victory. Chasing the horizon.
Interminable, interminably fruitless.
Wiser to warm the bench in the silence of what cannot be said.
"Like red, is the colour purple-crimson." - locked in, understood.
"I am like a fly at [I]a time where[/I] I am down depressed, desperately looking for positivity through about hundred eyes" - reasonable, suggests artistic likeness, it's nothing major to be fussed about.
We are similar and the same sometimes. This allows us to draw connections between each other, call it special relations, a type of family gene. I can say I am like a fly, because it has similarities (eyes, legs, mind, etc) and we are the same (living, breathing, homeostasis, etc).
Nagel is quite brilliant, and I've learned much by trying to work out what he has said.
it might be worth starting with a look at his suggestion that being objective is attempting the impossible task of adopting a View From Nowhere. The Bat is an extension of this line of thinking into consciousness; that the bat has a view that is different from anything else in the world, and hence irreducible. There is, then, for Nagel, an irreducible aspect of first-person conscious experience.
While it might not be possible to adopt a view from nowhere, that's not what rationality requires. Rather, what is required are explanations that work for many - any - points of view; Einstein's Principle of Relativity makes the point: the laws of physics must be such that they are true for all observers. And if we can do this for physics, why not philosophy?
Rationality does not ask for the view from nowhere, but the view from anywhere.
There is a shared world, a world about which we overwhelmingly agree. A world that we might set out in terms that are agreeable to all observers. So you, I and the bat all see the moth.
That's realism.
And further I am not sure that what I have said here is at odds with Nagel's own position. He has, if I recall correctly, objected to the direction that his bats have been flown. It's not at all uncommon to find folk claiming that because the bat sees the moth differently, there is no moth. An absurd, but ubiquitous, position.
As long as by 'wrong' you don't mean 'illegal.' Anti-realism, to your lights, may be a wrong or bad move in a game of chess. But it's not fair to call it an illegal move.
At any rate, metaphysics - even philosophy - is a game where the rules are at best in flux, at worst unknown.
I get it. But if Wittgenstein ended metaphysics, why go on with it? Genuinely puzzled.
I think it is illegal. It is plain that there are things that are true regardless of how we represent them. Claiming that this is not so is an error.
I think so.
There is a world. Not sure what you refer to as "overwhelmingly agree" about.
:100: Thanks.
Quoting NOS4A2
:smirk:
Quoting Banno
Showing flies the ways of matryoshka fly-bottles. :up:
:snicker:
If you only think it is illegal then you only think you know the rules of the game.
What kind of game is it in which the players only think they know the rules? Is such a game worth playing? worth taking seriously? Is not such a game best described as a playful chaos? If so, what is the use of investing so much time and intellect in a playful chaos? What is the justification for taking a playful chaos seriously?
Then there are other occasions when people say things like "I felt like a million dollars!"
These are workarounds to the insurmountable problem of sharing, making public, the subjective facet of experience. The objective here is to give the listener/reader some idea of what the speaker/writer is feeling/experiencing by looking for familiar landmarks such as winning a million dollars and being grabbed and wrung hard.
:snicker:
That's one of the most helpful insights I have seen on this matter to date. Appreciated.
How about The Great Wall of Consciousness or The Veil of Consciousness or ____ (fill in the blanks)
To answer that question, one has to give an account of the iinner conscious life of a bat.
We seem to have been able to imagine what being a bat is like (Daredevil, Marvel Comics) and we can probably do it for real with the right ultrasound equipment. Nevertheless, that isn't the point now, is it?
The question, at the end of the day, wants us to realize that some files of consciousness aren't shareable. They remain private and only you are privy to them and there's, as of the moment, nothing you can do about that. These files are what constitute one's subjective, first-person experience. The only way I can access these files on another person's consciousness is to literally be them; impossible, as of now, and ergo, the hard problem of consciousness but, mind you, this is probably just a temporary setback. The future is notoriously difficult to predict.
It isn't.
After all these years realist folks about these parts are still content to straw-man anti-realism to death. That's a Triumph of the Will, right there. A circle-jerk of bottleflies giving a round of thumbs-ups.
:up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up: :up:
(And I had thought flies had no thumbs.)
Quoting Banno
At any rate, into the files. Goodgamegoodgamegoodgamegoodgame
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3750115
Be interesting.
All I have to offer to this supremely sterile debate.
I suggest cracking Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle to gain some insight into folks' fundamental pathological desire to repeat themselves.
He calls it the death instinct and you're in its shadow again and again and again and again.
But I note that you are still here. What's good for the goose...
Any thread is what you make of it.
:chin: Death instinct vs. Eros (life energy)
A feckless attempt to draw you away from metaphysics once and for all. Your ethics threads are more interesting and more fruitful.
Now you see me, now you don't. :fire: :yawn: :fire:
[quote=Freud - Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. (toward the end) ]... The organic compulsion to repetition... The hypothesis that all instincts have as their aim the reinstatement of an earlier condition.[/quote]
I think I have a death wish and I have no idea that I have it!
:fear:
Then, every human being has a unique consciousness and the problem of a bat is just the problem of every single life form having unique consciousness
Aye!
As for my comment that this situation (current science) which the hard problem of consciousness calls home is probably temporary, vide infra:
[quote=Terminator T-800]Based on your pupil dilation, skin temperature, and motor functions, I calculate an 83% probability that you will not pull the trigger.[/quote]
So two distinct categories exist, the objective and the subjective , the first person and the third person? One could call this the hard dualism, or deny the subjective aide as Dennett does and end up with a hard monism. In either case, whether one considers this spilt a problem to be solved or not, one is accepting the traditional dualism between subjective and objective.
Neurophenomenologists , enactive cogntive scientists and postmodernist philosophers neither dismiss or reify the hard problem. The dissolve it by showing the subjective and the objective to be inextricable aspects of all experience rather than separate categories.
Modern science invented the idea of subjectivity. Brief comment, but I can defend it.
That’s right , by inventing the idea of objectivity. Objective reality is incoherent without a subject to apprehend it.
Exactly. Look how often we conflate "objective" with "objectively true" and subjective with "my opinion/perspective."
This is question begging. If there is a category mistake, then the primary question still remains unaddressed: What is it about the phenomenal and the tangible that distinguishes them so significantly that they be placed in separate categories?
To claim they are simply two objects of the same substance that have drastically different properties begs another question: What is it about the one than lends itself to certain properties that the other does not have?
If all "category mistake" ultimately means is that they're just very different things and you can't use the same descriptions for both of them, you've offered no explanation; you've just reiterated without explanation that the two are just two very different things.
How are they different?
:up: Yep. See my similar response here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/699747
The expression is just one way of approaching the concept. For some it works. For others it's confusing. It's not supposed to imply any comparison.
Says Nagel. But what else does the word "like" mean?
I'm not sure it has a meaning abstracted from the sentence. Consider the northern expression "Does it heck as like". You can't really abstract the meaning from how the individual words are normally used.
Here’s Dan Zahavi’s version of it:
“Compare your experiences of perceiving an apple and remembering a banana. In one respect, these experiences are very different. They differ both with regard to their object or content and with regard to their act type or attitude. In another respect, however, the two experiences have something very fundamental in common: in both cases, it is for you that it is like something to have them. Arguably, for every possible experience that we have, each of us can say: whatever it is like for me to have the experience, it is for me that it is like that to have it. What-it-is-like-ness is properly speaking what-it-is-like-for-me-ness.
On our view, this for-me-ness is a universal feature of experience. Some philosophers maintain that this for-me-ness is a philosophical myth, with no psychological
reality whatsoever. Others accept the existence of for-me-ness but do not think it is an essential or even universal characteristic of consciousness. We have argued for our view that it is universal and essential elsewhere (Kriegel 2003 and 2009; Zahavi 2000, 2005, 2011, and 2014) and will take it for granted here.
The for-me-ness of experience still admits of two crucially different interpretations. According to a deflationary interpretation, it consists simply in the experience occurring in someone (a ‘me’).
On this view, for-me-ness is a non-experiential aspect of mental life – a merely metaphysical fact, so to speak, not a phenomenological fact. The idea is that we ought to resist a no-ownership view according to which experiences can occur as freefloating unowned entities. Just as horse-riding presupposes the existence of a horse, experiencing presupposes a subject of experience. In contrast, a non-deflationary interpretation construes for-me-ness as an experiential aspect of mental life, a bona fide phenomenal dimension of consciousness. On this view, to say that an experience is for me is precisely to say something more than that it is in me. It is to state not only a metaphysical fact, but also a phenomenological fact. Here the relationship between experiencing and the subject goes deeper than that between horse-riding and the horse.We favor a non-deflationary interpretation of the for-me-ness of experience.”
Never heard that and do not know what it means.
"What is it like to be a bat?"
means the same thing as:
"How does it feel to be a bat?"
No comparison is invited.
Similarly "Is there something it is like to be a bacterium?" just means "Do bacteria have experiences?"
It's just another way of expressing a concept. If you have any sentences you find problematic I could try and translate them into equivalent ones that don't use the word 'like'. Would that be helpful?
Yes. How does it feel to be me? How does it feel to be the person in front of me at the grocery store? I have no idea and I do not think it is a real question.
This may not be a good comparison, but I think of Wittgenstein's notion of private language. You ask some how tall are you and the person puts his hand on the top of his head and says, "this tall."
Nagel's idea of experience seems to be a kind of solipsism.
'Private language' means you have a language no else has.
If you ask how it feels to skydive the answer could be "exhilarating", "terrifying", "boring", "disappointing" and so on. No need for 'resemblance' language.
True, a poem might use metaphor; I don't know how that would work in a painting or video, though.
What?
You are saying what it is like to skydive by naming experiences had elsewhere, and in skydiving.
Quoting Banno
No, I spoke in general terms of feelings, not other experiences or resemblances. If I had said skydiving is like bungee jumping that would be "naming experiences had elsewhere" or citing resemblances.
But that would not tell you how either skydiving or bungee jumping felt for me in any case, because even if you bungee jumped you would know only how it felt for you, not for me. I could say something like " you feel you are flying" or "you feel the powerful force of the air rushing past your face and body" but these are already easily imaginable, and so do not tell much that would not already be known.
We can, and indeed do, talk about what it is like; the adrenaline, the free-fall, the stomach in your mouth.
Hence, the notion that "you would know only how it felt for you" is wrong: if it is ineffable, it is not a case of knowing something.
All you can say is that only you can have your experiences; but that says nothing.
All feelings, which if the person had experienced them, they would recognize. Do you have an actual point of interest to make or are you just enjoying being pedantic?
You can also say that you can check your current experiences against previous experiences, and that in fact perception is based on this meeting between expectation derived from one’s past and the present event. This is knowing as interpretive recognition. By the same token, we can check our expectations concerning the way another person will react to and interpret an event against their actual behavior from our vantage. This is how we determine that there are ‘others’ in the first place , by their violation of our expectations that we can come to anticipate. We learn this way that other people are like me but also different. We can engage with them and form imperfect mutual
understandings using the ‘same’ language , that don’t overcome so much as they are built upon these interpersonal differences.
In sum , my ‘self’ is an ongoing checking of events against expectations. Through this process there is revealed an ongoing ‘self’ that is never self -identical but that for the most part continues to recognize itself though it’s familiarity with its perceptions of its world, its body and its thoughts and feelings. Of course, this achievement of a unified self is tenuous. Psychosis can split this ongoing unity into alien selves. But because in most cases a self-consistency is maintained over time, this provides a basis for distinguishing self from other in a fashion similar to how one experiences one’s own self as changing over time.
it's not clear to me what you had to add to the discussion.
But not just unidirectionally through language, as if we were stimulus-response creatures. There is a bi-directional reciprocal shaping between organism
and languaged community. If there were only one way shaping from the social unit to its bodies , there would be no need for the concept of ‘I’ in the first place, only a vast cultural we-self.
I think the idea of the self is something of a fetish. Hume's critique of identity is accurate. There are multiple selves without there being an identity of all the selves.
If I ask you what it's like to visit Las Vegas, would you understand what I'm asking?
Yes, I understand English.
Excellent.
My interjection? My original comment was a response to @Tom Storm; I wasn't addressing you at all, so if anyone interjected it was you. The point I made was that "what is it like to be...or do...?" just means "how does it feel to be.. or do...? and has nothing to do with resemblance.
You attempted, unsuccessfully, to argue against this, albeit without actually presenting a cogent argument. The best thing you've said lately in this thread was your point about the so-called "view from nowhere" actually being the view, not from nowhere, but from anywhere; a point which I also have made in a few of these kinds of discussions (and which I recently discovered was also made by Merleau-Ponty back in the middle of last century).
There is a general sense of self which underlies and ties all the different aspects of the self together in that they are all aspects of my self, even if some of them are in conflict.
I do not think the self which underlies is anything but all those aspects.
You can lose aspects, but not the underlying sense, of self. From my own experience I can say that the underlying sense of being myself does not change; it just consists in being me.
I have pointed out that "How does it feel to be...?" depends on resemblance as much as "what is it like to be...or do...?". "Exhilarating" has its use in the resemblance of different exhilarations.
But you are right that this it trivial.
:up: Trivial indeed, since the name of any kind of thing has its use on account of resemblances of different instances of the kind of thing named.
Knowing isn't an experience?Quoting Banno
Huh?
"What is it like to visit Vegas?"
"It's not like anything at all."
The reply is ambiguous, and that ambiguity brings out the disagreements in this thread I think. One thing the reply could mean is that there is nothing to compare it with, it's so unique there is nothing that is like it. Another thing it could mean is that if you go to Vegas you cease to feel anything at all. It is impossible to have an experience there. If that seems like an odd interpretation, consider:
"What is it like to be dead?"
"It's not like anything at all."
Again, this is ambiguous in the same way. It could mean that the experience of death is so unique there is no apt comparison. Or it could mean that when you are dead you can't experience anything.
In both examples the second interpretation is not about comparison. That's the sense that Nagel means.
Every experience is unique therefore there is nothing to be said about it.
Standing alone, the phrase "what is it like" is indeed vague, in that it can apply to many different contexts. I just Googled "what is it like" and got pages of examples in return. Example : "what is it like to be in a coma?". The implication in most cases is a desire to understand how it "feels" to exist in a different place or body or condition. Or to read another person's mind.
Although the common phrase is not precisely defined, that omission never bothered me. Because the following discussion provided a specific context. So, I intuitively understood what he was implying. However, to make it a bit clearer, I might supply the implicit subjective reference : "what does it feel like to inhabit (exist in) the body of a bat". Or "if I could exchange bodies & brains with a sonar sensing creature, how would my personal existence be different?" The ontological question is focused on our way of knowing & interpreting the world through the lens of our species-defined physiological senses.
The 2003 movie Daredevil, featured a blind hero, who could "see" with his ears. The film attempted to help us see what he saw, to feel what he felt, by converting the sound of raindrops splashing on Elektra's face into a conceptual image --- by analogy with photons reflecting off the face. It was a plausible, yet fictional, way to know "what is it like" to be a blind super-hero. However, Nagel's question was more general & philosophical, epistemological & ontological. It probed the limits of our ability to know anything beyond the boundaries of our personal body & brain. :cool:
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? :
The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind-body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
RAINDROPS FALLING ON HER FACE
The question is really asking what would one (typically) experience if one visited Las Vegas, so the answer is not so much ambiguous, as it is pedantic in taking the question literally when it is obviously (in ordinary parlance, and unless specified otherwise, at least) not meant that way.
Similarly, Nagel's overworn question "what is it like to be a bat?" is really asking "what (kinds of things) would you experience if you were a bat?".
So, in a subtle way the "what is it like?", the idea of resemblance, comes in in the form of "kinds of things" experienced, as @Banno said earlier; so now it seems to me that I misinterpreted what he was suggesting, and we were not disagreeing after all.
Or a rock. Or a tree. I am a panpsychist.
I find something of value and interest in Whitehead's panexperientialism, but the idea that rocks have minds does not convince; nevertheless to each their own...
Not that rocks have consciousness like humans. But that they act in intelligent systems like our own.
You may be interested in this paper by John Protevi. He discusses Evans Thompson’s book, Mind in Life, where he locates mind in the most general functions of all living systems. Mind and life are co-extensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Protevi suggests that it may be possible to push this back to include pre-living processes.
“…we have to worry that a definition of mind as mere information transfer involved in self-organization is so broad as to be meaningless: if convection currents in a pot of boiling water are mind, what good is such a broad definition? But on the other hand, what‘s exciting about dynamic systems modeling is that it shows self-organizing processes in an extremely wide range of registers, from convection currents through neurodynamics. So if self-organization is a univocal concept, that is, if there is a non-trivial shared structure between convection currents and neurodynamics, then we have identified a fundamental principle that links the inorganic and organic registers. So we‘re back to the cybernetic challenge: is information transfer and self-organization capable of being called ?mind? in a defensible fashion? It wouldn‘t be autopoietic cognition, because it‘s doesn‘t involve a membrane-metabolism recursive process and hence an autonomous subject position. But wouldn‘t it be ?Mind in Process,? even if it‘s not ?Mind in Life?”
http://www.protevi.com/john/Deleuze-Thompson-web-version.pdf
You'll have to ask someone who makes the mistake of placing them "in separate categories". Like "vapor" & "ice", they are different properties of water and not different substances (categories). Like "subjectivity" and "objectivity" with respect to (meta)cognition – no need to repeat the cartesian fallacy of reifying semantic functions of subject and object into "res mensa" and res extensa" substances (inadvertantly generating the interaction pseudo-problem ...)
What is it like to see a moth?
Quoting Banno
You could say that what it is like for a bat to see a moth is different from what it is like for a human to see a moth.
One explanation of "what it is like" might be "how it feels"; not only in an emotional sense, but also in sensory terms of (how it) looks, sounds, tastes, smells, proprioception, temperature, balance, etc.
What makes a subject special in this regard? Is there a way it is for any object? I'm not asking if a table or rock has a perspective or a mind. I'm asking if there is a what is the case for any object or subject? How is talking about what is the case for the environment of Earth different than talking about what is the case for your state of mind?
Quoting bert1
I doubt Nagel was implying that there is nothing it is like to be a bat. I think Nagel was trying to get at the sensory information the bat posesses and the form this sensory information takes and not only how it is like (similar to) our sensory information we possess and the form it takes, but also how it differs.
Oh indeed. I was just trying to bring out different usages of 'like', one as a way to compare, and one to indicate phenomenality.
I do not know what it is like to be me. I am not sure that is a meaningful concept.
Do you have the experience of location, of darkness and light; the experience of objects, of sensations (pain, hunger, desire, boredom), of thoughts and of emotions (and so on)?
Considered collectively, this is what it's like to be you. That's how the phrase 'what it is like to be me' is or can be used.
You can choose not to use the phrase. But you need to justify this choice.
It's not convincing to say you don't understand the phrase. But you can choose, and justify your choice, not to use it.
I have sensations, yes.
Never said I did not understand the phrase. I said it is incoherent and nearly meaningless.
If you understand it, then you can use it. That's all you need.
Understanding and use.
uh huh
What - precisely - do you find incoherent about this?
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Is it correct to say that X is incoherent but I understand X.
Yes.
No.
That's a fundamental disagreement and our dialogic terminus.
I'm not overly interested in this subject but thought it might be fun to hear from the town square:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13041/if-i-say-i-understand-x-can-i-at-the-same-time-say-x-is-incoherent
Sounds like something a p-zombie would say. Are you a p-zombie? What form does your information about the world take? For instance, how do you know that you're reading this post right now? What is it that you can point to to say, "I am reading a post in the English language on my computer screen."?
Yes.
How do you know? :smile:
I read and responded. Proof.
Proof of what?
Proof of what we were talking about.
Proof that you're a p-zombie or proof that you know? You're being evasive.
No. I was asked a question and answered. And cut the ad hominem stuff.
Proof that you're a p-zombie or proof that you know?
I was confused.
My question:
You say you're a p-zombie. How do you know you're a p-zombie?
I said nothing about knowledge.
So you don't know you're a p-zombie?
I do not need to care about the question.
If you don't know you're a p-zombie you have no justification for saying you're a p-zombie.
Your response is not you reading the post. That comes after reading the post. How do you know that you responded to my post?
Before responding, what is it like reading my post? What form does the information, "I am reading Harry Hindu's post" take for you? How do you know who's post is whose after you've written and posted your posts? What form does the information in your memory of you having written a post take? What is it like for you to remember something? What are you comparing to say that you remember writing your post if not a visual of your post and the visual memory of writing it?
A blind-sight person seems to understand what their deficiency is. They seem to be unsure about what it is that they are experiencing visually. They seem to respond to things that do not appear in their visual field without knowing what it is they are responding to. People with blind-sight don't behave like normal humans. Neither would a p-zombie.
I do not see how that is a meaningful concept.
What do you find unmeaningful about it?
I have explained this. We just don't agree.
P-zombies are specifically stipulated as appearing to be normal people.
Which is Chalmer's point. He wants to say there is a difference between a zombie and a human with self -consciousness.
Of course there is. Everyone knows there is.
Ok, close down the philosophy departments!
I put it several ways but you're cherry-picking.
Before you responded you had to read my post. It took conscious effort and time to do so. How would you describe this state-of-affairs - of you reading my post? If you wanted to describe to someone this state-of-affairs how would you do it? How would the description from someone else observing you reading my posts differ from your account of the same state-of-affairs?
P-Zombies are make-believe concepts that have no basis in reality. P-zombies are stipulated as having no experiences of color, shapes, sounds, feelings, etc. and being identical to humans in behavior. All one has to do is point to blind-sight patients as evidence that p-zombies could not behave like humans. In this sense, the concept of p-zombies are like the concept of god. They are proposed to be possible realities when one simply needs to look at reality to see that such things are not possible as stipulated.
Which is what philosophy is. One choses a specific thing to discuss.
I think we ran out.
Choose:
or
I would agree with that. Consciousness just means the way we interact with the environment.
Further, Solms says, "if the organism is going to make plausible choices in novel contexts it must do so via some type of here-and-now assessment of the relative value attaching to the alternatives".
I suggest that in Nagel's terms, it is to be like something if the subject is able to attach value character to contexts and adapt behaviours accordingly.
What do you mean by "sees"? Can an organism see it's own mind?
I think that "information" is more useful here. Just as every computer that comes off the production line and is purchased by a variety of users - over time the information in these computers will diverge in that each computer will possess different information depending on the inputs of different users.
Organisms possess information as well. The information they possess will be unique because each organism occupies a different location in space-time and possess different wants, needs and values. They're accumulation of unique input over their lives is part of the subjectivity in the information we possess.
So your options should look more like:
the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that the organism possesses a perspective of some aspects of its environment and not others.
or
the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that the organism possesses a perspective of some kinds of picture in its Cartesian theatre and not others.
Each organism possesses a perspective and a perspective is a structure of information about the relationship between the organism and it's environment. The environment appears located relative to the eyes but the environment is not located relative to the eyes. The experience is subjective because the information is about the environment relative to our self, and not any one else.
As information, we turn the information back on itself, forming a loop - like that seen when you point a camera at the monitor it is connected to. This creates a feedback loop where the information on the screen is about itself being about its self, being about its self, etc. In this sense we are not really "seeing" our minds. We are simply looping the information of our mind the same way the camera-monitor system does.