Illusionism undermines Epistemology
Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett are too proponents that conscious experience is an illusion produced by some yet to be discovered mechanism in the brain. By this, illusionists mean that we're being fooled by a cognitive trick into believing we have experiences of color, sound, pain, etc, leading some philosophers to propose there is a hard problem of trying to explain those experiences inside a scientific framework (the terminology of physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience or cognitive science). Consciousness is compared to a magic show, where the brain fools us using some slight of cognition we're not aware of.
The goal is to dissolve the hard problem without just handwaving it away or giving into some form of dualism. But taken illusionism to its logical conclusion has serious ramifications for knowledge. When I perceive an apple, I'm not just aware of the apple's color or its taste, I'm also aware of it's shape and weight. Some qualities of human experience are the basis for science. But if color and taste are illusions, what reason would we have for supposing that shape and weight are not? After-all, we know about apples by experiencing them via our sensations of color, taste, etc.
I don't see how they can get around this. Maybe there is a p-zombie argument for justifying beliefs?
The goal is to dissolve the hard problem without just handwaving it away or giving into some form of dualism. But taken illusionism to its logical conclusion has serious ramifications for knowledge. When I perceive an apple, I'm not just aware of the apple's color or its taste, I'm also aware of it's shape and weight. Some qualities of human experience are the basis for science. But if color and taste are illusions, what reason would we have for supposing that shape and weight are not? After-all, we know about apples by experiencing them via our sensations of color, taste, etc.
I don't see how they can get around this. Maybe there is a p-zombie argument for justifying beliefs?
Comments (266)
It's not at all clear what the heck the distinction would be.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Ooh, good point!
In a way, you could even say that the illusion theory is just pushing consciousness away one step. What then is experiencing the illusion?
I speak with no direct knowledge of Frankish and Dennett's work, so some caution is in order. But on the face of it it seems like a redundant middle step that explains nothing.
The whole gist of saying that something is an illusion is that we're saying our mental phenomenon--which could be a perception--turns out to get things wrong. For example, we perceive water on the road up ahead, but it turns out that there's no water in the road; it's just refracted light due to road/air temperature differences on a hot day.
But when we talk about something like experience of a color, we can't say that we have a mental phenomenon that turns out to be wrong, because all we're talking about in the first place is the mental phenomenon. If we're granting that we have the mental phenomenon of color (so that we can have an "illusion"), then we can't turn around and say that we don't have the mental phenomenon of color.
That too!
The "object" would be "the experience of a color," right?
It's even more basic than that. Colour is a real phenomenon by any account and not a merely "mental" phenomenon.
That's debatable and a minority position called color realism. Wavelengths of light and reflective surfaces are real. Whether either of those could be said to be colored in the way we experience color is controversial.
Compare this to feeling hot or cold, which relates to the amount of energy the particles in a volume of space has. Our experience of the energy can result in feeling cold or hot, but the space doesn't feel that way. Similarly, our experience of color relates to visible light reflecting off surfaces of objects.
Even granting color realism, it certainly wouldn't apply to all of our conscious sensations. Kicking a rock and feeling pain is a perceiver dependent experience, not a property of the rock.
Frankish says that the Illusionist argument can't just be pushing the hard problem back one step, so what's being claimed is that the illusion is that we have an experience at all. It's a cognitive trick. Dennett and Frankish use the metaphor of a magic show with slight of hand being used to fool our brains.
This is a good point, but I think they're using illusion in the sense of a magic trick which creates an experience of real magic that's actually smoke and mirrors where the audience is fooled because they can't think of how it's being pulled off. Similarly, our brains are tricking us into thinking we're having these experiences of color, smell, pain, etc.
As such, we're philosophical zombies according to the Illusionist. Even David Chalmers has referenced this argument on a recent podcast, saying that it's important and interesting because it provides an argument for the neurological mechanism that would cause his zombie twin in the zombie universe to argue for the hard problem!
To which the Illusionist would respond that the real world Chalmers is being fooled into thinking he's not in the philosophical zombie universe. I think the p-zombie argument is problematic, because of this, but I otherwise agree with Chalmers.
On the face of it this position has serious logical flaws. But... it would be wrong to pre-judge without reading their argument. Can you give us a reference? A specific paper?
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf
He's a link to a 22 page PDF with Keith's argument. I haven't read this one yet as I'm a lot more familiar with what Dennett has had to say over the years, which was always along these lines.
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
Cheers.
What is meant by "real" may be debatable, but according to any ordinary definition colour is real and not merely a mental phenomenon, since some at least of the processes which give rise to colour as a phenomenon are physical
Nothing is quite like we experience it. All vision shows things from an angle based on where our eyes are, rather than, say, from all directions at once. Everything is filtered, selected, interpreted. This would mean that nothing that we refer to is real. Since, it seems, actual qualities of the objects of perception lead to our seeing of specific colors, it seems to me there must be some color realism. It would be wrong to think that if there were no experiencers than the empty earth would have trees that look green - to no one, I guess - but it is not a random trait or aspect. Qualities of the things lead to our experiences. Which is the best we can hope for and would constitute a kind of realism, since no perfect realism is possible. Or I suppose I would put it that it's not binary, with perfect realism vs. some non-realism. There are degrees.
As for the references to 'color vision', this has certainly been a microcosm for epistemological debate between phenomenologists and physicalists. And it is interesting to me that Wittgenstein allegedly rejected aspects of his his own Tractatus after contemplating Goethe's (non Newtonian) 'color theory'.
What does it mean for our brain to fool "us"? Are we not our brain along with the rest of our body? Why would the brain want to fool itself? It seems like an awful lot of energy put into the brain just fooling itself.
Quoting Marchesk
It seems to me that the hard problem is the result of dualism - not the other way around.Quoting Marchesk
The sensation of shape and weight are not the shape and weight of the apple, just as the redness and taste are not the ripeness of the apple. They are all effects of the body's interaction with the apple and the light reflecting off of it. Redness is about the ripeness of the apple and the reflected light and your visual system. Any difference in any of those three causes leads to a different effect. Shut the lights off and the apple is black, not red, even though it's ripeness has not changed.
So some sensory impression isn't just about the object itself. It is about our body's state of awareness, which sensory system is providing the information (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, etc.) and it's state, and the medium in which the information travels to reach our senses, like the light and air around us. This is how illusions occur - by thinking that the experience is about the object itself, when it isn't. A bent straw in water isn't about the straw, it is about the light. We see light, not objects, and shape and color are visual sensations that come from the information in the reflected light in the environment. When we understand that we see light and not objects, then mirages and bent straws in water are what you would expect to see. The "illusion" becomes a natural effect just like every other phenomenon in nature. Consciousness also has causal power. Ideas shape the world, and where are those ideas formed if not in consciousness?
Sure, but what Illusionism is denying is our experience of color, which I think also undermines the warrant for believing in the processes which give rise to color as a phenomenon.
Seems like we agree on that.
Object would be colour. Illusion would be the mock-up of colour.
Of course you can operationally 'perceive colour', but it has been experimentally shown that that perception is ia funcrion of physiology, wavelenth, situational factors, and cultural experience. (Ref; Varela).
But the claim talked about in the initial post is the claim that the experience of color is illusory. In other words, it's a claim that we don't really have the experience, even though we think we do.
I don't believe that makes the idea any clearer. We're creating an experience of . . . real experience? But we're saying that you don't really have the experience?? What is the "real magic" part that we're denying here? It can't be experience if we're saying that we have an experience of it.
Being is first-hand, whereas what is perceived is second-hand.
Your experience relies on what is perceived, hence it is second-hand and illusory.
Is your experience real? Sure.
Is the illusion of colour based on colour? Sure.
But it's indirect knowledge; all illusion means is 'distorted image', with reflections on glassy surfaces being the prime example.
That's not what this thread is about though. The idea in this thread is that Dennett and others are saying that your experience is not real as an experience. The claim is that you don't have an experience; the notion that you do have an experience is an illusion.
Here's a brief article about it:
https://curiosity.com/topics/theres-no-such-thing-as-consciousness-according-to-philosopher-daniel-dennett-curiosity/
What I've been arguing here is more or less in the vein of what they give as Nagel's view in that article.
Now, how you deal with that is your own issue - I just provided the distinction.
You're talking about our relationship to things that aren't ourselves --the idea that we can get something outside of us wrong via our perceptual faculties. That's not at all what Dennett is saying.
A sleight of hand is a kind of distraction, not really an illusion. The magician distracts your attention while they do something else where you arent looking. Why and how would the brain distract itself just so it could do something else?
It is also refuting "I think therefore I am", and I thought that any doubting of that includes thinking and thinking takes the form if our sensory impressions. Its nonsensical.
What is the "we" that interfaces with our brains? If the interface is real, then how is it an illusion? How does this interface differ from what "we" are and what our brains are? Where is this interface in relation to the we and the brain?
We only know about brains because of our experience of them. So how does Dennett explain how he knows he has a brain that he interfaces with? The "fact" that he has a brain would be part of the illusion.
Exactly, it doesn't make much sense. And whenever I've seen Dennett talk about this stuff, he tends to ramble on about various, rather mundane optical illusions, in the traditional sense, as if that has some implication for claiming that consciousness itself is an illusion, but he never actually explains how consciousness is supposed to be an illusion.
Here's an example re a short bit of a TED talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness/transcript?language=en#t-240977
No one is claiming anything even remotely similar to "there are no optical (or other similar sensory) illusions." I don't know why Dennett is so fascinated with them, or why he thinks that rambling on about them, while doing nothing at all to say what the broader philosophical implications are supposed to be, while doing nothing at all to tie the examples together into any sort of philosophical theory or argument at all, is interesting. Dennett, to me, tends to come across as someone who kind of regrets his career choice, where he'd prefer to be doing research into perception, and specifically the various ways that the brain fills in information when it comes to perception, the various ways that we can get things wrong when it comes to perception, etc.
A more charitable interpretation would be that Dennett's not actually claiming that consciousness/experience/etc. itself is an illusion, but he does seem to be saying that, and apparently even the name of this talk was that. (Or, another possible charitable interpretation is that he's simply denying a view of what consciousness is, while saying that consciousness is really something else instead, but it's not clear just what the view he's denying is, just who would hold the view in question/just how universal that view would be, and both Dennett and well-known commentators on him, such as Nagel, Searle, etc. often do seem to be saying that Dennett is effectively asserting that there is no consciousness or that it's an illusion period.)
And it seems like people go, "Dennett says consciousness is an illusion. He showed us some optical illusions. So he must be right." It makes no sense.
Dennett, like Chalmers, Searle, etc. thinks that consciousness can't be fit into a physicalist explanation of the world. But unlike them, he takes the position that this means consciousness must be an illusion, because why would consciousness be the one thing that's an exception in the universe?
I've read and heard enough of Dennett to be convinced that he thinks there is no consciousness and we are philosophical zombies. Except that he likes to keep using the word with a different definition. Which would be consciousness in the functional or behavioral sense only, because those can be fit into a materialist explanation.
If they'd just realize that this is a mistake . . .
If it is a mistake, nobody has succeeded in showing how you can explain the subjective in terms of the objective, which is what the hard problem is about. See Nagel.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm
All the perception stuff Dennett shows in his videos is to show people can't be sure about their qualia and if they can't be sure about that then how can they commit to it being real.
Is that an issue for epistemology? Sure but there are other paths one can take like pragmatic realism
The first thing we need to tackle is that we don't have a very good analysis of what explanations are/just what makes something count or not count as an explanation.
No one really seems to care about that. They just plow ahead making comments about whether we have explanations anyway.
This issue crops up with perception in general. The ancient skeptics loved to rub people's noses in all the ways perception can be mistaken. But Dennett and Frankish only want to endorse radical skepticism for introspection and subjectivity, not the external world. Dennett is a pragmatic realist when it comes to objectivity. But I think the sword cuts both ways, as a good skeptic would be sure to point out.
Yes, since all they have, as empiricists, is experience to work with, any knowledge of the external world or even the conclusion that there must be one is fruit of the poisoned tree.
Isn't just obvious that Dennett is flogging a dead horse? The only thing his books plausibly do is illustrate, again and again, in exhaustive detail, just how utterly implausible his 'philosophy' is. And that does us all a service, because his is the most rigorous and intellectually honest explication of what materialism means when applied to philosophy of mind.
Dennett isn't alone, though. I linked to Keith Frankish's article on Illusionism.
Quoting Marchesk
After reading and hearing enough Dennett, I can't say that he even knows what he's talking about.
In this article Dennett replies to a question about whether or not he was angry with "greedy reductionism"...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/22/daniel-dennett-theory-of-mind-interview
If consciousness is an illusion, then how is free will not?
Another question and answer:
What is self-reflection to Dennett if consciousness is an illusion?
Quoting MarcheskThat isn't a problem at all. We speak objectively all the time - about the world, about our minds, about our preferences. Subjective language is just category errors where we project mental phenomenon onto non-mental phenomenon - like as if the apple were really red. The apple is ripe or rotten, not red or black. Ripeness is a property of fruit, not minds. Redness is a property of minds, not light or apples. Red and black are mental properties, or effects, that are about the ripeness of the apple, the light in the environment and the state of your visual system thanks to causation. Effects carry information about their causes. Illusions (or subjectivity) crop up when our minds don't interpret the causes correctly.
He knows that minds are shaped haphazardly (sort of) by evolution so he has faith in the scientific method before all else because it removes much of the bias.
He is skeptical on AI too for some of the same reasons.
All it shows is that consciousness doesn't accurately report the external world 100% of the time, but no one ever claimed it did. It wouldn't suggest any problem for qualia as qualia--that is, mental phenomena qua mental phenomena.
And how does this work with imagination, dreams, inner dialog? Subjective experience isn't exclusive to perception.
Much ado about nothing.
Where there is no consciousness there can be no illusion thereof. If all consciousness is an illusion, what is it an illusion of?
What the heck is he talking about? How could you have a non-phenomenal, non-qualitative introspective representation of phenomenal redness??
I think the idea is that the person doesn't know if their qualia has changed or how it has. We can agree that "color" is a quale right? I recall one change blindness experiment changed a sign in a photo from yellow to grey (or something like that) and no one noticed. The point is that the conscious states are really teleofunctional-states and not made up of bundles of qualia.
What does not noticing that have to do with qualia?
I dont see how such things can be labeled as subjective. How are your imaginings, dreams and inner dialog subjective if I can refer to them with language and use them as explanations for your behavior that I percieve? How is that any different than talking about atoms as an explanation for the behavior of matter that I perceive? Your imaginings, dreams and inner dialog have as much causal power as a boulder rolling down a hill towards your car an can be talked about like we can talk about any natural process.
They would only be subjective if you interpreted your imaginings, dreams and inner dialog as being the world, or being in the world rather than in your mind. In other words these things as hallucinations and delusions would be subjective, but could still be talked about as hallucinations and delusions by those that see them for what they are.
Because you can't experience my imagination, dreams, inner dialog and have to settle for language and behavior to know about them. And if I don't tell you, there will be experiences I have you won't ever know about, nor will you have any means of finding out, because they can't always be inferred from behavior.
It's not like we can hook someone's brain up to a machine and have it read out their thoughts or display their dreams on a tv.
This why Nagel asked what it's like to be a bat and used that as an example of how there is a gap between objective explanation and subjective experience.
If consciousness is a physical phenomenon (assuming that what counts as being physical is understood and defined well enough) then what could the illusion of consciousness be? We can't be p-zombies because p-zombies are defined as lacking any self-reflective awareness or ability to introspect. So, the illusion cannot be an illusion that we are not p-zombies.
Perhaps the illusion is that consciousness is somehow immaterial, non-physical; that it is something separate from, more than, and 'over and above' "mere" neural activity. Maybe we are just constitutionally incapable of being able to imagine or conceptualize how consciousness really is a physical phenomenon. If so, then it should not be surprising that consciousness cannot be "fit into a physicalist explanation of the world".
Which starts, unpromisingly, with a quotation from The Amazing Randi.
I started reading it, but as I see it, any appeal to 'illusionism' has to fail, because an illusion is always associated with 'a subject'. There can't be an illusion without a subject, as an illusion is by definition a mistaken, misunderstood, or misinterpreted perception. And then the question becomes, what is the agency that misunderstands? So, how to account for 'the subject'.
Like I said, we don't experience atoms and we use them as explanations for what we do see. We can't see anything smaller than a wavelength of EM energy. So there are things that we don't experience in the world that aren't just imaginings and dreams. Would those things that we don't experience thanks to the limitations of our sensory organs be considered subjective, too? In other words, are you saying that the information that is missing from our experience of the world is subjective and everything else is objective?
Quoting MarcheskNot yet. But we can hook someone's brain to a computer and have it interpret their intentions and move a mouse cursor on the screen and click on letters to type words. Google "Brain-Computer interfaces".
Quoting Marchesk
I don't understand Nagel's question. Is he asking what it is to be the whole bat, or just it's brain, or what?
He's asking what the subjective experience of a bat is like; which obviously cannot be answered since we are not bats. But really the question is "is it like anything to be a bat?". Of course, we know what the question means, but I never liked the "what's it like" part, because being a bat cannot be like anything but being a bat, if it is like anything at all. Perhaps the question should be simpler, perhaps "is there any subjective 'feel' to being a bat?". Of course the answer is that we don't and cannot know; we can only guess.
What makes us think that there is a what it is like for a bat, but not ask the same question of a computer robot with sensory systems?
It's the same as asking what it's like to be a toaster.
One thing I know for sure, is that bats produce an immense amount of shit, so we should keep that in mind when attempting to enter the mind of the bat. :grin:
Yes, but what about computer robots that process information from sensory systems (detecting level of pressure on their surface when touching objects, the information in the light and vibrating air molecules, and chemicals in the air) for the purpose of navigating its environment and finding sources of energy to replenish its finite supply? It's nervous system would consist of the necessary wiring for the transmission of electrical signals between the sensory devices and the computer brain. Would this entity possess a "what it is like"?
Again, I am unclear what Nagel is really asking. It seems to me that anything that exists would possess a what it is like to be that thing. It exists an amalgam of the characteristics that define what it is. Apples have the properties of ripeness and fructose levels. These are part of what it is to be an apple. I am not an apple so I cannot experience what it is to be an apple. Is this what Nagel is asking, or is there something more that Nagel is implying to being something? Maybe it's more of a question of whether or not an apple, computer or bat has experiences? What is an experience?
I agree that there is reasonable ground to consider the similarities between the cognition of bat and human. However, when we enter the realm of unfettered speculation, why should we not go further. For example, it could be argued that it is just as reasonable to compare the similarities between human rationality and the logic of computers (as predicate calculus attempts).
My problem is that the human being is impossibly complex, and there is much more happening in being human than in being a bat or computer. Of course this is more speculation.
Animals cannot tell us that they experience but their behavior, which certainly appears to be stimulated by fear, hunger, isolation, pain and so on certainly suggests that they do experience.
:lol:
Guano is a delicacy in certain cultures. :yum:
One of the problems with comparing humans and computers, is that computers don't actually have a neurological structure, that is, if what we are referring to by "neurological" is a product of evolutionary biology.
He's drawing attention to the fact that bats (by extension, us also) are subjects of experience. The phrase 'what it is like' is rather awkward, but I think saying that bats, birds and humans are subjects of experience ought to be non-controversial.
Whereas, I would argue that no device, no matter how complex or advanced, is a subject of experience, because it doesn't possess any of the attributes of subject-hood. A device can emulate or simulate the activities of living beings, but it's not actually 'a being'; it's a device, or a mass of networked devices; ultimately an enormous array of on-off switches, processing an enormous stream of ones and zeros.
(This was one of the connotations of the title of Asimov's ground-breaking 60's series, 'I, Robot'. The title implies that the robots in question have developed self-awareness, or subjectivity. )
I agree. Yet, I anticipate strong objections from the knowing ones.
What would you say subject-hood entails, and what is it dependent on?
Well, there's a million-dollar question for you.
I suppose one way to tackle it, is to suggest that, whatever this is, it is just precisely what 'eliminative materialists' deny is real. Conversely, its nature is just precisely what those who talk about 'the hard problem' are referring to. (Incidentally, at this point it's useful to point to Chalmer's original paper.)
Dennett, et al, say that consciousness itself is the collective output of millions of cellular transactions which collectively give rise to the illusion of subject-hood, selfhood, and the apparent first person reality of the mind.
If that sounds preposterous, well, you're not alone in so thinking. Dennett's first book on the subject was called Consciousness Explained, but critics, including Nagel and John Searle, said it ought to be called 'Consciousness Ignored', as that is precisely what it must do.
Dennett's most recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, takes the same tack, with Nagel again saying:
David Bentley Hart said of the same book, that '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.'
But Dennett shows no sign of backing down. So, how would you argue with him?
This is a caricature of Dennett's position. Dennett does not say that conscious experience is an illusion, in the sense of being unreal. He is saying that our intuitive, unexamined folk theories of "conscious experience" should not be trusted and given a privileged status, simply because they are ours.
Not so - it is exactly what Dennett says. In 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea', he says “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.' Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 202-3.
Dennett (and Dawkins) are the poster boys for neo-Darwinian materialism, and this is exactly what neo-Darwinian materialism proposes.
I wouldn't even consider Dennett a third tier philosopher. He is more of a theorist. And from a philosophical perspective, all you have to do is sit back quietly and watch his theories eat themselves.
Quoting Wayfarer
And what about those who regard it as a particular operation contextualized in some propositional format?
Right, computers don't have neurological structures, and that's why we have little reason to seriously consider the possibility that they might experience anything in the kind of way that we think we and other animals do.
I think this is unfair to Dennett, who by any account is a serious philosopher even if you disagree with him. Have you actually read Dennett? I know there are some who post on here who despise him even though they have never read his actual works.
What does it take to ‘contextualise’? I worked at an A.I. startup over Christmas and they were finding it extremely difficult to get their system to contextualise. At least some of what is required for that is ‘tacit knowledge’ - the kind of background that can only be imparted through culture and language. Devils’ own job trying to specify it.
You might be right. I won't argue.
I read him a while ago when studying atheism. I wasn't really impressed, and I felt he was rehashing many old empiricist dilemmas that have been long rendered indisputably repugnant to common sense.
But going even deeper. Is there not something unspeakable about lived experience, something that is unquantifiable, and informal?
Quoting Wayfarer
Devil never does, does he?
Yes. I believe that is what those quaint old philosophy types called ‘the mystery of being’.
Do you mean it couldn't extrapolate its binary logic into some abstraction of meaning? Go figure?
There is something else going on in natural language than what can be explained in propositional logic. And this has to do with the fact that many of the cleverest philosophers in the present age have found refuge in the sky castles of speculation, and lost sight of what it is to simply live.
What primitive idiots. They don't know the secret to life, like we do in the present age. :razz:
I think I had an identical exchange with some one else here on TPF. :grin:
I have one more concern. How can we confidently assert that propositional logic has some correspondence to life, when we haven't even determined whether or not life is rational? How do we account for the possible irrational aspect which would completely ellude any rational form?
This point always seems to be ignored.
The point about what is called ‘scientific’ rationalism is that it is ultimately always concerned with what can be measured and empirically known. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if applied to philosophy, it can only ever give rise to something like positivism. Or to put it another way, methodological naturalism is misapplied as metaphysical naturalism - which is pretty well what Dennett exemplifies.
Traditionalist rationalism is an entirely different matter, but that’s another topic altogether.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems like from the perspective of human reason, anything exceeding its bounds would appear to be quite similar to what is considered irrational. I assume you use reason to mean the faculty by which I can apprehend something rational.
Maybe you can explain how I am mistaken.
And, this is leading into a deeper philosophical question which is becoming lost in the great understanding of the present age, a much more important question: whether man discovers or creates his knowledge of the world (perhaps the hard question).
Right, but then he uses this to argue like Keith Frankish that subjectivity is an illusion.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf
Dennett's definition of consciousness is purely objective: functional, behavioral or neurophysiological with no additional experiential properties or stuff to go along with it. The colors, sounds, feels, are a trick of the brain.
This is where Chalmers and Dennett part company, but they understand each other's positions well. When you read or hear them debate each other's arguments, it's exactly on the point of whether subjectivity is real or an illusion.
Actually, the 'hard question of consciousness', which is relevant to this thread, is
Quoting Marchesk
The other questions are very interesting, but a different topic.
It fits more into a behavioral, functionalist epistemology. The focus is on its use in a given behavior but not the individual bundle of "quales" it is made out of. (So the person might know they are looking at a museum but not notice its furniture has been changed around).
The perception experiments are supposed to persuade people to think what gives the better explanation for consciousness.
Which seems to be starting from an assumption that there aren't qualia, or at least that there aren't subjective experiences qua subjective experiences that are worth talking about. But that approach isn't going to do anything but preach to the choir. It's not addressing the objections that it's "posing" itself as if it's addressing.
They're mental things done by the brain. If we use the term "subjective" to refer to mental phenomena, then they're subjective by definition. The definition just suggested in no way hinges on reference, whether any reference is possible, whether we have explanations for anything, whether you can perceive something, etc.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The difference is that those atoms aren't part of a material system that amounts to mental phenomena.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We know that consciousness arises given certain sorts of materials in certain sorts of relationships/structures, when it undergoes certain sorts of processes. We don't know if it's possible for consciousness to arise in other sorts of materials, structures, etc. So it's better to start with fewer unknowns.
Ok, but what does it mean to experience? Can you be something (in the way Nagel is asking what is like to be something) without experiences? Can you be something that has no subjectivity? It seems to me that in order to be something in any case is that you exist in an objective way that others can talk about if they had the right information, or made the right inferences based on the information that they have.
Does Nagel believe that what it is like to be a bat exhausts everything it is to be a bat including the non-neurological parts of the body that include the stomach, intestines, blood and feces? If not, then he's really not asking what it's like to be a bat. He's asking what it's like to be a specific part of the bat, no?
Quoting Terrapin Station
You said mental things are done by the brain. What if the atoms we were referring to make up the neurons in your brain? Isnt electricity a necessary component for the brain to do mental things?
He's asking what the experience of using sonar is. Is it accompanied with something like color or sound? The reason for choosing a bat is because it has a sensory modality we lack. It's akin to being born blind and then learning that other people see color, whatever that means for a person blind from birth.
But they might perform the same functions that brain structures do one day. So then it's a question of whether functionalism or information processing is enough to generate/emerge/supervene experiences. Thus the question of mind-uploading and consciousness (Greg Egan's Permutation City, San Junipero Black Mirror Episode), or replacing your neurons one by one with a silicon version to see whether consciousness fades out or remains (A Chalmers favorite).
No, not unless panpsychism is true. The things we can't perceive that we learn about through science are described in objective terms.
I'm not sure you have drawn a relevant "logical conclusion": I expect that being an "illusionist" about the putative phenomenon of conscious experience does not entail being an "illusionist" about apples, sensorimotor systems, and perception.
Maybe you can formulate the p-zombie argument for epistemology?
In the case of colour, sometimes called a 'secondary quality', the 'illusion' is that objects don't themselves have colour, they reflect various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that we use to construct the experience of colour, but the wavelengths are only a guideline - we apply various transforms, such as colour constancy, to make our experience coherent.
I can only make sense of Dennett's denial of consciousness in these terms; I have similar difficulty with his compatibilist defence of moral responsibility....
I expect most eliminativists or illusionists about the phenomenal character of consciousness will insist the path from perception to perceptual object remains open. They won't deny the existence of intermediate perceptual objects like light, sound, and odor, but only aim to characterize such phenomena in maximally objective terms -- terms that typically embrace the perceptual object construed as a physical system, and the perceiving object, construed as a physical or information-processing system in touch with the perceptual object by way of sensory contacts, while denying that there is a genuine "phenomenal character" or "subjective character" to perception.
Quoting Marchesk
I take it by the phrase "philosophical zombie", you mean a creature exactly like a human being in every physical detail, that behaves exactly like a conscious human being, but that somehow lacks sentience, or the phenomenal character of conscious experience, or something along these lines. Is that about right?
I'm not convinced this is a coherent notion.
If you're talking about brains functioning in mental ways, sure. But contextually you didn't seem to be talking about that.
It seems to me that even if panpsychism were true, we would still be describing how the world is in objective terms - just different objective terms.
Quoting Marchesk
Then the question Nagel is asking is more concerened about whether or not different senses produce different qualia, not whether or not there is a 1st person perspective of qualia?
This is a curious quote from that essay. He's pretty much stating that the "higher" levels of biology are real beyond the way we interpret and think about stuff.
There isn't really any other way he can present empirical evidence for his theory that the brain is just a big parallel processing machine with the right kind of information being copied from place to place. It's more or less saying, this is what the world will seem like if I am right.
Okay, but again, in the "what does that have to do with" department, what does that have to do with saying that consciousness is an illusion, with denying qualia, with denying the incorrigibility of subjective experience qua subjective experience, etc.?
A theory that brains work like "big parallel processing machines" is fine. It's just that it has nothing to do with the claims Dennett wants to make about subjective experience.
Quoting Marchesk
Dennett's objection is to reflexive ontologizing of naive psychological notions of subjectivity. In the linked essay he gives a quote of Searle (also cited by Frankish) whom he holds guilty of just such a practice: "where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality."
Now, being skeptical of first appearances may sound like a sound principle at first blush, but when you think about it, we hardly ever practice such skepticism, and seem none the worse for it. When it seems right to be skeptical is when first appearances suggest something totally out of the ordinary. And for a naturalist like Dennett, that is just the case with how the likes of Chalmers treat consciousness. Their ontologizing of "qualia" and other half-digested items of folk psychology seem very much like magic ("real" magic, as opposed to stage magic). And not just because of their spookiness, but because philosophically, they are nothing but lazy, magical pseudo-explanations.
Yes, he wants explanations with some meat on their bones, not just fancy names for stuff we don't understand.
He's asking what it's like to be the bat for the bat. To the degree that the bat is not aware of the "stomach, intestines, blood and faeces" then those elements of what it is to be a bat will not take part in what it is like to be the bat, even though they will be part of the conditions that give rise to what it is like to be the bat.
We don’t have a description for sonar experiences, nor do we have a way of gaining them from science. That’s Nagels point.
Which is how to account for our experience of colors, sounds, tastes, smells and feels characteristic of perception, memory, dreams, imagination in terms of the sciences. Dennett and Frankish think these experiences are illusions. We discriminate color, but we don't experience it. Color is a magic show.
Charmers is a naturalist also. He doesn’t think experience has a supernatural quality. For him, color, pain, etc. are not an illusion.
But I prefer Nagel's formulation because it gets at the heart of the objective/subjective split, which is that science removes the colors, feels, etc. to arrive at an abstracted, objective understanding of the world.
Nor am I. A p-zombie could not act exactly like a conscious human being because it is by definition not conscious. Even if consciousness were an illusion, we act in many of the ways we do, and say many of the things we do, because we think of ourselves as being conscious, and the p-zombie could not have such a self-reflexive self-understanding.
Yes, that's what saying consciousness is an illusion amounts to.
Agreed. This is my problem with the p-zombie argument. But I listened to a recent podcast with Chalmers as the guest, and he doubled down on this. Yes, his zombie twin argues that he's conscious, and yes, there has to be some mechanistic explanation for why the p-zombie makes that argument. Which would also be the same mechanistic reason for us, which is where I jump off the p-zombie bandwagon.
Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of mind uploading, but we might get general purpose AI, which then can join this debate. Will be interesting, if that happens. Particularly if they decide to troll us.
Then it is already implied that the bat has first person experiences so that you can then go about wondering what it is like to have sonar.
Quoting Marchesk
How would it be useful to have a description for sonar experiences? What purpose would the description serve?
Do you think bats are capable of intentional deception where they can fool others about the contents of their first person experiences with their behavior? If their behavior is all instinctive and it seems to me that their behavior is a direct indication of there first person experience. It would be more useful to know what they know not what form their knowledge takes.
Useful? Purpose?
This is a philosophical discussion about the nature of conscious experience. It's not about whether being able to know sonar experiences would be useful.
Because we don't brain structures for sonar perception. That's why Nagel chose bats. He could have also gone with whales and dolphins, which would have been even better, since they're smarter and have something akin to a language.
But what if the bat experiences something else that isnt color or sound when using sonar?
It seems to me that you are being inconsistent in your assumptions. You already assumed that the bat has first person experiences and experiences colors and sounds, but then you want to question whether the bat experience is the world similarly to humans?
Doesn't the theory of evolution by natural selection show us that are brain structures evolved from previous brain structures like the kind that the bat has?
That's the point.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't know whether any of that is true. The point Nagel was making is there is a gap in our understanding, because it would require us to be bats to know. Therefore, subjectivity is something additional to objectivity. Our objective descriptions of the world are leaving something out. Which shouldn't be a surprise, because we have to abstract the subjective out from experience to arrive at objective descriptions.
Now if bat neuroscience determined that bats used the same structures that we do correlating to color experience for sonar, then we could answer the question. But if they don't, we don't have a means of knowing.
Sure, but how long ago did we split off form a common ancestor with bats? If bats aren't exotic enough, what about squid perception when it comes to the feeling in their tentacles? What's it feel like to have 8 tentacles with suckers?
Then the purpose is to understand the nature of conscious experience. Unfortunately philosophy doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to solving difficult problems. That is the domain of science. Philosophers can keep asking questions until we are blue in the face, but we have to wait for science to catch up to the questions philosophy asks, or at least determines that they are incoherent questions.
Quoting Marchesk
Exactly. That's why we should be using the term, "qualia" since we don't know that the bat has experiences of color or sound.
Quoting Marchesk
I really don't see how questions like this help us get at the nature of conscious experience.
If science can solve such questions, sure. Until then, they remain philosophical.
I try to avoid qualia because it has controversial properties, and will be used by critics to dismiss the argument.
That it's subjective
They're just questions to me. It doesn't matter whether they are philosophical or not. They are all eventually solved by science, and philosophy should keep up with science in order to stay valid. In other words, they both one and the same and should be working together, not separately.
Quoting MarcheskWhat is controversial about "qualia" but not about "color"?
Quoting Marchesk
Well, this is a philosophy discussion, as people like to point out, so discuss how it is useful to you.
Here are some articles that explains how bat brains are similar to human brains:
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-human-brain.html
http://www.brainblogger.com/2018/08/23/echolocation-in-humans-and-other-animals-is-it-as-good-as-vision/
It seems to me that science is already trying to tackle this problem but the "I'm a philosopher, not a scientist" group are ignorant of this, hence the absence of the science in this discussion (until now). All knowledge must be integrated.
What is the brain structure for first person experience to say that both the human and bat have it?
You're a time traveller?
So philosophy should just be science? But philosophy asks broader questions and questions that science doesn't know how to address. Some questions like how to live are not scientific questions.
My guess would be those structures that handle sensory data and integrate them into a perception in addition to the ones for memory, imagination, dreams, thoughts and any kind of experience. There's likely a lot of overlap there.
I'm willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, that the bogey in question does act exactly like a human, according to genuine human observers. Along these lines, my point is basically a rehearsal of the physicalist's maxim: No difference without a physical difference. If it acts just the same, and it's made just the same, then it is just the same, and would be conscious like the genuine article -- would be an instance of the genuine article, and no zombie at all. The fact that we -- with our poor knowledge of the relevant empirical facts -- can imagine things otherwise seems no help at all in this matter.
Kick away the assumption I've granted, and I'll agree with you. If the zombie is an honest reporter, then it will report that there is no phenomenal character to its experience, and that it can hardly fathom what such talk amounts to. In these regions of its discourse, the zombie's behavior will differ from ordinary human behavior.
Of course the extraordinary burdens of our tortuous philosophical tradition may lead otherwise ordinary human beings to speak like zombies in this regard. Yet another example of human discourse and belief led astray by rational imagination.
Quoting Marchesk
No. My statement is based upon the fact that science has a better track record at solving difficult problems than any other method of investigating reality.
Quoting Marchesk
You seem to think that every philosophical question ever asked is coherent enough for, or worthy of, an explanation at all.
Has philosophy been able to answer the question about how people should live? If not, and its not something that science can answer then maybe it's an invalid question in the first place.
Quoting Marchesk
Then maybe the entire brain and the rest of the nervous system works together to create the first person experience - which supplies that extended feeling of being in a body with tactile sensations extending from the head where the brain is. In a sense, your mind is what it is like to be your nervous system.
If indirect realism is the case then the brains that we experience may not actually be what is out there. The brains that we experience could possibly be models of the mental processes that you claim science can't get at. Brains are how our minds model other minds. It is brains and neurons that science studies - which is the mental model of other minds.
We know, first off, that brain structure isn't identical from individual to individual, so that could easily lead to different subjective experiences. But it also seems to be the case from third-person reports that we don't all experience the same things the same ways, via different aesthetic and gustatory tastes, for example, different impressions of the same sensory phenomena, etc.
Lets just think about the Redness of the color Red. If you are Experiencing Redness or if you are having an Illusion of Redness, it is still Redness that you are Experiencing. The Illusion still gives you an Experience of Redness. The question is: What is that Redness in the first place regardless of if you want to call it an Illusion or not. Think about Redness as a thing in itself. Redness is a Conscious Phenomenon that is in a whole Category of Phenomena that Science cannot deal with yet. So Redness itself is the thing we need to think more Deeply about. Thinking more Deeply about Redness brings up the 800lb Gorilla in the room called the Conscious Mind.
So Quning Qualia quote 1:
"Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia."
Quote 2:
(in relation to Coffee taste quale intuition pump)
"It seems easy enough, then, to dream up empirical tests that would tend to confirm Chase and Sanborn's different tales, but if passing such tests could support their authority (that is to say, their reliability), failing the tests would have to undermine it. The price you pay for the possibility of empirically confirming your assertions is the outside chance of being discredited. The friends of qualia are prepared, today, to pay that price, but perhaps only because they haven't reckoned how the bargain they have struck will subvert the concept they want to defend."
It seems in quote 1 he is arguing against a specific kind of conscious experience. The second quote seems too suspiciously like the change blindness videos which he showed to philosophers that I believe that's what he is referring to.
Exactly.
Quoting SteveKlinko
I have views about that, but I think it's going off topic for this thread (although maybe we'd rather change the topic, since it doesn't seem like anyone is of the opinion that at least the language that Dennett, Frankish, etc. use in the claims they make has merit).
That was one of my suggestions earlier in the thread: "another possible charitable interpretation is that he's simply denying a view of what consciousness is, while saying that consciousness is really something else instead, but it's not clear just what the view is that he's denying, or just who would hold the view in question/just how universal that view would be."
As I said earlier in that same post: "No one is claiming anything even remotely similar to 'there are no optical (or other similar sensory) illusions.'"
The closest to definition he comes is here which he describes as fourfold.
"Qualia are: "(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness"
The experiments are less about illusion and more supposed to show the defenders of qualia are failing to meet that definition.
Yes, but Dennett has other arguments where it becomes clear he is arguing that consciousness is an illusion. We don't really experience pain in a subjective sense, because that raises a hard problem. It has to be a trick of the brain.
When he says illusion in recent years, he literally means user illusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion
It's difficult to unpack a lot of what Dennett says. Searle once said it took him a while to get what he was driving at when reading one of his essays.
But he's doing nothing to show that qualia aren't ineffable, intrinsic, private or directly or immediately apprehensible to consciousness. Rambling through a bunch of optical illusions certainly doesn't accomplish that.
"According to this picture, our experience of the world is not immediate, as all sensation requires processing time. It follows that our conscious experience is less a perfect reflection of what is occurring, and more a simulation produced unconsciously by the brain. "
Actually, that doesn't follow at all. The only thing that follows from "our experience of the world is not immediate" is itself: our experience of the world is not immediate.
If society concludes that my judgement of an object's color is wrong, it only means that my behavioral reaction towards the object isn't inferentially useful for society.
Supposing Dennett tricks you in a change blindness experiment, whereby you are provoked to gasp
"I could swear that I was talking to the same person!". Your statement at this point says nothing about your original experience. Rather, you are merely reinterpreting your original expression of your experience as being inconsistent with your present inclinations.
None of the opinions I have tomorrow about today, can refute my current opinions about today. Because tomorrow isn't today. And it is only through a post-hoc reinterpretation of yesterdays judgments, that we can say yesterdays judgments about today are wrong. For today didn't exist yesterday.
"What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green."
— Galen Strawson
To quote Galen Strawson again:
"When it comes to experience, you can’t open up the is/seems
gap. Descartes makes the point. To suggest, as Dennett seems to, that the apparently sensory
aspects of phenomenology (say) are in some sense illusory because they aren’t the product
of sensory mechanisms in the way we suppose, but are somehow generated by processes of
judgment or belief, is just to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism
of this rich seeming. It is in no way to put in question its existence or reality. Whatever the
process by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as Dennett agrees, at
least this: that it seems as if one is having a phenomenally rich experience of (in his
example) green-golden sunlight, Vivaldi violins, and so on. And if there is this seeming,
then, once again, there just is phenomenology.
— Galen Strawson
As always, Galen Strawson nails it beautifully.
This isn't contra you or what Strawson are saying, but it's difficult to believe that Dennett might actually be saying that people are effectively claiming that there are no such things as optical illusions.
Exactly this! Notice that it doesn't require any sort of interpretation as to the nature of the phenomenological, it just is our experience. And whatever mechanism neuroscience reveals behind it doesn't change the fact that it is our experience.
I feel pain, I see color, I hear sound, doesn't matter whether all the properties of qualia are coherent or whether we even talk using those terms. It doesn't matter whether one buys any of the intuition-pumps supporting the hard problem. What matters is that we have these experiences, and those experiences aren't the objective facts. Experiences of color, pain, etc. are something additional.
We have experiences and we have descriptions of the world. The descriptions are derived from experience. That's epistemology. Those experiences include the colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feels and proprioception as we interact with the world. That's how we know anything.
Is it consciousness they call an illusion? Or only the so-called phenomenal character, or qualia, or subjective experience... or some such putative feature contentiously associated with consciousness in philosophical discourses?
I mean, for instance, they do agree that there is such a thing as perception and perceptual knowledge? Such thing as observation, and observational reports? And introspection, and introspective reports? They agree there is something we may call awareness, or sentience, or cognizance, or consciousness -- I mean they agree that some animals are aware of some objective features of their environment by virtue of their sensory and perceptual systems, for instance, and have memories and intentions, and behave accordingly, so on?
If so, then it seems it's not consciousness per se that they call an illusion, but only some more subtle aspect that many of us insist belongs to consciousness, something like phenomenal character. Is that right, or am I off the mark in assessing their view?
That's correct, but it'd kind of a big deal to deny the phenomenal aspect, yes? I understand the argument to be a denial of experiencing pain, pleasure, heat, cold, music, bitter, sweet, joy, anger, indigo, pink, the smell of a rose, the felling of having a body, your private thoughts.
Of course the objective correlation to those experiences remain for the illusionist. I kick a rock and and act as if I have a pain in my foot and my neural activity agrees with my behavior (I'm not faking it), then that's all there is to the pain. With the addition of some mechanism that creates an illusion of feeling the pain.
I'm still not clear whether there is a consensus view in this conversation with respect to what counts as a zombie, and what features of consciousness the zombie is said not to possess. So far I have the impression that many of us are speaking at cross-purposes, with different conceptions of p-zombie in mind. Is there perhaps an authoritative source in the literature we might turn to for a concise characterization we might use as a guide in this discussion?
I suppose the sincere zombie could rightly think of itself as having both sensory and nonsensory sources of information about objects in its environment, including information about the object it recognizes as itself. I suppose this means the zombie would have something like "concepts" of particulars in the environment that function so as to organize its behaviors, and that one of the things it has an informed concept of is itself.
In other words, I assume the zombie will have reflexive awareness (or reflexive simulated awareness) of some kind. The zombie acquires a sort of perceptual knowledge (or simulated perceptual knowledge), by receiving information about physical objects in the environment through sensory receptors. One of these physical objects is the thing we call the zombie. I see no reason to suppose the (simulated) cognitive equipment of the zombie can't be organized in such a way as to give the zombie noninferential (simulated) knowledge of itself, of states of affairs in the (simulated) cognitive system that function like our own perceptions, memories, intentions, and so on.
In short, it seems to me the "understanding" the zombie has of itself is rather like the "understanding" it has of other things it encounters in the world; except that its "view" of itself is provided by a broader range of informative sources, including not only sensory information, but also (simulated) introspective bases of noninferential (simulated) knowledge acquisition.
In other words, the philosophers imagine their zombies without using the sort of constraint Anscombe employs in depicting her "A"-sayers in "The First Person" (see p. 24 here).
Or else: On what grounds do you suggest the zombies cannot have reflexive awareness?
A p-zombie is missing the experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels. Thus it has no subjectivity. The zombie is identical in every other way.
There are some interesting consequences for this argument. An identical p-zombie universe would still have all the same stories we have. But many stories have first person points of view. So how do p-zombies understand reading or watching someone's thoughts or dreams? How do they make sense of a character undergoing intense emotion not apparent to other characters?
What motivates p-zombie Chalmers to make arguments for the hard problem, since the hard problem cannot exist by definition in the p-zombie universe?
Well that section isn't sourced unlike other parts which contains a direct quote from Dennett's new book. I did some googling but could not find the original. It's probably original content based around Libet's free will experiment or something.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Can we posit any cogent distinctions between these "simulations" and reflexive awareness, cognitive equipment, knowledge of self and introspective bases of non-inferential knowledge acquisition?
(My own argument for its existence, pace Dennett et all, is Dennett’s own ability to argue that it’s illusory.)
Exactly.
https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/danieldennett2
At around 29:25, Dennett is asked about Galen Strawson's article concerning Dennett's denial of consciousness being the silliest argument ever made. Dennett responds on the podcast that Strawson has mischaracterized the argument. He is not denying that we're conscious, only that people like Strawson are mistaking the nature of consciousness. There are no qualia, instead there is something akin to the idea of "virtual glue" that performs the functional and informational roles that qualia is supposed to be playing.
So, on the one hand, it can seem like Dennett is only disputing what consciousness is, not that we have it. But then he endorses a 100% functional definition that's all just neural activity. This doesn't even amount to an identity theory where our subjective experiences are identical to certain brain states. It's an elimination in the vein of the Churchlands claiming that belief and desire will have no role in future neuroscience, even though we may continue to use those terms in everyday language.
So there are no "qualia", there is only "virtual glue". Forgive me if I dont see an improvement, or anything different than someone saying, "There is no God, only Allah".
Im not interested in the terms because they are arbitrary when it comes the fringes of our understanding. I want to know why the mind models other minds as grey-colored "qualia"/"virtual glue". How do we even know that we have brains if not the way our minds model other minds? It seems that Dennet is a naive realist that then contradicts himself by saying that grey-colored "qualia" doesnt exist. Its "virtual glue" - as if that is some sort of improvement over our understanding of "qualia".
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2017.0342
He states:
He then goes on to quote Richard Power:
This all seems a bit contradictory. If our minds are only content and not a medium as well, then that is saying that naive realism is the case, but then why bring in "representations"? How can they be "representations" if we access the content and not the medium?
It seems to me that our minds contain both the content and medium and the illusion comes when we confuse the two. Apples are not red. Redness is the medium for the content of ripeness. Redness is the mental representation of ripeness in an apple. When we say that the apple is red, we are confusing the medium with the content. Apples are not red. They are ripe. "The apple is ripe" is a statement that refers to the content and not the medium. Referring to the redness of the apple as a mental property, not an apple property. Not only that, but our use of language is the medium that refers to the content (the qualia) of our minds. We use the word, or sound, "red" to refer to the color that isn't a word or sound, and isn't the property of anything external to the mind.
Just as most, if not all, effects are also causes, and effects are not their causes but are the medium with which we access the causes, so to is redness both a medium and content - an effect of our minds interaction with the world and a cause of our use of language.
Evidently some of the professionals paid to philosophize and to instruct students in their art seem to think it's a pretty big deal. Me personally, I'm not sure there's any deal here at all. It may yet turn out to have been another of those pseudoproblems on which philosophers squander social resources, misleading and confusing each other along with the laity, leaving their own special mess in the literature for two or three generations until academic fashions shift professional attention to some new fantastic output of the rational imagination.
But here we are. I take it part of what's at issue in the zombie discourses is whether we should count cognition without subjective experience and phenomenal character as a form of genuine cognition, or whether we should insist that seeming-cognition without anything like subjective phenomenal character is not genuine cognition, but only, at best, a simulation.
Of course philosophers who deny that any of us have subjective experience with a phenomenal character do not thereby deny that any of us are conscious, in some sense of the term. Likewise, those of us who insist that human consciousness ordinarily involves subjective experience with a phenomenal character do not thereby deny that it is possible for a thing to be conscious in some sense of the term without resembling us in that one respect.
It seems the difficulties in this conversation are in part merely terminological. Perhaps we'd be better prepared for our conversation about zombies if we'd first clear up our use of relevant terms by considering differences and similarities among humans, nonhuman animals, and artificial intelligences, none of which (here by definition) are zombies. I mean terms like "consciousness", "self-consciousness", "sentience", "awareness", "experience", "cognizance", "cognition", "knowledge", "observation", "perception", "introspection", and so on.
Suppose we claim that any AI that passes the Turing test but does not have subjective experience with phenomenal character is not "conscious", but only an artificial simulation of a conscious thing; for, according to us, a thing only counts as "conscious" if it has subjective experience with phenomenal character. This claim doesn't inform us what kind of intelligence AI has, or what kind of consciousness we have; rather it informs us of a rule of use for the word "conscious" and its cognates.
Quoting Marchesk
Even in cases of pain, the subjective experience is correlated with and directs us to objective states of affairs inside and outside the sentient animal's body.
I expect the illusionist will argue that his sentient animals acquire, process, organize, and act on "information" just like ours do -- only without the subjective experience.
The hard problem here is that when you try to abstract the "subjective experience" from all the objective states of affairs, you come up against the limits of expression and ineffability.
Shift the burden: If the illusion of subjective experience with phenomenal character is the way it appears, then it appears to be a persistent illusion of reliable experience. But what, according to the illusionists, is the difference between a reliable subjective experience with phenomenal character, and the chronic illusion of a reliable subjective experience with phenomenal character?
That sounds exactly like the argument that consciousness is an illusion, and at least in this case, it's an outright denial of subjective experience.
One more quote from the same article:
I'll say it has no "subjective experience with phenomenal character"; but allow that it does have simulated subjectivity. It has features we ordinarily associate with subjectivity: It seems to have a point of view; it seems to observe and report reliably; it seems to act rationally with respect to a priority of values and purposes; it acquires, organizes, reports on, and otherwise acts on "information" about its environment, including the part of its environment we identify with the thing in question.
Quoting Marchesk
Arguably the p-zombies, as well as some sorts of advanced AI, would each have a sort of first-person point of view. I mean, we can say they make reliable introspective reports analogous to ours. For instance about states of appetite and emotion, about goals and plans and intentions, pains, sense-perceptions, memories, daydreams....
Their observations and reports about things outside them as mediated by sense-receptors will be as fine-grained and reliable as ours; and their observations and reports about things inside them as mediated by "introspective processes" will be as fine-grained and reliable as ours. I believe this comes by definition in these discourses; this is part of what it means to be a p-zombie, if there could be such a thing.
Quoting Janus
Do you mean, what's the difference between the imitation and the genuine article? As I've noted, this seems to me a definitional question, at least in part.
The difference I have in mind is the one I've been chattering about here under the unhappy label "subjective experience with phenomenal character". If there is such a thing, then I suppose ultimately it's an empirical question, which sorts of things in the world have and which do not have subjective experience with phenomenal character.
Once we posit -- the way we do in these strange discourses -- such a difference, we might consider the application of the distinction in relevant fields, to see where there may be lines or fuzzy boundaries to draw among similar objects.
Some of us claim it's self-evident that human animals have subjective experience with phenomenal character. Perhaps the claim that "something exists" is self-evident in a similar way. Both claims seem supported by the fact of experience, of experience like this, the experience of minds like ours.
As I noted a moment ago in my previous post, the hard problem here is that when you try to abstract this putative "subjective experience" from all the objective states of affairs, you come up against the limits of expression and ineffability.
I would put the burden on those who deny there is such a thing as experience in the sense in question. For it seems evident that there are appearances, and that things like us are appeared to.
Quoting Marchesk
I haven't read much Chalmers.
I take it the problem can exist in a p-zombie universe, as an object of discourse and figment of rational imagination.
I've brought Graziano's theories to the forum before - primarily his attention-schema theory of consciousness. I believe that what he is proposing is that attention is interpreted as the point of subjectivity. The existence of attention is what provides that feeling of being in your head and attending to the contents of the mind. It is really just a brain mechanism of amplifying certain sensory signals over others.
But Graziano seems to make the same mistake Dennett is making. They both talk about color as if it exists out in the world, when modern science says it doesn't. Electro-magnetic radiation exists out in the world and our brains process information about electromagnetic radiation and the processed information is color. Color and sounds have an aboutness to them. If they didn't then they would be the actual things themselves and color would exist out in the world and naive realism would be the case, and representations wouldn't.
What use is it to know if an apple is red or not? It isn't. It is only useful to know if it is ripe or not, and the existence of color is our way of knowing that the apple is ripe or not.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
P-zombies would use language in a way that would never refer to colors or sounds or feelings. They would use language in a way that refers to the causes of colors and sounds and feelings. They wouldn't use terms like, "red", "loud" or "painful". They would use terms like "680 nanometers" (the wavelength of EM energy that is registered as "red" in the mind), "amplitude", or "injury". In a sense they would use language as if they had a view from no where. They would never say that an apple is red. They could only say that the apple is ripe.
The question I have is how does a 680 nanometer wavelength of EM energy convert into the color red? I can imagine wavelengths as black wavy lines and then I can imagine a blotch of the color red as two separate things. Are Graziano and Dennett both saying that there are no wavelengths of EM energy and that red exists out in the world which we access directly?
Good post above (your second-to-last post now) that I agree unfortunately doesn't really clear up what Dennett is claiming very well.
And yeah, it's weird that he seems to be embracing representationalism there via Richard Power.
I find it amusing when Power says, "We know that our perceptions or imaginings of trees, faces, etc. are distinct from the objects themselves"--as if that's worth pointing out. As if anyone thought that a perception of a tree might be, in fact, identical to the tree. I know that Dennett has made comments in that vein a number of times as if he's saying something insightful.
I don't know, a lot of it comes across to me like a bunch of very confused imbeciles trying to figure out how to turn on a light switch.
"The brain has arrived at a conclusion"
"Introspect and seem to find x"
"Our cognitive machinery accessing internal models"
"An elaborate story"
ALL of those things are the subjective awareness that he's denying. You can't admit all of that by means of explanation and then turn around and deny it.
Re " . . . is not correct" ". . . is wrong" etc., he's talking about the correspondence between subjective experience and other things that aren't themselves subjective experience. That's fine to talk about that, but it has nothing to do with denying subjective experience qua subjective experience.
Also, to know that subjective experience has something wrong, it's necessary to have subjective experience that you believe is getting things right.
For example, the only way to say that the brain is getting "what green looks like" wrong, you need your brain to be capable of getting "what green looks like" right, whereupon you note that there's a discrepancy.
And that electromagnetic radiation is what we're calling color out in the world.
Only a narrow band of it. The rest of it has no color for us.
Quoting Terrapin Station
As if anyone thought that the perception of EM energy (redness) might be identical to the EM energy.
If they arent identical then how can we be referring to the same thing? How does red differ from EM wavelenghts of 680 nm?
The two idioms you gesture at here, which I might distinguish as ordinary language and scientific language, are both cultural products of human animals, cumulatively informed by experience of the empirical world as it appears to us.
I see no reason to suppose that p-zombies -- which are by definition in these discourses, I take it, physically and behaviorally identical to human beings -- would prefer either one of these idioms any more than we do.
You seem to take for granted that the term "red" is primarily subjective. On what grounds would you support such a claim? Concepts like the concepts of red, loud, and painful all seem to have objective associations and criteria, so far as I can tell. They're less precise than the measurements made by those equipped to measure more precisely; but isn't that precision mainly a matter of the instrument employed, not of the distinction between subject and object? I mean, for instance in the first case, the naked eye, and in the second -- what do we use for that -- a spectrometer (the output of which is available to us via the naked eye or some other sense-receptor)?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I haven't read enough Dennett to answer for him, and I don't believe I'm acquainted with Graziano.
I'm not sure I'd follow you in saying that "wavelengths convert into colors". To me it makes more sense to say that our color concepts range over physical objects. The word "red" is a name primarily for wavelengths of a certain frequency-range with fuzzy boundaries; and is a name derivatively for physical objects that emit or reflect light of the specified range "in ordinary circumstances". I would argue that much traditional puzzling over "secondary qualities" consists in pseudoproblems and misconceptions, and should be cleared up through a rehabilitation of our concept of perception.
What "converts" red light into an experience of red light and an experience of objects that emit or reflect red light? Cognitive systems like ours with sense receptors like ours.
This has it backwards. Our color concepts come from experience prior to any scientific understanding of optics, and then they were mapped onto the science as a correlation with our color experiences.
This is where the scientific explaining away of the phenomenal goes wrong. It assumes science is apriori and experience comes after. But it's the other way around. Science comes from experience. The foundation for science is empiricism. Science is concerned with explaining the various phenemona of perception.
Maybe I should press this definitional issue:
The p-zombies about which I've heard rumors are not just
i) any AI that passes the Turing test; nor just
ii) any AI automaton that passes the Turing test and outwardly resembles a human and is normally mistaken for a human under a wide range of ordinary circmstances; but rather are
iii) biological creatures physically and behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings (which thus of course pass the Turing test), which creatures -- by definition in these discourses, if yet somehow inexplicably -- lack the thing we here agree to call "subjective experience with phenomenal character".
Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses?
Yes, but I'm skeptical of p-zombie argument because I don't think it makes sense for them to make the same arguments about consciousness. Still, the thought experiment serves a purpose of illustrating what's being debated.
I prefer asking what it's like to be a bat, or whether a computer simulated world could have conscious inhabitants.
It seems to me I have it the right way, and go a bit further than you allow. I trace the phenomena to the places they seem to appear, even when they appear outside heads.
Our color concepts are informed by a collective experience of color embedded in our language.
Our experience of color, in its turn, is informed by colored objects: light of various ranges of wavelengths, and other things that emit and reflect light of various wavelengths.
So it seems, to all appearances.
Quoting Marchesk
I would reject the claim that the story I tell about color "explains away the phenomenal"; and I believe that story is in line with a contemporary scientific account of color.
I strongly agree, science is rooted in experience of the empirical world. I say science is nothing but a rigorous and systematic extension of ordinary empirical knowledge. Perhaps this indicates a range of common ground? On the other hand, I'm not sure what connection you're trying with this particular line of argument. I've never heard anyone speak in a way that suggested "science is a priori and experience comes after". What do you mean here?
Right. Particular ranges are what we're calling colors.
Obviously "perception of x" is different than "x," no?
I haven't read every post and I didn't see people arguing with you about that, but yes. That's what a p-zombie is.
Under physicalism, the argument is incoherent/inconceivable, because the properties of anything are determined by its physical constitution (including dynamic relations of parts). So you couldn't have something that's physically identical yet that has different properties. That's in fact not conceivable (at least outside of doing some very loosey-goosey fantasizing that ignores ontological details--it's akin to saying that it's conceivable that any physical system has any arbitrary property).
I don't recall anyone arguing about it, but on my read it's been tough to ferret what consensus there may be about the definition we're trying here; and occasionally an interlocutor's remark has led me to wonder if we have different conceptions in mind.
I normally prefer to clear up terms in philosophical conversation before proceeding to agreements and disagreements.
Now at least there are two of us signed on to the same formulation, a formulation which seems adequate for present purposes on my end.
I can't figure out if it's the end or beginning, Terrapin.
If colors, pains, etc. are an illusion, what makes us think the world we perceive is any better off?
I was thinking about this today and I remembered how TGW would talk about the Cyreneics, and how they went to the opposite extreme regarding perception, and denied that we knew anything about objects or the world. Instead, all we had was what appeared to us in experience.
I think both sides make a mistake in endorsing radical skepticism about our experiences. Different sides of the same coin.
I think P.Churchland has a vastly different view to Dennett in that he sees the direct empirical experience as being more informationally rich than our folk psychology can account for. For example, a description of Pat's son by the fire:
Quoting Churchland
Dennett in contrast believes that most of our minds are built up out of cultural memes.
OK, but it still seems reasonable to ask if there is a cogent distinction there. I'm not convinced there is. I mean we can stipulate whatever we like, but it doesn't follow that what we are stipulating will necessarily be cogent just because we stipulated it.
With Dennett and Frankish, I'm skeptical of the hard problem, p-zombies, qualia, and radical privacy of experience.
A necessary part of dissolving the hard problem is to identify false or misleading pictures of consciousness. One such picture is the Cartesian ghost in the machine.
One illusion, then, is the ghost (along with its attendent qualia and radical privacy).
But a second (and opposite) illusion is that humans are machines.
What is needed is a different picture that doesn't implicitly assume the Cartesian model either in whole or in part. And that requires paying closer attention to the ordinary and specialized language that we use. Our practical experience in everyday life is what grounds our language and knowledge about the world (which, of course, includes language and knowledge about ourselves).
So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions?
Quoting Andrew M
Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, only that we take the primary/secondary quality distinction seriously.
Color, sound, etc. are not illusions (i.e., stop signs are red). What is an illusion is the false picture of color, sound, etc., either as radically private or, its opposite, as definable independent of human experience.
Quoting Marchesk
Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. The point is that, similar to optical illusions, such distinctions can affect how we perceive the world in hard-to-notice ways.
It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. The room doesn't feel like anything objectively, but it does have molecular motion based on the amount of energy in the system.
Science is only possible because we can make these distinctions.
What would the difference between ii and iii be if the automaton had an outer layer that looked like flesh and therefore looked human and behaves like a human? The only real difference here would be one is electronic while the other is biological. Are you saying that biological matter gives rise to subjectivity while electronics cannot? I think that is part of the problem. I think we should be thinking of this from a perspective of information processing which can be performed by both biological and electronic machines.
The problem with p-zombies is that one is expecting the same effect from different causes. If we should expect the same results from difference causes, then that throws a wrench into all scientific knowledge that we've accumulated over the centuries. For me, a p-zombie is impossible, and it is possible for electronic machines to have a point-of-view because a point-of-view is simply an information superstructure in working memory used to navigate the world. P-zombies must have a point of view in order to behave like humans. If they don't then they can't behave identically to humans and would be illogical to expect one to.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I asked before, "Is it useful to perceive the apple is red?" I asserted that it wasn't. It is useful to perceive that the apple is ripe. Now the question is, is perceiving that the apple is red the same as perceiving it is ripe? Is the only way to perceive the ripeness of an apple is to see redness of the apple? If the answer is yes, then it IS useful to perceive the apple is red. One might say that redness of apples IS the perception of the ripeness of apples.
I wouldn't use the term "subjective" here. I agree that our concepts have an objective property as we can talk about others' minds and their contents as if they are just another part of the world. Subjective is a property of language use where category errors are made in projecting value, or mental, properties onto objects that have no such properties. You might say that I am committing the same category error in attributing mental properties to computer-brained robots, but I am asserting that computer-brained robots have mental properties of working memory and a central executive (attention) that attends to the sensory information in working memory.
There would be a "what it is like" for the computer-brained robot. It would be how the information superstructure is organized in its working memory. The information superstructure would be organized in such a way as to include information about the self relative to the world. That is how the world appears to us via our senses. The world appears located relative to the senses. That is what a point-of-view is, or what some would call, "subjective".
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I agree, and is why computer-brained robots with sensory devices like cameras, microphones, and tactile pressure points where information comes together into a working memory would have "experiences", or a point-of-view.
This sounds like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I'm unclear as to where that is a property dualism, strong emergentism or some form of identity theory.
The false picture is, for example, that only one's perception of the stop sign is red (or some variant such as sense data or phenomena), and not that the stop sign is red.
But perception (and human experience) is the starting point for explanation whether ordinary or scientific. You don't get behind it or transcend it, you instead explain things in terms of it. Including, in principle, perception itself.
Quoting Marchesk
I find that hard to parse. Do you mean we don't perceive the room? But we can feel the hardness of the walls when we touch them, or the coolness of the air. And that can be investigated scientifically.
It's also not clear what the "objectively" qualifier is adding if not just to say that such perceptions are beyond the province of scientific investigation. Which is just a reassertion of the hard problem.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm only familiar with Locke's primary/secondary qualities distinction which is a philosophical distinction. I'm not aware that science makes any use of it, or why it would be useful.
Science is an objective, third person enterprise that abstracts away from individual perception to formulate equations, models and laws. This is fundamentally based on the realization that properties such as extension, shape, mass, composition and number belong to objects, allowing us to systematically investigate the world and form predictable explanations.
Quoting Andrew M
It's not a false picture at all because the color red is what we experience given the kind of visual system we have. The scientific explanation is that packets of electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths are reflected off molecular surfaces into our eyes where cones are excited to send electrical signals to the visual cortex, where neuronal activity performs whatever functions result in an experience of seeing a red colored object. The experience is a correlation and not part of the explanation for molecular bonds, optics or neuroscience.
Quoting Andrew M
No, I mean that our perception of room temperature is a creature dependent experience. Notice how one person can feel hot, another cold and third just right in the same room. This sort of perceptual relativity was noticed in ancient philosophy, leading to skepticism of external objects. If the honey tastes sweet for me and bitter for you, who is to say that sweetness belongs to the honey? Instead, I am sweetened or I am whitened was the preferred formulation of the Cyrenaics, similar to how we sometimes say I'm cold. If I kick a rock and feel pain, the rock feels nothing. Pain is my experience of kicking a rock.
The physical explanation is not an experience of heat or cold, but rather the combined energy of all the molecules in motion, which we don't experience directly (or we would have known about atoms and chemistry from the start).
Quoting Andrew M
It's just a realization that naive realism is untenable, and we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. Science is our best attempt to get beyond how the world appears to us to explain how it really is (however incomplete it may be).
it's pretty obvious when we discover that solid objects are mostly empty space and the the visible light we see is only a small part of the EM spectrum. It's clear we don't experience the world as it is, thus the distinction between appearance and reality.
So as they see it, their view might undermine traditional epistemology, but traditional epistemology is already, again in their view, impossible.
PA
Or not so reliably, since this is accompanied with an illusion of color resulting in much ink spilled over the hard problem and also, the problem of perception (given other illusions such as optical, hallucinations, and perceptual relativity).
Yes, it is like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I don't see how it could be any type of dualism as dualism in any form is contradictory and has a hard problem itself of explaining how two different types of "properties" or "substances" interact. I have no idea what "strong emergentism" is (nothing comes up in a Google search). As for identity theory, that seems to have more to do with direct realism vs indirect realism. Is the brain you experience a mental model of others' mental information processing? When you look at another person, do you experience them as they truly are - a body with a brain, or is that just a model of what they really are - information? What about when you look in a mirror and see your body, but don't see a mind? What does that mean in relation to what you are? What are you when you look in the mirror - a mind, a body, something else?
Strong emergentism means something truly novel that couldn't have been predicted beforehand with perfect knowledge comes into existence when the right physical configuration occurs.
Some people also call it spooky emergentism. I think it falls under the title of non-reductive materialism. I consider it be a kind of dualism, because its emergence can't be predicted by knowing all the physical facts before hand. It's a new addition to the universe. One can easily imagine physically identical universes lacking strong emergence. It's a tacked on feature, basically. Kind of like God saying, let there be consciousness (or universals or whatever) when matter is arranged a certain way.
What is it like to be a bat? I suppose this line from Nagel, as much as any other in our tradition, directs us to the heart of the matter in these discourses, the thing I've been calling subjective experience with phenomenal character.
To answer in good faith the question, what is it like, the introspective phenomenologist must acknowledge the unity of experience, the integration of phenomena, the original synthesis of the manifold... and make room in his account for a whole phenomenology of nature. Empirical science is a most rigorous and complete phenomenology of nature, grounded in the ongoing investigation of appearances.
Could a computer simulation contain genuinely conscious characters? To me this seems an empirical question we're not currently in position to answer at this point in the history of our empirical culture. I tend to like Searle in these regions. Our conceptions of sentience, awareness, consciousness, cognition... seem informed by our own experience as sentient things, and by our recognition of other things that appear in the world along with us and seem likewise sentient. It seems reasonable to say that the only things in the world we have to date encountered that clearly count as sentient things are animals. It seems reasonable to expect investigation to reveal that there are biological bases to consciousness, and to direct empirical investigation accordingly.
Taking that much for granted, I suppose it is a distinct empirical question, whether consciousness may also be produced in other ways, by other biological or nonbiological means.
But it seems an error to suppose that consciousness can be produced merely by winding enough of the right sort of "information processing" into an AI program. To wit, Searle's Chinese room.
There is nothing it is like to be a simulated mind.
I think the position is unintelligible. If I am to accept that the whole of sense experience is an illusion, I no longer have any grasp on the idea of the physical world, nor can I attach any meaning to the suggestion that there are these "reliable machines" that "survive". All of that stuff belongs to the allegedly illusory world of sensory experience.
I know they will reply that it is not that the world of sense experience is an illusion, but the sense experience itself. I cannot see that there is any difference between the two.
PA
And that realization or perspective is a human one (i.e., it's based on the kinds of creatures we are), not a God's-eye perspective.
Quoting Marchesk
Our experience is observing the stop sign out there in the world. We describe it as being red because of the kind of visual system we have. If we had a different visual system, we would describe it differently.
Quoting Marchesk
Right, it can be valid and useful to describe things in those ways. And it doesn't really matter whether you think of the honey as tasting sweet for you, or the honey as being sweet relative to you (consider the analogy with special relativity, where observational reports are reference-frame dependent). The actual experience is in the interaction between the subject and object. Whether or not your experience generalizes for others is an empirical question. If it doesn't, then it can be investigated further - is it due to genetics, or the environment, and so on. There is nowhere a need to posit qualia or sense data.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm arguing against both direct and indirect realism as generally conceived. What I'm arguing for is a relational view that, as you say, holds that we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. What I'm also arguing is that language (whether ordinary or scientific) is grounded in our practical interactive experiences in the world, not in qualia or, on the other hand, in external/intrinsic/absolute properties.
Quoting Marchesk
There's no contradiction between an object being solid and being filled with mostly empty space. It's use doesn't imply that. But it's a good example of a false picture that people might hold. And some things are indeed invisible to the naked eye which we discovered by using, among other things, our eyes. It's no more or less a part of the world for that.
The distinction between how things appear and reality is fairly mundane. Most of the time a straight stick appears straight. But in some scenarios, such as when the stick is partly submerged in water, it appears bent. But we don't perceive "appearances" or qualia. They are ghostly objects that arise from invalid philosophical distinctions.
If we perceive the world as colored in, and science explains it without the coloring in, then the appearance of color needs to be explained. It doesn't matter whether we call colors relational, qualia, secondary qualities, representations, mental paint or whatever. Changing the language use isn't going to help.
One might think that neuroscience or biology would be of help here, but the coloring in isn't found in explanations of neuronal activity or biological systems either. This is why we have questions about whether other animals, infants, people in comas, robots and uploaded simulations are or could be conscious (experience a coloring in in their relation to the environment). We can ask what or whether it's like anything to be a bat or a robot using different terms, and the same issue arises.
Right. One question you could ask is can you ever really perceive experience? I don't think you do. I don't perceive the experiences I have - I undergo them; I am the subject of experience. When I say 'I'm having an experience' - say, if I try and relate what I'm experiencing to someone by telephone - then I'm trying to convey to them how I feel, what I see, and so on, but what I'm describing are all artifacts or attributes of experience. The actual experience is not an object even to myself.
I think it's just this fact which makes eliminative materialism possible in the first place. Because of the fact that the nature of experience itself can never be 'objectified' it is, on those very grounds, never to be found amongst the objects of empirical analysis. Which is how the eliminativist can claim that it is unreal! It's like saying - science knows what is the real basis of experience, which is neural activity and the like; the first-person sense of experience that comprises your sense of self is generated by that, and dependent on it, therefore, it has no inherent reality. And there's no empirical argument against that stance.
Myself, and many others - Searle included - think it's a preposterous argument, but it still keeps being made. But leaving that aside, considering it in those terms at least helps clarify what is actually at issue.
Searle's Chinese Room is a thought experiment that is easily debunked for many reasons, one of which is that Searle never defines "understand" to show the difference between "real" understanding and "simulated" understanding. Is there a phenomenal difference between the two? Is this relying on the untenable, and biased, position that carbon-based constructs are special in that they generate consciousness while silicon-based constructs cannot?
In the thought experiment Searle attempts to show that the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese, but the problem with Searle's thought experiment is that the instructions in the room aren't for understanding Chinese, or more specifically, the instructions aren't for interpreting the arbitrary symbols the same way as people from China would.
The visual and auditory symbols we use for communication are arbitrary. Large groups of human beings have simply agreed upon the rules for interpreting the symbols. We could have agreed upon different rules, just as other groups of human beings have. Many groups use the same symbols (their alphabets are similar) in different strings to mean the same thing, ie. tree, arbol, arbre, etc. So understanding some language is merely knowing the rules for interpreting some symbols to be able to apply that knowledge by using those symbols to communicate with others in coherent conversations.
The man in the room isn't given a set of rules for interpreting the symbols that people in China were given. The man understands something, and it is what to write when he sees certain symbols. That is what those symbols mean to him, and he could eventually become experienced enough to memorize those rules so that he doesn't have to reference them in the room any longer, they are now in his head.
If the man had rules that translated the Chinese symbol to the English equivalent, which Searle says that the man does understand (it's his native language), then he would begin to be able to interpret the symbols the way people from China would.
The native language of computers is machine language - the binary language of 1's and 0's. Programmers can create programs in machine code, but it is very time consuming so we have high level languages like Java and C+, which are more like English. But these programs need to be compiled which converts the high level language into machine code for the computer to execute. The computer understands machine language but needs an interpreter to understand other languages, just you and the man in the room would. The problem with the rules in the room is that they weren't an interpretation of Chinese into English. They were some other set of rules.
So computers can understand things, but is there a phenomenal aspect to their understanding? How do you know that a mass of grey matter has any phenomenal aspect to it?
What sort of experience shall we agree to call "perception", Wayfarer?
There's a powerful tendency in our tradition to divide introspective awareness from perceptual awareness, and to characterize perception primarily along the lines of the paradigm of visual exteroception, to the neglect of other perceptual modalities. These are unjustifiable biases.
I suspect the tendency to divide perception from introspection owes a great deal to the rationalist-theological prejudices and ambitions inherited by the early Kantians, and perhaps, more generally, to the problematic appropriation of skeptical philosophy in the early modern West. At least some of Kant's predecessors, however, including Locke and Hume, used the term "perceive" to characterize our relation to what we may call "ideas", "experiences", or "mental operations". See, e.g., Shoemaker, "Self-knowledge and inner sense: Lecture I".
We should aim to address substantive issues here without getting bogged down in futile terminological disputes. Philosophers like Shoemaker acknowledge that "[p]erception and introspection are of course alike in being modes of noninferential knowledge acquisition" ("Self-Knowledge and inner sense: Lecture II"). Most often I follow them in this usage, though now and then I try another idiom, still perhaps rough-hewn, according to which any instance of awareness is perception.
I suppose that last slogan indicates the sort view I track. To me it seems the most reasonable way to line up our terms according to the balance of appearances. The formulation gives broad scope to correlate concepts of phenomenon, observation, empirical world, and Nature; and facilitates or guarantees the integration of first- and third-person points of view in a single person in a single world.
Along these lines, I would argue that experience is among the available objects of awareness for the self-conscious sentient creature. We encounter our own experiences in time and place. Our experiences are among the things in the world that appear to us.
It's easy enough to characterize experiences, because each of them is shot through with objective character. This objective character extends throughout the body of the sentient creature, and remains open to empirical investigation.
To insist that experience has "subjective", as well as "objective", character, is not to suggest there is a rift between subjective and objective "worlds", "realities", "facts", or "entities". Whoever would make that sort of suggestion need support it on some other grounds, or admit it's only one imaginative possibility among indefinitely many other imaginative possibilities we may project beyond the balance of appearances.
Along those lines, the skeptic puts at bay the claim that sense-perception puts us in touch with empirical objects, while introspection puts us in touch with some supernatural, extra-empirical, domain.
On what grounds would we claim that sense-perception puts us in touch with empirical objects, while introspection puts us in touch with nothing, makes nothing present-to-consciousness, leaves us mysteriously witnessing or knowing-that in an empty arena, without any observable connection to things in the world that are observable?
We learn only so much by gazing. We investigate natural phenomena and empirical objects -- including the things we call sentient animals -- by moving around, trying things out, and collecting observations according to the balance of appearances.
We don't know everything there is to know about an empirical object by catching a few glimpses; nor by recording and assessing ten thousand years of glimpses. What can it even mean to say "everything there is to know"?'
We get a small bit of information about objects, and make fallible, if generally reliable, reports and inferences about objects on the basis of observation in every mode of "noninferential knowledge acquisition". We remain ignorant of "the whole truth" of any object we observe.
Or why should I suppose there's some relevant difference between introspection and other modes of observation along these lines, that I've overlooked so far in this account?
Quoting Wayfarer
I hope I've made clear that on the sort of view I favor, experience is objectified along with everything else that appears to us, on the same sorts of bases, the various modes of awareness.
Why trouble with preposterous arguments, when you can cut them down in bunches at the preposterous assumption without which they don't follow?
I'm saying that experiences are not objects of awareness, because that implies a split between awareness, on the one hand, and experience, on the other. I think when we undergo experience, then there's no such division, that we are 'in' or 'undergoing' the experience, which is constitutive of our being at that moment.
You might say, well if experience is not an object of awareness, then what is? To which I would respond, all the many objects of experience that surround us at every moment of waking experience. Our conscious experience comprises mainly subject-object relationships - relationships with other beings, who themselves are subjects of experience, and so not simply objects, as well as relationships with the objects that surround us. I don't find the subject-object nature of mundane existence especially problematical or mysterious.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
The first sentence in the thread is
Quoting Marchesk
So, is representative of 'eliminative materialism', which I remarked seems preposterous to many people. D. B. Hart commented in his review of Dennett's latest book that '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.' So that's what I'm aiming at in my remarks above. I'm trying to provide an account for why it is that apparently well-educated and serious academics that describe themselves as 'philosophers', and are so regarded by the public, could entertain an idea that others think is preposterous or deranged. Do you see what I'm getting at? I'm not articulating a general philosophy here, I'm simply making a very specific point about what it is that allows 'eliminativists' to argue as they do.
But that's just wrong. A misuse of words.
Hm. Odd, again, that folk can't see this.
Yes, it is odd, isn't it, when folk don't think as we do, when what seems self-evident to me apparently does not seem self-evident to others!?
I don't know about you, but I am able to be reflexively aware of (at least some of) what I am presently experiencing, including the sense of experiencing of it. What could experience be other than either the sense or the idea of it? I we could not objectify it how would we even come to the idea in the first place? This is not to say that experience is usually or even often objectified, but just that it can be. In a similar way, as Heidgger points out, objects, the world itself, are not usually objectified ( present at hand) but "transparent" (ready to hand).
I have been searching for our arm but I couldn't find it; perhaps it is an illusion? :joke:
Seriously, though I agree with you that pain is no illusion, sensations are as real as anything, in fact are the processes by which we know anything at all that we might call "real".
So it is only real if you have a sensation of it?
Nuh. Too simple to think of counterexamples.
So you think of yourself as a little mind inside a head, looking at a screen? A homunculi?
You don't have your thoughts, you have sensations of your thoughts?
You seem to be introducing an unnecessary "middle man" here. We experience or have "external" objects by sensing them. Similarly, we experience or have "internal" objects by sensing them. It's nothing to do with homunculi.
'Sensing' is a verb and you seem to be reifying that as a noun 'sensation' which you think I think represents something we "have" or "experience". In other words you are projecting your own presuppostions into my thinking.
Not I; that was your doing.
But yes, I heartily agree he is not needed.
It wasn't my doing; see what I was adding as you responded. Perhps the confusion was caused by my use of "sensation", but remember that word may be considered to be an objects or an act; it can be read as either "a sensation" or "the general act of sensing".
a) One has a sensation of seeing the cat.
b) One sees the cat.
You said: Quoting Janus
One sees the cat is equivalent to one senses the cat. Sensing the cat is an act of sensation.
Quoting Banno
Yes, and what exactly is wrong with that?
So you are saying that one has a sensation of seeing the cat.
What is wrong with that is the unnecessary middle man, in which we agree.
No I am saying that seeing the cat just is sensation (sensing) of the cat. I mean of course you could say that one has or experiences the sensation of the cat, but that is just a different way of saying the same thing and should not be taken to be introducing anything other than, or "over above" having or experiencing the cat, except perhaps if it refers to the sense that being reflexively aware of yourself seeing the cat might be introducing something extra to merely seeing the cat.
Yeah, you want to keep your cake and to eat it, too.
So let's take your account at face value.
Can you see a cat, yet there be no cat? Don't we then say things like "I thought I saw a cat, but I was mistaken"? Or more to the point, perhaps we say that the cat we thought we saw was actually an illusion?
In contrast, one might say one senses a cat, yet there is none - again, it was a mistake or an illusion...
But you are trying to claim that seeing the cat just is sensing the cat...
I suspect your analysis is fraught.
You're beginning to sound like creativesoul! :razz:
I'm not saying anything like that the existence of the cat is dependent upon our seeing, or sensing it or whatever locution you want to use.
Quoting Banno
I'm not trying to claim anything other than "seeing the cat" and "sensing the cat" mean the same provided we are talking about visual sense of course.
My original point was just that we know anything that we might call "real" only via sensing or sensation of one kind or another.
So, it remains unclear to me as to what your objection is.
No - @creativesoul sounds like me.
Quoting Janus
Sure.
Quoting Janus
And presumably you would now take into account the difference demonstrated above.
Quoting Janus
And when you tried to fill that in, you included thought as a sensation:
Quoting Janus
We don't sense our thoughts, we think them. We don't sense our feelings and emotions, we feel them.
So you are either wrong, or you have simple extended the notion of sensation beyond it's common ground.
And you are not alone, as this thread hangs on such misconstrual.
Yep.
@Janus This is perhaps the same point as I am making.
We see water on the road up ahead, but it turns out that there's no water in the road, and we were mistaken...
We perceive water on the road up ahead, but it turns out that there's no water in the road, is our perception mistaken?
Seeing and perception are not the same.
...as if mental phenomena - pain, grief, thought... were not real.
Actually, what is felt is not the temperature of the material - how much energy it has - but the material's capacity to transfer heat to or from the skin. That's why metal feels cold.
That inference is just invalid.
Everything is always, already interpreted...
Every thing.
Hence, there are things.
Your obtuse use of language. Despite my having shown that it is an error to do so, you insist on treating sense and see as if they are the same.
Yes, thinking thoughts is the same as sensing objects. If we are not aware of our thoughts how would we know what they are?
Yeah, might have to leave it there. Others might choose to pick appart this argument for you.
So you are claiming that we do see water on the road, but we do not sense water on the road, or what? Apart form your mere dismissal by insult of what I have been saying descent, what is the difference between visual sensing and seeing in your opinion?
Why leave it to some "others" you imagine will agree with you? Do you refer to others because you are trying to suggest normatively consensual support for your view over mine rather than argue for it or is it because you are not able to pick apart the argument?
Because it's time for a pie and some shopping.
Is the only way to be aware of something, to sense it? That's the hidden assumption in your argument. Is it true?
How else would we be aware of anything? The distinction between kinds of interoceptive sensing and kinds of exteroceptive sensing is fairly uncontroversial I think.
For example how do you know you are thinking? You can say you are aware of it, but that doesn't amount to saying more than that you know it. What does that knowing or awareness consist in?
That's quite right at times...
Certainly - but I still say it's a metaphorical sense of 'object'. It's not an actual object, because 'experience' by its very nature is inseparable from a subject; experience always requires an experiencer. It's not objectively real - which, I think, is another facet of the hard problem of consciousness.
I don't think you understood my post. Please read it again in full and the post I was responding to. I was using a quick reductio and to a large degree we are agreeing.
I can't see it.
I hope that means you can't find the original post or the one it was replying to..... Here we go....
I was taking his as saying that our experience of color has nothing to with the objects. I think it has something to do with the objects. He argues that since the qualities we experience are not like the qualities that stimulate the experience, they are [my words] 'mere qualia'. But since....
I added in the bolded this time to make it clearer.
I certainly could have argued this better, but in no way I am denying the existence of things. In fact my argument is quite in the opposite direction, though not focused on that issue. It is arguing there is connection even in those qualia where what we experience is likely quite different from the objects 'out there.'
There aren't straightforward word-for-word translations - those words have different uses in various philosophies and tend to have a cascade effect onto the use of other words. A case in point is with the terms "experience" and "consciousness" as evidenced by this thread.
Quoting Marchesk
You can ask the same kinds of questions about length, mass and time which we also perceive in particular ways. Philosophers can take the concrete findings of science and attempt to untangle the conceptual issues, but it's still up to scientists to do the hard work of investigating, differentiating experiences (such as with the honey sweet/bitter example), and coming up with explanatory models.
They're not the same only in the way that a Yorkshire Terrier and "dog" are not the same.
There was a faith-healer from Deal,
Who said, ‘Although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel.’
Quoting Andrew M
Isn't the study of color-blindness and vision in general a science that includes explaining color? It seems to me that it depends upon the scientific field you're talking about if you want to talk about color. It seems to me that the view from nowhere would leave out the first person because the visual system isn't part of the causal relationships that they are currently talking about. Start talking about visual systems and scientists start using terms like "color", and even use human test subjects to report their first person experiences to study.
Like I said before, color is the interaction between many different things. Color isn't just about the object that is colored. It is also about the light in the environment and the state of your visual system. If we're not talking about light or visual systems, but strictly the causal relationships prior to those interactions, then what need is there to include color in the explanation?
Since the first person is a participant in the world, a theory of everything from a view from nowhere would include and even make predictions about, what happens in the first person.
By folks, do you mean Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish? They're the ones advancing the view that consciousness is an illusion — a magic show or simulation caused by some hidden mechanism in the brain neuroscience will reveal.
The argument I'm opposing in the OP is that since consciousness experiences such as pain don't fit into a scientific understanding of the universe, at least when philosophers start discussing what it's like to be in pain, therefore consciousness must be a sort of illusion caused by some hidden (from introspection) mechanism in the brain which neuroscience will reveal in good time.
I call all the things of which we are aware "objects of awareness". I'm not sure this is contentious usage.
If it's reasonable for me to apply a predicate to something, and to say it is or it isn't, it's so or it's not so, then it's reasonable for me to call that thing a logical object, an object, at least, for thought and discourse. Anything we can speak of may be called an "object" in this sense. Should I suppose there is much more implied when we call a thing an object in this way?
In some cases, we say, an object of discourse is also an object of current perception. To apply two distinct concepts to the same object in this way does not imply a real "split" between two different objects, one that is discussed and another seen or touched; rather there is one object considered under a range of concepts. There is an x; I see x; you see x; we discuss x; it seems x is a stick half under water; from where we stand the stick looks bent....
According to this usage, if I am aware of my own seeing then this seeing of mine is an object of my awareness, it is a thing in the world I am aware of. This formulation does not entail that there is one entity, my seeing, and another entity, my awareness of my seeing. Awareness "belongs to" the seeing, awareness "is in the seeing", or there is no seeing. We need only shift conceptual orientation in the act of seeing, to shift cognitive attention from the proper object of visual perception (the thing seen) to the reflexive object of the same visual perception (the thing that is aware of itself as seeing).
When I look up at the heavens, is it the star I see, or only a snatch of its light? Is it the sky I see, or only a small patch of blue? Is it the airplane I hear, or only a chunk of the soundcloud produced by its jets?
It seems there is no fact of the matter in general with respect to such questions. There is a wide open range of conceptual stances we may take in the face of the same perceptual "presentation-to-consciousness", the same appearance. It seems whenever there is something "present to consciousness", whenever there is consciousness, whenever there is awareness; we may adopt an introspective conceptual stance, and consider the fact of presentation, the fact of appearing, in whatever relevant modes; and we may adopt a reflexive conceptual stance, and consider the fact of awareness itself, and whatever thing is aware; so long as we are equipped with concepts adequate to those stances.
"Awareness implies an object of awareness". On its own this formulation doesn't imply anything about what sorts of things may be objects of awareness, or what sorts of things may have awareness, or what sorts of awareness there may be. If there is awareness, there is awareness of something; and if there is awareness, there is something aware. That's all that's implied by such formulas.
I suppose we should call pure reflexive awareness a limiting case, in which awareness "abides in itself", is aware of itself alone. It seems an empirical question whether and under what circumstances this sort of awareness may be perfectly achievable by animals like us with minds like ours.
Quoting Wayfarer
I might agree the awareness is "in the experience". There is no experience without awareness.
I won't say that I myself am "in the experience". I see no reason to suppose that everything I call myself is contained within my experience, any more than everything I call this stick is contained within my experience. Likewise, I won't say "experience is constitutive of my being". I'll say my being is constitutive of my experience. It seems I am a sentient animal, not a pure awareness or a pure experience. It seems the thing we call the awareness of a sentient animal coincides with biological processes, much as the thing we call the digestion or the thing we call the respiration of a sentient animal coincide with biological processes.
I can take up Descartes's offer, and conceive of myself as pure mind. I can also conceive of myself as a turtle. Conceiving doesn't make it so. Perhaps I can learn to restrict my use of the term "I", so it refers only to the experience or the pure awareness of this sentient animal, and not to the rest of that thing. But this extraordinary strain on usage does not inform me about the real connection between this mind and this animal, nor about each "part" I have thus imaginatively divided. The sources of that information remain the same as before. It would remain the case that nothing but empirical investigation -- on my view, including but not limited to the noninferential knowledge we acquire on the basis of introspection -- can inform us about those notionally distinguishable "parts" and their connections.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm still not sure what distinction you're drawing with your terms "experience" and "awareness"; nor how similar our views may be beneath our divergence in linguistic usage in this particular regard.
We've gone down this road together before: I'm still not sure why you refuse to call the things we may call "subjects" in one analysis "objects" in another analysis, nor how you propose to justify this strange dissent. To call something an "object" is not to entail that this thing is not sentient. To call something a "subject" in a subject-object relation is not to imply that the same thing cannot be taken as an object in a subject-object relation; why should we suppose there is a problem along these lines? It seems to me you take far too much for granted in your use of terms like "subject", "object", and "being", without providing any justification for your uses, which so far seem motivated primarily by arbitrary connotations or prejudicial philosophical ambitions. In any case, it seems you'll need to erect a more general vocabulary, atop the layer in which you carve out by fiat rules for use of terms "subject" and "object" and "being". For I suppose even you will allow that the relations you distinguish as "subject-object" and "subject-subject" relations may be considered generically -- say as subject-[subject OR object] relations. And I suppose it's this more general conceptual layer that most of us seem to have in mind when we use the term "object" to ride over such distinctions.
I don't find any of the relations you indicate to be more "mysterious" than any of the others. A conscious thing is aware of something. The fact that it is aware at all, this remains, at least for now, a special sort of mystery. The thing it is aware of -- whether it is aware of itself, or of another conscious thing, or of a nonconscious thing -- remains for all time a mystery, in that we can never know the whole truth about any thing.
We piece our view of the world together over time, in the manner of Gassendi.
I presume I've made my stance on the theme presented in the origin of this discussion about as clear as anyone here has done. With respect to the topic engaged in the sentence you have indicated:
I have made plain that I find it absurd to suggest that consciousness is an illusion, and absurd to suppose that sentience like ours, awareness like ours, consciousness like ours, can be adequately understood as if our minds were nothing but fine-grained complex information-processing machines.
I have sought to clarify that what's at issue here is, specifically, an alleged feature of consciousness we may call "subjective experience with a phenomenal character", not some derivatively so-called "consciousness" without the special feature in question. This point seems to slip perhaps in and out of view in the exchanges of various speakers here among us. I'm told the eliminative materialists argue that the feature in question is an illusion; and I'm aligned with those who oppose that claim.
I have suggested that the best way to handle imaginative claims, like those ascribed to the eliminativist, is to shift the burden (their claim is prima facie false, and seems groundless); criticize the concept (what's the difference between a reliable experience and a reliable illusion of a reliable experience); and challenge correlate assumptions (reject the claim that introspection does not inform us about empirical objects in the empirical world).
There's not enough time in a life to address every outlandish claim made by the metaphysicians, materialist or otherwise. Why waste time sucking every one of their pumps, or responding to every single report of an experiment in which a scientifically measured feature of a situation is not quite what it appears to an introspective reporter?
Materialism is not science. Materialism is metaphysics.
Cut them off at the pass.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you mean to suggest that anyone who disagrees with you on what you consider basic principles in philosophical conversation should not be counted a "philosopher"? That would strike me as another sort of unwarranted "eliminativism", even less well-founded than that of the eliminative materialists.
I suppose it's a combination of imagination and ignorance that enables metaphysicians and epistemologists, among others, to make claims and weave complex narratives that seem outlandish to many people. It seems there's no end to the variety of fanciful stories that can be conceived. It's not only eliminativist materialists, and it's not only materialists, who should be taken to task for littering our philosophical discourse with boondoggles.
By your "very specific point", do you mean your claim that:
Quoting Wayfarer
and by "this fact" do you mean the fact you impute when you say:
Quoting Wayfarer
and along these lines, do you mean to suggest that if everyone would use words such as "experience", "awareness", "subject", "object", and "being" like Wayfarer, then the eliminativist's argument would be impossible to articulate?
I've given some indication of the extent to which you'd have to go to make your peculiar use of such terms comprehensible to me, and your objections to my use of them justifiable to me. I just don't see how this lexicography is relevant to the problem at hand.
In particular, as I've argued, the claim that "experience is not an object of awareness" seems absurd.
Aren't we aware of our experiences?
Not in the least. Just prior to that, I say:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Which means we're basically in agreement.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
That's what I'm trying to do.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Sentient beings are subjects of experience. Human beings are rational sentient beings. Objects are insentient. (There are marginal cases, including vegetative life forms and viruses, which aren't relevant here.)
We can regard other beings as objects which is one of the de-humanising tendencies of (for example) behaviourism, which eliminative materialism is an example of. But materialism, generally, is a philosophy based on the fundamental reality of objective physical entities, obviously. I don't see how that's contentious, it's the dictionary definition.
The 'nature of subjective consciousness' is really the subject-matter of the hard problem of consciousness.
In any case, are mountains, galaxies, oceans or molecules objects? not according to the definition you presented above.
If you tried to explain the concept to a non English speaker, what would you point at?
I don't disagree with 'experience' being different, however, I am not sure that the argument implicit in this question works. What would you point at to explain matter or atoms or space - since they are everywhere as experience is, the latter at least, in a sense, everywhere? I think perhaps with an incredible amount of miming, perhaps involving comatose patients, sleeping people who you whisper to and then wake and whisper to, bricks and gerbles, having two people one who sees you do something the other facing the wrong way, you might be able to 'point' at experience. IOW I think you could convey to experience' to someone non-verbally, and precisely because they are conscious experiencers, they would have an aha experience...finally getting that it is the experiencing you are
on about and not just 'responding' or 'reaction' (that is active functions) in all your tomfoolery.
i think, actually, it would be very interesting to try. I was great at Charades. And it could be tested.
I only know anything at all because I'm an experiencer.
Under a wide range of "ordinary circumstances", human observers would be unable to distinguish (ii) and (iii) from each other or from genuine human beings. But once you poke through the outer layer, anyone would be able to tell them apart. Whether or not anyone happens to tell them apart, (ii) and (iii) would in fact differ in physical, if not "functional", composition.
Having an "outer layer" that resembles something you are not does not make you that thing.
I take it the philosophical puzzles about p-zombies do not mainly involve problems concerning how humans may be deceived by human-like appearances, but rather problems concerning our conceptions of consciousness -- problems purported to go much deeper than the Turing test.
Quoting Harry Hindu
To me it seems the other way around: The problem with p-zombies is that the hypothesis proposes different effects from the same causes. For by definition, the zombies are "molecule-for-molecule" the same as we are, take in information and process it just like we do -- by way of the same physiological processes -- and behave just like we do... but somehow, as yet inexplicably, have no "subjective experience with phenomenal character".
They are identical to us in every feature we may observe in the third-person, no matter how deep you cut into the body of the thing, from whatever physical point of view, in any cross-section, under any microscope, no matter what ideal-physics technological instrument you use to explore that body.
This is not an AI problem or a "wires and pulleys" problem. It's weird metaphysics, or an attempt at some sort of a priori test of our concepts of conscious experience.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We're agreed on one thing at least. P-zombies seem impossible to me too. It's beginning to seem that we support our respective hunches on somewhat different grounds.
I'm not sure what it means to say a "point-of-view is simply an information superstructure in working memory used to navigate the world." Used by what or by whom? What is an "information superstructure"?
Doesn't the p-zombie have any "information superstructures"? Doesn't it "navigate the world"?
I might use a camera to help me navigate the world. But the camera does not navigate. Does the camera have any "information superstructures"? What kinds of things have "information superstructures"?
We say I have a point of view, the camera has a point of view, a painting has a point of view, a narrative has a point of view. I suppose we mean something different in each sort of case by the phrase.
Surely there's room in that hodgepodge for an application of the same phrase to p-zombies. What sort of view does it make sense to say they'd have; what sort of view does it make sense to deny they'd have -- assuming for the sake of argument that the notion of a p-zombie isn't self-defeating.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What if I want to arrange a room for a photo shoot or a painting?
What if it saves a hungry animal time, calories, and risk, to forage for red fruit instead of ripe fruit, since, in this forest, the reddest fruits tend to be ripe, and to stand out better from green leaves, so it's more efficient to distinguish red at a distance than it is to distinguish ripe at a distance?
I don't see what this calculus of utility has to do with questions of the subjectivity or objectivity of color and the experience of color; nor with the more general themes we're tracking here.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Let's celebrate this piece of common ground.
Do we agree even to this extent: It's not just "as if" minds are parts of the world. Rather, to all appearances, it seems that each thing we call a mind is in fact part of the world.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Do you mean to say that the only correct use of the term "subjectivity" is in the analysis of erroneous speech acts? I don't believe I'm acquainted with this rule of use.
I agree that people often seem to err by speaking about nonsentient things as if they had value in themselves (e.g., moral, aesthetic, or practical value); by speaking about nonsentient things as if they were sentient; by speaking about nonliving things as if they were living; and by speaking about nonpurposive things as if they were purposive.
But would you say the assessment of errors like these are the only contexts in which it makes sense to employ a distinction between "subjective" and "objective", or between "subjects" and "objects"?
Quoting Harry Hindu
It depends on how you propose to characterize "the mental" as a category that applies both to humans and to other information-processing machines (e.g. those that pass the Turing test); and on how you distinguish or decline to distinguish "mentality" in this generic sense from a more specific sort of "mentality" enjoyed by sentient beings.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I can accept all of this without agreeing that "minds" of this kind (even those that pass the Turing test) "have experience" or "are sentient" in the same way human animals have experience and are sentient.
To all appearances, it seems there's more to minds like ours than taking in, organizing, and acting on information.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I agree that instances of the relevant sort of AI, like the hypothetical (and biological) p-zombies, would make reliable introspective reports just like our reports, informed on similar bases about similar states of affairs.
But, unless you can persuade me that some of these "mental" machines are also sentient just like we are, then I will continue to deny that they are "aware" or "sentient" in the relevant sense, that they are "subjects", that they "have appearances" and are "appeared to", that they have "subjective experience with a phenomenal character", that they have "minds like ours", that there is "something it's like" to be such a machine. Though the resemblance be uncanny.
Quoting Harry Hindu
By now you catch my drift: It seems to me we should distinguish between i) generic concepts of "mind", "experience", "point of view", and so forth, which we may agree to apply to a wide range of genuine and artificial minds; and ii) more specific concepts of "mind", such as the genuinely sentient mind and the nonsentient imitation mind.
I suppose this remains a contentious position in our times. It seems there's no definitive way to resolve the dispute on philosophical grounds. So we rehearse our conceptions in the face of strange claims, pending further results of empirical investigation.
But the "outer layer" of humans is no different than robots. Its just physical stuff - not some mind. That's the point I'm trying to make - no matter how many layers you peel back on a human or a robot, you never get to their mind - why? Why would you say that carbon-based brains possess mind but silicon-based brains don't? What reasons would you have for saying that other than exhibiting some bias?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I was referring to the behavioral end of the p-zombie argument. It expects p-zombies to behave (the effect we observe) like humans even though the cause of those behaviors are different (subjective vs no subjective causes). I used the example earlier of how p-zombies would us language. How can a human or p-zombie talk about things that they are never informed about - like the existence of color or depth perception?
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Sure. Your take from the molecular end is just as valid. We're both taking about how p-zombies are the result of incoherent causal relationships and therefore an unlikely, if not impossible, scenario.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Exactly. It's an issue of indirect vs naive realism. How do brains and/or minds exist independent of our own visual information processing of them? Are the brains that we experience visually the result of processing visual information about minds?
Well, what is a "view"? What is an "experience" for that matter? How do others' "views" and "experiences" relate to the neurological and computational processes that we visualize (or part of our view)? We never access another's "view" or "experience". We access some neurological or computational counterpart. Why?
I would say that information superstructures exist in memory, and a central executive would be necessary to determine what, or attend to the, information within memory is useful achieving some goal. Your camera has memory and even a small processor that runs a small program for organizing the contents of its memory. Now the question is does your camera have a some degree of a "view" or an "experience"? I think the answer to this question would stem from one's take on the indirect vs direct realism debate.