Can Consciousness really go all the way down to level of bacterias and virus?
So I was reading theories and concepts related to consciousness when I came across this:
[b]"Where do we draw the line? At vertebrates? The nervous systems of insects may not be as complex as ours, and they probably do not have as rich an experience of the world as we do. They also have very different senses, so the picture that is painted in their minds may be totally unlike ours. But I see no reason to doubt that insects have inner experiences of some kind.
How far down do we go? It seems probable to me that any organism that is sensitive in some way to its environment has a degree of interior experience. Many single-celled organisms are sensitive to physical vibration, light intensity, or heat. Who are we to say they do not have a corresponding degree of consciousness?
Would the same apply to viruses and DNA? Even to crystals and atoms? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that consciousness goes all the way down. He saw it as an intrinsic property of creation."[/b]
It seems that the writer is trying to imply that since many single-celled organisms respond to light, heat and vibrations, they must havee some corresponding degree of consciousness. (He doesn't claim so but also doesn't deny it)
However, since the stimulus of light, heat and electricity are purely physical and the response of the single-celled organism is based on chemical pathyways, which are often not very hard to study, we should also conclude that anything that reacts to a physical event, must be conscious.
Now if we consider a device that has photoreceptors attached to it and simply beeps everytime light strikes it, shouldn't we argue that this device too is conscious in some sense? It surely picks up stimulus and through physical mechanisms reacts to it similar to a single celled organism. Now is it false to say that complexity of the response does not determine the degree of consciousness ? I can see why the complexity and number of stimulus can affect the degree of consciousness, but surely how we react to it cannot (maybe how conscious we are can affect our response but not the other way around). Hence, our device must have the same level of consciousness that the primitive single celled organsim has since it reacts to the same stimulus, although in a the reaction is less complex.
If that is the case, then even electrical appliances which operate when they pick up electron flow, shoud be considered conscious in some sense.
Are those conclusions valid based on the criteria the writer uses to say that bacteria might be conscious?
Or can response to stimulus be an indicator of consciousness only in living organisms?
[b]"Where do we draw the line? At vertebrates? The nervous systems of insects may not be as complex as ours, and they probably do not have as rich an experience of the world as we do. They also have very different senses, so the picture that is painted in their minds may be totally unlike ours. But I see no reason to doubt that insects have inner experiences of some kind.
How far down do we go? It seems probable to me that any organism that is sensitive in some way to its environment has a degree of interior experience. Many single-celled organisms are sensitive to physical vibration, light intensity, or heat. Who are we to say they do not have a corresponding degree of consciousness?
Would the same apply to viruses and DNA? Even to crystals and atoms? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that consciousness goes all the way down. He saw it as an intrinsic property of creation."[/b]
It seems that the writer is trying to imply that since many single-celled organisms respond to light, heat and vibrations, they must havee some corresponding degree of consciousness. (He doesn't claim so but also doesn't deny it)
However, since the stimulus of light, heat and electricity are purely physical and the response of the single-celled organism is based on chemical pathyways, which are often not very hard to study, we should also conclude that anything that reacts to a physical event, must be conscious.
Now if we consider a device that has photoreceptors attached to it and simply beeps everytime light strikes it, shouldn't we argue that this device too is conscious in some sense? It surely picks up stimulus and through physical mechanisms reacts to it similar to a single celled organism. Now is it false to say that complexity of the response does not determine the degree of consciousness ? I can see why the complexity and number of stimulus can affect the degree of consciousness, but surely how we react to it cannot (maybe how conscious we are can affect our response but not the other way around). Hence, our device must have the same level of consciousness that the primitive single celled organsim has since it reacts to the same stimulus, although in a the reaction is less complex.
If that is the case, then even electrical appliances which operate when they pick up electron flow, shoud be considered conscious in some sense.
Are those conclusions valid based on the criteria the writer uses to say that bacteria might be conscious?
Or can response to stimulus be an indicator of consciousness only in living organisms?
Comments (136)
If consciousness is defined as reflexive, operant, or instinctual responses to external stimuli, then the term could possibly be used with most animals.
When philosophers discuss the hard problem of consciousness, they cannot talk about the term without respect to verbal behavior. Verbal behavior is necessary in order to discuss mental states.
No, because consciousness implies “mental content”, an infrastructure that can internally model or represent itself vs. everything else. There needs to be a virtual reality simulator built on top of the reactive system, but whether such a system can fit in an insect brain or a single cell is still a question.
Also, you don’t run from a bear because you’re scared. You get scared when your body starts to run. Reaction first, experience second, or it might be too late. It’s also why people often do or say things they don’t “really” mean.
My own take is that consciousness is a term that humans use to refer to subjective experience. We assume that since we have it, other things must have it as well; possibly because we can't imagine what existence could be like without it.
Birds have feathers and fish can breathe underwater, but we can't. The qualities of subjective experience we have seem to me to be an evolutionary adaptation albeit on less observable than gills and feathers. But as we know from arguments on the existence of God, it's not possible to prove something doesn't exit. However, if panpsychists want to insist that virus are conscious then it is up to them to demonstrate their claim. This they haven't done.
It's right to ask panpsychists for positive demonstrations of course. But it is also interesting to consider what the 'default' position actually is. It is arguably more parsimonious and reasonable to assume panpsychism on the grounds that the only body we know about for sure is conscious, namely my own (and similarly for each of us). So then we have to consider whether there are two kinds of bodies in the world, conscious and non-conscious, or just one, conscious. If all other things are equal, it seems to me that the default position is that there is one kind of body.
The important part here is the qualifier "in some sense". We really only understand one kind of consciousness - our own. We infer from that understanding certain observable features that we consider evidence for similar consciousness.
Beyond that understanding, the term is meaningless. Yes you can muse about whether a computer, or even a specific program within is "in some sense conscious", but the phrase contains no information, it's empty. You have no idea how such a consciousness would feel like internally, or what it entails for your treatment of the device.
In their what, now??
Quoting Echarmion
Fewer, surely?
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Good question. I find that admission of such a possibility usually indicates zero prospect of any interesting discussion on this topic, as it sets the bar far too low - in relation to the psychology, anyway: it shifts the discussion away from the fascinating psychology, into metaphysical woo. So thanks for asking it.
Consciousness implies any basic level of the 'mental content'. As far I as I know, we talk about many forms of consciousness such as consciousness of inner mental state (such as awareness that we are experiencing happiness or sorrow), consciousness of the external world where we construct a world view using sensory input and consciousness about our inner state that is awareness that we exist.
If a single celled organism posseses any of these then so must a sophiscated man-made equipment because there is little difference in input-output mechansim of a single celled organism and a man made equipment.
That does make sense, but the question here is whether it is reasonable to think that a single celled is conscious even in the most basic sense, that is, whether it shares some aspects of consciousness, be it in a rudimentary form, with humans.
I disagree. All organisms are similar in the sense that all of them are subject to the same physical laws of nature. However, when subjected to those physical processes, they may come to posses certain traits and abilities that differentiates them from each other.
That would imply that consciousness is a result of evolution and can be explained by neuroscience. That is what I have come to believe.
I don't think consciousness is a some fundamental property of all creation. I think even the most rudimentary forms of consciousness are only in organisms that posses a nervous system and as the complexity of the system increases, it becomes more and more aware. (What it becomes more and more aware of depends on the part of the nervous system that has become more sophiscated)
I disagree. All organisms are similar in the sense that all of them are subject to the same physical laws of nature. However, when subjected to those physical processes, they may come to posses certain traits and abilities that differentiates them from each other.
That would imply that consciousness is a result of evolution and can be explained by neuroscience. That is what I have come to believe.
I don't think consciousness is a some fundamental property of all creation. I think even the most rudimentary forms of consciousness are only in organisms that posses a nervous system and as the complexity of the system increases, it becomes more and more aware. (What it becomes more and more aware of depends on the part of the nervous system that has become more sophiscated)
Phenomenal consciousness is nothing more than the having of a first-person perspective, and applies to everything.
The phenomenal consciousness of something that is not access consciousness is as unremarkable as the behavior of that object, though, since both phenomenal consciousness and behavior are products of the object's function.
Access consciousness is the difference in function, the important thing that matters, that distinguishes humans from rocks.
But that function is built up from simpler functions that are built up from simpler functions so there's never a hard line where something suddenly becomes / ceases to be "consciousness" in either sense.
My complete thoughts on the topic.
How far down, then, for you? Ants? Robotic AI ants? Smart phones?
Just curious, for the reason mentioned.
Everything living? Or everything that exists?
And they do have traits and abilities that differentiate them. But consciousness may not be a trait in this sense, it may merely be a facet of what gets called matter. Since we can't detect consciousness, but we can detect behavior, and because we have a bias in granting consciousness to things like us, we tend to grant it to organisms and those like us, and always with great reluctance. Not long ago in science animals, even, were considered machines without consciousness or scientsts at least had to remain agnostic about it.Quoting StarsFromMemory
Actually nothing in what you wrote implies that consciousness is the result of evolution. Because certain things can be the result of evolution does not mean all things are. Quoting StarsFromMemoryYes, this is what you think. And I can see the appeal of it and it might be true. Or it might not.Quoting StarsFromMemoryThe complexity of the nervous system may allow for more cognitive functions, but this may not be coupled at all to being conscious. For all we know a mussel has just as intense experiences as we do, but it does not have anything like our range of cognitive functions. And scientists, after long bias, are beginning to consider that plants are conscious, despite the lack of nervous systems. They have memory, react to pain, communicate, even across plant species, make choices (albeit much slower than we do in general, but not always), and have across whole plant reactions that look very much like nervous system reactions despite not having one. There is absolutely no reason to assume they are not conscious. Note my wording.
If that were the case and consciousness were a property of matter rather than a large, functioning nervous system, then consciousness would persist post-mortem.
What’s the purpose of the brain and sensory organs then? Leaf, branch, tree, forest… what is conscious there, and what makes the boundary between my consciousness and that of the chair I’m sitting at, or the house I’m in, for example?
If one were to posit consciousness to both human beings and viruses, one would have to explain by what means molecules making up the virus (or DNA) could process consciousness. It's difficult enough to explain how humans process consciousness, and we have about 3 pounds of brain matter to do it. Conscious toasters?
If we go up the ladder of complexity a ways, to honey bees, we find that scout bees (the ones who go out looking for batches of flowers, come back, and report to the hive) engage in what might possibly be a private mental experience. I read that scout bees sometimes perform their dance at night when their audience is not paying attention. When bees swarm, scouts go out and look for potential hive locations and return. Then they perform a dance which communicates information
The caucusing scouts have to have some sort of mental process to evaluate the information they are exchanging.
If you want to believe that rocks have a fragment of consciousness, go ahead. But IF you want to convince me that rocks and mountains, trees and forests, etc. are inhabited by some sort of 'knowing' you'll have to come up with a mechanism for how this could be the case. (Maybe there is such a mechanism; trees, for instance, do communicate with other trees; they don't discuss Hegel, obviously, but they do send out relevant chemical messages.)
The cognitive functions need not persist. This likes memory, or that this particular batch of atoms, all together, is conscious as a unit, end, but this need not mean that consciousness ends.
Yes, I'm familiar with the distinction. But to me that sounds like unconscious consciousness which in turn sounds like nonsense.
Woo.
Quoting Pfhorrest
True, but it's arguable there is a very wide zone of uncertainty separating perfectly clear cases of consciousness from equally clear counter-cases.
Denial of this alleged clarity at either end, i.e. as proposed by the pan-psychists doubting unconsciousness of rocks at one end, and possibly by Dennett (at least as he dares to paint himself) doubting consciousness of adult humans at the other, may turn out to be the right conclusion. But it (denial of clarity, and embrace of a continuum) seems to me to be caused by slippery slope logic only, and unnecessarily.
So I like the thread question, and I hope that it ends up puncturing anthropomorphism about robots and insects more than inspiring it.
What differentiates one consciousness from another - leaf, branch, tree, forest... each grain of sand or the whole beach - what is conscious? Also, what is the point of a claim that can not be confirmed in principle and has no explanatory power?
It would, but identity would not. The units would change.
Good question. Possibly Tononi's phi. I like to think of the IIT as a theory of identity rather than a theory of consciousness.
It explains why anything at all is conscious. It might also explain why anything at all happens, if everything that happens is a result of intention. Admittedly these are explanations at the very broadest level possible - you can't get any useful tech out of this, or solve practical moral problems with it.
Panpsychism must be true in some way because it’s maximally vague and ambiguous. Consider emergentism, the opposite of panpsychism, and yet if true, panpsychist could still say the possibility of emergence was built-in throughout the fabric of the universe all along, and that would be truth, but useless truth. Too general to the point of being meaningless, like stating “everything is universe”. It’s far more reasonable to say “consciousness is a program”, because, at least in some way, that’s what it is.
?
Metaphysics.
And I was urging against that kind of response to the OP.
As it happens, though, doing ontology, in the straightforward sense of inferring domains of objects to serve as the potential targets of our word-pointing, i.e. doing semantics, would be my suggestion for roughly where to look for the emergence of consciousness in (e.g.) human infants.
It seemed that way. But I think simply labeling something woo is rude and contentless.Quoting bongo furyI think that could have been shortened to 'I think consciousness emerges in human infants and not in any simpler organisms.' In my posts here I have been arguing that the people I responded to were reacting to various cognitive functions, memory for example, that may or may not correlate with experiencing. It is not woo to point this out. I was not asserting that viruses must be conscious or a pantheism. So, thank you for finally actually describing your views, even if you have failed so far to actually respond to my posts in any substantive way. And using 'metaphysics' as a pejorative, to me, doesn't seem to fit with the kind of intelligence you just showed in this last post. I know a lot of people use metaphysics as a pejorative - not realizing that everyone has metaphysical positions - but that last post tells me you must know better. Most of what is happening in this thread is speculative. I was raising an issue about what might be being (problematically) assumed, especially given our history of bias in relation even to mammals. You disagree with me. Fine. This 'I was urging against that kind of response' is a fancy way of saying you don't want people to disagree with you or who approach the issue another way to post their opinions. Using 'woo' is lazy ass posting and rude. Tossing metaphysics in after that was poor use of the term, since it is a blanket pejorative use for a whole area in philosophy that even you have assumptions within. On your third post, you can't even bother to respond to my arguements, but presume I should have noticed your earlier desire in a post of yours in the thread I was not responding to. You'll have to forgive me if I ignore any further posts of yours in the thread.
And phenomenalist panpsychism had the same usefulness as naturalism: it ends up purporting that a completely trivial property belongs to everything (naturalness/first-person experience) sure, but in the process of denying that a property that would be absurd if substantiative applies to anything.
No I am not claiming that I had provided argument in support of evolution. What I meant was that if consciousness is a trait of organisms possesing neural systems, then it must have evolved. Nothing in my text supports consciousness being a trait.
Quoting Coben
Okay, there is not much evidence for plants having memories. The only evidence we have of a long time memory is from the mimosa pudica plant that exhibits behaviour that is similar to what we would expect if it had memory. However, it is no way clear that the plant posses memory, only that the exisiting biological mechanisms can't explain the results of the experiment. Again, it could be that they indeed have a memory, but nothing can be said as of now.
Here is the point though, if we assume that plants are conscious in a fashion even remotely similar to humans because they posses a communications system, a memory storage system and so on, then many inanimate things like computers must also be considered conscious in the same sense.
Emergentism claims that consciousness is more than the sum of its parts. Or put another way, that the parts are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for (self) consciousness.
Panpsychism claims that the parts (or a part) are sufficient for consciousness, but in order to make this claim its proponents need to redefine consciousness as two different things; phenomenal and access. Phenomenal consciousness being a necessary condition of access consciousness. Or, put another way Access, or self-consciousness, emerging from phenomenal consciousness.
Put this way there seems to be little or no difference between the two positions apart from the convoluted terminology required in order to argue for panpsychism.
When we talk about consciousness aren't we really talking about self-consciousness? After all, what could non self consciousness possibly be?
Are you suggesting panpsychism or functionalism? Or do you think that some mixture of both is a better theory of consciousness?
Is that so? Doesn't emergentism also argue that a new property emerges from simply the combination of matter in such a way that we can never predict such an emergence from simply looking at all the physical property of the constituent matter.
Panpyschism though doesn't make any such radical claim and says that some sort of proto-consciousness is a part of all particles and when those particles come together, full blown consciousness emerges. There is nothing exactly new emerging here nor something that cannot be predicted if we know about what this proto consciousness is.
I'd take issue with your use of 'never'. Sure, we don't understand it at the moment, but never predict it?
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Unless 'proto-consciousness' is 'full blown consciousness', then this is simply emergentism by another name.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
We know that self-consciousness obtains when matter is arranged in a large nervous system. This is predictable. However, saying that it pre-exists in all its constituent parts is like saying that ice-cream already exists in egg yolk.
Emergentism doesn't hold that any trace of consciousness is already present in fundamental particles but when they combine in a certain way, out of nowhere, a non-physical property arises. We cannot thus deduce how the property arose simply by analysing the constiuents and/or their arrangment.
In other words, the system of matter has a property that is completely different and non existent in its constituents. However,panpyschism holds that this new property of the system is not completely different than the properties of the constituents but simply a collection of 'minds' formed by other simpler and smaller 'minds' so to speak.
An essence of ice-cream already exists in its constituents according to panpyschism, whereas emergentism holds that the constituents of ice-cream have absolutely nothing in common with the ice cream itself and the ice-cream appeared out of the blue when those constituents were combined.
Most panpyschist (?) believe that the emerging property of the system can be reduced and explained in terms of the smaller consciousness of the constituents.
Again, there are many forms of emergentism and panpyschism and there exists similarities between some forms of emergentism and panpyshism.
To be clear, I am not advocating panpychism as the best theory. Panpychism sound very unintuitive, leads to unintuitive conclusions and still faces a threatening challenge from the combination problem.
That is what emergentism holds right? That the property of the system (consciousness) simply cannot be deduced by looking at the composition/ properties of the constituents of the system
Positing phenomenal consciousness (or unself-conscious consciousness) in all matter does not explain anything. Matter is a necessary condition of consciousness.
All panpsychism can offer is an attempt to dissolve the question of when self-consciousness arises, but to do so it needs to posit an entirely contradictory form of consciousness. As far as I can see the only connection between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness is the lavish and neologistic polysemy conferred on the term 'consciousness' in order to shoehorn it into the hypothesis.
That access consciousness could emerge from phenomenal consciousness is equally mysterious as self-consciousness emerging from a large, complex, living nervous system. Indeed, phenomenal consciousness alone is far more mysterious than emergentism.
What do you mean by self-consciousness? Is it simply the awareness of one's existence or does it also include awareness of one's internal mental states and awareness of the external world?
Do you also think that consciousness is a property of only complex nervous systems and is thus entirely absent in insects,birds and other simpler organisms?
Do you think that consciousness (in any important sense) goes (in any degree) right down to the level of bacteria and virus?
Grateful for any votes on this, for the reason mentioned.
Entirely, or largely? (Complexity being relative in this context.)
I am unsure that consciousness can be anything but self-consciousness.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Awareness of one's existence is an internal mental state so you have to take the first two together. The last refers to the senses. What is done cognitively with sensory information appears to depend on the complexity of the nervous system. I suspect, for this reason, that self-consciousness is not present in an amoeba because it's not necessary whereas in humans it appears to be a useful evolutionary adaptation.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
I don't know. I suspect that it is absent in the case of it not being evolutionarily advantageous.
Quoting Txastopher
The cognitive processing of the sensory information does lead to a 'image' so to speak being formed in our minds. When we process certain wavelengths of light, a particular image with a distinct feel and experience emerges in our mind.
Quoting Txastopher
Would you please elucidate how being aware of my existence is beneficial to me. Birds, according to you, are not aware of their existence, they seem to survive just fine.
I meant entirely, since Txastopher didn't seem to believe in phenomenal conscious experiences.
You either are aware of your existence, or you are not. Hence, birds are either conscious or not.(If only self awareness is considered)
Also, the thought experiment 'Mary's Room' does establish the existence of phenomenal experiences
If you had no language, would you be aware of your own existence? No matter the answer, how could you know?
On the first point, reflexively, you should be able to answer your own question. On the second, I was unaware that I had opined on birds' self-consciousness.
Self awareness + sensory information = quale.
Okay, I did read your essay (nice read) and I have a couple of question :
"I think nothing wholly new emerges out of nothing like magic when physical things are arranged in the right way, only abstractions away from the lower-level, smaller-sccale physical properties that ignore the many details that are irrelevant on a higher level or larger scale."
What about properties like fluidity or rigidity that don't exist on the small scale but exist when the individual particles combine in a fixed way?
I understand that emergentism has major flaws and is not widely accepted, however, I don't think your objection is justified. What is objectionable is that emergentism claims irreducibility of those properties. That is simply unjustifiable to believe in.
Also, why don't you consider the possibilty that phenomenal experience arise from the processing of sensory input by the brain as detailed by 'The Integrated Information theory' and Global Workspace theory?
They do hold some principles in common with panpychism.
Also, what do you make of the Combination Problem that threatens the idea of panpychism and the conceivability of a P-Zombie that experiences the same physical states without any mental states. You do state that you think they are not possible, any concrete reasons for that belief?
So, birds do have self awareness?
And I don't seem to find a reason for why consciousness gives me a survival advantage over an ameoba, which you say has no consciousness. I suppose there are none, but you could help me find some and establish your point.
As a side note, when I began this thread, I too hoped to prove that consciousness is a product of evolution. But even then, I was fairly sure it was not a product of natural selection.
How different are other non-human organisms from humans themselves in this respect? The bottomline is that consciousness in people other than ourselves is not known directly as in we're aware of their consciousness but through behavior and if so to what extent does human behavior parallel the behavior of non-human organisms from blue whales down to bacteria? Does a bacteria not forage for food, seek a mate, etc.? Do we not do the same, the difference in complexity set aside for the moment?
If behavior is all we have access to and we do, continually, infer consciousness from it when it's other humans then what reasonable objection could be raised against inferring consciousness from the "behavior" of other organisms?
That said, consciousness may not be an all/nothing phenomenon but may come in degrees; bacterial consciousness may not be at the same level as human consciousness.
Perhaps the behavioral pattern in non-human organisms are of a kind that doesn't permit an inference of consciousness. I mean our behavior, despite clear similarities, does differ significantly from the behavior of non-human organisms and perhaps consciousness, its presence/absence, depends on this difference. At this point a real difficulty emerges: what are the sorts of behavior from which we may conclude the existence of consciousness?
I think we should consider that consciousness is a product of information integration by a complex nervous system. I am not really convinced by this but it can be seen as a source of consciousness.
What would it mean for a human to be more conscious than other organism? Like someone rightly pointed out, only the degree of sensory input can vary, however consciousness seems rather same that is, there is nothing to say that birds have less intense experience than us, less detailed perhaps, but not less intense. Again someone else in this thread pointed this fact out.
Perhaps this is solipsistic in character but from the viewpoint of an individual all that we can observe is the behavior of other organisms, other humans included. In that case there must be some standard or criteria by which you can infer/conclude consciousness from behavior. In short, as far as any individual is concerned, other humans and non-humans are in the same boat insofar as detecting consciousness is concerned: we can only observe their behavior.
If so, the problem we face is delineating a set of behavioral criteria which can help us unambiguously identify the conscious from the non-conscious. What would such a criteria look like? Thinking? Not observable. Goal-directed behavior? Bacteria move towards light. Language in a broad sense? Bacteria use chemical signalling. I have a feeling that we will fail to identify a behavior or even a group of them that can help us determine the presence/absence of consciousness because every behavior humans are capable of has a parallel in non-human organisms and I'm going out on a limb here, even even in bacteria. So, either we must conclude that all organisms are conscious or that no organism is conscious.
True, that we must identify some characteristic behaviours, however consider the following :
Let's assume that bacterias do have consciousness due to certain behaviours. However, all behaviour of a bacteria is a simple input - output function ,that is, it senses a stimulus and initiates a series of physical reactions that cause a certain movement (output). If such a simple organism can posses conscious then there is no reason to limit ourselves to the realm of the living. Many man made equipments also produce a output given a input (not going to say stimulus as stimulus is for the living). Hence, if a bacteria has consciousness in any sense , then many inanimate equipments must have consciousness too in the same sense.
You must follow the path to wherever it leads...the destination may surprise you.
I imagine so, but quite how it would be I have no idea.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Maybe it doesn't. Not every mutation confers an advantage. However, I suspect it does and I suspect that consciousness plays a key role in imagination, creativity, forward planning, deduction, abduction, induction, empathy and all sorts of other human qualities that allow us to shape our environment to ensure our survival.
If, like algae, our survival depended on little more than propelling ourselves towards sunlight, then it is hard to see why consciousness would be advantageous, but we are not like algae and the complexity of our life-cycle requires a cognitive complexity in which consciousness probably plays an executive role.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
What is a product of evolution that is not a product of natural selection?
Yeah.
There is “self” as a system that is having mental states and there is “me” as a content of mental states. “Self” is a physical entity, “me” is a virtual entity / representation.
Feeling of “me” can be dissolved, but there always has to be that “self” that is experiencing / memorising whatever the feeling is, even if the experience itself can deny it. For example there are people who think they are dead or do not exist, but the “self” who is experiencing such mental state of course still exists.
Thanks!
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Fluidity and rigidity are those kinds of abstractions I have no problem with. If you just model the mechanical interactions of molecules, you end up modeling a system that exhibits rigidity or fluidity etc automatically; you don’t have to have your model add something new to certain arrangements of molecules.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
When factoring in functionalism about access consciousness I basically do. Phenomenal consciousness generally is the processing of information (that every physical thing does in at least a rudimentary degree). The kind of complex phenomenal consciousness that we have arises from the complex information processing functionality that we (our brains) do.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
I’m not familiar with that problem by name. My reason for rejecting the possibility of philosophical zombies is my direct awareness of my own phenomenal consciousness plus anti-emergentism leading to my functionalist panpsychist conclusion whereby everything has some experience, and things with the same function have the same experience, so something functionally equivalent to a human would have the experience of a human.
That, and everything else. Panpsychism fails to make any empirically useful statement, it’s no less pointless than to claim god did it. It means nothing in particular, it explains nothing at all. Panpsychism is worse mysterianism than mysterianism itself, for mysterianism has some reasoning behind it.
Yes. What now?
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's precisely analogous to how the behavior of things groups together, because they are two sides of the same coin, that coin being function. Phenomenal experience is the input to the function of any thing, physical behavior is the output of it, and the specifics of the thing's experience and behavior are both determined by that function. All of the properties of the thing, of which the thing is merely a bundle, are behaviors, or functional dispositions to behave in a certain way; whatever cluster of functions makes those behaviors appear bundled into a single object, from the third person, also make the experiences seem bundled into a single subject, from the first person.
As I said before, it's precisely as useful a statement as naturalism is. To a necessitarian naturalist (of which I am also one), any object cannot help but be natural; it doesn't make any sense at all to talk of supernatural things. Everything is natural. So "natural" is not a distinguishing feature between any two things, and it really means nothing, in that sense. But it clarifies what otherwise might be a point of philosophical confusion: to be an object at all is to be an object of experience, something connected to the network of phenomenal interactions that is the universe, and a supernatural object, an object that has no observable properties at all (that outputs no behavior that feeds into the input of anything else in that network of interactions) is no object at all; it doesn't exist.
Similarly, panpsychism like mine (I obviously can't speak for everyone) just says that the point of philosophical confusion that might give rise to notions like philosophical zombies is as nonsense as supernaturalism. All there is to account for besides the third-person observable behavior that is output by the function of a thing is a first-person account of exactly that same function -- that's all that phenomenal consciousness consists of, the having of a first-person experience -- so it would make no sense to talk about something that is functionally identical to a human except it has no phenomenal consciousness, a philosophical zombie, because everything has phenomenal consciousness (a first-person perspective) that depends on its function, so something functionally identical to a human has the first-person experience of a human.
The thing that makes useful distinctions between objects is not whether they are natural or not, but what they do, the specifics of the output of their functions, their behavior. And the thing that makes useful distinctions between subjects is not whether or not they have a first-person experience at all (their phenomenal consciousness), but what it's like to be them, the specifics of the input to their functions, their experience.
Can those words produce some examples? Leaf, branch, tree, forest... each grain of sand or the whole beach - what is conscious?
What can or cannot reasonably be considered an object is in general the open question that mereology studies, but that has nothing to do with questions of consciousness specifically.
Anything that evolves from mechanisms other than natural selection is a product of evolution but not of natural selection.
There is nothing reasonable in what you are saying, so I'm asking you for the fifth time to explicitly name it. Leaf, branch, tree, forest.. what is conscious?
The fact that is not impossible that a P-Zombie can exist is a challenge to your functionalist conclusion. P-Zombie are defined as humans with same behaviour but no inner experience and the possibiltiy of such a creature is a challenge to your functionalist view. Saying they cannot exist because of functionalism would be assuming that functionalism is true and any objection to it is a case of faulty reasoning.
You would have to provide other reasons for why you think P-zombies cannot exist.
The bottom line I think is, P-zombies challenge the concept of functionalism and you cannot invoke concepts of functionalism to refute the possibilty of P-zombies.
If you go by panpyschism or functionalist panpyschism, then all of those are conscious.
Again while trying to refute the possibiltiy of the existence of P-Zombie, which poses a serious challenge to your view, you assume that your view is right and hence P-Zombies cannot exist.
Indeed only one of the two is possible, If P-zombies can exist, there are major flaws in your view or P-zombies cannot exist and your concepts are fine.
Saying that P-Zombies cannot exist because "because everything has phenomenal consciousness (a first-person perspective) that depends on its function" does not lead us anywhere because P-Zombies challenge that very view
can everything has phenomenal consciousness that depends on its function.?
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Is that a fact? Show me something that is definitely a p-zombie.
In any case, if you read my essay as you said then you already know my reasoning. There are three mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possibilities: nothing has phenomenal consciousness, only some but not all things have it, or everything has it. I know first hand that I have it, so the first one of those is out. A physicalist ontology leaves only emergentism as a possibility for the second, so arguments against emergentism leave only the third as a possibility, and that is what panpsychism is. If panpsychism then no p-zombies, therefore if at least I am phenomenally conscious and physicalism is true and emergentism is false then no p-zombies.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Okay, it is not a fact, but consider the following argument proposed by David Chalmer I think :
Suppose a population of tiny people disable your brain and replicate its functions themselves, while keeping the rest of your body in working order ; each homunculus uses a cell phone to perform the signal-receiving and -transmitting functions of an individual neuron. Would such a system be conscious?
Now initially he proposed it to argue for a P-Zombie which experiences nothing at all. However, since we are considering panpyschism, let us say this is not a P-Zombie.
Now pansychism holds that the tiny people would be conscious because they are in turn made out of particles that are conscious in some sense. However, would pansychism neccesarily imply that the system formed by these tiny people is also conscious exactly like humans are and thus undergoes the same mental states that humans do? Probably not. All a panpsychist can claim is that this system too will undergo some phenomenal experience, but it is not definite that these phenomenal experiences will be the same as human phenomenal experience.
The point here is that, it is likely that this system formed by tiny men is not conscious in the same way as humans are and undergoes no/ basic mental states even though the system functions exactly the same way as a human experiencing advanced mental states like fear.
Hence it looks as if the function is same but the corresponding mental state does not exist.
This is not exactly a P-Zombie since it can have some basic phenomenal experiences.
But it may or may not have experiences exactly like humans do and yet it functions in the same exact way. Wouldn't you agree that such a system poses a challenge to functionalism because you would have to argue that even this system is conscious in the exact same way humans are.and undergoes all the states a human does like fear, pain and so on.That seems unlikely and unintuitive but it is possible.
Like?
Evolution is simply the accumulation of gradual changes in an organsim. These changes can be facilitated by natural selection or can happen due to other processes.
One other process is genetic drift, you are probably aware of this already but here is a simple example :
In a small population of beetles, consisting of red and green beetles, you would expect that the number of red and green beetles remain fairly same given no advantage is confered by any of the colour.
However, if ,lets us suppose, an elephant comes by and stomps the bushes where the beetles reside leaving, by pure luck, more red beetles dead than green beetles; then we would see that the subsequent generation of beetles would more likely be green because so few red beetles were left alive after the accident.
There was no natural selection, yet the beetles evolved into solely having the green colour.
That is the conclusion. That this system would be conscious just like we are (For simplicity, let us assume the homonculi perform no other function ).
That is indeed a strange conclusion that we are forced to accept.
Nor for that matter, that a perfect copy of the functionality of a human brain (such that that brain-program they execute reports that it has feelings and memories and things just like a real human brain would), executed by a bunch of tiny thinking feeling beings (who each have their own independent functionality but, as a small part of that other independent being, also execute that brain-simulation function), would actually have the feelings and memories and other experiences that it reports having.
The tiny people who are part of making it happen would also all have their own experiences that (we're stipulating) don't factor into their execution of that brain-simulation, and so the simulated human has no awareness of them. And the whole larger brain-simulation function doesn't factor into the independent thought and feeling functions of the homonculi, so it's not like they each feel a little bit of the pain of the whole brain-simulation.
The whole setup is weird, of course, but the conclusion about what would happen if it were instantiated doesn't seem strange at all to me.
If having physiological sensory perception is equivalent to having an experience... the Venus Flytraps and slime molds have them.
It takes more than that.
I see, a tree is conscious even if all of its parts are already conscious on their own. So I am conscious and my brain is conscious, but so is my elbow and my nose, my eyelash, my pimple, my socks, and my bubblegum. How cute, and is there any actual reason, any reason at all, that makes you believe that?
I can promise you even people who stay and don't run from the bear are still scared, its not that simple.
Experience is a synthetic virtual representation of the physical state of the body. This simulation processing takes time, so it is only natural that physical reaction comes first and mental re-imagination of it second.
Not a single reason, other than the fact that it explains certain aspects of consciousness. It is not without problems though.
Look at it this way, we have absolutely no clue how consciousness works and so everything is considered.
Besides, just because it doesn't make intuitive sense, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it.
As a side note : The brain is conscious and so is everything else, but not in the same way. No panpyschist will tell you that rocks and coffee mugs are conscious, just that there is some form of proto consciousness present in the fundamental particles. The exact nature of this proto-consciousness and how it combines to form consciousness as we observe in humans is still unknown.
Also, I never said I believe in panpyschism. But it is worth considering.
I think that would be correct if we only look at reflex actions. It is true that when we touch a hot object, we move our hand before we experience the pain because this particular action is controlled by the spinal cord which intercepts the message before the brain can.
However, what happens when you see a sad movie. You obviously don't start crying before processing its content and experiencing the mental state of 'sadness'.
Nope. Try again. Perhaps you are misinterpreting WebMD or is that your own philosophy? That doesn't line up with reality
Okay, If that does not sound strange to you, that is fine but let me propose two more arguments I came across. Again, these are not mine, I am merely exploring the philosphy of the mind.
The China Nation Argument :
I suppose you have already heard of this but let me detail this one out.
Assume that there is an artifical interface or an artiicial body that has all the senses a human has. These senses convey information to the entire population of china all of whom have a cell phone to receive and transmit information. These individual humans behave as neurons for the artifical body and can control it's action. So each chinese person sends message to many others and similarly recieves messages from many others as well and all of these processes that are analogous to the processes performed by neurons give rise to human like behaviour of the robot.
Now a functionalist would be forced to conclude that the entire nation of china is conscious in fashion similar if not same as humans
Does it sound strange now?
The inverted qualia argument
Now I would really like to hear you respond to this. This is perhaps the most challenging problem functionalists face at the moment . Would love to hear your views on this one.
First let me just say that according to functionalism every psychological/mental state is completely determined by the causal relations it bears to (1) a certain "sensory input", (2) other psychological states, and (3) a behavioral output.
The inverted qualia argument proposes that it is possible for two humans to experience two different qualia even if they are in the same mental state and observe the same object.
A common version would be colour inversion. What if someone experiences the qualia I attribute to the colour red when they see the colour green? That is when they observes green apples, their experience would be similar to mine when I observe red apples (Their green is my red)
Let us for a moment entertain this possiblity of inverted colour experience and see how it breaks functionalism.
[b]Let us say p1 is has normal vision has sees red like we all do while p2 sees what we would call green when he sees red. However, he will still call the colour red and not know that his experience is different.
(See private language argument if that sounds strange)
P2 is has pseudonormal vision
This colour inversion implies the possibility that there can be two psychological states s1 and s2 in two persons p1 and p2 so that s1and s2 completely resemble each other with respect to their causal roles but are nevertheless psychologically different. For example, s1 and s2 may both be caused by the perception of a ripe tomato and for their part cause the same beliefs, emotions, desires, behavior, etc., but whereas s1 is a sensation of red, s2 is (p2 being pseudonormal) a sensation of green. So if the inversion is conceivable, it seems possible that there are two different psychological states with exactly the same causal roles, which contradicts the conceptual functionalist's assumption that psychological states are defined by their causal roles.[/b]
Most functionalist argue that such inversion of qualia is incoherent and simply not possible. Afterall can such inversion take place of pain and pleasure (hedonistic inversion) ? Obviously not. Hence they argue that such inversion for colour, while seems possible, is not actually possible.
The only issue is that such a inversion actually exists for colour. This qualia inversion is no longer a philosophical possibilty but a scientific possibilty too with one scientist figuring one in 14,000 people undergo this qualia inversion for colour.
I don't know if you are aware of this problem so here is a link if you want to read about the 'Qualia Inversion Hypothesis'
http://www.home.uni-osnabrueck.de/uwmeyer/Paper/Pseudonormal.Vision.pdf
I would recommend reading the pdf if you are not already familiar with Nida-Rümelin argument that I have highlighted in bold above.
The problem of other minds, is solved, via consciousness is above one conception, it is whole if necessary.
You can not be sure that some exist, fine.
You think others must meet some criteria but that is a symbol of your true effort, that's not what consciousness is.
It is actually this experienced online shape.
I figured your homonculi scenario was a refinement of this same argument, so, same answer.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Supposing that inverted qualia are possible is just supposing that functionalism is false. Not only do we not have any reason to assume that inverted qualia are possible, but we cannot ever possibly know that they are, because we cannot ever share someone else's first-person experience, only our own.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
I was not aware of those scientific findings, but as I started reading that PDF's description of them my immediate reaction was the same one that that author came to by the end: the conclusion that inverted qualia have been shown possible by those results hinges on a bunch of philosophical presuppositions.
The only slight differences in my take are that the stuff that goes on in the middle of a function can make a difference in the total phenomenal experience that happens on account of it. Just like, in the Chinese Nation or the homonculi scenarios, I concede that there is some different experiencing going on on account of how the "neurons" in the simulated "brain" each have their own full brains and lives and do things other than just execute the neuronal functions in the simulated brain, so too on my account there would be slightly different phenomenal experience going on within the functionally different sub-components of the person with inverted color cone pigments, but the phenomenal experience of the whole person, who remains functionally the same on that whole-person level, would remain the same.
Yes, interaction goes both ways, but the mind is secondary in many respects. For example, some people get brain seizure while driving or playing an instrument and they continue their activity totally unconscious as if nothing happened. In fact they fail to react to novel or unusual stimuli, so there, that’s what the mind is for.
Sorry, I thought I was talking to Pfhorrest.
You try again, you forgot to say what exactly do you believe doesn't line up with reality. In the meantime I will repeat what I sad. Experience is a synthetic virtual representation of the physical state of the body. This simulation processing takes time, so it is only natural that physical reaction comes first and mental re-imagination of it second.
People's reactions and emotions are very complex. You treat the human psyche as though we are an insect. What is your article that supports what you said. If i told Frank that i was going to go to his house in a week and shoot him, there is a good chance he would be scared before running. I've actually been held at gun point delivering pizzas and the human psyche and what goes on in our heads is very complex. Not that this is pertinent but i ran both robbers off. What medical journal supports that you run first and get scared later. Most medical journals would support that the human psyche is very complex. What you are proposing is much more controversial than what i'm proposing so if anyone should have to prove themselves it should be you. Do you have an article?
Yes, many, because what I said is not controversial at all. Google it!
what keywords do i google? You made a two sentence statement so i'm not sure what to google.
You said “it’s not complex enough”. It was about time delay, not complexity. Almost every neuroscientist and philosopher will tell you there is no free will based on -> Libet experiment <- and similar.
I read the important parts of Libet experiment and i also believe in scientific determinism (and the rejection of the classical look of how free will works). I have no problem with the findings of the Libet experiment. The problem is you have drawn conclusions that cannot be drawn from the Libet experiment. Humans may not have a say in their future decisions based on billiards table effect of the universe, but your interpretation of the "bear" example is not found in the Libet experiment.
Libet finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of 'the power of veto' (sometimes called "free won't"[10][11]); the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 20 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the spinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered).
This doesn't support the "bear" example the way you like but it does point towards determinism or scientific determinism. The latter i would agree with.
What do you think I said? What exactly are you arguing against?
Again, you say you disagree, but you never say what is it you disagree with. Are you a robot?
I doubt we have any idea of "what it's like" to "be" any of these things other than some animals. Consciousness is generated by the interaction of the universe with itself on an infinitesimal scale. This participates in a causal cascade — events leading to other events. The main things we usually assume are conscious are animals, in which all parts interact with each other constantly. But many other conglomerations of matter have the same property, clouds for instance.
I realize that these claims will sound utterly outlandish to most people. But the reason I believe them is that I find this to be the simplest explanation for what we know and observe.
:100:
It is far simpler and less absurd to assume that just having a first-person experience at all is not a special unusual thing but a perfectly ordinary facet of everything, and that the nature of that first-person experience varies with the functionality and behavior of things, than to suppose that some magical wholly new metaphysical thing starts happening when otherwise inert matter gets arranged in just the right way (or else than even we humans somehow don’t even have the first person experience we think we do).
One thing nudging me toward going all-in on where consciousness occurs was watching recent time-lapse videos of plants. They "behave" just like animals except for being planted in one place (other than tumbleweeds).
Yes, but those philosophical presuppositions are entirely justified while the presuppositions required for the correction of qualia before it becomes conscious have been widely abandoned. The author only wanted to show that even this is not a purely scientific hypothesis.
Just quoting the author here :
[b]"However, this position presupposes that there is a clear-cut boundary between the levels
of conscious sensations and reactive dispositions, an assumption having come under
heavy attack during the last few years, in particular since Dennett (1991). In his book,
Dennett criticizes what he calls the 'Cartesian Theater' theory of consciousness, according to which all sensory inputs of a given moment come together at a certain area of the
brain (the Cartesian Theater) where a conscious 'picture' of the world is formed from
them, this picture then giving rise to later reactive dispositions.Dennett raises a lot of empirical issues in his book, but I think that one main point is essentially philosophical. Prior to the question whether there is a clear-cut boundary between the levels of conscious sensations and reactive dispositions, one could ask if there can possibly be such a boundary. A positive answer would amount to the thesis that there is a sensible concept of pure sensation, i. e. to the assumption that one can sensibly imagine a sensation existing without any connection to reactive dispositions:after all, if the existence of a sensation were necessarily connected to the existence of a respective reactive disposition, one could never exclude the possibility that the disposition has an influence on the qualitative character of the sensation. However, this is a highly controversial point in philosophy. To quote an authority from the past, Kant seems to deny the existence of pure sensations by saying that sensations without concepts are "blind", i. e. that a sensory input must at least be subsumed under some (perhaps very general) concept in order to become a conscious sensation. "[/b]
Besides, a functionalist would agree that a concept of pure sensation/qualia does not make sense because a sensation is defined by its relation to reactions and other mental states.
One other thing I have problem apprehending is how the author concludes that the processing in the person 1 and person 2 must be different and which leads to him to the possibility of the correction of qualia before it becomes conscious. To quote the author again :
[b]But now notice that relevant parts of the brain of a pseudonormal person p1 must differ from those of a normally sighted human being p2 if they are assumed to produce different reactions to the same 'input' and the same reaction to different inputs. Suppose p1 and p2 both look at a ripe tomato. In p1, the average activation of G-cones in the respective area exceeds that of the R-cones, whereas in p2 the average activation of the Rcones exceeds that of the G-cones. So the inputs at level 4 are different. But they are both disposed to utter sentences like "This tomato is red", "This tomato looks red to me" etc., so that the outputs of the further processing are the same. This may also be true of
the emotional reactions being caused by the sight of the color red. It follows that the processing in p1 must differ from that in p2. Suppose further that p1 is looking at a ripe tomato, whereas p2 is looking at an unripe (green) one. The relevant input at level 4 is the same, but the behavioral output is different: p1 will be disposed to say things like "This tomato is red", whereas p2 will say that is looks green to him. Again, it follows that the processing in p1 must differ from that in p2.[/b]
In the peculiar case of colour, even if the input and the lower level processing (that gives rise to the qualia) is the same, the output can still be different. Let us assume that both p1 (normal vision) and p2 (pseudonormal vision) look at blood. Also, for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that the sensation of blood red, leads to experience of fear and disgust and a tendency to look away. Now the input in the case of p1 would be his r-cones firing (colour is red so r-cones fire in normal people) whereas the input in case of p2 would be his g-cones firing (colour is red, so g-cones fire in pseudonormal people).
Let us assume that now this input is processed in the same way in both people leading to a sensation of red in p1 and a sensation of green in p2. However, since p2 has learned to associate this sensation of green with the feelings of disgust and fear and sentences like 'yuck, blood red', he will still react the same way as p1 who has learned to associate the sensation of red with disgust and fear and sentences like 'yuck,blood red'. In other words, the lower level processing of the vision need not be different so as to give rise to same qualia 'sensation of red' in both people so that they can react the same way.
Indeed, would it be wise to even consider that the lower level processing is suddenly different because of an genetic anomaly in the cones of the eye? Consider p2 (pseudonormal vision) as a baby and seeing blood (red colour) for the first time. If his processing is same as other people, he would experience sensation of green. Concluding that somehow his lower level processing has changed would mean that the brain already knew that blood gives rise to red sensation and hence changed the green sensation to red. That makes no sense. Besides, a genetic change in the eyes has no effect on the brain just like genetic change in my limbs does not affect my heart.
What does make sense is that this pseudonormal baby learns to associate the sensation of green with all things we associate sensation of red with. Hence functionalism can't really account for this.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, there would be a difference in the experience of the r-cones and g-cones, however, the overall experience is also different
I've said multiple times what I was arguing against. Do you remember the bear example you gave? Once again, libets experiment doesn't dictate or certainly not in every case that fear does not come before the person runs from the bear. This basic notion of mine falls in line with libets and with an ordinary understanding of reality. I stated this general argument several times. You are looking for something in libets experiment that isn't there. Not every reality or truth in this universe has to have some strange twist. I do agree however the realities of scientific determinism or determinism are likely but believe it or not that is a separate issue from the bear example.
Strange twist? Experience comes with a time delay, that’s all.
I thought it was settled that not all experience comes with some sorta delay. Most are caused by mental states or a combination of mental states. Only in certain primitive reflex responses, where the brain is not involved in decision making, does the experience come later.
It “explains” why my socks and bubblegum are conscious, even though no one thought they were, but it doesn’t explain why the human brain is conscious the way the human brain is conscious, which is what we actually want to know. To put it mildly, panpsychism is irrelevant and pointless.
I'm only talking about response / reaction, any reaction, as opposed to contemplation / imagination.
Do you have a point you want to make using the case of such reflex action?
Sure, in some cases behaviour does precede the mental state but that does not violate any concept of panpyschism or functionalism. It would help if you could state what you are trying to prove using those examples.
If that was truly the case, then panpsychism would indeed be irrelevant and even stupid. However, panpsychism does explain human consciousness. If we stick to its principles, we are forced to conclude that everything has some sort of experience caused by interaction with environment. No one is saying that trees have thoughts or they are aware of their inner mental state or anything like that.
It was originally answer to someone's question, not related to panpyschism.
Define "experience".
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem.
Taken from the below entry:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia
Read the entry if you would like to know what we are referring to when we say phenomenal experience or qualia.
Also, 'Mary's Room' thought experiment demonstrates the existence of qualia almost perfectly. The thought experiment is described in the entry. So I do recommend reading it
Like legalising homicide in order to solve the problem of murder, it's sophistry.
Instead of definition you gave description. In any case, qualia is just one more thing panpsychism can not address. The brain itself is an obstacle for panpsychism.
What I wrote certainly doesn't explain anything (in the sense of Chalmers's Hard Problem).
But it does suggest the scope of consciousness in the universe. Which may be of no interest to you, but to me that would tell me a lot about consciousness.
And my hypothesis that all matter and elementary particles possess consciousness does not really say that socks or bubble gum is conscious as a whole. What would be conscious as a whole are assemblages of matter that are highly self-interactive. Which is why I listed some things that qualify: plants, animals, viruses, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, clouds, planets, stars, galaxies. And this works hierarchically as well, so groups of people, flocks of birds, beehives, and even (on a yet higher level of organization) the United Nations are included.
Socks and bubble gum are not completely lacking in consciousness, either — because their components, at some level, have it. In these cases, probably just their molecules.
As for human consciousness, this hypothesis posits that, like all consciousness, it stems ultimately from some kind of nanoconsciousness at the tiniest level of magnification.
Yes, well put.
...no? All that part you quoted about the problems of the Cartesian Theater view is questioning the presuppositions that lead to the conclusion that qualia inversion occurs, and therefore supporting my position that it doesn't.
I think the most illuminating part of that paper is the bit about people wearing vision-rotating goggles, where the people who have fully adapted to the upside-down view of the world to the point that they can do all the normal things people can do with right-side-up vision report that the very question of whether they've learned to internally perceive the upside-down view as right-side-up or just learned how to control their bodies to account for an apparently upside-down world is simply incoherent. There isn't a clear distinction between mentally flipping their perception and flipping their body movements to compensate for their flipped perception: it's the same thing, changing the behavioral output is the same thing as changing to perceptual input.
I don't think so
The author accepts the possibility that there might be an inversion, however the author also maintains that the inversion, while possible, does not necessarily follow.
To justify this, the author presents two possibilities based on the following argument :
If p1 and p2 receive different inputs (r-cones in p1 and g-cones in p2) and yet respond in the same way by saying something like 'that is red colour', then the processing of the input must be different on some level.
The two possibilities he presents are :
Then the author goes on to say that if the processing is different before the qualia becomes conscious (i.e before the person feels the sensation), then there may be a scope for correction of that qualia in the pseudonormal person. Hence, no inversion will take place and the green sensation p2 was supposed to experience will be converted to red. From then, since the sensation is of red, his output will be the same as p1 (p1 did not require any correction of qualia)
The second possibility means that p2 does experience green sensation itself, however, his behavior is same as p1 (who experiences red) because their higher level processing is different (the processing done after qualia is conscious and felt). In this case, p2 does indeed experience green and yet since the further processing of this sensation is different, he reacts the same way as p1 who experiences the colour red. Hence, in this case, colour inversion does take place and functionalism is challenged.
Hence, the author says that colour inversion does not necessarily follow from the experiment since it could be possibility one.
The key point here is that both the possibility are derived assuming 'Cartesian theater theory' because the narrator assumes the following sequence of events :
Input
Low level processing (Either this can be different in brain of pseudonormal people)
Sensation
High Level Processing (Or this can be different in brain of pseudonormal people)
Output
Hence, both the possibility the author derives rests on a widely criticized philosophical presupposition. If the Cartesian theatre theory is not true, then the possibility of qualia correction does not even arise and hence qualia inversion must follow. (if sensations don't accumulate in one place to be processed)
There should be a distinction. One would mean changing perception to ensure no change in behaviour is required, and the other would be changing behaviour to ensure no change in perception is required.
However, I think what you meant was, that we cannot empirically know which one it is.
That would be accurate but like I argue in my previous post, that first scenario (changing perception back to normal) is only plausible when the behaviours corresponding to the normal perception have already been formed and the normal perception has already been adapted to. The people had already adapted to seeing their world like we do and had formed behaviour patterns for this normal perception. However, when the perception changes to upside down view, it could happen that the brain corrects this upside down perception to the normal perception because the behavioural habits corresponds to the normal view. It could also be possible that the brain changes the behavioural patterns. Both are possible and empirically indistinguisable. It does seem easier to change the behaviour to match perception rather than change the entire perception to match behaviour. Hence, it is more plausible to believe that it is the behaviour that is changing. (Imagine how much inversion at each step is to take place to invert the perception back to normal)
One last question. When a functionalists says that the function of pain is to produce negative thoughts, a flight-fight response etc, on what basis is pain assigned to those particular functions?
Is it simply because we value our own lives and hence those are the functions of pain that aid our survival?
Isn't supposing pain has a function which is to help us know of and escape terrible situations already assuming that I have a inbuilt/hard-coded will to survive?
Would the function of pain in an organism for whom survival is not of prime importance be vastly different than the function of pain in us?
It seems to me we are describing functions of mental states by taking the human viewpoint in which survival is the most important thing.
And then he criticizes that by criticizing the view that there is one particular place somewhere in the causal chain that the experiencing happens, which by the end he seems rather resoundly against with the whole flipped-vision-goggles scenario.
Which you pretty much say here:
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Quoting StarsFromMemory
I don't see him making that conclusion, and I don't follow how you can make that conclusion. Qualia inversion is only possible if Cartesian theater theory is true and the second of those two correction-scenarios is the case. If Cartesian theater theory is false, then there isn't any one place in the causal chain where the experiencing happens, and so if beginning-to-end you have the same results, the overall experience is the same. Like the people with the upside-down goggles said: asking whether they're rotating the image in their mind or rotating their body movements to match the upside-down image is incoherent to them, they're the same thing to them.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
No, I'm saying that, according to your article, the people who had fully adapted to wearing upside-down goggles reported that there was no difference between those two scenarios to them. The question of whether it was their perception or their behavior that had adapted was deemed incoherent, by them, who had done the adaptation. Which suggests that Cartesian theater theory is false (there isn't one place in the chain where the experiencing happens), and so qualia inversion isn't actually a thing.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
Yes, of course. Pain is what I term an "appetitive" experience, an experience of something seeming good or bad (in this case, bad), an imperative experience, one that commands you, rather than an indicative experience, that merely informs you. We have appetites that command us to do things that contributed to our survival and reproduction, because we descend (with inheritance) only from creatures that did likewise, because creatures that did otherwise did not survive and reproduce to leave any successors to inherit those features. If somehow a creature were to come into being through a process other than evolution, so that such features did not preclude such beings from coming to exist as they would an evolved species, then those creatures could in principle have completely different appetites than we do, or none at all. (My computer, for instance, probably doesn't experience anything vaguely like pain, and probably would not, unless we carefully programmed it to).
Okay I apologise, I misinterpreted the article. Thanks a lot of pointing that out.
I get what you mean about inverted qualia being incoherent now.
Functionalism does seem to explain consciousness rather neatly and it also explains the response of the people in the inverted goggles experiment perfectly.