Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
So, here it is:
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
SO, can we list these?
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
What follows is a series of fifteen intuition pumps, posed in a sequence designed to flush out--and then flush away--the offending intuitions.
SO, can we list these?
Comments (2977)
What do you make of my claims today regarding that? Seems contentious by my lights. Wrong even.
Not really. Even if we pretend to have a hotline to “true reality” then the sentence “The apple seems red” would still be true and would be identical to “The apple is red”.
Quoting creativesoul
I don’t understand the significance of this. So what if meta cognition comes later? As marchesk just said:
Quoting Marchesk
Or doesn’t have to be at least. Also this:
Quoting creativesoul
Can’t be true. Red can’t indicate a certain frequency or wavelength. Or else the word “red” would have only been conceived of after we were able to measure frequencies and after we figured out light was a wave. But there are Greek words for “red” even as they were questioning what light was. Unless you suggest that when we say “red” today is different from when we said it in the past.
Furthermore, if this is your conception of red, then we would have to teach children the properties of light before being able to teach them colors. But again that is not the case. And I doubt that understanding light and wavelengths changes the referent of the word either. When a child says “the apple is red” and when einstein says “the apple is red” they mean the same thing.
Why do you write posts if those posts mean nothing at all?
Because of what they do.
You can do better, Oliver. You have some understanding of Wittgenstein. You have a better grasp of the argument than you pretend here.
Quoting khaled
Well, I could go back and point out again hat the red of the sportscar and the red of the sunset are not the same experience. That's closer to the OP, but the point is lost.
Tell me, have you read Austin's Sense and Sensibilia? Just curious, as to the derivation of our difference in our opinions. You appear to have a somewhat idealist view, or perhaps anti-realist...?
Yes there are different shades of red. We couldn't possibly have a word for every possible shade of colors so we lumped similar ones under one word. So I guess it was incorrect to say that "red" refers to a certain experience but rather a range of experiences. And all we need to be able to communicate is for these ranges to be largely similar. For instance I would say that a sunset is orange (the 'range' of experiences included under "orange" includes the shade of a sunset) but small differences like these shouldn't be a problem for understanding.
However if someone says the sunset is green he is either colorblind (his experiences are not a homomorphism of ours to begin with) or doesn't understand what the word means (the "pointer" he uses is incorrect even if the experience itself is a homomorphism of ours)
Quoting Banno
No.
https://graf1x.com/list-of-colors-with-color-names/
The red ones:
PS: I shall now call sunsets "Candy Apple" colored.
Just trying to map differences.
There are more in French:
Quoting khaled
I'm still stuck here:
Quoting Banno
You talk of your-experience-of-red; I talk of my-experience-of-red; yet you think the meaning of "red" is what they refer to.
How are we talking about the same thing?
The referent of "red" for you is on your account entirely distinct from mine; so how can they mean the same thing?
I love the Borg. One wonders what it's like to be the Queen (starting at 1:39):
An interesting species...
But I was puzzled by the introduction of the queen; she seemed incongruous.
For instance, Locutus was introduced as an individual to give a face to the Borg in assimilating humanity; but why bother, if there already was an individual who could represent the Borg consciousness?
Uhhh, are we really going to do the thread like this? Okay.
That is a good point. I'm guessing the writers hadn't thought up the Queen yet. And what made humanity so special? Wouldn't they do that for all species? Have one Locutus individual for Romulans, Ferengi, etc?
A better question is, what would it be like for Odo? Do his sensations change as he modifies his form? And can changelings be assimilated? Who would win in a fight between Kirk and Picard?
Go on, you love it.
But if you need a connection to the thread... does Odo know what it is like to be a bat?
Yes, that's it! Changelings would make the best philosophers. They could just morph into whatever and tell us.
I don't recall them ever exploring Odo using non-human senses. I know something he was a piece of furniture or a glass on Quark's tray.
Hmm. I think they gave up coherence in order to introduce feminine interest.
They never explained how Odo changed mass... presumably it was the power of plotonium.
Of course, how could one know that Odo had morphed into a bat correctly... That he had the correct sensations, those actually had by a bat, and not just a translation of them into Changeling.
Now that seems to help my case; that there is no way of being sure that Odo has done it right; indeed, that the notion of doing it right does no work here.
I didn't say we were referring to the same thing, I don't know if we are or not (I don't know if we are having the same experience when looking at an apple). But regardless that is not a hinderence to communication. You could be seing inverted colors from me and we would understand each other perfectly.
Do you understand what a homomorphism is? As long as our experiences are homomorphisms of each other we will understand each other.
But they couldn't tell us. It would be like describing color to a blind man. Maybe if they morph into something similar.
A visual colour is an equivalence class of illumination events.
(Duh.)
Yes, it did. Now consider whether there is something about the apple that would cause the apple to appear red to us. That "something" is what the word "red" picks out, not how the apple appears to us. How the apple appears to us is part of our experience, not part of the apple. Thus there is a difference between being red (which is a feature of the apple) and appearing red (which implies a perceiver).
Indeed. That's a clear and concise way to put it.
None, in the sense that they both have the same truth conditions in that situation. It doesn't follow that "what color it is" and "how it appears" have the same use or meaning. The difference is that how the apple appears can change under different conditions. Whereas the apple's color does not.
Quoting Janus
On that basis, the apple would also appear green to the colorblind person since they can't distinguish those colors. So it would appear green and red at the same time. If that sounds odd, it's because we don't define "red" and "green" in terms of how things appear to a color-blind person. And neither does the color-blind person.
Quoting Janus
And so it does. You can see here that red and green apples appear dim yellow for dichromatics.
But I reject the subject/object distinction that's implied by subjective "appearances" (i.e., mental entities or mental experiences).
Quoting Janus
Color terms refer to a physical aspect of objects. As abstractions, it doesn't matter what the physical details are - that's a scientific question (which, we've learnt, are the light reflective properties of the object's surface). If no-one is looking or it is dark, that physical aspect of the apple is still there. That the apple isn't being looked at, or appears differently in the dark, doesn't change that physical aspect.
All cats are grey in the dark.
I don't think that we're too far apart here.
Regarding the temporal order of emergence, elemental constituency, and thus existential dependency, I suspect we're largely in agreement. When it comes to thought and belief about red, naming things that consistently reflect/emit certain frequencies of light "red" happens first. In our own linguistically/conceptually mediated ways of making sense of the world(which includes ourselves) we begin/began making sense of red things by virtue of picking out things that consistently reflect/emit the frequencies of light that we've named "red". Those things are red things. We first picked out the things reflecting/emitting those particular frequencies, called them "red".
Put more simply:Red things reflect/emit certain frequencies of light. We first named red things. We then further described red things in terms of properties/attributes/qualities. We then began to wonder if red things really are red or if they just appear red to us as a result of our physiological sensory apparatus(is your red the same as mine, etc.). Then came talk of "redness" as a so called private directly/immediately apprehensible property of subjective conscious experience.
Talk of "redness" is existentially dependent upon language use. Reflecting the frequencies we've named "red" does not. Which is basic, raw, and fundamental to consciousness? Surely not talking about it.
No. Those frequencies are reflected/emitted prior to our looking at it. We need not look at it in order for it to reflect/emit those frequencies. We named the reflected light "red". The reflected light is the effect of the properties of the apple(how it interacts with light).
Certainly, talk of "frequencies" depends upon language use, just as talk of "redness" does, or talk of anything else... and ' we've named "red" ' depends explicitly upon language use.
Clearly, and it seems you're not alone.
So, all that means is that the word 'colour' means different things in different situations. Taking the word to mean a quality of an appearance, the apple has no colour when it is not appearing. Taking the word to mean the part of the electromagnetic spectrum being reflected, the apple has no colour when in the dark. And taking the word to mean the constitution of the apple that determines what part of the electromagnetic spectrum it will reflect under "normal" circumstances the apple is always whatever colour it appears to be under normal conditions.
I don't think I need to address the rest of your post because it seems to me this covers it. You want to privilege one usage of the term over the others, and that says more about your own preference than it does about common usages.
Quoting Andrew M
So do I if that distinction is taken to be anything more than a convenient way of talking about things. That said it is true that I can't see what you're seeing, and vice versa. I know what it is for me to see something red, and the different feelings and associations that come with that experience compared to seeing things of other colours.
No, it's about being clear on what the usages are and how they relate to each other. When says that "All cats are grey in the dark", I understand what he's saying. It's equivalent in that context to saying, "All cats look grey in the dark". No disagreement from me.
However that use is derivative from situations where we observe an object in normal lighting which is where color distinctions are originally made. That's the reference point in the world. Without that reference point, you have to contend with the private language argument.
But not black cats. Black cats cannot be seen in the dark.
Unless they open their eyes.
That I do agree with!
Folk suppose that if they can't sensibly talk about qualia then the eliminative materialists have won.
But that ain't so.
For colors, the looking and the being are dentical. An apple that receives no light cannot absorb part of the visible spectrum and reflect the other. It has the pigments to do so but not the light that would be playing with the pigments.
There's more: in the absence of light, maturing apples will become pallish, not red. So apples need to sense some light in order to even bother producing pigments to color that light. The same apply to leaves: if kept in the dark for a while, they will lose their green chlorophyll and turn white.
A question for you: Is the cat really black, or is it reddish? IOW, what makes our normal vision privileged?
Are what we order into colours, pitches and timbres. Objects, only derivatively and more roughly speaking.
So we don’t eliminate red, but red is not a property of either the objects we see, or the properties used in explanations given for vision. So where does the red come from?
And by red, I mean the color we see, not the word, lest anyone be confused by talk of language.
LOL. Talk for yourself, Banno. You can of course contend that you personally cannot make sense of the concept. But don't deny other people's use of it. I for one will use the word whether you can understand it or not. I'm not going to ask you for permission...
As for eliminative materialism, isn't that the theory that no true theory can possibly exist? It eliminates itself....
I'm no expert on color, but I think there are ways of asking this question that make sense. For instance, I heard an explanation once of the difference between the reds we observe in nature and the blues and greens: the reds are produced by actual pigments, whereas the blues and greens are not, they are a sort of a side effect of the molecular structure, more like a filter than a pigment. (Not inserting wikipedia links. We all know how to google.) You might say the same sort of thing about the purplish sheen of a blackbird's wing or, I think, of the various colors that play across the carapace of some beetles, where the effect is produced by translucence or refraction and so on. Thus you might say that green leaves are not green in the same way that the red berries next to them are red. And that's interesting. It's next door to finding out that giant pandas are not bears in the now standard sense of the word "bear", because there's a clear sense in which that bear isn't really a bear.
But there's a general, philosophical way of asking, is that red ball really red? You might as well also ask, is that red ball really a ball? I don't see much hope for sense there.
Aye. This is back to the first 10 pages or so.
(1) There are no qualia as they are commonly theorised or intuited.
(2) People do not have minds, sensations, feelings.
(1) does not imply (2), but (2) does imply (1).
It's asking whether the red ball is red in the way it looks red to us. Which is different from whether red is the result of a pigmentation instead of reflective surfaces, which is interesting, but a separate matter.
If the answer is no, then we're looking at some sort of subjective account of redness, and the difficult question arises as to how to account for that.
In music, there are microtones: notes between the named notes (e.g. between C and C#). I'm not sure whether these "extra" notes also have names, but I doubt that all of them do. Think of a trombone player continuously sliding up a continuum of notes. The same could be said of colours. It seems likely that we see more shades of colour than those we have names for. This is before any consideration of how these things may be seen or heard. Lots of folks are making this about language instead of conscious experience.
Trouble is,
(3) There are no minds, sensations, feelings as they are commonly theorised or intuited..
Aye. That is the rub.
So you are going to tell all about how minds, sensations, feelings are uncommonly but properly theorised or intuited? 'Cause the other guys ain't telling... :-)
Paul Grice tells a story about a college at Oxford offering a position to a young man who unfortunately owned a dog, and dogs were forbidden, so the fellowship committee "deemed" the dog a cat.
It's a question of framework: within one framework, the animal is "really" a dog, and within another it is "really" a cat.
If you ask whether a ball is really red outside all frameworks, then you ensure that the question cannot be answered.
Or do you expect an answer within a framework that includes "red" but nothing about how things look to human beings? What framework would that be?
To put a finer point on this...
Talk of "redness" is existentially dependent upon language use, but not just language use, per se. Talk of "redness" as a property of subjective, private, directly perceptible, immediately apprehensible conscious experience is a metacognitive endeavor. That is to think about pre-existing thought, belief, and statements thereof as a subject matter in their own right. Metacognition requires common language use. This holds true of all "qualia" talk, as well as all talk about "consciousness", and "what it's like". They are all metacognitive endeavors, and as such they are all existentially dependent upon simpler thought and belief about red things.
The question here is whether or not the referents of our naming and descriptive practices are themselves existentially dependent upon metacognition, or do they consist of and/or emerge from mere simpler language use(linguistically constituted thought and belief) that is not metacognitive in it's constitution?
Red things reflect/emit certain frequencies of light. Reflecting light is a process that does not require language use in any way whatsoever. The raw/brute perception of reflected light does not either. So the raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable perception that language less creatures have of red things does not require language use. Would it make any sense to call that "conscious experience"? Only if the detection/perception alone of certain frequencies of light counts as conscious experience.
Some red things are not themselves existentially dependent upon language use, but others are. Red balls made of rubber via some human mechanical technology are. Red cups are. Red tulips, completely untouched by human hands, are not. Learning how to use the term "red" to pick out red balls, cups, and tulips does not require thinking about one's own thought and belief. It does require language use. Talking in terms of whether or not the 'redness' is inherent to the balls, cups, and tulips or inherent to our perception of them, or some combination thereof does require metacognition. It is metacognition at work. Talking about our own conscious experience of red balls, cups, and tulips most certainly does/is. Claiming that redness is a property of subjective conscious experience most certainly does/is. In each of these cases, we're talking about that which is existentially dependent upon our prior own use of "red"(thought and belief involving the terminological use).
Simply put...
Immediately apprehending and/or understanding the property of redness requires already knowing how to use "red", and is metacognitive in it's constitution. Already knowing how to use the term "red" to talk about red things is thought and belief that is linguistic in it's constitution but not metacognitive. So, it is either the case that raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable immediately apprehensible conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips does not include the property of redness, or raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable conscious experience requires metacognition. Not all conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips requires language. All metacognition does. So, the property of redness is disqualified(pun intended).
False dichotomy.
The term "red" was used to pick out certain frequencies of light before we knew that.
Dennett’s
I doubt this is true. Yes, to know that it is called red, to talk to someone else about its redness, one must have language. But to know that this red ball is different to the blue ball, and to know that there is something in common between the red ball and the red cup that is not in common between the red ball and the blue ball, does not require language, not the kind of verbal language you mean anyway. The word 'red' is not important, nor is any other word.
In fact, I'd say the exact opposite is true: in order to have a meaningful word to describe the colour property of a red thing, we must first be able to distinguish between that red thing and an otherwise identical blue thing. A great many animals can do this perfectly well without being able to describe it.
I do not think that you understood the argument given. Merely distinguishing between red and blue is inadequate for understanding and/or immediately apprehending redness as a property of conscious experience.
Is this not contradictory?
It would be if all conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips required immediately apprehending redness(as a property). It doesn't.
You’re saying that conscious experience involving red objects is not necessarily conscious experience of red objects (or of the redness of those objects)? Why isn’t it?
All conscious experience consists of things that exist in their entirety prior to becoming meaningful to the creature. Red cups can become a meaningful part of a language-less color blind creature's experience, but not as a red cup to the creature. Red cups full of Maxwell House coffee become a meaningful part of conscious experience by virtue of becoming part of a correlation drawn by the creature between the red cup full of Maxwell House coffee and other things.
A tiny rodent is being chased by my cat. It hides behind the red cup full of Maxwell House coffee. The red cup full of Maxwell House coffee becomes meaningful to the rodent when it hides behind it. It becomes a place to hide. The red cup full of Maxwell House coffee becomes meaningful to the cat when the cat expects and/or otherwise believes that the rodent is on the other side of the red cup full of Maxwell House coffee, despite the rodent being unseen. Prior to becoming a part of that correlation, the red cup full of Maxwell House coffee exists in it's entirety as a red cup full of Maxwell House coffee, but it is utterly meaningless to the cat. Afterwards, it becomes an obstacle, it becomes something to be navigated around in search of the rodent. The red cup is definitely an irrevocable necessary elemental constituent of the chase experience, to both rodent and cat, however it is not experienced as a red cup by either.
Does that answer your question? It's not a matter of "why", it's a matter of "how"?
Your point is that humans and animals can both perceive or consciously experience red, but it requires language to identify the colour as “red”?
This needs argued for.
Red cups and red balls have something in common:They're both red. They both reflect/emit the same or similar enough frequencies of light. Knowing that red things have that in common requires isolating and focusing upon the fact that the same frequencies are emitted/reflected by different things.
How is it possible to compare/contrast between different things arriving at the thought and belief(knowing) that different things are the same color, if there is no placeholder, proxy, and/or name for the frequency/color?
No.
The point is that immediately understanding and/or apprehending redness as a property of conscious experience requires metacognition. Basic rudimentary conscious experience does not.
How is that different to saying that it requires language to identify the colour as "red"?
:up:
Quoting Olivier5
Yet we do make the distinction in practice - see below.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes. So that's a physical process. In the absence of light, the colors of the apples and leaves change over time independently of anyone being there. So looking red (or pallid, or green, or white) and being red (or pallid, or green, or white) are different. That is, apples don't look red in the dark, yet they are red (until they become pallid).
Identifying the color as "red" does not require metacognition.
Okay, whatever. It makes no philosophical difference that I can see to my perception of red.
Why not? I'm trying to understand the distinction between "talk of redness" requires metacognition and "talk of redness" requires language. Why does "talk of redness" require metacognition, or what do you mean by that?
And why does it matter?
That's two different meanings for the word "red". One is how it looks to us, the other is having the property of looking red to us under normal lighting conditions. That is to say, the chemical structure of the red apple's surface is such that it reflects visible light of a certain wavelength.
That was not the extent of my argument. Try not to cherry-pick. If, say, a crow can distinguish between a red ball and a blue ball, and can correlate a red ball and a red cup, that is more than sufficient to have a property 'redness' even without the word 'red' or indeed any other word.
Quoting creativesoul
No it doesn't, as had already been pointed out. Our concept of redness precedes our knowledge of the wave nature of light and cannot depend on such knowledge.
I suggest a revisitation...
Immediately apprehending and/or understanding "redness" requires already knowing how to use "red", and is metacognitive in it's constitution. Knowing how to use the term "red" to talk about red things is thought and belief that is linguistic in it's constitution, but not metacognitive. So, it is either the case that raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable immediately apprehensible conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips does not include the property of redness, or raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable, immediately apprehensible conscious experience requires metacognition. Not all conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips requires language. All metacognition does. So, the property of redness is disqualified(pun intended).
Talk of redness as a property of conscious experience requires both language and metacognition.
Understanding and/or immediately apprehending redness requires considerable previous usage of "red" to pick out red things, and then rather extensive subsequent careful consideration about that previous use of "red"(that's metacognition).
And it matters because qualia are supposed to be basic, fundamental, private, ineffable, immediately apprehensible, etc. but redness is none of those things.
I agree that some language less creatures can distinguish between red things as well as gathering different red things. I agree that some language less creatures can perceive the frequencies of light that we've named "red", and can distinguish between those frequencies and others. I agree that some language less creatures can gather different things that emit and/or reflect the aforementioned frequencies as well...
Where's the concept of "redness" in all of that? It's nowhere to be found because it's not necessary in order to do all of those things. It's not even necessary in order to explain all of those things.
The concept of "redness" emerges from careful and very deliberate consideration of previous normal everyday use of "red". Without the normal everyday use of "red" there would have never been "redness".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The irony of pots and kettles...
Apart from your repeated assertions, I still don't see much justification for "metacognition" or much distinction of it from linguistic competence. What does "rather extensive subsequent careful consideration about that previous use of "red"" add that linguistic competence can't already do? What makes it necessary for "immediately apprehending redness"?
Quoting creativesoul
Not sure where you get "basic" and "fundamental" from. Not from Dennett's paper. And "immediately apprehensible" is something you appear to acknowledge as being characteristic of qualia, given your claim that it requires metacognition.
But red is, so it doesn't matter.
Good point. People keep loading the concept with extraneous baggage.
By the way, Dennett's pumps illustrate that qualia are objective to a degree, and therefore can be studied by science. Hence all the neuroscientists he summons, who are connecting qualia, changing them, inverting them, etc. in his 'intuition pumps'. He could not imagine any of that if deep down (unconsciously), he did not see qualia as objective phenomena.
Cool. It relates to philosophical issues such as dualism, qualia, the hard problem, and what not.
Quoting Marchesk
The word "red" has the same meaning in both phrases, it's just qualified in the first phrase. It's the same form as "the stick doesn't look straight (partly submerged in water), but it is straight."
Distinctions are made in ordinary experience. And those distinctions can be qualified (by "seems", "appears", "looks") in subsequent experiences. Only one meaning is operative here, not separate "subjective" and "objective" meanings. Again, this just comes down to whether one accepts the philosophical subject/object distinction or not. As I've mentioned before, I reject it.
It may relate to these issues but it does not impact on them. E.g. you can think apples are red and still be a dualist.
Quoting Andrew M
You cannot actually reject anything if you are not a subject.
Yes it is. A crow cannot be trained to collect red things without some crow equivalent of a concept of redness. There is a phenomenological similarity that the crow must grasp in order to do this. For two phenomena to be similar, they must share properties.
Quoting creativesoul
Your argument is that because we encode our understanding of red linguistically, redness is a fundamentally linguistic process. This is not shown. You need to show that redness disappears without language, and that's a tall order. All you can demonstrate with this is that the way we discuss redness disappears with the language. We'll still be able to learn that this colour of mushroom is good eating while that colour makes us ill.
By the way, no one in real life behaves as uber-rationally as philosophers insist. Everyone gets by fine without careful and very deliberate consideration of "red", or indeed most other things.
Quoting creativesoul
You're relying too much on this. We have no phenomenal awareness of frequency. There isn't even a fixed one-to-one mapping between frequency and colour perception, as you can demonstrate to yourself quite easily by taking a video recorder into a white room with a standard light bulb. The walls look white to you, but appear yellow on the recording. This is because your brain adjusts the ambient light temperature toward white if it can. None of this process is present to you in your apprehension of a white wall.
Either way, the EM theory of optics is a theory -- a very good one -- to explain why certain things have certain colours. It is likely important to the operating of the brain in producing images, however it is not shown to be fundamental to our or any other animal's phenomenal *perception* of colour. Predicating a description of colour perception that relies on a theory of optics is well and truly putting the cart before the horse. In short, if a better theory of optics comes along, we won't start seeing red grass and green skies.
Quoting creativesoul
Ahh, I see. I ought to lower my expectations somewhat. As you were, then.
Indeed, and this shows us that "redness" is neither necessary nor useful aside from creating a bottle to buzz around in...
And something tells me you never will...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not to derail the discussion, but I think what you're discussing here is Sellars' distinction between "pattern governed behavior" and "rule obeying behavior"; see "Some Reflections on Language Games". Roughly, the former is a matter of conditioning, standard learning processes, etc., while the latter relies on a meta-level recognition of something having the status of a rule that authorizes inference.
(This is not the same as but next-door to Ryle's observation in The Concept of Mind, also taking chess as the prime example: he imagines a researcher observing a game of chess and afterward commiserating with the players about how their every move was "determined" by the rules, and Ryle explains the difference between "determined by" and "in accordance with".)
(Btw, I'm not offering to defend Sellars here, as any Sellars I read more than an hour ago tends to be less clear to me than I'd like, but it's an extraordinary paper and worth reading.)
Try critical self-analysis, rather than metacognition.
Eh, you know what it means, so it must have some use.
That's also not shown.
Not to the flies anyway...
If someone does not realize that there is no such thing as a property of language less conscious experience that we've called "redness", then there's not much more that can be said.
It is perfectly possible to experience the redness of an object, and to call it thus... I don't see what your problem is.
Perhaps, but not for lack of trying. I have asked for clarification.
I think that's apt, although I cannot speak for cs as to what they meant. Linguistic handling of object properties are obviously very different from phenomenological manifestation of object properties, and both are different to (models of) objective properties.
You can't reject anything if you're not a human being. But that doesn't imply subject/object dualism, which divides the human being in Cartesian terms. (Which I briefly discussed here.)
A human being has a perspective of the world. The distinctions we make and our representations of the world presuppose that human perspective. But that perspective doesn't itself have properties (qualia) or a substantial existence (res cogitans), contra dualism.
It's a different perspective to dualism, so to speak.
It's not about your species. Animals can reject things. Dogs tend to reject salad. Cats tend to reject swimming (and dogs). The capacity to reject things is about being a self-aware decision-making center, i.e. a subject. Note the common etymology.
To reject = to ‘throw back’, from the verb reicere, from re- ‘back’ + jacere ‘to throw’
Subject = ‘lying beneath’, from subiectus, past participle of subicere, from sub- ‘under’ + jacere ‘throw’.
Agreed. Quality of redness is not a property; it is the condition of the property of red. We experience the property, we merely think the relative condition of it.
Have you read all I've had to say on this topic in this thread? That may make a difference. Click on my avatar, then on my comments. I've been participating almost exclusively here lately. I assumed you had been following, but were ignoring it all. Perhaps that assumption was mistaken? I'm not interested in being asked for clarity of the clarity of the clarity, but it seems as though that is what's been going on with you. Nothing personal. No intent on insulting you.
What's the difference between redness and red?
We're not getting anywhere with gratuitous assertions or non sequiturs. You've a habit of rewording what I say into something different, and then criticizing your reconstruction. I'm not saying that one need to have knowledge that color is determined - in part - by reflected/emitted light, I'm saying that one needs to be able to focus upon the fact that different things reflect/emit the same light(that things are the same color) in order to gather like colored things for the sake of doing so.
One could gather like colored things as a means to an end that is not for the sake of gathering like colored things. For food reward, as an example. You're claiming that that gathering ability requires a concept of redness. I'm saying that it only requires the ability to see and gather like colored things and hold some expectation of food upon doing so, and that seeing and gathering red things does not equate to having a conception of redness.
Look at "red" and "redness" while you're at it...
I understood that, and I'm saying this is NOT relevant. If red things appeared red because God willed it, we would still have phenomena with the property of redness. The how simply doesn't enter into phenomena because it is not something we are conscious of, that we perceive. All we get is constantly refreshed, temporal mish-mash of impressions. This ball is red for whatever reason. This cup is red for whatever reason. This language-less animal can learn to connect these things by the key property they share, however it does it.
Quoting creativesoul
Well, I said "crow equivalent of the concept of redness" to be precise. What you have described is an animal that can not only compare two objects of the same colour, but can compare that colour to a colour is associates with 'get foodness'. This 'get foodness' may well be identically the "crow equivalent of the concept of redness" I spoke of (seems likely). That is all it needs.
So association of color equals conception of color?
At a basic, grammatical level, the latter is the adjective, while the former is the noun derived from the adjective. Redness is therefore the state or quality of being red, for an object. The "redness of her skin", "the redness of the sky at sunset".
But on a more philosophical plane, you were trying to make a fine distinction between the pre-theoretical perception of something "red" and our theories about the perception of "redness" (what you call meta-cognition). I suppose the idea is that the concept of "redness" reifies a mere colour (or set of colours) into a thing, but only you can tell what the connection was, if you still remember.
Refering back to myself:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So that last sentence proposes that the association could be identity in that instance, allowing for the possibility that, for said crow, there's nothing to redness but 'get foodness'. I wasn't making a general observation.
However, if that perspective is is coloring in the world, adding sound, taste, smell and various feels, then we're still left with something that needs to be explained, because the rest of the world isn't colored in, doesn't have feels and tastes and what not. It's only that way to a perceiver. So somehow the perceiver adds those sensations to their interaction with the world. The hard problem remains in some form until there is some way to account for these sensations.
Maybe the concept of qualia is problematic, but the term itself was derived from an inability to account for consciousness, which is made up of those sensations, plus proprioception, feelings and any other internal sensations. All Dennett has done in Quininq Qulia is highlight some issues with the traditional definition of qualia, while leaving the core of the hard problem.
And yes, perceivers are part of the same world, not walled off from it, but still the question needs to be answered: from whence comes the colors, sounds, etc?
To echo @Marchesk’s post, if we have perspectives - if our perspectives exist - yet they do not have substantial (physical?) existence, then what type of existence do they have?
But what are we supposed to be adding color to? A little paint-by-number picture in our minds? Even if we did such a thing, how would we see it? The "mind's eye" is a metaphor, not an organ.
Maybe it's no help, but I would rather start by saying that we see a world of colored things because that's how we see, and other animals must see quite differently because they have very different organs of sight. Since color is admittedly relational, what can it mean to say that the world lacks color until we daub it on? Is the intent just to say that other animals, or people with atypical eyes our brains, see differently? Color is neither out there nor not out there; color is an aspect of how you see or it isn't.
I find this slightly puzzling to think about, but I don't care, because I know that my brain always only presents objects to my awareness colored, and there's no way for me to see around my own corner. This simply is what seeing is for me. For me to have an experience of seeing-things-colored, I'd have to have something to compare it to, and I can't. That's why it makes sense to me to deny that I'm experiencing color sensations or whatever -- I don't see how I could do that, but I do know that I can see and when I do there's always color.
I don't doubt I've once again phrased some of this poorly; it is genuinely awkward to talk about, but I'm not convinced there's philosophical hay to make of that awkwardness.
The problem is how is there a conscious experience at all? We have detectors that can discriminate light and sound, yet they're not conscious. When we examine our brains, no consciousness is found there. It's not like some neural pattern is colored red.
You can't turn around and look at it. That's the main issue here: that the observing mind is never the object - which is why Dennett et al want to eliminate it altogether - but then, nothing can be said to exist without the perspective provided by the observing mind.
That is the sense in which consciousness 'underlies' - not that it's 'out there' as some mysterious substance or an attribute of matter (per panpsychism) - but that the act of knowing is grounded in the observing mind, which itself is never an object. Once that is understood a lot of things fall into place. (See this.)
By simply asking the question you answer it. What are we even talking about? Do you know? What are the arguments, what are yours? I understand it's how not if (or is it?). Neurons, man. It's just happening. It's exact nature should not be pinpointed. Otherwise we'll inevitably have Terminator: Rise of the Machines. Makes sense don't you know?
Does that include the existence of the observing mind itself?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, it’s a conundrum.
Quoting Wayfarer
Focusing on “knowing” misses the point, I feel. I agree it’s not “out there”, but “having” a perspective still requires explanation in terms of how or whether it exists.
You appear to suggest that we define physical existence in terms of what “the observing mind” observes , or in terms of objects, and simply ignoring any problems posed by having minds or being subjects.
Not ignoring it, but acknowledging that the inscrutable nature of the observing mind is a limit. Dennett wants to ignore it, or rather, wants to explain it away, to carry on as if it is something that isn't real, but meanwhile, everything he thinks, says or writes is grounded in it.
Wittgenstein said, did he not, that 'in order to set a limit to thinking, you would have to think on both sides of the limit'? But sensing, being aware of, the limit, is not the same as saying you know what it is. If you say 'I know what it is', then you've already fallen back into the subject-object mode of analysis.
Quoting Luke
What is the terminus of explanation in respect of such a question? What is the 'it' which is the subject of the question 'does it exist?' 'It' is that which every question presupposes, as without 'it' there is nobody to ask the question.
This approach requires a certain kind of diffidence, so to speak - an awareness of the limitations of thought.
As a general rule, knowing you don't know something is preferable to thinking you know something you don't. It's also preferable to endless blather about the redness of apples. :-)
Technically, if there is some other form of 'existence', which we, understandably if not narrowly assign the life we live as what encompasses and consists of it, it wouldn't be 'never'. Just not now.
Surely you didn't expect my eyes to be conscious, or my brain for that matter; I'm the one who's conscious, at least much of the time. What is it you're not seeing that you expected to? Do none of my parts look like they're part of a sometimes conscious creature? Why not? What do they look like?
Do we really know the objects we do talk about? Sure, basic things like Laws of Motion, chemical reactions (at least, what substances do what when introduced to others), other forms of easily observable reality (which have been found out to be wrong constantly ie. geocentricism), but just look at the animal kingdom. Or less advanced forms of our own like babies. The peek-a-boo game. If you cover your hands in front of your face, to the baby, you completely disappeared off the face of the Earth. We live in a world of infinite possibility. Those who doubt it are clearly stuck in their ways and blinded by their own ingrained beliefs. It's just how the mind works. Anything that challenges your ingrained beliefs ie. your sense of identity/who you are or one's understanding of reality is instantly ridiculed/laughed off. Cognitive dissonance 101.
All I meant to say is that objects can be measured, weighed, chemically analysed and we can talk about their shapes, colours, textures, parts, functions or lack of function, etc., etc. So per that view to know an object is is to be able describe its form, constitution and general characteristics. @Wayfarer says we can never do these kinds of thing with consciousness, because it can never be an object for us.
So we can never, according to him, know what consciousness is, what form of existence (if any) it has. My answer then is that if this is so, the question as to whether consciousness exists, and if so what kind of existence it enjoys, is a misguided question.
You can study the processes of consciousness scientifically through cognitive science, psychology and other disciplines. You can arrive at an understanding through introspection or through philosophical analysis (as Kant did, and phenomenology attempts to do). But the functional issues of consciousness that are the subject of the objective disciplines are what Chalmers categorises as the 'easy problems' (not that they're very easy!) The hard problem that has to be 'faced up to' is precisely what Chalmers describes as 'what it is like to be'...which I interpret as an awkward description of what is designated by the noun 'being'.
There is a genuine and deep philosophical issue at stake. It has to do with the whole question of the relationship between subjects and the domain of objects (and therefore objective science). Basically, eliminative materialism treats subjects as objects, it denies that there is a subjective reality apart from that can be described in principle by the objective sciences. Dennett spells this out, this is not a 'straw man' criticism; he proposes 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science.'(Consciousness Explained, p72.)
This is what I am saying (and Dennett's other critics, many of whom unlike myself are first-rate philosophers and scholars) is fallacious. You simply cannot arrive at an understanding of the first-person nature of experience (or 'being') by scientific means at all. You only ever know what 'being' is, because you yourself are 'a being'. But don't ask for a description or explanation of what 'being' is, because it's far to nebulous and polysemic a word to admit of a simple definition.
My theory is, eliminative materialism is actually frightened of the ambiguous and slippery nature of the notion of 'being', and so they're attempting to deny it - even though such denials are, according to one of Dennett's many critics, so preposterous as to verge on the deranged.
It's an interesting take that the Tractatus may be viewed as an attack on Cartesian dualism or subject/object dualism - not that I think you meant to imply it was, nor that I think that it is - but still, it's interesting to consider.
However, I'm not really interested in the limit, nor in thinking both sides of it (at least, I'm not seeing it that way). My immediate interest, resulting from @Andrew M's post, is the nature of existence of our perspectives. I don't claim to know, or to be able to say, what that is. If we follow Andrew in acknlowledging that "a human being has a perspective of the world", then it is hard not to fall into the subject-object mode of analysis. And I don't see that/why we should necessarily be avoiding it, anyway.
Quoting Wayfarer
What sort of explanation would satisfy me? Possibly one that explains the nature of existence of our perspectives, or one that would help to dissolve the apparent dualism without denying the existence/reality of either side of the issue. In short, something that helps to explain why our perspectives are different in nature from everything else in existence. I suspect it may be something to do with the definition of "existence".
Quoting Wayfarer
The perspective that each human being has, as I said in the statement you quoted.
Quoting Wayfarer
That doesn't really help (me) to explain the nature of existence of our perspectives, or to dissolve the apparent dualism without denying the reality of either side of the issue.
Quoting Luke
Aha. Interesting point. I would like to comment on your remark ‘Substantial’ (physical) existence’.
A point I often make is that the philosophical meaning of ‘substance’ (and ‘substantial’) is very different to the common sense meaning of the word. The common sense meaning is ‘a particular kind of matter with uniform properties’. The philosophical meaning of ‘substance’ is different to that; it was derived from the Latin term ‘substantia’ which was used to translate Aristotle’s ‘ouisia’. (I will acknowledge at the outset that I’m not a scholar of Greek or Aristotle, however, I think this distinction is one that even an amateur can grasp.)
Aristotle’s notion of ‘ouisia’ is much more ‘a kind or mode of being’ than what we would think of as ‘substance’. That is why, for example, in discussions of Aristotle’s metaphysics, we often read of ‘man’ or ‘horse’ as being exemplars of ‘substances’. In the modern sense of that word, it makes no sense to say that. There is no substance called ‘human’ or ‘horse’ in the modern sense of that word. And this mistranslation or equivocation lurks at the back of many philosophical discussions.
But we have retained the sense of ‘substance’ as ‘that which really exists’, or ‘that in which attributes inhere’. And generally speaking, we regard that ‘substance’ as being material substance, something which exists whether we conceive of it or not, something independent of my saying so or believing so. That sense of ‘what is real’ as being ‘something which exists independently of my thinking about it’ is practically the definition of realism.
That is the sense in which I think you’re using the word ‘substantial’.
Thanks, @Wayfarer. I was responding to Andrew's use of 'substantial', and was thinking in terms of Descartes' res extensa: extended thing(s), given Andrew's reference to res cogitans. So, yes, I was thinking of substantial existence as physical existence or mind-independent existence.
We're close.
What's a conception of color if not thinking about color? If crows have conceptions of color, and we have conceptions of color, there must be some commonality between the two in order for both to be called by the same name "conceptions"... the same is true of conscious experience of red/redness, thought, belief, understanding, apprehension, etc...
What does all conscious experience of red consist in/of such that it is by virtue of having that constituency that makes it count as conscious experience of red. You're positing some crow equivalent of concept of redness.
What does that consist of? Associations between red and food is a good start(for the trained crow), it seems to me. I do not get the 'get foodness' thing though...
Sure, but all of that is unverifiable/ unfalsifiable surmise that we may or may not give our assent to, just like we may or may not relate to works of music, poetry, literature, painting and so on; it's not determinate scientific knowledge that can be confirmed or falsified by inter-subjective observations.
I don't expect all animals to have the same concept of the same colour. As you pointed out, we have a linguistic component to our understanding of red that other animals would not. But answering your question regardless, I'd say that any commonality between conceptions of redness between different animals would rest in commonality between how those animals' brains transform raw sensory input into phenomenal data (qualia).
Which is fine; that which is not primarily empirical has no business being addressed under empirical conditions anyway. Logical speculation remains, and carries the weight of its own law, the ground of which ought to have inter-subjective assent. Where the law is to be applied.....that’s the problem.
That being said, I agree that......
Quoting Janus
.....for the question should hinge on what validity it enjoys, existence being categorically moot.
Yes, I think the question could be valid in the sense that it might serve as a stimulant to the creative imagination, for example.
You're describing the world as a barren landscape where the human comes along and colors it in with all the qualities that make it interesting to them.
But a different view is that the world already has qualities as well as quantities, particulars, relations, actions, events, etc. If so, then making a distinction between in-here and out-there, or subjective and objective, is a philosophical mistake. All of these features are part of the world as we perceive it. Without that perspective - our primary point of reference in the world - nothing is distinguished or defined at all.
Quoting Marchesk
But also whence comes distance, mass, time, motion, molecules, plant life and lower organism sentience?
These features are all defined in reference to our human perspective (consider Einstein with his measuring-rods, clocks and observers giving an operational meaning to his relativistic theories). The hard problem arises as a result of positing an ontological division between one set of features and the other. That is, a solution becomes impossible in principle because it has been defined that way.
It's a formal aspect of a human being perceiving the world. Their perspective is not a "thing" that has any existence separate from that human activity. But we can consider it separately (i.e., in an abstract sense).
For an analogy from physics, consider an inertial reference frame. In the train platform's frame, the train is travelling 60mph. In the train's frame, the train is at rest. So what is a reference frame? It's simply an abstract coordinate system that measurements are made relative to. It doesn't have an existence beyond a location in space (such as the train or platform) that is represents.
A person's perspective is like that. It's an abstraction that doesn't exist separately from the person interacting in the world. Yet it is assumed in the distinctions, observations, and measurements that the person makes. As with the train speed example, there is no "view from nowhere".
Physics, chemistry and biology already account for that stuff.
Quoting Andrew M
That has to do with the speed of light and inertial frames, not perceivers. Perceivers are only used for thought experiments to show their clocks and measuring-rods are different, but there's no need for that. Happens for any objects and events.
Quoting Andrew M
But there is, because life evolved long after the universe was around, and science can detail the universe in places where there is no life and no perceivers.
However, if you're arguing from a Kantian/correlationist position and not a realist one, then that's another matter. I'm pretty sure Dennett is a realist/physicalist, as is Chalmers, except for consciousness.
I'm not sure the consciousness debate matters for Kantians, since the empirical world includes all the colors, sounds, etc. So I get why you would deny Nagel's "view from nowhere". The consciousness debate seems to only matter for physicalism, pun unintended. At least that's how Chalmers approaches it, with his talk of supervenience and p-zombies.
'Perspective' implies or requires an observing mind, does it not? I mean, it is something I'm in complete agreement with, but it seems to me that it is more often than not overlooked.
Quoting Marchesk
Physics provides an account of it, but it doesn't account for it.
Well, yeah. That gets into Chalmers metaphysical (or was it natural?) versus logical supervenience. The physics doesn't entail consciousness, although it provides the conditions for it.
Thanks, Andrew. Allow me to try and press the analogy to see whether it holds.
Quoting Andrew M
In the same way that e.g. breathing, perspiration and digestion are not "things" that have any existence separate from human activity? Or, in the same way that the game of chess and economic markets are not "things" that have any existence separate from human activity?
Does separability from human activity help to decide whether these "things" are physical or real?
Quoting Andrew M
Are perspectives identical to reference frames, then? Is a perspective also "an abstract coordinate system that measurements are made relative to"? If it's not the same, then in what way is it comparable?
Language is one consideration worth touching upon. Drawing that distinction is important on my view. Conscious experience of color consisting of a linguistic component, and conscious experience of color that does not; a good move.
However, I advise that we draw yet another subsequent distinction between conceptions of color having linguistic components, because those come in both the simple and metacognitive varieties. So, there are three basic kinds of conscious experience of red/redness needing to be taken proper account of; conscious experience of red/redness that do not have linguistic components, and two different varieties of conscious experience that do(simple and metacognitive).
So, we've 'whittled our way down' to three kinds or varieties.
What do all three consist in/of such that that elemental constituency is capable of evolving along the evolutionary timeline, and growing in complexity alongside the worldview of the individual creature(whatever that may be)?
I propose correlations drawn by the creature between the color red and other things. It's the other things that determine whether or not the conscious experience of red/redness is language-less, unreflective, or self-reflective. The content of the correlations is the content of the conscious experience.
Language less conscious experience of red/redness cannot consist of correlations drawn between the color red and language use. The color and food items for the trained crow is an adequate example. If the crow was trained to gather red items after hearing the name "red" being spoken aloud, then it would no longer be language less for the correlations would include the language use, along with the red items and the food items. Should the crow be brilliant enough to learn how to talk about it's own conscious experiences of red/redness , that would be a metacognitive crow.
I would concur. The particular individual creature's biological machinery plays a huge, irrevocably important role in determining and/or facilitating the ability to draw correlations between colors and other things(to have conscious experience of red/redness), but not the only remarkable one. Language use plays as noteworthy a role as biological machinery in determining the ability to draw correlations between the color red and other things.
I request that meaning be invoked and/or incorporated out of bare necessity, common sense understanding of what must count as conscious experience of red/redness .
All conscious experience is meaningful to the creature having it. All conscious experience of red/redness requires the color to either already be and/or become meaningful to the creature that is reportedly having the conscious experience of red/redness. One cannot have a concept of red/redness, or a conscious experience of red/redness when the color is utterly meaningless to the creature. Again, correlations drawn between the color and other things is more than adequate an autonomous process capable of evolving nicely after language use has begun in earnest, allowing conscious experience of red to grow in complexity after we begin using the name to identify red things, and then self-reflectively considering color and it's relationship to us and other things, after we've begun earnest metacognition(thinking about our own conscious experiences of red/redness as a subject matter in their own right).
All three kinds clearly summed up.
All conscious experience consists of correlations drawn between the color red and other things. In that very real sense, they are all the same.
:up: Looks good to me.
Quoting creativesoul
In some qualitative sense, I guess. Redness seems to be a property of objects of perception (no abstract redness is observed, but we can collate red things), and a property is that which causes some particular effect in a particular circumstance (to be is to do) which is the correlation I think we're speaking of. The particular effect may vary from beast to beast, but the property can be established as the same through additional correlations between effects: the crows collate the same things we call red.
For exactness, crows do learn a simple nonuniform language. This might be too far-fetched, but I was considering four crows in adjacent cages, each with an array of buttons of variable colour. When the buttons light up in a random colour configuration, if all crows press all red buttons and only red buttons, they all get a treat. Occasionally crows are replaced by new ones.
If crows are capable, and I expect they are, they might learn a voiced instruction to alert other crows to press buttons, and which buttons to press. A noise that means 'press the red buttons' followed by a noise that means 'this is red' as the tutor presses only the red buttons might suffice. If this were the case, newer crows might be said to have a linguistic understanding of redness.
In the experiment where a crow learns to fetch a red object to get food, one could conceive of red objects as symbols for food. In this sense, to use a visual signal to trigger a learnt response is already something vaguely approaching language.
I don't think crows imitate other birds, but some birds are specialists of that, like the mockingbirds. Not sure what the Darwinian advantage is. That's why parrots can mimic entire sentences. I'm pretty sure you can train a parrot to say red when he sees something red.
by a being capable of speaking.
I left out the bolded portion above accidentally in my original reply. Does that correction change anything important on your view? Does it matter to your reply?
Yes it happens for any object and event - which are distinguishable in human perception.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes it can. I can point to the Sun and stars (a human perceptual activity) and we can agree that that is what we mean by those terms. It doesn't follow that the Sun and stars didn't exist before we identified them (or before humans emerged). Same thing for red apples.
Quoting Marchesk
No, I'm not a Kantian. My view is broadly Aristotelian, which is realist.
Seems OK to me. This is what I mean by saying that there is no view from nowhere.
Yes, that's right. For the first set of examples, if a person dies, they no longer have a perspective on the world - that perspective depended on them being a living, functioning human being. For the second set of examples, these things perhaps exist as artefacts of human activity (and thus don't literally depend on humans to always be there), but nonetheless gain their meaning and purpose by virtue of a human perspective (or perspectives).
Quoting Luke
I'm not sure I understand your question. In an everyday sense, we regard the things we can observe as real. Those things are separable from human activity. For example, red apples preceded human existence.
However identifying and talking about those things isn't separable from human activity. So, from my perspective, that's a red apple there (that existed prior to my interaction with it). But that perspective may not be relevant to an alien creature with a different perceptual capability, since their perspective may be different. So you can't necessarily generalize one's perspective to other creatures (or, in certain cases, even to other humans if they can't make the same distinctions that you can - their perspective would be different).
Quoting Luke
It's analogous, but not quite the same. A perspective is a reference point that observed distinctions are made relative to.
Also, a perspective is applicable to human beings and, potentially, other sentient creatures for whom it makes sense. But not trees or rocks (which nonetheless qualify as reference frames).
Also, two objects can be in the same inertial frame, whereas a perspective is ultimately unique to an individual. However, we are a part of the same world, have similar physical characteristics, and the laws of nature are the same for both of us. So most of the distinctions and statements that would be valid and true from my perspective would also be valid and true from yours.
The words in a statement such as "the apple is red" derive their meaning from (i.e., are grounded in) a human perspective. The main point of comparison with relativity is that distinctions/measurements are relative to some reference point, not absolute. That is, the perceiver is implied in any statement about the world.
Apologies, I was quite unclear. I was trying to connect it back to your earlier post, where you said:
Quoting Andrew M
More recently, you stated that a human perspective is not a "thing" which can be separated from human activity, and that having a perspective was like having a reference frame.
You have now agreed that aspiration, perspiration and digestion are also "things" which cannot be separated from human activity. The point of these more obviously physical examples is that they do (or that they might be considered to) have substantial existence. This is something which you have stated a human perspective does not have. Furthermore, these other "things" are also considered to have properties, which you have also stated a human perspective does not have.
If a perspective is no different to aspiration, perspiration and digestion in terms of their inseparability from human activity, then why does a perspective differ in terms of having substantial existence and properties?
Quoting Andrew M
But we don't observe a perspective.
Quoting Andrew M
I see. What I'm questioning about the analogy is your statement that we have a perspective just like we (or other objects) have a reference frame, and yet neither of these has substantial existence. I think I'm still not sold on what you seem to be implying: that we can have them without them existing. More to the point, I doubt that the analogy holds.
I should probably make clear that I have no interest in preserving 'res cogitans' or the human perspective as a non-physical substance. I am looking for a purely physical explanation, but one which retains the first-person perspective and the reality of its properties/qualities.
If we say that red/redness is a property of red objects of perception, all properties cause some particular effect, and that that effect is the correlation drawn between the property itself and something other than the property itself, then we're saying that red/redness is the cause of all correlations drawn between red/redness and other things(food items, in the case of the crow).
I cannot agree. On my view...
Correlations drawn between color and other things are not so much caused by color so much as they are made possible by color. Color is one basic elemental constituent of all conscious experience of color... that of red/redness notwithstanding.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think we're mostly in agreement here. If the effect of red/redness is the correlation drawn between red/redness and other things(which I'm uneasy with saying per the above reasons), then the only variance from beast to beast would be amongst the other things. I agree that we can establish that the crows are drawing correlations between color by virtue of gathering different things of the same color. I agree that we can establish color as a property of things. I'd go further and say that the color is clearly meaningful to them, particularly so if the color is associated, correlated, and/or otherwise connected to their eating behaviours(food items) and all that that entails physiologically speaking(all the autonomous activity regarding their biological machinery). Those are deep seated simple basic correlations being drawn between directly perceptible things.
The difference is that aspiration, etc., are bodily processes or functions. Whereas a perspective is a logical condition for being able to make distinctions.
Compare running a race to winning a race. Both are predicated of people (i.e., are not separable from people). But they are different kinds of predicates. Running is a physical process, whereas winning is the logical condition of having passed the finish line first and is not itself a process. (This is Ryle's distinction between try and achievement verbs.)
Quoting Luke
We don't, but it is implied in a person's activity which we do observe.
Quoting Luke
Concrete particulars such as people, apples and rocks have substantial existence, being substances. Abstractions do not. They depend on (are not separable from) concrete particulars. They exist, to the extent that they do, because the concrete particulars that they are predicated of exist.
Linguistically, we wouldn't normally say that breathing exists, we would say that a person breathes (though we might say that their breath exists - however this refers to the air, which is itself substantial). Similarly, we wouldn't normally say that perspectives exist, we would say that a person has a perspective. So the non-separability (and thus the dependent and abstract nature) of those predicates is clear.
Quoting Luke
As I see it, the first-person/third-person division excludes the possibility of a physical explanation (hence the hard problem). Instead, as human beings, we have a perspective on the world. That's the logical condition for being able to make any distinctions at all. So, from my perspective, the apple is spherical and red (i.e., they are properties of the apple). Not that the apple is objectively spherical and subjectively red (which is subject/object dualism).
Can ‘we’ be categorised with ‘other objects’? Do objects have a reference frame? Or do reference frames only pertain to observers?
Quoting Andrew M
:up: Perspective is an attribute of rational thought. Do non-rational animals entertain perspectives? I think not, because they are not capable of abstraction.
Quoting Andrew M
I have to draw attention again to the equivocal meaning of ‘substance’ in this context. ‘Substance’ in normal usage means ‘a particular kind of matter with uniform properties’. ‘Substance’ in the philosophical sense means the fundamental kinds or types of beings of which attributes can be predicated.
So I think what you are actually saying here, is not 'substantial', but 'material' - you're contrasting material particulars with abstractions.
Quoting Andrew M
But that leads to the question of what 'dependency' means. If you consider such concepts as fundamental logical laws or arithmetical principles, there are at least some that are understood to be 'true in all possible worlds'. Basic arithmetical principles, such as number, are applicable to any and all kinds of particulars; '3' can be predicated of people, apples and rocks. So I question this notion of 'dependency'.
Wouldn't you say that having a perspective (or being conscious) is a bodily process or function like any other?
Quoting Andrew M
I think you and I might have different conceptions of a human perspective. Yours is apparently stripped of all phenomena leaving only an abstract point-of-view singularity. Whereas I see little difference between having a perspective and being conscious (in the first-person), with all that that entails.
Quoting Andrew M
Do you consider observation to be a part of a perspective?
Quoting Andrew M
I think that human aspiration or human digestion could be said to have physical existence?
Quoting Andrew M
Why does it?
Quoting Andrew M
If these are properties of the apple, rather than properties of your perception (or rather than some relation of the two), then it would seem to imply that the apple is objectively spherical and objectively red. Which is fine, but how do you deal with things like seeing illusions where there is a discrepancy between the properties of the object and the perception of the object?
I was following Andrew's lead here, since he said:
Quoting Andrew M
In any case, I generally agree with what Andrew M is saying about the primary nature of perspective. The way I express it is that in all judgements, including scientific judgements, there is a subjective pole that is fundamental in that judgement, but that is not made explicit in it. That is very much a Kantian argument. Physicalism insists that the data of the objective sciences exist independently of any perspective, that they exist 'as is', independent of any cognitive act on our part. They imagine that the world continues to exist, just as it does now, in the absence of any observer, without, however, acknowledging that there is an implicitly human perspective even in that imaginative act.
What exactly is your argument that precludes all animals but humans from being able to imagine or visualize; that for them it is nothing but "stimulus and response"?
Neither can children. Do they not have a perspective? Are they not rational?
Hey Jeep! :smile:
What you've said here is over-simplistic. There are three basic varieties of conscious experience consisting of language less thought and belief, basic thought and belief with linguistic components, and metacognitive thought and belief with linguistic components. That is also the order in which they appear/emerge with each successive one wholly dependent upon the previous one(s).
However, children have the capacity to acquire language, which they do with extraordinary rapidity. And only human children can do that.
Do you ever hear the poignant tale of Nim Chimpksy? This was the story of a chimp who was raised by a scientist who was determined to prove that Chomsky's theory of the innate linguistic abilities of humans was wrong, by teaching a chimp to sign. Long story short, failed abysmally and completely, and the scientist altogether lost interest in poor Nim, who ended up being abandoned into an animal lab, 'signing frantically for someone to get him out' before dying at a young age (for a chimp). :sad:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-sad-story-of-nim-chimpsky
As for your categorisation of 'varieties of conscious experience', that may be all well and good, but I'm concentrating specifically on rational thought, as I regard that as germane to the OP. It comes from a discussion of the role of perspective in knowing. Andrew M is arguing that perspective is fundamental to knowing - which I agree with.
Not only human children have the capacity to acquire language. What I'm saying is that language use alone is inadequate for reason, as well as unnecessary. In fact, the very notion of reason is fraught by being based upon a gross misunderstanding of thought and belief.
Some language less creatures can learn that fire hurts when touched. That does not require language, nor metacognition, but it does require basic rudimentary thought and belief which amounts to recognizing and/or attributing causality. That is most certainly a conscious experience of touching fire. Deliberately avoiding fire thereafter seems rational by my lights...
The problem with all this talk of consciousness and the easy and hard problem are the notions of consciousness at work.
You seem to want to require metacognition, which is the most complex sort of conscious experience known to man, and it comes after simple linguistically informed consciousness and language less consciousness. Entertaining a perspective requires first having one and the ability to think about it as a subject matter in and of itself. Of course only humans can do such a thing, that we know of, for doing so is a process that requires complex language use replete with the ability to talk about one's own 'mental' ongoings... and others'.
If it seems hard to explain how consciousness 'pops into existence', perhaps it's because it doesn't. The framework being used to take account of that which exists in it's entirety prior to our awareness(the first two varieties of conscious experience) is inadequate for doing so as a result of conflating the different complexity levels of conscious experience...
That's the way it seems to me.
I've seen very little, if anything, that Andrew has argued here that strikes me as obviously mistaken. Andrew also seems to be skirting around, or nearly touching upon what I call existential dependency and elemental constituency. Unfortunately, he seems to be working from a dichotomy of sorts that is itself inadequate. Perhaps the physical/mental, or physical/ non-physical, or material/immaterial? I'm not sure, however, none of those is capable of taking proper account of that which consists of and is existentially dependent upon both. All conscious experience is of that sort of existential/elemental variety, for it all consists of thought and belief, and all thought and belief consists of and is existentially dependent upon physical and 'mental', material and immaterial, internal and external, physical and non-physical, etc...
Nor should you try when apparently you don't have any further argument.
Quoting Wayfarer
The alternative to linguistically mediated rational thought is not merely stimulus and response, though; that is way too simplistic and demeaning of animal life.
Seems that way to me as well. Dennett also pointed it out.
Yes, I think that's true for a self-reflective sense of perspective. However I'm just using it in the sense of a reference point from which things are observed. Animals can still distinguish objects and colors, even though they lack an ability to use language to represent them.
Quoting Wayfarer
The types and kinds that you're referring to are what Aristotle termed secondary substance. So 'tree', 'apple', and 'human' are all secondary substances. However concrete particulars are primary substances. This tree here, that red apple on the table, and Socrates are all examples of primary substances. For Aristotle, the kind apple depends on there being individual apples. So secondary substance is not separable from primary substance.
This is central to Aristotle's discussion of change. What is substantial to a thing is that which does not change for that thing during its lifetime. Thus Socrates might change from pale to tanned, or healthy to sick, but he is always human (and he is always Socrates).
From SEP:
Quoting Substance - SEP
Quoting Wayfarer
What I've described is Aristotle's notion of dependency. For details, see Aristotle's four-fold classification of beings in the Categories. There's a useful chart at 8:40 in this video (Substance and Subject) by Susan Sauvé Meyer. The arrows show the dependencies of universals and inherent items on concrete particulars (primary substances).
This inverts Plato's scheme since, for Plato, concrete particulars are dependent on the Forms. As Meyer concludes (from the Video Transcript):
Quoting Substance and Subject - Susan Sauvé Meyer - University of Pennsylvania
No. As I'm using the term, it's a logical condition.
Quoting Luke
Yes, my usage here is the former. However, your alternative usage is fine as well (i.e., the result of having observed, made distinctions, drawn conclusions, used language). In this case, like the "winning the race" example, it would be a logical condition that denotes the end of a process - something that is achieved by looking, thinking, interacting in the world, etc. Which is just what it means to be conscious. However I don't accept the "first-person" qualification if it's meant to imply a contrast with a "third-person" perspective.
Quoting Luke
Observation is an activity or process. Perspective is the prior condition (my usage) or the end result (your usage) of that activity.
Quoting Luke
OK.
Quoting Luke
In effect, it posits ill-defined ghostly entities that are outside the scope of scientific investigation. See my earlier post on this here.
Quoting Luke
If there's a known discrepancy, then we ordinarily express that by saying, for example, "The stick is straight but appears bent". However if someone simply said that the stick is bent (when it is straight), then they would be mistaken.
I'd just add that the 'objective' qualifiers are misleading, since they imply that the apple has those characteristics independently of a perspective. It's both sides of the subject/object duality that need to be rejected and replaced with a perspective of the world conception.
Yes, I briefly discussed Dennett's Cartesian Theater metaphor here. And, of course, Dennett points out how qualia is defined to be beyond the scope of science (radically private, ineffable, etc.).
That's because it's not language. Bacteria can learn. It's basic to any living organism to be able to respond to stimuli. That's what I mean when I refer to 'stimulus and response' - it describes a huge gamut of behaviour, even human behaviour to a point. But language depends on abstraction and on reason. (I don't see why the notion of 'reason' is fraught, either, although I don't know if I want to argue the case.)
Quoting creativesoul
Right.
Quoting creativesoul
I think there's a background assumption that the fundamental constituents of reality are physical or 'substantial'. Being non-materialist by inclination, that is what I'm questioning.
Quoting Andrew M
But they can't conceptualise them. I think we have to be extremely wary about projecting 'perspective' as something that exists outside of, well, the human perspective.
Quoting Andrew M
I note with satisfaction that Meyer says a good translation of 'ousia' would be 'being-ness'. I actually think 'being' would work equally well. After all, what kinds of entities are usually referred to as 'beings' in common parlance?
And she also notes that the use of the word 'substance' is something of a mistranslation for 'ouisia', just as I've been saying. I think if we used a word like 'being' or 'subject' in place of 'substance' - like 'primary being' or 'primary subject' - it would convey the meaning of the term much more realistically.
Saw that too. It's only the second time they change that thread title. What's next? "Not Understanding Quining Qualia"? "How to Use Quining Qualia as a Door Stop"? :-)
Edit - better yet:
Quining the Qualia Lovers and their Bastard Zombies
"Qualifying Quania" - exploring the concept of "quining", and whether it boils down to some elementary, ineffable "Quania".
Still, a view logically implies a point of view. There are of course things that nobody views, but there is no view from nowhere.
I don't see these as exclusive. If we saw in high-contrast black and white, such that any light below a certain threshold frequency appeared to us black and any light above this threshold appeared the same intensity of white, we would have a single colour of sorts (white) but no differentiation: it is either present or absent. We could not distinguish between a nice purple berry and a dangerous red one, and colour as a linguistic concept certainly wouldn't exist. I'm not sure it would make sense to say we have an experience of colour in this case: we have an experience of light above that threshold. By having a different, frequency-dependent mapping between light and perceived colour, we have multiple colours to distinguish and colour itself emerges from that distinction.
:brow:
Some language less creatures can learn that fire hurts when touched because learning that fire hurts when touched is a process that does not always include language use.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that stimulus/response describes a kind of behaviour, and there are many examples thereof, including some human behaviour. I disagree with the implication that stimulus/response alone is adequate for learning, and that learning is basic to any living organism as a result of stimulus/response. There's a gap between stimulus/response and learning that needs bridged.
Not all stimulus/response counts as learning. Motion detectors count. Fire alarms count. Smoke detectors count. Surely, we're not saying that those are capable of having conscious experience, or learning, are we?
Stimulus/response is autonomous. Learning begins that way as well. However, learning as a conscious experience requires more than just stimulus/response capabilities.
Color and conscious experience thereof? Think about the elemental constituents. Think about the existential dependency.
Apples are not the cause of apple pies. They are an elemental part thereof. An elemental constituent. A necessary precondition. An existential pre-requisite. Color is no more the cause of conscious experience thereof, than apples are of apple pies.
What does this add to our understanding of conscious experience of color?
There are multiple colors to distinguish between and the biological machinery necessary for doing so, prior to distinguishing between colors. Color doesn't emerge from that distinction. Color is an elemental part thereof. Color allows it to happen in the exact same way that all of the other elements of conscious experience of color allow it to happen. They are the necessary ingredients.
Crust, filling, topping...
Apples allow apple pies to be made. Colors allow correlations between colors and other things to be made(drawn).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This portion seems agreeable enough. I mean, that sounds about right, to me. If that were the case, we certainly would not be capable of having conscious experience of color. In fact, I would say that rendering eliminates sight altogether.
What is it like to have synesthesia? Some people will see number symbols and letters shaded or tinged with color. The shadings are not the same across individuals, although there are some commonalities. For some reason, "A" is often seen as red. There's lots of other interesting types of synesthesia.
The reason for bringing this up is because those people will experience some things differently than the rest of us. Seeing black "A" as red tinged or shaded is surprising, because a black symbol is not reflecting red light. So where does the red come from?
Something other than brain shivers is also going on.
Qualia. :heart:
It's an empirical question. The conceptual point is that the natural distinctions people make (and which can potentially differ depending on the person or animal involved) need not be the same as the distinctions a scientist might make in their specialized field (in this case, regarding light wavelengths). Similar words may be used, but with different uses.
A simple example that shows this is with the yellow emojis and avatars on this forum. They are not reflecting yellow light (since computer screens emit red-green-blue light). Whereas a banana is reflecting yellow light. The relationship between those different distinctions can be investigated empirically, and without assuming an ontological subject/object division.
(I simply can't resist) Could she shiver the yellow empirically in her room?
Fair enough, although you did ask about reference frames, not perspectives.
A logical condition of what? Or, what do you mean by a "logical condition"?
Quoting Andrew M
I wouldn't say that being conscious is the end of a process. I consider it to be an ongoing process, or simply put: a process.
Quoting Andrew M
It is meant to imply such a contrast, since that's the nexus of the mind-body problem.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't consider perspective to be the end result of observation. If anything, it might be the other way around. Either way, I would consider observation to be a part/constituent of having a perspective or of being conscious.
Quoting Andrew M
I take it there is a particular way things seem to you at particular times, including the way things look, sound, smell, taste and touch. Simply because science cannot directly observe this particular way things seem to you, and/or simply because no direct intersubjective comparison is available, does not make these into "ghostly entities".
Quoting Andrew M
It is only a subject who has a perspective of the world (object), so how can this be a rejection or replacement of the subject/object duality? It seems more like a bolstering of it.
How do you account for Intuition Pump #3?
:brow:
Why ask if you already know?
Exactly.
You don't understand what it means?
Make a point.
Dennett seems to think it means something:
Quoting Banno
You said that "Colours ain't coming from in here, either, since we overwhelmingly agree on them". The point is that our qualia may be different despite using the same colour words, so I'm questioning what you claim we "agree on". That your wife says its violet while you say its blue is beside the point.
I'm not sure. I think Isaac is the only one asserting that there is no such thing as phenomenal consciousness. I don't know what the others are saying.
Does insurance cover that? :razz:
A perspective (or a point-of-view) is a logical precondition for making natural distinctions and observing things.
Consider Alice taking a photograph of a landscape. A logical precondition is that she needs to be standing somewhere, and thus will be taking the photograph from a particular perspective. She can't be standing everywhere, and she can't be standing nowhere.
Alice points the camera, presses the button and the camera takes the picture. That's a physical process. At the end of that process, Alice has a snapshot of the landscape from a particular perspective.
So the photograph doesn't represent an objective "view from nowhere." Which is an analogy for the situation humans are in with respect to the world they are embedded in. They have a perspective of the world, and use human language to express that perspective.
Quoting Luke
Intersubjective comparison is available via public language. We can both agree that the straight stick appears bent (when partly submerged in water) because we can point to actual bent sticks and recognize the superficial similarity.
Similarly, normally-sighted people can distinguish red, green and yellow apples, so there's nothing ineffable in saying that red and green apples appear dim yellow for dichromatics. And the dichromatic will agree they all appear dim yellow. That the dichromatic lacks the ability to distinguish these three colors is a kind of privacy in practice, but not in principle, since their lack of color discrimination has a physical basis.
Quoting Luke
The subject/object duality that I'm arguing against is the idea that a person has radically private and ineffable experiences and, on the other hand, that the world can be represented independent of a perspective. Neither are true.
What I'm arguing for is that our experiences are not radically private or ineffable (which our public language attests to) and also that we represent the world from a particular perspective (since our public language reflects the natural distinctions we make when we observe and interact in the world).
I think that with her knowledge Mary could have learned to visualize yellow before seeing it (in the world). Whether or not she would make that connection when later seeing a yellow object, I don't know.
Similarly consider: could Mary know what a circle looks like before seeing one? Or a $50 bill? Or a bent stick?
Of particular relevance to this thread, is visualizing (and dreaming, imagining, hallucinating, etc.) a form of seeing or perception? Or are they different kinds of activities?
Quoting fdrake
It seems that Dennett finds our talk about tasting food and experiencing spiciness to be on a par with our talk about Santa Claus. I would concede that what might be problematic here are words like "existence" or "instantiation" in the body, but does anyone seriously doubt that they actually taste food or experience spiciness feelings (besides, maybe, @Isaac)?
Dennett's intentional stance seems like an extension of this idea: to treat our external behaviour as if we had internal states, but ultimately denying we have them.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, but what you seem to be granting here, which Dennett seems to deny, is that you have memories, tastes and sensations. Further quotes from Wittgenstein on private language are relevant here:
If remembering were nothing more than the external behaviours that we typically associate with remembering, as Dennett seems to indicate, then this "would mean to deny the remembering, to deny that anyone ever remembers anything." Of course, it is evident from people's external behaviours that people can and do remember things, e.g. a person recalls where they left their car keys and then looks in that place, or just plain old learning of any sort, is evidence of remembering. In fact, it is this external third-person perspective of our shared language that gives us the correct idea of the use of the word "remember", according to Wittgenstein. We would be grammatically mistaken to assume that the word is used to refer to an inner process, but without that inner process there would be no such thing as remembering:
Quoting fdrake
I'm not sure that's comparable. You want to compare our own experiences - of which we are aware - with the mechanical workings of a computer, of which we are (in this example) unaware. This analogy might work when dealing with other people, but I don't see how it works on ourselves. We might infer or attribute beliefs and desires to a calculator just as we might do to another person, but I think we tend to have better and more direct knowledge about these things when it comes to ourselves. Of course, there are cases where this will not be true, as some psychologists might attest. But I think you would agree that you know better than most people whether or not you like spicy food.
I don't see why making natural distinctions and observing things could not be a logical precondition for having a perspective (or a point-of-view). But I see neither as a pre-condition of the other; merely that the two go hand-in-hand.
Quoting Andrew M
None of that makes any sense unless there are conscious people to look at snapshots of landscapes.
Quoting Andrew M
I understand that you want to argue against the "view from nowhere". I'm not trying to argue for it, but I don't think that you can just stipulate having a perspective as a pre-condition. But perhaps I'm not understanding your point.
Quoting Andrew M
I can't directly show you my perceptions or sensations, and neither can anyone else.
Quoting Andrew M
We can do that, but it's not directly comparing our perceptions or sensations. Consider Locke's spectrum inversion: Since we both learned colour words by being shown public coloured objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colours. It seems to me more likely that what "straight" and "bent" looks like to you will be the same as what they look like to me, but the same issue could apply if only as a matter of degree (or perhaps if I had some sort of condition or brain malfunction that made me see differently than most people).
Quoting Andrew M
I don't disagree that our minds have a physical basis, but I don't see why the same "privacy in practice" doesn't equally apply to everyone, including statistically "normal" people. This could be another case of spectrum inversion, in principle.
Quoting Andrew M
How does our public language attest to the fact that you see the same colour as I do when we both refer to "red"? How can our public language help to show me your sensations?
Quoting Andrew M
I don't believe that it is a "particular perspective", unless you mean some ideal, statistically normal "average person" - which is not a view from nowhere, but not a view from somewhere, either.
How could you possibly ever determine that? You can't, and hence it is an irrelevance.
When my wife tells me it is violet, the conclusion is not that she is seeing a different colour to me, but that I have mis-used the word "blue".
It is still a possibility that our qualia may be different. Besides, if you can’t “ever determine that” our qualia may be different despite us using the same colour words, then it must be because our qualia are private. Unless there is another reason that you can’t “ever determine that”?
Quoting Banno
Irrelevant to what? Qualia may be irrelevant to language use - as Wittgenstein notes with his private language argument - but I don’t consider qualia irrelevant to philosophy of mind.
There is no sense in which the notion that "the quali could be different" could be meaningful. It cannot have a role in a language game.
Or it's no more than the difference between what I call blue and Wife calls violet.
If you want to have long conversations about the Beetle in the box, be my guest. It can make no difference.
Quoting Luke
But don't complain that there is a problem of consciousness here. It only appears to be a problem because you choose to talk in such an odd way. Go ahead and develop a philosophy of mind that cannot connect to anything in the world.
What cannot have a role in the language game? Qualia? I thought it was the subject of this discussion.
With regards to intuition pump #3, you know what is being indicated by "we experience entirely different subjective colors", don't you? I assume you must, since you asserted in your previous post that we can't "ever determine that".
I take it that you know how pain feels and how the colour red looks to you, even though it is not from your own case that the words "pain" or "red" get their meaning. What is "how pain feels to you" or "how red looks to you" - an illusion? Meaningless gibberish? Can't we talk about how red looks to a colour-blind person or to someone with cerebral achromatopsia? Surely the private language argument excludes something (whatever it may be) from providing the basis for linguistic meaning.
Quoting Banno
If qualia are not definitive aspects of the mind, then I don't know what is. Are you an eliminative materialist?
"Qualia" is the name of all that?
Indeed; and in much the same way that the subject of Antigonish is the little man who wasn't there, or the Jabberwock the subject of Jabberwocky.
You said that qualia "cannot have a role in the language game", so how can it be that there are language games about qualia? You are not merely saying that qualia don't exist; you are saying that we can't talk about qualia. Yet, qualia is the subject of this discussion, the subject of Dennett's paper, and here we are talking about qualia.
My point is that we view the world in a particular way that depends on the kind of physical and perceptual characteristics we have (in our case, as human beings). We explain the world in terms of observable distinctions (such as the distinction between red and green objects). It's a mistake to suppose that one can "get behind" one's perception and invalidate those distinctions when one's perception is assumed in the attempt.
Quoting Luke
That's a Cartesian view of perception and experience. But ordinary perception and experience involves contact with the world which grounds our language and communication.
So when you and I observe this red apple we are perceiving the same red apple. That's our contact with the world, and I'm showing you what I'm perceiving.
Is that an infallible demonstration? No. If you're dichromatic, the red apple will appear dim yellow to you. But even in that case, your perception of the apple is not private or ineffable since I just described it.
Quoting Luke
Yes, a red apple could appear green to Alice and vice versa. But there would be a relevant physical difference between Alice and Alice's twin who sees things normally. This difference is potentially discoverable, and therefore potentially comparable. That is, if discovered, Alice would then know that red apples appear green to her. Just as a dichromatic already knows that red apples appear yellow to them.
Quoting Luke
Could be. But once it is recognized that this is due to some physical difference (and not radical privacy or ineffability), then there is no longer a philosophical hard problem. Investigating physical differences is within the scope of scientific inquiry.
Quoting Luke
There's no guarantee it will. However when differences in people's observations are detected (such as a failure to discriminate colors), language can be used to describe it. For example, the dichromatic's experience can be described, and so is not radically private or ineffable.
Quoting Luke
Everyone has their own perspective. But language norms emerge. This works in practice because we are observing the same world, have generally similar physical and perceptual characteristics (as human beings), and the same laws of nature are operative for each of us (principle of relativity).
Maybe if you’re making a sci-fi movie about switching bodies and the struggles that come with getting used to a new homomorphism of experiences. Seems like a situation where talk of qualia makes a difference. So “your blue is my red” would make perfect sense in that setting.
I'd add that the 'view form nowhere' argument seems to me to be non more than sophistry. Consider instead that third person speech is the view from anywhere... that it is phrased so that perspective is irrelevant.
That's pretty much how the Principle of Relativity insists we phrase things.
Try again. There are no language games about “Prefflings”, but there are plenty about qualia, Moreover, if Prefflings and qualia “cannot have a role in the language game”, then we would be unable to talk about them, yet here we are. Surely being the subject of discussion is “having a role in the language game”. Otherwise, please explain why it isn’t.
Here's the thing: I do not have to have an alternative explanation in order to show that qualia are not helpful.
But since you asked, it seems to me that the hard problem is a result of looking at the issue the wrong way. Here's a post of mine from a while back:
There is indeed a discussion to be had about how the selection of paint leads to the impact that Guernica has on the viewer. In the end you might be able to show the effect, but not to say it; there is nothing to say, when what is left is to look a the painting. A complete description of the tones and materials will not have the same impact.
Here's another:
[quote="Philosophy is a jigsaw puzzle. Descartes thought the best way to finish the puzzle was to start by finding the corners. The corners are fixed, he thought, so if we get them in place, we can work our way around the edge by finding the straight edges, and work our way into the middle. He argued that "I think therefore I am" was a corner. Other folk thought he was mistaken. They looked for other corners. A priori concepts, perhaps; or dialectic, or the Will, or falsification, or logic, language, choice... And on and on Wittgenstein's contribution consists in his pointing out that this particular jigsaw does not have corners, nor edges. There are always bits that are outside any frame we might set up. And further, we don't really need corners and edges anyway. We can start anywhere and work in any direction. We can work on disjointed parts, perhaps bringing them together, perhaps not. We can even make new pieces as we go.;https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9414/philosophy-and-jigsaw-puzzles/p1"]Philosophy is a jigsaw puzzle.
Descartes thought the best way to finish the puzzle was to start by finding the corners. The corners are fixed, he thought, so if we get them in place, we can work our way around the edge by finding the straight edges, and work our way into the middle. He argued that "I think therefore I am" was a corner.
Other folk thought he was mistaken. They looked for other corners. A priori concepts, perhaps; or dialectic, or the Will, or falsification, or logic, language, choice... And on and on
Wittgenstein's contribution consists in his pointing out that this particular jigsaw does not have corners, nor edges. There are always bits that are outside any frame we might set up. And further, we don't really need corners and edges anyway. We can start anywhere and work in any direction. We can work on disjointed parts, perhaps bringing them together, perhaps not. We can even make new pieces as we go.
[/quote]
See what I did there?
Or the cliché, should we argue that this is reducible to an image of a rabbit?
Is it really just a rabbit? Is the mind really just matter?
This is the content of Wittgenstein's PI, and it seems to me to have an impact on many philosophical questions; to carry a great deal of weight.
But don't ask me to tell you what that impact weighs in kilograms. That's not a sensible question.
Seems you have entirely missed what was said.
On your account, you have already entered into the game about Prefflings.
What can we say? Well, it's a word I made up on the spot, but we already know that a Preffling is smaller than a Preff. And because it is capitalised, we know that they are individuals.
There are those who claim that "pref" comes from "preference". But others claim it comes from "prefabricated". Which side will you take?
If you’re only going to respond to the first line of each of my posts then why should I bother?
It is you who has missed what was said. Being the topic of a discussion is “having a role in the language game”. However, your claim is that qualia “cannot have a role in the language game”. Contradiction.
Ok, you got me. You win. There is indeed a language game about qualia.
As indeed there is now a language game about Prefflings.
And they have equal impact on anything else.
Good. Then you should accept that it’s not senseless to talk about qualia or inverted spectra.
Why? Are all language games sensical?
What does "qualia" pick out to the exclusion of all else?
I'd say they are not. But if we all think we enjoy an inner life, then even though we cannot directly share our inner lives in the way we can directly share the sensory world, could it not be sensical to talk about our inner lives, since we at least have thinking we have an inner life in common? Isn't that what poetry often does?
Quoting Luke
I had https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense_verse in mind. Maybe you're using a stricter meaning of sensical than I, but I don't think the subject matter of nonsense poetry is suitable for serious discussion, even if the existence of nonsense poetry is.
Wouldn't talking about our inner lives count as sharing them? Otherwise how would we select the words which might constitute such a conversation if there were no public meanings to which they might refer?
None of this is to say we need to speak in terms of qualia, though; unless 'qualia' simply means something like 'quality of experience'. But then inner experience is all qualitative, so I guess we don't even need to speak about quality of experience, but just about the experience itself.
Conscious experience.
Yeah, maybe. Then i suppose those we must show, or pass over in silence.
Quoting Janus
Spot on. There seems no purpose for this wierd intermediary 'qualia', neither in perception, nor in experience. What we can say we can say directly of the world itself, what we cannot say...we cannot say.
Quoting Luke
Disingenuous.
But that's just begging the question. We're arguing about just that very proposition.
What’s the difference? I guess it depends on whether you take an “experience” to be something inner or something outer. Qualia is what eliminative materialists want to eliminate.
Quoting Isaac
Why does it need to be considered as an “intermediary” instead of just the (quality of the) experience that a person has? The way things taste, look, sound or feel to a particular person. We know that these things are not the same for everyone, otherwise there would be no colour-blindness or synaesthesia or deafness, etc. And it’s likely that there could be even more slight, less noticeable differences for more “normal” people.
Yep.
Maybe you are beginning to understand...?
If someone were to set up a world in which there was only eliminative materialism or qualia, and one were obligated by reason to reject qualia, one would also be obligated to accept eliminative materialism.
Is that your world?
What is the difference between the quality of the experience and the experience?
Quoting Luke
What is 'the way' doing here?. The taste of an apple is the taste of an apple, there's no other thing it becomes inside my mind. There's the chemicals which make it up, there's the responses those chemicals cause (both in neurological terms, if you're a neuroscientist, and in stated cultural terms for the rest of us). Where in that is qualia? It's not that I spit out the bitter coffee, it's not that my neurons fire in a certain way, it's not that I reach for the word 'bitter' when describing it, it's not that I'm reminded of my grandma's coffee...because none of these things require a new non-physical entity. The synaesthete reaches for a different word, has different memories, has different mental images... none of these issues requies a new entity either. So wither qualia?
Nobody's denying that people have conscious experience, just qualia. :up:
Different people have different experiences, and the same people have different experiences on different occasions. That should not be surprising, even on a purely physical account, because each body and environment is different and on each occasion too.
I think the reason for eliminating unnecessary terms like 'qualia', is that experiences are always already qualitative, so we have no need, in fact it will just produce reificatory confusion, to speak of the quality of an experience. You know, it's like the taste of beer; there's no experience of the taste of beer since the taste of beer is the experience, and to say that there is an experience of the taste of beer is like saying there is an experience of the experience. So how much less is there a quality of the experience of the taste of beer?
To an extent yes. A lot of people hang a lot of their professional respect on being expert in matters which would take too long (and too much risk of error) to learn the physical basis of. There's a strong incentive to create entities whose properties are sufficiently ineffable that one can forever be right about them without fear of redundancy.
See my latest response to @Janus.
Quoting Isaac
If an apple has a taste, then there is a way it tastes. Am I Englishing wrong?
Quoting Isaac
If apples have a taste then you can taste them (or not), which means they taste some way to you. I’m not suggesting it becomes some other thing in your mind, but it becomes something in your mind: a sensation of taste. That sensation of taste probably has properties, such as sweet, bitter, juicy, sharp, etc.
"A taste"...
This seems to be a large part of the misunderstanding here - that it's qualia or there's no consciousness.
That's because qualia are defined at first as conscious experiences. The sections of PI that @Luke quoted earlier in the thread show that so far as conscious experiences can be discussed, we can and already do have a tried-and-true language for them; and so far as conscious experiences are private, they cannot be a part of our conversation.
That seems pretty clear and unequivocal to me, and I suspect to others, but is apparently incomprehensible to Luke and a few others.
Would that there were a way to rephrase this so that it was understood.
All of which we can talk about, without the extra structure of qualia.
Do you really think that anyone here doubts that apples taste of apple?
Do you suppose that the taste of an apple is somehow only available to you?
Here you go again conflating qualia with language use. It is not the language use which is private, but the sensations.
Phenomenal consciousness has been a topic of discussion for about 100 years. It's a science fiction theme, it's a significant issue in philosophy. Scientists speculate how it's produced.
I think most people would understand the term if given the definition.
I honestly do not understand the objection. Dennett I understand. You, I don't.
If experiences are qualitative, then what’s the problem in speaking of their qualities?
Quoting Janus
I don’t see why it’s necessary to phrase it like that.
There's no problem; to speak of experiences just is to speak to speak of their qualities; the danger would be in being led to think that the qualities are somehow separate from, or "over and above", the experience.
Quoting Luke
I think it helps to see the reificatory hazards that lurk in speaking in ways like "the experience of the taste of beer". At the very least it is a redundant expression, and so should be avoided on purely technical grounds.
SO you are claiming to be the only person who can taste apples?
I don’t know; how does an apple taste to you (or to anyone else)? Can you show me how it tastes to you? What reason is there to assume that how it tastes to you is identical to how it tastes to me?
Here’s how I see it:
There is a public meaning for each, but that is not the experience itself. When people say “The apple is red” they do not really care about what color gets imagined in your head. They care about the relative position of that color in your map of experiences to words.
For instance, if we’re seeing inverted colors from each other and I say “the apple is red” then I don’t really care what you’re seeing, all I care about is to indicate a property of said apple relative to other properties. For instance: saying the apple is red is to say that it produces the same experience as blood when it comes to color. Also that it produces the same experience as parts of the US flag, etc. Basically, when I say the apple is red I am pointing to the corresponding element in a homomorphism.
However a problem arises when I say the apple is red, and then you think that that means the apple produces the same experience as grass. Then our experiences are no longer homomorphisms. What I would use “red” to describe is no longer what you use “red” to describe. Then communication problems arise. And we call people whose map of experiences to words strays too far from the majority “colorblind” in this case. But some straying is likely and not a big issue. For example here: Quoting Banno
However, whatever I actually experience as I’m seeing a red apple is qualia, and that is useless to talk about outside of a sci-fi setting.
That apple tastes sweet to me, bitter to you. See? Are we talking about qualia now?
Which is why I said "sci-fi". You were fine with startrek having changelings. But I don't care to continue this because you said that there are language games about qualia (even if useless-which no one was arguing they weren't)
The problem comes when you say "and thus qualia do not exist". If you had said "And thus it is useless to talk about qualia" then I think this thread would have been dead by now. Notice how no advocate of qualia has made the attempt to seriously argue that anyone here has "inverted vision". Because they can't.
Quoting frank
I think the whole thing with Banno is that to him "Qualia do not exist" and "It is futile to talk of or attempt to prove cases when we have different Qualia (when the same stimulus produces different conscious experiences)" are identical statements. The wittgenstein is strong in this one.
An apple tastes precisely and exactly just like an apple... to all apple eaters. That's how...
Proof is the one thing nobody has. So Chalmers says Dennett's view is so extraordinary, he carries the burden of proof. Dennett says there is strong reasons to doubt common knowledge in this case, and so he lays out the pumps.
What I'll note is that through all the discussion in this thread, no one has tried to elicit doubt using Dennett's stuff.
I think that proves that Dennett is boring. :cool:
Yes, when we represent the world in language, we generalize and abstract from our experience in the world, not in separation from our experience. The former is natural (and is useful in everyday life and scientific investigation), the latter is dualist (and is useful for creating interminable philosophical discussion).
No, it's just noting that there is a conscious experience to tasting beer, and this taste is not in the beer itself, but rather the taster.
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism#The_ten_modes_of_Aenesidemus]Owing to the "circumstances, conditions or dispositions," the same objects appear different. The same temperature, as established by instrument, feels very different after an extended period of cold winter weather (it feels warm) than after mild weather in the autumn (it feels cold). Time appears slow when young and fast as aging proceeds. Honey tastes sweet to most but bitter to someone with jaundice. A person with influenza will feel cold and shiver even though she is hot with a fever.[/quote]
The apple isn't always going to taste the same to everyone. It won't always taste the same to you, depending on your "circumstances, conditions or dispositions".
Without the apple, there is no apple taste for anything or anyone, and yet you wish to claim that the taste of apples is in the perceiver. Yeah...
No.
Ok: qualia exist in a way not like smells and tastes, but like the little man who wasn't there and the Jabberwock.
I find that risible. But if that's how you need me to say it...
AH. Does the taster often taste beer without the beer being present?
It seems that the beer has something to do with it's taste...
Why must it be?
Quoting Andrew M
I don't disagree, but that's not showing me your perceptions or sensations. Maybe you're colour-blind and you perceive it differently to me. You can show me the object you are looking at, but that's not showing me how it looks to you.
Quoting Andrew M
Your description might tell me how it appears, but your description doesn't show me how it appears, which would make all the difference if our spectra were inverted.
Quoting Andrew M
I agree, it is potentially discoverable and comparable - I'm not trying to argue for anything supernatural. However, it remains private until then. Anyway, it's not really the privacy that's at issue here, but whether there is, in fact, some way that things seem to a person, i.e. some "inner" phenomenal experience. That's the definition of qualia given by Dennett, and what I understand eliminative materialists consider as somehow unreal.
Quoting Andrew M
I have long considerd the hard problem to be a question of why, rather than how. Namely: why do we have phenomenal experiences at all? That question would not seem to be answered by a complete "map" of how all phenomenal experience corresponds to the body/brain.
Quoting Andrew M
A problem with this might be that a perceptual difference needs to be noticeable in order to...get noticed, and therefore some perceptual differences could remain undiscovered and private.
I don’t know what those are so I don’t get what you’re saying.
Quoting Banno
Smells and tastes are words that point to certain qualia. “Red” points to a certain experience. When I tell you “the apple is red” I am saying “the apple produces the experience we all dubbed red”. This experience itself is very real, yet incomparable. I don’t know whether or not you’re experiencing the same thing when looking at the apple. But I do know, assuming you’re not colorblind, that whatever experience you do have when looking at a red apple is the same as when looking at blood or certain parts of the US flag.
I really have to ask though, do you know what a homomorphism is?
The two other best pieces of nonsense -
and
No, just inventing an extra entity without any apparent reason. The apple has a taste - two ontological commitments, that there is an apple, and that it has a taste. Why the third, that in addition to there being an apple and there being it's taste, there is also 'the way' it tastes?
Quoting Luke
Nope. The sensation of taste cannot have those properties to me because those are public words, those properties have public meanings. I can't possibly think one thing is 'sweet' whilst other people think a different thing is 'sweet', otherwise there's no public meaning of 'sweet' for us to use and the word ceases to have any function. I might be able to detect sweetness in something that other people cannot, but what sweetness is must be public. We learn what 'sweet' means by experiencing the use of the word in our shared world, not our private one.
Quoting khaled
This is why I went to all the effort of explaining the neurological process.
No colour gets imagined in your head.
End of story. It simply doesn't happen. You do not have a bit of your brain which lights up red for another bit of your brain to see. You do not have a bit of your brain which represents 'red' that is distinguishable in any way from the bit of your brain which represents 'green'. It just doesn't happen. I don't know how much more clear I can be about this, you can't just make up neuroscience to suit your preferred view of the world.
___
There is the colour of the apple - that is a public property it has, a shared fiction (I'm a model-dependant realist). It's the colour we call red, the colour of stop lights, the colour that the grocer reaches for when I ask for red apples.
Then there is our response to the colour of the apple - different for different people. Memories, emotions, desires, connections, associated words... all of this is unique to the individual and unique to the very moment, but none of it is the colour of the apple. All of it can be observed in one way or another - it's not radically private.
And - what's more important - all of it is in constant flux at a speed faster than our working memory can retain (again, this is not really up for debate). So not even we are aware of what all these responses are, we're only aware of the story we later tell about what all these responses were.
Then - all of it actually feeds back to our sensory inputs (again, in constant flux) to mediate and filter what we 'sense' to make it more suit the story, much of this story is influenced by the public meaning of 'red'.
What's completely absent throughout this process is any identifiable step at which there is a sensation, unique to the individual, which can be identified as a particular colour. There's no neurological evidence for it, there's no phenomenological evidence for it, there's no sematic evidence for it. I've really no idea why this concept continues.
And then conceded that the intent behind the expression is as I described. I’m not proposing a neurological theory here, I’m saying what the intent behind the expression “the apple is red” is.
Quoting Isaac
Agreed. But individually that color may be different. If your red was my blue, and stop lights and apples were both my blue from your point of view, there would be no issue of communication.
The intent is that the apple corresponds to the public meaning of 'red'. Anything less and the expression is useless.
How so? I definitely see something when looking at a red apple. And I do not know if you see the same thing. Maybe what you’re seeing I would describe as “blue”.
Correct. That is exactly what I said. Quoting khaled
Does the apple produce some sort of experience (sight, taste, etc). Yes. So when you describe an apple as red you are saying that it produces the experience we all chose to call red right? That is the public meaning.
Does this imply that we are experiencing the same thing when looking at the apple?
Yes. A red apple.
Quoting khaled
If you ask people to pass you the red apple, do you generally find they pass you the one you were expecting?
Quoting khaled
How? We're you taught to use the word 'blue' incorrectly?
Quoting khaled
Yes. We're experiencing the apple. As I said, our response to the colour of the apple will be different, but this is what our experience actually consists of, it's not the subject matter of our experience (that's the apple) it is the constitution of it.
Quoting khaled
"Red" doesn't point to the experience of red. If it did, we wouldn't need to write "red" differently from "the experience of red"; they would mean exactly the same thing. But further, there is no one thing that the word "red" might point to; it's one of the classic examples that seem to show that words do not always point to something.
Quoting khaled
There's something a bit odd going on here. If "red" points to the experience of red, and they are incomparable, then what you call "red" is different to what I call"red"...
Are you familiar with Wittgenstein's, or Austin's, or any, of the large numebr of arguents form the middle of last century that laid to rest the notion that the meaning of a word is the thing to which it points?
Quoting khaled
I'm not sure. I'm aware that it is a term used in maths, but you seem to want to use it in a novel fashion. I'm cautious about using technical terms out of context, so I didn't share your use of the term.
More accurately “what we all call a red apple”. Public meaning and all that.
Quoting Isaac
Correct. That is no evidence to indicate they have the same experience when holding the red apple as I do when I hold it.
Quoting Isaac
No. I would be using it correctly even in that case. Again, if your red is my blue, we would have no issues of communication. We would both call the apple red despite having different perceptions of it.
Here is a simple example: Say I was wearing glasses that inverted all the color going into my eye. And at the same time, I had a device attached to my mouth that would change any utterance of color I make to an utterance of the inverse color. So if I was about to say “red” it would immediately and seamlessly translate that to “blue”
Now assume we both looked at a red apple and couldn’t see each other (so you don’t know I have those devices on). We are asked to describe the color of said apple. We both say “red”
There you go, an example of having different perceptions of the object but still being able to communicate.
Quoting Isaac
So in this previous example am I still seeing a red apple with those devices on? Even though the light coming into my eye is inverted? That’s really the point at issue here
If red was truly only public meaning and did not have anything to do with the experience itself then yes, I would be seeing red despite the fact that the color going into my eye is blue (not very technical but you know what I mean). Doesn’t seem plausible to me.
Not necessarily but it could be different. To say that they are different would mean you compared them and found that they are.
Quoting Banno
It’s something in set theory. It’s not about numbers. So using it here is fine since we’re not talking about numbers. I’d recommend you watch even a short 10 min video on it or something it’s not a difficult concept.
Quoting Banno
I would be most familiar with Wittgenstein but even then not very.
Also I’m curious about how you respond to my example to Isaac so I’d appreciate it if you took a look. The question is: Am I still seeing red with both of those devices on?
That's what 'a red apple' means. adding 'what we call...' to it implies that there might actually be a red apple other than what we call one.
Quoting khaled
I doubt they do. As I said, people's response to the red apple will vary. Their response to the colour is not the colour.
Quoting khaled
Colour doesn't go into your eye. Photons go into your eye. Colour is a public concept.
Quoting khaled
Yes.
Think on that a bit. If the meaning of "red" is the experience it points to, then what you call red and what I call red are different - because your experiences are not mine.
But overwhelmingly, we do get by talking about red things.
Hence, the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to.
Not necessarily. If there wasn’t such a notion then both “red apple” and “what we call red apple” is identical
Quoting Isaac
I knew you were gonna nitpick but I just couldn’t edit it fast enough
Quoting Isaac
I don’t think many would answer that but if that’s your answer then I see why you’d say qualia don’t exist. Seems nonsensical to me to say that if I’m literally forced to lie about the color I’m seeing that I’m actually seeing the color that is the lie. If the speech transforming device was removed I’d call the apple “blue”
You don't see a colour in your brain. Why Am I having to repeat this? You do not see a colour. There's no part of your brain which represents a particular colour. It doesn't happen, not there, absent, not present, unrepresented, lacking, missing, devoid.
Anyways the main contention seems to really be this:
Quoting Isaac
Care to argue for why there is not such a thing?
It's not at issue. We don't just make up neuroscience to have a discussion about it. There is no part of your brain which shows you a colour, it cannot happen, brains are made up of neurons, not colours.
I would surmise that it is because the taste exists as an experience, and it does not exist unless it is experienced by someone. Therefore, it's the way it tastes for someone, or when someone experiences it. That is, the way it tastes is the taste experience.
Quoting Isaac
You mean that the sensation of taste cannot have those properties only to you. That doesn't mean that it cannot have those properties to you. But neither does it mean that it has those properties to everyone.
Quoting Isaac
Then what of intuition pump #10? Perhaps perceptual norms affect linguistic norms?
Quoting Isaac
If it's not sweet/bitter for everybody, then maybe it's only public for some people but not for others?
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but "if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, then the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant." So our spectra could very well be inverted without either of us noticing.
Quoting Isaac
Then how do we distinguish colours? How is it that I am able to fetch a red object upon request?
I read a bit of Wiki and Wolfram and so on - the Britannica article was the best - but so what?
I've written extensively here about model-dependant realism. I don't think there's anyone wants to go through all that again.
Quoting Banno
That I own a car and you own a car does not eliminate the possibility that we own identical cars. But if you want to say that one car being “yours” and the other being “mine” makes them different cars then yes, we cannot be referring to the same thing when saying red
Quoting Banno
That we are referring to different things does not imply that we won’t get by talking about red things. It would seriously help if you knew what an isomorphism is.
It doesn’t matter what I am referring to when I say red and when you say red as long as the relationship is the same. I’ll call my experience that red refers to X and I’ll call yours Y. As I was saying, X could equal Y. But even if they’re not, we will have no issues of communication if:
Everything that produces X for me produces Y for you. That’s roughly what an isomorphism is. That’s what I mean by “the relationship is the same”
If that is the case and I see blood for example, that would produce the experience X, and I would promptly call it “red”. If when you see blood you get the experience Y you will ALSO promptly call it “red”. Therefore there is no issue of communication see?
However if grass produces Y for you you’re likely colorblind. And it is no longer an isomorphism
It would seriously help if you would explain its relevance. Just using the word does not help.
Meh. Time for dinner. This is not interesting.
But this is not true. The taste doesn't exist as an experience for someone. The taste is a public concept. The experience is a unique set of memories, emotions, desires, sematic associations etc resulting from the taste.
Quoting Luke
It does have those properties to everyone who knows what taste is. The learning of those properties is what constitutes learning what taste is.
Quoting Luke
How could they? I don't understand the process you're suggesting here.
Quoting Luke
It's 'sweet'/'bitter' that are public. I might think the coffee is bitter, you might think it less so, but 'bitter' is a public concept, we're both talking about the same thing. What's different is our ability to detect it in the coffee.
Quoting Luke
No, our spectra could not possibly be inverted. There is no neurological way this could happen. Neurons cannot represent particular colours.
Quoting Luke
Receptors in the retina send trichromous signals to the retinal basal ganglia. These are combined in the V1 area of the occipital cortex to form signals responsive to combinations of wavelengths, different combinations will (normally) fire different neurons (or fuzzy combinations fire clusters of neurons - we're not sure yet). These start two chain reaction processes - one along the dorsal pathway, and one along the ventral pathway. The former leads toward responses, the latter toward recall. All along the signals are suppressed by regions higher in the chain to minimise surprise signals. Eventually such chains will reach a response (fetching the red apple) and a recall (other things which are red apples from your memory), as well as emotions, desires etc.
I meant on this site in general, not on this thread. It's mostly in the 'What's it like' discussion. We also had one on direct vs indirect realism.
Yep, time to go to work. But you're having dinner at eight o'clock in the morning! You Australians are weird.
Wow - all that results from a public concept?
Quoting Isaac
You said: "I can't possibly think one thing is 'sweet' whilst other people think a different thing is 'sweet'"
Intuition pump #10 says: "phenol-thio-urea., a substance which tastes very bitter to three-fourths of humanity, and as tasteless as water to the rest. Is it bitter?"
Quoting Isaac
Why must it come down to a matter of ability?
Quoting Isaac
Sure, not if we don't see colours.
Quoting Isaac
So why does it seem like we see colours?
Cool. Can you give me Saturday's lottery numbers as soon as you get them? I'm going to make a fortune...
Quoting Isaac
So if someone doesn’t understand the public concept they do not have an experience? What about children then, do they have experiences?
And could you elaborate on what the “public meaning” of red exactly is? Because I would argue that the public meaning is a reference to an experience.
Anyways I just went to the "What is it like to experience X" thread and the first thing thing I find is this:
Quoting Isaac
Do you still hold this position? Because it seems exactly like something I would say. Here you recognise that there is an experience X that cannot be communicated 100% accurately. Smells like Qualia to me. And you are not making up neuroscience, you're speaking on a phenomenological level.
Quoting Isaac
I wasn't making up neuroscience, I was reporting phenomonological evidence for qualia. We certainly feel like we have some experience of "redness" when looking at a red screen (or else we would have never come up with the word "qualia"). I am not then saying "Thus this chunk of my brain has 'red' in it". You can talk about mental life without implying anything about the brain.
Also I don't see how model dependent realism would do away with qualia anyways. We can create a model that incorporates it. See the example I gave to Banno.
"Phenomenal consciousness" refers to the fact that we have conscious experience associated with sight and taste and so on.
One of the ways this first became significant is that industrialists treated people like machines. It was an extension of the use of slaves in sugar production where people were just used up and discarded.
It became a question: is it morally right to treat people like p-zombies? This was a prominent issue in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
And then came Turing. It's not like some bored philosopher invented the concept of qualia. It rose from a seismic cultural shift.
Hello Isaac, I'm new here and I've never heard of model-dependent realism, so I'd be interested in a concise description of it, and some indication of why it means we don't see colours.
The taste is the way it tastes. It’s a conscious sensation. Stating what it’s like is just to point that out.
Where oh where does the color come from?
But it can be the thing that produces an experience in us. Which would be the visual perception of an apple.
The visual perception of an apple produces an experience in us?
"The process" of conscious experience...
Perfect!
What does that consist of?
Quoting Marchesk
So, putting that together, The process of the visual perception of an apple produces an experience in us?
That is, the experience is something different to, and produced by, the process of the perception?
Doesn't blindsight for example suggest a distinction between perception and experience?
Ok, so what next?
I'm wondering about that word, "produces". Are we talking a causal link?
Yet,
the process of the visual perception of an apple sometimes produces conscious awareness.
Not sure what this does to make things clearer.
Visual perception of red apples does not guarantee conscious experience of red apples.
Seems to me that that follows from what has suggested.
Now @Marchesk offered this as a reply to my 'the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to'.
I'm not following the argument.
I do not understand it as an answer to your exchange either.
And?
You argued this is the case because otherwise we’d have communication issues. I showed why that doesn’t have to be the case. But I want to ask if red is not the experience it points to then what is it? I don’t think it can be the neurological process happening as you see red. Otherwise understanding that neurological process should be required to understand what red is but that is clearly not required.
There must be some information about red that is not contained in the neurological process that occurs when you look at red things. And I’d argue that understanding the process is not required at all to understand what “red” is.
Both a robot and a human can detect red light.
A human has an accompanying experience. The robot doesn't.
Right?
Well we wouldn’t know about that. Which is what makes the problem hard. We can’t detect the property we’re testing for. At least not yet.
Or at least the process all the way up to focus/attention, assuming normal neurological functioning.
This:
?
I haven't been able to follow that argument, either -
I'd thought you were claiming something like that the set of word - meaning correspondences in one mind was homomorphic with the set in another mind - an interesting argument - but now you say we should use 'isomorphic'.
It would be a great help if you articulated your argument.
So... there is a statistical relation between there being an apple in one;s visual field and one noticing the apple.
What's this got to do with my "the meaning of "red" cannot be the experience it points to"?
Again, it would be a great help if you articulated your argument.
Well, this was meant to cover cases where people do not have the exact same experience, but they can still communicate about the same object.
But let’s say we never evolved eyes. In that case, red would have no meaning, even when we discovered light and that some creatures navigated by sight. It would be colorless like the rest of the EM spectrum to us.
Similarly, sonar or detecting magnetic fields might have some rich experience we have no words for, because we lack those sensory modalities.
That's not something with which I would disagree - and it doesn't mention qualia.
A step towards some sort of reconciliation.
No, don't go changing the argument again, please - I couldn't stand that.
Quoting Marchesk
...and this is because there is a correlation between our noticing an apple and its being in our visual field...
I'm not following that.
We'll never make it to a thousand pages with that attitude.
So I'm understanding that qualia are somehow important to your political philosophy - which seems not to be too far form my own leftist leanings - and so you want to defend it.
If "qualia' was shown to be of little use in philosophical discourse, would your political views have to change?
I doubt it.
I was thinking of adding an exegesis on the SEP qualia article, which is pretty good, and tending more to your views, I suspect.
But I'm not enjoying having to work both sides of the argument with both Marchesk and Khaled, and I'm not sure I have sufficient interest.
What about you?
I don't believe a robot can detect red light in the way a human can, because a robot is not an entity in the way a human is.
Can a dead person detect red light in the same way a living person can?
Isomorphic is just “homomorphic both ways”. Anyways I don’t plan to use technical terms anymore since they seem to just confuse.
Quoting Banno
I thought I did last comment.
I’ll just summarize:
We have the age old Mary’s room thought experiment which is no longer really a thought experiment. We can “cure” some forms of color blindness or deafness and you always see the participant being shocked at the experience. I’m pretty sure you’d still get the same reaction even if the participant had a PhD in neurology. Point is that there is some information that is present in the experience itself that is not present in a neurological description of the brain as it is occurring. Which is also to imply that they’re not the same thing (as clearly there is some information present in one not present in the other). Otherwise why are people surprised when the see color for the first time?
Another reason to believe this is simply that we don’t have to teach children neurology before teaching them colors. That is what leads me to conclude that “red” refers to a certain experience. It cannot refer to any property of the red object as children likely don’t understand that property, yet they understand red. They don’t know what wavelengths are for example so it can’t be that.
And so that’s where my argument on how we can still have no trouble communicating comes in
Quoting khaled
This X and this Y are qualia. They do not have to be equal for us to be able to communicate. And here is the interesting bit: It is possible for “blue” for me to be pointing to Y, and for “red” for you to be pointing to X. I mean this in the sense that the “values” are equal, not that I am accessing your experience somehow. So it’s sort of like (forgive the terrible illustration I’m on my phone)
My experience to word table
X -> “Red”
Y -> “Blue”
....
Your experience to word table:
X -> “Blue”
Y -> “Red”
.....
That would be “inverted vision”. If I were to have the exact experience you’re having I’d call the apple blue.
I also gave the example of the speech changing device + color inverting device to Isaac where you said you agreed with him. But that still seems absurd to me. If you were wearing color inverting glasses you’d call the apple blue. That would mean you are a seeing a blue apple yes? But then how does the addition of a speech altering device change that? If you were seeing (what you would normally describe as) a blue apple, and you were forced to listen to yourself lie about what you’re seeing, you’re not really seeing a red apple now are you? You’re seeing blue and reporting red. I’m speaking on a phenomenological level here, I’m not making up neurology as Isaac insists I am.
In other words, the color inverting glasses change Y to X and also change the word that you utter when describing the apple. However that doesn’t mean that you’re actually having the experience related to the word being uttered (you’re not actually having Y. You’re having X and saying “Red”)
No, it's that I've really struggled to understand the opposing view.
But then I thought about the vast cultural story that phenomenal consciousness is a part of. I thought that touching on that might help.
Quoting Banno
That would be cool. I wonder if it has Chalmers' p-zombie argument.
I don't disagree with anything here - but it does not lead to a conclusion about qualia.
Your argument on isomorphism is very close to that found in PI. I noted before that your argument hinged on:
Quoting khaled
and pointed out that there is no way we could know that this is true, given that our experiences are set out as private, unsharable.
Despite this being unknowable, we are able to talk to each other.
The conclusion to be draw here is that the shared understanding is not dependent on our knowing that the other person has the same experience as we do. It can't be, according to the advocates of the theory you posit, since we cannot know that the experiences are the same.
SO the shared understanding cannot be based on a shared experience.
Wittgenstein's solution is to point out that what is shared is the use of language. We don't need to posit a shared experiences, or even hypothesis shared experiences, if instead we look at what we are doing with the words - the role they play in our language games.
Your example of the inverted glasses and inverted voice is just this - it shows how communication takes place without consideration of a mooted shared experience.
I ask you to pass me the red apple. It doesn't matter if you have the same experiences as I, or if they are isomorphic, or anything at all about them, provided that you pass me the red apple.
Yep, it does.
Cool. I also like to keep one eye on the bigger implications.
But to my eye, introducing qualia seems to be playing in to the schism between reductionism and dualism... that is, to forcing wider an already misguided split.
The solution I see, outlined above, is to treat physical explanations and intentional discussions as distinct language games, neither reducible to the other, but neither implying any ontological concerns for the other.
Quoting Banno
I don’t think anyone here is positing shared experiences, just experiences. Every “Qualia advocate” has says “inverse vision” at least once here which means we don’t think that we need to have the same experiences to be able to communicate. I went out of my way to show that you don’t need shared experiences, just shared words. As long as red apples produce X for me and Y for you and we both respectively call the experience we’re having “red” there are no issues.
Quoting Banno
Thank you! And I’d say Qualia play a key role in language games about phenomenology and intentionality. And that that doesn’t imply anything about the brain.
You missed the crux, perhaps: Quoting Banno
We don't even need to both call the experience we are having 'red'; what we need is that you pass me the red apple.
Which is to say that provided I don’t pass you the red apple those things matter. Why did I not provide the red apple? Is the disagreement at the level of the Ys and Xs (I am colorblind) or is it at the level of the words used (I assigned the wrong word to X). Both are conceivable as the cause of the issue. But provided everything is running smoothly we don’t need to talk about Qualia. When you call a red apple green, we might have to talk about Qualia, or your understanding of English.
We don't even need to refer to them when things go astray. They are not needed in the diagnosis of colourblindness, nor in the correction of someone's English usage.
It's worth pointing out that this is a long way from their use in Chalmers and Dennett. It's the sort of confusion that I think best avoided by not talking in terms of qualia.
Where?
The way I see it: Without Qualia there would be no way to distinguish from someone who stubbornly refuses to use the right words for the right colors and someone who is actually colorblind.
Anyways I’ll have to pick this up later. Thanks for the discussion so far.
Because you're describing your perceptions and experiences as private and inaccessible to others. That's the Cartesian theater model of perception.
Quoting Luke
Or maybe you have normal color vision and perceive it the same as me. Do you agree that that is a possibility?
If you do, then we have a case where not only are we both seeing a red apple, but the apple also appears red to both of us.
If that condition is met, we have a common reference point in the world that we can use language to talk about.
Quoting Luke
If the Cartesian theater model of perception is rejected, there is no "inner" phenomenal experience. There is only our experience understood as practical contact with the world. So on an ordinary perceptual model, the 'inner' egg is eliminated (as a ghost that serves no useful purpose), and we simply perceive the egg in the world. Or, more precisely, on an ordinary perceptual model there is no implication of an "inner" egg to begin with.
So how does this model deal with disagreements about what is perceived? Via norms that function much like the standard meter length bar that used to be held in Paris. If you want to check whether the apple is red, find a normally-sighted person and ask them.
Quoting Luke
The first step is to properly articulate the problem. If the Cartesian perceptual model is rejected, then the simple answer is that we don't have "phenomenal" experiences at all (i.e., there is no experience of an "inner" egg), we just have ordinary, everyday experiences involving ordinary, everyday things like red apples.
Every now and then, as with the bent-stick-in-water example, things aren't always as they seem. So that becomes a point of difference that can be investigated further.
The Cartesian dualist turns this around and says that all we can know for certain are how things seem to us. And, further, no-one can know how things seem to someone else, since those "seemings" are private. This is then described as "phenomenal" experience (or qualia) which is separate from the things in the world that people naively supposed they were experiencing. The hard problem is then to explain why we have this mysterious "phenomenal" experience at all, and how it could have arisen.
Quoting Luke
That's not a philosophical problem though. It's just a matter of not having discovered something. Since there is a physical difference it is something that can, at least in principle, be noticed, investigated and explained.
...as Davidson said
So if Chalmers wants a scientific theory of consciousness that goes beyond function to include the phenomenal, he's just using poor grammar?
He's invented a game - the hard problem - that will keep him in hot dinners and clean socks.
:up:
...but there is no way to distinguish someone who stubbornly refuses to use the right words for the right colours from someone who is actually colourblind.
Or better, the imposter is discovered by examining the structure of their eye. Which has nothing to do with qualia.
Ok. I'm going with cultural rift.
Ah - that last quote from Davidson finishes a paper showing that there can be no cultural rifts...
Not if they are mooted to be incommensurable.
Maybe not cultural. Just very different life experiences.
I was a tutor in a small philosophy department for a year or two. I recall clearly the discussions about needing to encourage existential angst in the student body in order to improve student numbers.
But you appear to speak the same way. At least, you don't speak with certainty that colours do appear the same way to both of us. The way colours appear to each of us is not public, is it? If it were public, then there would be no doubt about the (im)possibility of inverted spectra. If it were public, then we could directly see how colours appear to those who are blind, colour-blind, short-sighted, synaesthetic, etc. This doubt and lack of public access doesn't require a Cartesian theatre. If you allow for the possibility that colours can appear to some/each of us differently, then you must also allow for what you consider to be a Cartesian theatre. However, I don't think it's required. You can't perceive or experience another person's perceptions and experiences. That's just a fact of being you and not them.
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, I do consider it as a possibility. Do you consider it a possibility that there could be differences in our colour vision (yours and mine), however slight?
Quoting Andrew M
We don't need to meet the condition of "the apple appears red to both of us" in order for us to use the word "red". How red appears to you does not need to be the same as how red appears to me in order for us both to use the word "red" the same way. That's the point of the inverted spectra intuition pump. (The colour-blind are more easily discoverable because of their inability to distinguish between colours e.g. red and green.)
Quoting Andrew M
But, again, if how the colour of the apple appears to a normally-sighted person was public (and not private), then we shouldn't need to ask them in order to find out.
Your reference to "how the colour...appears to a...person" is all that I mean by qualia, so why do you get to avoid "the Cartesian theatre model of perception" but I don't?
Quoting Andrew M
What's the difference between phenomenal experiences and "how the colour...appears to a...person"?
And yet there is a difference. That’s the key. We can imagine both possibilities (we can imagine stubbornly refusing to use the right words while seeing the right colors and we can imagine seeing everything in black and white ourselves). Even if we can never test which is the case I think there should still be language that allows us to describe what we’re imagining. Feels like a waste for me to not be able to.
What I’m getting from this is that the worst case scenario: Qualia is untestable or useless outside discussion of sci-fi shows and endless debates on philosophy forums. You think that’s grounds for saying they don’t exist, I don’t think so. If we can conceive of a P-Zombie we should have a word that can express that difference. If we can conceive of the difference between a stubborn confusing person and a colorblind person I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to express the difference even if it is untestable.
Quoting khaled
Well, no, as your example showed -
Quoting Banno
Please quote the full sentence. I said that’s the worst case scenario. As in even if we couldn't test for coloblindness we would still be able to imagine both alternatives. And being unable to express what we imagine seems like a waste. Inverted colors are one of those things we can imagine but cannot test for. Qualia would also be useful for expressing colorblindness before we came up with ways to test for it. It's a pretty old concept.
Given that we are in the 1200s and we do not know how to test for colorblindness. And given that the person I'm talking to is not lying. If he says "The sky is the same color as the grass", is he making statements about grass and skies or is he making statements about his experience of them. Based on that I can surmise that the person I'm talking to is experiencing different qualia from me (aka is colorblind).
But I think that the word still has a use. Outside of sci-fi shows, endless debate and expressing what we’re imagining (which in my book are good enough reasons to keep it around). I believe that a complete neuroscience will only ever show sufficient conditions for consciousness. It would still make sense then to ask whether other things are conscious. Are spiders conscious? Are computers conscious? Etc. These are questions asking whether or not something has experiences, aka whether or not it experiences Qualia. We cannot answer these by looking at human brains, as all that would provide is sufficient conditions for consciousness. How will we know whether or not an AI is experiences pain by studying human brains?
Also barring any mention of qualia, why do you think colorblind people are surprised when seeing color for the first time?
Like that blue/gold dress?
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Scientific_explanations]There is currently no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant colour perceptions among viewers[, 31] though these have been confirmed and characterized in controlled experiments (described below). No synthetic stimuli have been constructed that are able to replicate the effect as clearly as the original image.
Neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe that the differences in opinions are a result of how the human brain perceives colour, and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes that it has a connection to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:
Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.[32][/quote]
Or like when someone hears voices and sees things the rest of us don't.
Like unmediated touch with the molecular motion or infrared light when we feel temperature, eh? The motion of molecules and the photons in the infrared range are given to us directly in experience when we feel warm or cold. That's how that works?
Add a man day dreaming and another one meditating. Since there is apparently no such thing as inner phenomena, no cartesian theater, it should be easy to figure out who is experiencing what. It's all public, right? All out there in the world to empirically verify.
I think I shall start investing in lie detector tests and brain scans.
That our perceptions and experiences are private and inaccessible to others is a fact, which empiricists should respect I think. I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine. René Descartes did not invent this fact.
Add a brain in a vat, a brain in a bat, a cat in a box, and poor Mary who never had her periods.
I’ll try my chances with the nun.
Have your read Dennett's paper about Robo-Mary?
Hasn't stopped some scientists from publishing papers about the political and moral persuasions of people linked to various brain scans. I'm guessing those are not much better than lie detectors.
Err.. no, I’m not a big fan of Dennett. I think he is bulshitter.
Mary’s room is what happens when a traditional male ‘thinker’ tries to behave all pro-women: 1) choose female guinea pig for your thought experiments; 2) then forget that she is supposed to be a woman, with a womb that will discharge a lot of red colour every month.
However, this won't work with bat sonar. So Mary still doesn't know what it's like to be a bat. But it does get at the issue which is propositional knowledge cannot communicate a kind of experience a person has never had.
Ok, I’l bite... And the conclusion is?
There's no knowledge problem. Thing is, the person (or robot) has to put themselves into the right state in order to gain that knowledge, which means that if they can't, they won't know what it's like. So I don't think Dennett's counter thought experiment does the trick.
What a surprise!
If you are interested in philosophy, as opposed to the speculative mental expertiments of the anti-mentals, I’ve been reading about modern biosemiotics by Howard Pattee, Thomas Sebeok and others. I know enough biology to understand what they say, and also to see how a philosophy of life as language can work. Currently on:
On the Origin of Language - A Bridge Between Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics, by Marcello Barbieri
Barbieri is an embryologist from Ferrare University. So far (p.3) he gives me a good primer on the ‘school’.
I can also recommend Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee. Apokrisis told me about this. It’s all based on Pierce theory of signs, and the importance of interpretation by a subject, which according to Pattee lies at the core of the ‘hard problem’. (Pattee doesn’t solve the problem but exposes it quite well)
Smells like a private ineffable experience which cannot be known by knowing the brain processes occuring as one experiences it to me.
Quoting Olivier5
Oh wow, it's great to find somebody who thinks like me ! I've been thinking along these lines for ages. It's why I say a robot/computer isn't an entity in the way a human is. But I've also been thinking that a bacterium is an entity of the appropriate kind. Looking forward to reading Pattee now, thanks Olivier!
Quoting Olivier5
Oh wow, it's great to find somebody who thinks like me! I borrowed his "Consciousness Explained" from the public library when it first came out in 1991, when I knew almost nothing about Philosophy of Mind. I took what he said at face value, I believed he really was explaining consciousness. I will never forgive him for misleading me like that. I think he's a charlatan.
This said, it has nothing to do with Dennett so I have posted it on another thread. The mods are welcome to delete it here.
Moreover, he then goes on to further sharpen his focus...
So, here he talks about the source concept of Qualia, noting the "pretheoretical" condition, which - it seems to me at least - must be met if we are to even attempt to attribute Qualia or conscious experience to language less creatures, or language users who've yet to have the mastery required to talk about conscious experience as a subject matter in it's own right. So, the properties of ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct or immediate apprehensibility in consciousness are supposed to be further refinements for the criterion of what counts as pre-theoretical.
So, I'm asking any of the proponents of Qualia...
What meets these standards? Better yet what could?
Quoting creativesoul
What does this mean “talk about experience as a subject matter in its own right”? Does it mean understanding words such as “red” or “bitter” etc? And you are claiming that without this understanding we cannot attribute conscious experience to people?
And I have no idea what you’re asking for. What is a “pretheoretical condition”? Could you give an example of some concept or other and what its “pre-theoretical condition” is? So I have a clue what you’re talking about
The proceeding posts, amusing as they are, did not address the issue.
Sure, there is a difference between being in pain and pretending to be in pain. No one has denied that.
I use a pulverised coffee imported from the middle east. Almost equal amounts of coffee and sugar, bring it to the boil in a pan, pour it immediately into cup. Allow to cool. There is a bitterness that rolls around one's mouth that is quite delightful; along with the rush of sugar and caffeine. It's not smooth.
And no qualia were used.
My question would rather be: who gives a flying rat’s ass, and why? If Dennett prefers to use another term than qualia, who is stopping him? Why does he care so much for the words other people use?
Pfft. You don't have to be here, yet you are. If Olivier prefers to use a term, who is to stop him? So that argument looks to be a bit disingenuous.
It's interesting to me because of the way it fits with the Investigations. I am enjoying delineating and iterating the beetle and private language - putting them to the test, as it were.
Exactly what qualia are is the topic here. IS the argument just angry dolphins?
But further, I've cited several examples of very poor philosophical theories that use qualia. Qualia are misleading.
Well then, drop qualia and use another concept to try to say what you want to say...
Indeed, one of the arguments that has been used in this thread is exactly that; to take examples of the use of "qualia" and translate them into example without that term, hence showing that the term is not needed.
You might try the opposite; give us an example in which we cannot do without the notion of qualia, and you may well carry the argument.
To the extent that the concept is treacherous, it may be in giving:
1. a false impression of permanence, when qualia can evolve through life;
2. a false sense of absoluteness, while it would intuitively seem to me that qualia are always relative to a context and to other qualia;
3. a false idea of an unbreakable atom, while qualia are always aggregates and hence I never use the singular ‘quale’ - qualia is to me always plural like data; there’s no such thing as one datum or one quale;
4. an illusion of objective reality, when qualia are obviously symbolic, they code for something else, eg for physical variables such as wavelengths of light or for chemical composition of food.
From this POV, qualia are to perception what concepts are to articulated language: infinitely adaptative and breakable and recomposable elements of a language that tries to describe the world. Their flexibility is a bit bewildering at first but it’s an asset, and we can still memorize them, recognize them, and use them to think. Or to perceive, in the case of qualia.
Yes. And such differences would be potentially discoverable as we've seen with color-blindness, etc.
Quoting Luke
So color-blindness implies a kind of privacy in practice - they can't make the color distinctions that normally-sighted people can. But that is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.
The philosophical problem (which leads to the hard problem) is the Cartesian Theater and the radical privacy it entails. That is, that everyone's experiences are intrinsically private including the experiences of normally-sighted people.
Whereas ordinary perception starts with the ordinary distinctions that normally-sighted people make in normal conditions (e.g., between red and green apples). That's the paradigm context - the norm - which grounds color language.
When those physical conditions change - when the context is not normal in the relevant respect - then those ordinary distinctions may no longer be obvious. So there is a need to qualify one's statements in those contexts. Terms such as "seems", "appears" and "looks" have that role. For example, a red apple looks green when I wear filtered glasses. The condition that is different here is that I'm wearing filtered glasses.
The physical conditions for color-blindness are also outside the paradigmatic norm. As with the filtered-glasses example, those conditions can potentially be identified, investigated and explained (and, ultimately, changed in the cases where a person's vision is restored through surgery or technology).
Quoting Luke
Because you seem to be invoking privacy even between normally-sighted people. That would be true if there were an intermediary (phenomenal) layer between the person and the world that they are perceiving. That intermediary layer is what I'm rejecting.
Now a color-blind person's experience is different to a normal-sighted person. But there is no intermediary layer for them either. Their options are to develop their own color terms or, as actually happens, use the color terms that derive from normal-sighted people's experience.
Quoting Real colours of dress confirmed - Wikipedia
[tweet]https://twitter.com/romanoriginals/status/571224722438004736[/tweet]
Quoting Olivier5
It seems the dress retailers are not familiar with the Cartesian "facts".
And what is the difference exactly? In both cases the outward action is identical. Given that there is no way to tell whether or not someone is in pain or only pretending to be in pain, what exactly is this difference?
The way I see it is: Things produce experiences which we use words to describe. So if I trip and smash my face into the concrete that would produce experience X. If I stub my toe that would be experience Y. We categorize both Y and X as “pain”. We could come up with more detailed words, such as how German has dozens of words that can only be translated to “Angry” in English, but there seems to be no practical need to describe our experiences in more detail in this case. Trying to remove the middle step (the experience of Y or X) makes it so that there should be no difference between someone pretending to be in pain and someone in pain (assuming we cannot test for pain).
However the problem is this is a self imposed limit that doesn’t need to be there. I can be in pain. I can also pretend to be in pain. There is a very distinct difference in my experience in both cases. Even if this difference was not testable for in a lab, I see no reason we shouldn’t be able to express it since we can clearly imagine the difference.
Again, think back to the speech altering device + light altering glasses example, now imagine we removed the speech altering device and now I’m just straight up lying and saying the inverse color each time. Am I still seeing a red apple? I can see a red apple and then describe it as “red”. I can see a blue apple then lie about it and describe it as “red”. There is a very clear difference in my experience there even if my outward behavior is the same. I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to express this difference.
Additionally, how do you talk about imagination without talking about Qualia? If there was no X and Y, no “middle man” then what exactly is imagination?
Quoting Andrew M
When we ask “is this dress blue and black or gold and white” we ask what experience you are having. It is a fact that some people saw a white and gold dress, even though the dress was blue and black. It is furthermore a fact that you cannot tell if someone is actually seeing gold and white or only lying about it. That’s what it means that you can’t “read minds”.
Quoting Andrew M
I don’t understand how there can be no intermediary layer, but there can be an experience. Isn’t the experience the intermediary layer? Or else what does “experience” mean.
Also what is imagination without the intermediary phenomenological layer?
Well, in the one case, the person is in pain; whereas, and in contradistinction, in the other, they are not.
Quoting khaled
Yes; indeed. As we did, with the English sentence "In one case the person is in pain; in the other, they are not". No mention of qualia here.
What you have said had no traction.
Quoting khaled
So you would now extend qualia to imaginings as well as experiences.
Fine. Cheers.
Correct. Now what’s the difference? Assume I do not understand what the word “pain” means. What does it mean to be in pain vs to not be in pain in the absence of a scientific method of telling the difference? You insist that there is a difference so what is it?
You keep saying “no mention of qualia” but as my first reply to you said: “red” “pain” “bitter” are all referring to Qualia.
Also please answer this:
Quoting khaled
...and you think "Pain is a quale" answers this?
Answer your own question; what is added to the understanding of pain by introducing qualia?
The middle man. The X and Y. That’s what Qualia is. And introducing it is what allows people to first understand words such as “red” “bitter” and “pain”. If you want to explain what pain is to someone you say something like “the experience that occurs when you stub your toe”. That satisfies as an explanation because there is a specific experience X that occurs every time you stub your toe. Without Qualia, without there being some middle man (an experience) that occurs each time you stub your toe, you would never be able to explain to children what “red” or “pain” or “bitter” means. The word would simply have no referent. What is added by Qualia is an actual referent.
Your turn. Without having this middle man, how do you explain to someone what “pain” is if they don’t understand what the word means. In such a way so as to make a distinction between actually being in pain and only pretending to be in pain that does not rely on a scientific explanation.
Also, again, please answer this:
Quoting khaled
My bolding.
Notice that the explanation bit makes no use of qualia, only of pain.
Adding "qualia" into the explanation achieves nothing.
Which was to be shown.
And yes, I know you will find that answer frustrating; but that's it...
Did you read The Mark of Zombie?
The point is adding that middle man there. Call it whatever you want. So in the color altering the device + speech altering device example, the person in question is seeing a blue apple despite claiming that they are seeing a red apple.
Without the middle man the explanation would make no sense. “The experience that arises when....” is a satisfactory explanation only if an experience actually arises. We refer to these experiences in general as “Qualia”. But you can just call them experiences if you want.
For instance my explanation would be unsatisfactory to Isaac, because he doesn’t believe (or I suspect just refuses to admit the reality of) that middle man. He would claim “Again, you don’t experience pain, there is no point in your brain that experiences pain....”. By adding the middle man inverted vision makes sense, even if it is untestable. I’m curious how Isaac would explain what “pain” means to a child without referring to any experiences.
Quoting Banno
Yes. But that article relies on the assumption that you can make identical humans that are not conscious. Which is something I never claimed. And indeed sounds ridiculous.
Like how even if the light entering your eye has the wavelength which is typically associated with blue, if a device overwrites your speech and changes “blue” to “red” that that somehow means you’re seeing a red apple. And you haven’t answered whether or not removing the speech altering device, and instead lying about the results by choice means you’re seeing a red or blue apple. How about if the glasses were not even glasses but were just blocks of wood blocking my vision and I just said “I’m seeing a red apple” randomly and happened to be correct, am I still seeing a red apple?
Because your answer implies that “red” does not refer to any sort of middle man or experience produced by the wavelength entering your eye. In which case, again, what does it refer to?
The point is that I still don’t think it makes any sense. And I don’t see where they addressed the point. I’ll go scouring later but a link or a few quotes would be appreciated
It seems you are not particularly familiar with facts either....
Respectfully, I can see it makes no sense to you; but that's not my problem. At this stage, I don't see a point in continuing.
Cheers.
Why did he fail?
For one, he is attempting the impossible: concepts are always ambiguous so they cannot be ‘nailed’ like he is trying to do.
For two, deconstructing a concept is only useful if you can propose an alternative, which he doesn’t, and therefore he cannot show a better way to speak about subjective apprehension of qualities.
For three, he is attacking the wrong aspects of the concept. There was something useful to be said about qualia being a risky concept to use, but you won’t find it in Quining Qualia. The correct and useful critique of the concept ‘qualia’ is related to them not being atomistic, permanent, absolute and objective. This is perhaps why some materialists have trouble understanding them.
They are subjective and objective?
Correct, like a lot of other things. Words for instance.
It is one way to connect a subject and his objects, yes. It’s called perception. The subject perceives the object through a symbolic representation. The symbols used in this representation include qualitatively different tastes, colors, sounds, etc. which are generically called qualia. They can evoke emotions and memories, thus engaging the subject fully.
If you're advocating for qualia, this is pivotal.
It is the requirement that something be able to exist in it's entirety prior to any theoretical considerations, and it serves as the standard to meet in our assessments. For example, most everyone would agree that some conscious experience existed in it's entirety prior to being named and described. Since all theoretical considerations about conscious experience consist of descriptions thereof(in large part at least), and all pretheoretical conscious experiences exist in their entirety prior to theoretical considerations, pre-theoretical conscious experience cannot consist of descriptions thereof.
Proponents of qualia invoked the "pretheoretical" standard. The source concept of subjective conscious experience that "qualia" are supposed to be refinements of(properties thereof), is claimed to have this "pretheoretical" status. In order to qualify(pun intended) as being pre-theoretical, qualia must exist in it's(their) entirety within pretheoretical conscious experience prior to being named and subsequently described. The burden to meet that explicit criterion belongs to those who advocate for it's use. It's quite common to see that burden be shifted to opponents or just simply neglected altogether during debates such as the ones within this thread. In fact, this thread is nearing fifty pages, and I challenge any and all proponents of qualia to clearly set out some conscious experience which actually meets that standard, and requires invoking the idea/notion/conception of "qualia" for doing so.
This is where qualia claims run into very serious problems. It's a 'hard problem'(again pun intended) to sell to someone like me that some property of 'subjective' conscious experience, say the color of the cup, is private, ineffable, and intrinsic if the experience itself consists of, or is existentially dependent upon - in any way - external things like red cups. Our conscious experience of red cups is most certainly existentially dependent upon red cups. In addition, the frequencies of visible light that we've recently discovered to have named "red" long ago were being emitted/reflected by certain external things long before we ever named and described them in color terms, and long before our becoming aware of the role that light and biological machinery plays in conscious experience of red cups.
We need not discuss the role that light and biological machinery plays in conscious experience of red cups in order to have conscious experience of red cups. However, we most certainly need to discuss such things in order to immediately apprehend that conscious experience of red cups comes in different varieties, some of which do indeed satisfy the pretheoretical criterion, but none of those require the idea/notion/concept of "qualia".
Quoting khaled
"Talk(ing) about experience as a subject matter in it's own right" is not equivalent to understanding words such as "red" or "bitter". Understanding words such as "red" or "bitter" is a necessary prerequisite for subsequently talking about any conscious experience thereof as a subject matter in it's own right, but just using "red" or "bitter" is inadequate for doing so.
Understanding the words is not necessary for seeing red things or tasting bitter red apples. That is because some red things are pretheoretical. Red apples are such things, and the ability to eat them and experience the involuntary autonomous response that bitter apples induce in biological machinery is also pretheoretical. So, conscious experience of eating bitter red apples can happen pretheoretically. That said...
One can also learn how to use the terms "red" and "bitter" to talk about the pretheoretical conscious experience of eating bitter red apples. The learning process itself also counts as pretheoretical conscious experience. Once that process begins to turn inward on itself, and we begin discussing seeing and tasting bitter red apples in terms of our "conscious experience" thereof, we've begun to talk about experience as a subject matter in it's own right.
This thread is a prima facie example of talking about experience as a subject matter in it's own right, whereas a first grader's use of the terms "green" and "red" to pick out different colored apples is not. The grade school experience is a conscious experience of red and green apples that is not talking about the experience itself as a subject matter in it's own right. Rather, it's a conscious experience of talking about the apples. To tease the nuance out, it's a conscious experience of red and green apples that includes language use, but is prior to any theoretical considerations. Thus, some conscious experience of red and green apples consisting of language use counts as pretheoretical as well as all language less conscious experience thereof.
Well, given that it's the proponents of "qualia" who set it, they ought give several rats' asses.
:brow:
Personally I would rather obliterate any and all philosophical notions that lead to widespread confusion and false belief given the sheer power that belief wields in this shared world of ours.
And here I thought it was via physiological sensory perception apparatus. Who knew it was through symbols and signs. No perception of objects for those poor language less beasts...
People's experiences sometimes differ in certain situations (reflecting differences either in the environment or in their physical characteristics). And that's a valid question to investigate. But in many situations we can predict what other people's experience will be like. I assume you and other readers would agree that the dress color looks blue and black in the image I posted. We learn which situations are like that and which aren't.
Quoting khaled
From Lexico, experience is "practical contact with and observation of facts or events." Note that there is nothing there about intermediary layers, phenomenalism, or minds. Watching a sunset is an experience. And so is kicking around a football with your kids.
Quoting khaled
It's a separate issue. To perceive things is not at all the same as to imagine things. They are different kinds of activities.
Part of the Cartesian error is to categorize unlike things together based on superficial similarities instead of making natural and functional distinctions. So visualizing, dreaming, imagining, hallucinating, etc., are considered by the Cartesian to be a kind of seeing and perception, when they are not.
The Cartesian dualist conceptualizes the world very differently to the way people ordinarily conceptualize things. Discussions like this help to bring those philosophical premises to the surface where they can be analyzed and compared.
I didn’t say they were. But what is imagination without a phenomenological layer, still? Because without a phenomenological layer I don’t see how you can describe what imagination is like.
Quoting Andrew M
But they’re not incompatible. This “observation” is taking place in an intermediary layer.
Quoting Andrew M
Cool but I’m not sure how that relates to what I said.
So first off everyone here (except Isaac) has said that people experience things. Moreover everyone here has said that you cannot understand words such as “red” or “pain” without seeing a red object or being in pain. This indicates to me that this “experience” is ineffable (or else we would be able to just tell someone what red is without having to show them something red).
The fact that someone only needs to experience pain once to understand what pain means also indicates that these “experiences” are intrinsic.
Furthermore, at least Banno (and I suspect all of you share this opinion) said that the contents of our experience themselves are unimportant. However no one has been able to expressly deny the claim that they are private. Instead everyone has said that if they were private, that would be useless to talk about as there is no way of accessing them, so we should instead focus on the words we use to describe the experience rather than the “how things seem to us” itself. Something like this:
But then again, no one is talking about the thing in the box (Qualia), no one is trying to “eff” Qualia. What everyone here advocating for Qualia is trying to do is say that there is something in the box, labeled “Qualia”
I don’t know about immediate apprehension, haven’t seen anyone talking about it recently because it’s probably the most boring property
Quoting creativesoul
Given that everyone here quining Qualia talks about experiences (except Isaac), what exactly is so problematic about Qualia that is not problematic about experiences?
Private: I do not know what you’re experiencing when seeing a red cup. As long as we both call it red that’s fine. Again:
Private would mean: I do not know what’s in your box. Doesn’t seem to contradict the quote above. Nor the dependence on red cups.
Ineffable: If it were effable you would be able to understand what “red” means without seeing anything red in your life as long as you’re given sufficient explanation. I don’t think either of us thinks that’s possible. There is some new knowledge added when you actually see a red thing for the first time (ask Amy). Again, doesn’t seem to contradict the dependence on red cups.
Intrinsic: The reason I cannot explain red to you without showing you something red is because there is nothing much to describe. You just have to see it. Again, doesn’t seem to contradict the dependence on red cups.
And I assume the “immediate apprehensibility” property is either clear or too boring to discuss so you didn’t mention it.
So which one of those properties is unconvincing? Which ones, in other words, are properties of “Qualia” but not properties of “Experience of red apples”? Because I would argue that the latter falls under the former.
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand...
We all know what red cups look like. We know that each and every experience of seeing a red cup always involves seeing red cups. It only follows that we do sometimes know what others are experiencing when seeing a red cup for we know that the experience - most definitely - includes red cups. Since we know that that much is true, we also know that what you've said here above is not.
Not necessarily. Check my discussion with Banno about this. It is possible for us to be having a different experience and to still have no communication problems.
Indeed; hence, "one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is".
We're talking about pretheoretical conscious experience...
"Ineffable" denotes that which is unable to be said; that which cannot be spoken. When pretheoretical conscious experience is ineffable, it is unable to be spoken and/or otherwise expressed by the creature having the conscious experience. This makes perfect sense. Some creatures cannot talk about past experience; all the language less ones. A language less creature cannot say anything about their own conscious experience of red cups, for doing so requires talking about what happened and/or is happening, and they've no such ability. Such conscious experience of red cups is ineffable in the sense that it belongs to a creature incapable of speaking.
Quoting khaled
Irrelevant.
We know that all conscious experience of red cups includes red cups. If you cannot agree, there's not much more to say.
But to say “I do not know what’s in your box” (private) also makes sense. One can divide through by the thing in the box. One can also not. It makes sense not to divide by the thing in the box sometimes. Because we can easily imagine what the world would be like if there were different things in the box. So to be unable to communicate what we’re imagining seems to be a waste to me. You still haven’t given me a good reason why we must divide by the thing in the box.
Now apply the context...
You do not know what another's conscious experience of red cups consists of. Why do you keep saying that?
You do know that another's conscious experience of red cups consists - in part at least - of red cups. There are red cups in the box.
Right. I know they call it red. That’s it.
Quoting creativesoul
I don’t see how that’s the case. I know that their experience consists of what they call red cups. That’s good enough to communicate. But I don’t understand how that’s conceding the argument. Care to explain?
Quoting creativesoul
I’ll only give that we know they call it red. That’s it. Seems to contradict what you literally just said above though. Unless by “we know you are seeing a red cup” you mean “we know that you are seeing what you call a red cup”. Which is fine in my book, but not necessary.
Quoting creativesoul
It also makes sense in the case of creatures who can talk about past experience. As long as those creatures cannot just express the experience to someone else such that they don’t need to have it. Again, you cannot explain what “red” is to someone who’s never seen a red object. So the experience is ineffable. You need to see a red object to understand what “red” is
But they are kinds of conscious experiences. And the thing about them is you can't just dismiss dreams, hallucinations, etc. as properties in relation to the objects being perceived, since there are no objects, and thus no such relations. But there are still experiences.
I dream of a red apple, and that red apple is a visual experience.
I would agree, but when it comes to people who are supposed to be describing their own conscious experience of red cups, saying that that conscious experience is ineffable is considered a flaw, not a defining feature like it is with language less conscious experience of red cups.
I do not see why not...
There are names and descriptions for and/or of unobservables.
If only you could get everyone else to agree with you.
That is not a wish of mine.
I've found myself unexpectedly surprised on more than one occasion.
Those unobservables aren't red, nor do they communicate redness.
Red is unobservable to the candidate under consideration in that particular example. Being cute/coy by feigning ignorance is nice though.
Slogans with global appeal.
Unobservables aren't experienced. But they can be described. That's why we don't have words for sonar sensations, but we do for sonar.
Because there is something extra that they will always be missing with those explanations. Which is why when colorblind people see color for the first time they are surprised. Same with deaf people. You can’t describe the thing in the box. Just ask Amy about it.
Quoting creativesoul
People label certain experiences with certain words. And then use those words to tell which experience is occurring. But they mostly don’t attempt to describe the experiences (the thing in the box). They can estimate the thing in the box in terms of other things in other boxes (for example: coffee is bitter and sweet) but some cannot be explained in simpler terms. For example “pain” and “red”. There are no words that break down “pain” as an aggregate of multiple experiences
You try to say that all that exists is a box and that nothing more needs to be said about the thing in the box. But ignoring the things in the box results in problems. Such as not being able to explain why people are surprised when they see color for the first time. They knew the word “red” and knew which objects were “red” roughly. But they got something extra when they actually saw the color that surprised them. Your model fails to account for that. And so should be rejected.
There's a huge difference between our reports of conscious experience and conscious experience. No one is saying otherwise. Sure, someone who has never seen a red cup before is going to be surprised by first doing so, especially if they've already learned that there are colors that they cannot see. My model cannot account for that???
Pfft.
Why? I have a ready explanation: Because he’d never had that experience before. The experience being that thing in the box. And no amount of describing the color red would have had the same effect as seeing it (ineffable)
In your view, where there are only boxes and no need to talk of what’s in them, how can you explain why that person was surprised?
A better example: Assume for instance that there was a colorblind person so good at distinguishing shades of gray that no one knew he was colorblind.
You could put 100s of colored cups in front of him and he would be able to tell you the colors perfectly.
Why is he still surprised after undergoing surgery that allows him to see colors?
Red is unobservable to those who cannot see it. The description counts as the totality of the conscious experience of red regarding such people.
Never a good sign...
That's not even remotely close to anything I've written here. It's closer to the exact opposite.
Be well .
Quoting creativesoul
It's what I got from Banno. I assumed you were both arguing in the same style.
So let me get this straight:
There are no Qualia, but there are experiences
These experiences cannot be fully encapsulated in any description, as the actual experience needs to be had to understand the word associated with it. You don’t understand red until you’ve seen something red. Something new is found out upon seeing color for the first time that cannot be described.
(Ineffable and intrinsic)
There is no reason to believe that these experiences are the same for everyone as there is a difference between reports of conscious experience and conscious experience. All we ever have access to is the reports. And so we cannot compare the experiences, all we can do is compare the reports.
(Private)
And these “experiences” are radically different from Qualia?
The “Banno route” was to refuse to talk about the thing in the box under any condition as it is unnecessary (supposedly) which also seems to me to be what Dennett is doing. The “Isaac route” was to adamantly insist there is nothing in the box and that implying that there is anything in the box is somehow advocating for a certain neurological theory. What you’re doing just seems like Qualia under a different name for me, you're fine with talking about the thing in the box, but for some reason not fine with the word "Qualia" which is what I would define as "the thing in the box". I don’t see how talk of experiences fixes any of the problems that happen with talk of Qualia.
Cheers creativesoul.
Dennett set up this strawman all by himself. You are not paying attention.
Quoting creativesoul
You are welcome to obliterate your own concepts, and not use certain words.
Personally, I treat words as tools. I need tools to do stuff, and I am not going to jettison a concept without a good replacement. So what other concept do you propose, to replace qualia?
This physiological apparatus uses symbols. I’m not talking of articulated language here, but of the symbols that colors and tastes are. You keep missing the point.
Quoting Banno
Incorrect. Using the word "pain" when trying to describe to someone what "pain" is doesn't add anything to their understanding (because it's using the word to explain what it means). The explanation that I gave was:
Quoting Banno
You insist that the word "pain" doesn't refer to an experience yet you seemed fine with that as an explanation, even though it clearly sets the referant of the word "pain" to an experience or other.
I still want to see how you explain to someone what "pain" is without referring to any experiences (because you insist that "pain", "red" and other such words are not referring to experiences)
I wonder if you could explain in broad terms how this works? Where colour is concerned, my understanding is that light of a certain wavelength reaches the eye, initiating a series of electrochemical impulses which eventually result in the experience of seeing a colour. The process can be described exhaustively in terms of electromagnetic radiation, electrochemical impulses and the like. It seems to me that there isn't anything left for symbols to do.
Of course we're not yet able to explain the part where the electrochemical impulses are turned into experiences, but we can explain the entire process whereby a bacterium for example responds (without conscious experience) to the presence of a particular chemical in its environment. Here again, once the process is described in terms of chemical reactions and so on, there doesn't seem to be anything left for symbols to do.
The symbols are to point at certain parts of the experience.
Quoting Daemon
It is to be able to talk about that experience of seeing a colour. That is different from talking about the electrochemical impulses. If they were the same we would have to teach children neurology before being able to teach them what "red" means, but they clearly understand what "red" means without knowing the electrochemical impulses that are occuring in their brain as they see red things.
Quoting Daemon
Incorrect. If this was correct then you would be able to explain to someone what "red" is without them ever seeing anything red. However we know that there are certain kinds of "curable" deafness/blidness and it is always the case that the patient is surprised when they hear sounds or see colors for the first time. Even if said patient had a PHD in neurology I suspect they would still be surprised.
Quoting Daemon
What evidence do you have to support this claim? You already recognized that the electrochemical impulses in a human brain are sufficient conditions for consciousness. Why do you assume whatever the bacterium is doing is not also sufficient? That would be assuming that the complexity of the human brain is something necessary for consciousness, which I don't think we have enough (or any) evidence to claim.
Can you explain where and what these symbols are? Olivier says that colours are symbols. How do colours point at certain parts of the experience?
How do we teach children what "red" is? We point at red things correct? We do not teach them the electrochemical impulses that are happening in brains as red things are perceived.
Same with "pain", "bitter", "sweet", etc.... There are plenty of words where the only way you can understand them is by having the associated experience, and where explanations of electrochemical impulses that coincide with said experiences do not help the understanding at all. This leads me to conclude that the words are actually pointing at experiences, as the experiences are what mark whether or not you understand the word.
As for what "symbols" mean for Olivier, I can't speak for him. I gave it a guess.
Again, can't speak for him. We just have to wait until he answers. I gave it a guess.
The point I am trying to make is a little bit like what people call ‘color coding’. When one wants to represent, say, altitude on a map, one can do so with a set of colors associated to a set of altitude intervals. The colors code for altitude. Similarly, one could say that in vision, colors code for wavelengths. Tastes in the mouth code for certain chemicals in the food, etc. Qualia are symbolic in nature.
Quoting Daemon
Whether the bacterium is conscious or not is hard to decide empirically. I am ready to assume it is not conscious in the common meaning of this word (human of course), but it’s an assumption.
This assumption made, the process, as we know it, involves the genetic code, as well as other codes such as hormones, and therefore it involves decoding. Once again we assume that the decoding engine works through chemistry, and it seems to, although the actual process of associating one particular codon to one particular amino-acid is infernally (or divinely) complex. If anyone is interested, the key to the genetic code is a set of keys: 20 different aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, one for each amino acid coded by the genetic code. One chemical key binding one amino acid with one (or several) codons of 3 RNA bases.
These proteins themselves are coded in the genetic code, of course, and they must be present around the ribosome in strictly defined concentrations otherwise the decoding goes haywire. This means already two feedback loops here.
The keys (aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases) help the ribosomes synthetize the right protein from the right genetic code. Here is a model of the largest sub-unit of a prokaryote ribosome, just to give you an idea of the level of complexity we are talking about.
Proteins are coloured in blue and RNA in brown. The core transcription site is in red. This large sub-unit has a molecular mass of 2.8 million daltons, twenty times bigger than this previous baby. It is paired with a smaller sub-unit with a molecular mass of 1.4 million daltons to form the ribosome.
Bacteria swim towards chemical attractants. They need to move towards the higher concentration of an attractant, which means keeping track over time whether the concentration is higher where they are now than where they were some time ago. This is how it works:
The changes in MCP conformation that inhibit CheA lead to relatively slow increases in MCP methylation by CheR, so that despite the continued presence of attractant, CheA activity is eventually restored to the same value it had in the absence of attractant. Conversely, CheB acts to demethylate the MCPs under conditions that cause elevated CheA activity. Methylation and demethylation occur much more slowly than phosphorylation of CheA and CheY. The methylation state of the MCPs can thereby provide a memory mechanism that allows a cell to compare its present situation to its recent past.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(02)01424-0.pdf
The chemotactic swimming is a result of rotation of flagella at speeds of ca. 18,000 rpm, and it is powered by the proton motive force. Flagellar motors are reversible in nature, helping to change bacterial tumbling into directional swimming by reversing the flagellar rotation from clockwise to counterclockwise. An environmental stimulus, e.g., light, oxygen, chemical, etc., is sensed by a receptor and signals in the form of two-component regulatory systems are transmitted to the flagellar motors, which then move in the required direction.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC134409/
We understand the entire process of swimming towards the attractant at this level of detail. We know that the attractant chemicals react with chemicals in the cell, setting off a chain of reactions which eventually cause the flagella to rotate in such a way that the bacterium swims in the direction where the concentration of attractant is increasing.
When you know the full explanation for the bacterium's behaviour, it's just too much of a stretch to say "oh yeah, also it's conscious". There's just no reason to think it is.
Quoting Olivier5
In the case of colour coding on a map, a conscious human devises the code and a conscious human interprets it. One thing stands for or symbolises another. We might call this "actual coding".
The cornea and lens refract light into a small image and shine it on the retina. The retina transduces this image into electrical pulses. This can be called coding, but that's a metaphor. It's not "actual coding".
How come then that the word “red” preceded any understanding of light? And the word “bitter” preceded any atomic theory? I don’t see how these words could be coding for these properties as that implies that you need to know the properties to be able to use the words coding for them (just as you need to understand what altitude is to be able to read the map), but you don’t.
Quoting Daemon
And there is no reason to assume that is not sufficient for consciousness. If you think there is then what is it?
The referent of "The apple in the fruit bowl" is the apple in the fruit bowl.
The referent of "the experience of seeing the apple in the fruit bowl" is not the apple in the fruit bowl.
The referent of "the pain in my foot" is the pain in my foot.
The referent of "the experience of the pain in my foot" is also the pain in my foot.
Pains are not like apples.
Do you agree?
...you hit the nail squarely on the head here. Kudos.
Words are not the only symbols. Qualia are biological symbols, like genes. You don’t need to know genetics to reproduce your genes, and you don’t need to know optics to see a certain wavelength as red.
Does "The apple" refer to the apple? I say that it does.
Others will say variously that it refers to the perception of the apple, the experience of the apple, the quale of the apple, and so on, saying stuff such as that the map is not the territory or that we cannot say anything about the thing-in-itself and so on.
Interestingly, this is a discussion had with @Isaac, who seems to think that "the apple" refers not to the apple but to a mental model of the apple.
Things can be treated as symbols.
If everything is just a symbol, what are they symbols for?
Each other?
Idealism.
Quoting Banno
Personally, if I want to talk about the apple, I say « the apple », and if I want to talk about the perception of the apple, I say « the perception of the apple ».
Nothing problematic about experiences. Why do we need the extra layer of "qualia", though?
Why does it need to be an “extra layer” though?
Of course we can talk, via abstraction, about the qualities, the smells, tastes, textures, sounds and visual characteristics of the objects we perceive; but we don't need to conceive of them as entities in their own right. I think the idea of qualia suggests that they are entities in their own right; and it us thus misleading. No one has yet shown why the idea is indispensable, so why bother with it; particularly if it prone to mislead.
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
Qualia emphasises the subjective, phenomenal, felt aspects of experience.
Experience, at least insofar as we are aware of it, just is subjective, phenomenal, qualitative and felt; so I'm still not seeing what the concept 'qualia' is adding to our conceptual toolbox.
I find the argument that we should eliminate synonyms to be an unusual one. The term qualia seems to be useful in philosophy of mind discussions to pick out or emphasise the subjective, phenomenal aspects of experience. We can talk of the experience of skydiving or of playing the piano without necessarily focussing on these aspects. The concept might also be considered useful particularly given that some people try to eliminate such aspects as illusory. We could use the terms ‘experience’ or ‘perception’ instead, as long as we restrict such talk to referring only to the subjective, phenomenal nature of the experience or perception (although ‘perception’ might be a closer synonym that doesn’t require the qualification). But then we could more easily just refer to qualia instead.
What would it mean to say that aspects of experience are illusory? Just that they are not what we think they are, no? Are we liable to think of them as substantive?
Fair enough, though, use it if you find it useful. It's down to a matter of personal taste (and I don't mean qualia :wink: ) , I guess.
The mirror stage in a capitalistic society?
Quoting Banno
The self as a bundle of mirrored symbols?
That is the question. It seems most of us agree there are conscious experiences which include colors, sounds, pains, etc. But what does that amount to? We can reject qualia talk, but we're still left with the conscious sensations, which are not easily accounted for by some objective account.
When someone refuses to agree that all conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups, there's not much more that can be said is there?
:meh:
How do we arrive at the need for "qualia" from here? Is the notion just being used in a sort of closeted subjectivism stance?
Illusions, hallucinations and red not being a property of the cup itself leaves some room for saying otherwhise.
Rubbish. Illusions and hallucinations of seeing red cups are not conscious experience of seeing red cups.
What do you think about the three kinds of conscious experience I set out in the last few pages?
This presupposes that there is a need to replace the notion of 'qualia'. What is it taking proper adequate account of that some other language game does not already do a much better job of?
What do you think about the three kinds of conscious experience I set out recently?
By all means, I wish someone would at least offer some sort of explanation for using these words. If it's useful for picking out or emphasizing the subjective, phenomenal aspects of experience, then surely one of the proponents would utilize the tool by doing so.
Which aspects exactly?
You might know how red objects appear to you (or what red objects “look like” to you), but how do you know how red objects appear to other people? How can you know that red objects appear the same (colour) to everyone?
Are you saying that not all conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups?
Red, I would think.
Has something to do with certain frequencies of visible light spectrum being picking out.
Yep.
Cool.
You’re not certain? You said that “we do sometimes know what others are experiencing when seeing a red cup”. How do you know that what I experience (colour-wise) when I see a red cup is the same as what you experience (colour-wise) when you see a red cup?
Quoting creativesoul
What is this “something “?
“Since we both learned color words by being shown public colored objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors.”
I do not. Nor need I.
Quoting creativesoul
Yeah, its weird how everyone always picks out the red ones. I'm fairly certain that that's because those frequencies appear exactly like those frequencies each and every time someone is picking out red cups...
Those entirely different subjective colors are always like the little man who wasn't there. They're quite clearly not entirely different. We all pick out the red ones.
:brow:
You're certain that everyone will pick out the same shade of red?
Is the apple candy or rose colored?
We'll all pick out the frequencies that appear to us all individually over and over again, time and time again, each and every time we pick out red cups.
Gotta love it when folk ask someone to compare something that is nowhere to be seen to a color chart.
You'll have to refresh my memory. But does it matter for whether qualia is a useful concept? I take it you think the three kinds show that it is not useful.
Do you agree that all conscious experience of seeing red cups includes seeing red cups?
Public versus private colored?
But thing is that we don't always see the same colors.
Is the idea/notion/concept of "Qualia" useful? Perhaps you missed this...
By all means, I wish someone would at least offer some sort of explanation for using these words. If it's useful for picking out or emphasizing the subjective, phenomenal aspects of experience, then surely one of the proponents would utilize the tool by doing so.
Which aspects of conscious experience of seeing red cups are we picking out and emphasizing - to the exclusion of all else - when we say "qualia"?
What qualia?
There are variations in our biological machinery.
Of course. That variation somehow produces the color difference.
Not all by itself.
But you claimed that you do know. You've claimed, and are continuing to claim - without any argument - that red objects must appear the same to everyone.
Quoting creativesoul
How so?
Quoting creativesoul
Why not? Do you have any supporting argument?
Quoting creativesoul
But that's the point of inverted spectra: "our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors". We should expect to find that we would succeed in picking out "red ones" even if colours appeared to each of us differently, because we each learned to associate the colour words with however that colour appears to us (regardless of whether the colour appears the same to everyone else). Merely repeating that we succeed in picking out red cups is not an adequate response.
How colours appear to each of us, for starters, e.g. what a colour in the chart above "looks like" to you.
Quoting Luke
No, I did not. Quote the entire post please.
Then what you call “experience” we call “Qualia”
Quoting Janus
That somehow you can think you’re experiencing something while actually you’re not experiencing anything. That’s what an “illusion” is, something that you think is there but isn’t.
You first. What does the square named "rosewood" look like to you?
That's what I said, but taking it out of the context ignores the support that was given that you have since claimed was not.
Your other questions have been answered despite the fact that they're basically irrelevant to the position I'm arguing for/from, and the arguments given in support of that position.
So what are they and how does one differentiate? If the experience is identical but in one there is a red cup in the other there is a drawing of a red cup how do we differentiate?
Quoting creativesoul
In that case then, the experience of red cups does not necessarily include red cups, as “red” seems like to you, that’s what I meant. They include what each person calls red cups. If we were to take a “screen shot” (somehow) of everyone’s experience seeing a red cup and put the screen shots side by side, you might call some of those green cups or purple cups. It just means that what you call “green” the first person calls “red”, which is fine as long as everything that appears red to you (by your standard) appears green to him (by your standard).
You typically don’t need to talk about this until someone says “seeing grass produces the same experience as seeing blood”. In that case is the person lying or actually having that experience (synonym of Qualia)?
Quoting creativesoul
Qualia are an umbrella term to include these “how things seem to us”s. Like how “mammals” includes elephants. We don’t need talk of mammals to describe elephants. However we can talk of mammals in general. Same with Qualia. We can say for example that Qualia are private, since we can’t compare them, we can’t take a screen shot of what everyone is seeing. Yet.
We all know what red cups look like. We know that each and every experience of seeing a red cup always involves seeing red cups. It only follows that we do sometimes know what others are experiencing when seeing a red cup for we know that the experience - most definitely - includes red cups. Since we know that that much is true, we also know that what you've said here above is not.
That's exactly what was said... verbatim. It was in response to the following...
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
I meant it as you meant it here:
Quoting creativesoul
Read the latest reply for detail.
You two seem to be imagining some sort of problem. Do you believe that I've somehow contradicted myself?
What you mean by “the experience of red cups always includes red cups” needs explanation. Do you mean “the experience of red cups for me is identical to others” in which case I think we both would disagree. Otherwise do you mean “the experience of red cups includes what each of us individually classifies as a red cup” which is literally what I said? Because it seems to be the latter from your replies.
Quoting creativesoul
Well, the experiences are not identical if in one there is a red cup and in the other there is a drawing of a red cup.
Oh, brother...
Say what you mean.
Go back and read.
They are illusions and hallucinations of red cups seen in past. They are illusions and hallucinations, in part, because of the fact that there are no red cups involved at the time of the event. Such illusions and hallucinations are made possible, in part, because of prior conscious experience of seeing red cups.
I meant exactly what I said.
What - exactly - do each of us classify as a "red cup" if not red cups?
I've no idea what seems so difficult about this for you to understand.
The two terms are not synonymous, though. 'Perception' and 'experience' are more synonymous. So it makes sense to say 'I experienced the taste of the apple' or 'I perceived the taste of the apple' (even there it would be better to simply say 'I tasted the apple') but how would you use 'qualia' in that sentence? I'm puzzled as to why some seem to be so attached to a term, which is unclear, ambiguous and unnecessary, not to mention potentially confusing.
Quoting khaled
No one here (I think) is denying that colours are being experienced or perceived when we look at coloured objects. But to say qualia are illusory is to say that what we are seeing is not qualia, but coloured objects; in other words the illusion consists in thinking that what we are seeing is something other than what it is.
I find it rather telling that it's never used when making things clear.
Because it has a certain meaning. When people argue "qualia doesn't exist" it makes it seem as though they are saying experience doesn't exist. As I said to creativesoul, Qualia is an umbrella term for experiences such as "pain", "bitter", "red", etc in the same way that mammals are an umbrella term including elephants. You do not need to talk about mammals to describe elephants however you can talk about mammals in general. So this is an unfair comparison:
Quoting Janus
Is like asking "An elephant has 4 legs. How would you use "mammals" in that sentence?" See the problem?
Talking of Qualia in general you can say that they are private as:
Quoting creativesoul
for instance shows "privacy" is a property of these experiences or:
Quoting creativesoul
Despite any amount of description of what "red" is like. Which shows ineffability (there is something new discovered when experiencing the thing that cannot be encapsulated in words).
etc...
Quoting Janus
It's more like being baffled at how hard people are trying to undermine a perfectly reasonable concept based on unsubstantiated claims that it is "confusing" when no one else is confused by it. I'd rather we stop psychoanalysing the other side though as it is usually a hidden ad hom that does nothing to further discussion.
It seems to me you are thinking that because I could hallucinate a red cup on the table when there was no red cup; and that I would be unable to tell the difference by visual appearance alone, that what I see when I hallucinate is exactly the same as what I see when I am actually seeing an object. But such hallucinations are rarely so stable, and also the rest of the environment would not usually be an hallucination, just the red cup.
I could easily dispel the illusion by trying to pick the cup up. While it's reportedly true that in extreme cases whole scenes and activities may be hallucinated, it's hard to tell how detailed such hallucinations can be, because when we are in such trance-like states our critical faculties are not usually functioning at capacity and memories of such 'events' are notoriously unreliable.
I'm not psychoanalyzing anyone. I said "perhaps"; I was surmising. What does 'qualia' give us that 'perception' or 'experience' doesn't? I would be pleased if, to satisfy my curiosity, you would tell me whether you are an idealist or believe in an afterlife.
Quoting creativesoul
Here you emphasize that the experience (colour-wise) produced by the red cup can be different. So let me just call the experience of a red cup you have X. And let me call the experience of a red cup Janus has Y.
When you say Quoting khaled
Can mean 2 things:
"X and Y are identical" which would be an unsubstatiated claim as you yourself said.
"X and Y are both produced by looking at red cups" which no one is disagreeing with.
Which is why I replied with "experiences of red cups always include what we call red cups" which removes the ambiguity, and only refers to case 2. I am basically saying that "When creativesoul has X, he says red cup, and when Janus has Y, he said red cup, but that does not mean that X=Y"
I'd not care to guess why it's seems so important for others.
It's odd to me.
That's an equivocation.
Not afterlife but I'm not sure about "idealist". I never got the split between idealism and materialism. They both just seemed to be using different words for what is practically the same thing, if not exactly the same thing.
Quoting Janus
Yes.
Quoting Janus
Which is why it was a thought experiment assuming said hallucinations were stable.
Anyways I lost track of what this has to do with the overall argument so I suggest we leave talk of hallucinations on the backburner until it comes up again.
Alternatively, materialism fails to properly account for conscious experience. One might turn the psychologizing around and say that materialists have a dogmatic commitment to dismissing any arguments challenging their metaphysical positions.
It means that both Janus' seeing red cups, and my seeing red cups always always always includes red cups.
Indeed.
Wait, now I'm confused. Whose side are you on? Do you just not like the term qualia?
"Dogmatic" may be a bit too much, depending upon the person.
I don't personally believe in an afterlife, but I do think Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn, Block, etc. present more convincing arguments than Dennett, Churchland, Frankish, etc.
Neither, and I said as much from the very beginning. Curious that, huh?
Quoting creativesoul
Let me rephrase. Here you say "includes red cups". And also you say:
Quoting creativesoul
Therefore what I call "red" may not be what you call "red" correct?
Therefore when you say "experiences of red cups always include red cups" do you mean red as it seems from your POV? As in "experiences of red cups produce the exact same experience in me as they do in everyone"
I don't recall the beginning. I think I jumped in sometime after about 18 pages. It is a bit curious.
All conscious experience of seeing red cups includes more than just red cups, ya know?
:brow:
Didn’t see that.
I should hope so. Red cups in the brain doesn't sound like a healthy condition.
Sure but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
Anyways I have to run now. I edited my last comment a bit hopefully that makes it clearer. Good talk.
It sets out what counts as pretheoretical conscious experience. But, since you've expressed no interest in that criterion, calling it a "strawman" built by Dennett, I suspected you may not have taken note that I'm not in complete agreement with Dennett, because I'm neither a dualist, nor a monist.
Yes, that's just the point in distinguishing those activities from perception. You are having a dream - there's nothing being perceived, only dreamt.
Quoting Marchesk
Metaphorically perhaps, but nothing is being seen, only dreamt. Paraphrasing:
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the inner spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no inner spoon.
Neo: There is no inner spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the inner spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
We can’t synthetise the mechanism from scratch yet, which means we are still guessing how it might work. Note that all the flagella have to paddle in the same direction, so the process involves some uniform sense of spatial direction, which ain’t easy to do with mere chemistry.
But this is just nitpicking. More importantly, how would you propose that we differentiate « real codes » from « unreal codes »? Is the genetic code not real, and why?
That's why it's not a problem for someone(like me) to make both claims you're asking about.
We can know something about what another is experiencing when seeing red cups, and I need not know that what I experience (colour-wise) when I see a red cup is the same as what you experience (colour-wise) when you see a red cup. I know that both experiences include red cups and people seeing red cups in whatever way they appear to them, each and every time.
It's been interesting.
I am quite interested in pretheoretical conscious experience. In fact, I taught you how to use this word, remember? https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/469904
Sure, once we've made up our minds to.
Fantastic. Thanks for clarifying. That's exactly what I meant when I said "The experience of red cups includes what people call red cups" but I can see why that would have been confusing.
Quoting creativesoul
Isaac or Banno would say that both claims are identical. That's why I needed to differentiate. Isaac would go further to say that X and Y don't exist so both claims are non-sensical from what I gather.
So far of the "Qualia Quiners" I've talked to Banno did it on the basis that it is useless to talk about. Isaac insisted we don't have experiences, which seems crazy to me. You seem to just think the term is redundant at best - as there are other ways to encapsulate what it is supposed to be referring to - and confusing at worst and based on that say it doesn't exist. I don't really have a problem with that.
Well I'm afraid you haven't quite understood the description of what the bacterium is doing. The (to me) astonishing truth is that the bacterium does swim in the direction of the higher concentration of attractant chemical, it does achieve this entirely by means of biochemistry and biophysics, and we're not guessing how it works, we know precisely how it works, it's set out in those papers.
Quoting Olivier5
The genetic code is not "actual coding", coding here is again a metaphor, the whole amazing thing happens by what you call "mere chemistry". "Actual coding" takes place in the way you describe for the colour coding of a map, it's an activity which requires the involvement of conscious agents with the cognitive capacity to make use of symbols.
So if the genetic code was written by God (or some alien race), then it is actual coding, but if it is the result of random variations, then it is not actual coding. By this reasoning, you cannot know if the genetic code is an ‘actual code’ or not, because you don’t know who wrote it.
To me, only the result counts. The origin doesn’t matter. If it behaves as a code, quacks as a code, and looks like a code, then it’s a code.
How do you think it developed Olivier, really? How do you think the bacterium's ability to swim up a chemical gradient developed, really?
Indeed. You taught me how you use it. What of mine?
Absolutely, but this proposition is, for all intents and purposes, tautological, for it presupposes a certain knowledge given from a particular experience of a given object, but in a plurality of occurrences. Otherwise, there is no warrant for either red or cup for any of us, but only the presence of some object imbued with some existential conditions.
————-
Quoting creativesoul
Saying to perceive a particular object is the same as what it feels like to perceive a red cup iff that particular object contains that which corresponds to the quales of red and cup, still doesn’t inform us of the origin of red or cup, or the synthesis of “object” to the quales “red” and “cup”. It is clear how the altogether distorted notion of qualia were arrived at, but the need for them has never been properly justified, in that they are neither sufficient nor necessary for what they’re supposed to do. And anything neither sufficient nor necessary can be summarily dismissed, insofar as doing so offers no jeopardy to that which is already established as the necessary means for human cognition and experience in general. Theoretically established, of course.
In some ways...
Do you think Morse code emerged naturally? Can you see the difference between the way Morse code emerged and the way the genetic code emerged?
Our verbal behaviour already matches despite known variations in biological machinery because those variations do not have any effect/affect upon the actual light being emitted/reflected, and that light appears exactly the same to us, each and every time we look at red cups. Red cups look exactly like red cups to each and every individual capable of seeing red cups, regardless of any variation between individual biological machinery.
That's the point.
We all pick out the red ones, regardless of any variation between individual biological machinery, and that's largely due to the public effable aspects that nearly all of our own individual experience of seeing red cups includes.
I certainly don’t think gods and fairies were involved in the creation of the Morse code. Some guy called Morse must have invented it.
But how do you think he invented it, if not through some chemistry-based mechanism in his brain? Why should the Morse code, that must have emerged from some chemical process in the brain of some M. Morse, be seen as a truer code than the genetic code, which supposedly emerged from some chemical process in some primordial soup?
Do you understand the relevant difference between Morse code and the genetic code, or would you like me to explain it to you?
You're more than welcome.
Well, I'm not attempting to speak for either of them, for they are quite a bit more capable of explaining their own position than I.
However, the "in whatever way they appear to them" portion can be eliminated for red cups always appear exactly like red cups to each and every person capable of seeing red cups. That's why "All conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups and people seeing red cups" is better than "All conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups and people seeing red cups in whatever way they appear to them".
They always appear exactly like red cups, to each and every individual capable of seeing red cups, regardless of any variation between the individuals' biological machinery.
No problem, but...
What do people call "red cups"?
Red cups.
See???
The experience of red cups includes red cups. Shorter. Clearer. Better.
One presupposes purpose and intent(Morse code), and the other does not.
Well, if you're very interested in pre-theoretical conscious experience, then you and I have shared interest. Our notion of what exactly counts as such seems much different though, based upon what you wrote regarding your own ideas, and what I know of my own...
Here's the relevant bits where I set it all out for khaled...
What is a “pretheoretical condition”?
This is pivotal.
It is the requirement that something be able to exist in it's entirety prior to any theoretical considerations, and it serves as the standard to meet in our assessments. For example, most everyone would agree that some conscious experience existed in it's entirety prior to being named and described. Since all theoretical considerations about conscious experience consist of descriptions thereof(in large part at least), and all pretheoretical conscious experiences exist in their entirety prior to theoretical considerations, it only follows that pre-theoretical conscious experience cannot consist of descriptions thereof.
In order for something to count as being pre-theoretical, it must exist in it's(their) entirety prior to being named and subsequently described.
Our conscious experience of red cups consists - in part - of red cups. In addition, the frequencies of visible light that we've recently discovered to have named "red" long ago were being emitted/reflected by certain external things long before we ever named and described them in color terms, and long before our becoming aware of the role that light and biological machinery plays in conscious experience of red cups.
We need not discuss the role that light and biological machinery plays in conscious experience of red cups in order to have conscious experience of red cups. However, we most certainly need to discuss such things in order to immediately apprehend that conscious experience of red cups comes in different varieties, some of which do indeed satisfy the pretheoretical criterion, but none of those require the idea/notion/concept of "qualia".
"Talk(ing) about experience as a subject matter in it's own right" is not equivalent to understanding words such as "red" or "bitter". Understanding words such as "red" or "bitter" is a necessary prerequisite for subsequently talking about any conscious experience thereof as a subject matter in it's own right, but just using "red" or "bitter" is inadequate for doing so.
Understanding the words is not necessary for seeing red things or tasting bitter red apples. That is because some red things are pretheoretical. Red apples are such things, and the ability to eat them and experience the involuntary autonomous response that bitter apples induce in biological machinery is also pretheoretical. So, conscious experience of eating bitter red apples can happen pretheoretically.
That said...
One can also learn how to use the terms "red" and "bitter" to talk about the pretheoretical conscious experience of eating bitter red apples. The learning process itself also counts as pretheoretical conscious experience. Once that process begins to turn inward on itself, and we begin discussing seeing and tasting bitter red apples in terms of our "conscious experience" thereof, we've begun to talk about experience as a subject matter in it's own right. Such discussion is not pretheoretical.
This thread is a prima facie example of talking about experience as a subject matter in it's own right, whereas a first grader's use of the terms "green" and "red" to pick out different colored apples is not. The grade school experience is a conscious experience of red and green apples that is not talking about the experience itself as a subject matter in it's own right. Rather, it's a conscious experience of talking about the apples. To tease the nuance out, it's a conscious experience of red and green apples that includes language use, but is prior to any theoretical considerations. Thus, some conscious experience of red and green apples consisting of language use counts as pretheoretical as well as all language less conscious experience thereof.
The term "code" is used literally with something like Morse code, but metaphorically with something like the genetic code.
Morse used the (metaphorical!) codes in his brain and the other aspects of his consciousness to create a non-metaphorical "actual" code which involved sending electrical pulses through a wire.
With the genetic code there's only the metaphorical level, no conscious designer. The same is true of the bacterium. I found that such a beautiful revelation, that we can explain what looks like conscious activity through purely unconscious (chemical) means.
I don't understand your motivation in wanting to say that Morse code and the genetic code are equivalent.
It’s because I don’t see the origin of the two codes as fundamentally different, just because consciousness was involved in one and not the other. To me it makes no significant difference to what they do, which is to code for something else.
That was both cool and super, I learned something, thank you!
Cool. So you agree with all of that?
No, thank you.
:blush:
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting creativesoul
Similar, I suppose. I find no need for qualia though, whereas you seem to want to preserve it. So, something is different.
Spot on.
What’s different is that I am using concepts like tools, opportunistically. I see them as sets, defined by the user. « Qualia » is just the set of qualitatively different tastes, smells, colors, timbres, etc. that help us perceive, represent and memorize the world. I see this concept as unproblematic, or not more problematic than others.
Chalmers and Nagel have their own problems... Dennett has his own as well... not sure about the rest.
They all three have the same problem though...
They do not understand how meaning arises/works, and it's role in all conscious experience as it pertains to thought and belief, of which all conscious experience consists entirely thereof. Different subject matter though.
Thanks. Our chat is in danger of being swamped in @creativesoul's Great Debate. Creative's doing a fine job of keeping the candle of wisdom alight.
SO we agree that there is a distinction to be made between a red apple and the experience of a red apple, but no equivalent distinction to be made between a pain and the experience of a pain.
There's another preliminary issue to which I would like to draw attention, one that perhaps seems rather mundane but which caused much angst in philosophical circles when it was pointed out in the middle of the last century. Armed with their newly developed symbolic logic, philosophers had come to the conclusion that language involved names, and groups, and a few connectives. Russell was a great proponent of this, as indeed was Wittgenstein, who was so convinced that he gave philosophy away and went off to become a teacher.
But then Wittgenstein, and a few other philosophers in at both Cambridge and Oxford, noticed that there were many rather important utterances that simply did not seem to be groups, names and connectives. Consider, if you will, the word "Hello". It does not refer to a greeting; it is the greeting. It is not the name of something, so much as a thing we do with a word. A more pertinent example might be "ouch!".
Due exploration fo language will reveal whole mountains and valleys in which the meaning of the utterance is not given simply by identifying what the words involved refer to.
Now at the risk of misplacing our thread of conversation in the forrest of this thread on Dennett, I'd appreciate your view here. At the least, can you consider the possibility that there are parts of language, things we do with words, for which the meaning is not given by the referent, but is instead found in the role these utterances and scribbles play in our day to day lives? Then we might follow our thread home.
The councilors refused to allow the protestors to hold their demonstration because they advocated violence.
The councilors refused to allow the protestors to hold their demonstration because they abhorred violence.
In the course of performing speech acts we communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when a stranger asks, "What is your name?"
However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there are linguistic means, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. One may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or one can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!"
One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one speech act, and indeed performs this act, but also performs a further speech act, which is indirect. One may, for instance, say, "Peter, can you close the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to close the window, but also requesting that he does so. Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly) performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.
An even more indirect way of making such a request would be to say, in Peter's presence in the room with the open window, "I'm cold." The speaker of this request must rely upon Peter's understanding of several items of information that is not explicit: that the window is open and is the cause of them being cold, that being cold is an uncomfortable sensation and they wish it to be taken care of, and that Peter cares to rectify this situation by closing the window. This, of course, depends much on the relationship between the requester and Peter—he might understand the request differently if they were his boss at work than if they were his girlfriend or boyfriend at home. The more presumed information pertaining to the request, the more indirect the speech act may be considered to be.
Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example, if a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and the other replies, "I have class." The second speaker has used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection.
This poses a problem for linguists, as it is confusing (on a rather simple approach) to see how the person who made the proposal can understand that his proposal was rejected. Searle suggests that the illocutionary force of indirect speech acts can be derived by means of a Gricean reasoning process[18]; however, the process he proposes does not seem to accurately solve the problem[citation needed].
In other words, this means that one does not need to say the words apologize, pledge, or praise in order to show they are doing the action. All the examples above show how the actions and indirect words make something happen rather than coming out straightforward with specific words and saying it.
Materialism accounts for conscious experience by saying that it is a function of neural complexity; an emergent function that, like the emergence of life itself, occurs as a phase transition at a critical degree of complexity. The fact that we don't know all the details doesn't entail that this hypothesis is incorrect. We don't know with certainty, to be sure, but seriously, what cogent alternative hypotheses are there to choose from? Also, bear in mind we don't know anything with certainty, so this hypothesis is by no means unique in that regard.
So, it's not a matter of dogma, at least not necessarily so; even if it might be for some closed minds. It's a defeasible hypothesis that has no serious competitors.
That knife slices both ways.
OK, thanks for answering honestly. As to the "split between idealism and materialism" they are based on substantially different metaphysical presumptions. As I said earlier, whether you are one or the other, seems to depend largely on whether you accept such things as introspection, personal intuition, religious traditions and scripture (all of these or just some) as being the most reliable guide to the nature of reality, or whether you accept empirical investigations and science instead as being more likely to show us what is fundamentally real.
it means most particpants could say it, each with the same sincerity.
Sure. Definitely those exist too. I realized I was mistaken when you pointed it out a long time ago. Some words just don’t have referents or definitions. But I still think words such as “red” or “pain” or “bitter” refer to experiences rather than being properties of the objects. Because as I said, “red” is not really a property of the apple. If you wore blue sunglasses the apple would appear blue (purple?), but since the apple didn’t change, only its color did, that leads me to believe that apples are not red, they just reflect high wavelength light. And since everyone here, quiners included, seems to agree you don’t really understand “red” without seeing something red, I believe the word must refer to the experience, not a property of the apple.
Are you going to argue that “red” and “bitter” and such are similar to “hello” in that they are simply words that do things, and they don’t need a referent?
At least this is my initial reaction, I'll probably edit a good bit of this in the future but I don't really have time right now.
Quoting khaled
Tools do do what, though? Would you want to claim that the tools of science perform the same functions as the the tools of intuition, introspection, religious tradition and scripture?
I agree, intuition and introspection (and imagination) are very important for the sciences and philosophy (and of course for the arts), but in the former domains they are always subject to empirical and analytic scrutiny, modeling and testing.
Leibniz is a good one.
What role does "hello" play? Does this not mean that that utterance refers to the role that it plays?
Leibniz is cogent and as testable as materialism.
So you're pitting idealism against methodological materialism?
That makes no sense. You are a methodological dualist. We all are.
Not at all! There is no methodological idealism except in relation to human reason-giving. like "I did this because...", and the like. When it comes to producing speculative hypotheses regarding the origins of life and consciousness physical theories are all we have, because only they are testable. That doesn't mean you can't speculate idealistically; it just means there is no way to test such speculations.
ok
What is the difference between practical privacy and philosophical privacy?
Quoting Andrew M
I await your distinction between practical privacy and philosophical privacy. Either way, I don't think you've addressed the privacy issue that I noted previously:
"You can't perceive or experience another person's perceptions and experiences. That's just a fact of being you and not them."
The Wikipedia article on Qualia gives the following definition of privacy: "all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible."
Quoting Andrew M
If the difference between a normal-sighted person and a colour-blind person is not in their supposed "phenomenal layer", then how are they different? Why does colour-blindness involve a practical privacy but normal-sightedness doesn't?
Indeed, and intuition is very handy to design crafty experiments. Also to know what you are looking for in those experiments. Scientist without intuitions are just number crunchers.
Yes. Is there some limit you had in mind to the number of things a public concept can be party to?
Quoting Luke
How do you know phenol-thio-urea is a substance which tastes very bitter to three-fourths of humanity, and as tasteless as water to the rest if we don't have a public meaning for 'bitter'?
Quoting Luke
Public meaning. If it weren't public concepts and our ability to detect them, then we'd have nothing to speak of and would never have learnt the term for the concept in the first place.
Quoting Luke
'Seeing' is a process. It starts with an external state if the world for which we usually have a public model (a red apple). It ends (arbitrarily) with our response to that external state. Colours are part of the public model of those external states which produce our responses.
Photons hit the retina, they fire a chain of neurons in the V1, these (depending on previously cemented pathways) fire a chain of other neurons (with the important backward-acting filters). Some of these neurons represent things like the word 'red', images of other things which caused the same initial V! pattern, emotions attached to either the current image, or remembered ones... All this is held in working memory, which is then re-fired (selectively) by the hippocampus. It's this re-firing which we are aware of when we introspect, not the original chain. The colour red is a public concept. We use it to indicate to other people some category of thing, we learn which word to use by experiment in early childhood (retaining those uses which work), There's nothing more to 'red' than the public use of the word.
Quoting Luke
Because there's a public word for them. We're there no word, you'd be less likely to think you see colours. Note the differences in the colour names for different cultures. People actually claim to distinguish colour separations based on their language's colour names even when the difference in wavelengths are not as significant as colours they do not distinguish. I'm genuinely dumbfounded by the degree to which people seem to expect their introspection to deliver accurate information about their underlying mental processes. Why would it?
The public meaning can't possibly refer to an experience, how would we ever learn what word to use if the only thing they referred to was private experiences? The public meaning is found in the use the word is put to in a particular language game. We're engaged now in just such a language game, so when I say X derives from Y I'm necessarily invoking the public concepts of both.
So the public meaning of 'red' is exactly that which gets you the apples you expect when you use it in the sentence "pass me that red apple". We learn to expect such a response by observation in a social context.
Quoting khaled
Yes. I don't think I've ever denied that our full experience at any given time may not be perfectly communicable. Though given enough time I think another person could come to know it no less well than you yourself do. Our memories are no less fallible than our language.
Quoting khaled
No. You have a disposition to communicate your experience in those terms post hoc. There's no evidence at all that you feel it at the time, neither from neuroscience nor phenomenologically. All you have is your dispositions to act in response to the stimuli. (Please see my response to Luke for an account, but really I've said this several times, it just doesn't seem to be getting across for some reason). If one of those responses is to reach for the word 'redness' or talk about qualia, that's no reason to draw any ontological conclusion. I could train a parrot to say 'red' every time a bell rings, doesn't mean it's having a phenomenological experience of 'red'.
Imagine your 'qualia' exist as this 'experience of redness'. What if someone implanted a false memory of this 'red quale', milliseconds after you perceiving a blue screen. How would you know? So when the evidence we do have from neuroscience suggests that there's no such event, our tendency to talk as if there was one is not good reason to deny it. We used to talk about Elan Vitale as well. Not so much anymore. Did it used to exist and now has ceased to exist? Or is it just that it's no longer used?
Our use of language.
This thread has already got very far from the OP, so I'd rather not discuss it here. It's been discussed at length in https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6895/what-it-is-like-to-experience-x posiibly toward about page 30.
So it is still a thought experiment then isn't it. All we have is someone who obviously doesn't know all there is to know about red and you're assuming the reaction would be the same in someone who does know all there is to know about red. That's just begging the question.
OK, so let's get rid of "red". Secondary properties might have a distinct grammar and complicated the issue unnecessarily.
Here's the question we are dealing with:
Quoting khaled
Let's instead consider theses two sentences:
Superficially their grammars are almost the same. Perhaps this superficiality hides a deeper difference. It looks as if a referent of the first is the apple, and one would expect that a referent of the second is the pain. Let's check that out.
We agreed that there is at least this difference; There is a difference between "I have an apple in my hand" and "I am experiencing and apple being in my hand"; but there is not an equivalent difference between "I have a pain in my hand" and "I am experiencing a pain in my hand". So there are at least some differences hiding here.
We also saw that some utterances don't have a referent - I used the example "Ouch!". Technically it's an exclamation rather than a sentence, since it has no subject.
What I would ask you to consider is that the deep grammar of "I have a pain in my hand" is not so much like "I have an apple in my hand" as it is like "Ouch!" That is, that it does not work by referring so much as by exclaiming.
There's more that might be considered. "We know Banno has an apple in his hand" fits in with the classic analysis of knowledge as justified true belief; the justification is there for all to see. But what of "We know Banno has a pain in his hand"? The justification is no shared.
So it's not that "'pain' does not refer to an experience", as if it might refer to something else. Rather, it's that "'pain' does not refer". At least, not in the same way that "apple" does.
So...following that principle...what does a 'painkiller' kill, metaphorically?
(Not nit-picking, by the way, just trying to follow through what you're saying).
Complaints.
Yes! Perfect.
Being "party to" is one thing. You've suggested that a taste experience is "a unique set of memories, emotions, desires, sematic associations etc" that results from a public concept. I would have thought that a taste experience resulted from eating or drinking instead.
Quoting Isaac
You've missed the point. You said that you "can't possibly think something is 'sweet' while other people think a different thing is 'sweet'. That is, you implied that we must all agree on what is 'sweet'. However, the example of phenolthiourea that Dennett gives shows that not everyone agrees that it is 'bitter'. How do you reconcile this with your claim that everyone agrees on what is 'bitter' (or 'sweet')? Are they disagreeing over the meaning of the word?
Quoting Isaac
How do we "detect" public concepts? I thought we just learned to use them.
Quoting Isaac
Your position is that we don't really see colours, it only seems like we do because of our language? Then how and/or why did the English-speaking community come up with these concepts?
No. Here's a really good paper on the subject - https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712. I'm not sure what bearing you're expecting the fact that you 'would have thought' taste experiences result from eating or drinking to have on the matter.
Quoting Luke
Whether something is 'bitter' and what 'bitter' means are two different things. we might all agree what 'interesting' means, that doesn't mean we all agree on what things are 'interesting'.
Quoting Luke
See the article above.
Quoting Luke
To do a job. I'm not following your line of thinking here. If I want to select a particular apple, then using a word to distinguish it seems like a good move, no?
I'm sure you're right; taste is only a concept and has nothing to do with eating or drinking.
Quoting Isaac
According to what you've said, whether something is 'bitter' cannot be different from what 'bitter' means. How can something have a bitter taste if taste is only a concept? How can a concept be bitter?
No-one said anything about it having "nothing to do with" eating and drinking, only that it is not the result of it.
Quoting Luke
By associating the concept with it. That's what 'having a bitter taste' means. That the eating or drinking of it produces the responses some subset of which are somewhat similar to the ones we've learned to use the word 'bitter' to describe.
Quoting khaled
Quoting Banno
I guessed right.
But the question remains: How do you teach someone what pain is without them ever being in pain? There is a difference between a child saying "Ouch!" to skip school and someone saying "Ouch!" because they ran into a wall.
Even if it were true that when someone says "I have a pain in my hand" they are effectively saying "Ouch" that cannot be said of other sentences. For example: "It feels like I'm being stabbed with a knife" is different from "It feels like someone whacked me with a baseball bat", they cannot just be reduced to the same "Ouch!" In these cases the person in question is asking you to imagine a certain experience. Doctors ask about these all the time in diagnoses, so there is another language game for Qualia.
Edit: The more I think about it the more it seems that these words without referents are used to make the other party imagine a certain experience or image. In which case, sure, pain may not have a referent, but there is a distinct experience of pain still. Saying “Ouch” just brings that to the mind of the listener.
So the colour-blind can't know that they're colour-blind? Ask a colour-blind person what it is that they don't see, they will answer "colours". Are they using the word incorrectly? If not, then it seems they know what colours are sufficiently to use the word.
Quoting Isaac
I'd ask how we learn to use the words without having the experiences? Why is it that when we want to teach a child what "red" is we point to red things? If someone has never seen something red before, but just has a list of words he memorized as "red objects" (for example blood) none of which he has seen does that person understands what "red" means? I would say no and I'm guessing you'd say yes.
Quoting Isaac
Are you seriously suggesting that if the patient was a neurologist he wouldn't be surprised? I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that among those patients at least one knew how their own illness worked from a neurological perpsective and were still surprised.
Quoting Isaac
Ok so we have this word "Experience" you assign the property "Ineffable" to. Let's see what other properties we can discover for this word "Experience" (which is of course radically different from Qualia).
Would you say that it is possible to compare these "experiences"?
Quoting Isaac
I don't see where in your reply to Luke you showed this.
Quoting Isaac
I agree, but I want to know what, by your standard, would it take to say "Isaac is having the phenomenological experience of 'red'".
Quoting Isaac
Thing is, I don't see how neuroscience can provide any sort of evidence about phenomenology. Sounds to me like asking "The mathematical evidence for why you should vote for Biden".
I don't see how that follows. Ask a colorblind person what "red" is and they'll probably think you're rude because you're pointing out that they don't know.
Quoting Isaac
That is not the same thing as knowing what colors are. If I never studied topology, and you asked me what I don't know about math, and I said "Topology", do I know what topology is? No, the exact opposite, I don't know what topology is, that's why it was the answer.
Quoting Isaac
Knowing that you don't see something doesn't mean you know the thing you're not seeing.... In fact it means the opposite.
All I know about topology and all color blind people know about color is that they don't know what it is but others claim to do so.
I'd like to direct you to this article: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-what-happens-when-anaesthesia-fails
It's an article about when anaesthesia fails and instead of no longer being in pain, the person is simply paralyzed. Say I have a bottle of working anaesthesia and a bottle of paralyzing anaesthesia. According to you the only purpose of anaesthesia is eliminating complaints (as I understand). So for you it shouldn't matter which one I use right? But I am positive you wouldn't want to be treated by the latter. What is the difference?
Maybe painkillers and anaesthesia kill more than complaints. Maybe that's why they're not called complaint-killers.
You said earlier that taste was a concept:
Quoting Isaac
Now you're saying instead that (a bitter) taste is "associating the concept with it". What is "it"?
:up:
Say someone had such a list. They'd be indistinguishable from your someone who'd never seen anything red. So I have a reason for my answer, I don't know why you'd add something where there's no cause to.
Quoting khaled
A neurologist does not know everything there is to know about red either. Just fractionally more.
Quoting khaled
I didn't say ineffable. I said 'not perfectly communicable'. They're not the same thing. I also said that such imperfect communication need be no less imperfect than one's own recollection. You're missing important parts of my posts in your responses.
Quoting khaled
The paper I cited.
Quoting khaled
Nothing. The sentence is nonsense. There's no such thing as 'the phenomenonological experience of 'red''.
Quoting khaled
It depends what question you want answered about it. If you're just going to take everything you feel like is the case to actually be the case then there's no further work to do is there? Why are we even talking? The whole point of any investigation is premised entirely on the idea that what feels like it is the case might not actually be the case. If you're going to respond to any such suggestion with "but it doesn't feel like that's the case", then there's no point in investigating. You already know all you want to ever know about the issue.
Quoting khaled
Of course they know. "It's the colour of stop signs, blood, teacher's ink..." that's an answer a colour-blind person could give. You want to add something to the meaning of 'red' which there's no cause to add. A colour-blind person could say "pass me the red apples" and the same job would get done as if a normally sighted person said it.
What they don't have is something like specific neurological responses associated with red objects. But that was never part of the public meaning of the word 'red'. Our parents didn't point to fMRI scans to teach us how to use the word, they pointed to red things.
Quoting khaled
Yes. If you ask someone studying topology in their first year what they're studying and they say "topology" have they misused the word because their studies are incomplete?
Yep.
Quoting Luke
Nope. That's not what the quoted text says.
It may be my poor communication. Let me try again from scratch. We'll do it with object perception because I know the routes better. The neurological process I described earlier...
Quoting Isaac
The public concept is applied as an inference model to explain the interoception of responses. Did you read the paper I linked? It explains the evidence for all this.
All we have at the time of the initial experience (stimulus to response) is the chain of neural firing, various associations. When inferring a cause for these various mental states we reach for public concepts as models. These are usually a very fuzzy fit and always applied post hoc.
'Bitter' is just such a concept. We apply it to a range of mental states caused by drinking or eating (or imagining such).
You can see this with the influence colour words has on perception of colour shades.
Is it the theory that is physical, or what the theory is about (what it points to) that is physical, or both?
Is testing physical theories a physical or non-physical process? How can a non-physical thing test physical things? What does "physical" even mean?
This is one of the problems with philosophy. Speaking ways that create the very problem you are trying to solve.
In behavior yes, but you know they have never seen anything red. I would say then that they don't understand the word.
Quoting Isaac
There is plenty of cause to.
The difference between anesthesia and paralysis
The surprise experienced by people when they first see something regardless of their empirical knowledge about it
The fact that doctors talk about qualia all the time (does it feel like stabbing or blunt force?)
etc
All of these seem to indicate that there is some experiential content that the words refer to or at least are associated with.
Quoting Isaac
I never said "everything there is to know about red". I was not repeating mary's room. I said that understanding of neurology does not remove the surprise of actually seeing/hearing for the first time. Which suggests that something happens when seeing/hearing for the first time, although you keep denying there is.
Quoting Isaac
Those are the same thing.
Quoting Isaac
Might get back to you on that.
EDIT: Read until the first table. Don't see anything contravertial here. So far the only thing Lisa has said is that our emotional categories are man made and do not need to exist in nature. And that we cannot locate certain emtions in the brain. Both are things I knew already and I don't see a problem with. If anything she admits that there exist such emotions as "fear" and "anger". That there is some experiential content behind those words. Which already seems to disagree with what you're saying. That emotional categories are man made or that we cannot find "fear" in the brain is no threat to the claim that there is experiential content behind the words.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Here you said that training a parrot to say red repeatedly doesn't mean it has "the phenomenological experience of 'red'". In other words there is this thing, that is not nonsense, that the parrot doesn't have. What is that thing? It makes no sense to me to say somthing doesn't have X if X doesn't mean anything.
Quoting Isaac
That's not what's happening. Talk of phenomenology is talking of everything you feel like. It does not imply anything about the mechanisms causing it. Which is why I think your connection between neurology and phenomenology is fundamentally misguided.
Quoting Isaac
But that's not what's happening. I say "it feels like X" you say "No it doesn't feel like X, nothing feels like anything". If you want to say "Sure it feels like X but that's not what's happening in your brain" no one would disagree. You are debating whether or not we have experiences in the first place.
Quoting Isaac
That's like me saying topology is an area of math. Or citing some of its uses. It doesn't mean I know what topology is don't you agree? I know things about topology in general but I don't know what it is. Similarly, colorblind people know things about color but don't know what it is.
Quoting Isaac
Not really. If I passed him the green apples he wouldn't complain but a person who can see color would. There is a difference there. But fine let's say that the same job gets done. And I know that to you that means they understand the word. However, being able to use the word well in one situation does not show full understanding. Being able to use it well in every situation does don't you agree?
So for instance if someone drew a red lake and asked the colorblind person "What color is this?" and the colorblind person said "blue" that would be evidence that the colorblind person does not understand the word "color" sufficiently to accomplish the same job as an ably sighted person would doesn't it?
So how might we teach the colorblind person to be able to distinguish all the colors perfectly in each situation? And that includes seeing new things for the first time too? Answer: We can't. In other words we cannot teach someone to fully understand "red" if they've never seen red things.
Quoting Isaac
No but as I said, their understanding is rudamentary and far from perfect. And I'm sure you'd agree that the only way for them to understand it perfectly is to be able to use it in every scenario. For topology this is easy, they just finish the course. For color not so much.
Why?
Quoting khaled
One prevents either nociception or working memory function (depending on type), the other prevent muscle function. I'm not seeing how this relates at all to the meaning of words like 'red'.
Quoting khaled
We've just been through this. It is not "regardless" of their emprical knowledge. You've not demonstrated at all that surprise is not eliminated by empirical knowledge. All you've shown is that two states of empirical knowledge both show surprise, ie neither have acquired sufficient knowledge to eliminate surprise altogether. You haven't even shown that the neurologist is not less surprised. It's all nothing more than armchair speculation.
Quoting khaled
Agai, how would this even be a useful question if there were not a public meaning for these terms. If they referred to private experience then the doctor will have learned nothing whatsoever from your answer.
Quoting khaled
And yet...
Quoting khaled
How would you know that the surprise is "regardless" of empirical knowledge unless you're referring to 'everything there is to know'? Anything less than that and you haven't made your case at all, the surprise might be caused by a lack of some empirical fact of which both the neurologist and the layman were previously unaware.
Quoting khaled
Not as I intended it they're not. Ineffable implies some metaphysical impossibility. 'Not perfectly communicable' was just meant to imply fallibility in language. Again, you ignored the important bit. We can communicate an experience with no less fidelity than we ourselves recollect it.
Quoting khaled
Look at the inferential method she demonstrates. The same thing applies to 'red'. I'll dig out a paper specifically on perceptual features if you're having trouble making the cross-over, I just thought the emotions paper was clearer about the role of public concepts.
Quoting khaled
Sorry, it made sense to me when I wrote it. I mean exactly the thing you say it makes no sense to mean.
Quoting khaled
I've nowhere said that the way things feel to you to be is not the way things feel to you to be. I'm saying they're not the way things actually are. In other words, I have a better model.
You haven't answered my question on this. What exactly are you investigating if you're going to assume that the way things seem to you to be is the way they actually are?
Quoting khaled
No. You've just said what topology is. How is "it's an area of maths" not an answer to the question "what is topology?".
I don't see how the fact that it's possible to give more detailed answers means that less detailed ones are now not answers. As you say...
Quoting khaled
"Understand it fully". Now you've snuck in a 'fully' which wasn't there before. So how does the postgraduate student now understand it 'fully' when the post doctorate student clearly understands more? You're placing an arbitrary threshold on 'understanding' just to match your theory. Colour-blind people understand the meaning of the word 'red'. Normally sighted people understand more. Artists (arguably) understand more still. Colour scientists understand even more. Why draw the line at some arbitrary point?
Quoting khaled
Not one of us has that level of understanding. To use the word well in 'every' situation.
Quoting khaled
Yes. Not understanding the word as sufficiently as all other users of it has, thankfully, never been a criteria for understanding the meaning of a word.
Quoting khaled
Give them a spectrometer and tell them that anything with a wavelength of approximately 625-740 nanometres is called 'red'.
Pain is interesting. Per Hilton's law (@Isaac is it Hilton's?), any nervous pathway that is used extensively, will become a pain superhighway, so pain from any source in the area will use the same pathway and present the same feeling to the subject.
How do we explain this without resorting to talk of phenomenal consciousness?
I'll try:
Um, I have no idea. How do you explain it? Just reject Hilton's law?
________________________________________________________________________
Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy
Treated monkeys can now see in technicolour.
Researchers have used gene therapy to restore colour vision in two adult monkeys that have been unable to distinguish between red and green hues since birth — raising the hope of curing colour blindness and other visual disorders in humans.
"This is a truly amazing study," says András Komáromy, a vision researcher and veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. "If we can target gene expression specifically to cones [in humans] then this has a tremendous implication."
About 1 in 12 men lack either the red- or the green-sensitive photoreceptor proteins that are normally present in the colour-sensing cells, or cones, of the retina, and so have red–green colour blindness. A similar condition affects all male squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus), which naturally see the world in just two tones. The colour blindness in the monkeys arises because full colour vision requires two versions of the opsin gene, which is carried on the X chromosome. One version codes for a red-detecting photoreceptor, the other for a green-detecting photoreceptor. As male monkeys have only one X chromosome, they carry only one version of the gene and are inevitably red–green colour blind. A similar deficiency accounts for the most common form of dichromatic color blindness in humans. Fewer female monkeys suffer from the condition as they have two X chromosomes, and often carry both versions of the opsin gene.
"Here is an animal that is a perfect model for the human condition," says Jay Neitz of the University of Washington in Seattle, a member of the team that carried out the experiment.
Computer test for colour blindnessThe monkeys were trained to touch a screen when they saw coloured patches.Neitz Laboratory
Neitz and his colleagues introduced the human form of the red-detecting opsin gene into a viral vector, and injected the virus behind the retina of two male squirrel monkeys — one named Dalton in honour of the British chemist, John Dalton, who was the first to describe his own colour blindness in 1794, and the other named Sam. The researchers then assessed the monkeys' ability to find coloured patches of dots on a background of grey dots by training them to touch coloured patches on a screen with their heads, and then rewarding them with grape juice. The test is a modified version of the standard 'Cambridge Colour Test' where people must identify numbers or other specific patterns in a field of coloured dots.
Colour coded
After 20 weeks, the monkeys' colour skills improved dramatically, indicating that Dalton and Sam had acquired the ability to see in three shades (see video). Both monkeys have retained this skill for more than two years with no apparent side effects, the researchers report in Nature1.
Adding the missing gene was sufficient to restore full colour vision without further rewiring of the brain even though the monkeys had been colour blind since birth. "There is this plasticity still in the brain and it is possible to treat cone defects with gene therapy," says Alexander Smith, a molecular biologist and vision researcher at University College London, who did not contribute to the study.
"It doesn't seem like new neural connections have to be formed," says Komáromy. "You can add an additional cone opsin pigment and the neural circuitry and visual pathways can deal with it."
I could ask the same of you. Why is your standard so low?
Quoting Isaac
Anesthesia prevents both (you don't move during surgery). And in that case we have behavioral equivalence (the complaints are removed). However if all there was to anesthesia and pain killers is complaint removal then it shouldn't matter which is used in surgery. But I'm positive you'd rather have anesthesia than be paralyzed during surgery, even though it's behaviorally equivalent (which apparently according to you means the pain doesn't exist)
Quoting Isaac
So you are seriously suggesting that with enough knowledge the surprise would be eliminated. I think that's a much less reasonable expectation.
Does it also follow then that we can teach children colors by having them look at enough fMRI scans and reading enough neurology books?
Quoting Isaac
Incorrect. The doctor knows that the private experience we each describe as "like knives" is indicative of a certain condition that is not the same as the descriptor "like blunt force". However we do in fact need to be having an experience to make this distinction.
Quoting Isaac
Fair enough.
Quoting Isaac
Give me a quote or something I don't know what you're referring to.
Quoting Isaac
Don't, I won't read it. One is enough for now since I already think it will be a waste of time from reading the first bit.
Quoting Isaac
Let me just dig into this a bit. So if I say "I am experiencing red", you would reply "Actually, you're not experiencing red, you're.....". What is the ......? Could you do that for "I am in pain" too? What exactly would you put in place of those dots?
Quoting Isaac
The way I see it is that there are two different domains here. One can talk about phenomenology or one can talk about neurology. When I say "I am in pain" I am talking phenomenologically, meaning, I am talking of the way things feel like. And usually doing so to get some sort of sympathy or help in this case.
Me saying "I am in pain" however is not to say "There is this hunk of brain that's active right now that is making me in pain". That would be false (there is no specific point in the brain where pain happens) and would be implying that the way things seem to me reflects the structure of my brain, a completely unwarranted assumption. So just because I feel distinct experiences doesn't mean that they are traceable to distinct patterns or chunks in my brain (fear and excitement for example are very similar from my limited reading on the subject)
However you seem to me to be doing something weird. You are saying that the neurology somehow implies phenomenology. That since there is no specific point in my brain governing "pain" there cannot be a distinct sensation of pain in my experience. I think that's an equally unwarranted assumption.
So your question makes no sense to me in the first place. On a pheonomenological level, the way things seem to me is the way they are, by definition. On a neurological level, I don't know much nor do I care to investigate further.
Quoting Isaac
Yea but it's what I meant.
Quoting Isaac
Because you're gonna have to draw it somewhere. You draw it at being able to use it correctly literally once. I draw it at whether or not you've seen something red.
Quoting Isaac
Sure but a colorblind person will use the word wrong consecutively if you just keep showing them pictures of things painted in colors that are usually not the color of those things. To say they understand color is like saying the person who gets 10% on a calculus exam understands calculus.
Quoting Isaac
I would argue it is somewhat. You have to be at an average level at least. A parrot doesn't understand what a shark is because he learns to use it in one sentence such as "Sharks swim in the sea". And if your definition of "understanding" means that that parrot knows what a shark is I think it's ridiculous, even while recognizing that that parrot did in fact use the word correctly.
Quoting Isaac
That's like saying you can teach a kid math by giving him a calculator. I obviously meant for them to be able to distinguish it alone.
I would say the theory is ideal, in that it's humans creating a map of the territory, while the territory itself might be understood as physical, assuming a physicalist ontology. That does allow for the possibility that the theory is missing something fundamental. A map is only as good as the map makers and their knowledge of the territory.
That's absurd. Does this mean birds don't see colors?
And why don't we have the equivalent language for the rest of the EM spectrum or sonar?
Earlier you spoke of not being able to take a screenshot of another individual's sight. Isaac is offering you as close a proximity of that as we can get. He's explaining how the 'camera' works 'inside all of our heads'(the biological machinery - 'private' - aspect of experience). It's worth setting aside presuppositions, opening up your defenses, and allowing a bit of knowledge in.
Making the same sound as "shark" is not equivalent to correct use of the term. Parrots may make the sound, but correct word use requires a bit more.
And I still don't see what that has to do with anything. And furthermore it seems to me like every two paragraphs he insists that there is no such thing as "experience". With infamous quotes like "You don't see red"
Quoting creativesoul
He's explained to me how people see things like 3 times now. And every time I ask what that has to do with anything. How does an explanation of how the camera works imply that the footage on said camera (qualia, metaphorically) doesn't exist?
Quoting creativesoul
Ask Isaac. I wouldn't be so sure. After all if a colorblind person says "I can't see color" then that apparently means the colorblind person understands color according to him.
Anyways parrots are pretty intelligent so I wouldn't put it past them to actually know what they're quacking about.
The involuntary biological response.
It has everything to do with the privacy aspect of conscious experience that we've been touching upon.
Earlier, with me, you invoked the idea that because we cannot take a screen shot of what another is seeing during an experience of seeing red cups, that we cannot know what they experience when doing so. We've agreed since, I think, that despite that, we can still - at the very least - know that they're seeing red cups, however red cups appear to the individual. Hence, variation in biological machinery does not impede our ability to know some things about another's experience. If we can know some things about another's experience, then it is not private.
Our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to red cups is the extent of the privacy aspect of seeing red cups. That capacity includes the individual's own biological machinery as well as their skill with common language use. We've spoken about the language aspect(the use of which is a part of some conscious experience of red cups), Isaac is a good resource for the biological machinery aspect.
Thanks, but from my vantage point it seems like some language use just whirls people so far away from red cups that the language itself is no longer connected to anything aside from itself and it's user.
How so?
To his credit.
Why invoke "qualia" here? What does it add that "footage" lacks?
I don’t think it does. As in it doesn’t add anything new. We already agreed how “private” private is.
Quoting creativesoul
An explanation of the underlying biological machinery doesn’t help here. Because we don’t know what connection the biological machinery has to the experience. We only know its connection to behavior.
Quoting creativesoul
Again, an explanation of the underlying neuroscience doesn’t help to explain the phenomenology. As in, me knowing your eyes cannot perceive red light does not allow me to imagine your experience. So nothing new about privacy is said by explaining how we see.
I am reading Isaac’s explanations and I find them interesting, just unrelated.
The more I talk to you the more I don’t understand what your gripe is with Qualia. It seems to be minor at best.
Qualia IS the footage.
Do you agree that all conscious experience of seeing red cups includes red cups?
I know that the conscious experience of seeing red cups requires the capability of seeing red cups, and that all the evidence suggests that biological machinery plays an irrevocable role in helping to provide that capability.
What has convinced you to believe otherwise?
Although pain (or illness) is sometimes termed 'a complaint', so if you mean it in that sense, then yes.
So what is the camera?
I found the extra "non" a bit amusing...
We went over this. Yea sure.
Quoting creativesoul
I don’t believe otherwise. What you said doesn’t contradict what I said.
We don’t know the connection the biological machinery has to the experience. For instance: we feel like we’re in a theatre, watching things (a Cartesian theatre), however we know the brain doesn’t have that structure (there is no “control room” where our senses come together). So it remains a mystery how the biological machinery produces this unified experience.
Quoting creativesoul
The eye. I am making Cartesian theatre metaphor. Your eye is the camera and it is projecting footage on the screen which you watch. This “footage” is Qualia. What I have just said is not a statement of neurological fact, but of phenomenological fact. I am perfectly aware there is no “control room” in the brain where all our sensations are gathered. However that does not change the fact that it feels that way. And it is a mystery why it feels that way, as far as I know.
I'll get to your recent comments, but my replies require a bit of paving, so...
Quoting creativesoul
Do you agree?
I do, but what is that supposed to be relevant to?
"I have a pain in my hand" is more like "Ouch!" than like "I have an apple in my hand".
Not "the same as". There remain differences.
Quoting khaled
How do you know what "pain" is?
"That's just a scratch. You don't know what pain is; I've had a broken arm. That's real pain".
Ah, broken arm? You don't know what pain is. I've had a bowl perforation..."
"Call that pain? You don't know what pain is. I've had second degree burns to both legs..."
That is, "how do you teach someone what pain is" is a misguided question, because it assumes that there is a something that pain is... That there is something it is like to be in pain... as if, again, I could hold pain in my hand like an apple. If pain talk is emphatic, then there need be no such thing.
Learning what pain is consists in no more than being able to use the word suitably.
"How do you teach someone what pain is" assumes that there is some thing that is had in common by a scratch, a broken arm, a bowl perforation, a broken heart, a betrayal; and of course this is wrong.
All that red things have in common is that we use the same word for them.
All that pains have in common is that we use the same word for them.
Quoting khaled
Or used to illicit sympathy or used to sexually gratify or used to frighten into submission or used to win philosophical debates...
You are right; more progress is made when we stop looking for the meaning of 'pain' and look instead to the uses of the word.
Curiously, I can't know that you are in pain, according to those who advocate for qualia and the privacy of pains, because your pain is ineffable.
So I'm just going to give you these pills that stop you being so annoying...
It has to do with the claim that we do not know what connection biological machinery has to conscious experience of seeing red cups. We most certainly do know that biological machinery plays an irrevocable role, wouldn't you say?
We don't presently understand how phenomenal consciousness work, but we do relate it to functions. We don't fully understand gravity either, but we know it has to do with time and space.
It's not a physical object. True.
You mean atomic?
Are you implying the need for omniscience?
:worry:
What does that have to do with our knowing that conscious experience of seeing red cups requires red cups and a creature capable of seeing red cups, and that that capability itself requires biological machinery?
I seem to be arguing against the position that everything real has properties.
This is where some philosophical work is needed.
Huh?
Quoting creativesoul
We do relate qualia to biological functions. So?
If it isn't a thing, what is it?
Not interested.
Experience is like a symphony. Pulling single notes out will be lossy because of the way the parts influence each other.
Is that what you mean?
That's a good question. What is your answer? Now's your chance.
Ok. I take it you didn't really have a point to make there.
I might not have to assert anything stronger than that pain is a family resemblance - that there is nothing that all talk of "pain" has in common. Then there need be no property or set of properties that is common to all talk of 'pain'.
A symphony. But a symphony that is in the process of being written.
:point:
Or individuated in a manner that doesn't resemble labelling classes [hide=*](or aggregating states based on family resemblance)[/hide] of similar states with the word "pain" as we usually use it.
Hence doubts regarding the accuracy of folk psychology, whose truth depends upon just that kind of procedure. "This hurts!" as expletive more than description.
Do you have time to explain more about how that relates?
Quoting Banno
Still, I need to know if it's sharp or dull, burning or electrical, rate it from 0 to 10, etc.
Precision comes with practice.
No - later.
'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.'
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Pain is a thing, an aspirin is a thing. The world is so full of a number of things, of different kinds. What are we getting so hung up about?
Well, that's one way to take it.
Pain is already a broad category like color. There's a long list of types of physical and psychic pain. Pain is especially prone to being part of an experiential soup though. Fear and dread amplifies it and so on.
How about cadmium red deep hue? Is there something that all talk of this color has in common? I think so.
I'm not just making a bald assertion; see the last half-dozen posts to @khaled. If you want, address the argument.
But, can you set out what that "something" is?
And if you can't how can you be so sure of it?
Or is it that we expect genus-differentia definitions even were they cannot be found?
So, if you think so, then tell us what it is. My suspicion is that for any genus-differentia definition you offer we will be able to posit a counter-instance; or make one up.
It comes from a particular formulation of cadmium, so there's an external standard as with the frequency middle-c.
Quoting Banno
So maybe like the power of suggestion?
Quoting Banno
What does this lead you to conclude?
It's not as if we could not make a sample of cadmium red deep hue appear a slightly different shade or hue by, perhaps, shining a light of a different colour on it, or accelerating it away from us at some decent velocity. But we are back to talking about colour, which I was at pains to remove from the discussion because of its status as a secondary quality.
Newcastle University neuroscientist Dr. Gabriele Jordan, recently announced that she has identified a woman who is a "tetrachromat," that is, a woman with the ability to see much greater colour depth than the ordinary person.
...
According to Discover Magazine, in 2007, Jordan, now at Newcastle, developed more powerful methods for identifying women with tetrachromatic vision. She chose 25 women all of whom had a fourth cone and tested them for tetrachromatic vision. She identified one woman tagged cDa29, who got all questions designed to detect an extended range of colour vision correct. Jordan told Discover Magazine: “I was jumping up and down." After 20 years of search she had finally found a true tetrachomat.
Discover Magazine reports that Jay Neitz, vision researcher at the University of Washington, believes that all women with four cones have potential for tetrachromatic vision but most need to develop or awaken the ability. Neitz said: “Most of the things that we see as coloured are manufactured by people who are trying to make colours that work for trichromats. It could be that our whole world is tuned to the world of the trichromat.”
Neittz also suggested that the natural environment may not have sufficient hues of colours to harness the full potentials of tetrachromatic vision. He said that people with four cones may be helped to develop full tetrachromatic vision if they regularly visit a lab where they are exposed to vision experiences that will help then develop the cognitive skills to identify a richer variety of hues.
An intriguing question that arose was: How does cDa29 see the world? She was unable to communicate her experience to the researchers in much the same way as it is impossible to describe the experience of red to a dichromatic person. Jordan says: “This private perception is what everybody is curious about. I would love to see that.”
______________________________________
So all the men here are colourblind, and an estimated 88% of the women.
We can equip a computer with an electric eye and program it to acknowledge in memory every time it detects something that reflects red light. In this sense, there is such a thing as a red light detector.
I think it would be simple to demonstrate that humans qualify as red light detectors. Can we put aside whatever calibration issues Austin was referring to? Or is it important enough to address?
Quoting Banno
I used the word "standard" for a reason. An external standard allows you to verify that I can pick out cadmium red deep hue. All you'd be doing is verifying that I'm a red light detector with some precision built in from experience.
The question remains: do you think there is a phenomenal aspect to my detecting abilities?
That part. Just being a bit snide.
Not just that, pain determines language use. Pain is one of the things that show what words like "good" and "bad" mean.
hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young
-- e e cummings
Mice were shown a screen with a faint grey line appearing and moving across it, they pressed a lever to receive a reward when they saw the grey line. Certain synapses could be seen firing when they saw the line. The line could be made fainter. Eventually synapses were seen to be firing in synchrony with the appearance of the line when the mice no longer pushed the lever. The line was being detected by the brain, but without any phenomenal aspect.
There's an entire ethical system built around that.
Yeah, I've shown, at least to my own contentment, this question has no sense nor reference.
So there was a phenomenal aspect and then there wasn't?
Ok
Yes
The point is that there is a "them". There is an experience behind the word. And when we have that experience (or range of experiences) we say "Ouch". So far your objection to the idea that there is something that pain is like is simply that the category is vague:
Quoting Banno
but we can always narrow it down more. "Feels like a stabbing" is different from "Feels like blunt force trauma" for example and so on. And furthrmore we can say that there is something common to all those forms of pain: They are all unpleasant, and all bring some sympathy when someone is seen to experience them.
I still don't see how this will end up being:
Quoting Banno
If you mean that there was conscious awareness and then there wasn't, I'd agree; but what do you think that demonstrates?
Denying that there is any conscious awareness, or "phenomenal aspect" and saying that it is not what we might intuitively think it is, that it is not a mysterious non-physical "something", are not the same.
Good metaphor. Just want to say that we have two cameras (eyes), not just one, and therefore that we see actually 2 different footages all the time. So every time we see a red cup, we actually see two distinct images of the same cup. The difference between the 2 images tells us how far the red cup is from our eyes.
At least this is true for those of us who are qualiaphiles. I don’t know how the qualiaphobes can account for the fact that we see two cups where there’s only one cup.
I think Hilton's is more about the overlapping of sensorimotor and surrounding tissue nerve ending, the superhighway idea is a consequence of it, but my expertise ends at the neck, so I'm not sure.
Either way, I'm not clear what the issue is with explaining this. Presumably if our nerve endings had a one to one relationship with each patch of tissue you'd have less of an issue, right? So why not apply the same one-to-one relationship with the neurons in the post central gyrus where the location of pain signals is interpreted? I don't see the fact they're imperfectly wired causes any issue.
Learning any concept consists in no more than being able to use the word suitably. However, it does not follow that pain consists in no more than being able to use the word "pain" suitably.
Likewise, learning what a tree is consists in no more than being able to use the word "tree" suitably. However, it does does not follow that a tree consists in no more than being able to use the word "tree" suitably.
There is a distinction between "pain" and "learning what pain is".
Quoting Banno
All that games have in common is that we use the same word for them? Wittgenstein's point is that family resemblance concepts have no essential defining property, not that they have "no sense or referent".
Quoting Banno
What does it mean for a word to refer "in the same way" as another word? Why should we expect all words to refer "in the same way"? If a word does not refer "in the same way" as another word, does it imply that one (or both) of the words must have no referent?
But, but using the word suitably is only possible because we feel various pains. just like the various color words exist because we see colors.
Charity as much as anything else. But also, meaning is related to use, so any (intentionally) successful use has to have an element of understanding meaning, otherwise we end up arbitrarily disassociating meaning from use. This leads to all sorts of ontological issue reifying the 'meaning' of words.
Quoting khaled
No it doesn't. I bet those patients who were accidentally merely paralysed complained a great deal afterwards. Again, you're applying arbitrary parameters to make the evidence match your model. Why place an arbitrary time restriction on complaints? They are clearly not behaviourally equivalent at all.
Quoting khaled
I'm not sure what your opinion of reasonableness has to do with it.
Quoting khaled
No. Not unless you're suggesting that all the empirical data about colour in the world is somehow written down in neurology books. That would be some book!
Quoting khaled
How does he know this?
Quoting khaled
Well, there's not much point in pursuing a line of argument based on the data if you're not going to take the time to read it - let's leave that line of argument for now.
Quoting khaled
"Actually, you're not experiencing red, you're... reaching for the word 'red' as a model to help you explain, predict and act on your actual experience which may or may not have included stimulation from some particular wavelength of light". As I've said, it is virtually inarguable at this stage that your awareness of mental processes is post hoc.
Now you can have the definition of 'experience' in this context to be just whatever story your brain puts together to model the interioception events, but then the investigation must end there.
You cannot conclude we have 'red' quale from that. You might, other people might not. Someone who's never heard of the idea of a qualia certainly won't have a 'red' quale. You're trying to have your cake and eat it here. On the one hand you want to establish a discursive reality to your experiences as they appear to you to be, then on the other you want to use this to make claims about our shared experience (there is such a thing as qualia, we experience redness, we have experiences etc). None of this derives from the mere fact that you've told yourself a story about what's happening in your brain. If you want to divorce the actual mechanisms from your experience of them (the story you tell yourself about them), then that's fine, but all you have left is a story, you can't then treat it as some matter of fact that can be further investigated. For one it will change minute-to-minute.
Quoting khaled
Why? As per the comment with which I opened this post, why are you setting arbitrary limits to what constitutes understanding a term? I've answered for me, but you've not given me your answer.
Why would it mean that?
Quoting Marchesk
Because we have no signals from either of those wavelengths to model.
I'm not clear on what you're getting at here at all.
It sounded like you were denying color sensations. But perhaps you prefer to call colors models of wavelength or reflectivity.
An element of understanding doens't translate to the colloquial use of "Do you understand X". Being able to use the word correctly in one sentence doesn't show understanding as it is commonly used. Just like knowing that the derivative of x with respect to x is 1, doesn't mean you understand calculus. Passing a test would.
Quoting Isaac
Fair enough. But then again, a couple comments ago you said that if a colorblind person says "Hand me the red apple" that that does the same job as an ably sighted person saying it. Even though the colorblind person would clearly behave differently from an ably sighted person upon being handed a green apple.
Quoting Isaac
From noticing that everyone complaining from a stabbing pain usually has this ailment but if they're complaining about blunt force pain then they usually have this other ailment.
Quoting Isaac
The "actual" in "actual experience" is redundant. Experience is talk on a phenomenological level. Your experience is your experience (another way of saying "the way things seem like to you is the way things seem like to you"). Saying "actual experience" makes no sense as it implies a distinction between "fake experience" and "actual experience". Fake experience would translate to "The way things seem like they seem like to you but don't actually seem like that" which makes no sense. You cannot think you're experiencing something and actually not be experiencing that thing.
Quoting Isaac
The fact that I cannot conclude what other people's experiences are like is why qualia are private.
Quoting Isaac
These claims that I am making are based on the (what I think is a reasonable) assumption that our experiences are similar in structure (unless either of us is disabled). This assumption stems from the fact that, on average, we all call the same things red. I cannot based on that conclude that your experience of red is my experience of red, nor did I, all I can conclude is that we both call them "red". In other words, that whatever experience we are having, we both tell the same story about it. What is the issue? How does this lead to the conclusion that we are not having experiences which we tell these story about (again, to have an experience is for it to seem like X or Y, it is not a neurological statement, but a phenomenological one)
Quoting Isaac
What do you mean here? The way things seem like to me, is, as a matter of fact, and always will be, the way things seem like to me. I don't see what's non-factual about this.
Quoting Isaac
I have repeatedly. You have yet to give an example where knowing a list of things and their colors, but never actually having seen the color results in the same behavior as people who’ve seen that color. I keep giving you examples where colorblind people may know that lakes are blue but will still repeatedly fail a test where they're shown drawings of purple lakes and red skies. I am saying that without having seen something red, you will never be able to use the word as appropriately as people who've seen red things.
Your reply was: Give them a spectrometer. But if "understanding" for you means that a kid with a calculator understands math despite not being able to solve any problems without the calculator, then I think the definition is ridiculous and misleading.
Too tired to look it up, it may be Davis' law is about the superhighway and Hilton's is about generalization of pain, unilateral to bilateral, then all over.
Anyway, I was asking how an anti-qualist puts that into words. A person with chronic pain complains of a bout of the ”same pain" but we know the cause is not necessarily the same.
You seem to be thinking of qualia as little ghosts. I was introduced to the idea at around 12 years old when I started reading sci-fi in earnest. The idea of little ghosts has never been part of it.
Quoting Janus
Humans, maps and territory are all observable, so I don't know what Marchesk means by "ideal" other than that they like the theory, or that it works for them. The fundamental aspect that is missing is causation - of how maps can be about territories.
If "physical" means observable, then "physical" isn't fundamental as the physical property of some phenomenon is dependent on the existence of observers. Are observers physical? What about observations? Only a fraction of the universe is observable, so does that mean that only a fraction of the universe is physical?
Quoting Luke
The Cartesian Theater metaphor shows the difference. If what we perceive is in the mind then it is inaccessible to others. If what we perceive is in the world then it is, in principle, accessible to others. (Even if, for some reason or another, it's not accessible right now.)
Quoting Luke
Obviously if I stub my toe, then it is me that feels the pain, not you. It is my pain, not yours. But, all else being equal, if you stub your toe then you will feel the same pain that I do when I stub mine. Similarly with looking at a red apple. All else being equal, you will have the same experience as I do.
Quoting Luke
Yes, that's the Cartesian viewpoint. Which has no use in ordinary discourse. We talk about pains and colors because we know that we can compare and communicate our experiences with others.
Quoting Luke
Because color-blind people can't make the color distinctions that normally-sighted people can. But, in turn, normally-sighted people can't make some of the color distinctions that certain animals can (and vice-versa). That's just a difference in perceptual capability, which has a physically identifiable basis. There's no need to introduce an artificial "phenomenal layer" to account for that difference.
I keep hearing this argument by all the Quiners here. I want to instead ask, what's the problem with introducing that layer anyways, even if we don't need to (not that I'm convinced of that)? What are y'all afraid might happen? What confusion have you been trying to avoid?
Yes, that's right. Public models. By which I mean ones which, although in individual minds, are kept similar by repeated use to accomplish similar tasks in a social context.
From where are you getting this empirical data about 'common', 'colloquial' use of the expression 'to understand the meaning of a word'?
Quoting khaled
I wasn't talking about their response to the next event, I was talking about their public use of the word 'red'. In the example of paralysis/anaesthesia, you we're talking specifically about the behavioural response to pain. Two different cases. In mine we have two events - the use of the word to get a job done, and the response to that job having been done incorrectly. In yours we have just one - the response to tissue damage.
Quoting khaled
The question I asked was how does he know that "the private experience we each describe as "like knives" is indicative of a certain condition". I've bolded the relevant section. Knowing that a person using the expression 'like knives' is usually complaining of a certain ailment doesn't in any way give him knowledge about what you're calling 'private experience'. It is just response based. He would know this no less if he didn't consider 'experience' at all. He has no need of it.
Quoting khaled
Say I knocked you out and then brought you round in a perfect virtual reality simulation of swimming in the ocean and I later explaining that what you were actually experiencing was a virtual reality set-up. You're saying that my use of the term 'actually experiencing" there would make no sense to you at all, you wouldn't know what I was talking about? Seems unlikely. You may not prefer to use that term, but the idea that it "makes no sense" is ridiculous. Surely we can come to some mutual understanding of what is meant?
Quoting khaled
You cannot conclude that qualia even exist. Other people may not have the experiences you have. You may not even have those experiences in the next five minutes. It might seem to you that the colour 'red' has an experience associated with it, it might not seem that way to others, it might not seem that way to you tomorrow. Others might feel that talk of 'experiences' at all doesn't make sense. You might feel that way tomorrow.
Quoting khaled
What you can tell is that when presented with an object, both you and I respond in similar ways (reaching for the word 'red', for example). This gives you no information whatsoever about mental 'experiences'. Any further information you draw from this similarity in response is entirely speculative and without a grain of substance.
Quoting khaled
Because it is a trivial matter to prove that the way things seem to you (at time t0) will definitely not always be the way things seem to you (at time t1), even on the subject of exactly the same stimuli.
Quoting khaled
Why would it need to result in the same behaviour? I don't think either of us is under the delusion that all people understand terms to the same extent.
Quoting khaled
Yep. And what I'm asking you is why you've drawn the arbitrary line at that particular level of understanding.
Quoting khaled
We're not talking about understanding a practice (maths) we're talking about understanding a word (red). Understanding a practice means being able to carry out tasks according to it's rules, that's not the same thing at all as understanding how to use a word. The proper equivalent for what we're talking about is whether a kid knows how to use the word 'maths'. You're saying that an inability to detect something is the same as an inability to apply the term for that something once detected. It's clearly two different issues. I can only detect neural activity with an fMRI scanner. Now that I can no longer access such machinery, have I lost my ability to use the term 'neural activity' simply because I can no longer identify it?
I thought I'd answered that. There's one-to-one relationship with the neurons in the post central gyrus where the location of pain signals is interpreted. I don't see the fact they're imperfectly wired causes any issue. I could say that the patient showed neural activity in the upper section of the post central gyrus corresponding to the lower back, despite tissue damage in the upper thigh. This activity causes them to reach for terms like 'lower back', and to show defensive reflexes there. I don't seem to need to talk about their 'experiences' even, let alone 'qualia'.
For me it's...
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
Quoting frank
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
... and a dozen others.
The constant refrain of the idealist.
"X is not amenable to empirical evidence from the material world of the physical sciences" - before proceeding to expound exactly how an understanding of X should impact our behaviour in the aforementioned material world.
So you would explain the law in terms of the range of words uttered, not in terms of the subject experiencing the same pain.
More or less, yes. I don't see the need for a speculative 'middle man' with no empirical support for it's existence.
Stimuli cause responses. We can examine the mechanisms by which that happens. We just don't need 'Stimuli cause experiences which then cause responses'. It doesn't aid our understanding at all and it contradicts most of what we know about how the process between stimulus and response actually works.
It just appears that you're saying we can be fairly confident that a silent patient is not in pain.
Why would we rely on the spoken word as the sole response? We could measure prostaglandin for example, or activity in the thalamus.
Sigh.... Fine you win. A 3rd grader with a calculator understands integral calculus. And a blind person equipped with a spectrometer that says the associated color of the wavelength it receives knows what color is.
Quoting Isaac
Fair. But how does the patient tell between blunt force pain and stabbing pain? He doesn't know what condition he has nor has he performed any physical tests (which is why he has gone to the doctor). And despite this the patient always has enough information to distinguish between the two different ailments (he doesn't know how to use the info, the doctor does). How come? Where did he get this info that is so crucial to the diagnoses?
Quoting Isaac
No. In that context "actually" could indicate emphasis. Like saying "This actually tastes so good". As proven by the fact that if you had just said "You are experiencing a virtual reality set-up" I would have understood you just fine.
Or it can be indicating that the source of the experience is actually virtual reality not the real world. As proven by the fact that if you had just said "The source of your experience is actually VR not the real world" I would have understood you just fine.
Neither of these uses implies "fake experience". Which is what I say doesn't make sense.
Quoting Isaac
Correct. I assume others experience things (have qualia). It is not proven. And the more I talk to you the more it seems like it was a mistaken assumption :rofl:
Quoting Isaac
Sure. But one thing is a matter of fact: "Right now it seems to me that the color red has an experience associated with it". Try as you will, that is a fact. I didn't claim that qualia are constant. Maybe I wake up tomorrow colorblind because of a stroke or something. Who knows.
Quoting Isaac
I am not basing my information of whether or not I have mental experiences on whether or not I reach for the word red. I am having a mental experience, as a matter of fact, and I am reaching for the word red to explain it. I don't know about you, but I assume you do too.
Quoting Isaac
I am only claiming that the way things seem to me at time t0 is the way things seem to me at time t0. I do not understand what is so difficult here. When did I even insinuate that our experiences don't change over time?
Quoting Isaac
How about "stimuli cause experiences and also responses"? That's more what I think is happening.
When did I do that? As in even claim that an understanding of X (qualia that is not my own) is possible. I only know what experiences I am having, I don't know what experiences you're having. What matters is the words you use.
And besides:
Quoting Isaac
There is a non sequitor there. Why is it the case the if X is not amenable to empirical evidence that that should not impact our behaviour?
Echoing what Daemon said earlier, your view has consequences in the realm of morality. If we ask what it's like to be a rape victim, the answer would be: tachycardia, hypertension, soft tissue trauma, inflammatory response, etc.
This is one of the many reasons this view, which we might call p-zombieism, is going to be a hard sell. A lot of people will just be revolted by it.
Nice cartoon idea.
"I live for pleasure!"
*attempts suicide*
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
But it does, for it contradicts this...
The connection is one of existential dependency and elemental constituency. Without biological machinery there is no conscious experience of seeing red cups; however differently they may appear to each individual.
We could probably do it if somebody would paste in half of War and Peace.
Have we come to any sort of consensus as to what color is? Or pain?
If it's not qualia, is it ... a model? A language game? A private beetle we can't talk about?
I think you'd have to look to context of use. In cases where qualia is being talked about, some of the posters here would understand, some would understand with annoyance, and some apparently wouldn't understand at all (which is odd).
I think all Dennett wanted to do was shift the burden of proof (which is usually supposed to be on him).
Or to put it another way, even if we dispense with the notion of qualia, consciousness still poses a problem for physicalism, because those colors and pains are simply absent from any biological, chemical or physical explanation of the mechanisms behind conscious experience (as best we understand them).
Somehow color and pain pop into existence from the structure and function of the biological systems. I guess one could bite the bullet and endorse spooky emergentism, which would be a form of non-reductive physicalism.
But I'm not sure how strong emergentism is different from property dualism. And I also don't know why you couldn't have a physical universe absent that spookiness. To paraphrase Chalmers: "God has to go to extra work to add in law for consciousness when the right structure and function are in place." And by God, Chalmers just means the additional supervenience that's not logically necessitated from the physical.
I think one of the confusions in this thread is that Dennett was directly attacking some commonly accepted understanding of qualia, so that he expected his audience to walk away convinced that there is no such thing.
I found it impossible to get across that this is a misconception. The result of trying to explain what he was doing (which I did ad nauseum) was just hostility. So my interest went back to where it usually lands: just looking at the conflict psychologically, anthropologically, and culturally.
Quoting Marchesk
My understanding is that non-reductive physicalism is the prevailing view in philosophy of mind. There are some pretty persuasive arguments for it.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm not sure what you mean here. Could you explain?
The ability to attribute meaning.
Indeed; it's bad thinking. In the next breath the phenomenal becomes all there is; the experience becomes the ontology. Most philosophical problems are built on lack of attention to the language being used.
Those colors and pains are absent from ALL explanations.
And teach/learn from past mistakes...
What I should have said was...
What qualia?
Yep. I agree with those who say you don't really understand an issue unless you can argue either side.
What I mean is that knowledge of the biological machinery doesn’t allow us to know how the cup appears to people. We can know the sufficient conditions for being able to act as though you perceive the red cup. That’s all neurology can tell us.
I feel bad Frank. I've not been here long. I'm still trying to place people on the deranged/perspicacious continuum, and I haven't taken in everything people have been saying ad nauseam.
You go ahead and tell us all again what Dennett was doing, and if there is even the tiniest hint of hostility I will defend you fiercely even if I know you are wrong, like a mother whose son has stolen a car and committed some dreadful felony.
That's not true either. It tells us much about the autonomous involuntary aspects of all conscious experience of red cups, including whether or not the color matters to the creature.
Yeah I may have been a little melodramatic there.
You sure about that?
Tell us exactly what it is that is missing.
And if your answer is "the qualia", then...
...all you have done is engage in the circular argument that the biological machinery cannot tell us about the qualia, and the qualia are what the biological machinery cannot tell us about.
But all of this is no different from the very start of the discussion. It's becoming tedious.
You can't tell us what qualia are, because they are ineffable.
And you cannot show them to us what they are, because they are private.
Were this any other argument, you would join us in rejecting them.
He's giving you reasons to doubt that other people have qualia. Hopefully you'll connect the dots and realize you can doubt what appears evident to you about the matter.
No, I don't imagine they are, by their adherents, conceived of as "little ghosts" (whatever that means), but as something like non-physical mental representations; intermediaries between the perceiver and the perceived. Dualism, the Cartesian theatre with the observer as a kind of homunculus. This folksy intuitive notion goes right back to Plato's Cave.
I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid too, from the age of about 8 into my teens, as my old man had an extensive collection. I don't recall encountering the idea of qualia. Which author(s) do you have in mind?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think you're conflating observable with observed. Something doesn't need to be observed, or better detected, to be counted as physical; it needs to be observable or detectable, even if only in principle. The entire physical universe is detectable in principle, even though the vast bulk of it will probably never be detected (by us at least).
...and we all went back to Dennett's essay. Remember Dennett's Essay? This is a song about Dennett's essay.
(Apologies to Arlo...)
It's experience, Janus. It's not complicated.
Ockham's razor applies.
When you try, you end up talking about plain simple tastes and smells and pains and apples.
You try and try to explain the "something more" that you want to be there, and each time it's just more tastes and smells and pains and apples; even when you try to talk in terms of the psychology, and physiology, you get eth same thing.
It's just experience. Plain and simple. Nothing more. Nada.
It is experience.
Hey now! This thread is about not reading Dennett. You're risking a tangent on Quining Qualia.
I'm just spinning in the void shooting out woo tangents like lighting bolts
You know, of course, that it is all just physics. Where you go wrong is thinking that this makes it pointless and meaningless. All along, it was up to you to give it meaning, to find a purpose.
It is all just physics, in the end; all the more reason to make it poetry, to make it beautiful, to make it kind.
Rejecting qualia does not diminish Monet's water lilies, does not detract from “Ozymandias”, does not render your love empty or your hopes, vain.
Arthur C Clarke in his 3001 book has Hal and Dave tell the humans that the monolith around Jupiter isn't conscious. It's just a really sophisticated machine. They're able to use this information to logic bomb it to death.
On the terminator movies, they usually show a brief first person perspective of the killer robot from which looks like human vision with various information overlays.
I don't know, of course, that physics is all there is.
”Tell me Mr. Deckard, did you ever take that test yourself?"
The understatement of the century.
Good one! Also, Westworld.
And I'm just shivering qualia in a p-zombie apocalypse. I think on The Walking Dead they briefly showed the zombie consciousness of an important character when they turned. Turns out, there is something it's like to want brains.
Sounds interesting; I used to love that kind of stuff; these days I have too much else on my reading list to be able to give any time to sci-fi.
If I only had a brain.
Quoting Janus
Why do we need the concept of experience? Uh, it comes up from time to time.
Is there a mantis shrimp being consulted?
I have a brain in my mind, but I've never [s]tasted[/s] seen my own.
Are they tasty?
What's that?
Wonder if ducks and rabbits have such a thing? Seems to me that they do not. And yet, they most certainly have conscious experiences.
(Of course, there are different concepts of experience. Whitehead for example, in his pan-experientialism, does not equate experience wholly and solely with conscious awareness; in fact he says that only a tiny fraction of experience is conscious. That is a different notion than the one I would equate with qualia; which is just the notion of conscious awareness of things).
yes, that.
Which is sometimes just conscious awareness of mental activity. I don't know why perception thoroughly dominates the discussion. It's a bit harder to dismiss the Cartesian Theater when dreams come up.
Perception can be a bit misleading because the discussion becomes so focused on what the properties of the things are and our relation to them. You can't do that with other conscious experiences.
This question is nonsensical and possibly communist.
Why do you say that?
A coke and a smile. :up:
Dreams don't seem like a movie is going on in the mind, except with the additional feeling of your body?
As near as I can tell dreams are just like real life; I'm immersed in a world, only it's often a much more bizarre world. I certainly don't experience them, just as I don't with movies, as being "in the mind". It's more like I'm in the movie.
If you don't know how (an instance of seeing) the colour red looks to you or how (an instance of having) pain feels to you, then there's little to discuss here and I'm surprised that you can make any sense of Dennett's paper.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Isaac
Ohhhh I see. All this feigned ignorance of seeing colours, tasting tea and feeling pain is done in the service of maintaining physicalism. Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods.
Okay yeah, but it's not an experience of a world outside the body, so ...
One could say the brain is generating a very immersive (but weird) VR-like experience when dreaming.
Yes. The whole purpose is to behave and speak as if they were machines, so as to convince themselves that they are machines. I suppose it makes life easier to handle, when you pretend to be dead inside?
No-one mentioned understanding the subject. In fact I specifically explained the exact opposite (the difference between understanding a practise and using a word), yet you still want to come back with this disingenuous straw man. If you're not going to argue seriously, there's no point in continuing. We're talking here about whether a person can use a word, understand the meaning of it. So the equivalent with 'maths, or 'calculus' is whether the person uses the word in the right way in the right context, not whether they can carry out the calculations contained within its practises. My claim is that a colour-blind person can use the word 'red' correctly in context (for example if you ask them what colour stop lights usually are). They can use the word correctly in even more contexts if you give them a spectrometer.
Quoting khaled
Nerve endings can distinguish between those different types of pain, plus the thalamus helps to distinguish based on experiences.
Quoting khaled
So if I played you a virtual reality film of going to the rain forest and said I'd 'faked' the experience, you wouldn't know what on earth I was talking about? You might well not like the expressions I use, but that doesn't mean they make no sense. 'Fake' means that it's not part of the real world, something you invent, a model which doesn't have good predictive power. This latter makes 'fake' an important distinction from 'real'.
Quoting khaled
Yep. Those two things are happening. Nothing in that correlation indicates that there is such an entity as the 'experience of red'. You have experiences, you reach for words like red. Nowhere does that show that your experiences are what cause you to reach for the word 'red'. The important thing here is the place these experiences have in the chain of events. if it goes stimuli>experience>response, then your response 'red' results from the experience, you are experiencing 'redness'. If it goes stimuli>response>experience, then your experience is not of redness, it is of your response to redness, a post hoc fabrication, a 'fake' - in that it appears to be something it's not. This is why investigation of the neurological mechanism matters. It gives us evidence as to which path best explains the process (clue - it's the latter), but thought experiments like Dennet's can also throw doubt on the process we think is happening.
Quoting khaled
There's just no evidence of this, and absolutely tons of evidence to the contrary. If you want to make up some imaginary realm where non-brain-related 'experiences' happen, then be my guest, but you've ceased taking part in any serious discussion at that point. assuming not, then you have to at least take seriously the evidence from neuroscience which opposes this view.
Quoting khaled
X in this case is not 'qualia that is not my own'. It's 'qualia' the topic, the concept itself. You, and others, have listed all sorts of potential problems from avoiding the concept - doctors having trouble with diagnoses, inability to appreciate art, moral problems...
Quoting khaled
Where would you be getting the 'should' from then? It 'should' because...? It cannot be because of some consequence (that would mean it has a measurable effect on the world and so be amenable to empirical testing). So what is the 'because...' here?
I don't see why. If someone asked me what it's like to be a rape victim, I'd more likely reach for considerably less technical terminology. But if someone asked me to help a rape victim deal with some of those issues, I'd sure as hell what to know what they 'really' were and not base my therapy on some fanciful woo which just 'sounded' right.
Quoting frank
Yes. I'm sensing that. It's a good job some people prefer to investigate matters in a more productive way than just avoiding what they find repulsive and pursuing only that which seems nice. We'd have never left the dark ages. You recall the reaction to Darwin's suggestion that we were descended from apes?
Simply claiming your position to be 'obvious' is a lame argument. Do you really expect anyone to take that seriously?
Ha! That's a perfect microcosm of what's going on here. I'll quote one bit.
Apparently it's perfectly reasonable to believe that sentience comes from Carbon, or Plasma...or God or conscious electrons, or some third realm of existence we can neither see nor touch...but the one place literally all the scientific evidence in the world points to it coming from is the one place, for some hidden reason, that people claim to find it impossible to believe it comes from.
It's like pointing to the light coming out of the sun and everyone asking "Yes, that's all very well, but where's the light really coming from? I mean, suns can't just produce light, can they."
...and here again you have entirely misrepresented what has been said.
But hey, it's my thread, so keep adding to it.
I never said that my "position" was obvious. I said that qualia are obvious. The definition of obvious is "apparent", "perceptible", "self-evident". Qualia are - according to Dennett - "the way things seem to us". So yeah, qualia are obvious, obviously.
But the patient didn't examine nerve endings. So how come he was able to distinguish?
Quoting Isaac
Again, this use doesn't imply "fake experiences" it implies fake sources of experiences. Experiences are the way things seem to you. Those can't be fake. If it seems to you one way then that is the experience you're having. For you to have a fake experience would mean something seems to you one way, but actually doesn't seem to you that way, instead, seems to you another way. That makes as much sense as "married bachelor"
Quoting Isaac
I am having experiences. That's evidence. Which you recognize here:
Quoting Isaac
So I AM having a mental experience now?
Seriously though which is it? Am I or am I not having experiences?
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Point me to the point where I said either of those things. Otherwise please stop misrepresenting. I'll repeat it again. It goes stimuli>experience+response. What's weird here?
Quoting Isaac
Present me the neurological evidence that says that our brain activities cannot coincide with an experience. What theory breaks if I propose that at the same time my brain is processing color, I am having an experience of red?
Do I need your permission?
Or I've simply stated a matter of fact. Like if someone says "A triangle has 3 sides and the sum of its internal angles are 180, and the shape which consists of 3 sides with a sum of internal angles adding up to 180 is a triangle"
Quoting Banno
I really don't appretiate when people turn a debate into psychoanalysis. Don't be presumptuous. At least for me I'm here because all the quiners have successfully convinced me of so far is that qualia are mostly useless to talk about. But you all still admit "experiences" which you admit are uncomparabe when pressured. You spend the whole thread arguing that "Inverted vision means nothing" but when actually questioned concede that "Inverted vision is untestable for, but I can imagine it, and it makes no difference to talk about". The first statement is not the latter. But then you immediately go back to saying "Inverted vision means nothing"
You start with:
"Inverted vision makes no sense"
And end with:
Quoting Banno
Which is clear recognition that there may be experiences, just that they're useless to talk about outside of a sci-fi show. Then go back to the starting point. It's tiring.
I don't think it does. How do you explain the phenomenology otherwise?
I can tell you what the category means but not its memebers. As in I can't describe red to you but I can tell you what Qualia are. And no I can't show you what they are but I'm pretty sure I don't need to. They are what you refer to as "experiences".
The "you" was generic; if you took it to be a reference to you, that's your issue.
Generic implies that it applies to all the people advocating for qualia. I wasn't offended by it, but it's still psychonalaysing that doesn't add to the discussion. Also congrats for 10k posts
Sense with no reference. That'll work.Quoting khaled
There's that moving goal post, that ambiguity back to which you have repeatedly withdrawn.
You can't tell us what qualia are, because they are ineffable.
And you cannot show them to us, because they are private.
Rubbish. Understanding why the issue is important enough to take up over sixty pages is directly relevant.
(and since you keep going back over the same arguments, it's one way to keep the thread moving on to new territory.)
But we have a large number of people reporting to have them. How did that happen?
And, again, I can tell you what qualia are. The experience of pain is ineffable. "Qualia" the word isn't. Or else we wouldn't have been able to say anything about them.
This sounds to me like theMadFool's post about how the concept of nothing is a paradox.
Quoting Banno
How does understanding why people are responding for 60 pages affect whether or not qualia exist?
No we havn't. We have a small group of philosophers pretending that something which is the subject of ubiquitous conversation is actually ineffable. It's laughable, and sad. It's almost as absurd as claiming that we can't speak about pain - which you just did.
(Retracted tired, grumpy part of post)
Ineffable =/= We can't speak about. And I already gave you a model where we can have ineffable experiences and still have meaningful conversations.
Ineffable means not fully describable. And I bet you if you asked any layman whether or not they can describe what color is like to a blind person they would say no. And I also bet you that if you asked them whether or not they can imagine what "inverted vision" would be like they would say yes. And if you explained to them what a p-zombie is they would probably say it makes sense.
The small group of philosophers is the one claiming otherwise.
Quoting Marchesk
:rofl:
60+ pages so far and you still don't have any sort of consensus as to what color or pain is? Colors and pain are information! Duh!
More seriously, the fundamental stuff of physics like fields, energy, matter, forces, spacetime and all the stuff that's logically entailed by that.
If Banno at the start of the Big Bang could simulate the rest of the history of the universe, apparently colors, pains and dreams would be part of the outcome. As would these non-terminating philosophical discussions.
Because its difficult to derive meaning from anything Banno says. It probably has to do with how he uses words.
This is all just more information. All causal relations, which include logical entailments, is information.
It's shivering all the way down.
It means that everything is a causal relationship.
Quoting Marchesk
That's information too.
Right. And your position is that qualia exist (are a coherent ontological commitment), so saying their existence is 'obvious' is exactly the same as saying that your position is obvious. It's no different to arguing that 'Elan Vitale' is obvious, or that 'Aether' is obvious.
Quoting Luke
...before showing how such a notion is incoherent.
It doesn't matter what weird expression you use, they all end up empty. "What it's like...", "the way it seems...", "how it feels"...none of these expressions have any coherent meaning beyond behaviours and interoception of physiological states. There's nothing they describe that the aforementioned don't.
What part of the path between the signals sent by nerve endings and signals sent to the voicebox to produce "it feels like a stabbing pain" is it that you think is broken?
Quoting khaled
Yes, but such a notion of experience when applied to "it seems like I have an experience of redness" is utterly useless. What do we then do with that? I'd want to know why, but evidently you're not much interested in that question. I'd want to know how I came to learn to use such expressions, but evidently you're not much interested in that either.
If all you want to do is say "the world seems like X to me" and don't want to ask any questions of that, then I don't know what you're doing here.
Quoting khaled
How is you having an experience evidence of "stimuli cause experiences and also responses"?
All you've shown is that one side of the relationship exists. Your claim was about the cause, not the mere existence.
Quoting khaled
I've never claimed you are not having experiences tout court.
Quoting khaled
The inclusion of an aparrently direct route from stimuli to experience for which there is absolutely no evidence. Not to mention the things you then want to claim of these experiences...
I've cited several papers which you've declined to read.
Darwin was very warmly received.. I think you'll find your view is absent in scientific communities and the world in general. Dennett doesn't even take it as far as you do and he's as close to it as you'd find it in philosophy of mind.
That would be the hard problem. Which I am interested in.
Quoting Isaac
Yea I'm not really interested in that one.
Quoting Isaac
I want to emphasize that the statement "the world seems like X to me" is not negated by any neurological evidence you can throw at it. The world still seems the way it seems. The statement "qualia does not exist" implies "the world doesn't seem like anything, there is no X", which is absurd.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think I need to present to you evidence that stimuli cause responses.
Quoting Isaac
Oh that's easy. When I close my eyes I do not have the experience of color. Additionally I know there are certain ways the biological machinery can malfunction to make me colorblind. Therefore the stimuli and biological machinery must be causing that experience.
Quoting Isaac
I'd say the experience is a side-product of whatever our brain is doing. As in this:
Quoting Isaac
Causes the experience as well. Is there a problem now?
Quoting Isaac
All of those papers attack the model stimuli>qualia>response or stimuli>response>qualia.
Conscious experience of red cups is what was in need of explanation... not an explanation of an explanation.
Then I think you've either had little experience of the scientific community in my field or you've misunderstood my position. It's quite the most common view among my colleagues and those whose work I generally follow.
That color and pain are models?
Ah, so you're another one for whom 'why?' apparently means something completely different with regards to consciousness than it does in every other field of inquiry.
Quoting khaled
Replace 'qualia' with God...unicorns, fairies, fate, Valhalla... What use is just saying that the way things seem to you right now is completely impervious to any evidence to the contrary? Seems like a self-defeatingly dogmatic position to hold.
Quoting khaled
Why are you dodging the only bit of your claim which is relevant? The significant bit of your claim is that stimuli directly cause experiences.
Quoting khaled
None of which demonstrates that it does so directly (ie, that you are experiencing the stimuli and not your culturally-embedded response to the stimuli).
Quoting khaled
That's not what is demonstrated in those studies. They show how prior models (mostly socially mediated) filter stimuli to place modified predictive models in the working memory which then provides data we associate with 'experience' (ie, the tendency to say things like "that tasted bitter").
Since you don't seem to know the difference between Hilton and Davis, I'm not convinced you have a field.
In neuroscience though, nobody thinks people are p-zombies. That's not up for debate.
Yes. That the brain creates models to predict the outcome of the body's interaction with hidden states of the exterior environment. That these models are heavily socially mediated (factors like language and culture).
It is really the standard model in cognitive sciences.
Yep, you've called my bluff, I've just been winging it so far using Google.
Quoting frank
Again, for emphasis.
You'd struggle to find so much as a handful of neuroscience papers which even mention p-zombies in anything more than a disinterested passing phrase, so I'm not sure how you might have formed this view. If you've got any supporting citations I'd be interested in reading them.
The hidden state of some part of the external world.
Alright, so does cognitive science have a proposal for how this model is generated?
Here is a thing I've never managed to understand when talking with you about this. Do you agree with these things?
(1) The model's state is informative of the hidden state, but underdetermined by the hidden state.
(2) The model's state is directly causally connected with the hidden state but underdetermined by it.
(3) That underdetermination arises because of priors and task parameters.
When a hypothetical philosophical someone says "I see the apple", they're utilising the causal connection between their perceptual system and the apple. Do you believe they're seeing "apple models" or do you believe they're seeing what the apple models are modelling in the manner they are modelled (roughly, the apple)?
Yes, several. My favourite is Karl Friston's model.
Here's an introduction.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Active%20Inference%20A%20Process%20Theory.pdf
And here's one specifically about visual perception.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Scene%20Construction,Visual%20Foraging%20and%20Active%20Inference.pdf
...but there are others. Anil Seth's take is slightly different, but along the same lines...
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zvbkp/
...is quite an interesting recent one.
Yes, definitely, but the extent will depend on the novelty of the environment and the developmental stage of the brain. It's one of the reasons babies are such interesting subjects.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, but less so. I don't necessarily see any reason why a model might no become disconnected from the causal state which at one time formed it, I don't think there's anything neurologically preventing that.
Quoting fdrake
The apple. There's nothing more that an apple is than the publicly agreed model. It's not that there's no apple, it's that that's what 'seeing an apple' is.
Edit - I should add that it depends on the context. In terms of challenging any objective authority to those public models I might be more tempted to say 'there's no apple'. It's a contextual language game thing about what we're using 'apple and 'model of apple' to do in some particular conversation.
I think directness is ultimately a question of whether there is a direct causal+informational relation between the hidden environmental states and the process of perception, not whether the whole process of perception is direct or indirect when regarding (properties of) the object. For me at least, a perceptual system is direct when there are no intermediaries between some part of it and hidden states.
Though I imagine that is unusual, since direct realists can be construed as believing when someone sees a red apple, the direct realist's perceptual system simply acknowledges that it is indeed a red apple, and there's a neat correspondence between perceptual properties and apple properties.
Quoting Isaac
I agree with that too. I think there's some ceteris paribus clause required - in normal circumstances the hidden states are directly causally connected with the perceptual process and the perceptual process is informative of the hidden states' status insofar as they are task relevant.
Quoting Isaac
Are you throwing the hidden states into the public agreed model there?
Yeah, I think you'd have to. We can't escape this and look at it from a position where I'm outside of my modelling, but I don't see that as a problem (I know some people do). I'm ultimately a pragmatist and it seems to work.
So would what constitutes a 'perceptual system' have parameters other than the edge of their Markov blanket? I mean such that we're not simply making the above true by definition?
So let's make a distinction between environmental and bodily hidden states. If a hidden state occurs as a part of a bodily system, then I'll call it bodily. If it doesn't, I'll call it environmental. Analogy, my current blood sugar level is a bodily hidden state, the position of the bottle on my desk is an environmental hidden state. Doubtlessly the two have feedbacks between them, and sometimes there is ambiguity regarding whether something is a bodily state or an environmental one.
I'm going to call whatever specifies the current overall task the body is engaged in task parameters, I'll throw in whatever task relevant actions are proposed [hide=*](but not why they are proposed as they are)[/hide] in with task parameters. EG, I'm currently typing, part of that is motor control, part of that is cognitive functioning, where the keys are, what I feel the need to write, those are task parameters.
I'm going to call whatever a person's learned and is bringing to their current state from that learning - language stuff, habits, etc - priors.
And to spell out underdetermination, a system X is underdetermined by a collection of states when and only when that collection of states does not force X to produce a unique output. EG, if x+y=1, there's more than one solution to it. More metaphorically, if a corpus of evidence supports more than one conclusion, it can be said that the corpus underdetermines its conclusions.
Lastly, I'll call whatever bodily systems in their aggregate output our perceptual features (cups, pulses, warmth/cold, position, emotion etc) the process of perceptual feature formation.
Do you think the following are true:
(1) Environmental hidden states underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(2) Bodily hidden states underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(3) Task parameters underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(4) Priors underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
?
For perceptual systems, (1) means something like "you need not see the same thing as someone else given the same environmental stimulus", (2) means something like "you and another person might disagree on whether 37.6 degrees celcius is normal body temperature or very hot", (3) is like "you and another person can agree entirely on the problem to solve and the solution but not do exactly the same thing" and (4) is like "you and another person bring different life histories to an event and so can interpret it differently". The possibility of those differences is underdetermination.
I think if you put the hidden states into the process of perceptual feature formation, it changes part of their causal relationship with perceptual feature formation. I think that's most clear with environmental hidden states. Putting the environmental hidden states into the process of "publicly agreed" perceptual feature formation, making them play an internal causal role, seems to make them causally fully determined by the process rather than informationally constrained and (possibly) causally partially determined by the process.
In active accounts of perception, people take exploratory actions to elicit data from their environment - that can be how your eyes track over a face to produce a stable image, picking something up and adjusting your body to distribute the load -. These exploratory actions elicit data streams nascent in the environment or cause the environment to behave differently and elicit data regarding the change - contrast exploring someone's facial features which are "already there" vs manipulating a heavy object and adjusting to distribute its load.
These exploratory actions interface with the hidden states - the layout of someone's face and its colour in the light conditions, how the heavy object responds to attempts to pick it up due to its distribution of mass, but they don't causally determine the state of the hidden state. EG, someone's face doesn't rearrange itself because it's looked at, the distribution of mass along the heavy object doesn't change when it's lifted. The environmental hidden states have their own developmental trajectory that we are perceptually exploring in an active, task relevant manner. When perception is functioning normally, though, our perceptual features do model the developmental trajectory of our environmental hidden states enough for our purposes. IE, normal functioning perception places informational/statistical constraints on the developmental trajectory of environmental hidden states, but it should not causally determine their developmental trajectory generically. Like exploring someone's face to form perceptual features of it doesn't actually change the layout of their face. That's a case of informational constraint without causal constraints.
Edit: to clarify, imagine a civil engineer's model of how a bridge bears loads is perfect, they will be able to tell exactly how much would be required to break it. If they had it in their computer, and put in inputs to the model that would collapse the bridge, the bridge would collapse. But the real bridge wouldn't collapse, it just would collapse with certainty if it was exposed to the same inputs. The model informationally constrains the development of the bridge given an input load, but it doesn't actually make the real bridge respond to a load. That'd be a situation where the model completely informationally determines the behaviour of the bridge, but has absolutely no causal relationship with the load bearing behaviour on the bridge.
When I pick up the heavy thing, I do determine its trajectory from the ground to some degree, but I don't do the whole thing - it might be unwieldy, I might bend too much, I might've overestimated the weight and pull it too high. But eventually I manage to stabilise the load. In that situation, the process of perceptual feature formation has attuned to the developmental trajectories of the heavy object and reached a fit for purpose relation - it's being held where it is stably, and I feel it being held there. That's a case of informational constraints with causal constraints. But I still don't causally determine gravity or the heavy thing's distribution of mass (hidden states) that play into the overall lifting action.
Edit2: We're in a more mixed situation than the bridge example with active perception. It's more like if the civil engineer realised that the bridge would collapse from peak Christmas traffic that year, an intervention to stop disaster would happen if the engineer told someone. That's more of the situation we're in - the models we make propose courses of action, so our models when accurate both propose worldly interventions given our current representation of the world and represent the world in some way, so they're causally connected to what they concern, but the content of the model doesn't determine how what it models will behave or develop, it places constraints on how it will behave or develop given the degree of accuracy of our model and our intervention.
I think if you throw the hidden states into the "public perception" of things, you lose the possibility of surprise and adapting to it. To be sure, there are public perceptions of hidden states [hide=eg](like we can agree on whether an apple is green and whether it is a more sweet or more sour variety)[/hide], but those public perceptions don't causally fully determine the hidden states [hide=more eg](light reflection profile, pigmentation, acid vs sugar ratios)[/hide]. It might be that it looks just like a Golden Delicious but it's really a Granny Smith.
If you make the environmental hidden states a part of the process of perceptual feature formation, you lose the ability to elicit underdetermined behaviours from them based on models; to be surprised by them at all. Since they may become fully causally, not just possibly informationally and partially causally, determined by the process of perceptual feature formation. How things look in public becomes what they are.
No it's the same old why. Just this time it's harder to answer. Because we cannot gather data about something private.
Quoting Isaac
That's not what I'm saying. I said that things seem to me a way. That is a fact. You keep saying things like "there is no phenomenological layer" or "you do not see red" but those are false. I do, in fact, have an experience. There is, in fact, a phenomenological layer. Me knowing how my brain works does not remove the phenomenological layer.
Quoting Isaac
What does it even mean to "experience the culturally-embedded response to the stimuli" or to "experience the stimuli". That just sounds like word salad.
I know when the stimuli is removed, the experience is removed. I also know that when my brain is messed up in this particular way, the experience is removed. I therefore conclude that the brain processing of stimuli is causing the experience. Where is the issue with this line of logic?
Quoting Isaac
Ok so my experience is largely shaped by my language and culture. First off, no one is disagreeing (at least I'm not). Secondly, how does this undermine the claim that there is a phenomenological layer? It doesn't.
What? Idk what you're trying to say here.
Quoting khaled
I have long believed that culture and language influence experience. For instance, there's nothing in the visual information I get from standing in front of a tree that tells me it's a tree. It's all just shapes and colors. The tree is an idea.
So yeah, I see ideas. I think we all do. This doesn't conflict with the idea of qualia, though.
If your view does, how so?
This might be wrongheaded, but I think the perceptual system would not be direct if the process of perceptual feature formation didn't have direct causal contact to some hidden states. Isn't that the Cartesian theatre metaphor? We see "models" or perceive "aspects of aggregated sense data", rather than perception being a modelling relation. In those formulations, the models or the sense data are in direct causal contact with the environment, and all perception is of those things which are in direct causal contact with the environment. Two steps removed at all times (Cartesian Theatre) vs One step removed at some times (direct realism).
Yes, it's as though real life experience is written in neural code, blended all together in sometimes very weird ways and then relived.
The way the world seems is not a theory, is it? To try and put it another way, the biological machinery produces some end-product of consciousness, and that end-product is not theoretical, is it? It's a real end-product.
Quoting Isaac
With your last sentence it sounds like you accept that we have qualia but that you want to provide a physical explanation for them. I'm fine with that. It's your rejection of qualia (the end-product) that I don't understand.
We're trying to avoid Cartesian dualism. That's the position of positing a container mind (the Cartesian theater), and then redefining ordinary words in terms of that container mind. For example, in everyday life watching a sunset, or kicking a football around with your kids, are experiences. Whereas for the dualist, an experience is instead the sense of redness, or the feeling of pain, confined to the mind and intrinsically private to a person. The connection between this "internal" experience and the "external" world is consequently mysterious.
I discussed this previously here. Cartesian dualism has no practical application in everyday life or in scientific inquiry. Concepts like qualia, p-zombies and the hard problem are purely philosophical inventions that derive from Cartesian dualism.
Understanding the difference between dualism and non-dualism is like understanding the difference between geocentrism and heliocentrism. People can look at the same world, but conceptualize it very differently.
Is non-reductive physicalism a form if Cartesian dualism?
You implied that it was necessary(for some reason unbeknownst to me) that my position explain phenomenology. I mean, I certainly can, but a better explanation of conscious experience does not require explaining a different explanation of conscious experience. Weird thing is that I believe I've given you more than enough to piece together as an explanation of phenomenology as well as conscious experience...
Phenomenology is a philosophical position that aims to explain conscious experience. It is an explanation. I find it overcomplicated. There's no need to use the framework to explain anything. Everything about conscious experience can be better explained without using a phenomenological framework. This has been done throughout this thread by those arguing against "qualia".
By the way, you're committing an equivocation fallacy with the word qualia. That's a nice way to say that your position has led to incoherency and/or self-contradiction. Banno has also noted the continual changes in your position.
Loosely speaking, 'the connection' is the experience, on my view.
It consists of both internal and external, physical and non physical, subjective and objective. The problem I seem to see is that both sides miss this. Experience is neither objective, nor subjective; neither internal nor external; neither physical nor non physical...
It is both.
Why do you say that emergentism is 'spooky'?
Do you expect conscious experience to just pop into existence ex nihilo style? Does it still seem magical to you? It's not the least bit mysterious, magical, or spooky to me.
Yes, but again with caveats I'm afraid. I presume you're talking about mutually exclusive variables to an extent (again with ceretis paribus). In normal circumstances all four would collectively determine - ie there's no other factor - I want to leave aside the thorny issue of whether there might be some random factor for the moment as I don't think it's relevant (my gut feeling is that there might be at least a psuedo-random one resulting from the chaos effect of such a complex system).
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrake
If I've understood you right I completely agree. Of course, I think the case of the engineer's timely intervention is the most interesting part, but I totally accept that we have to have a foundation of the independence of hidden states in order to even make that interesting.
We may have got crossed wires. What I mean by saying that the thing modelled is 'the apple' which is a public model, is not intended as an entanglement of some hidden state with the public model. It's a limit of language (which is what I was trying to get at in my edit). The process of 'seeing' could be seen as essentially that of fitting sensory data to priors (filtering of priors being task dependant). So the meaning of 'I see an apple', might be 'the sensory input best fits the public model of 'apple'', but this is not that same as saying that we see 'model-of-apple', because that would be to make that Cartesian divide of 'seeing' into object>qualia>perception(of qualia). It's just that that's what 'seeing' is, so it's only correct to say we 'see the apple'.
If we wanted to phrase all this in terms of purely Markov Chains in the process of perception, then I don't think we can say any more than that the cause of of our perceptual feature has no name. We do not name hidden states, we only name objects of perception.
Edit - Another way of putting this (the language gets complicated) might be to say that we do name the hidden state (apple), but that these christenings then produce fuzziness on the hidden states we could possibly refer to in any given instance of perception - so the hidden state that is in direct causal relationship with our perceptual system will be only fuzzily identified by any word we apply. I'm not sure which approach is best (if any), I don't think we've really got the linguistic tools we need to develop theories about objects of perception.
Quoting fdrake
Yep, I think that actually a good way of putting it. I've described myself as an indirect realist before, but these are not terms I have a in-depth knowledge of, so I'm not attached to them. My question was really just getting at the issue of how we define the boundaries of a 'perceptual system'. Where does the perceptual system end and some other system take over (even if only in theory to show that it never does)? If we just say that the boundaries of the perceptual system are the edge of the Markov Blanket, then your version of direct realism is true, but only by definition (ie if some other process intervened between the hidden state and the perceptual system it would, by definition, either be a hidden state itself or part of the perceptual system). So to get a Cartesian Theatre problem (in order to disprove it empirically rather than definition-ally) we'd have to say that the creation of 'the play' out of some hidden states was not part of the perceptual system - the perceptual system was the bit watching the play. If we say the play-making mechanisms are part of the perceptual system then the system is in direct causal relationship with the hidden states (it's just that the description of the perceptual system is wrong). I don't see anything wrong here at all, I only wanted to clarify which way you were looking at it.
Consciousness is not private. It's exact components might be pragmatically so, but there's no reason at all why some highly specific limits to the granularity of our data should prevent us from developing some very compelling models. If you ask 'why do objects fall earthward' we don't need the details of Higg's Bosons to give a very compelling and fairly exhaustive model - there's no 'hard problem' just because we don't know the exact pathways of all the fundamental particles involved - (apologies to any physicists who might be reading if that example is complete nonsense - reaching for an example from another field). The point is that just because the exact state you're aware of right now is not pragmatically reportable that's no reason why we can't have a good enough general impression of it to make extremely accurate models of consciousness - incomplete accuracy doesn't lead to a 'hard problem' in any other field.
Quoting khaled
We're talking about the cause of your experience here. Claiming to have "an experience of redness" puts 'redness' as the cause of your experience. It's not. Some hidden state of the external world is the cause of your experience - 'red' is a public concept you apply later to define it. And in the case of "an experience of redness" we can trivially show that such an application is very removed (ie, it's not what anyone would reach for without introspection aimed at reaching a specific conclusion like that).
Put a temporal aspect in. Let's say this morning the world seems some way to you. Later in the afternoon you want to tell someone how the world seemed to you that morning, so you consult your memory. But your memory is flawed and filters stuff by prior expectations, so your report this afternoon is not accurate, it's not the way the world seemed to you this morning, it's an inaccurate recollection of it, yes?
Now contract the timescale. Even in the milliseconds between the conscious awareness of some state and the formation of a report of that state (especially a linguistic one), that report has already become inaccurate.Quoting khaled
Nope. All manner of experiments can show that when the stimuli is removed you can continue to experience is as you brain still expects it to be there and the new data isn't yet sufficient to overcome the expectation that the stimuli is still there.
Quoting khaled
Nothing. Experiences are caused by brains. That doesn't say anything about what experiences are experiences of.
Quoting khaled
Again, no-one's denying that we have something we could call experiences. It's the nature of the experiences that's at issue - what they are experiences of, how private they are, the degree to which they're in flux, the extent to which they reduce to function (p-zombies), the extent to which a person knows any more about them than a third-party...etc
The place it purportedly plays in the process of perception. Mostly hidden state>qualia>introspective perception (of qualia). The colours and shapes are processed sub-consciously (ie not available to introspection), so the first part of the process available to introspection is the model 'tree'. Any further introspection is only going to reveal what colour 'trees' are, not what your V1 neurons actually responded to. So looking at grass, you do not get a 'green' quale. Even if the V1 neurons which usually code for what you call 'blue' actually fired, your introspection of the experience would tell you you experienced 'green' because you're expecting grass to be green and what you 'saw' was grass.
Even if we put it later it's problematic. We could get around the first problem by positing hidden state> model>qualia (of model). Here we run into the problem I outline to Khaled above (the timescale issue).
Also, all the issues of privacy, ineffability, availability which have already been discussed are not thus removed.
Yes, but the mere existence of an end product of some sort is not what's in question. It's properties are. 'Qualia' does not simply mean 'some mental state'.
I don't think so. "Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" -the standard encyclopedia of philosophy. Saying that phenomenology is an attempt at explaining consciousness is like saying that newtonian mechanics is an attempt at explaining why "forces" and "energy" exist. Newtonian mechanics doesn't care about why its components exist, it is a study of how they interact. Same with phenomenology.
Quoting creativesoul
You said before that you disagree with Dennett and that the neurology does not explain why we have a conscious experience. So are you proposing that you have a solution to that problem? If so what is it?
Quoting creativesoul
What distinct meanings of the word am I being ambiguous about?
So. What's the difference between a 'study' and a 'report'?
One would expect a 'study' of baking a cake to have some kind of hypothesis in mind, data, conclusion - something of that sort. One learns something new from it.
A 'report' might simply be "I dropped the mixture on the floor". One learns nothing new from it, it's merely a conversion of what you already knew to written (or spoken) form.
To claim that phenomenology is the 'study' of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view, rather than merely the report of them you'd need to be able to learn something new from it. But if you can't possibly be wrong about what the structures of consciousness are from this perspective (they are exactly how they seem to you to be), then how is it a 'study' and not a mere 'report'?
Incorrect. I do not know where you get that impression.
Quoting Isaac
Cool. Has nothing to say about whether or not we have experiences (as usual).
Quoting Isaac
The timescale issue amounts to "Things are not how you remember them to be or exactly how you describe them to be". This is not an issue of the model. The model is fine, all you have said is that when trying to report this last step (qualia) we give inaccurate reports. I think everyone here already knew that.
Quoting Isaac
We at least agree on something. Now, about these "experiences", can you imagine a robot that acts identically to a human but doesn't have these "experiences" (note I am not saying it is possible to construct such a thing, I'm just asking if you can imagine it). That would be a p-zombie. I don't think p-zombies are possible because I think consciousness is a product of function.
Quoting Isaac
Well you seemed to be denying for the longest time. What with "You don't see colors" and all. This whole time I've just been trying to get you to openly say this.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not sure what this question means.
Quoting Isaac
We know experiences are caused by brains. But we do not know that the same experiences are caused by everyone's brains. As in I don't know if when I look at a red apple and you look at a red apple we both have the same expereince. I know we both call it "red" and it has largely the same relationship in our brains. As in mostly everything I call red you also call red or orange or something around there (assuming neither is colorblind). That does not give evidence that we are experiencing the same thing. Neurology can only study the relationship between brainstates and behavior, not brainstates and mental states.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think anyone disagrees with experiences being in constant flux. Quiner or not.
Quoting Isaac
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unless its type is what interests us.
-Standard Encyclopedia of philosophy
I think you're interpreting ”qualia" as "sensory data."
I'm aware that when I tell the story about standing before a tree, "green" and "shape" are also ideas (or models?).
It's as if models are involved in grabbing things out of the stream of sensory information. There's no way to remember anything of that stream without modelling grabbies (grabbies means "little hands")
But the above is also just a story. And we could talk about what all the stories seem to have in common.
The point with regard to this thread though, is this:. qualia isn't a word for sense data. A quale is an instance of a type of consciousness. "Instance" connotes an event here. As Luke put it, it's the end product, which is seamless and unified. That is what we mean by "qualia".
Quoting Isaac
Those properties aren't as defining as Dennett makes them out to be. Privacy is just related to the idea that people aren't telepathic. Obviously, in a non-woo sense, we are. I'm trying to read your mind now. The technology I'm using is the written word. So here the discussion would pass into the topic of meaning and truth.
We should talk about multiple realizability. That's the stuff that hammers home that some aspects of consciousness have to be emergent. More later..
In fact there's a line between the sceptics and phenomenology, namely, that of 'epoché', being 'the suspension of judgement regarding what is not evident'. This was interpreted by Husserl as 'bracketing' (German: Einklammerung; also called phenomenological reduction, transcendental reduction or phenomenological epoché) which describes the suspension of judgment about the the objects of experience so as to develop a detached awareness of the nature of immediate experience.
As Frank points out above, the 'raw' nature of experience is generally straighaway incorporated into 'stories' which attempts to situate it in so-called 'objective' terms. We generally do that instinctively, immediately, without noticing. The point of the phenomenological suspension is to notice that.
agree! I've started drafting a post on that. Interesting topic, on which I have an interesting angle.
To the extent it endorses a private theater conception of mind, yes. (Though it might not do so - see the third quote below.)
As some support for my initial claim above, I came across the following interesting passage about the history of qualia:
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction, p216-218 - William Jaworski
And also as a theory-laden commitment:
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction, p216-218 - William Jaworski
With respect to physicalism, emergentism and hylomorphism (which is my own position):
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction, p216-218 - William Jaworski
--
[*] The argument for epiphenomenalism:
1. There are qualia
2. Qualia cannot be physically described or explained
Or neither. I think the divisions themselves, as understood in their Cartesian sense, are misleading and unnecessary. They don't arise in normal communication.
Because otherwise you have an experience 'which is red' (Cartesian theatre gone mad), or an experience 'which you called red' (non-private, you can misuse the word). I'm taking the most charitable interpretation of what might be meant by 'an experience of redness', which would be something like - there was some redness>I experienced it. If instead you want to say "the experience I just had is called 'redness'", then I don't know how you'd ever come to learn the word.
Basically, being least charitable "an experience of redness" doesn't make any sense at all. I'm trying to work with a meaning which at least makes sense.
Quoting khaled
Yep, because no-one's denying that (as usual).
Quoting khaled
You said the the way things seem to you is a fact and that some philosophical work can be done with that fact. Well it can't. The way things seem to you (as such a fact is available to form part of any philosophical investigation) is not an unarguable fact. The moment you enter it into discourse or consideration it is already wrong, not how things actually did seem to you.
If indeed "everyone here already knew that", then no-one can claim to be having an experience of redness with any more authority than I can claim you're not. You are no more accurate a reporter of the way an event actually felt than I am.
Quoting khaled
It depends entirely on what you mean by identical. And before you're tempted to say 'exactly identical', have a glance at Wittgenstein on what we could possibly mean by 'exactly'.
Quoting khaled
I really can't see why people are finding it so hard to tell the difference between "we don't have experiences" and "we don't have experiences of colours".
Quoting khaled
Do you experience a red cup, or 'redness' and 'cupness', or the mental activities resulting from external stimuli (presumed to be a red cup), or something else? What is the subject matter of this experience.
When I use the term 'experience', I'm just meaning the recollected results of introspection about an event I was just involved in.
Quoting khaled
Agreed, to a certain level of accuracy.
Quoting khaled
Unlikely. Again, depending entirely on the accuracy required.
Quoting khaled
...and here we go with the 'red' nonsense again. We were talking about experiences - whole events. You don't experience red. You can't it's neurologically impossible. And, as we've just established, you telling me you do has no validity because we've all just agreed that you cannot give an accurate account of you experiences.
As to phenomenology, nothing in that section tells me what it's studying. It says nothing more than "make a list of all the things you think you felt and sort them into groups". What new information is being learned?
If I was, the process would be unproblematic.
Quoting frank
Then how can we have a 'red' quale? Red is not the end result of any stimuli at all. If qualia are now being reduced to just another word for experience where we mean just the recollection of mental states, then it's a) useless, we already have a word, and b)very confusing because there's already a word 'qualia' which is used to talk about subsets of perception (like 'red').
Quoting frank
I don't think it's that simple. I think privacy is at the heart of the irreducibility claim, which is far more important for the extent to which neuroscience can investigate. Nonetheless, if I'm wrong, I still struggle to see what properties qualia do have, if not those listed by Dennett.
I appreciate the explanation, but I'm still not seeing the 'study'. If one performs this 'bracketing' then one has list of experiences which one just accepts unquestioningly as being what they are. Great. What have we learned that we didn't previously know?
In Descartes' time there was very little freedom of thought. The Church decided what kinds of problems could and couldn't be pondered. Literally, they forbade math problems that they found anti-church.
The debt we owe Descartes (other than the groovy math) is that he helped slam the door open (with the help of a lot of pissed off rich Protestants) to the freedom science and philosophy need to flourish.
We've come a long way since Descartes, but where his outlook lingers is in the shadow of 20th century attempts to push materialism to it's limit: to remove all of the things Descartes labeled as internal.
It lingers in the discomfort we might feel when we affirm phenomenal consciousness and then realize what that means about the universe.
IOW, yes, the concept of qualia is partly rooted in Descartes, but so is the notion that there is no qualia.
What i think we're looking for is some kind of synthesis.
Yes. This thread started by collecting ideas about qualia that make it easier to attack. People do that when they're less interested in exploring and wondering and more interested in pushing a certain agenda.
That's one of the things I look for in engaging people. Is there anything to you but primate aggression in the guise of a philosophical discussion?
Qualia is experience, or an aspect of experience. Whether it's constructed of memory, models, woo, or moon cheese is relavent only to our attempts to explain it.
It's that thing cognitive science is trying to explain.
If you understand the term differently, please share.
'Experience' is no less slippery a term unless pinned down. Equivocation is the weapon of choice for most woo-merchants.
I use a shiver-shooter.
This. As to how I learned, I looked at all the situations where people said "red" and found out the common factor in my experience, that is "redness".
Quoting Isaac
I didn't claim they are. This is the second time now. I claimed I am experiencing things. That is an unarguable fact.
Quoting khaled
Quoting Isaac
You exaggerate greatly. The reason we agreed that qualia are not accurately reported is because our memory is fallable. So if someone says "20 years ago, I remember we went to the taco shop down the street, it had a blue sign" and his friend that was there with him said "actually it was a red sign" then yes, neither really has the authority here. But as we decrease the time frame the inaccuracies decrease as well. So no, I am a way more accurate reporter of the way an event seemed to me as opposed to you, who has no idea. Inaccuracies are not the end of the world, as you said yourself.
Quoting Isaac
Because you claim at the same time that we have experiences which "we later reach for the word 'red' to describe". People say "we have experiences of colours" as a shorthand for that.
Quoting Isaac
Yet you and all fellow Quiners seem to love it.
Quoting Isaac
So if, hypothetically, we could take a screen shot of what I'm seeing and show it to you, how big of a difference do you think can exist? Can you imagine a situation where you remark: "Why is the sky red?"
I said hypothetically. I read the intuition pumps, I know it is impossible.
Quoting Isaac
We didn't. You agreed with yourself. You seem to like exaggerating. Again, an inaccuracy is not the end of the world. If someone measures something as 5cm then you can't say "That's not valid at all because there is always a measurement error"
Quoting Isaac
When looking at a red apple I experience something that I later reach for the word "red" to describe. You also experience something that you reach for the word "red" to describe. How big of a difference can there be in these "somethings"? Can we compare these "somethings"?
Quoting Isaac
Which group each belongs to for one. How they're related. And other stuff.
That's not entirely true, since ancient skepticism and idealism proposed similar issues based on the problem of perception.
But one could say the same thing for using words like model for sensation.
That's what makes me wonder about functionalism.
I did start a thread a year or so ago where neuroscientists Anil Seth discussed in a podcast his research into consciousness and marking progress on the hard problem.
https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html
And:
Starting at 6:57:
[quote=anil seth]How can the structure and dynamics of the brain, in connection with the body and environment, account for the subjective phenomenological properties of consciousness.[/quote]
So not just a few misguided philosophers.
What evidence do you have that that's what you did? You learnt to use 'red' at, what, two, three? Are you suggesting you have a clear memory of the method you used?
Quoting khaled
You said...
Quoting khaled
You didn't say 'the world seems like something'. You said ''...seems like X". I'm saying, for example, that the evidence from cognitive science suggests that it cannot have seemed like X. It must have seemed like Y, or Z. You're simply reporting, post hoc, that it seemed like X because of your cultural models which encourage you to talk about experiences in this way.
No-one is denying you have experiences. I'm trying to argue that they are not as you, seconds later, think they were.
Quoting khaled
In long term memory, yes. I'm talking about sensory and working memories here. They don't work the same way, the inaccuracies are built in to the mechanism, it happens instantly, as a result of hippocampus function, not long term as a result of action potential changes.
Quoting khaled
No, they don't just use it as shorthand. Conscious experience is invoked in AI, physicalism, the limits of knowledge... This is exactly the eqivocation I referred to. You make specific claim about the nature of 'experiences', and then, when pushed on them, revert to "oh it's all just another way of saying exactly what you just said". Having an experience of something and, as Parr of that experience, reaching for the word 'red' is not the same as having an experience of colour. The two have radically different implications.
Quoting khaled
No, it's absolutely impossible, thats just not how colour and language is processed in the brain (the link between photon hitting the retina and vocal muscles making the word 'red'). At no point do I have a 'feeling of a colour' which I then select the name for from some internal pantone chart.
Quoting khaled
But each group belongs to whatever category you feel like it belongs to, and they're related in whatever way you feel like they're related, either one of which might change from one second to the next.
I don't think so. The idea of sensation being filtered through Bayesian models is expounded in great detail in the various papers on the subject. Not everyone agrees that it's a good or even accurate way of modelling cognition, but I haven't read anyone suggest there's a problem with equivocation on terms. I can't even think what that might consist of, did you have something specific in mind?
Quoting Marchesk
Cool, I'll have a read sometime.
Quoting Marchesk
You know Anil has categorically said there's no hard problem of consciousness, right? You've possibly misunderstood his line of research. He's attempting to answer that very question using neuroscience - specifically a Bayesian inference model. That means he believes a) it's possible to explain phenomenological experience using neuroscience, b) the cause of phenomenological experience is not introspectively available, and c) that phenomenological experience can be studied third party.
I'm not sure how that sets him in the same gang as people like Chalmers (whom he's openly said is wrong about consciousness).
Read some of Seth's papers, he's a lot less circumspect than he is in public lectures.
Why would sensations be cognitive? Not everything the brain does is cognitive. A red sensation doesn't have cognitive content until it's put into language.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, but he doesn't dismiss the problem as just a philosophical misuse of language. Rather, it's a topic for neuroscience to resolve. I'm open to that if it actually explains how colors and pains arise from brain processes.
Actually he does (to an extent). I'm fairly certain he used almost those exact words in a lecture. I'll see if I can find something more concrete for you, so that you don't just have to take my word for it, but for now, don't confuse his tackling the problem with his not seeing a terrible linguistic muddle also. He's not a philosopher of language and doesn't make a habit of making propositions outside of his domain, but I've attended a few of his lectures now and the linguistic issues are not lost on him.
Quoting Marchesk
Well, that depends on what you mean by 'explain'. A problem I find with many 'consciousness' arguments. What serves as an explanation is very subjective. One can obviously continue to ask '...but why?' ad infinitum, so when to stop doing so is a personal choice.
That said you seem a little resistant to the ideas I've already written about on this (not my ideas of course, I'm just regurgitating). If you're open to neuroscience explaining these things then whence the resistance? Are there some explanations you find particularly unpalatable?
I listened to the podcast and he didn't say there was no hard problem, only presented a research program for approaching it. I don't know about the video as I just found it and skipped ahead to where he presents the hard problem, assuming it would be similar to the podcast. But maybe he says something different on there.
People can and do change their minds so ...
Because the explanations are just replacing phenomenological terms with statistical ones. That's not an explanation. It's equivocation.
What I'm looking for is how the color sensation is generated, not how the hard problem can be avoided using other terms. I see a colored-in world, and somehow brain processes are responsible. That needs to be explained.
Non sequitur. That doesn't follow from anything I've said here. What are you talking about? I've not said anything at all about caring 'why' the components of conscious experience exist. I'm talking about how it happens. There's a significant bit of irony here, given that you're misattributing meaning to my words, and the attribution of meaning is itself the emergence of conscious experience... it's the how part.
Your belief is not required here, so you do not have to think so. You're perfectly within your rights to think otherwise.
"Phenomenology" is the name of a certain philosophical school of thought. That school of thought had/has as it's target something that existed in it's entirety prior to our reports of it:human conscious experience.
Name these components of which all conscious experience consists.
Yes. Erring on the side of neither dispenses with the inherently inadequate dichotomies altogether.
Quoting Andrew M
However, I'm hesitant if all experience has internal and external components, physical and non physical components; something to be connected and a creature capable of making connections, where the connections are the neither part but that which is being connected is one or the other(or both in the case of metacognitive endeavors).
So, while the subjective/objective dichotomy can be thrown out simply by granting subjectivism in it's entirety, I'm wondering about whether or not the internal/external and physical/non physical dichotomies can be equally dispensed with.
Throws the same thing at khaled...
The same experience is not caused by the same brain... Thus, the variation cancels out. It tells us nothing except that each and every experience is unique, and that no report regardless of first or third person perspective can be complete. But so what? No one is asking for a complete explanation of the red apple being one component of many in the conscious experience of seeing a red apple(or being hit in the arse with it).
What problem?
Neurology is a discipline that tells us much about how conscious experience happens.
It takes work, it takes training. Say in your case, you interpret pretty much everything in terms of a scientific framework - objective facts, satisfactory explanations and so on. That is internalised in such a way that it becomes second nature to you. Becoming aware of such patterns of thought is an aspect of that kind of training.
Quoting frank
:up:
I definitely should've highlighted that I was claiming in normal circumstances items (1) to (4) do collectively determine the process of perceptual feature formation. I do think they're mutually exclusive components of perceptual feature formation - they have different names and play different procedural parts - but all four variable types are informationally and causally connected so long as there's an agent actively exploring an environment during a task. When I said the types are connected, I mean some variable that belongs to each type is connected to a variable that belongs to some other type, though it need not be a direct contact in order for it to count as connected. In the network of variables in the model, that would correspond to there being a path from a variable in every type to some variable in every other type, rather than having every variable in each type being a neighbour of some variable in each other type. If that's super dense, it's the same as colouring task parameter and prior variable nodes red and hidden state nodes blue in whatever variable network the model has then saying "there's at least one arrow between the red ones and the blue ones".
So they're "mutually exclusive" in terms of being qualitatively distinct variable types in the variable network of the model, but they're not thereby causally or statistically independent of each other since they're connected.
Quoting Isaac
I think we did get wires crossed, but I suspect we disagree on something somewhere. Maybe in the nature of that entanglement and the relationship language plays to it. One way of reading the second paragraph makes how language is used consequent of perceptual feature formation. So it would go like: hidden state -> apple perceptual features -> "I see an apple". But AFAIK there are also models [hide=*](I think we've talked about this before on forum in the context of Barrett's work)[/hide] that look more like:
hidden state -> categorising of sensory inputs -> output perceptual features
hidden state -> categorising of sensory inputs -> language use
but also with:
output perceptual features -> categorising sensory inputs
and
language use -> categorising sensory inputs
feedbacks somewhere in the model. So once someone is categorising sensory inputs in a sufficiently mature way, they already have prior language use and prior perceptual feature feedforwards into the categorisation of sensory inputs.
To be clear, by categorising sensory inputs I mean a device that distinguishes foraged data generated by hidden states and aggregates them into related salient types based on previous model states. This is part of perceptual feature formation. For example, that I see the duck in the duck rabbit or the rabbit at any given time. The salience bit says I see a duck or a rabbit, not a meaningless scribble. The types are the duck and the rabbit. Categorisation is assigning something a type.
To put it starkly, it seems to me that there's evidence that language use plays some role in perceptual feature formation - but clearly it doesn't have to matter in all people at all times, just that it does seem to matter in sufficiently mature people. Language use seems to get incorporated into the categorisation aspect of perceptual feature formation.
The layout of lines on the page isn't changing in the duckrabbit, but the state of my perceptual models regarding it is varying in time - at one time the pair of protrusions function to elicit the perceptual feature of rabbit ears, at another they function to elicit a duck's bill.
So the issue of the degree of "fuzziness" associated with labelling hidden state patterns with perceptual feature names comes down to the tightness of the constraint the hidden states place upon the space of perceptual features consistent with it and the nature of those constraints more generally.
I would like to highlight that the duckrabbit stimulus can only cause model updates after its observation. So in that respect, the hidden states which are constitutive of the duckrabbit picture act as a sufficient cause for for seeing it as a duck or a rabbit, given that someone has a perceptual system that can see the layout as a duck or a rabbit. But only a sufficient cause when conditioning on the presence of a suitably configured perceptual system.
Analogy, "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck", taking that way too literally, if someone observed something that quacked like a duck but did not look like a duck, on that basis alone the believer of "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." could not conclude that it was a duck. But if they then observed the thing making the quacking noise looked like a duck, they could immediately conclude that it was a duck. The "quacking" was in place already, so "it looking like a duck" was sufficient for the conclusion that it was a duck.
Translating out that analogy; we expect certain configurations to be ducks and certain configurations to be rabbits - we expect ears and rabbit faces on rabbits, bills and long necks on ducks - if you show someone who will see bills and long necks appropriately arranged as a duck a picture of a duck, they will see the duck. To be sure that's not a very complete list of duck eliciting hidden state patterns [hide=*](and someone who doesn't know what a duck is will probably see what we would call a duck, just not "package" those patterns together as a duck)[/hide]... But I shall assume you know what I mean.
In summary: I think that issue boils down to whether the duckrabbit's hidden states associated with page layout cause duck or rabbit given my priors and task parameters. I think that they do. It isn't as if the hidden states are inputs into a priorless, languageless, taskless system, the data streams coming out of the hidden state are incorporated into our mature perceptual models. In that respect, it does seem appropriate to say that the hidden states do cause someone to see a rabbit or a duck, as one has fixed the status of the whole model prior to looking at the picture.
I think that's about what I meant. Don't come away from what I've said with the idea that "how fdrake thinks about direct realism" is canonical though. For me directness is just a lack of perceptual intermediaries. I think people who are professionally direct realists have different commitments to that. For some it seems to come down to mind dependence vs mind independence of what is perceived [hide=*](and clearly that intersects with the perceptual intermediary debate, mind dependent perceptual intermediaries are strongly intuition pumped by arguments from dreaming/illusion)[/hide], and there's also an element of whether (and how) perceptual features are real.
Aye. I think that's true. I think the directness claim (no perceptual intermediaries) is an easy consequence of any active perception account which includes environment exploring actions as a component of perception. If you pick something up, there has to be causal contact between the mass of the thing how you sense and adapt to loads. If "how you sense and adapt to loads" in total is labelled as (a part of) perception, then perception (as a process) is in direct causal contact with the world.
Though devil's advocating it, that direct causal contact could be between a perceptual intermediary and the mass. But I think that requires the Cartesian Theatre metaphor to be true - it would only be an intermediary if the perceptual intermediary was submitted to some distinct faculty or process [hide=*](note: not talking about passing inhibited patterns of signals around in the process of feature formation, the more cognitive aspects are lumped in)[/hide]. So that's going to turn on whether it's more appropriate to emphasise action in perception than a "submission" process to consciousness as a distinct faculty.
Without that submission process and with an active account of perception, directness in the sense I meant (I think) is implied. It is almost true by definition (within the account of perception), but whether it's supported in practice turns on the behaviour of the account using it and accounts which don't use it.
Yeah, but as Luke in this thread (and Chalmers elsewhere) have pointed out, it doesn't explain why any physical system would be conscious. Our understanding of physics would not predict this if we weren't already conscious. A nervous system wouldn't fundamentally be different than a computer with input devices, in that regard.
Why do we see colors and feel pain when no other physical system does this, far as we can tell? What would it take for a robot to do so? Did Noonien Soong sliip a qualia chip into Data's positronic brain?
I don't understand what you mean by this. Perhaps you could clarify with some examples from Seth's papers?
...and you know this how?
[quote=Max Planck]I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.[/quote]
Over and out!!
Cool, that makes sense. We have common ground here.
Quoting fdrake
I see what you mean here. If at any given time the only variable that really is 'varying' in the system is the hidden state, then we can appropriately talk about a direct causal relationship. Like triggering a pinball, the various flippers and pegs are going to be determinate of it's path, but they're fixed, so right now it's path is directly caused by the strength of the trigger?
So, if we want to answer the question "what are people modelling?" I think the only answer can be 'hidden states', if they were any less than that then the whole inference model wouldn't make any sense. No-one 'models' and apple - it's already an apple.
But...
If we're talking about the properties of those hidden sates which constrain the model choices...
Quoting fdrake
I'd agree here. Do you recall our conversation about how the two pathways of perception interact - the 'what' and the 'how' of active inference? I think there's a necessary link between the two, but not at an individual neurological level, rather at a cultural sociological level. All object recognition is culturally mediated to an extent, but that cultural categorising is limited - it has functional constraints. So whilst I don't see anything ontological in hidden states which draws a line between the rabbit and the bit of sky next to it, an object recognition model which treated that particular combination of states as a single object simply wouldn't work, it would be impossible to keep track of it. In that sense, I agree that properties of the hidden sates have (given our biological and cultural practices) constrained the choices of public model formation. Basically, because the dorsal pathways activities in object manipulation etc will eventually constrain the ventral pathways choices in object recognition, but there isn't (as far as we know) a neurological mechanism for them to do so at the time (ie in a single perception event).
A little of what we know. Object recognition in adults is mediated by two systems. A high level one which relates to naming, conceptual properties (such as use, ownership etc) and manipulation. But we also had what's called a mid-level system which is responsible for object tracking and enumeration. This system appears (in adults) to be independent (broadly meaning lesions in it can cause independent issues). Here spatiotemporal signal are king (what moved relative to what), things like edge, colour, shape etc play a secondary role in the case of stationary objects. But none of this directly informs the higher levels system (at the time of a single perception event). The higher level system is extremely culturally mediated, and is very difficult to actually change by perceptual features alone.
Experiments on surprise and attention in infants have indicated that their own object enumeration relies heavily on spatiotemporal markers and so it seem likely that this system is the primary object division system and the higher-level one is secondary. Interestingly, infants as young as 2 months show strong object recognition in this primary mid-level system, but not until 18-24 months do they have an equivalent grasp of object recognition in the higher system.
So higher level it might first go... hidden state properties > some constrained model space > cultural/biological modelling process > object christening
Then in an instance of perception... hidden state properties > some (now constrained) choice of public models > object recognition
But mid-level it would go hidden state spatiotemporal properties > (possibly drawing on other mid level properties - shape, edge etc) > object enumeration > object recognition
In order to have this model we have to have a cognitive facility to model new data (cultures are groups of people after all), so in that sense I agree that
Quoting fdrake
We may disagree as to the extents, but I think we have common ground on the general process.
And also the other way around. Kant have either one without the other.
Quoting Isaac
A 2-month old is a different animal from an 18-24 month old. Adding another circle to the model can't do justice to the phenomenon or to the statistics. For a moment, consider comparative psychology of infants, apes, cats. Apes and cats are comparatively smarter than infants at the earliest stages. If you can agree even to a degree then how could that be?
Take it up with Max.
Look, the fundamental issue, the basic problem, whatever, is that all modern science - big statement! - relies on objectification. Newton, Galileo, Descartes, et al, perfected the method for mathematisation of statements about objective phenomena. It is the universal science, in that it can cope with any kind of object. But mind is not an object. If that is not obvious, then let’s get into a multi-hundred page Internet forum thread about why it’s not. Although I might sit it out.
:100:
Which is why social sciences are so difficult. There are very few convenient object names, like apple, to anchor isolated changing processes.
Be reasonable. What use is it asking the question if the reply was going to be: Actually, you don't remember. I just generalized to how I learn new words that have an associated experience. For instance, in my language there was no word for "malencholy". What I said here is how I came to learn the word and the experience associated with it, at a much later age.
Quoting Isaac
Basic algebra tells you that X can take on any value including Y or Z. Point is that it seemed like something. I later call it "red" or "pain" or whatever.
Quoting Isaac
Agreed.
Quoting Isaac
As far as I can tell, the working memory and sensory memory are the source of experiences. As in if they stopped funcitoning, you wouldn't have any experiences at all. What you're saying here is that I had the experience Y first which was then altered to a different experience X due to built in inaccuracies. That doesn't make sense, what is this experience Y? All I ever see is the experience X. There is no "more accurate" experience Y that preceded it.
If I am measuring something and it turns out to be 5cm you cannot make the claim "Actually, you made a more accurate measurement which was then changed to 5cm +- 0.1cm due to the built in inaccuracy of the ruler".
Quoting Isaac
Can't AI also have a certain experience then reach for the word "red" to describe it?
Quoting Isaac
But you said that you experience something, then reach for the word "red" to describe it. I am asking how we can compare these "somethings".
Makes me wonder how Tegmark thinks the mind fits into math. He's fond of arguing that everything that exist is mathematical, and all mathematical objects exist.
We're asking why.
Quoting creativesoul
I haven't read phenomenology books. Couldn't tell ya.
Quoting creativesoul
So you have ineffable private experiences. As I said a while ago, the way you use "experiences" is nearly identical to the way people use "qualia".
You aren't entitled to just call something pain any more than calling something duh.
Yes I don’t understand how he can still be materialist but he apparently is.
This is the core of the issue, and probably why we think it’s hard, but I am not yet convinced that the human mind is unable to understand itself.
Quoting Wayfarer
There are logically coherent forms of materialism, that consider the mind as physically mediated, created by the brain, but not an illusion. Instead, the mind is seen as an effective organ, useful to the survival of the individual. Aka compatibilism. So one can be a non-naïve, coherent materialist if one includes the human mind in ‘matter’, as something that literally ‘matters’.
But it's problem of reflexivity. 'The eye can see another, but not itself. The hand can grasp another, but not itself.' That actually is from the Upani?ads, and it's an observation which I don't think has a parallel in Western philosophy, but it's an extremely important principle.
I don't know if you're aware of a French scholar by the name of Michel Bitbol. He has some very interesting and relevant insights into this issue - see his paper It is never known but it is the knower.
Quoting Olivier5
I think 'created by' is an issue. It's a question of ontological dependency. We instinctively see the mind as 'created by' or 'a product of' the material, but I'm not so sure. If I was a good enough story-teller, I could tell you something that effected your physiology - your 'blood would run cold' or maybe you would become angry and your adrenaline would kick in. That is 'mind over matter' on a very small scale, but the principle applies in all kinds of ways.
But you couldn't tell that story without vibrations in the air hitting his eardrums which go on to have the effect you perscribe. I think it's always "mind along with matter" never "mind over matter". And especially not "just matter", if the word "matter" is to mean anything.
Chalmers' "what it's like" rendering is an untenable and rather ill-informed approach. I've argued that at length on this very forum. There is no such singular thing as "what it's like" to be human.
Our conscious experience(being human) is an ongoing process that is directly and indirectly influenced by, and consisting of, all sorts of different things all the time. It is an autonomous process, one of which we have little to no control over, to very large degree. That said, each and every moment of our lives counts as "what it's like to be human", and this alone poses a huge problem, obviously enough I would hope, for anyone who aims at defining "what it's like to be human", for being human is not like any single excised duration within our lives. It's exactly like all of them, but they are each respectively different. Thus, the notion is incoherent at best. It's untenable. Our conscious experience consists of all moments during our lives, and each and every duration is unlike the rest for each and every one consists of some elements that the others do not. Being human is all of them.
Moreover, to labor the point by introducing changes in our thought and belief systems, because the way we think about what's happening changes over time(along with changes in our belief system) and the way we think about things affects/effects conscious experience, even our experiences involving the same sorts of things changes over time as well, despite the recurrence of some of the elements.
Drinking Maxwell House at time t1 is a much different experience than drinking Maxwell House at time t20,000 if along the way one gradually begins to enjoy the experience less and less unbeknownst to themselves at first. This will certainly happen as a result of the taster drinking 100% Kona coffee freshly ground and prepared with a French press at some time during their lives, and then continuing to drink Kona coffee more and more afterwards. We can replace Kona coffee and the preparation process with any other, and the point holds.
All of this places the notion of "what it's like to be a human" under rightful suspicion regarding it's ability to even provide an outline for our conscious experience, for what coffee tasting is like at time t1 is not what coffee tasting is like at time t20,000, even without the introduction of Kona coffee. The very same issues arise with any and all conscious experiences of 'X' at different times. Variables fundamentally change the experience.
Quoting Marchesk
This seems irrelevant to me, although I'd be happy to entertain an argument for how it is.
Some folk hereabouts seem to think that we cannot acquire knowledge of our own conscious experience, simply because we must use it as a means for doing so. They've adopted this fait accompli attitude about the subject. There's a similar vein of thought pervading philosophy of language and 'getting beneath language'. I've found that that's not an insurmountable problem at all, actually, in either respect. The method of approach matters most in such metacognitive endeavors, and that method must include adequate minimal(universal) standards and criterions which must be determined first and satisfied accordingly throughout the endeavor.
Unfortunately, attention spans are required, and seem to be lacking...
It's really no different(roughly speaking) than acquiring knowledge about anything that exists(existed) in it's entirety prior to our awareness and/or subsequent accounting practices of it. Conscious experience is one such thing.
Quoting Marchesk
This breaches another topic, but perhaps it's worth touching upon...
On my view, nervous systems aren't fundamentally conscious. They are most certainly fundamentally different than computers. I would not even go as far as to say that a human being is fundamentally conscious, at least not from the moment of conception through the first completely autonomous correlation drawn between different things.
This skirts around the issue of where to 'draw the line', so to speak, which again harks back to the aforementioned criteria.
Quoting Marchesk
Animals do. They are physical systems, in part at least, just like we are.
What would it take for a robot to see colors and feel pain? Probably biological machinery capable of doing so. At least, that's my guess.
You invoke consciousness, I invoke reason. The same intrinsic circularity is patently inevitable.
Nature of the beast.
Sigh...
Quoting khaled
If you believe that, then you clearly do not understand much of what I've said, and until I have reason to believe that you do, there's no reason for me to continue our discussion, for it seems to have been a waste of time. Hopefully some other reader gets something out of it. Best, of course, if you do...
Respectfully, be well.
:smile:
Yep. That's where a major disagreement between you and I seems to be. We've discussed that at length in past, but as it pertains to conscious experience, could you explain how we cannot use reason to acquire knowledge of our own conscious experience?
Why, or how is it fait accompli?
Yeah....I was wondering which of us would break the dialectical ice.
I will begin by saying for the record, you are soooo close in your reasoning, to my own. As before, the only thing missing, and the potential source of complete affirmation or possibly negation.....gotta allow that, after all....., is method. As far as I’m concerned, existential dependency and elemental constituency are given, but I want to know what they are and HOW they are given. I can tell you, from a very particular speculative methodology, but you haven’t told me. I grant you may find mine untenable, if not inadequate, but at least you have something to judge.
I submit for your esteemed consideration, we cannot use reason to acquire knowledge of consciousness, because reason invented it. The very best we can do, is use the notion of consciousness in such a way that it does not contradict its own invention. And the best way to use it, is, not as a thing to know about, but as a necessary condition for something we do know about.
Perhaps you recognize that last sentence.
Robotic voiceover: “...Shall..we..play..a......game?”
But a hand can hold another hand, and an eye can see another eye...
Never heard of him, will check out.
Underwritten by the brain, if you prefer. Information is always ‘written’ on something, it has to be the form of something material, in order to exist materially. A poem is not paper and ink, but it has to be written in paper and ink (or another material support) in order to exist.
If matter can affect minds (and it can), then minds can affect matter, by the principle of action-reaction.
In the type of biology-centred ‘emergent materialism’ I practice, ‘mind over matter’ is the only possible raison d’être of minds. By that I mean that if nature created something as bizarre as minds, it must be for a reason. Minds must be able to do something special, have some sort of value-added that living creatures without it are necessarily lacking. My hypothesis is that the mind is simply the pilot in the creature. It follows that the greater the freedom of movement of the creature, the greater the need for a mind. A plant moves less than an animal, and has far less need for a mind than an animal. A vegetative animal (e.g. a corral remaining in the same place, or any bivalve mollusk attached to its rock) has less need for a mind than an octopus. De facto, cephalopodes (octopuses, cuttlefish etc) have far larger brains than any other mollusk species, because they can move a lot of arms (8). Now, if brains underwrite minds, cephalopodes have bigger minds than all other invertebrates.
Not as l large as birds, who can fly. I envy them a bit for that... :-)
Just to try and bring it back to within the bounds of the conversation about Dennett and materialist theories of mind, I'll refer to Thomas Nagel's op summarising the main point of his book Mind and Cosmos:
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/
Whereas, Dennett and those like him want to dispute the reality of subject-hood altogether, or to say it is a byproduct or an illusion.
Quoting Olivier5
I recognize ontological discontinuities between different kinds of beings - mineral, vegetative, animal, human - which is of course completely rejected by modern philosophy, in fact rejection of it is one of the hallmarks of modernity. But the appearance of living organisms in the cosmos, is also the appearance of horizons of being that are not manifest in the inorganic domain. We ourselves have a pivotal role in 'realising' the nature of the cosmos, because in h. sapiens, the Universe has evolved to a state where it can know itself (which is an idea implicit in some forms of ancient philosophy i.e. stoicism, hermeticism.)
Quoting creativesoul
I presume that would include myself. Let me clarify it again. Obviously I can 'know my own mind', and people can do that to a greater or lesser extent. Donald Trump exhibits a pathological lack of self-knowledge, whereas the wise person - Socrates as an archetype of that - is self-aware, 'knows him/herself'.
But none of that mitigates against the issue of scientific 'objectification' of the mind. The reason eliminativism wants to eliminate the mind (or consciousness) from their reckoning, is precisely because it can't be made an object of scientific analysis. It is not amongst the possible objects for the natural sciences.
The most cogent and succinct criticism of that view in the philosophical literature is, in my opinion, and based on secondary sources, Husserl's critique of naturalism.
[quote=IEP] Naturalism is the thesis that everything belongs to the world of nature and can be studied by the methods appropriate to studying that world (that is, the methods of the natural sciences). Husserl argued that the study of consciousness must actually be very different from the study of nature. For him, phenomenology does not proceed from the collection of large amounts of data and to a general theory beyond the data itself, as in the scientific method of induction. Rather, it aims to look at particular examples without theoretical presuppositions (such as the phenomena of intentionality, of love, of two hands touching each other, and so forth), before then discerning what is essential and necessary to these experiences.[/quote]
(This is then the subject of all of the massive literature around epoche, suspension of judgement, bracketing, and so on, which I haven't studied in depth.)
(Which are ultimately those of physics.)
Both from Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran.
So although Anil is not pessimistic like Chalmers or McGinn about the problem being truly hard, he does not dismiss phenomonlogy by replacing with with neurological or statistical terms, as you do. Instead, he says we are conscious and it is strongly correlated with brain activity, so let's continue investigating the link between the two and see where that leads.
What does it mean, on your view?
Quoting frank
Maybe. Or even a dissolving of the dichotomy.
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction, p24 - William Jaworski
In order for that to be true, invention must not be a conscious experience and/or process.
Certainly the antecedents for Cartesian dualism can be found in ancient thinking. As it happens, the textbook I quoted earlier links substance dualism with Plato.
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction, p35 - William Jaworski
But note that Descartes posited a conception of mind which included not just the intellect, as with Plato, but also pain and perception (see the above quote to Frank). So it lends itself to a concept of qualia that Plato's idealism doesn't (who regarded the entire natural world as dependent on Ideas, or Forms).
:up:
Quoting creativesoul
Supposing experience to have internal and external components still implies the Cartesian theater metaphor. Say you were playing a game of football where you scored a goal. Did this involve internal thinking and external kicking? Or did it involve kicking the ball intelligently and purposefully (as opposed to unthinkingly and aimlessly)? The latter description doesn't depend on an internal/external division. It instead applies everyday predicates to particular types of entities as appropriate (in this case, intelligent and purposeful behavior to you - or, where warranted, random and aimless behavior).
Also we can describe the football game in physical terms (say, in terms of the energy expended by the players or the distance they travelled), or in purposeful terms (say, in terms of who won the game). But those descriptions don't imply physical and non-physical components, or physical and non-physical activity. We simply predicate entities in particular ways depending on the kind of entities they are, whether they be humans or inanimate objects.
So the model is of entities interacting in a relational sense, rather than a model where the world is divided in a physical/mental sense.
A prima facie example of a problem created by language use. The above basically says that...
The subjective essence of conscious experience equals and/or amounts to "how 'it' is" from the point of view of conscious experience's subject.
:brow:
Conscious experience is not the sort of thing that has the uniqueness of individual points of view as it's subject unless it is a conscious experience of talking in such terms.
Furthermore...
What noun does the pronoun "it" replace in the last part above, particularly the last two instances of it's use? What does the pronoun refer to? What singular entity does that pronoun pick out to the exclusion of all else?
Added to which, in Descartes there is the tendency to objectify the mind. 'Res cogitans' means 'thinking thing'. It was from that, that the self-contradictory concept of 'thinking substance' developed. Whereas pre-Cartesian philosophy didn't conceive of it in those terms.
BTW- excellent passage from Phil. of Mind. :up:
I see you're commenting on the text I quoted above from Thomas Nagel. (Would help the other readers if you made that attribution.) It's not 'a problem created by language use'. He's spelling out why the objective sciences are necessarily incomplete in principle, due to the omission of the subjective from their methodology, at the outset, as part of the terms of their formation. Nagel has written a lot on this, including the essay that made him famous, 'What is it like to be a bat?'
Quoting creativesoul
In context: "There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it...'
'It', here, is 'an experience'. He saying, you can give a neurophysiological account of an experience (e.g. 'pain is the firing of c-fibers') but the experience of pain is much more than a descriptive account of the physiology of it.
I don't understand what is obscure or difficult about this idea.
Quoting creativesoul
Looking for an answer to the questions posed... that's all.
Because your own ad hoc, single person sample is next to useless as a description of how people learn to use terms. I thought you might have, you know, read some actual research before just randomly deciding how the cognitive development of language works, which you might be able to point me to, failing that some uniquely clear memory to work with, As it turns out, it's just how you 'reckon' it probably works based on the five minutes thought you gave it just now. There's masses and masses of research time gone into trying to figure this stuff out, you know. I know my tone can sometimes get a bit short, but can you not see how frustrating it is to be in a position where it might take years of work and ruthless scrutiny from peers to get to a point where I could publish a paper just on one small aspect of how our mind works only to have a discussion touching on those facts dominated by a load of guesswork about it from an armchair after not even having read the results of such investigations let alone bothered to carry any out.
Quoting khaled
No. I'm arguing here about the privacy and accesibility aspects. That requires that when you say it seems like X you're right - ie it could not be the alternatives Y and Z.
Quoting khaled
Right. So your account of the fact that it 'felt like X' is no more accurate than my neurological account of how it probably felt. We're both guessing how it felt from evidence - mine neurological (statistical likelihoods), your is inferential (traces of working memory re-firing of neurons). Neither have good access, neither have private access.
Quoting khaled
Which is it, the working memory or the sensory memory. It can't be both, they'd deliver contradictory experiences?
Again, equivocation on 'experience' here is causing problems. If you're saying that the working memory is the 'source' of experience - ie it generates, but does not constitute experience - then that's a whole different discussion than the one we're having about perception, which involves considerably more brain regions than signal to the working memory. It would help if you clarified what model of consciousness you were working from.
Quoting khaled
Yes I can, if I've got good evidence that that's what's happening. Why would I not?
Quoting khaled
Yes, I think it can. I was pointing out here that theories about consciousness matter - in opposition to your comment about 'experience' just being shorthand for this. If it is then AI is definitely conscious because it can reach fr the word 'red' in response to some state of it's neural network. Yet there's intense debate about whether AI is conscious or could ever be. So this equivocation isn't helping. It' not the case that 'qualia' is just shorthand for experience which is just shorthand for this correlation between mental state and tendencies to respond (like reaching for the word 'red').
'Experience' is being used to refer to some ineffable, private, introspectively accessible concept when it come to AI, p-zombies, etc. Then when pushed by things like Dennett's intuition pumps and the evidence from neuroscience, you retreat to just "whatever you just described - that's what we mean by 'qualia'". But then the questions drop away. Ai is already conscious, p-zombies are impossible, panpsychism is wrong, and physicalism is fine - job done.
Quoting khaled
Reaching for the word 'red' is part of the experience. As @creativesoul has pointed out experience is a constant process, not a series of discreet packages.
You'll have to quote him (or we'll just agree to differ), it's not the impression I get from either that podcast, nor his other lectures, nor his papers.
Sigh...
That is true by the definition of "experience" that I am using. If you are asking about the experience in the moment, that is, by definition, exactly what it seems and therefore I am right about it. When asking about what it seemed like I give that I am not infallable there.
Quoting Isaac
You wanted me to provide you with research about the cognitive development of language? That's now how I read your question at all. If that's the case you probably already know the answer considering you work in the field. When someone asks "How do I learn a programming language" I would think they're not asking for research about cognitive development of language but rather some practical advice such as "Buy this book" or "Do these practise problems". I thought your question was in a similar vein, so I told you how I learn new words.
Quoting Isaac
I think that "neurological guessing of how it felt" makes no sense. You can guess general aspects, like for example that I was afraid at time t1 (and even that is difficult) but you can't guess what fear feels like from a first person view. This "what fear feels like" is qualia.
Quoting Isaac
The bit you can't make is:
Quoting khaled
Because that makes no sense. There was no "more accurate measurement" which the ruler ruined. All we have is the 5cm +- 0.1 measurement. In the same way there was no "more accurate experience" which was then morphed by built in inaccuracies, we just have this one experience of what's going on right now.
Quoting Isaac
Agreed.
Quoting Isaac
Don't see how either of those follow.
Quoting Isaac
That doesn't follow exactly. An AI's "neural network" is hardly similar to a human's as far as I know. But besides that, I do think that conscious AI is eventually possible.
I was not objecting to that. I agree with that.
Read it, thanks. That's really witty and useful, and very topical to pretty much all these discussions we've been having here on the "hard? problem?". (question marks to imply that the problem may not be that hard, or that it may indeed not be a problem at all)
Bitbol is making pretty much all the same arguments that we have been making here against the Great Denial. He calls it a blind spot, but I think he is being too charitable, at least in some cases. The amount of resistance that some eliminative materialists put up to the rather obvious idea that they themselves exist as 'minds', and their their incapacity to understand the contradiction in their stance indicate that something more sinister than a mere blind spot is at play: eliminative materialism is a self-denying and life-demeaning ideology. What started as a blind spot has evolved into denial.
I take Bitbol's point that we may never "objectify subjectivity", because that would be a contradiction in terms. So we will never be able to understand a subjective experience 'from the outside'. But explaining how our biology give rise to minds and how minds affect our biology in principle is a more modest project than to objectify fully a subjective experience. It is rather about explaining how something like experience could possibly emerge from biology.
What would an answer to this question even be? As far as I can tell it doesn't make any sense at all. If I ask "what the the rollercoaster like? " you might say "it was scary". If I ask "what was being scared like?", I expect you to shake your head and walk away, what could I possibly mean by that?
Simply being able to form a sentence does not make the content meaningful.Quoting khaled
But you don't. That's the point. You have a memory of what was going on a few seconds ago. There's a fundamental disconnect between the external world (if you believe in such a thing) and your experiences which makes talk of the experience of red - where 'red' is considered to be something in the external world) fundamentally wrong.
If you want to say that experience 'just is' the unified memories of some mental states from the last few seconds, then we can work with that, but then we have an very good model of that already. There's no need for qualia.
Quoting khaled
Because if conscious experience is just reaching for some word (or other response) from some internal mental state, then rocks can't do it and we've given an entirely complete physical account of it.
Quoting khaled
What part of the definition of conscious requires that is takes place in a network similar to humans?
I wouldn't. I would say "It's what you feel when you go on a horror ride" and ask you to try it. If you don't feel anything maybe there is something wrong with your brain.
Quoting Isaac
When did I consider "red" to be something in the external world? Our very first discussion on this thread was agreeing how that wasn't the case. Heck this:
Quoting Isaac
Sounds like something I would say.
Quoting Isaac
How do you know rocks don't have a mental state? We have mapped certain mental states to certain brainstates. That gives us sufficient conditions for this or that experience. That doesn't explain what the necessary conditions are. Disclaimer: I am not claiming rocks have mental states.
Quoting Isaac
It's just that we only know that a human's neural network produces consciousness. And an AI is fundamentally different in that it doesn't have neurons. They are not similar enough to conclude both are consciuos.
[quote=Anil K Seth]In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions). A good starting point is to distinguish between conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Conscious level has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware. Conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe. And among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious self, and is probably the aspect of consciousness that we cling to most tightly.[/quote]
And:
[quote=Anil K Seth]But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.)[/quote]
And this, since it mentions dreaming:
[quote=Anil K Seth]What are the fundamental brain mechanisms that underlie our ability to be conscious at all? Importantly, conscious level is not the same as wakefulness. When you dream, you have conscious experiences even though you’re asleep. And in some pathological cases, such as the vegetative state (sometimes called ‘wakeful unawareness’), you can be altogether without consciousness, but still go through cycles of sleep and waking.[/quote]
I've bolded the salient points.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one
I'll go grab some quotes from the podcast in my next reply.
That's what being scared is, not what it's like.
Quoting khaled
It's not the mental state, it's the inability to report on working memory, which you'd just said was what 'experiences' are. Rocks don't have a working memory.
Quoting khaled
This assumes consciousness is very tightly bound the the type of substrate. I'm not even sure I'd go that far.
[quote=Anil K Seth]Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism.[/quote]
It's readily apparent that Seth is talking about phenomenal consciousness, and he understands the issues, such as when you make it identical to something like "integrated information".
And then there's this that further drives the point home:
[quote=Anil K Seth]When we are conscious, we are conscious of something. What in the brain determines the contents of consciousness? The standard approach to this question has been to look for so-called ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCCs). In the 1990s, Francis Crick and Christof Koch defined an NCC as ‘the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept’. This definition has served very well over the past quarter century because it leads directly to experiments. We can compare conscious perception with unconscious perception and look for the difference in brain activity, using (for example) EEG and functional MRI.[/quote]
Neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't make sense unless Seth (along with Crick and Koch) didn't take phenomenal consciousness seriously as something in need of explanation.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one
This last quote from the paper is exactly what the anti-Dennett side has been arguing this entire thread.
[quote=Anil K Seth]But as powerful as these experiments are, they do not really address the ‘real’ problem of consciousness. To say that a posterior cortical ‘hot-spot’ (for instance) is reliably activated during conscious perception does not explain why activity in that region should be associated with consciousness.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one[/quote]
So being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride? You're contradicting yourself:
First you insist that if someone who has never experienced fear before (someone with urbach-wiethe disease even) uses the word "afraid" then they know what fear is. Now you say that fear is fundamentally an experience.
Quoting Isaac
Not exactly. I never said experience is the ability to report on working memory. You can be unable to report on working memory and still have experiences. When I say "reach for the word red to describe..." I don't mean literally saying the word "red". I still see red things without remarking "this is red" each time. I just need to have the mental category "red" to be able to see red things, not necessarily be able to report them.
What I said was sufficient conditions for consciousness, not necessary ones. I don't know necessary conditions.
Quoting Isaac
But it's not an unreasonable assumption. We know consciousness is produced under these particular conditions. There is no evidence to deviate from these conditions by attributing consciousness to anything else without first making a "consciousness-o-meter" to test our hypothesis.
Glad you liked it, I was introduced to Bitbol on this forum and find his work illuminating. He has an excellent YouTube lecture on Kant and Bohr.
Quoting Olivier5
It’s fear. For that, see Thomas Nagel’s essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Sorry if I’m overburdening you with reading materials. :yikes: )
Quoting Olivier5
Of course! I think biosemiotics, about which I’ve learned a huge amount from this forum, is part of that idea. Also I really like a philosopher of biology by the name of Steve Talbot.
Thanks. That pretty much ties in with my understanding of Seth's position from his papers. The aspects I don't see how you're attributing are things like...
Quoting Marchesk
...and...
Quoting Marchesk
Seth's work, his research objective in fact, is to do exactly that, explain the one in terms of the other. When he talks about matching first-person reports to third person analysis, he's explaining his method, not reifying first-person reports.
Quoting Marchesk
Again, methodologically, not ontologically.
Quoting Marchesk
No, you've misunderstood what he's saying here. He's saying that the posterior cortical activity could not explain why the region should be associated with consciousness, not because of some fundamental inability to provide such explanations, but because the specific functions within that region don't encompass a wide enough base of signals related to conscious reports. He's making a purely neurological point, not a deep philosophical one. He's just saying 'good as these single modality correlations are, the don't address the real problem because it is multi-modal. He's not saying anything like what's being advanced on this thread. His entire lab would be rendered pointless if he held to that view.
Seth's View on perception is basically where I'm getting a lot of what I'm saying here.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17588928.2015.1026888, is unfortunately paywalled, but this paper gives a reasonably good account. He talks specifically about an active inference model of colour synthesis explaining conscious perception of colour.
[my bolding]
What is preventing someone with urbach-wiethe disease (passing over the complications in simply correlating the condition with a lack of ability to feel fear) from saying "being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride". If being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride, then someone correctly identifying it as such has understood what fear is, haven't they? I don't see the contradiction.
Quoting khaled
How could you possibly know that?
[quote=Anil Seth]The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself.[/quote]
He's not denying phenomenology. He isn't reifying the hard problem, but he's also not dismissing it. Rather, he's proposing a way forward for investigating consciousness. And it might turn out that the hard problem isn't so impossible after all.
While you have been arguing from an eliminativist view in this thread, dismissing phenomenology as irrelevant or replaceable by non-phenomenological terms. That is not what Anil is doing. He is talking about mapping brain processes to consciousness, and see where that takes us.
From the article:
[quote=Anil Seth]Armed with this theory of perception, we can return to consciousness. Now, instead of asking which brain regions correlate with conscious (versus unconscious) perception, we can ask: which aspects of predictive perception go along with consciousness? A number of experiments are now indicating that consciousness depends more on perceptual predictions, than on prediction errors.[/quote]
You missed the quote where Anil talks about how identifying consciousness with something like integrated information is a form of panpsychism. And it's something Chalmers himself has endorsed, although from a property dualist view. Notice how Anil does not replace consciousness with a predictive model, rather it's a mapping from one to the other as part of the ongoing investigation.
I fully endorse what Dr. Seth is doing. If the hard problem or explanatory gap is every to be resolved, it's along these lines. It's not along the lines of pretending it's just an invention by philosophers.
On a separate note we probably agree on, I do like the talk of perception being an indirect and predictive process. Very interesting stuff.
Nothing prevents them from saying it. But they haven't had said experience. Therefore they do not know what they're talking about.
Quoting Isaac
The contradiction is you saying that fear is a public concept and not an experience and at the same time that fear is an experience.
Quoting Isaac
I don't know but I assume. In the same way I don't know that you're conscious but I assume you are. It's just that this assumption is so basic we say we "know" others are consicous and that some animals are conscious, etc. For instance, if Helen Keller never learned to communicate with people, I would still assume she was conscious.
Hoo-boy! That will drive some of direct realists on here battty.
Back to the [s]quining[/s] shivering. Anil does mention qualia on the podcast. He doesn't dismiss it. Just says that it's the philosophical term for the contents of consciousness. Then goes on to talk about building bridges and mapping brain processes to those wonderful sensations we all know intimately.
I never cared enough about gods to think or want this or that of them. They are metaphors, the way I see them, sometimes useful and poetic metaphors but nothing more. What I came to value over the years is spirituality, that is to say, to leave the transcendental door open.
There's a misunderstanding somewhere. I do not divide the world in a physical/mental sense, or a physical/non physical sense. Internal, external, that which consists of both. Conscious experience being of the third; part physical, part non physical; part internal, part external, part neither.
Quoting Wayfarer
If only writing a paper that makes one famous warrants believing that the paper actually says something coherently. I've just critiqued the very idea of "what it's like" earlier in this thread. I stand by that critique.
And that's different from what it's like for Siri to feel cold when she tells me, "Burrr, it's 20 degrees outside". Because she doesn't feel anything.
I haven't had a rollercoaster ride, but I know what one is. I can use the term correctly. I don't see how you can justify a difference with 'fear'. Why do I need to have experienced 'fear' to know what I'm talking about when I use the term, but I don't need to have experienced a rollercoaster ride to know what I'm talking about when I use the term?
Quoting khaled
Experiences themselves (as a models of interocepted states) are public concepts. That's what the Barrett paper was about. Do you read the stuff I cite or not, because it's not worth my while doing so if not?
Fear is further a category of experiences. What belongs in that category is a public convention.
Quoting khaled
My bad, we've had this misunderstanding before and I haven't learnt from it. 'Reporting' has a technical meaning in cognitive science, it doesn't necessarily mean spoken or written. Think of it as a writing a journal in your head.
I don't know what to say. We could trade Anil Seth quotes all day. I've read most of his papers (certainly the Sackler lab work, anyway). I've been to three of his lectures and I've worked, briefly, with a couple of people from his lab. You've either misunderstood his position or you've misunderstood mine because a large chunk of my position on this comes from Seth's work. He's certainly not opposed to the position I'm expounding here and he's not a supporter of Chalmers, Nagel et al's position on this.
It's not that I've independently come up with a theory and now I'm saying "look Anil Seth agrees with me", it's mostly his theory that I'm presenting here. Him, Friston, Barrett, Edelman... all of whom frequently collaborate on the same papers and are very close in their view on this.
Because it sure as hell seemed like you were arguing along eliminativist lines to me and others in this thread. In fact, in the very post before your reply to me you're doing it again. Replacing the experience of fear with talk of a model and public convention.
Methodologically, yes. I wouldn't have put it that way (I don't literally agree with every word he says, of course), but broadly speaking yes.
In psychology there's very little choice but to start out with self-reports and ask "what's going on to cause this?" We can't just look at brains and expect to 'see' what's going on without any phenomenological data. We get people to say what they're experiencing, we look at their behaviours, we correlate these with brain activity (and other behaviours) and make inferences.
I wonder why that is. :chin:
Because brains are just lumps of biological matter with electrical and chemical activity. Just looking at it isn't going to tell us what any of it's doing any more than looking at a microprocessor is going to tell us what software is on it.
The point is that once certain mappings have been established (and a huge quantity have), then we get correlations, strongly predictive models, statistical inferences... Once we reach a certain threshold we can start to look at aberrant phenomenological reports and say "well, either this report's not quite right or we have to throw away all these otherwise excellent models". Since we've absolutely no reason to presume phenomenological reports are always accurate (as in providing the type of data point we're interested in), we don't just take them at face value anymore as we might have done at the outset of the project, hence Seth and Barrett's work on public models of phenomenon like emotions and colour.
One of the possible mappings of brain activities to phenomenological experience is via public models like 'fear'. Why would you rule that out?
And there you go again. I thought for a moment you were backing off the eliminativism.
Quoting Isaac
Nothing is always accurate. Certainly not our perception of the world. What matters is that phenomenological experiences exist and need to be accounted for. We see colors. We feel emotions, pains, taste food. We dream. We visualize. Many of us have inner dialog. We relive memories at times.
I don't know wha it means to say fear is a public model. I can't always tell when someone is afraid. Particularly if they wish to hide it, or are one of those people with good poker faces who don't wear their emotions on their sleeves. In fact, I don't know to a large extent what everyone else is thinking or feeling. Only some of it is apparent, to the extent I'm reading them accurately. Which is always a guessing game that can be wrong. And even when they tell me, I don't know if it's the truth. People often omit things or tell white lies.
It's like saying lying is a public model. Which would mean we could accurately detect liars, right? Something that would stand up in court.
No one's denying any of that from a phenomenological perspective. It's just that from a process perspective some of those accounts are not as we think they are. When you feel 'angry' it feels like you're 'finding' yourself to be in some state, but you're not. There's no such state. It doesn't exist. So that can't be right, no matter how much it feels like it is - or else we discard the idea that conscious experience is caused by the brain, in which case why bother looking at it at all.
So people like Barrett try to find out what's going on. How can a set of physiological states with no boundary and no non-overlapping properties give rise to the feeling that we're 'angry'? The answer she proposes (and with substantial empirical support) is that we use public models to infer the causes of our interocepted signals. "I've just had someone punch me, people get 'angry' when they're punched, these mental states I'm receiving data about must be 'anger'"
Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides.
Quoting Marchesk
It's not about you telling if someone else is afraid. It's about them deciding that they themselves are afraid.
Also in the moment when someone punches me, I'm probably reacting in anger, not stopping to do some reflection. That comes after the reaction.
Quoting Isaac
So does this mean other animals do not have experiences of colors, tastes, memories, because they lack the language to ask themselves about how other animals typically react?
And I can't make sense of that for color at all. So you're saying seeing a red apple is the result of learning the public model for using the term "red"? And that generates an experience in the reporting?
Does this mean Helen Keller had no conscious experiences until she learned the word water by the feel of it from her tutor writing the word on her hand? That seems exactly backwards.
Thinking about this some more, how would the words "afraid", "red" or "pain" have become part of language if there wasn't fear, color, or uncomfortable sensations to begin with? What exactly is the public model that we learn based on?
We don't have any words for sonar experiences. Could we make one up and get people to have sonar experiences by teaching them the model?
@Banno (because "seeing as" and "seeing an aspect")
Yeah! That's a good analogy. Translating it back to make sure we're concordant: the priors=flippers, task parameters =pegs and the strength of the trigger = hidden states.
I think what I claimed is a bit stronger, it isn't just that the hidden state variables act as a sufficient cause for perceptual features to form (given task parameters and priors), I was also claiming that the value of the hidden states acts as a sufficient cause for the content of those formed perceptual features. So if I touch something at 100 degrees celcius (hidden state value), it will feel hot (content of perceptual feature).
I think a thesis like that is required for perception to be representational in some regard. Firstly the process of perceptual feature formation has to represent hidden states in some way, and in order for the perceptual features it forms to be fit for purpose representations of the hidden states, whatever means of representation has to link the hidden state values with the perceptual feature content. If generically/ceteris paribus there failed to be a relationship between the hidden states and perceptual features with that character, perception wouldn't be a pragmatic modelling process.
Quoting Isaac
Just to recap, I understand that paragraph was written in the context of delineating the role language plays in perceptual feature formation. I'll try and rephrase what you wrote in that context, see if I'm keeping up.
Let's take showing someone a picture of a duck. Even if they hadn't seen anything like a duck before, they would be able to demarcate the duck from whatever background it was on and would see roughly the same features; they'd see the wing bits, the bill, the long neck etc. That can be thought of splitting up patterns of (visual?) stimuli into chunks regardless of whether the chunks are named, interpreted, felt about etc. The evidence for that comes in two parts: firstly that the parts of the brain that it is known do abstract language stuff activate later than the object recognition parts that chunk the sensory stimuli up in the first place, and secondly that it would be such an inefficient strategy to require the brain have a unique "duck" category in order to recognise the duck as a distinct feature of the picture. IE, it is implausible that seeing a duck as a duck is required to see the object in the picture that others would see as the duck.
I think we have to be quite careful here, whatever process creates perceptual features has the formed perceptual features that we have in them - like ducks, and faces. I know the face example, so I'll talk about that. When someone looks at something and sees a static image or a stable object, that's actually produced by constant eye movement and some inferential averaging over what comes into the eyes. When someone sees an image as a whole, they first need to explore it with their eyes. Eyes fixate on salient components of the image in what's called a fixation point, and move between them with a long eye movement called a saccade. When someone forms a fixation point on a particular part of the image, that part of the image is elicited in more detail and for longer - it has lots of fovea time allocated to it. Even during a fixation event, constant tiny eye movements called microsaccades are made for various purposes. When you put an eye tracker on someone and measure their fixations and saccades over a face it looks something like this:
(Middle plot is a heat map of fixation time over an image, right plot has fixations as the large purple bits and the purple lines are saccades)
But what we see is (roughly) a continuously unchanging image of a face. Different information sources [hide=*](fixation points, jitter around them)[/hide] of different quality [hide=*](whether the light is hitting the fovea or not)[/url] at different times [url=*](fixation points are a sequence)[/hide] of different hidden states [hide=*](light reflected from different facial locations of different colours, shininess)[/hide] being aggregated together into a (roughly) unitary, time stable object. Approximate constancy emerging from radical variation.
That indicates that the elicited data is averaged and modelled somehow, and what we see - the picture - emerges from that ludicrously complicated series of hidden state data (and priors + task parameters). But what is the duration of a perceptual event of seeing such a face? If it were quicker than it takes to form a brief fixation on the image, we wouldn't see the whole face. Similarly, people forage the face picture for what is expected to be informative new content based on what fixations they've already made - eg if someone sees one eye, they look for another and maybe pass over the nose. So it seems the time period the model is updating, eliciting and promoting new actions in is sufficiently short that it does so within fixations. But that makes the aggregate perceptual feature of the face no longer neatly correspond to a single "global state"/global update of the model - because from before it is updating at least some parts of it during brief fixations, and the information content of brief fixations are a component part of the aggregate perceptual feature of someone's face.
Notice that within the model update within a fixation, salience is already a generative factor for new eye movements. Someone fixates on an eye and looks toward where another prominent facial feature is expected to be. Salience strongly influences that sense of "prominence", and it's interwoven with the categorisation of the stimulus as a face - the eyes move toward where a "facial feature" would be.
What that establishes is that salience and ongoing categorisation of sensory stimuli are highly influential in promoting actions during the environmental exploration that generates the stable features of our perception.
So it seems that the temporal ordering of dorsal and ventral signals doesn't block the influence of salience and categorisation on promoting exploratory actions; and if they are ordered in that manner within a single update step, that ordering does not necessarily transfer to an ordering on those signal types within a single perceptual event - there can be feedback between them if there are multiple update steps, and feedforwards from previous update steps which indeed have had such cultural influences.
The extent to which language use influences the emerging perceptual landscape will be at least the extent to which language use modifies and shapes the salience and categorisation components that inform the promotion of exploratory behaviours. What goes into that promotion need not be accrued within the perceptual event or a single model update. That dependence on prior and task parameters leaves a lot of room for language use (and other cultural effects) to play a strong role in shaping the emergence of perceptual features.
Quoting khaled
Khaled's picture of what is going on prevents him form seeing the obvious falsehood. We have a person who says things such as "being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride" and "I am unable to feel scared because I have urbach-wiethe disease", but Khaled is obligated by his mistaken picture of mind to say that this person does not know of what they speak.
Now there is something that this person cannot do; they cannot feel fear (ex hypothesi). That's a quite public fact about them.