Keith Frankish on the Hard Problem and the Illusion of Qualia
Philosophy Bites Podcast
The podcast is only 15 minutes. The two hosts interview Keith Frankish about his position on the hard problem. Keith does agree the problem is difficult:
[quote=Keith Frankish]We can tell quite a detailed story about the light rays hitting your eye, being focused by the lens in your eye onto your retina. About the signal that sends to the optic nerve to your visual cortex. About the processing that happens there. The various forms of discriminations made by the visual system. But how, in the course of that, does the experience arise?[/quote]
Which has come up in a couple recent threads, particularly the Reading Dennett's "Quining Qualia". Frankish goes on to say he used to think that consciousness was just a way to represent the world:
[quote=Keith Frankish]Maybe the experience you had of looking at the green leaf , the way it felt, was just a way of representing the world. Representing the fact that there is a leaf out there that has certain characterists. That reflects light a certain way. And maybe that's all there is to it. That's one strategy. And it's a strategy I used to think would work. But now, I'm not so sure about that. I've come to think that qualia are really too mysterious to be explained in physical terms.[/quote]
So instead, he suggests that qualia are an illusion. By this, he does not mean the experience of the green leaf itself (or red apple, etc). He just doesn't think the experience has any properties of qualia. It just seems to be that way.
[quote=Keith Frankish]What I'm suggesting is you'e under an illusion about the nature of the internal world. About what's involved in your having that experience.[/quote]
This seems to accord with what Dennett has been arguing. The problem is Dennett doesn't come out and directly say that, while Frankish does explicitly say that of course we do have an experience of the green leaf.
[quote=Keith Frankish]I don't think that consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness is what we're all familiar with. That's not an illusion. The question is what's involved in having those experiences and those sensations.[/quote]
So what accounts for the illusion that conscious experience has properties of qualia? Keith suggests that one the one hand there is the perceptual account. But then there is a separate internal monitoring of the perceptual processes that gives rise to the sense of a rich, internal world. And the reason for this illusion is to make ourselves and other humans feel special. The seeming hardness is a feature of the illusion, with the implication being one of survival and ethical considerations.
So then, the debate about the hard problem would turn on whether qualia can be explained away as an illusion. My issue is still how to account for the sensations of color, sound, etc.
Edit: link updated to the correct podcast.
The podcast is only 15 minutes. The two hosts interview Keith Frankish about his position on the hard problem. Keith does agree the problem is difficult:
[quote=Keith Frankish]We can tell quite a detailed story about the light rays hitting your eye, being focused by the lens in your eye onto your retina. About the signal that sends to the optic nerve to your visual cortex. About the processing that happens there. The various forms of discriminations made by the visual system. But how, in the course of that, does the experience arise?[/quote]
Which has come up in a couple recent threads, particularly the Reading Dennett's "Quining Qualia". Frankish goes on to say he used to think that consciousness was just a way to represent the world:
[quote=Keith Frankish]Maybe the experience you had of looking at the green leaf , the way it felt, was just a way of representing the world. Representing the fact that there is a leaf out there that has certain characterists. That reflects light a certain way. And maybe that's all there is to it. That's one strategy. And it's a strategy I used to think would work. But now, I'm not so sure about that. I've come to think that qualia are really too mysterious to be explained in physical terms.[/quote]
So instead, he suggests that qualia are an illusion. By this, he does not mean the experience of the green leaf itself (or red apple, etc). He just doesn't think the experience has any properties of qualia. It just seems to be that way.
[quote=Keith Frankish]What I'm suggesting is you'e under an illusion about the nature of the internal world. About what's involved in your having that experience.[/quote]
This seems to accord with what Dennett has been arguing. The problem is Dennett doesn't come out and directly say that, while Frankish does explicitly say that of course we do have an experience of the green leaf.
[quote=Keith Frankish]I don't think that consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness is what we're all familiar with. That's not an illusion. The question is what's involved in having those experiences and those sensations.[/quote]
So what accounts for the illusion that conscious experience has properties of qualia? Keith suggests that one the one hand there is the perceptual account. But then there is a separate internal monitoring of the perceptual processes that gives rise to the sense of a rich, internal world. And the reason for this illusion is to make ourselves and other humans feel special. The seeming hardness is a feature of the illusion, with the implication being one of survival and ethical considerations.
So then, the debate about the hard problem would turn on whether qualia can be explained away as an illusion. My issue is still how to account for the sensations of color, sound, etc.
Edit: link updated to the correct podcast.
Comments (196)
My opinion is that qualia are a basic property of matter, like shape, size, weight, etc., and they arise from complex combinations of superposition in systems of entanglements within entanglements I called coherence fields. This means that colors of the visible spectrum are analogous to the phenomena within our minds: its all extremely complex superposition, hybridized waves or wavicles producing intricate quantum resonances that are images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings. The following will give you a basic sense for what the model consists in.
So basically in this account the brain is a complex cluster of waves that interfere, and these interferences adopt the form of shape, size, mass, weight...and "qualia" or superpositions. If the theory is accurate, qualia aren't an illusion, they're basic to the material world. If any of these concepts are difficult to grasp, I'll be happy to clarify. This has actually been discussed at length already at this forum. The following threads I posted might give you some ideas.
Qualia and Quantum Mechanics
Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, The Sequel
Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, the Reality Possibly
I'd call it transpsychism in a sense because consciousness or qualitative experience can inhere in more types of matter than organic brains, but qualia are not intrinsically experiential in a way analogous to human phenomenality. The idea is that psychical experience, to the extent we define it as such, is intrinsic to matter, infused into the structure of objects, not generated as a supervenient illusion, abolishing substance duality and the mind/body problem. This does not mean that existence is more animate than inanimate.
The usage of the word illusion in this context strikes me as strange. What is it an illusion of? If the experience is "real" but doesn't involve any qualia, then the qualia are not an illusion. They're a representation. But that just brings us back to the view Frankish rejects.
Quoting Marchesk
This doesn't seem to solve the issue of how the internal monitoring process constructs the internal world with qualia if no such qualia are present in experience. It would force us to conclude that qualia are a priori properties of the human mind.
Quoting Marchesk
Isn't this an explanation that could equally be applied to any possible outcome? That is, it merely restates that since all properties of the mind are evolved, qualia must also be evolved. But it doesn't provide any account of how this works.
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
The problem is that an explanation for everything is an explanation for nothing. If you can equally explain every outcome, you have zero knowledge. If you look at things from the perspective of evolutionary biology, everything has some kind of evolutionary reasoning. But this only provides you with a plausible explanation given the framing. It doesn't tell you what actually happened.
All I mean by the concept of evolution in my quote is a convergence of causal vectors we classify as biological. Didn't intend to introduce the baggage of any particular psychological, pious or godless form of that theory.
Forgive my laziness, but is that what he's saying? I read that as: what you think is going on in the brain is not what's really going on. Chalmers insists there is something to having an experience that is separate from the neurological activity involved in having an experience. This seems to be the illusion to me or, rather, a prejudice. Not that qualia do not exist, but that what we infer from their existence is an illusion. This also seems consistent with what Dennett says: it's not that qualia -- which are familiar, everyday phenomena -- do not exist, but that they are not what we think about them.
Yeah, except they wouldn't have the properties for us to use the word qualia. We're conscious, just not in the way it seems, I guess. That does raise the question of what it means to be conscious.
I think he said in this podcast that perception is representational, but introspection of perception is where it seems like the representation has special properties of qualia. And that's the illusion. But it's a useful one.
This sounds like a metacognition approach.
Yeah, presumably the task is left up to neuroscience.
They wouldn't have the extraneous properties, sure. But properties of qualia ought to be no more than those we know we observe. The original definition is suitably vague so as to avoid any illusory qualities:
e.g. red things can be collated across space and time as red things.
Qualia definitions that go well beyond this, such as being the *feeling* of experiencing the colour red, ascribe qualia with additional properties that are probably not real. I am not sure I am ever conscious of the feeling of seeing a red thing. And indeed the point of such definitions is to insist upon an ungraspable component left over when the functional aspect of the mind is understood.
We have the illusion of qualia not in the moment of experience, but retrospectively due to our ability to conceptually represent such entities. It's a trick of language, basically; the sort of thing Wittgenstein was on about with his "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.".
I think you meant to link to the podcast here from Oct 11, 2014. The podcast you linked to is on Conscious Thought from Jan 15, 2017 (and is 12 mins long).
The Conscious Thought podcast made perfect sense to me and qualia wasn't mentioned at all. Whereas in the hard problem/qualia podcast, Frankish seems to accept qualia as an apparent phenomena to explain (i.e., which he goes on to say is an illusion), rather than rejecting wholesale the subject/object dualism that gives rise to it. Unlike Frankish, it doesn't seem to me that we experience qualia, so there's nothing to explain (or explain away). Instead, it seems to me that we experience the world, which includes sunsets and red apples and human beings. And those are the things that we seek to explain.
Quoting Andrew M
Sunsets and red apples are experienced a particular way because we're human. The physiology doesn't account for why we experience it in terms of colors and other sensations.
Don't you imagine the various animals experience in terms of colours and other sensations? Isn't the difference just that, unlike the other animals, we can talk about it, conceive it in terms of mental representations; talk and conceptions which then get reified to appear to us as mental entities we call "qualia"?
Some people cling to those assumptions because it suits them, because they are emotionally invested, because thinking that way enables them to support imagining a hidden spiritual dimension, reject materialist and/or evolutionary explanations, or whatever; but I don't think you are one of those. I'm familiar with that mode of thinking because I was one of those at least half-heartedly. Am I mistaken?
This is nothing more than the usual -of-the-gaps argument: If science were capable of explaining consciousness, it would have already (impossibility of future scientific discovery); Science has not already explained consciousness; Therefore science cannot explain consciousness (and therefore consciousness is magic).
Janus' previous post already deals with your response to it:
Quoting Janus
:100:
It's not a god-of-the-gaps argument if the difficulty is conceptual. It's more of either something is wrong with physicalism or something is wrong with consciousness. The reason for this could be epistemological, or it could be ontological.
How do the colors, sounds, feels, etc come from the color-less, soundless, feel-less matter? We know about the matter because we experience it with colors, sounds, feels, etc. but our scientific understanding is a necessary abstraction from the particulars of our human experience. So either our abstract understanding is leaving something out, or our particular experiences is not what we think it is. Or there is some way to derive the particulars from the abstract.
Or one can go off in a different metaphysical direction and avoid the hard problem in favor of other difficulties. Philosophy demands some bullet-biting sacrifice from all of us.
Grateful for the reference I needed here:
But you are not promoting that by saying that "where is the scientific explanation for...?" You are pointing to gaps in knowledge and claiming them for the inexplicable. What I guess you'd like is an ab initio conclusion that consciousness is not amenable to scientific modelling, for which pointing to gaps in knowledge is irrelevant.
Quoting Marchesk
Because the causes of our human experience are not part of that experience.
This is a an extremely important observation in my opinion but it's probably something that comes out of a reading that's peculiar to me.
Let's, for simplicity, take two of our senses viz. hearing and sight. Current understanding on these sensory systems is that it all boils down to electrical signals traveling along neurons called action potentials. If you were to isolate an auditory nerve (hearing) and a ocular nerve (sight) and observe the action potentials that propagate along them you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, not even the world's most renowned neurologist could. In essence, this means, insofar as our brains are concerned, the perceptual neuronal signals of sight and sound are indistinguishable. Yet, we can identify sounds and sights as separate. At some point in the perception process, our brains can tell the difference between an auditory nerve signal and a visual nerve signal but, as neurology informs us, there's no difference physical difference between the two - they're both action potentials.
Now, it's true that the neurons themselves are dedicated structures in the sense that auditory neurons are sensitive to sound and not light and vice versa for ocular nerves. However, this doesn't solve the problem of how the two perceptions, sound and light, are differentiated because both ultimately end up as action potentials.
As an analogy, imagine two people who speak different languages - one Hindi (ears) and the other English (eyes). Both of them, upon hearing something spoken in their own language translate it into the same language, suppose German, and not only that, into the exact same words in German. So "Karma" in Hindi and "Yellow" in English get translated into the same word, "Herr", in German. How can the receiver of this information (the mind), the information German "Herr", tell if it's "Karma" or "Yellow"? This is inexplicable in physical terms because what's going on physically are the action potentials and one action potential isn't distinguishable from the other at least to my knowledge.
Hmm. I wonder, if this were the case, how could we imagine anything at all. What causes one to experience unicorns and dragons?
And if this were the case then how can we ever say that our experience is about a non-experienced cause? Are you saying that we can only talk about our experiences and not about what caused them? How can we ever talk about things that are not part of the experience, like electrons being waves and how they move through holes?
No, I'm saying that no one is conscious of the causes of our phenomena: we have no knowledge of objects that cause phenomena except indirectly through phenomena; we have no awareness of light lensing through the eyeball and being projected onto the retina; we have no consciousness of outline detection occurring, of images being turned upside down, of colour being whiteshifted, or any of the other processes of the brain that create qualia: the objects of experience and their properties. What we get is, if not an *end* result, a late iteration of a metaview of the data. That is immediacy of qualia.
For as long as we think that way there will seem to be a chasm we cannot cross; but we don't have to think that way. There is no self-evidence involved in that view, as much as there might seem to be, due to our "bewitchment by means of language", or our emotional investment.
An illusion happens when something is mistaken for something else; the illusion of a magic trick, the illusion of movement in an optical illusion; it appears like one thing but is another.
The notion then is that qualia are an illusion in that they appear one way but are not actually like that.
My objection to qualia is that in so far as they are subject to discussion they are just what we see, taste and feel; and so far as they are of philosophical interest, they are not available for discussion. A close approximation would be someone deciding to call their beetle in a box "Fred". The beetle still drops out of the conversation.
One might understand Frankish as suggesting that consciousness is an illusion. If so, then it appears one way buty is actually another. But I can't see hoe this would work. I can't see how, for example, my pain could be an illusion; what could be mistaken for pain? Perhaps it is just a very strong itch? Then the matter of contention is not the nature of the sensation but the correct word to use - pain or itch.
And don't come along claiming that I disavow qualia and then use them; my beef with qualia is no more than that they are not needed, and that using them leads the discussion astray. I'm happy to talk about sensations, pains, colours and so on.
More generally, it seems that discussions of consciousness fail to take into account the vastly differing experiences we put under that heading. I've often pointed out that the paradigmatic case is the sort of consciousness of which one learns in a first aid course. The discussion should include sleep, dreams, sensations, responses, locked-in syndrome, anesthesia, mental narratives, lack of mental narratives, unconscious reactions, embodied cognition...
SO here's an outline of a quest for you: could you prove that a philosophical zombie - a person who doesn't experience qualia - is not conscious? That is, why shouldn't we extend the definition of consciousness so as to include philosophical zombies? THe answer will be something like that a philosophical zombie is by definition unconscious because they do not experience any qualia. SO would a locked-in person who is separated from their senses and body in such a way that they can neither perceive anything nor respond. Suppose that despite that, they have an internal narrative. Are we going to say they are unconscious? OR are we going to claim that an internal narrative is itself a qual, hence divorcing qualia from perception? If the latter, then isn't what you are describing a homunculus, something that experiences its own thoughts rather than having its own thoughts? Thoughts would then not be constitutive of the self.
My position is that this sort of discussion only serves to further demonstrate the philosophical bankruptcy of qualia.
I already told you, an intrinsic aspect of quantum superposition in matter is the qualia constituents that contribute to colors, sounds and feels, conjoined in specific and relatively rare ways to generate qualitative experience in brains and elsewhere. The basic scientific framework is resolved, that is what we are going to find. Human qualia are not action potentials alone, they're wave interferences between quantum resonances in cells and the global quantum field of the brain that is exuded by trillions of simultaneous action potentials, producing along with additional factors an extremely complex array of superpositions.
oh, @Marchesk, when you gonna listen?
Quoting Enrique
Tell me again how talk of qualia clarifies things.
you nitwit! lol matter=quantum superposition=qualia
Oh. Ok. Tell me again how talk of qualia clarifies things.
arf!=meow!=moo! lol
It would be wicked cool if we could tie quantum weirdness to consciousness, but color me a little skeptical.
Most biochemical reactions happen too fast to be accounted for without near instantaneous motion such as in entanglement. Systems of entangled particles like subatomic bodies of water conjoin molecules in photosynthetic reaction centers, the foundation of the ecosystem, and will probably be discovered in much functionality throughout nature. Magnetoreception in birds and butterflies relies on a quantum process called the fast triplet reaction that is sensitive enough to register the magnetic field of the earth. The brain produces a similar field as standing waves measured by an EEG. Biochemistry of the nervous system and especially the brain may be fine tuned for responding to this field, generating the synthetic holism of human consciousness. Fields on fields cause superpositions analogous to hybrid wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. Entanglement systems similar to photosynthetic reaction centers could have comparable superposition effects with the brain's electric field. Qualitative consciousness is the brain's electric field superposed with these entanglement systems as honed by evolution.
Its the only possible explanation.
Qualitative consciousness on the macroscale is emergent from material qualia on the nanoscale. Its not a simple ascending pyramid though, top down factors exist as well.
What better reason to throw such empty notions and/or language use aside?
:brow:
:smirk:
If everything is physical (physicalism), then how do we account for (i.e. categorise) the mental/experiential?
Quoting Janus
Experience could emerge from brute matter, but then it is not identical with brute matter, and is therefore not itself physical (matter).
Quoting Janus
I take it you are using "emerge from" here to mean "evolve from", whereas the putative emergence of experience from matter occurs as a process of a (current) functioning body. Experience itself may have emerged/evolved as life evolved, but that's not the same use of the term associated with the "emergence" of experience/consciousness from the matter of a functioning body, which occurs concurrently.
Quoting Janus
Should we just give up on these philosophical questions? Perhaps they are conceptual problems - if so, why not try and resolve them?
Isn't that a bit like saying you believe we have qualia, but we just can't discuss them; which is to say that they are ineffable?
Rather than "hedg[ing] his bets", as Dennett posits, perhaps this is what Wittgenstein means when he says:
Quoting Marchesk
What conscious sensations?
The one's you're aware of.
If that were the case then Wittgenstein would admit that there is no difference between between pain-behaviour with pain and pain-behaviour without pain. Instead, he says: "What greater difference could there be?"
Either you can explain what you're referring to when you use "conscious sensations" or you cannot. It's not my job to fill in your blanks. I do not use such language. I'm aware of "conscious sensations" as an utterly inadequate metacognitive notion borne of a gross understanding of thought and belief, and thus conscious experience.
Is it? OK, then qualia are not ineffable, and we can talk about them.
So, what's the next step? What do we infer?
I made the claim:
Quoting Banno
This seems to me to be in keeping with the Wittgenstein quote.
Wittgenstein's point is not that we cannot talk about pain. Read the whole of ?304. Better, read thru to ?309 - the fly and the bottle.
Pain is not a thing in the way a chair is. But our grammar misleads us into thinking that it is.
As I have previously quoted:
He is saying only that qualia do not enter into the language. He does not deny their existence:
"The conclusion was only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something [i.e. qualia] about which nothing could be said."
Colour is classes of illumination events.
Pain is classes of trauma events.
I thank you.
Can you show that he didn't? Wittgenstein himself - not one of his interpreters - states the Tractatus contained "grave mistakes". I've provided relevant quotes from the PI and my reading of them in relation to qualia. You now appear to want to change the subject rather than to address these directly.
You’ve been talking about them qualia for weeks. FYI.
That's risible. You selectively quoted Wittgenstein and when challenged used another misplaced quote to defend your misreading. You're better than that.
Quoting Olivier5
Oooo snap. How clever you are.
What challenge? A random quote from the Tractatus which you have failed to demonstrate was a view Wittgenstein still held in his later years? I met your random quote with my own. Try an argument instead.
Edit: As for your accusation of selective quoting, I believe that the private language argument and the sections of it I have quoted from the PI are much more pertinent to Dennett's paper and this discussion than your one unsupported quote from the Tractatus.
How can you not see the contradiction here? How can someone claim that we can't be aware of the causes while at the same time explaining the causes as if they had "direct" knowledge of the causes? :chin:
If you aren't aware of any of this then how is it that you are able to report it and explain it? "Indirect" and "direct" are meaningless terms if you are asserting facts about the world. The way you are asserting these things makes me think that you are perfectly aware of how your experiences are caused.. How did you come to know about these causes and report them if you dont have any awareness of them?
By all means, point out where I suggested that I have direct awareness of, say, stabilising my field of view or whiteshifting the colours I see. My statement was that abstraction from subjective experience is a necessary part of understanding subjective experience because the causes of subjective experience are not part of subjective experience. For instance, I am not aware of turning the retinal image upside down; I am only aware of the transformed image (which is why I am happy to talk about qualia at all). The fact that I can be extremely confident that this transformation occurs does not rely on subjective experience, or divine revelation for that matter, but on scientific progress and study. It might yet transpire that science and books and research journals are a conspiracy to mislead us or some such, but I'm happy that that's a vanishingly small likelihood.
The experiential in this context is metacognition or 'conception' of qualia arising from brain plasticity. This domain is always changing as we acquire more information about the world and is designed to do so, for instance Freudian concepts have entered public consciousness and affected behavior. The key is to facilitate its maximum adaptiveness and versatility so we can incorporate new concepts as they arise from science and elsewhere, as rationality, the best reasons for holding our various perspectives. Veering too far into materialism, nonanalytical emotion, mysticism or any particular perspective to the exclusion of contrary ones quickly becomes maladaptive. Experimenting balance and progress is the ultimate human value. Rationality isn't foolproof, but its the best metacognitive strategy we've got, and while not necessary in every situation, effort should be exerted to make it the core of culture.
The colors you see, the pains you feel. I thought that was clear.
Your being a pain in my ass?
You imply that you have "direct" awareness by describing these facts. What is missing from your explanation of the facts of the causes of our experiences? My point was that "direct" and "indirect" are meaningless if you are still able to know the facts, which you just reported, unless you are saying that you don't know what you are talking about.
Quoting Kenosha KidIf you aren't aware of the cause, then how can you even say anything about it? What is missing from your report of the state-of-affairs that precede our experience of something? How would someone who has direct awareness of these states-of-affairs describe them compared to someone who has indirect awareness of those same states-of-affairs? If they both say the same things, then what is the difference between indirect and direct awareness? If the person that had direct awareness says something different, then does that not mean that you don't know what you are talking about because you are only aware indirectly?
No, you might infer it. I do not imply it. By explicitly stating that we don't, there is no implication that we do. "My name begins with J and is not John" does not imply "My name is John and is not John."
All direct experience is of phenomena. If we have some raw data and a black box that produces all of my phenomena, there is no contradiction between "I do not have direct experience of the raw data or the black box" and "the black box transforms raw data into my phenomena." You might question the existence of the raw data and the black box, but that doesn't constitute a contradiction.
That wasn't the type of argument I was making. If your "indirect" description of events that cause experiences is no different than a "direct" description then what is the point of even using the terms "direct" and "indirect" when it comes to awareness/knowledge of some event preceding the experience?Quoting Kenosha Kid
What is an indirect experience of phenomena? If there is no such thing, then why use the term, "direct" in the first place? All experience is of phenomena. Then I would ask, Is there anything else, other than experience, that can be of phenomena? For instance, could effects be of their causes?
But they are different. Again, I said quite the opposite.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Precisely because you seem confused by it.
How do you know? Isn't what you said prior to your present experience of what you said? Can't you only infer what you previously said since it happened prior to your present statement of what you previously said?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If confusing me is your intent, then you have succeeded.
In the middle are the psychics, imbued with Soul but not Spirit. They are condemned to navel gazing- questioning if they experience qualia or not. Alas, for all that navel gazing, they will never join us in our navel gassing, so bloated with enlightenment and filled with pneuma are we.
Quoting Enrique
For all the little Banno buddies who still think we need to argue this til the year 3000, maybe you didn't get it the first time lol Qualia aren't about soul/mind/body anymore, they're about distribution of quantum processes within nature and the body, something introspective thought might shed light on.
Thanks for the link and the discussion so far.
1. It's not clear to me what it is that Frankish is claiming to be an illusion. My understanding is broadly that "qualia" is a collective term for experiences. Frankish seems to not like qualia because they have mysterious non-physical properties, but he's relaxed about experiences. Why do qualia have mysterious non-physical properties and experiences don't? What am I missing?
It's said that Frankish "doesn't think the experience has any properties of qualia. It just seems to be that way." What is meant by "properties of qualia"?
2. "Keith suggests that one the one hand there is the perceptual account. But then there is a separate internal monitoring of the perceptual processes that gives rise to the sense of a rich, internal world. And the reason for this illusion is to make ourselves and other humans feel special. The seeming hardness is a feature of the illusion, with the implication being one of survival and ethical considerations."
What's the perceptual account? Bacteria can swim towards a favourable environment, we can explain this process exhaustively by describing chemical processes (stunning knowledge!). Is the bacterium perceiving the light, sugar?
Or does the perceptual account involve seeing?
The separate internal monitoring. Is that not a homunculus?
Maybe that's enough to be going on with for now.
Going deeper in our examination, is the pain in creativesoul’s behind ineffable?
There’s always a “humunculus”. The hypothesis cannot be avoided. Homunculi R us.
Are you ever going to explain what you're talking about? What are you picking out to the exclusion of all else with "conscious sensation"?
One assumes conscious sensations are to be contrasted with... unconscious sensations...?
I agree, but would add that this might not be down to Frankish; that notion of qualia is ill-defined is part of the issue here. Advocates of qualia seem to treat them as if they are something more than just sensations; after all, why introduce them at all if they are just sensations?
So much of the discussion of the hard problem seems to be based on this flawed reasoning.
The fact that we cannot think of a physical model, is neither grounds to say qualia are non physical, nor that they are some kind of "illusion".
I agree.
Quoting Banno
That's true. Which is one reason why people can be mistaken. But if your argument against the idea that we are not conscious of the causes of our consciousness is going to rely on a general doubt about the veracity of anything we experience, you really do have a contradiction on your hands. After all, I'm only rendering knowledge of the causes of our experience indirect. You're questioning the reliability of experience itself, which is going much further (too far imo) down the road. The reliability of experience has nothing to do with my earlier comment; it is the total absence of experience of certain events that underlies my comment.
I'm trying to apply the Principle of Charity by taking Frankish's arguments in their strongest form. Trying to understand what he's trying to say rather than dismissing it. So Banno, or anyone else, do you have a clear understanding of his distinction between qualia and experiences?
Speaking for myself, no:
Quoting bongo fury
Same with,
Quoting Banno
And
Quoting Mijin
Every time a neuroscientist says "neural representation" without clarifying it as readiness to play a social game of agreeing actual representations, a dualist gets more confused.
Quoting unenlightened
:100:
That all depends on what you mean by "conscious", "experience" and "knowledge". If the accuracy of our knowledge is not affected by how direct or indirect the knowledge is, then what is the point of using those terms? I'm only questioning the reliability of the experience by taking what you have said and running with it. If you don't mean to say that the accuracy of our knowledge is affected by the indirect nature of it, then what are you actually saying when you say that our knowledge is "indirect"?
The accuracy likely is affected, but for one thing it avoids going down wrong paths when looking for or describing something. The way people often talk about human reason and it's role, for instance, seems very wrong to me. There was a famous experiment a while ago that showed that neurological behaviour associated with motor responses fired before correlated decision-making processes in the prefrontal cortex. The subjects remember, from their limited but direct phenomenal experience, deciding to act, then acting, when in fact the action appeared to be unconsciously chosen and only consciously ratified -- or rationalised -- after the act. The narrative based on the first person viewpoint is wrong, and this is exceedingly common it seems.
This reminds me very much of Daniel Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 model of the brain and his tests of it. Problems that appear amenable to pattern-matching (the thing that makes it easier to add 5 or 9 to things than 7 or 8) but that pattern-matching would lead to the wrong answer for follow a similar pattern. Human subjects swear blind they worked out the answer, when in fact they seem to be *receiving* an answer and ratifying it. Badly. That is, System 2 (the so-called rational, algorithmic part of the brain associated with conscious decision-making) receives a putative answer from System 1 (the dumb but hard-working pattern-matching part of the brain that acts without conscious input).
There are all sorts of psychological effects that follow from these sorts of behaviours, some good, some terrible, and those effects can be exploited. It's beneficial to know how your mind operates, what mistakes it makes. For instance, the above suggests to me that the conscious mind is not adept at discerning "We should do this, right?" from "We did this FYI." Besides that, it's just interesting.
You are quoting me from a different thread, and I think the context is important here (I was talking about optical illusions).
Sure. And accessible to the interested reader via the quotation link. As with quotations within a thread. If you wish not to be quoted across threads, no problem. :ok:
As in, "no", or "to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere"?
But re-introducing Goodman is a good move.
Should qualify this, I think a place has to be set aside for theorizing unconscious motivation as in psychoanalysis, so a domain of mind exists beyond nature, body and first person thought.
Again, I will cite it as an example of the sort of misconception that talk of qualia engenders.
Both, as in, I think I see how "sensations" (like also images and experiences and representations) is seen as a euphemism for "qualia".
Quoting Banno
Don't get me started, but I love how you could (I probably did) read Languages of Art without forming the vaguest suspicion that the philosophy behind it was in the least bit austere.
Are you able to say what the Illusionists believe we infer from the existence of qualia, and/or what we think about them, Kid?
Quoting Banno
I could also live happily without (the concept of) qualia, we could just say "conscious experiences" instead. But are they available for discussion, in your view?
I'm not a neuroscientist but I would suggest that the differentiation takes place during processing in the different areas of the brain. I vaguely remember reading that synesthesia results from signals going to the wrong location, auditory signals reaching visual processing areas for example, so that sounds result in the perception of colours.
That sounds like Libet: there's still a lot of controversy about these experiments, their findings, their interpretation.
I'm not really following Bongo.
They seem to me either irrelevant or just colours and tastes and so on.
Correct. Libet’s experiment is easily debunked. We know that our decisions are often taken after some deliberation, that we commit to a choice after contemplating that choice, which can make our decisions somewhat predictable (with a better performance than just by chance), as in Libet’s experiment, but we also know that we can take decisions in less than a second (eg when driving, or playing blitz chess) so there’s no possible way to reliably predict such decisions.
There have been lots, but I was thinking of Fried.
Your argument is circular. You're assuming conscious decision-making in precisely the sorts of behaviours (e.g. split-second decisions when driving) that are suggested to be decided unconsciously.
Is there perhaps a missing comma, or is that a general announcement?
I'm a light user of commas. I was wondering if you were saying something interesting.
Not really. I’m not talking of conscious vs. unconscious here, but of predictable in advance vs. unpredictable. Libet’s experiment was testing the ability of a computer coupled with an MRI system to predict the choices made by folks in the MRI, opting between a red and a green button to press (with no consequence to the choice, no punishment or reward, which simplifies the problem quite a lot). Beside pressing one of two buttons, the ‘guinea pigs’ were also asked to note the moment when they felt they took the decision. If memory serves, the finding was that the computer, after some training, could predict the folks choice something like 5 seconds before the tested person was conscious of her choice. The interpretation given by Libet et al. was that choices are made unconsciously in advance of them becoming conscious, ie that consciousness is not an active function in human choice making.
My point was that there is a difference between leaning towards pushing the red button and committing to that choice. We know that our decisions are often taken after some deliberation, that we commit to a choice after contemplating that choice, which explains how Libet’s apparatus could predict some of those choices in a highly simplified and artificial context with a lot of time for deliberation.
But this apparatus would not work in a real life scenario where a decision has typically some stake in it, eg in a chess game that one wants to win or while driving a car; and in a context where a decision has to be taken very quickly, like under one second, eg in blitz chess or to avoid an incoming obstacle while driving. In those cases the decision cannot logically be taken 5 seconds in advance, because by then the obstacle wasn’t seen yet or the opponent hadn’t made his move yet. There was not yet a decision to make, 5 seconds ago and there is no time to quietly deliberate, so Libet’s machine won’t work. Another difference is that the stake involves emotions (fear for instance) which modify the way the brain operates. So from the moment I become conscious of the wild boar crossing the road in front on my car, my brain enters a different state, a different modus operandi than before I noticed the wild boar. How would a computer be able to predict that? Finally, another crucial difference is that the options available are much more numerous than in the case of Libet’s experiment (2), and they are not given, they are to be invented or imagined by the person before any choice can be made between them. Like I can veer the car (left or right), or brake, or any combination of these two, or do nothing if I want to kill that boar. In chess, the number of theoretical options is often very large.
For all these reasons, It is highly dubious that Libet’s apparatus could predict any real-life choice, because in my view it picks up clues from our deliberation that sometimes prepares decision making. When the deliberation time is reduced, when the alternatives have to be invented or imagined prior to deliberation, or when emotions systemically affect deliberations in sudden ways, I predict that no computer can predict my choices in advance.
This begs the question then, what use is personal phenomenal experience in an evolutionary "survival of the genes" sense? This seems more like evidence of a Cartesian theatre where the phenomenal experience is just along for the show - that there is no top-down, or fault-tolerant, processing.
That could mean different things. For one, it could be that consciousness is simply a mental model of attention. See the Attention-schema theory of consciousness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
What would it look like for someone to change their mind? And what about those instinctive urges that only seem to be inhibited by conscious effort? It seems like consciousness really evolved to inhibit certain instinctual behaviors within social environments. It also seems important when learning new skills. After the skill is acquired you don't have to focus conscious effort in performing it - like walking and riding a bike.
An interesting thesis. So for your first port of call I recommend the Manchester undergrad course
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/2021/00550/bsc-cognitive-neuroscience-and-psychology/
Then there's some really good masters work there, but also at UCL
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/study/masters/msc-cognitive-neuroscience
The most exiting place to do doctoral and post doc work is the lab at Sussex
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/sussex-neuroscience/research/consciousness
Hopefully they'll have some research opportunities for you.
When you've finished all that, it would be great if you could report back on your findings, in the meantime...perhaps just look up some actual source material before regaling us with how you 'reckon' the brain works?
I ask the people who still hold out hope that science will explain consciousness: what do you base that hope on?
Your position is easier to resolve than Oliver's.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128005385/neuroscience-of-pain-stress-and-emotion
The pain is to some degree quantum superposition, and that is what "qualia" can refer to. The what it is like is a property of physical matter (maybe a quantum field phenomenon?), as unintuitive as it seems to our wiring mechanism corrupted brains. The matter brains are composed of is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff, just like it has a shape, size and texture. There are more than ten thousand kinds of neurons in the human brain and their electric fields interacting with different combinations of glial cells, probably explaining much of the variety.
On the astonishing and accelerating progress we have recently made in neuroscience. As we're able to see and understand more and more my hope is that somebody will see something that points the way to the mechanism causing consciousness.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128005385/neuroscience-of-pain-stress-and-emotion
This sounds like panpsychism. The matter that makes up the brain is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff? I assume you mean neurons? What about the matter what makes up the neurons? Is it thinking/feeling too?
http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
Was I asking what Chalmer's thought about consciousness?
My theory is that qualia are quantum superpositions which rapidly flit in and out of existence as matter moves, so for instance a cloud of gas has some properties of feeling and image generation without a level of organization that we could regard as constituting experience. Its when these qualia get metaorganized in association with for instance an organic body that qualitative experience emerges, and I probably don't have to tell you how much more of consciousness this accounts for. The mechanism is analogous with the combination of light waves to make the visible color palette. The human "what it is like" essentially amounts to synthetic arrays of quantum resonance, roughly speaking extremely complex color fields. Turns out qualia aren't so ineffable after all!
Variations of the test have been performed for decades now as criticism of this form of yes-buttery is ongoing, all verifying the original result. To put it another way, the number of scenarios in which the effect has been seen is always increasing. No one believes this is true of all decision-making: it is almost certainly not true of chess decisions. However, driving is probably a great example of where it *would* kick in, precisely because the timescales are often short, requiring action to be taken faster than conscious decision-making processes are adept at.
How do you know that the work I've linked doesn't tell you how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience?
Look, the means by which this non-conscious stuff produces consciousness must, if it exists, be some process or mechanism that is a property of this non-conscious suff. It just seems really odd to me that you'd claim interest in such a mechanism and then refuse a study of the exact non-conscious stuff you would need to know about in order to ascertain if the production of consciousness was among their feasible properties.
Because the Hard Problem hasn't been solved. Ergo, the book you linked doesn't solve it.
I don't think neuroscience is going to solve the hard problem. The idea that you can mix non-conscious stuff around in a certain way and add some electricity to it and get consciousness from it is magical thinking. Since we know consciousness exists, we should doubt the non-conscious stuff exists. We have no evidence that it does anyway. Why assume it exists?
Who judges whether it's been solved or not? You? Chalmers?...
Quoting RogueAI
Why? Without having studied the properties and functions of all non-conscious stuff, how are you in a position to say what it can and cannot produce?
Quoting RogueAI
We do?
Quoting RogueAI
If non-conscious stuff doesn't exist then how can you conceive of a problem with it's producing consciousness? How have you aquired some rules regarding what this non-conscious stuff can and cannot do if it doesn't even exist?
Do you see the absurdity of your question? This is why I don't waste my time with Dennett or his followers. They inevitably end up doubting really obvious stuff like their own consciousness, and then it devolves into a semantics game. No thanks.
What is so difficult to grasp about the fact that what seems obvious to you is not obvious to others? Are you suggesting that 'obviousness' is some kind of objective property of posited entities?
Quoting Luke
Are you not just saying that the mental/experiential are not perceptible material objects? Life itself is not a perceptible material object; would it follow that life is not physical?
Quoting Luke
Yes, but doesn't it "occur concurrently" only by virtue of having originally emerged or evolved, both in the individual's and the species' cases? I mean you were a zygote before you were conscious, no?
Quoting Luke
Perhaps they have been dissolved to the satisfaction of some.Whether or not someone thinks they have been dissolved seems to be a function of the person's presuppositions, which is back to what I have been saying.
But our presuppositions are based on what we believe to be the facts, so its a matter of how much we are willing to pool into a common discourse. As per some comments by contributors to this forum, we may need a whole new "language game", and this might not be the most ideal period in human history to realize that requisite. Doesn't mean its not possible though. I think this new language game can begin with concepts such as superposition and entanglement as they apply to biological systems and cognitive science.
I could equally well say that what we believe to be the facts is based on our presuppositions. As to "how much we are willing to pool into a common discourse", if what you are saying is based on presuppositions I don't share, don't accept, then "common discourse" may thus be limited. In the worst case we will be talking past one another, like ships passing in the darkest night. So, "a whole new language game" would need to be based on a sufficient commonality of presupposition.
Quoting Enrique
These are facts/presuppositions we can share, and an adequate foundation for research. I think this resolves the issue on an initiating conceptual/hypothetical level, but neither of us are scientists I suspect. Someone's going to have to fund experimental investigation of a quantum consciousness theory. I wish I could get the chance to participate in some capacity.
I am not a scientist, and I have no way of assessing whether or not what you presented there should be counted as fact. To be honest, I don't even know what much of it means; but that could be down to my ignorance, of course.
So, it is not just commonalities of presuppositions that are important, but similar kinds and levels of education in the fields under discussion.
I seriously doubt it. Don’t believe all the hype.
An interesting thesis. So for your first port of call I recommend the Manchester undergrad course
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/2021/00550/bsc-cognitive-neuroscience-and-psychology/
Then there's some really good masters work there, but also at UCL
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/study/masters/msc-cognitive-neuroscience
The most exiting place to do doctoral and post doc work is the lab at Sussex
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/sussex-neuroscience/research/consciousness
Hopefully they'll have some research opportunities for you.
When you've finished all that, it would be great if you could report back on your findings, in the meantime...perhaps just look up some actual source material before regaling us with how you 'reckon' the brain works?
Quoting Daemon
"Another common objection to illusionism is that in the case of qualitative states there is no gap between illusion and reality. Something can look like a Penrose triangle without being a Penrose triangle, but an experience that seems to have a greenish phenomenal character really does have a greenish phenomenal character*. As Searle puts it, ‘where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences’ (Searle, 1997, p. 112, italics in original).12 This is often presented as a crushing objection to illusionism, but it is far from compelling. It turns on what we mean by seeming to have a greenish experience. If we mean having an introspective experience with the same phenomenal feel as a greenish experience, then, trivially, there is no distinction between seeming and reality. But of course that is not what illusionists mean. They mean introspectively representing oneself as having a greenish experience, and one can do this without having a greenish experience.
* I follow Levine’s practice of using ‘greenish’ for the (putative) feel associated with perception of a green object"
_____________________________________________________________________
So a quale for Frankish consists of introspectively representing oneself as having an experience, and this is to be distinguished fromhaving an introspective experience.
I'm still trying to apply the Principle of Charity, but he's not making it easy. Is it clear to anyone what introspectively representing oneself means?
We've been questioning fundamental assumptions throughout and will continue to do so. In my view Searle has solved the mind/body problem, it's Chalmers' Hard Problem that we are currently making progress with.
Well, what use is it in day-to-day life? Isaac, Banno et al would argue that there isn't a meaningful separate phenomenal experience, i.e. it isn't useful at all even if it exists. The transformations and augmentations of raw sensory input with memory, motivation, etc., are sufficient to account for consciousness. And I agree to an extent. In my view, when we talk about qualia, we're talking about these transformations and augmentations, at least as available to access consciousness (which is all we can report on). The usefulness might be summed up as: it is quicker and easier to work with 'lion' than it is to work with an unadorned granular image.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's probably not one thing. I've touched on an example from Kahneman's work earlier. There are decisions we make that are not consciously made, that is we are not conscious of making them in the way we do, but rather, once those decisions are made unconsciously, they are presented to consciousness as if for ratification in such a way that we'll swear blind we did make them consciously. (NB: Kahneman doesn't speak in terms of unconscious and conscious decision making but in terms of System 1 (fast, e.g. pattern-matching) and System 2 (slow, algorithmic). But the implication is there.) Consciously we can change our minds, i.e. System 2 will come up with a different answer.
And, in science such common presuppositions can be called working hypotheses that need not be believed by any scientist involved. The argument is made, research is carried out, and everyone gets paid. The relevance of the research in terms of broader theories comes later by the way of review and assessment.
Quoting Enrique
Everything is quantum mechanical at magnification levels great enough to reach that deep, but the evidence that those physical processes have any bearing whatsoever on greater issues that we like to discuss are very difficult if not impossible to verify. The gaps between physical levels in terms of speed and range are very wide, and it may not be possible to leap past intermediate levels.
None of this explains why have a different experience of my raw sensory input with memory, motivation, etc. than you have of my raw sensory input with memory, motivation. From my view, I don't experience neurons. I experience colors, shapes and sounds of the world. From your view, you experience neurons in the format of colors and shapes. How can on one end you point to a visual of neurons, while I point to an experience of a sound.
I could point to blind-sight patients as evidence that phenomenal experience is necessary. Blind-sight patients don't behave, or think like normal humans. They don't have the level of detail about their environment that normal people do. Their different behavior is the result of their phenomenal experience, or the lack of one, compared to those that have it. In other words, p-zombies would behave differently than normal humans, and would therefore be distinguishable from human beings.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This assumes that consciousness only exists in one part of the brain. How do you know that there are not other consciousnesses in other parts of the brain making those decisions?
You say that "we" are not conscious of our decision, then how can we associate the decision with "we"? Who made the decision? Is the "you" morally culpable for those decisions? Why present anything to consciousness, if not for ratification - meaning that consciousness would be part of the whole decision-making process. If you asked another person for advice, have you made the decision yet?
It seems to me there is an intermediate level in biochemical mechanisms such as entanglement systems within photosynthetic reaction centers, a kind of quantum machinery within cells, perhaps an energy transfer process capable of transcending membrane barriers that could permeate some macroscopic structures to the point of being core to their function. In my own musings, I called these macroscopic entanglement systems "coherence fields". We don't have the technology, experimental designs or models for this yet, but like you said, someone needs to run with the hypotheses.
Maybe physicists can work at the problem from the foundational angle of superposition principles, integrating quantum mechanics with molecular chemistry, and the neuroscientists and psychologists can look for molecular mechanisms and behaviors that harness these superposition principles in the brain, just as magnetoreception was discovered by collaboration between field biologists observing animal behavior and chemists investigating the composition of biologically active substances from a quantum angle, with some commonly held intuition thrown into the mix.
It can't be a coincidence that the brain is so rich in apparent qualia and produces an uncommon kind of electrification as standing waves. A close linkage must exist between quantum fields like the electrical field of the brain and qualitative experience.
I found this a very interesting read:
https://www.academia.edu/42985813/The_Idea_of_the_Brain_A_History_By_Matthew_Cobb
Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the mind of a mouse. Very recently the theories about memory were highly speculative and all over the map, and now we understand the mechanism (for one kind of memory). I think new knowledge like this will lead to the discovery of the mechanisms underlying conscious experience.
I have a family member working in this field and I'm hoping that he will be the one to make the breakthrough. I reckon people his age can expect to live to at least 120 and to be active at least into their 80s. So I'm confident that within another 40 or so years I can give you an answer.
Solving the memory problem is an "easy" problem, because the answer is simply some brain mechanism. Solving the question: why does a working brain produce the sensation of stubbing a toe, but when I put it in the blender and add some electricity, I don't get anything? So there are three questions that need to be answered: what is it about a particular configuration of atoms and forces that gives rise to conscious experience? How does a particular configuration of atoms and forces give rise to conscious experience? Why are we conscious, what purpose does it serve?
Solving the memory problem won't get you anywhere closer to the answer to those three questions. And if you think there will be an answer in 40 years, you would expect there to be some progress in the short term. I see progress on solving mechanical issues, but I don't see any progress in solving any Hard Problems.
I agree, but I don't see the relevance to what was being discussed.
If you accept that the brain produces consciousness, and you know from introspection that you have absolutely no awareness of the neural processes going on in the brain, then why would you not conclude that non-conscious processes produce consciousness?
Like memory, consciousness itself is simply some brain mechanism.
Why are we conscious, what purpose does it serve? Well as has just been said above:
Quoting Harry Hindu
Pretty much. This seems to be what divides existing things into the physical and mental categories.
Quoting Janus
That's a good question. I'm not sure if it's a satisfactory answer, but if life is defined as a distinction between organic and inorganic matter, then life is a category of matter, and so life is physical in that sense. It's the matter that's perceptible, regardless of whether it's organic or inorganic.
Quoting Janus
Yes, "emergence" in the concurrent sense where mind emerges from brain function could have come about via "emergence" in the evolutionary (non-concurrent) sense. I just think that we should avoid any conflation of these two different meanings of "emergence".
Quoting Janus
Fair enough, and perhaps they have not been dissolved to the satisfaction of others.
Qualia are not physical and the term qualia does not refer to anything physical either. Physicalists presuppose that only physical things exist and reality is just that. Should you choose to suppose that the brain is an instance of the physical then you will have no use for the now empty word qualia which refers to mental representations.
Are there mental events and mental representations that are in need of naming? Frankish agrees with you that there are not. What if you are both wrong? Shouldn't you allow those who work in psychology or phenomenology to coin concepts and words that are of use to them?
Did your fingers write that?
The brain is the medium that carries information that it does not understand. Think of printed symbols in a book. Do the book and the ink produce anything?
But look, for example, to @Enrique's misuse, earlier in the thread.
And again, it should be noted that rejecting qualia does not lead inevitably to physicalism.
Qualia are just percepts of the mind's experiencing that can be distinguished as particulars. Like "life" or "language", the term is an intrinsically vague reference to a class of phenomena, more approximating generality than precise definition. My claim is that this class of phenomena can be subjected to a partial explanation based on biological applications of quantum physics that unify these phenomena within a new neuroscientific/physical framework, a mechanistic accounting for their causality that will transcend currently mainstream concepts. Qualia are percepts, and I'm saying we are approaching the point where percepts can be modeled by material science. Doesn't mean its the only or best way to model them, but its an important piece of the puzzle and promises a huge synthesis of philosophy, social and physical sciences in the future.
No I use my nose. Quoting magritte
So, you're saying the brain doesn't produce consciousness, just like a book doesn't? So, either there is no consciousness to be produced, or it is produced by...what?
But then you betray your cause.
You 'used' your fingers means you do not believe that your fingers independently act of their own accord but are commanded by your mind. Or do you really believe your bodily organ brain commands you and your fingers? It's the other way around, you are the one and only unique 'I' that uses your body parts to carry out your intentions.
Philosophy uses words some ordinary some technical to convey its message. Unfortunately all words are loaded to a lesser or greater extent which with skill can facilitate begging the question in an argument. The podcast is loaded with skunk words to stink out its supposed opponents.
Edit: I reviewed the first 3 minutes of the Frankish podcast to show some detail.
@ :28 the introduction says "this podcast has a subjective impact ... for you",
and if there is to be anything to talk about this must be correct. It is the subjective character of experience that is to be explained or explained away.
@ 3:11 Frankish affirms that "qualia the way experience feels to you -- mental things within you -- something private" is to be the issue, one way or another.
To evaluate experience as a consequence of consciousness we must realize that experience can only be subjective and private to the first person 'I'. To propose tentative elements for that private subjective experience which may be discussed publicly by referring singular events to 'qualia' requires a third person public stance, something similar to what is done in the social sciences. To do so is hand-waving until it can be verified in public communication or practice.
Suppose we're invited to a wine and cheese blind tasting where 5 bottles of wine are in identical decanters marked only by numbers and 5 more decanters have custom blends of the originals. But the fun only starts when we are asked to note in detail the experienced taste and bouquet of each of the 10. Can you smell and taste the distinctions, and can you describe those sensations so someone else can appreciate and valuate the 10 samples just by reading your notes?
@ :46 According to Chalmers, "making sense of this is the hard problem of consciousness",
But by @ 1:01 Frankish is already talking of "the illusion of qualia"
'illusion' doesn't sound like a very objective introduction to me.
@ 1:08 "explaining 'consciousness' is the hard problem", so by now consciousness is a fixed material or physical object with properties to be picked out of a basket of Wittgensteinian apples
@ 1:24 Frankish has moved on to physical brain somehow causally 'producing' physical consciousness. Yikes !
@ 2:00 "how does the brain produce these experiences" , so experience need also be discrete objects to be physically 'produced'
The issue with Frankish is that to him the mind is nothing more than a brain in a beetle box. We can't see it, so we can't talk about it. True for Frankish, but maybe other people can open that box first before they talk about it.
No, it's just a way of speaking. I can say "I wrote it"; you can ask "what part of you performed the action and I can say " The fingers" or "the nose", but really the action was performed by the entire body, with the fingers or the nose being merely the most proximate part of me to the keyboard.
The brain is the "command centre" of the body without which there can be no function at all. We know this because we know what happens when we take psychoactive drugs or receive a bullet to the brain. You cannot control your brain function; you are not even aware of it.
Apologize for getting spiritual, but maybe its possible that the physical substance of consciousness transcends the organic body, a functional complex of which the brain is a key component yet not the entirety? Any philosophy that talks about a possible qualitative experience of soul in connection with material contexts? Sounds like something your Mr. Chalmers would have been into.
I'm curious if Buddhist philosophy has something introspective to say about the structure of consciousness in this respect. Seems beyond the Western psychological tradition. Even the postulated collective unconscious is typically viewed by Western academia through the theoretical lens of evolutionary rather than transpersonal mechanisms, as if the common substance of mind is transmitted solely via heredity instead of a nonlocality such as quantum physics and quantum biology have been modeling. Jung did address the concept of synchronicity, but I haven't read his proposals.
Note that the Buddhist conception of consciousness is entirely driven by introspection, and the reification of linguistic concepts, not by empirical research. Proponents will insist that consciousness is not a thing, and that it thus cannot be subjected to empirical investigation; but this attitude assumes its conclusion.
Isn't that the case for any foundational premise? If we instead begin with the premise that we have direct access to material objects, then idealism and skepticism are boh assumed to be false.
Sorry for the late reply. I've seen this argument a few times and never got the sense of it. We don't need any knowledge of the workings of the brain to understand why I don't experience your sensory input. It is not a neurological question. It's not even a sensible question imo.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Actually it doesn't, which is why it is broken down into functional systems not specific parts of the brain. Either system could be, and likely is, distributed. But certainly parts of the brain are dominant in certain functions.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The answer to that is precisely why we labour under the illusion that we make those decisions consciously. Recall that we are not conscious of the unconscious causes of conscious phenomena. Decisions from System 1 are presented to System 2 apparently uncaused (i.e. without System 2 being aware of the process). So from System 2's point of view, decisions originate in System 2. There are lots of published tests for this.
How about why you have experiences at all?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What the heck does this even mean? What is the difference between unconscious and conscious phenomena, or systems? If the systems are distributed, then how is it that they aren't aware of what is going on in the other parts? How is the brain itself not aware of what it's different systems are doing? Can an unconscious system be aware of what the unconscious and conscious systems are doing?
If it is an illusion that you make decisions consciously, then you conscious understanding of brains should be called into question. You basically pulled the rug out from under yourself. Happy landings!
I'm not sure what specifically you're asking. We have brains that react to external stimuli and convert that reaction into what we consciously experience via various transformations and augmentations. What bit of that are you questioning: How things can react to external stimuli (physics)?; Why we have brains that can do this (evolution)?; How brains do this (neurology)?; Or are you just asking about the first-/third-person distinction, e.g. why a stimulated nucleus accumbens feels like pleasure?
Quoting Harry Hindu
My bad, I used the term 'phenomena' in an inconsistent way. What I meant was that there are _processes_ in the brain that we are not conscious of (e.g. outline detection, pattern-matching, etc.) and processes that we are conscious of (e.g. rational decision-making).
Quoting Harry Hindu
A child can just ask 'why?' to every answer; that's not interesting conversation. Do you believe that you are conscious of every thing your brain does, including the cited examples of inverting the retinal image, white-shifting colours, outline detection? Do you claim you make a conscious effort to do these things? Do you consciously regulate your breathing at every moment? Consciously produce dopamine when you spot something surprising that you consciously decide is good?
If not, then you already know that you are unconscious of many (indeed) of the processes occurring in the brain, and your incredulity is less than credible.
You used the term, "experiences", so I'm asking you how you were using the term.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What does it mean to be "conscious" of something?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It depends on what you mean by, "conscious" and "conscious efforts". How does one come to consciously know that they are unconscious of many processes occurring in the brain? :brow: It sounds like a meaningless contradiction to me.
Really? It seems odd to ask a question about it then, seeing as asking questions about something is a perfectly obvious means of learning about things you weren't conscious of. Have you ever, for instance, read a history book, or a science book, or a biography? You really do make the most bizarre statements.
Which part of the brain asks questions - the conscious part, or the non-conscious part? Your still haven't made a meaningful distinction between conscious processes and unconscious processes.
You're asking about the possibility of something that, if not possible, would not allow you to ask questions about anything. It seems extremely moot to me.
Also I did answer the question by example. :roll: If you've ever read a nonfiction book, you have gained knowledge of things you never had conscious experience of. You do not experience Agincourt when you read about it, but you still acquire knowledge about it. Same goes for science. You can learn about things the brain does that we are not conscious of by study, research, education, reading out of interest, etc. I don't really get why this is where the conversation is going. It seems a tad basic.
Your example is to basic and leaves too many questions left unanswered. How does consciously observing scribbles on a page provide knowledge of unconscious processes?
Is the web page that appears on your computer monitor a unconscious process? If it is, then are you consciously aware of an unconscious process? Is your breathing an unconscious process? Are you consciously aware that you are breathing? You may not be consciously controlling it, but can be aware of it and you can force yourself to breath faster, slower or deeper or hold your breath. You can even make noises when your breath. How do you explain how we can be both not conscious and conscious of our breathing?
What is the observable difference between conscious and unconscious processes?
You have this backwards. You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness. Science OTOH does not need to assert the inverse; though it is a working premise at the moment, given that we can see a correspondence between activation or damage to specific locations in the brain having a predictable effect on consciousness.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is a straw man / shift of the goalposts. The point being debated was whether we are consciously aware of unconscious processes. And we are of course; I am aware that my vision performs a lot of processes that are not under my control. This is a very different thing than having an awareness of those specific processes.
It's like the difference between knowing someone took a cookie from the jar and knowing exactly who and what happened.
Again, this is nothing but an infinite regress of childish 'Why?'. That we can learn about things we didn't witness is not in doubt in the scope of the question. That we can do so is sufficient to answer the question of whether we can, through study, have knowledge of brain function, including functions on the inputs to consciousness.
No. Its an effort to get you to back up your own statements. You can't even answer my question about the observable distinction between conscious an unconscious processes. So again, you continue to make statements using terms that you can't even explain or define in any coherent way.
I do not need to back up a claim that we can learn things from study. The claim is not seriously in doubt.
This doesn't make sense. I have asserted that it's highly improbable that science will produce an EXPLANATION of how non-conscious matter produces consciousness. I base this on the complete lack of progress so far on the Hard Problem.
No, you went further than that:
Quoting RogueAI
(emphasis added)
Regarding your point, I disagree.
I have no expected timeline for when any particular problem will have a scientific explanation.
Neurology is very new and rapidly advancing; we probably know more from the last 30 years than all of the rest of human history put together. It's a strange time to give up.
Everything you said is to be doubted because you can't explain the observable difference between conscious processes and unconscious processes. In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about.
As I said, you can't logically doubt that we can learn things and at the same time ask questions expecting to learn my viewpoint, or expect me to discern your meaning. You're obviously not ashamed to appear completely self-contradictory to defend an invalid position, but no one is obliged to lower themselves to that level. It's reasonable to expect a certain minimum degree of rationality on a philosophy forum.
Unless I'm wrong, in which case do explain how the inability to acquire data is consistent with asking questions expecting data, after which I'll furnish you with the apology you are due and the answer you requested. I shan't hold my breath.
I only doubt that we can learn things based on what you have said, not what I have said. You are the one that can't explain the difference between conscious and unconscious processes. If what you said works for you, then good for you.
Oh, I can explain it. I just can't learn it for you. We have reached an impasse: I shan't embark on a lengthy post describing how human beings learn things without a sign of good faith from you that this is a serious conversation, and you can't provide a sign of good faith, presumably because you have none. That, as far as I see it, is that.
LOL. That is what I've been asking this whole time -- how human beings learn things. How is a scribble about unconscious processes, and what is the observable difference between conscious processes and unconscious processes?
Iirc you were asking about how an unconscious mental process could feed into a conscious experience. We just ended up at how humans learn anything at all by a regression of lazy 'Why?'s. Since there's no end to that, and I have good reason to believe that humans learning things is not something you doubt, I'm drawing a line there. It is sufficient to accept that humans can learn within the scope of this question. (A different matter if the thread were about, say, child development.)
I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet.
No. For the umpteenth time, I'm asking what observable difference is between conscious and unconscious processes are.
Here you seem to be asserting that the neurologist is conscious of the patient's unconscious processes before the patient is conscious of them:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So why are you challenging the idea that humans learn things at all?
It's basically where it occurs in the brain. See my and Isaac's lengthy and somewhat off-topic discussions on the Strawson v Dennett thread for examples. Reactions to visual stimuli, for instance, consist of chains of processes with feedback loops that evolve and dwindle according to factors like attention and memory. Some of those we are not conscious of, some we are. The difference comes down to the function of the bit of the brain running the process. For instance, much of our motor control, including what we call 'muscle memory', occurs in the cerebellum, which does not run conscious processes. That is, you can stick a knife in someone's cerebellum such that they struggle to walk without affecting their consciousness one iota.
We haven't made any progress on the Hard Problem. For the questionsHow are we conscious and Why are we conscious, science has nothing to say but conjecture. It's panpscyhism or computation or integrated information theory or quantum computations in brain microtubules. The fact that there's not even a framework for an answer to the Hard Problem is evidence of the fact that no progress has been made on it. I expect that lack of progress to continue. I think it's fundamentally incoherent to think that non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness, and that's why you're seeing such frustration on the part of materialists when it comes to consciousness, and why there's a temptation to handwave it all away, like the behavioralists did and people like Dennet still do.
Possibly, but from where we're at epistemically, it really comes down to "is there stuff outside the mind, is everything mind/thought, or is it some combination of stuff outside the mind and mental stuff?" In other words, physicalism, dualism, or idealism seem to be exhaustive. I don't think we're going to be discovering another "ism" to add to those three.
I wasnt. I'm challenging how the information about unconscious processes got into the book we are learning about unconscious experiences from.