Then it’s called an intuition. A ‘likelihood’ is an estimation, expressed in quantitative or qualitative terms.
You realize that this is not a proof, but a belief. Calling it “inevitable” assumes some sort of certainty.
That’s because you have built your life around that lack. It depends on the situation. The invisibility of other consciousnesses is not a problem if I want to see if gravity still works on the pen on my desk. But not going back in time is a problem for accurate history, and the invisibility of other consciousnesses is a problem for a “science” of consciousness.
We exist as conscious beings who encounter “biological computers” within our consciousness and ascribe them a certain essence. Your question puts the cart before the horse.
Imagination is not the problem (that’s what a “Theory of Mind” is); the lack of knowledge is.
Well, my use of the terms “idea” and “feeling” may be a bit sloppy, but basically what I mean is this:
Imagine how you would describe what it’s like to see something – perhaps something very simple, like a red square – to someone who had been blind their whole life.
You could perhaps completely describe the information measured by your eyes with a bunch of sentences like “I am detecting light with a wavelength of X and an intensity of Y”, but do you think that would give the blind person the slightest idea of what the experience of seeing something red is like? Likewise, you could say, “I’m seeing the same color I see when I look at oxygenated blood, or when I look at a sunset,” but that isn’t of any use to someone who has never seen those things.
It seems to me that regardless of how well we describe what “seeing red” means, we’re never going to convey the experience of “seeing red.” The part of the experience which we’re failing to convey isn’t something about the way light interacts with a red surface and then interacts with out eyes; it’s something about the way our consciousness reacts to the sight of something red.
Is this clear? What I’m calling the “feeling of seeing red” is the thing we can’t convey to the blind person – do you agree that such a thing exists?
Hmm, it seemed to me like Dennett was going beyond just saying that these feelings are exist in the brain. It seems, and perhaps I’m misinterpreting, that he’s saying the notion that there’s some feeling (at least in the sense of an “indescribable sensation” – see my response to Digital Stimulus) associated with seeing the color red or tasting a particular wine, is false.
Upon preview, I see that II Gyan II agrees that Dennett is saying that such feelings don’t exist.
My point is, if those feelings do exist, then we run into the problem of explaining why a physical system should have any such feelings at all. If an identical physical system that lacks those feelings (a “zombie”, I suppose) is impossible, then how is it that that configuration of particles causes a consciousness to experience those feelings?
Even if I fully accept that feelings are caused by the physical state of the brain, and that a certain brain state must result in the experience of a certain feeling by a conscious mind, that doesn’t explain how those physical configurations cause those feelings to occur. (And, as I suggested in post #31, I think this connection may be impossible to explain even in principle.)
You might say that the brain state doesn’t cause the feeling, the brain state is the feeling. But I don’t buy it. If I describe the state of every neuron in my brain to a blind man, this doesn’t tell him what it feels like to see what I’m seeing. Even if the information is encoded in my brain state, you’d need some sort of key to decode brain states into the feelings associated with them – and if those feelings are indescribable, the key is equally so. And we’re still left wondering “Why should this brain state correspond to this feeling, instead of that one?” E.g., Why should red look red to me, instead of looking like blue?
Do you agree that if such indescribable feelings exist, it poses a problem for physicalism?
Should read “… that these feelings only exist in the brain.”
Incidentally, I stuck to the word “feeling” instead of “qualia” in the above post because I’m not sure if “qualia” implies a feeling not caused by the state of the brain. I’m trying not to assume these feelings aren’t caused by brain states, I’m only saying that if they are caused by brain states it seems impossible to know how this causation works. (I.e., by what mechanism does the brain being in a certain state cause me to have a certain feeling – and why does that state have to feel that way, instead of a different way?)
Of course this is meaningless if the feeling of “seeing the color red” simply means nothing more than “my brain is in physical state X”. (We can’t reasonably ask, “How does my brain being in state X cause it to be in state X?”) But there’s a difference between something that represents something else, and something that is something else. E.g., the character 1 represents the number one. But the number one has a conceptual meaning, that isn’t conveyed by just seeing the character 1. Likewise, brain state X may encode the feeling of seeing the color red, but it isn’t the same as that feeling. Otherwise, describing precisely the state of your brain when you see the color red would suffice to make it clear to a blind person what it feels like to see the color red. I think it’s safe to say that it does not suffice. Likewise, saying “I see red”, or “I see light of such and such wavelengths,” etc., does not suffice. If this separate thing, this “sensation of seeing red” which we can’t express in words exists, then the question “How does the brain being in such-and-such state cause this sensation,” seems like a legitimate one to ask. (I.e., if we’re making the physicalist assumption that the brain state does cause it.) And if the answer to that question is unknowable, it seems like a problem.
Dennett’s argument suggests that the “sensation of seeing red” is somewhat intertwined with the “sensation of remembering seeing red”, but doesn’t convince me that the sensation (which I have direct experience of right at this very moment as I look at my red shirt) doesn’t exist at all.
Very well, my intuition is that “I am not a special case”. I don’t see quite how that’s different to saying “I may be wrong, but I think it’s highly unlikely that I’m a special case”, but there, I hope my language is now acceptable.
Of course – I consider that everything is ultimately a belief, since I believe that’s how brains work.
I still don’t accept the “problem” label (there would be no such thing as history or cognitive science if time travel and ‘public’ consciousness were possible!) , but that’s a useful analogue there. An inability to time travel doesn’t make historical study impossible: we use the evidence we do have access to to make deductions and inductions about that which we don’t (ie. the past).
No “we” don’t - I don’t believe in essence.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as absolute knowledge. Again, if that’s a “problem”, then it’s not one we talking apes living in spacetime can do anything about.
Hmm, I still don’t think this equivalence between “feelings” and qualia is very useful. He says that there’s no such things as qualia as defined so in that essay. He, and I, are merely suggesting that there’s no difference between “the feeling of seeing red” and just seeing red.
Bolding mine. What’s the difference between just seeing red or tasting wine and “the feeling of” those things? I (and he, AFAICT) suggest that the feeling is the process.
Again, I think the vitalist analogy is useful: They do not accept that life is caused by the physical state of the molecules, when you and I would say “Huh? What is there to cause? The life is the physical state itself – life and molecules cannot be separated.” And thus would I answer: “Those physical processes (ie. configurations in time) are the feelings themselves, with no separation.”
But neither does explaining a cell’s biology allow me to live its life, nor explaining a historical event to time travel back there, nor explaining how encryption works to decrypt any message I like. None of these fundamentally flaw biology, history or cryptography as academic pursuits.
Quite right, but I can’t read your credit details either.
If there were no such “correspondences”, it would be because of the externally measurable element: the wavelength of the light. That’s what the “feelings” would be: the response of your visual cortex to that wavelength (ignoring optical illusions here). tim, I’ll repeat a point I made to Gyan: The solipsist tries to imagine “feelings” in other people, and fails. He sees only similar behaviour (even down to the PET scan or fMRI level) in other brains, and does not consider the jump to positing similar “feelings” justified. We non-solipsists assume “feelings” in others despite only being able to see behaviour – if that’s a ‘problem’ well, fuck it, better such an imperfect but reasonable alternative compared to the perfect absurdity of solipsism: We use our imaginations ina way which the solipsist fails to do.
Now, imagine somehow building a computer our of cells. A computer which could identify things in its visual field (ie. signals from a “retina”) and label them with sounds (“language”). A computer which could similarly process the signals from sensory organs like the basilar membrane or the biggest of all, the skin. A computer which, furthermore, could combine these labelled memories into logical structures and pass them through “logic gates”, yielding further outputs. Don’t let’s get hung up on how we’re doing this with cells (since we can’t even do them with silicon yet), let’s just imagine it’s magically produced by, say, millions of years of trial-and-error or something.
The question is “Does this computer have ‘feelings’?” And we can answer that question only by engaging our imagination. This thing has a visual field. Its skin can tingle. It can tell you things. It can think logically. How could all of these happen without “feeling” them happen?
If you can’t imagine such a feeling computer, then maybe I’m letting my imagination carry me away. Just remember the solipsist.
Because ‘likelihood’ is an estimation. Likelihood makes use of existing data to extrapolate - the likelihood that the sun will rise at least once more is 0.99999bar, but that’s derived from the regularity of past experience. “I am not a special case” has no base data to fall back on, hence ‘intuition’.
Essence here simply means that the brain gives rise to the mind.
For a science of consciousness, you need to first demarcate what has consciousness and what doesn’t. When you can’t even observe that and need to assume, it’s premature to hope for a “science”.
What does the second phrase mean, and how is the presence of that activity determined?
If a cell’s not conscious, there’s no such thing as to “live its life”. That’s the difference between life and consciousness (if the original vitalists’ use of life was not synonymous with consciousness, although I’m unsure on this point).
We non-solipsists assume “feelings” in others despite only being able to see behaviour – if that’s a ‘problem’ well, fuck it, better such an imperfect but reasonable alternative compared to the perfect absurdity of solipsism: We use our imaginations ina way which the solipsist fails to do.
[/quote]
Again, it’s an epistemological quandary, not a “problem of imagination”. The very fact that you frame it as a problem of imagination means that you recognize that epistemology is the key here.
Well, I’d say that the base data here is that the natural laws of the universe apply to all of those other people in the world, and so to consider that they don’t apply to me would require some special circumstance or mechanism.
Then that’s a strange way to use the word essence in a philosophical discussion – I’d suggest using “essence*” in its place, with the asterisk denoting your personal use.
Hmm, I don’t think it does need such a demarcation really – after all, biological exploration continues without necessarily having to demarcate precisely what’s “alive” and what isn’t. Heterophenomenology can study responses regardless of what we personally (you, me or the solipsist) demarcate as one thing or another.
“Seeing red”? What do you mean, “what does it mean?”? It’s what happens when, for example, a red light is shone in my eye: a signal is sent along the optic nerve, chiasm and tract, via the lateral geniculate nucleus to the visual cortex. Acitivity is thus observed in all of these neuroanatomical regions via, for example, fMRI imaging. My position, which I am well aware that you don’t share, is that this is what “the feeling of seeing red” is.
It lives its life, regardless of whether it is conscious or not. Another cell (or a bunch of them called “me”) can’t live its life since it is spatio-temporally distinct.
Here’s the deal: you call things whatever you like, and if I don’t call them similarly I say so. I cannot be certain (ie. “know”, ie. be epistemologically “unquandarised”) that you are conscious, I simply call you so based on your behaviour and my ability to imagine that you are so.
In solipsism, the objects representing “other people in the world” (and the world at large) have no referents. But let’s drop this talk about solipsism since the point I’m making has to do with the exclusive subjective experience of each consciousness and only that consciousness, not whether it’s the only one.
Life’s just the label given to certain spontaneous activity. There’s no invisible element who presence is to be assumed.
You are describing ‘red’ by reference to your feelings - “red light is shone in my eye”. Whereas your position is that “seeing red” is sufficient to determine the concurrent existence of “feeling of seeing red”. How do you know if someone “seeing red” is having the same “feeling of seeing red”?
What does it mean for a non-conscious thing to live “its” life? There’s no selfhood there.
And the point I’m making is that solipsism’s truth or falsity is only an “intuition” on behalf of each of us, personally - we cannot demonstrate its falseness no matter how much we each reject it. This is well worth remembering in our attempt to study cognition scientifically: there is always a possible solipsistic interpretation of any evidence, and it’s really only personal preference which leads us both to reject it.
I say the same of consciousness (and understand that you disagree).
But I can’t see the life itself either: it’s just what I call that which I can see.
Oh, sorry - I didn’t mean to be so circular. OK: for example, what happens when a brake light is shone into my eye.
I don’t know they’re having any feelings at all (and neither do you). It’s just my intuition that I’m not a special case in that regard.
For a period of time, the plant or cell (or whatever “it”), grows, moves, metabolises and replicates (or whatever). Thereafter, it doesn’t. Its growth, movement, metabolism and replication is its “life”. The vitalist disagrees.
The words exist. And they participate as nodes in a functional matrix. But there are no referents i.e. there’s no external world.
But there’s nothing to see, unlike consciousness (“We non-solipsists assume “feelings” in others despite only being able to see behaviour”)
I don’t know.
There’s no “it”. The cell is a collection of smaller entities held together by forces, and which exhibit a surface reflecting certain spectra, generally in contrast to the “surroundings”, leading our brains to categorize it as a distinct object. There’s no “cellhood” except within our perceptual sphere.
So something must be in the external world to be a “referent”? If so, feelings aren’t referents either.
Yes there is: the growth, motion etc.
I wasn’t asking a question. You asked “What does seeing red mean?” I answered “ieg.* what happens when a brake light is shone into my eye.”
Is too. I can point and say “look, there it is”, and you can look atit.
What’s this “generally in contrast to” all about? So long as we’re “generally contrasting”, let me have a go: Consciousness is a collection of computational sensory and memory processes which don’t operate outside the device itself.
So “what it’s like to see red” is a “feeling”. You’re asking if one can explain it to a blind person such that they understand that “feeling”. Doesn’t the same objection holds for the “idea” of red? What is the difference?
Do I agree that I experience “seeing red”? Yes. Do I agree that I cannot convey the “feeling of seeing red” to a blind person? Yes. Do I think that I can convey the “idea of red” to a blind person? No. I suggest that to think it is possible to do so is folly. Again, I see little difference in this sense between “ideas” and “feelings”.
Let me cut to the chase, reiterating something I said earlier. “Are they [ideas and feelings] not part and parcel of the same overarching apparatus?” It seems to me that what you are characterizing as “ideas” are concerned with perceptual capacities (e.g., the apparatus that accepts input from an external source, such as light, and registers “seeing red”). It seems to me that what you are characterizing as “feelings” are concerned with reflective capacities (e.g., the apparatus that accepts input from an internal source, such as “seeing red”, and registers “experiencing seeing red”). Is that accurate? If not, could you clarify?
I’ve gone back to the OP and re-read it to regain my bearings. My question for you is to elaborate on the statement:
I have to ask for elaboration – what does that mean? What do you mean by “directly aware”? For that matter, what do you mean by “aware”? Is there a difference between them? Is there a difference between being “directly aware” of something and being “conscious” of it?
About the assumed “separate question” of experience produced by the system – and please correct any faulty summarization on my part – you say:
As to the first, I would argue that it is, quite literally, nonsensical. That is, it’s an abuse of the word “identical”. As to the second, why are senses that accept input from an external source different in kind from those that accept input from an internal source? I think SentientMeat just summed it up beautifully:
It isn’t clear to me why people arguing for the independent existence of qualia insist that there is nothing observable about them. There seems (to me) to be a conflation of what it is that is being observed – for some reason, the physical description of “light enters the eye, hitting rods and cones” is an explanation for the process of “seeing”, but the physical description of “the activation of rods and cones (seeing) results in the release of hormone X” is somehow inadequate. Conversely, the “experience of seeing red” is ineffable, but the “idea of red” is somehow well defined and understandable.
It seems to me that this is where the meaning of “aware” enters and causes all sorts of confusion. My definition of “aware” is simply being able to sense the status of an internal state. What is yours?
Let’s put it this way, in an example. You place your hand on a hot stove and quickly pull it away. Prior to being conscious of it, you were aware of the hotness in some way – there was a reflex action to an external sense. (How could you not be aware of it? Does not a reaction entail awareness? And yet, would you say that you were conscious of the sensation?) Then, at a later point in time, you are aware of your awareness – the awareness of the internal state that registered the external input. Where is the issue here?
A functional matrix or network; a ‘word’ derives its functionality from its relations with other words.
For a solipsist, it’s all in the mind. So the word ‘persons’ doesn’t refer to actual persons, but to mental phenomena.
That’s visible to a third-party. I should have said, “what you see is all there is, unlike consciousness”.
You’re the one who brought up two phrases “feeling of seeing red” and “seeing red” and equated them. So you should define precisely what the two mean, especially the latter.
Yes, it’s an object in your mind, e.g. a rope is made up of very many tiny interweaving threads (themselves divisible) and we assign that term to certain structures which satisfy a certain description. But there’s no ropehood, other than as a concept in our minds. Similarly, there’s no cellhood. A cell can’t live “its” life.
Yes, I heard you the first time. Is matrix the term you’re really searching for there, or is it another instance where an asterisk denoting your use of a personal dictionary might be more helpful? You’re certainly not discussing linguistics in anything like academic nomenclature.
ie. it is a referent, yes?
And, of course, my position is that there is nothing more to see than neural activity in the case of consciousness, just like trying to decrypt the workings of an unfamiliar computer (wihtout having to become that computer).
I just did: “What happens when, for example, a brake light is shone in my eye.” Like I say, of courseI understand that you disagree with that definition.
Yes, and my mind is a process in the world.
Then there’s no me either, and you’re talking to yourself.
There’s the cell, over there. Its life is its growth, motion, metabolsim and repilcation. When those processes stop, the cells life stops. It stops living its life.
Look up ‘matrix’ in a regular dictionary, and adapt the meaning to this context.
Yes, but not the referent assumed by a non-solipsist.
There is something more to see, but one can’t see it. I’ll repeat (“We non-solipsists assume “feelings” in others despite only being able to see behaviour”). In life, there is nothing invisible.
But all you can know is your mind.
Except that by analogy to my own consciousness, I assume you exist.
This is pretty simple. We categorize certain stimuli as distinct objects, but as modern science shows, these are just arrangements; they don’t exist as ontological entities.
I’m afraid none of those entries make much sense, and I’ve never heard the term used in linguistics. Is it your very own (which would benefit from an asterisk), or can you cite somewhere more useful?
Again, is this your very own personal definition? If you’re going to use such, it would help enormously if you said so. If I depart from standard nomenclature, I try to point it out for clarity’s sake.
Then how d’you know it’s there?
Except the life separate from the stuff, which vitalists posit. Similarly, there’s no need to posit a consciousness separate from the stuff either, in which case there’s nothing to “see”.
Then solipsism is your lot: I prefer an external reality, personally.
Your “analogy” being merely an “intuition”, of course.
Just as consciousness can be an arrangement of computational processes, yielding a less bloated ontology per Ockham’s Razor.
I don’t know. If I assume that other consciousnesses exist, then I know that I can’t see those, as you agree (“We non-solipsists assume “feelings” in others despite only being able to see behaviour”).
That’s not the life, that’s the solution - elan vital (“what drives the life?”)
Yes, and which totally misses the point. I intuit that there’s something there, via analogy. The fact that it’s an intuition is irrelevant to this point. There’s no intuition for a cell, because characterizing it as alive is based totally on its visible behavior.
But if behaviour is all you can see, why do you assume there is something more to see? When you play a computer game, there is nothing more to see in the computer than its *activity[/]i, is there?
The life is the spirit – the vital force. That’s what life is to a vitalist (eg.Georg Stahl). Matter in my body containsanima sensitive (sensitive soul), which makes it separate in composition from nonliving matter. That anima sensitiveis my life, to a vitalist.
Yet you characterise me as “conscious” based totally on my visible behaviour. And you just agreed that that’s merely intuitive.
There is nothing more to see. There is something more, I assume, but it can’t be seen. And the assumption is derived by intuition, via analogy to my own Being.
If it’s conscious, there is. If it isn’t, there isn’t. I don’t know which case it is.
But the decision to demarcate life from non-life is entirely based on behavior (see Vitalism Theory). The sensitive soul is the life force, contained within living matter.
I assume you are conscious, as you do of me. Because it’s analogous to my behavior. The analogy may not hold, as you agree.