Aha, that actually made me laugh out loud for several minutes.

I like reading about these ideas, something both very poetic and powerful about them.

What is the Buddhist view about creating life? If they see life as just suffering and the ultimate goal is ending the cycle of suffering, death, birth - "extinction" - (as far as I understand), then wouldn't they be anti-natalist?

Wow, very interesting, thanks! Will definitely have a look.

Pregnancy is actually an interesting example in these kinds of debates that touch on the notion of disease as a construct that is intertwined with social activities and consensus. Not sure why I have never thought of that before, so thanks! At the same time, I wonder what has motivated this post since I have never heard of anyone calling pregnancy a disease.

methodological dualism — Mww

I might steal this phrase to describe how even though I am not a dualist, I often refer to both brains and experiences.

…..and yet, there is currently no plausible explanation for experiential space in terms of sufficiently reduced brain dynamics. — Mww

The experiences aren't explanatorily reducible to brains, but in principle, the dynamics of how these experiences change will map to the dynamics of how brain states change. Maybe to be more intuitive, a "perfect" model of the brain will produce all of the behaviours and reports you would find in normal people. Maybe that model is used to control a synthetic but perfect replica of a human body - no one would be able to tell the difference. Put that replica in a psychology experiment, it would then demonstrate all the findings of psychology and our various cognitions.

But then, models of brains are just predictive tools that replicate functions and behaviours. They don't tell you anything about the underlying metaphysics or devalue experience imo. A model of a brain we construct isn't necessarily a statement about that, it is a bundle of formal tools and math that we can use.

I don't think such things are a threat to people's humanity.

Everything in this response further entrenches the clear fact you are confusing cognition and experience — AmadeusD

No, not at all. I am just pointing out than in the scientific process we construct concepts and models of cognition abstracting from things people observe in their immediate experience. They are just constructs describing experiences and behaviour. "Unconscious" cognition is a category defined by directly observable experiences in the exact same way "conscious" cognition is. When awake, we are always in the flow of experiences, sometimes with the phenomenology of deliberative thought, sometimes with automaticity where we are not really aware of why or how we have behaved in a certain way. We cannot directly observe the root cause for either but in principle, any underlying hidden cause or explanation for exactly why we go through chains of either "deliberate" acts or "automatic" ones will be explainable completely by a sufficiently complete model of the brain. "Cognitive modules" are in principle completely explainable just by dynamics in the brain. With regards to phenomenal experience, both these kinds of cognition are in the same boat in terms of unfolding on the same experiential space with the same category of underlying explanation very broadly in terms of brain dynamics.

I am unsure why you're bothering with length replies at this stage. — AmadeusD

I am just trying make sure I am articulating my thoughts as thoroughly as I can, even if just for the case of someone else reading.

The charge that I'm invoking some mysterious unobservable is risible, in that context. — AmadeusD

"We can understand it as an underlying organisational structure that informs experience in some way, but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. This is so much more fine-grained than you're allowing for, while simultaneous so much simpler than you seem to think it really is. Cognition has no per se relationship to experience. This is, in fact, in what that mystery largely consists in. Even if we are to grant a 100% reductive concept of 'consciousness' there is no current, plausible way to connect cognition with experience beyond some vague, uninteresting correlates that amount to 'vibes'."

I didn't write this ...

One of them started Apple Computer.. — Wayfarer

And according to some, that has only exacerbated the culturo-emotional malaise talked about in your other post.

Emotions come already world-directed — Joshs

Maybe Barrett is explaining how emotions are world-directed in terms of how interoceptive states are integrated with external environmental context and allostatic responses to stressors / in service of some kind of evolutionarily basic goals.

We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. — Joshs

Well think about all the different kinds of scenarios that may coincide with release of (nor)adrenaline in body and raised heartbeat. This is a dimension of the bodies response to scenarios which is present across many different contexts, anger, anxiety, excitement even. It may seem obvious how this can be distinguished in all these different scenarios but I think to some extent your conscious cortical regions actually have to learn to hone your bodies basic allostatic responses to the environment and then recognize different contexts because knowledge about the self doesn't come for free - under these accounts, what we know about ourselves is inferred in the exact same way as learning about the external world. Different social contexts (e.g. in different cultures) may then result in slightly different emotions which, while perhaps sharing a similar underlying basis in visceral(bodily) motor responses and ethological response programmes similar in various animals, is coupled to environmental contexts in different ways (and probably more complex ways than other animals). And we have to recognize these in our selves as well as in others - and we all have various levels of skill at it from very good to very poor.

the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it — Joshs

she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes — Joshs

I am not really sure I see an inherent conflict here. What she talks about just may reflect her priorities on what she wants to describe or explain compared to someone else.

but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole. — Joshs

But isn't talking about emotion in terms of components together what she is doing?

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). — Joshs

If you look at this from a free energy / active inference perspective (not sure if Barrett goes this far but I am trying to show that the contested views you are talking about are not actually inconsistent with each other), emotions would be linked to an organism which modulates its behaviour in response to how well it is minimizing free energy. What is minimizing free energy? It is fulfilling the predictions of an organism about the states it wants to exist in - it is about a goal-directed organism that is actively manifesting the sensory states which confirm its own existence, and when met with different obstacles or successes in this, you may have various emotional reactions and moods which reflect the organisms continual adaptation to its external circumstances in order to realize its own existence.

Today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future. Let’s discuss this, let’s work on it together, let’s rationally reflect on it. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It’s going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities. And in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

Not a fan of this. Just comes across as suggesting this stuff produces some kind of secret sauce to salvation which is independent to other structural factors going on in society. How many times in the past have things like this been offered as solutions. What happened to the hippies of '67? Transcendental meditation.

defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states — Joshs

I wouldn't say it is just this, but also organisms acting on the external environment in order to realize the sensory experiences which confirm their own existence - to describe it in a Friston-esque manner.

I would say the bit at the end of your quote, which Thompson accuses standard cognition of leaving out:

how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity

Is exactly what Friston's theory is about.

At the same time, I think it's maybe worth noting that on Friston's account, there are Markov blankets within markov blankets on every level. Organisms are comprised of things with Markov blankets; they might also plausibly be construed as part of wider systems which have Markov blankets.

You do not understand what you're talking about given the above. You're conflating the activitiy in the brain with the (abstract) experience which is not of that action. We are blatantly speaking past each other and you are, unfortunately, flat-the-heck-out-wrong. — AmadeusD

Here is the issue. You are talking about the idea of some mysterious unobservable process.

I am coming from a different angle which is what is actually being studied in psychology. We are studying observable data, right? Thats where all psychological study comes from. We then give names to these events we observe. Some of them we describe as involving conscious, deliberate awareness. Others as unconscious or automatic. But both these categories are things that are observable, just like a reflex is something like an act performed automatically but we are still observing empirical data. Or playing music on the piano in a habitual automatic fashion. Both of these things can be experienced by the one performing these acts even though they are categorized as automatic or unconscious - because they lack deliberation. This is what I am talking about when I am saying that both unconscious and conscious cognition arr manifest in experience and so not fundamentally different in that way. Yes the behaviors are different, but after starting from the empirical observations, it is then that models of cognition are constructed to explain those events after the fact.

So when I am talking about unconscious cognition I am talking about these observable events and this is a totally valid way to do it because after all, thats how we know these things are happening and thats the entire basis of the categorization. We don't have access to what is going on in someones head when they automatically and fluidly do some kind of intricate automatic event so we therefore we cannot be distinguishing automatic and controlled cognition through direct observation of the unobservable faculty inside someones head. If you look at lists detailing the differences between automatic and controlled cognition, you will find that all of the things on the lists are what you can observe for yourself through your own experience... because unconscious and conscious processes are defined from whats observable, we do it by categorizing the behaviour that is experienced and observed by people. Models might then built to explain that after the fact and obviously people might construct different latent models to explain the same observable facts.

So by my reasoning we have both of these categories are, on the most superficial level, about behaviours and experiences which are just different in ways which can be directly discerned from experiences or behaviors. They both have in common that we can view them and discerning them through our own personal experience. We can then construct different underling cognitive models to explain them. But at the end of the day brain activity is more fundamental than these models. So at the end, what do we have? Two sets of distinct events observable in experience and, in principle, brains which explain them because the cognitive models can in principle be eliminated as underlying causes. They both can be entirely discerned and explainable in the same two mediums of experience and then the brain in similar ways. The brain is doing all the hardwork for both processes and again the main difference can be thought of in terms of something like temporal and contextual depth of processing. Conscious processes are very sensitive to temporal contexts - to goals, to history, to future - deliberately controlling attention in open ended scenarios. Whereas automatic processing the temporal or contextual depth is thin. Reactions to cues which are indifferent to recent histories or goals and no longer entertain an open endedness in future context presumably due to practise and repetition or expertise. I think it is widely considered though that these are just extremes and most things meet in the middle somewhere; for instance, playing a musical instrument is definitely attentionally demanding but if you are familiar with a piece enough you will be going through passages in a very habitual and automatic pattern. The less familiar you are, the more deliberate is the playing of those passages.

Which makes it all the more clear that you're confusing not only the concepts you're discussing, but yourself in the process. — AmadeusD

No, because that incoherence being referred to ia just referring to the paradox of phenomenal judgement as stated in Chalmers' book.

I'm not. This follows from what i take to be your (rather extremely) misguided conception of cognition in relation to phenomenal experience. It seems quite clear to me your monist conception is arbitrary and counter to what's presented to you. The line of yours I quoted should make it sufficient clear that your objection here is not apt, at all, in any way, to my objection/s. — AmadeusD

Nonsense. You didn't understand what I was saying. I don't even think what I was saying actually depends on any metaphysical stance. It just depends on you understanding what I mean by unconscious and conscious cognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_cognition

And the triviality that we learn about our own cognition through experience and behavioural responses or reports are used in psychological experiments as a way to access these events that take place in the manifold of our experiences.

Your point about other complex behaviors either does not clearly fit the kind of distinction between conscious and unconscious cognition I was thinking about or it simply begs the question in a way that is sympathetic to dualism by assuming that those certain things don't have experience or that there is a kind of flick of the switch between experience and non-experience. I don't like making claims about what or how things other things would experience because I think ultimately talking about it is ill-posed; but by rejecting the dualism between physical things and experience, my view rejects this notion you have that one thing clearly has experience and another does not. Again, where I was coming from in the first place was a notion of human cognition where.we all agree on the role of experience operationally.

an underlying organisational structure — AmadeusD

Structure of what.

but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. — AmadeusD

You will have to be clear what you mean by this and give examples and then it will probably be easier for me to show you what I mean by interpreting these examples through my lense.

Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. — AmadeusD

Cognitive science is not trying to explain phenomenal experience in any sense in the first place. Experience is relevant because cognition is studied by people reporting or behaving in reaction to their experiences, so cognition is tied to experience in that sense. If you went and participated in a study on memory or attention, you are reporting about your experiences to the experimenter, correct? In that sense, cognition is about your experiences. Cognitive models are constructed by scientists to explain the flow of people's experiences after the fact. We trivially wouldn't know about cognition without our own experiences ans ultimately notions of cognition are less fundamental than the brain which in principle explains all cognition purely through the apparatus of neurons.

This is the entire f-ing point my dude. We dont. And this is a known fact. We have no idea about most of our cognition. Because "as above.." — AmadeusD

I will give you a list of cognitions from wikipedia:

"functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language."

Not one of these is not something you are not directly aquainted with by experience. Perception? Obviously experience. Attention? Obviously attending to experiences. Imagination? Bring up mental images, talk about narratives. Intelligence? Do an intelligence test, you have the experience of doing it and coming up with the answers. Memory? You experience your recollection of a fact or event. Judgement? You experience yourself looking at something and experiencing it and then making the judgement or reporting it and how you feel. Problem Solving? you experience yourself thinking and engaging with a problem. Language? You experience yourself reading or bringing up words.

All of these functions are describing things happening in experience.

Where we ascribe the term unconscious is when we don't really know how we do some of these things. We are unaware of where they came from. They seem automatic. They are not deliberative. But at the same time all of these tasks are being performed experientially and arguably deliberative processes are just products of automatic processes which perhaps show traits of temporal depth as I suggested before. Therefore, "unconscious" and "conscious" cognition has the same foundations in terms of flows of experience which are in some sense automatic. What explains the transition from one experience or behaviour to the next? The brain. The brain in principle is all that is required to explain the changes in the sense of isomorphia., though not the phenomena itself in the sense of the hard problem. This is how I view "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition as inherently separate. Afterall, they are both being performwd by the same brain, perhaps just with different patterns of brain behaviour which nonetheless don't have a strict divide.

No. — AmadeusD

So how do you know when you have been distracted? There ia obviously a pattern of experiences which characterizes someone who has been distracted and deviates from a task.

I have no idea what you thought this was addressing? — AmadeusD

I am talking about the fact that if you lack access to the fundamental nature of reality you don't have to take intuitions about dualism to be ontological. It is therefore not waving away anything but embracing the reality of the limits to our knowledge.

But no. — AmadeusD

All you had to say.

You think a reductionist account is incoherent? — AmadeusD

I was talking about dualism being incoherent, i.e. conscious experiemce arising out of and separate to something elae.

I guess its just agree to disagree then since I don't find your justifications compelling. — Apustimelogist

It's difficult to when you misunderstand about 85% of what I say.

If property dualism were true, we could formulate and test psychophysical laws the same way we test physical laws, and come to the same levels of causal, relational and phenomenal certainty about them — AmadeusD

This wouldn't explain why physical things were connected to the particular phenomena though it is beside the point because I was talking about phenomenal experience being irreducible to functional explanations of "mental stuff".

here is though. I think i'll just leave you to discover the discussions on your own, at this stage. Chalmers himself deals with these issues in the work we're referring to. — AmadeusD

I have already explicitly coveredthis with you and told you his responses are irrelevant to my position.

It seems you simply have no idea about hte arguments in this area. — AmadeusD

Chinese Room*. Chalmers deals with it head-on aimed at Searle. — AmadeusD

I don't know. Someone who earlier admitted to misconstruing the hard problem, was seemingly unaware of some very general definitions of idealism and now has shown they are unaware of the knowledge argument, I think it is you who seem to have much less familiarity with this whole topic.

This, again, has literally nothing to do with the discussion we're having. — AmadeusD

Again, more evidence that you just don't understand anything I say. The point is that we can functionally explain why people have an intuition for dualism without requiring the distinction to be about fundamental ontology.

There are extant examples of complex behavioural outputs from complex reaction and adaptive cognition without any hint of anything like conscious experience. — AmadeusD

I have made it clear in this discussion that I am not a dualist so why are you interpreting my words in a dualist fashion?

I have used the notion of p-zombie in my posts in a way that specifically alludes to the idea that all cognitive functions can be functionally explained in terms of the brain in the sense that all our reports and behaviours can be seen as following a causally closed chain of interactions as described by entities from physical science.

Given that your interpretation of what I have said is in fact inconsistent with the views I have already set out in this thread, there is no way that what I have said in the last post could "explain [my] entire rationale".

The following that you have pointed out:

Ants, cilliates and even slime molds are examples which make the vast majority of what you're saying, which basically relies on the assumption above more-or-less moot arguments. There are extant examples of complex behavioural outputs from complex reaction and adaptive cognition without any hint of anything like conscious experience. — AmadeusD

Is therefore in no way contradictory to anything that I have said. The issue is you are interpreting what I have said as some kind of dualist would even though I am not one.

Either way, what I had in mind was specifically human cognition as studied in psychology. The medium through which we study cognition is 1) what we experience and how those experiences flow; and 2) behavioural responses which is inevitably required to catalogue the former. We can think of cognition as latent models created to explain this empirical data in the flow of experiences and behavioural responses. What we call unconscious and conscious cognition in terms of things like memory, attention, automatic behavior, dual processes, perception, etc., are all embedded and instantiated in the same flow of experience and responses albeit in different ways, perhaps with different latent models or explanations. But ultimately the functional behaviour of the brain is more fundamental than any of the typical kinds of latent cognitive model and it is responsible for both "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. So I don't see any fundamental difference between "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. They are both embedded in experience and have the same fundamental explanation. What is different about them I think is something that can be talked about in terms of something like context-sensitivity in terms of things like temporal context, goals, trajectories and similar: e.g.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28416414/

This is a functional difference, not about experience. We can talk about attentional awareness in terms of functional explanations.

Probably worth noting. cognition is not 'things', it is not 'experience' - cognition is the processing element of perception. thinking. — AmadeusD

At this point, I don't know what you mean by things. But "cognition is the processing element of perception." seems more or less a reasonable definition probably. Purely operationally (don't interpret it metaphysically but simply what is required to make the concepts empirically articulable), perception involves our experiences and behavioural responses. What do we mean by processes? I am not sure but maybe another question is how do we know we are "processing" or engaging in cognition? Well, we are experiencing it or experiencing its consequences. Before psychcology was a field I am sure people were aware (or meta-aware) of their own cognition... attention, memory, thought... purely through experiences. Otherwise how else you would know about these things? You are aware of memory through experiencing your recollections or failure to recollect. You experience your losses of attention.

Any cognitive model of that is either a latent explanation constructed to explain those experiences and responses or just an abstract, non-latent description of the flow of experiences (e.g. when talking about memory, you may just be referring to the ability to behave (and experience) with a sensitivity to historical information). But again, if you believe functional brain interactions are ultimately what is both necessary and sufficient to produce cognition as observed in experience or behaviour, then what exactly is the status of the latent cognitive models? Do you really believe they float around in some other realm which is neither experiential or physical? Or possibly are they just models we construct to organize what we empirically observe and have called cognition (or synonyms) before psychology was even a field? Again, there is the non-latent way of thinking about it but as someone who rejects dualism this is ultimately not distinct in a fundamental ontological way from the latent view from my perspective. Only in a superficial sense (e.g. someone might posit different ontologies or paradigms for different scientific fields e.g chemistry vs biology without thinking these represent fundamental ontological distinctions in the same way a dualist would think of experience vs. the physical. We can explain away the ontological difference in different scientific fields simply through the fact that they approach the same world from different perspectives).

Even on the reductionist account, the missing piece of the puzzle is still how consciousness arises from any level of cognition. It clearly does, though. — AmadeusD

Well, I can only say that I have already outlined why I believe such a view is incoherent.

I think my previous comments are adequate to outline my thoughts. If they are not convincing, so be it — AmadeusD

I guess its just agree to disagree then since I don't find your justifications compelling.

Waving it away wont do. — AmadeusD

I don't think my view is waving it away in any sense because as I have already said, I believe there is very good reason to think that we cannot have access to the fundamental nature of reality in any objective sense while what we perceive and the beliefs about them we come to are obviously constrained by the informational processing of a brain.

On the other hand, you seem to think the problem of irreducibility can be solved when arguably irreducibility by virtue of its meaning means it will never be solved. Even if somehow, science empirically discovered "mental stuff" separate to the physical, such functional explanations of "mental stuff" would still not be able to explain phenomenal experiences and so the problem will still persist. Stands to reason that if dualism is true and we have a complete explanation of both "mental" and "physical" stuff, there would still be a problem of consciousness and it would still suffer from Chalmers' paradox of phenomenal judgement but this time in terms of "mental stuff". There is no possible explanation of experience in virtue of its irreducibility and positing "mental stuff" doesn't help. The basic stipulation of two substances / properties is really as far as you can get; the irreducibility hurdle cannot be overcome because thats what irreducibility means.

There doesn't seem any way to get away from Chalmers' paradoxes without getting rid of dualism, and I don't see any additional reasons to keep it. The fact that dualism is intuitive need not be explained by direct observations about inherent ontology but by discrepancies due to epistemics. If you recall the Mary's room knowledge argument against physicalism, it seems reasonable to think that a p-zombie Mary would give the exact same response to regular Mary in some scenario where she was previously colorblind and then come then became color-able (e.g. due to gene therapy). Her inability to reduce phenomenal experience to physical stuff then is inherently tied to the information processing in her brain in a functional sense. I feel like dualists sometimes underplay that what we are capable of perceiving and believing is not totally unconstrained by brains; in principle there are reasons we think or perceive things in the way we do which are constrained by physics in the same way a car runs in ways constrained by physics. Obviously some dualists may underplay this because they believe in some kind of interactionist substance dualism where the mental actively causally affects the physical but I don't think there is any good scientific reason to believe in this kind of model - I would need good evidence to entertain that.

Imo there is no reason to think these functional capabilities of a brain give an insight into the intrinsicness of reality... in fact when I am talking about a brain, I am invoking a family of constructed models and explanations, not inherent ontologies.

Well for one, an explanation of the words "dog" or "swimming," seems like it should require reference to dogs and water respectively, rather than just neurons. Explanations that draw a line around the brain seem to forget that brains do not work in isolation and do not produce consciousness in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm, I don't think anyone could create any kind of explanations for language or the use of words without including what words are referring to or connected to - that wouldn't make sense! I don't think many people are that reductive. Similar I think can be said for other questions you talk about like the why and how word use is created. I think word use is more or less about the contexts that surround the utterance and reception of words (maybe counterfactually), whether you want to talk about context in terms of experiences or the role of the brain and physical interactions with external stuff (at least in principle). I think the questions of why and how is just a matter of expanding these contexts, the chains of causes.

I get the impression you won't disagree with what I say and maybe you have been just attacking this truncated version of use you briefly mentioned which is not intuitive to me.

Now, the "examination of the queen," might actually have a role in the explanation of language. Here we might substitute the queen for "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc." That is, the properties of our "pieces," will tend to explain part of how language emerges and has the structure it does. But you can't focus just on this. This is what I was talking about before when I said it would be strange if information theory didn't shed some light on language, or human communication in general, but it also doesn't seem like it could possibly adequately explain everything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What else do you have in mind in terms of explanation?

Edit: To clarify - in terms of other explanations that cannot be explained by "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc."

IE, it is a problem of circularity, in that there are two objects provided we have already determined that there are two objects. — RussellA

Very good point. I think what this point really alludes to from my perspective is that numbers is not strictly a passive consequence of objects in the world but are consequences of our ability to create cognitive maps or models we use to navigate the world. Spaces with dimensions, distances, transformations. We develop the ability to deal with metric information (even rats can deal with distance, duration, numerosity) just in virtue of a brain which can sequentially sample environmental inputs, has memory, can act to manipulate those sequences, and can abstract regularities or overarching structure from that kind of sequential sampling of the world, one viewpoint or location at a time. Counting on a number line is like tracking a location in a 1D space.

what is entailed by 'mental only' — AmadeusD

Well what is entailed by it then? I haven't understood from what you have said so far. I don't recall talking to or reading about anyone else who has this issue with the notion of idealism.

I have. "What are the experiences of" is a good enough question to at the very least, put the position you're driving at on the rocks, if not infer a position that requires externalities (in a 'proper' use of the word - not the economic one) to inform any type of experience. Otherwise, we have infinite regress - at what point would content be involved, if it's experience all the way down? Seems a massive gap here. — AmadeusD

Why do experiences have to be of anything? All I know is that I have experiences. Why can't experiences be externalities? I don't see any justification here for an infinite regress.

As noted a couple of times, and apparently ignored: Experiences must be OF something(if you do not accept this, we may be at an end of the road we travel together). — AmadeusD

You should then be able to give a logically entailed justification why an experience must be of something or come from somewhere.

Mental objects do not exist outside of mind, by definition. What's not getting through? — AmadeusD

This issue can bypassed by just postulating that the universe is a mind or made out of minds. At the same time, I see nothing here suggesting that minds need to be supported by something else like the physical.

This is the exclusion you seem to just straight-up ignore. — AmadeusD

If it looks like I am ignoring what you have said, it is because you haven't given sufficient justification. You just keep reiterating your position that experiences must be a certain way and must be related to some other external stuff in a certain way. But from what I gather, this is just based on definitions you have started with that you perhaps find very intuitive. You haven't logically ruled out alternatives in any case. You just keep going on that it must be this way without giving me a further reason.

"why isn't anything conscious"? The latter is not irrelevant, in the discussion we're having. — AmadeusD

Yes, but questions like these and "why is there experience?" are no more or less difficult than asking why the world isn't some other metaphysical kind of way. The point was that the issue of why there is experience is no longer the hard problem of consciousness, which is specifically about the inability to explain consciousness through physical and functional explanation. In an idealist universe, this is no longer a problem.

This is not a problem, and it does not suggest this. I would recommend reading all of Chalmers, if this is where you're going. — AmadeusD

I recommend you reading it because he says this paradox is probably the greatest tension created by dualism. It is definitely a big problem. A p-zombie believes they have consciousness, they report on it in ways identical to any non-p-zombie. Whats worse is they do it for the exact same reasons we do. We report our experiences and profess them because our brain fires in a certain way which leads to our behaviours and reports. Your beliefs about consciousness then seem to have nothing to do with consciousness itself and all to do with the causal action of whats going on in your brain. Chalmers' only response to this is pretty much that we are directly aquainted with out consciousness which is not something I am denying. But I am denying dualism because that story makes no sense, and the only way it can make sense is if there wasn't really any dualism at all.

From this point of view, "Discovering that the consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical" is not saying something about the profound ontology of the world but about how information processing and explanations work, which is exactly why a zombie would come up with the same conclusions. There is no reason why a zombie could know anything about the profound ontologies of the world just from the functional interactions that go on in a brain. There is no reason to think we do either.

Can you explain why this would have any weight in displacing the (potential) property dualist account? — AmadeusD

I think the story of a world that logically makes sense but we don't have direct access to - for pretty reasonable justifications regarding how minds and brains work - is a much better explanation than a world which doesn't logically make any sense at all and then postulates two different ontological categories which we can't even explain anyway under this view.

He would posit that nothing you've said changes the fact that Consciousness is irreducible. — AmadeusD

Well then you have not understood a thing I have said. *I am not motivated to change the irreducibility of conscious experiences, only the idea that this represents some fundamental ontological category that sits beside some other fundamental ontological category called the physical*. As I just happened to say earlier in this thread, my view is probably closest to a kind of neutral monism which Chalmers goes through briefly on page 153 - 156 of the excerpt of his book you linked me.

I'm beginning to think you're confusing yourself. — AmadeusD

No, I think you are confused if you think indirect perceptual realism is about directly accessing the world.

Do you know any idealist scientific realists? — AmadeusD

There is nothing necessarily inherent that contradicts it if you are open to the kinds of definition in the article on idealism that I linked which the majority of other people seem to think is a reasonable definition.

But we know, for sure, that cognition happens sans any experience. — AmadeusD

I disagree. I think all of what we call cognition is things we observe ourselves through experience. The difference between conscious and non-conscious experience is to do with things like whether we perceive cognition to be automatic or deliberative, or whether our attention is strong or weak. But they all still occur through the flow of experience and the kinds of non-experiential aspects that explain the flow are the same for both conscious and non-conscious cognition, involving dynamics of brain activity. There is a non-trivial difference in the experiences of conscious and non-conscious cognition, but they are both experiential and are underlaid by the same kind of non-experiential explanations.


Edit: * *

Just commenting on this to remember/"bookmark" it because I thought it was interesting.

"why are social practices what they are? why do they evolve the way they do? etc." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because we have a brain with trillions of parameters capable of extremely complicated abstraction and inference tasks!

Everything I am saying about idealism is just the basic contemporary opinion on it. I linked an article by David Chalmers as the source for my definition and conceptualization of idealism. Notable contemporary idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and his followers thinking about idealism in precisely this way, as you may have seen.

I feel like you have this strong preconception that any kind of phenomena is necessarily internal to some kind of external physical things, because you are dualist. But I don't see how this view is strictly necessary and how other kinds of views of phenomena as ontology are not at least conceivable.

You seem to agree that:

"We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences ..... there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception"

Elaborating (in a similar way to the Chalmers chapter you linked): all we have direct access to is our personal experiences; our engagement with and articulation of physical theories is through experience; and the content of physical theories is relational or functional.

So if physical theories are defined purely functionally or relationally and say absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of what is beyond our personal experiences, I think you have to give an argument to rule out the idea that what is beyond our personal experiences can conceivably be more experiences and nothing else.

Again, we have established that you have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what is going on beyond your immediate experiences so I don't see what standard you are using to judge that what is going on beyond cannot be experiential. There are various options such as one universal mind filled with mental things interacting or many different individual minds interacting. What we think of as physical objects can still exist, just they have to be made of phenomena. What is the basis for saying that "Mental "objects" giving rise to conscious experience sans anything else is just dumb"? I haven't seen justification. What standard are you using if you don't even know what physical things intrinsically are? Does a standard even exist if physical concepts are purely relational?

It then seems pretty clear that if everything were phenomenal, an idealist would avoid the hard problem in its most basic sense (perhaps not the combination problems). The question of "why do experiences exist?" would be no different from the question of why any other different kind of intrinsic stuff were to exist (e.g. why does material exist? (perhaps in a hypothetical universe that only has material and no consciousness)).

With regard to dualism?

There have been absolutely no discoveries in science that suggest some kind of inherent metaphysical separation between mental and physical stuff in any sense. Such a dualism is incoherent.

My main argument against dualism is probably the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" that Chalmers talks about in chapter 5 of the Chalmers link you gave, and it is a consequence of epiphenomenalism (it follows soon after the pages you recommended). The problem is that consciousness is rendered causally irrelevant not only to our behavior but to our own knowledge of consciousness. The absurdity suggests that dualism is an illusion and that there is no dual-aspect.

There is no need for a dual-aspect. Physical theories are just models that are used within the human experience to predict and carve out abstract functional relations to other intrinsic experiences. They cannot tell me anything about the intrinsic nature behind "physical" objects. In fact, I think that not only are all physical theories relational and functional… all beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, etc, etc, etc, are relational and functional. No knowledge, as a cognitive process, can ever tell you anything about any kind of intrinsicness, simply by the nature of what descriptions and explanations do and that is also why phenomenal experiences are fundamentally ineffable. I think this is less mysterianism than the fact that if you endorse kinds of scientific and metaphysical deflationism / antirealism, then the need for inherent dual-aspects is not pressing. The fact that there is no accepted peer review published scientific evidence for non-physical properties and the incoherence from the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" then presses even more against the idea of dualism. Because this view doesn't rely on falsifying phenomenal experiences, it evades Chalmers' responses. I don't think Chalmers would see this view as adversarial to his though, even if he may not necessarily agree with it.

I think the closest we can get to characterizing reality is that there are objective structures in reality which we cannot directly access; my experiences are what it is like to be some of that structure at some particular scale (or I guess even what it is like to be information to move closer to Chalmers' thoughts). And as more or less an instrumentalist about cognition and knowledge, that characterization doesn't even necessarily mean much other than a story that helps conceptualize the world. At the same time, the brain, information processing and cognition should still in principle be the ultimate basis for explaining why people have difficulties articulating things about consciousness and why explanations about it fail (given the p-zombie who is confused by the hard problem because of his brain independently of consciousness).

Scientific realism posits there is an external world we can accurately measure. Perceptual realism posits that we, without measurement, can directly access an external world — AmadeusD

Your latter definition only accounts for direct realism, not indirect realism. Also, scientific realism is not about positing an external world per se, it posits that our theories about the world are true. Doesn't seem very different from the idea of perceptions being true representations or giving true access to the world.

What's your take here, then? Pure curiosity. To come to table, 'cognition' doesn't seem to me something that is the same as experience. So, all cognition is 'conscious' but barely any cognition arises in experience — AmadeusD

Cognition is just a higher-order description of what is happening in the flow of experience imo. The difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition essentially comes down to differences in this flow of experience.

Atomization (also mistakenly termed 'individualism'/'individualization') is a result of these types policies — Tzeentch

Sounds a bit reductive, no? The world is much more complicated than that. At the same time, were the issues being discussed much better for societies that are less atomized, perhaps in the past? Not sure about that. Seems a distraction from the issue at hand imo. I am not entirely sure ideals like this are reliable just as the notion of the American Dream never was.

Getting rid of neoliberalism, heh.

Very interesting.

with senses other than sight I'm not sure what is representative. — Moliere

I certainly get the intuition. We know that the sensation of sweetness is associated with certain molecules but its not clear that perceptions of taste are representing anything like this to us. From my viewpoint, vision is not inherently different.

To be honest, for some further reading around the issue, which seems more nuanced than I thought and my own preconception of what indirectness meant, I have become much more sympathetic to the direct view and the ambiguity of what constitutes directness/indirectness. For instance, I find the following passage reasonable:

"In this light, consider the following two
claims:

(i) perception is indirect in the sense that it
involves a series of causal intermediaries
between the external object (or event) and
the percipient;

and

(ii) perception is indirect in the sense of involving a prior awareness of something other
than the external object (or event).

Claims (i) and (ii) thus distinguished,
Direct Realists can argue that it does not
follow from the fact that perception is indirect in the sense of (i) that it is indirect in the sense of (ii). What the Causal Argument establishes is only the causal indirectness of perception in the sense of (i), not the cognitive indirectness in the sense
of (ii)."

Ofcourse, my own inclinations away from realism generally don't take a strong preference of one set of views or the other or even either, perhaps. The topic as a whole seems too complex for me to give a well-thought view without a lot of research.

I feel like your misunderstandings here must come from a different notion of idealism.

Idealism as I described and as entertained in the article I linked is completely consistent with external objects beyond your immediate experience so the idea of external objects is completely consistent, they just happen to be mental or experiential. In the first paragraph it even says that it is analogous to physicalism, the only difference is replacing physical with mental. I think your notion of idealism is far narrower than most people seriously entertaining idealism today.

It then follows that when you say something like:

If consciousness does not reduce to the physical — AmadeusD

The idealist would agree and then they would say the physical simply does not exist so there is no problem. There is no need to reduce the mental to the physical because the physical just doesn't exist. All there is are experiences. Consciousness doesn't supervene on the physical because consciousness is all there is.

Once you formulate an idealist universe as identical to a physicalist one except that everything is made out of mental stuff, then there is literally no hard problem of consciousness. We can ask in the physicalist universe why energy exists or forces exist or fields exist or anything else. There will always be some point where it just doesn't have an answer - we don't know why things exist or don't exist. The problem of why experience exists would reduce to exactly that problem for an idealist. There is no other thing that gives rise to experience for the idealist because all there is is experience. Existence and being is simply experience at all levels. So the hard problem doesn't exist for the idealist and this is probably one of the major advantages amy idealist will give you to their theory.

I'm not quite sure I'm understand thsi reply. — AmadeusD

The reply is saying that a dualist reality where there is a metaphysical divide between the mental and physical is unfounded. It has no basis in science. Now I can also say that I have experiences but the fact that I say I have experiences doesn't entail that there must be some other physical substance which is profoundly metaphysically different and from which experiences arise. We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences because we can only do science within our experiences. It follows that any metaphysical distinction is inaccessible and science gives no reason to suggest that there is one. At the same time given how the information processing that undergirds perception and knowledge is due to brain structure and functional capabilities, there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception. None of this comes from a particular realist viewpoint which I think is probably key. Essentially all that we work with when it comes to knowledge is empirical structures that we happen to find in what we observe, and models we create concerning those observational structures. From that standpoint the most I can say is perhaps that the universe has some kind of structure which I cannot directly access. Loosely, I am what it is like to be some kind of structure in the universe. But then again, neither the notion of "structure" or "what it is like"(experience) have any substantive definitions that let me pick out anything metaphysically or scientifically meaningful, let alone any dichotomy between experience and the physical which would only lead to an incoherent type of epiphenomenalism.

One question here is going to be (or more accurately "How do we produce conscious experiences of the external world?") but another, separate and probably more profound question is "How could we know that anything in the external world is actually as-it-seems? Even if we have 'direct' perception we still have the issue of Descartes Demon and all that fun stuff - whereas the question around scientific realism addresses the problem of whether our perception is of actual things. In world A' we may have direct perceptions of things which are not actually things, for instance. It is a false perception, but its a direct relation with the mental substance that it arises from. Even in world A, we might have indirect perception yet trust that our scientific instruments are relaying the actual behind our perceptions. — AmadeusD

So in the Scientific sense, are we even metaphysically able to ascertain the world as-it-is? And for Perception its do we, humans, naturally, perceive the world in direct causal relation (regardless of whether the world actually allows for accurate measurement. — AmadeusD

I don't think you have said anything here that distinguishes realism about scientific theories from that about objects of perceptual. Descartes Demon exemplifies a general skeptical problem that can be applied to anything whereas the question of whether our perception is about actual things seems to me just as much a concern for realism about perception as it is for scientific theories. We may have scientific theories that turn out to not be of actual things also. The last two lines also seem to be basically the same except you have added direct for perception which seems to be besides the issue since you can have indirect-realism.

You can keep question one, and simply swap question two for the more specific version: Why is anything in the Universe conscious? To essentially outline the two distinct questions that idealism would still post. Consciousness not supervening on the physical simply doesn't explain it as the majority of cognition is not accompanied by any experience. — AmadeusD

The question of "why the universe is the way it is?" is the same for any kind of metaphysical position because you can imagine the universe in a vast number of different ways even for the physicalist, which are just as arbitrary as the universe being conscious or not or some other distinction. So too you can have an idealist universe where even what you are thinking of as non-experiential cognition is still experience or consciousness. Personally I don't believe in some strong distinction between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition in the way that I believe you are thinking about it.

Again, the meat of the hard problem is the reducibility of experience to physical and functional explanation:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=2544424150595524876&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

Quotes from above:

"It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when
our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have
visual or auditory experience:"

"It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it
should, and yet it does."

"What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions."

"Why doesn't all this information-processing go on in the darkí free of any inner feel? Why is it that
when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a
sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these
functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an
explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience"

The problem of consciousness is only in contrast to the metaphysics of the physical and functional.

This is interesting. It reads lile you view your bodily sensations as fundamentally different from your visual experiences in some separable way?

That literally is the hard problem. Perhaps you have an erroneous idea of what it is? The hard problem consists in this exact question. — AmadeusD

AS above, clearly this is not right. — AmadeusD

If the only thing that exists is experiences, then how are the questions different? "Why is there experience?" would be precisely the same as "Why is there anything at all?"

Its just ignoring one problem for another. — AmadeusD

Well from this perspective, it isn't a true metaphysical problem which is why illusionists may be more interested in the meta-problem of consciousness instead, aiming to explain what it is about human cognition and computation that leads to these limits of explanation.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=metaproblem+chalmers&btnG=

It's very hard to see how this could matter. If one is having an experience, that's all that's needed. The framework in whcih is sits isn't relevant the Hard Problem. It is the experience per se that needs explaining. — AmadeusD

This is not my understanding of the hard problem. The issue is the reducibility of consciousness to physical explanations. If you remove the physical from the equation then there is no hard problem. The issue I was talking about in the quote you replied to effectively also amounts to a problem of irreducibility but between different experiences.

An idealist rejects that there are external objects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at here. — AmadeusD

The kind of idealism I have in mind is just that everything in the universe is mental (definition exists in the paper below), which I guess could be quite broad in terms of possible types of idealism.

https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:-7cyUpbkVq4J:scholar.google.com/+modern+idealism+chalmers&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2020&as_vis=1

Because you're misattributing what 'realism' stands for within each framework. — AmadeusD

Can you elaborate the differences in realism for science vs. perceptual representations?

My take is that there isn't really evidence for indirect realism as much as indirect realism is an interpretation of what we know -- so I'm providing an alternate interpretation to weaken the justification for indirect realism. Or at least that's the strategy. — Moliere

Yeah, fair enough. I do agree you can plausibly see it different ways depending on how you frame things.

It seems so to me, yes. — Moliere

I think our metaphysics clearly are just quite different and don't agree.

I don't understand what a representation of my toe would be when I'm stubbing it or not. — Moliere

Minimally I have a hard time thinking of the perception of my body as a representation: I can go as far as to say it's a bundle, and there is no "I", but I don't think my body is a bundle of representations. — Moliere

Very interesting; can you elaborate? Especially the first bit.

all Russian peasants held their land in a form of communal ownership known as obshchina or mir, which was similar, but not identical, to the commons-based communities in pre-industrial England — Monthly Review

Very interesting. Makes me think that communism as created by Marx maybe was envisioned specifically in these kinds of communal contexts and so communism would be a kind of radical political modification to a familiar (or at least not so far off) social situation.

Look how different society is now though - how individualized but at the same time geographically extended / globalized it is; how much economies have shifted from manufacturing and producing material goods to services and entertainment; how we have gone way beyond basic necessities to choice and consumerism. I wonder if communism actually even makes sense in modern society without some radical re-invention of it. Maybe someone has done that. That said, even experiments in socialist communities back in the 1800s basically all failed as far as I'm aware.

Was Russia ever actually truly communist though?

These are explanations for phenomena used to support indirect realism which don't resort to the position of indirect realism — Moliere

But most indirect realists do think that these explanations are directly evidencing indirect realisms.

I think "information" counts as kind of idealism, if you're positing it as a kind of fundamental substance that everything is composed of. — Moliere

No, I'm not implying it in a fundamental metaphysical sense. But some have pointed out that my actual view on mind-body metaphysics is not so dissimilar from a kind of neutral monism (maybe a very minimalist one) so maybe you would still think it the case of my view anyway. Though I don't think I see my view that way.

Isn't that pretty much what the topic of indirect or naive realism is about? Fundamental metaphysics? — Moliere

I'm not sure to be honest. I think it depends on the angle you take. As you say below, it can be quite vague all this talk I think. I don't think indirect realists necessarily have to bring strong metaphysics into it beyond the talk of realism about representations, similar to the way you can talk about whether scientific theories (are real)*. The science I think provides quite a good description of how perceptions would be indirect so not much work is needed to be done there. Naive direct realism I'm not so sure.

I'm uncertain of the best way to put it, but at the very least what it means is that though direct realists directly perceive objects in the world that does not then entail that what they see is a fixed property, or that there are not other properties which a given perception is not perceiving.

It's mostly the notion of permanent objects and their essences that I'd try to avoid -- things are in constant flux. — Moliere

My intuition is that this would certainly require a more elaborate metaphysics about the world.

- a term of art meant to contrast with "properties", is what I was thinking. — Moliere

Ah well, fair enough.

Perhaps this is a way of differentiating the naive from the direct realist: I think the naive realist is seeing something real, that literal objects are a part of their experience, but that does not then mean that every judgment about that real thing which a naive realist makes is going to be true or comprehensive. — Moliere

But the experiences still extend into the outside world beyond the head?

While I've come to discount the notion of an information ontology, you're far from alone in thinking like that. — Moliere

Well I only use it in a weak sense as opposed to a fundamental, tangible ontology.

in a sense I'd say that every judgment has a dual-awareness -- the judgment ,and what the judgment is about) — Moliere

Yes, I think I understand.

But how do we really differentiate which is the better way to talk? — Moliere

Well I'm not sure since it seems you were perhaps using affordance in different sense, ha. But possibly yes, I definitely think I have preferred starting points in my reasonings that are probably not the same as yours.

Edit: ( )*.

No theory has an explanation of why experience compliments activity. Idealism still cannot answer the hard problem. It just shifts from having experiences of 'the world', to having experiences of one's mind. But the problem of experience remains. — AmadeusD

I don't know exactly what you mean for experience to compliment activity.

If everything is experience, there is no hard problem because the problem just becomes "why are there experiences?" but if everything is experience, then this is no different from "why does anything exist?" which is equally applicable to a physicalist. There is no physical things in idealism just experiential phenomena that follow the laws of physics.

This is a hard problem but not the one of consciousness and is arguably even more intractable to the point that most people don't consider it that interesting except perhaps people who believe in God or something.

Aside:

And maybe people similarly-minded to Dennett actually want to turn the hard problem of consciousness into this kind of more trivial hard problem - i.e. the reasoning going something like - Why does anything exist? Can we even answer that? Do we have to make up an additional metaphysical substance of consciousness that needs its own separate answer? This is probably close to my view on that matter. I don't think there are sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics that warrant an intrinsic dualism of experience vs. physical so there is no reason to postulate that a different kind of creation story should exist for something called experience. I think that the nature and limits of our information processing is plausibly a sufficient way of explaining why the hard problem arises for people (in terms of being unable to explaim certain things about reality)**.

Back to idealism:

To my mind, problems analogous to the hard problem of consciousness (which I think are probably actually closer in spirit to the combination problems of panpsychism e.g. see stanford encyclopedia panpsychism page) only come about in idealism when you postulate something like observers that have a way they seem to themselves, via their own experiences, which is different to how they seem from another observer's perspective.

Obviously, this construction has an inherent indirect aspect to it in the sense that there are experiences out in the world and then your own experiences which seem to be about those experiences but are not the same - they are separated. For instance, I have my own experience of what is going on inside my mind. Presumably other people perceive what is going on in my mind as brains in their own experience, through various levels of mediation. And it is only then imo that there is this kind of hard problem/combination-type problem of consciousness for idealism - because it seems inexplicable that my experiences right now look like a brain to someone else, which is an objects that seems structurally completely different. But again, this presupposes an indirectness about how we observe things. At the same time it is not identical to the hard problem because physical things still don't exist - its more the problem of how certain experiences can produce other disparate experiences (i.e. my experiences create the impression of a brain).

I think if you take away that indirectness and just have mental observers all observing a common experiential world then this hard-type problem doesn't arise. It might not actually be a plausible way to view the world based on scientific knowledge we have, but that is because imo scientific knowledge paints a picture of indirect mediation (i.e. object perception mediated by chains of events from the surface of an object to a brain which implies boundaries that gatekeep information and separate internal events / representations / experiences from different external stuff out there). Indirect mediation is precisely why I have both the notion of a ball and the atoms that make it up... at least, that is the best explanation. At the same time, without indirect mediation I feel like there would be no need to identify brain processes and experiences or distinguish internal experiences from external stuff. That's not to say older Cartesian notions of mind-body problem wouldn't arise but not sure its same as more modern versions I would be interested in.

So I think in that sense hard-type problems in idealism do presuppose indirect realism (including external objects to be realist about which are qualitatively different from internal perception). If everything were direct, the hard problem of consciousness would just reduce to the problem of why experiences exist? why are the laws of nature they are? - which isn't particularly different from analogous questions for a physicist.. Why do we have certain physical laws? etc.

therefore there is no hard problem. Experience is a brute fact of reality.

The bolded, appears to me, an absolute fact as long as one is not an Idealist. There is the world. There is inside the head. — AmadeusD

So it appears you already anticipated the answer I gave about why idealism doesn't necessarily have a hard problem of consciousness.

Obviously, you may think it an absolute fact, but then what I am saying is if it wasn't, the idealist would have no hard problem.

I'm not entirely sure what's being suggested here. AI doesn't have conscious experience, that we know of. — AmadeusD

It's not clear to me that indirect realism needs to be a concept restricted to conscious experiencers. For instance, if realism is a concept that can be attributed to mathematical scientific theories, why can't it be attributed to the representations and models built in machine learning? And often, these machine learning models quite aptly embody the idea of in-direct realism, since they are what neuroscientists use to model how the brain and mind works. For instance, Bayesian statistics involving the idea of learning internal representations or models about hidden variables based on noisy sensory data. This is similar to how debates about indirect vs direct perception in psychology have been framed (e.g. gregory vs gibson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gregory). A mathematical scientific theory cannot talk about anything about as much as A.I., yet people often attribute realism to them.

So I think really these debates about direct and indirect realism, though obviously may involve the concept of experience, may not be directly related to the hard problem of consciousness itself.

Edit: ()**

but hallucinations like one experiences on hallucinogens or when they don't have enough sugar to make the brain function as it normally does. — Moliere

I am not sure I see a profound difference tbh. Disruption of normal functioning is what the indirect realist sees as disruption of normal representations.

if we do not analyze them using Cartesian assumptions, are evidence that our mind is a part of the world because the world influences it, rather than the other way about — Moliere

Again, maybe this is all just a semantics issue rather than representing deep conflicts with what the indirect realist conventionally believes.

I think I will just note that my "direct awareness of information" doesn't seem conceptually that far away from semantic direct realism... minus the realism.. so I guess it isn't so close, ha. But the concept is reminiscient imo in terms of the kind of change it makes to differ itself from direct realism.

So I'd claim that I am aware of my toe — Moliere

Right. For me this almost implies some form of idealism where the object of my toe is just the experience of my toe, without anything more. I think I would also be open though toward some kind of notion of direct awareness of information or something like that which I
think is similar to this comment here you made:

If it's all just experience then wouldn't that be a kind of direct realism? There wouldn't even be a self as much as a local bundle of experiences which gets in the habit of calling itself "I", erroneously. — Moliere

But to clarify I wasn't trying to necessarily imply anything about the universe being just experiences. I don't believe sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics are accessible so I don't bother with that.

I was just saying that I am having what I call experiences and they flow and any time I recognize errors, that is just encompassed in types of experiential flow. And yes, what I would call the self is enacted in the flow too just like you said.

It might not be apt to call it direct realism though because I wouldn't say it conflicted with the idea of mediational processes and a chain of causes originating outside of what is experienced. It is more appropriately, and perhaps trivially, a direct awareness of what is going on in my head which I think is then not the same as the kind of direct realism described on wikipedia or something. It would be quite weakened and I would even push back against the notion of there being a fact of the matter about the sense that these experiences are about objective objects out in the world in the same kind of way I push back against scientific realism. As an analogy, I would say what we perceive is closer to a notion of an instrumentalist science where we construct theories that predict data, as opposed to theories being objectively real.

I think objects have affordances more than distinct properties. — Moliere

But what does it mean for a color itself to be an affordance? What is it inherently that colors afford? On the contrary, color seems more closely related to wavelength properties in light, which maybe then can be used to construct affordances in some sense afterward (and cannot be identical per se).

And sometimes people do see features which are not actually there from some other person's perspective, like hallucinations. Someone on an LSD trip might see motion in the carpet where another person sees none at all. (Though I guess you might say motion and non-motion are both there?)

Tbh I think the affordance/J.J.Gibson-kind of direct perception is closer to my "direct awareness of information" than it is to more literal direct realism. But I suspect maybe that interpretation may be particular to me. The idea of affordances definitely was a significant input, among others, to what led me to the idea that our experiences are fundamentally just about "what happens next?" and enacting that... which I see as pretty much just a more general view of affordances. So affordances is an important concept to me but I have gone away from the idea that the kind of qualities I directly experience are literally affordances. If sensory information arises from patterns on sensory boundaries like the retina, then the connection to affordances must come in afterwards.

For me, I don't think it makes sense to say the dress can be two colors without loosening realism and directness, arguably both. But again, I don't think that contradicts my "direct awareness of information" thing imo.

Edit: ( ).

though it's not all that satisfying to me to say that the hard problem presupposes anything. — AmadeusD

I think it does. If you are like an idealist and the world of experience is just the world, then I don't think there is a hard problem for them in the way you imply. For there to be a hard problem I think there must be a kind of dualism where what is going on outside the head differs from inside the head (presupposing indirectness that would not be there for the idealist where the nature of the world as it is is right before their very eyes).

If there's no conscious experience, there's nothing to compare with mind-independence. — AmadeusD

Why can't I just talk about some kind of representations an A.I. has?

Edit: ( ).

Is that not different to your mind? — Moliere

Yes, when you put them side-by-side but I am still not sure what the latter really means in terms of being aquainted with the world.

So how does the indirect realist account for error about perception, if not another intermediary? — Moliere

To me, there are basically just sequences of experiences and we can be erroneous about what experiences will happen next, or what experiences accompany each other. That is all. And recognizing errors itself involves some sequence of experiences.

To me it seems like it's much more elegant to simply say we can be fallible — Moliere

What if two people see the same object in two different ways due to an illusion, yet they are both directly aquainted with that object?

I'd believe that if we recreated the conditions for creating perception then we'd produce the same results, but I don't believe anyone really knows those conditions. — Moliere

Well I think we agree here.

there is no direct link between most things in the world and our experience of them. This is, in fact, the hard problem — AmadeusD

I am not sure I would say that the hard problem is the crux of the problem - if anything, the hard problem probably presupposes indirect realism. It's also an interesting question whether indirect realism is a construct that can be applied to things that don't have experience.

using arguments like this seems to me to entirely side-step the question, and assumes that the very concept of 'direct'ness is somehow intensional and not something which can be ascertained 'correctly' seems both unsatisfactory, and under-explanatory. — AmadeusD

Well yes, I think it's difficult to ignore steps of mediation in the chain of events leading to experience, especially under a notion of indirect realism defined by the idea that perception is governed by experiences or representations different from the objects-in-themselves. I guess under that definition I could equally ask whether anything could count as direct which seems quite difficult imo under modern understandings of science and partly why I wasn't sure what people were meaning by direct realism.

I don't think it's a matter of knowledge as much as an interpretation of what we know. — Moliere

Well alright, but then I think I would be interested in whether you would think it acceptable for an indirect realist to call you an indirect realist, since you are not necessarily contradicting their beliefs at all as far as I can tell.

I don't know why I'd prioritize ipseity over the object... the sacrifice of fidelity to our intuitions. — Moliere

Some interesting thoughts here.

Rather, I can't see how we'd be able to tell the story about retina, photons, or brains without knowing -- rather than inferring -- about the world. — Moliere

Not sure I agree. I don't see the contradiction in the idea that there are things that happen beyond our immediate perceptions which we create stories to try and explain even if we cannot definitively know anything in a perfect way.

Else, "retina, photons, brains" are themselves just inferences about an experiential projection in a causal relationship with a reality we know nothing about, but just make guesses about. — Moliere

Well all of our knowledge about the world is enacted within experiences which are not identical with things in the outside world beyond those experiences.

The only problem with this view being that we do know things, so it falls in error on the other side -- on the side of certain knowledge which rejects beliefs which could be wrong, when all proper judgment takes place exactly where we could be wrong. — Moliere

I am not sure I understand.

There's a difference between being able to accomplish something, and knowing something.

I'd liken our neuroscientists to medieval engineers -- they can make some observations and throw together some catapults, but they do not know the mechanical laws of Newton or its extensions.

It's more because we're ignorant of how this whole thing works -- even at the conceptual level, which is why it's interesting in philosophy -- so I wouldn't believe it without more. I'd think the person was making some sort of mistake along the way, in the same way that I thought about the Google employee who thought that later iterations of ChatGPT are conscious. — Moliere

I really don't think its as complicated as you make out. The only way information gets into our brain and cause sensory experiences is by stimulating sensory receptors. The light hitting my retina is causing patterns of excitation at any given time. If artificially exciting them in an identical way did not produce the same results it would seem inexplicable to me. Why wouldn't it? To me that is an unnecessary skepticism.

Rather, we directly interact with the world as a part of it -- the world interacting with itself, in the broad view. — Moliere

I would ask whether anything could ever count as indirect under this view. On the other hand, if you think of the fact that we, as parts, can be decomposed into parts then there are parts which mediate eachother's interactions with the rest of the world... visual cortical states, sensory states on the retina, photons travelling in the air. I can maybe in some sense interact with patterns in the outside world but not without those patterns appearing on the surface of my retina through photonic interactions and then the correlations appearing in cortical states. If that information is about something that has happened on the surface of a car 30 feet away then I do not see how there is not mediation there which leads from events at the car to what I see.

and all that seems to justify doubt that were some scientist of consciousness to claim they have a brain in a vat which is experiencing I'd simply doubt it without more justification. It's entirely implausible that we'd stumble upon how to do that given the depth of our ignorance. — Moliere

I am not sure I agree. Our experiences are a direct result of stimulation at sensory boundaries so I do not see an immediate biological or physical reason to suggest that artificial stimulations couldn't produce the same experiences in a brain in a vat scenario. Neuroscientists can already cause familiar experiences by artificially stimulating sensory receptors or brain cells.

Nevertheless, we don’t know what goes on under the hood, yet we rise to the occassion of making it comprehensible to ourselves, in some form, by some method. Representation is merely a component which fits into one of those methods. — Mww

so we throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks — Mww

Yup, definitely agree with your sentiments in this post! I think this applies to all our learning. All we have are "stories" that are constructed and enacted in experience and we argue about their merits.