But I also believe this is broadly compatible with the phenomenal-noumenal distinction. The problems arise when we try to 'peek behind the curtain' to see what the in-itself really is. — Wayfarer

Good, agreed. That there is a distinction is all I insist on.

This is exactly the wrong attitude. By giving the name "world" to the noumenal, you imply that what exists independently is in some way similar to our conception of "the world". — Metaphysician Undercover

We can be more precise, terminologically, if that suits you. I have no stake in what's called a "world" and what isn't. Again -- what I care about is the difference, not what terms we use for it. I don't think attitude has much to do with it. We can call the "noumenal world" the in-itself, and "our world" . . . well, whatever you'd like, that you believe would be less misleading. No arguments here.

OK, I'd forgotten the context of the OP.

It's against my religion to dispute about how to use the term "exist". :wink: I'll just point out that if the world neither exists nor does not exist, then to say "our perception of the world is mind-dependent" is a bit of a puzzler. How can I perceive something that transcends the category of existence? It's hard enough to perceive things that don't exist! Unless -- as I was trying to suggest -- "the world" and "the in-itself" are not the same. This was the distinction I was drawing between "our world" and "the world of noumena."

This is all cogent and helpful, very clearly written. Just one thing:

The kind of world we experience depends on the kinds of senses we have—and, in our case, also on the concepts and structures we use to interpret them. This doesn’t mean the world is illusory. But it also doesn’t mean it exists independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it — Wayfarer

To me, this muddles the idea of "world" a bit. As you say, a world without perceivers, a world of noumena, is a kind of "placeholder world," granted as necessary but by definition unknowable in itself. The world we experience -- let's call it our world -- is not illusory, but nor is it the world of noumena. But when you say, "[the world] doesn't exist independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it," you're talking about our world. The noumenal world does exist independently. So, if I may:

"This doesn’t mean that our world is illusory. But it doesn’t exist independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it; that sort of world, the noumenal world, does have such an independent existence."

I only bother with this because otherwise is tempting to read the position as saying that there is no independent reality, which I don't think is what you mean. "What reality is in itself" may be a mystery, as you say, but it is not an empty phrase. We can't jump from the inevitable fact that our world is co-constituted, to the conclusion that our world is all there is. But you know this.

Is that where some confusion lies? — Hanover

Possibly, thank you.

Kill #1. It's dead. — Hanover

Consider it dead.

OK, the analogy with qualia is clear. In #2, "burj" is like a quale. In #3, "burj" is like a quale that has been made public. You're saying that there must be qualia, otherwise the transition from 2 to 3 would make no sense. "Burj" is still lingual, still a word, even at 2.

Something like that?

Moving it a little further, is there any process for making qualia public? We more or less understand what happens to "burj" in #3, but what is the analogy for qualia here?

I generally avoid engaging with people I assess as hostile or aggressively obtuse. I suspect many who come across as belligerent aren’t necessarily self-aware, they likely see themselves as committed to truth or other ideals that, to them, justify what others experience as harshness or dogmatism. — Tom Storm

This is generally my practice too, both here and elsewhere.

I always assume people are doing the best they can, even the rude ones. — Tom Storm

You're more charitable than I. Looking at my own behavior, it's apparent that I am often not doing the best I can, so I tend to assume that's true for others as well.

The other thing that helps with civility, when disagreements occur, is an attitude of genuine curiosity. This puts the discussion into an entirely different dimension than "dueling refutations." But what is genuine curiosity? See under "humility" -- not one of the Greek virtues, but many today regard it as an improvement over megalopsyche.

For us, not for cats, this is a language event — Astrophel

Then, as noted before, we have no real difference. I too think that language permeates human experience, though calling sense perception a "language event" is perhaps too strong. I'd taken you to be saying that the thing we perceive is also a piece of language, but that, of course, is different, and I'm pleased you're not recommending such a view.

obviously there are things there that are not language. Obviously. This is why we have the term qualia — Astrophel

Well, and the term noumena as well. But again, no problem, as long as something, whether noumena or qualia (depending on the degree of idealism you adopt, I guess!) pre-exists our efforts to talk about it.

Really, can't this all be said quite simply? We don't (as adults with language) encounter the world innocently, seeing objects like fenceposts and cats "because they're there." Both biologically and socially, we've learned over the history of our species to make choices about how to concatenate and discriminate our perceptions into the categories that are important to us. More often than not, we're aided (or on occasion constricted) by our language, which provides ready labels. Whether some sort of "true being" is to be discovered beyond this, we don't know, or at least I don't.

I would say there are three terms, not two. Substrate, encoding, and content. — hypericin

Good. So the substrate of a numeral would be, e.g., ink on paper.

Please, try to give me an example of a 'non-physical' bit of information that exists.
— Philosophim

A song on a vinyl LP that is the same as the song you hear on Spotify. — hypericin

It seems that @Philosophim is thinking of information as requiring the physical substrate, while @hypericin believes information is some further item that the physical substrate may instantiate. The analogy with numbers illustrates this: The numeral "3" would be an instantiation of the number 3. Or, using music, both the vinyl and the digital are instantiations of the song.

I don't have any stake in which way is the better way to use the term "information."* I'm just pointing out that, either way, a complete account needs to include both halves of the relation, so to speak. If information is like numerals, then we need to know the status of numbers -- "informational content", perhaps? Or, if information is like numbers, what do we understand numerals to be? I'm calling them "instantiations", but maybe "informational vehicles" is better. Or just "symbols"?

*Unless the "information is like numerals (hence physical)" position entails physicalism. Which it needn't. But if taken that way, I don't think physicalism gives a convincing account of abstracta in general.

You likely won't be very pleased. — Astrophel

Oh hell, nothing in philosophy pleases me! :grin:

But the philosophical insight that acknowledges that language recognizes its own delimitations is a pivotal recognition in that it forces, really, one to face a world without the confidence and security of any authority at all. — Astrophel

OK. But how does that turn the world into language?

I say Look a cat!, you ask, whaty is a cat? I look in the dictionary, find other explanations, and each of these bears the same indeterminacy. — Astrophel

Let's switch the example to something I might really find puzzling -- an echidna, let's say. You point to the thing, calling it by name, and I say, "What's an echidna?" For starters, you'll say, "That is," and I'll have a good look and form some sense impressions. We might then discuss its features. If I then go on to ask, "What sort of beast is it?" you might have recourse to a biology text to give me some info. But that can't be the point at which what you're calling the "indeterminacy" enters. Nothing in a written text is any more indeterminate than the language you and I are already using. So for me, the question is, How indeterminate is that? At the level of philosophy, we all know the arguments that can be made. But none of them prevents you and me from agreeing with perfect certainty on what counts as an echidna, and what are the correct and incorrect ways of describing it. Isn't that good enough?

primordiality, as Heidegger puts it, is really "equiprimordiality": a bottom line analytic that is itself manifold, complex, open to the world for more penetrating discovery — Astrophel

You do realize this is opaque? Perhaps not in context, but it doesn't do the job of explaining why the world must be made of language, which is what I was asking about.

He didn't posit, but explicitly denied, any metaphysical primordiality to our existence, anything like qualia. — Astrophel

Who said qualia, or some qualia-like sense of existence, were metaphysically primordial? (Not me.) I'm asking why you think language is. Do you perhaps mean that the only alternative to the primacy of language is some story about what is self-evident about my own existence? Why would that be?

the cat seen and accepted as a cat is all there is to being a cat, in this everyday world. There is another world that IS this familair world and is also a more penetrating analytic into the presuppositions of all this familiarity. — Astrophel

Fair enough. Can you describe the cat in terms of the more penetrating analytic, showing how a relevant difference in description occurs?

I'm really not some AnalPhil opponent of Continental philosophy. Nor am I trying to broaden the discussion to make you defend an entire approach to philosophy. I just want to get a sympathetic grasp on how it might appear to an intelligent thinker that the external world is at bottom linguistic, which I take to be your position. Far from wanting to refute it, I'd like to inhabit it, at least provisionally, and see what I can learn.

OK, here's where I am with this, and please tell me if you think I'm off track:

First of all, you're showing that this is not about private language as Witt understood it. There's nothing intrinsically private about "burj," or at least I don't think there is -- that's why I've been so concerned to understand the circumstances in which it's introduced. It got a little confusing because, by telling us that it refers to a somewhat ineffable feeling on the part of the speaker, you incline us toward believing that it is private in Witt's sense, but the subsequent details don't bear that out. "Burj" is merely a potential new word in a public language. It would make no difference to the case whether "burj" referred to a somewhat ineffable feeling or a type of perfectly effable tree.

I think this fits with your saying:

That means we need not subject a word to public use to make it lingual. A private word is just as much a word as a public word — Hanover

though you take it a bit further. For you, "burj" is already a word at T-2, by virtue of its meaning something to you, the speaker. I'm calling it a "potential" word but the difference is unimportant because we're both saying that, either way, it's not private in the invidious sense that would lead someone to conclude that meaning lies exclusively in usage. (It is an open question, however, whether meaning can be determined in any other way.)

If all that rings true, then I see the analogy with qualia. Your (a) is the internal state which analogizes to a quale, in that both exist and are "meaningful," if I can put it that way, yet have no appearance in public. You're saying it isn't possible to demote either (a) or a quale, claiming they're irrelevant to the experiences of language use and sense perception, respectively. Subjectivity matters, in short.

The analogy might break down when we ask how a quale could become part of public experience, but that's outside the scope of your story here.

Well, this is interesting and complex enough that I might have it all wrong! But see what you think.

So if we subtract 2 from the 3, we isolate our quale. — Hanover

OK, sorry if I'm like a dog with a bone here, but . . . if we dispense with the referent, as Witt suggests we can, are you arguing that the word itself at T-2 is now like a quale -- something personal and not yet "used," but still meaningful? Is that the case you're illustrating against usage as meaning?

Again, your patience is appreciated. I don't like posts that clearly haven't tried hard enough to understand what they're responding to, so I don't want to be guilty of that.

Reference here is to form of life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" — Hanover

Yes, though as is often the case, I think Witt was exaggerating a bit to make his point.

But that being a cat becomes a cat when I take it into my perceptual apparatus. Prior to this, it is not a cat. My perceptual, cognitive, affective "functions" manufacture catness. — Astrophel

This is what I meant by saying that "our way of constituting the physical world may be simply that -- our way." And I recognize that all kinds of meaningful debates occur around just how much the human apparatus contributes to what we consider the physical world to be -- in other words, what the cat "is" before it is a cat for us.

But if we agree, more or less, about this, how can language be primordial? Unless we're just disagreeing about what "primordial" ought to mean. I took it to refer to something extremely basic, ontologically, something that, at the very least, precedes human cognition. If all you mean is "Language is basic for humans, without which we could not recognize items we call 'cats'," then that's fine. Yet I sense you mean something quite different and more radical, but it still isn't clear.

thought is directed to something palpable in time and space, and what could be more "real" than this [biological entity], but when asked what a biological entity IS, you find more language, and this leads to more language still . . . — Astrophel

I want to understand why you believe the experience bottoms out in language. It seems to me that the necessity of thinking in language does not mean that what is thought about is also language. Can you help me see why this is false? With respect, you just keep asserting it. Can you perhaps describe how that experience happens for you -- the moment at which you lose contact with a reality external to language?

However, if you were a cat, my story would be better all things considered, but I digress. — Hanover

And if you were a cat, there'd be no story, so there! :joke:

OK, I just wrote a post in reply to your "burj" story that was coming along very nicely until I realized I had another question I needed to ask. So, if you'll be patient with me:

When you say that a quale is like "burj" at T-2, do you mean the word "burj" or the reference of the word, i.e., a feeling about the park? I had been taking you to mean the word itself, but in replying I realized that a lot hinges on that interpretation, so I'd better check it out.

We have three cats and they are adorable, and they are endowed with emotional abilities, are sensitive, yearning for affection. — Astrophel

Very good! And do you never wonder what they're thinking? I find this especially interesting precisely because I doubt they have language, yet I'm quite sure they engage in ratiocinative mental processes and are able to represent facts about the world to themselves, somehow.

But we [the corporation] were NOT just years before. How does existence simply come into being just by talking it into being? A person is like this, no? — Astrophel

Well, no. I'm happy to grant existence, for philosophical purposes, to both corporations and persons (however galling that may be in U.S. politics). But if we agree that both exist, we should also agree that they exist in very different ways. A corporation is a sort of mereological construction, whereas a person is a living biological entity. (I'm assuming you don't mean to get into the intricacies of whether every human is properly a "person."). A living thing doesn't get talked into existence. A corporation does, and must, along with a few other social requirements.

The point is, language is primordial, and that makes being complicated... or does it? — Astrophel

Again, I recognize that this is what you're asserting, but I don't see the case for it yet. Let's imagine that all language-users go extinct; is the physical world not still there? If so, how is language primordial? It may be basic and constitutive for us, but that's a different matter, no? Likewise, we can hypothesize that our way of constituting the physical world is simply that -- our way -- but do you want to deny any independent existence to it at all?

OK, the picture is coming a bit more in focus. Is my role at T-1 mute, though? Am I meant to be understood as simply listening, just as I do with the video at T-3? Can we assume that, among other uses of "burj," you define it for me?

I need to get a little clearer about these circumstances before I can hazard an opinion on what is missing, so to speak, during the crucial T-2 events, which take place with neither a present nor a future auditor.

I don't think about the way animals and infants experience the world because it is simply a bore. They eat, sleep, and defecate and stare at things, generally speaking. — Astrophel

I guess this would be a spade-turning difference between us. I am fascinated by the inner lives of animals; to me it's the least boring thing in the world. Infants, a close second. I guess you've never been close to an animal? Eating, sleeping, defecating, and staring are popular activities, all right, just as they are for us! (And you left out sex!). But they don't begin to exhaust the repertoire.

As for our need for language to describe non-linguistic things: granted. You still haven't shown me how this turns the thing described into more language.

The meaning underlying the mutterings are the references to qualia. — Hanover

Ah. But that's different. You asked, "Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia?" I think you owe us a story about how the mutterings are conveyers of meaning, which in turn can be analogous to qualia. I took you literally, to be referring to the sounds themselves. Isn't the question (of what [and how] they could mean) at the heart of the thought experiment?

On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. — Hanover

I hate to rain on a fun thought experiment but . . . what does this actually mean? Could you give just a few examples of how you spoke to yourself using "burj," and how the community was able to declare your use consistent and rule-bound?

The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover

Nice. The mutterings were "out in the open" but still private because there was no community to evaluate it. I think the analogy works, and makes your point, but no, the mutterings are not what we properly call qualia. They may share the feature of being private by virtue of "no community", but qualia are sensations or individual subjective experiences, not words or behaviors. Allegedly.

this term [qualia] is something that turns up in philosophy forums, but really, nowhere else, and this is because other contexts do not possess the basis for the concept to come forth. Only philosophy. — Astrophel

I've seen this said before, and have never understood it. Anyone with an introspective turn of mind has thought of qualia, often under the name "inner feels." One of the standard childhood puzzles is, "How do I know my 'green' is your 'green'?" I've had innumerable conversations with adults in which the distinction is easily made between the (seemingly public) sensory basis for experiences of sight or sound, and the (seemingly private) experiences themselves.

Why hasn't "qualia" caught on as a term? No idea. But it can't be because the concept is obscure.

" Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience." In this you implicitly affirm the metaphysics of everydayness. — Astrophel

Not sure what that is. But in any case, thinking in language doesn't make the subject of thought also linguistic. Does cutting boards with a saw make every board a tool? Nor does it mean that animals and human infants don't have experiences because they don't have language.

I sense that you basically agree with this latter point, but are holding out for some other way to frame the idea that "Language is what we ARE." Language may be, as you say, the foundation for comprehension, but so much of my experience has nothing to do with comprehension.

It is impossible to imagine a world outside of language, because 'language' itself is a particle of language. — Astrophel

But why would that restrict what can be imagined? I am now imagining a rabbit. Why would it be the case that the rabbit must be within language, because "language" is within language? There could conceivably be some other reasons why imagining a rabbit requires some linguistic component, but the status of the word "language" itself doesn't seem relevant.

Thanks, Hanover, I see your point now, and agree with it. We don't even need to involve cats here; a human infant will do as well.

The answer to the question, what is the nature of pain? is answered in language, or there is no answer at all, and this puts pain outside of language, but this outside is not conceivable, because even the term 'outside' belongs to language. I assume this is already made clear. — Astrophel

Not so clear to me. Is this the "absurd game" you're looking for a solution to? Or do you endorse this viewpoint?

It seems to me that the absurdity is evident. An "outside of language" is not conceivable because "outside" is a word? Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience. Whether we must mediate these experiences through language is a separate question, the answer to which will vary depending on which experiences. Pain, I'm guessing, is pretty language-free.

In a universe only of cats, the cat's pain is qualia, but not his "pain," unless you say pain and "pain" are inseparable, in which case there's no pain and no qualia.

It's just a silly game. — Hanover

This looks interesting, but I can't relate it back to some previous post or comment. Could you expand? What's the pain/"pain" distinction?

'It would be possible', wrote Einstein, 'to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.' — Wayfarer

like trying to capture a conversation by analyzing the acoustic properties of the sound waves of which it consists (although orders of magnitude more complex). Even if successful, it would miss the semantic content, the intentions, the meaning being imparted. — Wayfarer

I question that the brain can be described in solely physical terms or as a physical thing — Wayfarer

Just to clarify -- Aren't the first two examples descriptions in solely physical terms? Understood thus, they would starkly reveal the limits of such description. I'd have expected your point to be that the brain can be described solely in physical terms, but that such a description has to leave out what we think of as the mental.

I think what you mean is that there cannot be a physical brain-description that also describes mental content. Is that close? Or perhaps, the more uncontroversial point that any physical description of a thing may not necessarily tell us what the thing does?

Can you rephrase this? — Tom Storm

I'd better -- it was pretty ugly, sorry!

I'm assuming you're asking whether the aesthetic value of a work is independent from the information we have about it. — Tom Storm

That's more like it. Yes, that's what I was asking. And as a corollary: Does the aesthetic value change relative to what we know about a work? Like you, I think art is understood only in context, not in some idealized free space. Part of that understanding is aesthetic judgment.

Causality is not the same thing as truth. Causality is a relationship between events. Truth is a characteristic of statements - propositions. — T Clark

OK.

Though as we've often discussed on this forum:

Is "If P then Q; P; therefore Q" about events or propositions -- or both? It can be given either a causal or a logical construal.

Yes, I took the more detailed explanation to be part of what a good investigation would uncover. Taken at whatever level of detail seems important, then, would we also say the explanation is true?

Causality and truth are apples and oranges. — T Clark

I don't quite see this. Aren't you saying that the statement "{some set of Xs} caused the plane crash" has to be true, in order to be of use? How then is causality an "apple" in regard to such a statement? The predication seems the same as in any other similarly phrased statement, and would follow the same inferential rules.

I understood that but I think this is stretching this idea too far, but we don’t have to agree. — Tom Storm

Sure. It's a thought experiment, really. Nothing of great moment depends on it.

is that the sort of "innocent eye" we'd find desirable? Probably not.
— J

Depends on the purpose. Obviously no good for an art historian or dealer. — Tom Storm

What about for a philosopher? Do we want to argue that aesthetic value is neutral as regards the amount of information a viewer may have access to?

Agreed, but is the explanation nonetheless true, as opposed to merely useful? We can bracket questions about how all bombs behave, and ask whether the causal explanation involving this one is correct, can't we?

I think the concept of causality can be a very useful one, depending on the situation. At other times, it can be misleading. — T Clark

I think we can make it stronger than "very useful." When an investigation determines the cause of a plane crash, this is of course useful. But I'm confident the investigators also mean it to be true. Is there any reason to withhold that designation, in such a case?

We're talking about an actual, literal written statement. Most works are without such a thing. — Tom Storm

I know, but I was pointing out that there's much less difference than at first appears, and suggesting we think about an "accompanying statement" more broadly. Because we can pose the same question about traditional art: How much information, if any, should be included as "part of" such a piece? At what point does information become necessary in order to see a Renaissance work as art? Leonardo may not have offered us a written statement, but his tradition did, or something very like it.

And then there's the name of the painting . . . part of the work?

I think there are plenty of people who are unfamiliar with artworks and have no idea how to engage with them or what they even are. — Tom Storm

No doubt. So, is that the sort of "innocent eye" we'd find desirable? Probably not.

Yes, these are good discriminations. I tend to agree that biographical knowledge about the artist, for instance (hunter or gatherer? :smile: ), might not matter much to seeing a work as quality art.

The ultimate "innocence," which I'm arguing is an impossible limit-case, would have you looking at the Lascaux painting from a kind of "view from nowhere" -- suddenly, somehow, it appears before you, and you have no context in which to surmise it might be an art object, or for whom. Moreover, you yourself have no exposure to art up until this hypothetical moment.

I think we agree this is a fiction?

So the more practical question is, how much does each particular bit of knowledge you do bring to the painting affect your ability to have a pure or semi-innocent view? You say:

I know something about the Fauve artists of the 20th C and I have a particular cultural and individual experience, but all these have no effect on my seeing an object that has great aesthetic value. — RussellA

I find this hard to understand. Are you saying that your own cultural and individual experience of art, which you bring to the Fauve painting, has no effect on your perception of "great aesthetic value"? That anyone can see it? That seems so counter-intuitive that I think we must be somewhat at cross-purposes here. Maybe you could elaborate a bit? I think you're wanting to say that the painting contains, in and of itself, aesthetic value?

I know that these images have an aesthetic and are therefore art without knowing anything about the cultures they originated in. — RussellA

Sure, so do I, but "the culture they originated in" is only one element of what I'm calling the "accompanying statement." My list of what constitutes an innocent eye was partial, but taking it as a starting point, do you feel that, when you encounter one of the above artworks (which are extraordinary, by the way, thanks!) you:
- know nothing about it? Really??
- know nothing about art yourself, from your own culture?
- are able to encounter the art in a way that is separate from a time and place?
- bring no cultural or individual experience to bear?

That would be, per impossibile, a truly innocent eye. And would we even be able to recognize art, using such an eye?

Innocence is a matter of degree, of course, but I think we should really try to notice what we already know, or think we know, when we see a work of art from an unfamiliar culture.

Is the "artwork" just the pebble or is the "artwork" the pebble plus the accompanying statement by the artist? — RussellA

"In Postmodernism, the boundary between the artwork and its accompanying statement is often deliberately blurred." — RussellA

But this is not only true of post-modernism. There is no such thing as an art work without an "accompanying statement." To suppose otherwise is to subscribe to the idea of an "innocent eye" which is somehow able to encounter an art work without knowing anything about it, or about art, disregarding the time and place of the encounter, and without bringing any cultural or individual experience to bear. Is there anyone on this thread who disagrees that this is a fiction?

Post-modernism perhaps is more deliberate about bringing this to our attention.

Do you think they use "learn" and "teach" inappropriately in this article? — Patterner

That's a really useful question. Let's see . . .

But this exercise would, at least theoretically, only teach the computer to be on par . . . etc. — Scott R. Granter, MD

Yes, this is inaccurate. Teach "the computer"? Which computer? Surely they don't mean some actual piece of hardware. So what or who is being taught?

AlphaGo then played against itself millions of times, over and over again, learning and improving with each game — Scott R. Granter, MD

On the fence here. Do we require learning to be something the so-called "AlphaGo" is doing under that description? In other words, can something be learned according to a 3rd person point of view, but not from the 1st person PoV of the learner? I don't think there's a right answer to this. If we decide to say that we can recognize learning even though a program cannot, then yes, AG can be said to be learning.

AlphaGo literally learns by teaching itself. — Scott R. Granter, MD

No. Nothing like this could be "literally" happening. A computer program is running, and responding. Where do we find the "itself"?

we have created machines that truly think and, at least in some areas like Go, they are smarter, much smarter, than we are. — Scott R. Granter, MD

You didn't ask about "think," but my 2 cents is: Yes, we should be generous and agree that an LLM program simulates algorithmic human thinking so successfully that, if we use this metric for what "thinking" means, thinking is indeed happening.

I'm interested in how you see this issue. Are you more inclined to grant an agent-like status to the AG program and others of similar sophistication?

Yeah, probably a losing battle on my part. But I'd like to see more pushback against the easy acceptance of the fiction that a program is an entity or even an agent. With a name! Who starts sentences with "I . . . "!

Or if we insist on some such description, then we're talking to the humans who invented the program.
— J

not really. The programmers gave them only the framework to learn, — Ulthien

I'm actually happier with leaving out the whole "talking to" description, partially because if we try to stretch it, as I did, to generously include the human programmers, then your point becomes relevant -- it is a stretch, considering how the program runs. (Notice my careful avoidance of the term "learn"! :wink: There is no entity here that can learn anything.)

Sorry, our math contemplations do contain a lot of fine qualia that are not so maybe prominent as other stronger qualia, but can still very much be sensed: i.e. rapture, elation, insight, direction, similarity - all of these are qualia feels, too. — Ulthien

A quale is usually defined as a sense perception, not a "feel," so that's how I used it.

Bit of an odd reply on my part perhaps, and for that I apologize, — Outlander

Not at all. You'll be hard pressed to find any two philosophers who agree on how to discuss consciousness!

The main point here is that I'm recommending making a distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. (How firm and/or clear such a distinction will turn out to be, remains to be seen.) So qualia and other objects of thought or perception are in one bucket, and subjectivity or consciousness is what thinks or perceives them.

As you point out, consciousness itself can also be an object of consciousness -- "thinking about thinking," self-consciousness. I myself don't believe that's a necessary element of subjectivity; probably very few animals other than humans have it, whereas consciousness is surely widespread throughout the animal kingdom.

would the rules of the game be somewhat analogous to a form in the Platonic sense? — Wayfarer

Interesting. "Form" does seem to be in the neighborhood somewhere. We could perhaps give an ideal description of a particular instance of a game, noting exactly what happens. It could be perfectly accurate. We would then have something in addition to "the players" and "the field," namely an account of events. But without the rules, we're still unable to give even the crudest story of the game. This somewhat resembles the notion of form, which can encompass both organization and intention.

Is "qualia" not fundamental to what is considered to be defining, if not relevant, to the "Hard Problem of Consciousness?" — Outlander

Yes, in a way, but it's misleading to think that qualia somehow are consciousness. The Hard Problem asks how consciousness, or subjectivity, arises from the physical, and why. One result of this emergence (according to Chalmers and others) are qualia -- how sensations present themselves to consciousness. But you can have consciousness without qualia. My contemplation of a math problem involves no qualia, but would be impossible without consciousness.

It might just be that I am hung up on the thing in something. — Banno

That's a possibility. We've noticed before how hard it is to come up with neutral, "place-holder" terms in philosophy. Of course there no "thing" involved in being a bat, or a human, if we're taking "thing" in the same way we take it when we point to a rock. But what else should we substitute? "An experience that could be reified and quantified over"? That doesn't seem much better. And "what it's like" is an English idiom, often untranslatable into other languages. Still, I think we should let Nagel's point stand, even if we're not satisfied with the phrasing: A living creature of sufficient complexity is going to have an inner life as we commonly think of it, and a water bottle isn't.

A possible reply to this is that "ineffable" may be one of Chalmers' "temporary" obstacles, as opposed to a permanent one like biological composition
— J

Another of Karl Popper's promissory notes, I'm afraid. — Wayfarer

That's why it would be striking and significant if a philosopher could show that the promise was impossible to keep, not just "possible in the future." As you know, some promising (sorry!) lines of thought here would focus on subjectivity as necessarily inaccessible from the 3rd person PoV, or necessarily untranslatable via algorithm-like instructions. Do you know of an argument along those lines that seems watertight to you?

In fact, what we should do is tell it all the things it ought do for a good existence and hand those rules down from a mountaintop. — Hanover

Good one!

We never thought we'd be talking directly to machines like we do today, so you never know. — Hanover

At the risk of being a monomaniac, I have to say again: This is an illusion, cleverly encouraged by the programmers of the "machines." We do not talk to anything when we talk to a chatting program. Or if we insist on some such description, then we're talking to the humans who invented the program.

Expert chess players are able to play with no physical board. — Wayfarer

Right, but we don't even need to concede that much. Even a game like football, in which physicality is not optional, cannot be said to be "identical" with the players and the field. There is a mental or conceptual element involved, without which no one could understand what a football game was.

So, analogically, mental activity can't be called identical to physical activity. It might depend upon it -- supervenience, anyone? -- but a purely physical description of brain processes will not get you to the content of a thought. The challenge for a philosopher is to explain, if they can, why this has to be the case; in other words, why this isn't simply a limitation of our current technology. "Imagine what we'll know about brains in 100 years!" the physicalist urges us. "Why, we'll be able to 'read off' any thought you have by analyzing the neuronal activity." But does this make neurons and thought identical? The scientist needs the philosopher to clarify, at this point.