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Atoms which make up strawberries don't taste like strawberries either. Biology emerges from chemistry, Smith, not "sorcery". — 180 Proof

Non-sequitur

EDIT: pointing out that emergence occurs under one set of circumstances says nothing about whether or not it occurs in some other set of circumstances.

For me, a thing only perceives modifications of itself. And as the self is self-identical, there is no intermediary. If a bomb goes off two feet away from you, but it doesn't alter your body in any way, you haven't perceived it. That's my suggestion anyway.

EDIT: Is this a version of the 'extended mind' idea? Don't know. I should probably DuckDuckGo it.

For perception to occur at all, something direct has to happen somewhere, otherwise we get an infinity of intermediaries, no? I think that's what @NOS4A2 might be challenging the non-direct realist to tackle. Could be wrong.

Though if God acts in the interest of Himself and not for us in general, I’d argue that isn’t what we intuitively grasp as benevolence. — Astro Cat

Indeed, it needs an unintuitive reinterpretation of omnibenevolence. I've never really thought of that as one of the traditional omnis anyway. There are four knocking about, but people tend to choose three: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipresence. I tend to collapse omnipotence and omnibenevolence into one, as I think what is good is what is willed. But that's not a popular move. When ditching one of these, most choose omnipresence, in order that God may be transcendent and non-spatial. But I like omnipresence for exactly that feature, it gets rid of problematic dualist interaction problems. I'm talking like I'm a theist aren't I?

Though as you note, the PoE isn't really a problem on Divine Command Theory since by definition, anything at all that God does on DCT, even torture for torture's sake alone, is "good." — Astro Cat

Sure, although adopting this horn of the dilemma does not commit us to DCT. DCT says that what God wills is Good. Period (full stop). One could, instead, simply say that what God wills is good for God. This leaves human beings with the interesting and burdensome problem of what is good for us, or for me in a world of finite opposing wills. Meta-ethical relativism is maintained, which is good.

Very nice clear OP. It does assume that one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is accepted, that God wills what is good, because it is good. That's an assumption in the OP. There's a reason all this suffering is good that we can't see but God can.

Embracing the other horn of the dilemma, that is to say that x is good because God wills it, is much more defensible in terms of intelligibility without recourse to special pleading. However this horn almost certainly involves disagreeing with God. It's all very well for God to will earthquakes and god knows what - it doesn't affect Them (my God is woke). But from our point of view these things are shit, so fuck God, you Divine Cunt. This conclusion should be embraced by theologians, but it's not a message that sounds well from a pulpit, no matter how philosophically satisfactory it is. This conception of the good, as that which is willed by a subject (even if that subject is God), and thus entailing the subjectivity of the good, nicely allows for God to be omnibenevolent (everything They will is good from Their point of view), and for us to violently object, saying that's all very well for God but from my point of view a whole bunch of stiff is shit. The human condition is very much about coming to terms with reality, that is, a world that does not obey our finite will.

I'm trying to get how a fact about reality is supposed to be implied by a fact about language. — Isaac

I think this would be a good topic for a thread. Don't have time to start one.

Thanks, I should get into the habit of using that.

Of course I believe that you think that @Banno understands the problem. It's just not evident to me that he, nor even @180 Proof does most of the time. However @180 Proof's recent gloss on it seems apt, so maybe I'm wrong.

So you have never been unconscious? — 180 Proof

In the sense of asleep or under anaesthetic, yes. What's happening there is that bert1 as a coherent subject ceases to exist. It's not that bert1 remains a constant that gains and loses consciousness, although that is how we ordinarily speak. It's that bert1 as a coherent functional identity, with memories, desires, beliefs etc ceases to exist. what is lost is identity, not consciousness.

I know I have and that you do not have any grounds to doubt my subjective account of having been unconscious.

How did you feel when you were unconscious?

Would you believe me in saying Banno and @180 Proof understand the problem? — Moliere

Maybe they do. 180 seems to having asked him.

So while unconscious one "lacks the capacity to feel"? — 180 Proof

Yes. But this never obtains.

Btw, is it even possible for a panpsychist to be unconscious?

No. It's not possible for anything to be unconscious in my view.

My charitable reading of Chalmer's notion is, in my own words, 'the difficulty of scientifically demonstrating that human beings are n o t zombies'. — 180 Proof

OK, thank you.

I think that this is an odd tactic. — Moliere

It's not a game. This is a thread about the hard problem. Banno and 180 think it's bollocks. But I'm not sure if they even know what it is.

Can you state what the hard problem is, in your own words?

↪bert1 I'll wait for you to state clearly your "concept" which you claim I and Banno lack and then I may further elaborate on what I've already written here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/771417 — 180 Proof

Consciousness is the capacity to feel.

What is the hard problem, in your own words?

What Olivier5 said.

↪Tom Storm It reeks of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Only true Scotsmen will understand Bert.

↪bert1 has yet to provide us with anything like a definition of consciousness. But he says he is a panpsyhist, (↪bert1), so if he thinks rocks are conscious then it would be best for him not to provide such a definition. — Banno

I've offered synonyms. That qualifies as a definition. I have invited you to be aware of your awareness, which you haven't yet done. If you had, that would be a kind of ostensive definition. Unfortunately I don't think it is possible to provide a definition in terms of things other than the thing defined. That's just how it is with foundational concepts.

Note that people who already have the concept have no trouble at all knowing what I'm talking about.

EDIT: can you make sens of my claim: "Rocks have experiences". Does that sentence have any intelligible meaning for you (regardless of whether you think it is true or false)?

Yeah, which we can, of course. Hence my invoking the Glasgow coma scale earlier. We can (and do) use the term sometimes in a perfectly 'physical function' kind of way. There's no one thing 'consciousness' is. It's just a word. Like most words, it's used in all sorts of ways with all sorts of degrees of success. — Isaac

Indeed. Banno insists the Glagow coma scale is the only definition. Or at least all definitions are really aspects of one sense of consciusness, and that is a public, functional one.

We all know what each other is talking about to some extent in each case (enough to get by) but it doesn't require any of those objects to correlate with something empirical science might reify. — Isaac

Sure, that';s true with things except consciousness. To put it in Cartesian terms, it is coherent to doubt the existence of pixies, God and phlogiston, but it is incoherent to doubt consciousness. Because doubting itself (arguably, I guess) entails consciousness. To doubt is the act of a conscious thing. So there is certainty attached to consciousness in a way that doesn't attach to invisible unicorns.

Do we know there's something by virtue of which we have experiences? Can't we just have them, does some additional factor need to 'allow' it? — Isaac

No particularly, I was just trying to relate the words 'consciousness' and 'experience' in a sentence such that they are linked in meaning, which I think they clearly are.

The hard problem has, as a foundational axiom, the notion that the things we talk about - experiences, awareness,... - ought to be causally connected to the objects of empirical sciences. — Isaac

Yes, I think that's sort of right. Of course, people who like to go on about the hard problem (me for instance) tend to use this a sort of reductio:

1) Assume that consciousness is caused/realised/instantiated/whatever by some physical processes
2) Figuring out exactly how seems impossibly hard
therefore 3) It's probably not the case that consciousness is caused/realised/instantiated/whatever by some physical processes

But this only has any force if we have a particular definition of 'consciousness'. If we define consciousness as a physical function, for example, the hard problem disappears. That's why definitions are absolutely crucial.

You seem quite adamant that the concept is there, but some are 'missing' it, yet you don't seem to be able to provide the necessity that would set it apart from, say, ether, or humours, or phlem...loads of concepts which we made use of at one time, but turned out just not to refer to anything at all. — Isaac

That's a good question. Ether was proposed to solve a problem, namely a medium to carry electromagnetic radiation, or something. Humours were a way of explaining illness. These were crappy scientific theories, but scientific and somewhat testable, so were eventually abandoned for better theories. Consciousness isn't like that. It's just a name for something we know exists, namely whatever it is in us by virtue of which we can have experiences. And this definitely exists, unless you want to deny that we have experiences, which you might. The concept of consciousness in this sense is non-committal. It might turn out to be a ghostly ectoplasm. Or it might turn out to be a brain state. It might turn out to be a brain function. It might turn out to be integrated information. It might turn out to be a soul. It might turn out to be space. It might turn out to be a property of the quantum field. It might be an illusion caused by how we use language. Whatever. The point is, before we can start disagreeing about these theories, we have to agree on what it is these theories are theories of. That's the definition part. That's what, as usual, we are stuck on.

Concepts, unhelpfully, often contain a mixture of theory and definition, which makes things harder. It's helps if we ca separate them out.

If that's what you mean, bert, I admitted that I don't. — 180 Proof

What we have is different theories. I'm a panpsychist. You, at various times have been a functionalist, enactivist, probably one or two other things I forget. The question is, do our theories compete? Are they theories of the same thing? That's what I'm trying to get at.

I'll put the question another way that doesn't involve you reading my mind, or even reading any of my posts (I gave my definitions a few posts ago in reply to Banno).

Please state, in your own words, what the hard problem is. I know you think it's nonsense, but that doesn't stop you stating it. I think that the flat-earth theory is wrong, but I can still state what it is.

What is my concept?

No. It's a perfectly simple question. If you have the same concept I have, even if you think it's incoherent or whatever, you should be able to explain, in your words, the concept I have.

Banno and 180,

What do you think I mean by the word 'consciousness'?

I think you've just illustrated my point.

Well, knowing and feeling and sentience are not each equivalent to the others. — Banno

They can be equivalent, in this sense I'm trying to talk about.

That last one... what is it? — Banno

Probably an unhelpful addition, it causes a lot of confusion

Are you saying 180 proof and I lack awareness, or lack the concept of awareness, or what? And how do you know this? What basis do you have for your claim? — Banno

I'm saying, reluctantly, that you lack the concept of awareness. But I don't know this for sure. I think you are aware. You both seem to avoid the concept. One explanation for this is that you don't have it. You don't avoid the word, but you seem to construe it in its non-phenomenal senses, at least when going into detail.

My old tutor at university, Stephen Priest, once said to me "Some of my colleagues haven't noticed they are conscious." I didn't take him seriously at the time. I thought it was absurd, these guys were smart guys. But I'm reluctantly coming to the view that he was right. It seems like the only realistic explanation for what is happening. There has been some papers on this. Off the top of my head, I think it's Max Velmans who wrote "How not to define consciousness", if I remember correctly. It might be interesting to do a thread on one of these papers about definition.

phenomenal consciousness..." - what is it? — Banno

Equivalently:

- sentience
- the capacity to feel
- the capacity to know
- that in X whereby there is 'something it is like' to be X

These are all abiguous though, they can be construed in a way that avoids the concept. And sure enough, that's what you have done many times. I don't think that's you being deliberately obtuse, I think you genuinely don't get it.

The issue is that consciousness can only be defined by appeal to someone's consciousness of their own consciousness.

phenomenal consciousness — Banno

Awareness

So what exactly am I missing? — Banno

I'm not sure. I don't really know why some people have the concept and some don't.

Is this the concept you say I don't have? — Banno

Yes

that the issue is about the self? — Banno

No, phenomenal consciousness. The subject of the thread.

I just don't know whether it seems like I'm phenomenally conscious is different than actually being conscious in the hard sense. — Marchesk

Seeming to be conscious is equivalent to being conscious, no? Just as a matter of definition.

Ok, so if 'experience' is the word we're using to describe the post hoc storytelling, then neuroscience has a few quite good models for that. There doesn't seem to be a hard problem there. — Isaac

That's great! So what is it about the neuronal models that explain how it is that I feel like I'm having an experience, when I'm not? Why can't all the neuronal stuff happen without me thinking I'm having an experience?

Possibly. They'd need to have eyes, but I don't see any reason they couldn't. — Isaac

OK, so this clearly separates two concepts of consciousness. One in which experience is not part of the concept. One in which it is.

One way to solve the hard problem of consciousness is simply to say experiences are illusions, ad-hoc rationalisations, not real, don't exist. That's a genuine solution.

Sure, but it's the milliseconds after that is relevant. Maybe I didn't have an experience three milliseconds ago, but I am now. I may have been a zombie 3 milliseconds ago, but I know I'm not now.