You say there is nothing you can say about things as they are. I'm just making the obvious point that there is plenty you can say, even though things as they are cannot be perceived. Science is the endeavor of doing just that. I'm butting into a conversation I didn't fully read, so I'm probably missing something.

Not true. It is what grounds perceptions and makes them possible. From that perspective you can say quite a lot. Science investigates and attempts to model the principles underlying observations.

Since we cannot discern the goings on in this world as it is in itself, we cannot make statements about it, let alone true statements. On this view, there is precious little that we can say that is true. — Banno

You can say, tautologically, that the world as it is is non-perceptual, simply because as soon as you perceive it, it is a perception, and therefore not the world as it is. .

Strange then that we can read what you’ve written. (Which is not to say it was worth the trouble ;-) ) — Wayfarer

Damn, you got me. Checkmate.
You don't understand. But looking at your many "contributions" over the years, that is an unreasonable expectation.

how is the brain/mind informed as to which perception is in play, if the symbol has no connection with the signal? — Mww

Of course it is connected. I'm saying it's not intrinsically connected. There is nothing doglike about "dog". You cannot examine the 3 glyphs comprising the word and arrive at canines. An outsider can only look in an extrinsic rulebook to discover it's meaning.

As opposed to a vinyl record. A record has an intrinsic relation to the sounds it captures. It is a time series of sound waves, captured in a different, stable medium, frozen in time. You can literally examine a record and see the sound waves. A clever archaeologist can feasibly deduce what it is, just by examining it. Unlike words, records are in direct, non symbolic, relation with sounds.

And I claim that qualia stand in the first, symbolic, extrinsic relationship with reality. Our relationship with reality is mediated by symbols, and so it is an extrinsic relationship too. The very notion of perception implies this extrinsic relationship. Therefore there is no such thing as "directly see reality", it is a contradiction in terms.

"see the world as it is" is inherently contradictory. "See" is a stand in for perceive. "Perceive" as we know it means to transform signals into a symbolic domain These symbols have no inherent connection with their corresponding signals in reality. Qualia (Red) is totally unconnected to the reality of light at red wavelengths, except by convention. An alien somehow looking into our brains and examining the qualia (red) would have no way of connecting it to red light, absent the convention.

Red light is to (red) as (red) is to "red". "Red" is therefore the result of two symbolic transformations.

This is perception as we know it. Symbolic translation is inherent in the concept. We know nothing else. We don't know what it would mean to perceive the world as it is.

Conspiracy theories serve the believers. They permit them to believe what their reason would otherwise cause them to abandon, and avoid suffering the consequent ego loss.

But conspiracies serve another master as well. Once the conspiratorial mode of thinking is adopted, the believer can no longer be reasoned with. Just imagine trying to argue a QAnon true believer out of their belief. Obviously impossible. The mind of a conspiracist is much more flexible than a rational person's: their main epistemological criteria is, “does the answer come out right?”. Any mooring with reality is unimportant, which gives the conspiracist tremendous rhetorical latitude. Foolishly attempt to debunk a conspiratorial claim, hydra-like, 7 new claims will spring from nowhere to replace it.

As they are imperturbable to logic and facts, conspiracists are fanatics. They are the core of Trump's notorious base, the reason his approval never went much below 40%. Having fanatics on your side is solid gold for politicians. Is it any wonder that conspiratorial thinking is so encouraged?

The American right, by their lunacy, have forced their adherents to conspiracy theories. And since their reason is shut down, the right is full of fanatics. Paradoxically, the more ludicrous the right has become, the stronger it has become. To believe them, reason must be surrendered, and so fanaticism is required, a devil's bargain the right wing masses have accepted.

LOL
On the one side you have QAnon, the Orwellian "Stop the Steal", 1000 voter fraud conspiracies, Fake News (the conspiracy of the entire media against Trump), Covid Hoaxers, Climate Hoaxers, RussiaGateGate (aka "investigate the investigators"), UkraineGate, Sandy Hook, etc. But that's just scratching the surface. The right wing is a witches cauldron of conspiracy, new ones bubble up faster than anyone can keep track.

And for the other side the best you could muster is RussiaGate, corroborated by US intelligence and the republican Senate, and something about whatever right wing promulgated conspiracy hunter biden's laptop was.

And you prefer the first one. What a sad joke.

To summarize my op, it is not reasonable to hold right wing beliefs in America anymore. But instead of changing their beliefs, which for many amounts to ego death, the right changes something far more fungible: their reason. If reason produces the wrong results, change reason, not the desired results. This is the conspiracy theory mindset: alternative reasoning, to complement alternative facts. The right political class has therefore become peddlers of cheap conspiracy theories to a base of insane people.

With words there is a fine line between "common misconception" and "common usage". No one is going around thinking there is no such thing as conspiracies. "Conspiracy theories" are not merely theories about conspiracies. The term picks out a particular, paranoid style of reasoning. One which is totally out of control in the right wing. I'm presuming you are all familiar with the usage.

The problems I mentioned are not features of individual conspiracy theorists, they are features, as I see it, of this genre of interpretation.

In other words, the problem is not the conspiracy so much as conspiracy theories.

I would argue that conspiracy theories are vastly worse than reading bones.

Reading bones is basically guessing about the future. As long as the divinator interprets the bones so as to make reasonable guesses, this is about as good as you can predict the future anyway (apart from the limited subset of cases we understand and can predict accurately). You would therefore expect reading bones to be at least a middling prognosticating tool.

Conspiracy theories don't predict, they interpret events. The basic methodology is to substitute the best interpretations of experts with amateur, sloppy, often politically motivated, usually batshit crazy interpretations. Their accuracy is therefore terrible, and ranks far lower as an interpretive technique than reading bones ranks as a prognosticating technique.

... just as there is nothing about predictions made by casting bones that renders them automatically wrong.

It's one thing to doubt a claim but another to come up with an even more improbable alternative. — TheMadFool

Right. Conspiracists are not skeptics, they are the exact opposite: True Believers.
Doubting established wisdom is one thing. But then giving full credulity to a far less likely theory is where skepticism ends.

The flaw was not in any of the possibilities, it was in denying the same possibilities to a non-being as I gave a being. Since the ratio is now equal, this leaves the chance of a Being as a first cause versus a First Cause that is not a being at 50%. Of course this still holds a God is possible, just not as possible as my first conclusion held. — Philosophim

In fact, any event can be explained by an infinite variety of mundane causes, and an infinite variety of supernatural ones. And if your criteria is not mundane vs. supernatural but literally anything (i.e blue Ys vs any other colored Ys), you still get infinity on either side. Using this method, the probability is always 50%. Therefore, this method has zero predictive power, and discloses zero information about the world.

The real flaw is, this is not how probabilities are calculated. You don't just enumerate the possibilities and count them, you need to assign weights to them. Merely enumerating possibilities tells you exactly nothing.

Sure they will cite evidence until the cows come home. They show infinite creativity here.
But, the conclusion is what is all important. The "evidence" is just means to that end. Typically this "evidence" is easily dismissed, by experts. But conspiracy theories operate outside the domain of experts (otherwise I guess they would be "fringe theories"). Their audience is the lay public, and the quality of evidence must only be good enough to fool them.

True, I misspoke:
Russian collision was a conspiracy, to assist a hostile power to illegally affect the election. One can theorize about such conspiracies, without engaging in a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy theory is something more than its name suggests: It is typically the work of amateurs, seeking to overturn expert opinion in favor of an outlandish alternative. Such "theories" require the complicity of the entire body of subject experts to cover up the truth the theory purports to expose. I think this is ultimately the "conspiracy" referred to. Facts and sound reason fall by the wayside, as every sophistic trick and duplicity possible is employed by the conspiracist to arrive at the desired conclusion.

BTW, Collusion happened, so it almost by definition is not a conspiracy theory. I wonder what conspiracy theory you employ to discount the findings of the republican controlled Senate Intelligence Committee?

It is probably true that declining quality of education increased the vulnerability of the population to conspiracies. A true conspiracy theory can only be believed when there are massive gaps in the believer's model of the world. I would contend that the balkanization of the media, taken to the extreme on social media, is a far more salient factor.


Great reply, very thoughtful, but not a conspiracy.


Great reply, very thoughtful, but not a conspiracy.

This is what we do when we "speak to ourselves". Typically we just borrow the existing language and speak to ourselves literally, but we can employ other perceptual systems: visual, spatial, musical, emotional.

Qualia themselves are symbolic, not linguistic, but we cobble together a kind of language out of qualia we use to communicate with ourselves.

And how is the Chinese room general more than the equivalent of a book I’m this thought experiment? — apokrisis

Books merely present information, they don't process it.

You seemed to be making the argument that the Chinese room does not "push against the world", therefore it is a simulation and cannot be conscious.

But my point is that any simulation can trivially be made to "push against the world" by supplying it with inputs and outputs. But it is absurd to suggest that this is enough to make a non-conscious simulation conscious.

... or something he's overlooked. — Mijin

But he seems to have overlooked it.

If neuroscience is able to isolate the mechanical process that gives rise to consciousness, then Searle grants that it may be possible to create machines that have consciousness and understanding — Searle

He presents a false dichotomy:
* Consciousness cannot be emulated by a Turing machine
* Therefore, it must be physical, not informational, and can only be reproduced with the right mechanical process.

But what if consciousness is informational, not physical, and is emergent from a certain processing of information? And what if that emergence doesn't happen if a Turing machine emulates that processing?

Any questions? — Daemon

I don't think this is the right approach. There is nothing special going on with observer dependence. Yes, a bit, or an assembly instruction, has no meaning in itself. But neither does a neuron. All take their meaning from the assembly of which they are a part (rather than an outside observer). In hardware, the meaning of a binary signal is determined by the hardware which processes that signal. In software, the meaning of an instruction from the other instructions in a program, which all together process information. And in a brain, the meaning of a neuron derives from the neurons it signals, and the neurons which signal it, which in totality also process information.

but that the brain gives rise to consciousness and understanding using machinery that is non-computational — Mijin

Thanks for the quote, this is precisely the point where I disagree with Searle.
There is a middle ground between Turning Machine and physical process.
Searle argues that a Chinese Program (a strip of magnetic tape processed by a Turing Machine) does not (necessarily) understand Chinese. He then pivots from this, to say that the brain therefore gives rise to consciousness using *non-computational* machinery.

This then ties consciousness to biologic process or machines which can emulate the same physical process.

But there is a middle ground which Searle seems to overlook: computational machines which are not Turing machines, and yet are purely informational. Such a machine has no ties to the matter which instantiates it. And yet, it is not a Turing machine, it does not process symbols in order to simulate or emulate other computations. It embodies the computations. Just like us.

So then would Searle agree that it is possible to build a machine that thinks? Either via replicating nature (the thought experiment of replacing each brain cell one by one with a functionally equivalent replacement), or, by a novel design that just fulfills the requirements of conscisiousness (whatever they may be)?

But then it is no longer just a simulation, is it? — apokrisis

Really? As soon as you attach inputs and outputs to the robot brain, it is no longer a simulation?
So, if the Chinese room simulated a famous Chinese general, and it received orders which the laborers laboriously translated, and then computed a reply, and based on this orders were given to troops, it is not a simulation? Seems absurd.

directly pushing emotional buttons — Pfhorrest

But then you are not explaining how music is able to "directly push emotional buttons". The last time you were saying that it is explained by our responses to recognizing patterns. This time, it seems like you are saying music somehow has direct access to emotions.

Simulations have no real effects on the world. — apokrisis

This is just not true. You can plug a simulation into the world, for example a robot, feed it inputs, and it could drive it's body and modify the world.

How do you know this? Why not percussion first? Could we have g before we gave meaning? If not, why not? — Benkei

Good point, I didn't think about percussion. Note that percussion also serves a spiritual function in primordial cultures. Also it is hard to imagine percussion without at least chanting.

It seems highly unlikely song as we know it came first. We would expect to observe this behavior in at least one nonlinguistic animal.

I really like this elaboration of the predictability theory.
Note that it is not exclusive with mine: they can both be true, and modulate each other.
I also don't think this theory can stand on its own. This way, music might be as much as a fascinating novelty, but no more. It cannot explain how the most dramatic and exalted emotional states we can experience can be evoked by music.

I've experienced this :I write black metal music, and my dad heard a song. He knows nothing about the genre, but he said it made him think of a burning red sky. That is exactly what I experienced when I wrote it,(I can only get lucky, I can't deliberately embed an image like this), hence the name, "Extinguish the Sun".
I thought that was great, but I don't think these images are truly "inside" the music. That seems as absurd as saying the concept (ice) is contained in the word "ice". But least within a culture, the emotional piano which music plays in us is similar. And the emotions we feel when contemplating the planets or an apocalyptic red sky are also similar. Therefore, it is possible, but not easy, to communicate images in music.

All I have to do to tell them apart is to put the real one in my left pocket, and the counterfeit, fresh from the counterfeit machine, in my right.

I would answer the same way if the information were merely irretrievable, since the information does still exist. — Andrew M

But if it were irretrievable, from our perspective the situation is identical with that where it doesn't exist.

It doesn't matter if they are indistinguishable, so long as they can be individiually tracked.

Exactly. Suppose there was a universe that consisted of a computer and a super battery. The computer continuously overwrites its hard drive with random 1's and 0's, and runs effectively forever. Where does all the information go? Quantum or no, at some point the universe will run out of room for it.

It doesn't have to be an identical copy. Merely close enough so that for any conceivable test of genuineness that the real dollar passes, the counterfeit passes as well.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the no hiding theorem. Right now I'm thinking of a 10 digit number. I'm not repeating it, and there's no way I will remember it in 5 minutes. Could a sufficiently clever alien, arriving on a venus like earth 10 million years from now, retrieve it?

Would you answer the same way if the no hiding theorem turned out to be false? Or true, but information can still be irretrievably, in principle as well as practice, lost and inaccessible?

Your thesis does not square with the reality of an absence of army barracks full of peace loving tie-died hippies.

It is odd that Christians tend be on the right, while those with no god to care for them, tend to be on the left. — Athena

Not odd at all. I define the right as a "Tribalistic fealty to power". A spiritual hierarchy of Immigrants < Unbelievers < Believers < Wealthy Believers < Priests & Anointed Politicians < J-Man & G-Man holds appeal for those with this kind of disposition.

Quite a lengthy reply from someone who didn't trouble to read past my first sentence!

There is utterly a culture war. I place the blame squarely at the feet of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

At some point, some democratic strategist had a bright idea. It made so much sense! If the party moved to the left, what would that gain them? They were already the party of the left, and all votes to that side of the spectrum were effectively won. But what if they moved to the right? The left had nowhere else to go, the logic of winner takes all makes the emergence of a third party challenger unlikely. But suddenly, a whole universe of "reasonable republicans" would become accessible to their ballot boxes. They could only win!

The Republicans might have responded by moving to meet them in the center. But they were cannier than that, they understood their side better: the right is not really about ideals, unless a tribal fealty to power is an ideal. So then, they moved to the right, and took their whole party with them. The democrats didn't gain shit. But, being morons, they chased after the republicans, left their whole base behind them, and became the party of nothing. The republicans, happy to oblige, moved themselves ever further right, straight into the abyss.

Now we have a left which is abandoned, incohate, powerless, bewildered, and despairing, and a right, still delirious with their monumental upset in 2016, which has evolved into a full blown fascist clown cult. Media algorithms have further segregated the two sides to the point where they don't share a common frame of reference, they both walk the earth, but live in entirely separate worlds. They are entirely separate cultures, and entirely opposed. In such a situation, the "culture" war may plausibly be a prelude to plain, war.

Haha, OK. Way to white knight poor helpless old Dennett. I'll tell you what buddy, I'll spare him my sympathy if you spare him your "help". Really, he's fine, he doesn't need your help, even if it were not worthless. In fact, as a working philosopher, I'm sure he would quite resent this honorary rocking chair you want to place him on. These are not exactly new ideas of his, so I doubly don't understand what his age has to do with anything.

I think of perception as a kind of mathematical transformation, from the raw sensory data received and processed by cells into the purely symbolic domain of qualia. This transformation is done so that higher level computation can be performed within this symbolic domain. Our everyday conscious experience takes place within, or in terms of, this symbolic space. I *think* we are in agreement here, this is more or less a restatement of what you said above.

Where I cannot follow you is your denial that this symbolic domain is experienced by us as " ineffable deeply personal qualit(ies)". They are deeply personal: each of has access to our own symbolic space, and no other. And they are certainly ineffable. Language is just not equipped to transmit them directly, it can only refer to them. Red would be incommunicable to a blind person, and so on.

What is really confusing to me is that you seem to be saying that this first part, which I think we agree with, somehow implies a denial of the second part.

So we all have blue experiences but they aren't really phenomenal qualities, no matter how much we like to say they are. — Graeme M

By "not really phenomenal qualities", you seem to mean that they are not qualities of the world. I think most here would agree, they are contrivances of our minds. But nonetheless they are phenomenal in the sense of phenomenalism, and in this sense they are real. They are the elementals of our inner lives.