Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. T — Andrew M

It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. The room doesn't feel like anything objectively, but it does have molecular motion based on the amount of energy in the system.

Science is only possible because we can make these distinctions.

Our practical experience in everyday life is what grounds our language and knowledge about the world (which, of course, includes language and knowledge about ourselves). — Andrew M

So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions?

A necessary part of dissolving the hard problem is to identify false or misleading pictures of consciousness. One such picture is the Cartesian ghost in the machine. — Andrew M

Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, only that we take the primary/secondary quality distinction seriously.

To restratre my main point in the OP:

If colors, pains, etc. are an illusion, what makes us think the world we perceive is any better off?

I was thinking about this today and I remembered how TGW would talk about the Cyreneics, and how they went to the opposite extreme regarding perception, and denied that we knew anything about objects or the world. Instead, all we had was what appeared to us in experience.

I think both sides make a mistake in endorsing radical skepticism about our experiences. Different sides of the same coin.

Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses? — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, but I'm skeptical of p-zombie argument because I don't think it makes sense for them to make the same arguments about consciousness. Still, the thought experiment serves a purpose of illustrating what's being debated.

I prefer asking what it's like to be a bat, or whether a computer simulated world could have conscious inhabitants.

To me it makes more sense to say that our color concepts range over physical objects. The word "red" is a name primarily for wavelengths of a certain frequency-range with fuzzy boundaries; and is a name derivatively for physical objects that emit or reflect light of the specified range "in ordinary circumstances". — Cabbage Farmer

This has it backwards. Our color concepts come from experience prior to any scientific understanding of optics, and then they were mapped onto the science as a correlation with our color experiences.

This is where the scientific explaining away of the phenomenal goes wrong. It assumes science is apriori and experience comes after. But it's the other way around. Science comes from experience. The foundation for science is empiricism. Science is concerned with explaining the various phenemona of perception.

And that electromagnetic radiation is what we're calling color out in the world. — Terrapin Station

Only a narrow band of it. The rest of it has no color for us.

Here's an outright denial that credits Dennett and P. Churchland:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html

That sounds exactly like the argument that consciousness is an illusion, and at least in this case, it's an outright denial of subjective experience.

One more quote from the same article:

But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.

~Michael S. A. Graziano

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html

Here is a podcast interview of Dennett from 2018.

https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/danieldennett2

At around 29:25, Dennett is asked about Galen Strawson's article concerning Dennett's denial of consciousness being the silliest argument ever made. Dennett responds on the podcast that Strawson has mischaracterized the argument. He is not denying that we're conscious, only that people like Strawson are mistaking the nature of consciousness. There are no qualia, instead there is something akin to the idea of "virtual glue" that performs the functional and informational roles that qualia is supposed to be playing.

So, on the one hand, it can seem like Dennett is only disputing what consciousness is, not that we have it. But then he endorses a 100% functional definition that's all just neural activity. This doesn't even amount to an identity theory where our subjective experiences are identical to certain brain states. It's an elimination in the vein of the Churchlands claiming that belief and desire will have no role in future neuroscience, even though we may continue to use those terms in everyday language.

I'm still not clear whether there is a consensus view in this conversation with respect to what counts as a zombie, and what features of consciousness the zombie is said not to possess. So far I have the impression that many of us are speaking at cross-purposes, with different conceptions of p-zombie in mind. — Cabbage Farmer

A p-zombie is missing the experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels. Thus it has no subjectivity. The zombie is identical in every other way.

There are some interesting consequences for this argument. An identical p-zombie universe would still have all the same stories we have. But many stories have first person points of view. So how do p-zombies understand reading or watching someone's thoughts or dreams? How do they make sense of a character undergoing intense emotion not apparent to other characters?

What motivates p-zombie Chalmers to make arguments for the hard problem, since the hard problem cannot exist by definition in the p-zombie universe?

If so, then it seems it's not consciousness per se that they call an illusion, but only some more subtle aspect that many of us insist belongs to consciousness, something like phenomenal character. Is that right, or am I off the mark in assessing their view? — Cabbage Farmer

That's correct, but it'd kind of a big deal to deny the phenomenal aspect, yes? I understand the argument to be a denial of experiencing pain, pleasure, heat, cold, music, bitter, sweet, joy, anger, indigo, pink, the smell of a rose, the felling of having a body, your private thoughts.

Of course the objective correlation to those experiences remain for the illusionist. I kick a rock and and act as if I have a pain in my foot and my neural activity agrees with my behavior (I'm not faking it), then that's all there is to the pain. With the addition of some mechanism that creates an illusion of feeling the pain.

that it seems as if one is having a phenomenally rich experience of (in his example) green-golden sunlight, Vivaldi violins, and so on. And if there is this seeming, then, once again, there just is phenomenology. — Galen Strawson

Exactly this! Notice that it doesn't require any sort of interpretation as to the nature of the phenomenological, it just is our experience. And whatever mechanism neuroscience reveals behind it doesn't change the fact that it is our experience.

I feel pain, I see color, I hear sound, doesn't matter whether all the properties of qualia are coherent or whether we even talk using those terms. It doesn't matter whether one buys any of the intuition-pumps supporting the hard problem. What matters is that we have these experiences, and those experiences aren't the objective facts. Experiences of color, pain, etc. are something additional.

We have experiences and we have descriptions of the world. The descriptions are derived from experience. That's epistemology. Those experiences include the colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feels and proprioception as we interact with the world. That's how we know anything.

A solipsist walks into a bar and says, "We're all in this together!".

A solipsist walks into a coffee shop and asks, "Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?"

That's all I got. Other than noting it's much easier to take solipsism seriously at 4am in the morning while everyone else is asleep than 4pm.

The experiments are less about illusion and more supposed to show the defenders of qualia are failing to meet that definition. — Forgottenticket

Yes, but Dennett has other arguments where it becomes clear he is arguing that consciousness is an illusion. We don't really experience pain in a subjective sense, because that raises a hard problem. It has to be a trick of the brain.

Nick Bostrom uses this kind of reasoning to argue that there is a Great Filter lying ahead of us, and that we live inside a computer simulation.

The first is why we don't see any evidence for aliens. However, if the reason we don't see any aliens is because technological civilizations are extremely improbable, then there is no Great Filter lying in wait for us. Assuming civilization continues, then eventually we will make super realistic simulations, some of which will be ancestor simulations. The population of simulated people will far outnumber those of non-simulated kind. So therefor, odds greatly favor us living in a simulation.

So either we face extinction soon, or we're simulated. However, I don't really buy these arguments. They seem to be too simple, ignoring potential complications to building ancestor simulations or colonizing the galaxy in a few million years.

What is the brain structure for first person experience? — Harry Hindu

My guess would be those structures that handle sensory data and integrate them into a perception in addition to the ones for memory, imagination, dreams, thoughts and any kind of experience. There's likely a lot of overlap there.

They are all eventually solved by science, — Harry Hindu

You're a time traveller?

In other words, they both one and the same and should be working together, not separately. — Harry Hindu

So philosophy should just be science? But philosophy asks broader questions and questions that science doesn't know how to address. Some questions like how to live are not scientific questions.

nfortunately philosophy doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to solving difficult problems. That is the domain of science — Harry Hindu

If science can solve such questions, sure. Until then, they remain philosophical.

Exactly. That's the why we should be using the term, "qualia" since we don't know that the bat has experiences of color or sound. — Harry Hindu

I try to avoid qualia because it has controversial properties, and will be used by critics to dismiss the argument.

I really don't see how questions like this help us get at the nature of conscious experience. — Harry Hindu

That it's subjective

Doesn't the theory of evolution by natural selection show us that are brain structures evolved from previous brain structures like the kind that that has. — Harry Hindu

Sure, but how long ago did we split off form a common ancestor with bats? If bats aren't exotic enough, what about squid perception when it comes to the feeling in their tentacles? What's it feel like to have 8 tentacles with suckers?

But what the bat experiences something else that isnt color or sound when using sonar? — Harry Hindu

That's the point.

It seems to me that you are being inconsistent in your assumptions. You already assumed that the bat has first person experiences and experiences colors and sounds, but then you want to question whether the bat experience is the world similarly to humans? — Harry Hindu

I don't know whether any of that is true. The point Nagel was making is there is a gap in our understanding, because it would require us to be bats to know. Therefore, subjectivity is something additional to objectivity. Our objective descriptions of the world are leaving something out. Which shouldn't be a surprise, because we have to abstract the subjective out from experience to arrive at objective descriptions.

Now if bat neuroscience determined that bats used the same structures that we do correlating to color experience for sonar, then we could answer the question. But if they don't, we don't have a means of knowing.

Why would similar brain structuring mean it provides a first-person experience but with different qualia? — Harry Hindu

Because we don't brain structures for sonar perception. That's why Nagel chose bats. He could have also gone with whales and dolphins, which would have been even better, since they're smarter and have something akin to a language.

How would it be useful to have a description for sonar experiences? What purpose would the description serve? — Harry Hindu

Useful? Purpose?

This is a philosophical discussion about the nature of conscious experience. It's not about whether being able to know sonar experiences would be useful.

Might one day" being the salient phrase here. — Janus

Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical of mind uploading, but we might get general purpose AI, which then can join this debate. Will be interesting, if that happens. Particularly if they decide to troll us.

Even if consciousness were an illusion, we act in many of the ways we do, and say many of the things we do, because we think of ourselves as being conscious, and the p-zombie could not have such a self-reflexive self-understanding. — Janus

Agreed. This is my problem with the p-zombie argument. But I listened to a recent podcast with Chalmers as the guest, and he doubled down on this. Yes, his zombie twin argues that he's conscious, and yes, there has to be some mechanistic explanation for why the p-zombie makes that argument. Which would also be the same mechanistic reason for us, which is where I jump off the p-zombie bandwagon.

I take it by the phrase "philosophical zombie", you mean a creature exactly like a human being in every physical detail, that behaves exactly like a conscious human being, but that somehow lacks sentience, or the phenomenal character of conscious experience, or something along these lines. Is that about right? — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, that's what saying consciousness is an illusion amounts to.

We can avoid talk of qualia and consciousness and still arrive at the same problem.

Which is how to account for our experience of colors, sounds, tastes, smells and feels characteristic of perception, memory, dreams, imagination in terms of the sciences. Dennett and Frankish think these experiences are illusions. We discriminate color, but we don't experience it. Color is a magic show.

Charmers is a naturalist also. He doesn’t think experience has a supernatural quality. For him, color, pain, etc. are not an illusion.

But I prefer Nagel's formulation because it gets at the heart of the objective/subjective split, which is that science removes the colors, feels, etc. to arrive at an abstracted, objective understanding of the world.

Qualia is first person, but I prefer to talk in terms of color, sound, etc.

We don’t have a description for sonar experiences, nor do we have a way of gaining them from science. That’s Nagels point.

Of course not, but that's what I think the logical conclusion is if you say colors, sounds, etc. are illusions, since that's how we know about apples and everything else.

Maybe you can formulate the p-zombie argument for epistemology?

Would those things that we don't experience thanks to the limitations of our sensory organs be considered subjective, too? In other words, are you saying that the information that is missing from our experience of the world is subjective and everything else is objective? — Harry Hindu

No, not unless panpsychism is true. The things we can't perceive that we learn about through science are described in objective terms.

Right, computers don't have neurological structures, and that's why we have little reason to seriously consider the possibility that they might experience anything in the kind of way that we think we and other animals do. — Janus

But they might perform the same functions that brain structures do one day. So then it's a question of whether functionalism or information processing is enough to generate/emerge/supervene experiences. Thus the question of mind-uploading and consciousness (Greg Egan's Permutation City, San Junipero Black Mirror Episode), or replacing your neurons one by one with a silicon version to see whether consciousness fades out or remains (A Chalmers favorite).

Does Nagel believe that what it is like to be a bat exhausts everything it is to be a bat including the non- nerological parts of the body that include the stomach, intestines, blood and feces? If not, then he's really not asking what it's like to be a bat. He's asking what it's like to be a specific part of the bat, no? — Harry Hindu

He's asking what the experience of using sonar is. Is it accompanied with something like color or sound? The reason for choosing a bat is because it has a sensory modality we lack. It's akin to being born blind and then learning that other people see color, whatever that means for a person blind from birth.

He is saying that our intuitive, unexamined folk theories of "conscious experience" should not be trusted and given a privileged status, simply because they are ours. — SophistiCat

Right, but then he uses this to argue like Keith Frankish that subjectivity is an illusion.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf

Dennett's definition of consciousness is purely objective: functional, behavioral or neurophysiological with no additional experiential properties or stuff to go along with it. The colors, sounds, feels, are a trick of the brain.

This is where Chalmers and Dennett part company, but they understand each other's positions well. When you read or hear them debate each other's arguments, it's exactly on the point of whether subjectivity is real or an illusion.

I dont see how such things can be labeled as subjective. How are your imaginings, dreams and inner dialog subjective if I can refer to them with language and use them as explanations for your behavior that I percieve? — Harry Hindu

Because you can't experience my imagination, dreams, inner dialog and have to settle for language and behavior to know about them. And if I don't tell you, there will be experiences I have you won't ever know about, nor will you have any means of finding out, because they can't always be inferred from behavior.

It's not like we can hook someone's brain up to a machine and have it read out their thoughts or display their dreams on a tv.

This why Nagel asked what it's like to be a bat and used that as an example of how there is a gap between objective explanation and subjective experience.

Red and black are mental properties, or effects, that are about the ripeness of the apple, the light in the environment and the state of your visual system thanks to causation. Effects carry information about their causes. Illusions (or subjectivity) crop up when our minds don't interpret the causes correctly. — Harry Hindu

And how does this work with imagination, dreams, inner dialog? Subjective experience isn't exclusive to perception.

Isn't just obvious that Dennett is flogging a dead horse? — Wayfarer

Dennett isn't alone, though. I linked to Keith Frankish's article on Illusionism.

All the perception stuff Dennett shows in his videos is to show people can't be sure about their qualia and if they can't be sure about that then how can they commit to it being real. — Forgottenticket

This issue crops up with perception in general. The ancient skeptics loved to rub people's noses in all the ways perception can be mistaken. But Dennett and Frankish only want to endorse radical skepticism for introspection and subjectivity, not the external world. Dennett is a pragmatic realist when it comes to objectivity. But I think the sword cuts both ways, as a good skeptic would be sure to point out.

If they'd just realize that this is a mistake . . . — Terrapin Station

If it is a mistake, nobody has succeeded in showing how you can explain the subjective in terms of the objective, which is what the hard problem is about. See Nagel.

And it seems like people go, Dennett says consciousness is an illusion. He showed us some optical illusions. So he must be right." It makes no sense. — Terrapin Station

Dennett, like Chalmers, Searle, etc. thinks that consciousness can't be fit into a physicalist explanation of the world. But unlike them, he takes the position that this means consciousness must be an illusion, because why would consciousness be the one thing that's an exception in the universe?

I've read and heard enough of Dennett to be convinced that he thinks there is no consciousness and we are philosophical zombies. Except that he likes to keep using the word with a different definition. Which would be consciousness in the functional or behavioral sense only, because those can be fit into a materialist explanation.

What is meant by "real" may be debatable, but according to any ordinary definition colour is real and not merely a mental phenomenon, since some at least of the processes which give rise to colour as a phenomenon are physical — Janus

Sure, but what Illusionism is denying is our experience of color, which I think also undermines the warrant for believing in the processes which give rise to color as a phenomenon.

Seems like we agree on that.

This link is to a PDF of Dennet's review of Keith Frankish's survey of the Illusionist argument.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf

He's a link to a 22 page PDF with Keith's argument. I haven't read this one yet as I'm a lot more familiar with what Dennett has had to say over the years, which was always along these lines.

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf

If we're granting that we have the mental phenomenon of color (so that we can have an "illusion"), then we can't turn around and say that we don't have the mental phenomenon of color. — Terrapin Station

This is a good point, but I think they're using illusion in the sense of a magic trick which creates an experience of real magic that's actually smoke and mirrors where the audience is fooled because they can't think of how it's being pulled off. Similarly, our brains are tricking us into thinking we're having these experiences of color, smell, pain, etc.

As such, we're philosophical zombies according to the Illusionist. Even David Chalmers has referenced this argument on a recent podcast, saying that it's important and interesting because it provides an argument for the neurological mechanism that would cause his zombie twin in the zombie universe to argue for the hard problem!

To which the Illusionist would respond that the real world Chalmers is being fooled into thinking he's not in the philosophical zombie universe. I think the p-zombie argument is problematic, because of this, but I otherwise agree with Chalmers.