The last part of the system I described to Luke

... These are then modulated, filtered and suppressed in turn by models in the frontal cortex which is where cultural mediation, semantics, other somatosensory feedback and environmental cues come in to play.
— Isaac — Isaac

So the public referent to "pain in your head" comes from a bunch of technical jargon?

...on the assumption that these refer to something shared - the public concept... — Isaac

The public concept is of a first person experience. That's why it's called a correlation.

No. The neuroscientist is not correlating with experiences he has. He's correlating with the spoken words the subject is reporting, on the assumption that these refer to something shared - the public concept of pain. — Isaac

So why are they called, "the neural correlates of consciousness"?

Here's the thing i would guard against: those who have, either explicitly or implicitly, a theory of the meaning of "red" or "pain" such that these words refer to something in one's mind. — Banno

Where did the meaning of something being in someone's mind come from?

Why do people in ordinary language occasionally say things like, "the pain must be in your head"?

The experience of pain is private" can only be understood by ignoring most of what we know about pain! — Banno

That it hurts?

A blind neurologist will never know that red is. Though he will know the physical condition under which the epiphenomena manifests. — khaled

Reminds me of a short science fiction story in which a cryogenically intelligent alien is recovered from deep space and is restored to life. It's some kind of marine life that has no eyes or ears, making heavy use of chemical detection sensory organs instead. The humans overseeing the restoration remark that it will make communication very difficult, since the creature doesn't experience the world the way humans do. And indeed, the creature, being more technologically advanced, creates a hybrid human from DNA it sampled to act as an intermediary that it could interface with.

which can still be undermined by identifying your 'neural underpinnings', as you put it). — Isaac

That only works we can correlate with experiences we already have.

We can do some of the behaviours of being in pain, or we can do all of them. That we can do only some doesn't have any bearing at all on what doing all of them would constitute — Isaac

Or we can do none of them. The experience of pain isn't a behavior. Behavior is often a result of being in pain, but not always. We can also perform all of the pain behaviors without being in pain, depending on how good of an actor one is.

Therefore, no set of behaviors is the experience of being in pain.

set up this ludicrous notion that if someone faked pain we have no behavioural method of telling, that we'd have to get our fMRI scanners out as our only resort. — Isaac

No, the issue is that pain can be faked successfully, not that we have no way of potentially finding out after the fact.

Because, presumably lacking your own fMRI, how would you ever find out they did, if not by their behaviour. — Isaac

Behavior is often an indicator of private experience as an inference, but it's not always, and it's usually incomplete. The takeaway from this is that behavior is not consciousness, because you can have behavior absent the experience, such as when someone fakes being in pain. Or make a robot that acted as if it had pain sensations, without any circuitry mimicking the neurological underpinning for pain in animals.

I know. What I'm trying to draw out is why you don't. — Isaac

I don't believe you.

How do you know? — Isaac

Really? You don't know?

But you said "science cannot completely show us the conscious experiences of other people". You didn't say 'give us'. The two are different. — Isaac

The first being inferential and the second direct. In those cases where we lack the requisite neurology, we can’t know the correlated experience.

No-one ever fakes pain. — Isaac

If you wish to abuse language to make a philosophical point. Otherwise, people fake being in pain. As in they behave as if they are in pain. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference. This wouldn’t be possible if behavior always revealed conscious sensation.

You don't see someone scream in agony and also see their pain sensation, do you? So how do you verify a person's sensations? Do you have anything more than inferences from their behaviour? — Luke

Obviously not, or faking pain for deception or acting would be impossible. I really don't get the behaviorists. It's so clear to me how they're wrong.

Isn't carving up the world a good rough definition of language, in the wider sense of symbolism or reference? — bongo fury

That's a very anthropocentric point of view.

So perhaps you just mean, without specifically verbal language, but qualia are internal symbols? You don't need words to speak the language of colour and smell etc? — bongo fury

I was thinking in terms of the cognitive structures the brain produces internally to make sense of the world. But yeah, animals don't need language to understand smells and colors. I wouldn't consider them symbols, though.

Why not? I don't get that from what I just said. Science can't show us now. But nothing in what I said precludes science from showing us in principle - which is what we're talking about here. — Isaac

Because you stated that one would have to possess the same neural makeup to have all the same experiences.

You have some evidence for this? — Isaac

Cognitive Science, evolutionary biology, various animal studies and object recognition and mapping in computing systems.

Right. Which undermines what you just said. They need not know "what a mate smells like, what food tastes like, and what kind of brightly colored pattern a poisonous animal is likely to have" What they evidently 'know' is what to do in a range of circumstances. — Isaac

In order to do that, they need to be able to cognate, which includes object recognition.

As you admit above, it is far from evident that they do this in any way other than a holistic assessment of the entire set of signals at any given time. — Isaac

I don't see how this helps for navigating the environment. An organism must be able to filter out noise and determine what's important to focus on.

For example, a chimpanzee trained to touch the squares on a computer screen based on the ascending order of numbers 1-9 after they briefly appear. Chimps are better than us at this, btw.



Here's a parrot that can use a few words to pick out colors and shapes:

We understand what it is to ask if your phone is the same as mine. We can bring the phones out and compare them and make a decision one way or the other. — Banno

If one were to be pedantic, as one often is in these sorts of discussions, no two phones are identical, but they might be the same brand and model.

I've no clear idea what you are asking. — Banno

I'm asking if you think we can't exactly compare feelings/sensations.

"Are your feelings exactly the same as mine?" is less like "Do you have the same mobile phone as I do?" and more like "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". — Banno

Is the issue with trying to pin down exactness for feelings as opposed to noting that we know what it's like to feel fear or happiness or pain?

If you tell me you enjoyed a song, I know that's not the same thing as feeling outraged, although admittedly, people do tend to like feeling outraged at times.

At the same time, the question of what immortality (or 'not experiencing death') means is always complicated in esoteric or mystic registers - I get the sense that for these 'mystery' traditions, it's much less 'bodies resurrected on the day of judgment' & more 'you see that life persists despite radical - self/ego-annihilating- transformations.' — csalisbury

I'd be careful to ascribe Buddhist meaning to a 1st or 2nd century Christian text, even if it's non-canonical, "gnostic" one. It would better be understood from its Jewish and Hellenistic roots where salvation is knowledge that frees one from the material world to return to the spiritual source in the heavens. I suppose one could consider that a transformation, but it's more of a freeing the divine spark from its material shell, not so much an ego death.

I don't know that Jews thought of annihilation-transformation of the self, although Judaism, like early Christianity, was quite diverse back then.

In the Gospel of Judas:

Judas said to him, "I know who you are and where you've come from. You've come from the immortal realm of Barbelo, and I'm not worthy to utter the name of the one who's sent you." — https://www.gospels.net/judas

There were these platonic ideas of God emanating beings or spiritual realms with eventually the material world being created by some of the more distantly related and foolish ones. And at least some humans had a divine spark in them. Jesus came to remind them of where they came from. Or something along those lines, although Gospel of Judas was a different text from Thomas.

No, because "knowing what it's like" doesn't make any sense. But lets' not open that can of worms again. — Isaac

It makes sense to some of us. Those of us who think there's something to being conscious, and not all conscious experiences are the same across sensations, people and organisms.

To have someone else's feeling in a neurological sense, you'd have to have a sufficiently similar set of neurons firing during the time period of assessment. This would certainly require the same availability of neurotransmitters in the same proportions, but it would also require the same set of axon potentials prior to the assessment period. — Isaac

So the answer is science cannot completely show us the conscious experiences of other people. Or bats for that matter.

An organism only need to respond appropriately to stimuli. It need not group aspects of that response. Fighting for a mate involves pain, but the animal continues nonetheless, standing on a sharp thorn involves pain but the animal desists immediately. 'Pain' doesn't cause some pre-programmed response. The entire set of environmental stimuli at the time does. — Isaac

Yes, but the animal knows what a mate smells like, what food tastes like, and what kind of brightly colored pattern a poisonous animal is likely to have. They don't need language to make these discriminations. Of course it's usually in the form of object recognition like mate or foe, so there is complex cognition going on for many animals that combines sensations into things in an environment.

The point is other animals carve up the world successfully without language.

How so? Our current models would suggest so. I don't think adhering to successful models until they're contradicted by evidence constitutes begging the question. It's a standard scientific approach. — Isaac

So what does it "look like" for neuroscience to someday make all experience public? We can imagine people watching dreams on a tv monitor, assuming anyone's neural activity while dreaming can be 100% mapped for audo-visual outputs. What about the other senses? Do we make use of something like Neuralink and stimulate other people's brain in a way that gives them the same experience?

But what if someone's neurology is atypical? Can I know what it's like to be Hellen Keller? Maybe someone with incredible visualization skills? Or simply the other gender? Can I really know exactly what it's like to give birth as a man?

Will science tell us exactly when someone lies? Maybe a red dot appears in our visual field through our AR glasses. Perhaps we'll get a printout of their inner dialog, or hear them in our earbuds. Or the right chemicals will be released in our brains so we can have their feelings.

None of this is distinguishable from the general milieu of experience by private means. That's what I take to be Wittgenstein's point. That's why he calls it a 'something'. — Isaac

The problem is that human language is relatively recent ability added onto much older nuerological abilities that handle experiencing things like pain so that the organism can respond appropriates. Words are not needed for this. Humans are the exception, not the rule.

Wittgenstein isn't taken into account evolution. Lions don't talk, but they do understand pain. Again, pain wouldn't be of much use if most animals couldn't distinguish it from other sensations and act upon that.

Unless you can propose such a boundary for these private epiphenomena, there's no way of distinguishing the 'slice' of epiphenomena associated with red, form the entire epiphenomena of existence to date. — Isaac

You're talking about carving up our experiences into meaningful categories. That would be true of the world outside the body as well.

With public epiphenomena we have the arbitrary (and loose) linguistic boundaries, with their 'props' of set membership. — Isaac

But animals can perform color and other sensory discriminations without language.

No. Not by any means other than the public language. I have experiences when I injure myself, but which of them are 'pain' I wouldn't know how to distinguish privately. — Isaac

Animals know when they're in pain. Pain would be a useless sensation if an organism couldn't recognize that something was causing potential damage.

Why shouldn't the sharing bring the aspect into being, as it where - the child learns the aspect in the process of learning to talk in a certain way. A child does not have a notion of "four" in its mind that it learns to match up with the word "four"; it learns what four is by moving beads, colouring squares and using the word. — Banno

But how would this behavior be possible unless human brains were capable of forming concepts? The problem with behaviorism is that it treated the brain as a black box, where the only relevant thing was matching behaviors to stimuli. But we know from computational models that the black box matters for producing the behavior. You don't get an output without some sort of mapping function. That's analogous to whatever roles the brain plays processing sensations internally, and producing whatever behavior makes sense for the individual organism.

Roles like perception, cognition, memory, imagination, motor control, speech production and what have you. Without that, you don't get the behavior.

How can subjectivity be shared? — Banno

Language and non-verbal communication in shared environments. As humans we have very similar biology. That helps. But subjectivity only partially ever shared. I can't fully know what it's like to be anyone else or what they're thinking. Consider how much more difficult it is for us to understand non-human animals.

The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity in its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes.

Philosophy and subjectivity didn't begin with Descartes. The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. Seems like modern critics of the hard problem think that Descartes put philosophy on the wrong path and all it takes is to point that out and the problems go away or something. They don't.

Relying on sense perceptions for a theory of knowledge, the realist has to argue, “apples are red if I perceive them to be red, and I perceive the apple to be red; therefore, apples are red”. This is circular reasoning, as it appeals to sense perception to verify something found in sense perception. — WHAT IS THE MÜNCHHAUSEN TRILEMMA?

Ah, the direct realist specialty. Things are as we perceive them because we say they are.

There is no value, purpose or morality to the universe itself. It just is because it could be for whatever physical reasons. Same with life where the chemical conditions were right for it to come about. But some living things can assign and argue over values because valuing things is useful for survival, and social organisms need to cooperate.

and that anyone who judges any of these things to be acceptable is wrong, because the objective fact of the matter is that these things are unacceptable. — Michael

What makes moral claims objective? While I agree that genocide is bad, I don't see what sort of fact about the world justifies that being an objectively real judgement. The universe doesn't seem to care, and human societies have had different moral codes with philosophers defending competing ethical systems. What makes any of our moral judgements objective?

Is there a kind of internal moral realism? Is it real in the way money and economics are real? We have some means of agreeing on what values to assign to things or actions?

No, reason didn't tell us that. David Hume did. — Wayfarer

Is there a difference? /s

That's not right. For someone inside the block universe, time does flow. — Banno

It appears to flow, but it does not actually flow. This is not because of the physics of the block universe, since time does not flow. Rather, it's an illusion created by our nervous system.

The context of this is that the world is different from how it appears to us. Time does not flow, despite appearances, if the block universe is true.

I open my browser console and type Math period and get a list of mathematical functions and constants in that Math class. So at least for the Javascript predefined universe, this is the case. However, programmers add their own mathematical values and functions outside of Math all the time. Which could be analogous to how we invent new branches of math.

But maybe those maths already exist in the possible space of all Math defined by inherent logic. We could say all possible games of chess or life worlds similarly exist. That requires a realist commitment to possible worlds or at least possibility space. But what happens when one modifies the logic? Does that cause a new possibility space to come into existence? You can always create derivatives of chess, or your own cellular automata.

Or the case of math, add new concepts like infinity or imaginary numbers with their own derivation of the rules.

What’s the big issue with dualism? Why’s it such a boo word? — Wayfarer

Apparently, Descartes ruined it for everybody else. Also, there seems to be this fear that any non-material conclusion leads to woo. Which is bad, because we should have a nice, tidy empirical explanation for everything. Or something.

Thermodynamics teach that information can be lost, is in practice lost all the time, and thus that some events are irreversible. When you burn a book and spread the ashes, it becomes hard to read. When somebody dies, she becomes hard to resuscitate. When a species becomes instinct, it’s hard to recreate it... If tomorrow our planet was swallowed by a black hole, I imagine the planet would melt into some particle soup, and us too. I seriously doubt that we would be able to keep talking about Schopenhauer and Descartes on the forum, unaffected. — Olivier5

In principle, burning a book is reversible, as is a corpse. It's just not feasible for us to do it. But according to the physics, everything you mentioned could be reversed. The information for doing so is conserved in the fire, ashes, decaying body and so on. The environment conserves the information.

Hawking demonstrated that black holes seem to be different. When they evaporate, the information to recover what fell into the black hole is lost. However, progress has been made on how that might not actually be the case. The radiation left over after the evaporation might contain the information, provided one has the right sort of theory for that to be the case.

What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? — Janus

Assuming the mind is explained as a function of the brain. There's quite a few people who think this has not been the case, at least for consciousness, intentionality and intelligence in general.

If the mind could be fully explained, then we'd have a neural account for propositions, as Banno has pointed out. But we don't have anything like that.

Direct realism is not the view that we perceive the world as it really is, but the view that true statements set out how the world is. — Banno

Direct realism is about perception being direct. Metaphysical realism is what we both agree on in principle as realists, but we don't tend to agree on how we get there.

Which is precisely what you would expect for a temporal being. — Janus

If that's what we would expect, then why has there been a philosophical debate between A and B-theory of time, where the second maintains that the flow of time is an illusion?

Well, no it doesn't mean the flow of time is an illusion. — Banno

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.

So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7#:~:text=According%20to%20theoretical%20physicist%20Carlo,t%20correspond%20to%20physical%20reality.&text=He%20posits%20that%20reality%20is,of%20past%2C%20present%20and%20future. — The Illusion of Time

I can find other physicists stating similar things.

Further, the way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside a block universe. That's rather the point of the description. — Banno

No, the point is it makes sense Einstein's theories, which rather overturned our notions of space, time and gravity. The reason for the illusion is probably because our nervous system creates the illusion for adaptive reasons.

Why bother trying to support a naive realist view of the world when even the ancients could tell things were not as they appeared? Modern science makes a mockery of the naive realist position.