You cannot explain it because there is no it... — creativesoul

There is a conscious visual experience with red in it.

Too bad the paper hinges upon it. — creativesoul

The paper hinges on the possibility that bats have kinds of conscious experiences we don't. If not bats, then almost certainly dolphins.

Plain and simple. — creativesoul

I don't undestand what you mean by "consciousness" then. Color is an aspect or property of visual experience. We could substitute "What it's like" with what are the properties of sonar experience?

Ok. Explain it then. What's it like to see red? — creativesoul

I obviously can't explain that other than to say it's one of the three primary shades of objects in visual experience, which differs from other sensory modalities. Maybe "What it's like" is a misleading phrase. All it means is that a bat may have sonar sensations like we have color sensations, but we can't know what those are.

That's too much effort for a long thread with so many wordy posts.

I'm not sure how I mischaracterized it. I just don't agree that there's nothing it's like to see color or hear sound. Maybe I misunderstood.

Errr... ummm... ahhh... maybe something like what I've been doing? — creativesoul

I honestly can't remember at this point. Brief summary?

I'm a little worried for your gustary enjoyment while we wait on the neuroscientists.

Fair enough, but what we'll do in the meantime?

ere's a thought, something to kick around.

What if Dennett is right that qualia are incoherent, but wrong about reductionism? — Banno

That would be interesting. How would we characterize consciousness in that case?

Most wretched existence is ours. Stuck in our conscious containers with our dreadful colors displaying on the mind's wall. Unable to appreciate the pure material forms.

We shiver about unable to know the truth that would set us free of that awful model.

I think you've been taking science fiction too seriously; it is fiction after all! — Janus

It's not all science fiction, since there are some organizations like NASA and SpaceX researching such matters. Maybe the pessimists are right and we are nearing the peak of human technological progress. But my guess is that if we make it out of this century, we'll a lot of time to figure things out.

Maybe you should ask Dennett to summarize then.

Mostly I got it from this recent post:

So people like Barrett try to find out what's going on. How can a set of physiological states with no boundary and no non-overlapping properties give rise to the feeling that we're 'angry'? The answer she proposes (and with substantial empirical support) is that we use public models to infer the causes of our interocepted signals. "I've just had someone punch me, people get 'angry' when they're punched, these mental states I'm receiving data about must be 'anger'"

Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides. — Isaac

So we're apparently interpreting some physiological response via a public model and that becomes what we're conscious of, or at least what we say we are.

Also, the expectations have something to do with public models, which are what we think other people would do in our situation.

So feeling anger or seeing the red of an apple is the result of telling ourselves about the public model, I think. An outside-in or top-down sort of construction of consciousness.

What I'm not sure about is whether @Isaac thinks this means consciousness is a kind of illusion, or merely just identical to the public model self-reporting mechanism (or expectations).

*Sigh* So yet once again another game of changing the language to avoid the hard problem. Your side is nothing if not persistent.

Are the colors we experience out there in the world as such? Or are they generated by our conscious visual system, often (but not always) in response to stimulation from the eyes when there's illumination?

[deleted] — Wayfarer

I'm searching for a public model to express my experience of seeing a deleted comment. Disappointment? I'll have to shiver harder.

But whether complete or not, water still freezes at 32F and boils at 212F. — tim wood

Yeah, but you can alter those temperatures that by adding stuff to the water or changing the air pressure.

Isn't there a whole science about that, and the huge inexactness? — bongo fury

Yes, so what makes the colors real?

Not sure what you're getting at. — bongo fury

Visible light is part of the EM spectrum. We call it visible because that's what we evolved to see, since it reflects off surfaces. But what makes the visible light special such that its colored, unlike radio and gamma rays? They have the same kinds of properties in terms of frequencies and wavelengths.

I think illuminations events are actually colored i.e. ordered into hues. — bongo fury

For the entire electromagnetic spectrum? Do these hues correspond exactly to the three cone combinations in human eyes?

There you go again. — bongo fury

Do you think photons are actually colored?

Why "rather"? Sound events and illumination events are clearly external and public. — bongo fury

As physical waves, not experiences of color or sound.

It's not about you telling if someone else is afraid. It's about them deciding that they themselves are afraid. — Isaac

Thinking about this some more, how would the words "afraid", "red" or "pain" have become part of language if there wasn't fear, color, or uncomfortable sensations to begin with? What exactly is the public model that we learn based on?

We don't have any words for sonar experiences. Could we make one up and get people to have sonar experiences by teaching them the model?

How does that work for animals? Fear and aggression are important for survival, and they're not exactly querying themselves for reports on conscious experiences.

Also in the moment when someone punches me, I'm probably reacting in anger, not stopping to do some reflection. That comes after the reaction.

Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides. — Isaac

So does this mean other animals do not have experiences of colors, tastes, memories, because they lack the language to ask themselves about how other animals typically react?

And I can't make sense of that for color at all. So you're saying seeing a red apple is the result of learning the public model for using the term "red"? And that generates an experience in the reporting?

Does this mean Helen Keller had no conscious experiences until she learned the word water by the feel of it from her tutor writing the word on her hand? That seems exactly backwards.

One of the possible mappings of brain activities to phenomenological experience is via public models like 'fear'. Why would you rule that out? — Isaac

I don't know wha it means to say fear is a public model. I can't always tell when someone is afraid. Particularly if they wish to hide it, or are one of those people with good poker faces who don't wear their emotions on their sleeves. In fact, I don't know to a large extent what everyone else is thinking or feeling. Only some of it is apparent, to the extent I'm reading them accurately. Which is always a guessing game that can be wrong. And even when they tell me, I don't know if it's the truth. People often omit things or tell white lies.

It's like saying lying is a public model. Which would mean we could accurately detect liars, right? Something that would stand up in court.

Because brains are just lumps of biological matter with electrical and chemical activity. Just looking at it isn't going to tell us what any of it's doing any more than looking at a microprocessor is going to tell us what software is on it. — Isaac

And there you go again. I thought for a moment you were backing off the eliminativism.

Since we've absolutely no reason to presume phenomenological reports are always accurate — Isaac

Nothing is always accurate. Certainly not our perception of the world. What matters is that phenomenological experiences exist and need to be accounted for. We see colors. We feel emotions, pains, taste food. We dream. We visualize. Many of us have inner dialog. We relive memories at times.

The problem is those sounds and colors don't exist in external objects. It's rather sound waves and photons. The sounds and colors we experience are shivered into existence. But that shivering is explained in the same language as the external objects. Just more stuff doing functional things.

In psychology there's very little choice but to start out with self-reports and ask "what's going on to cause this?" We can't just look at brains and expect to 'see' what's going on without any phenomenological data. — Isaac

I wonder why that is. :chin:

So you agree with Anil Seth that the goal is to map brain processes to phenomenal consciousness as a way forward to building bridges between the two?

Because it sure as hell seemed like you were arguing along eliminativist lines to me and others in this thread. In fact, in the very post before your reply to me you're doing it again. Replacing the experience of fear with talk of a model and public convention.

Okay, but if i'm brain shivering color and pain, that still needs to be explained.

I'm glad you find that obvious. But you digress. — bongo fury

I don't actually think that. I'm okay with my dualism. Physicalism doesn't have to be true.

It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, why not the external world?

Thereby getting nowhere, but perpetuating the myth of an internal world. — bongo fury

Our an external one? That sword can cut either way.

This neuroscientist is going somewhere:

The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself.

https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html — Anil Seith

No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do. — Mijin

Indeed. Even the illusion is itself being conscious of something.

I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. — Mijin

Indeed. It's like some of the more staunch behaviorists in the earlier part of the 20th century. They didn't just want to put mental content to the side, they wanted to handwave it away in favor of stimulus and response, as if that alone could explain everything humans do.

Your critique being that every experience is unique? "What it's like" doesn't need to pick out the same exact experience. It just means there's something it's like to have a visual experience versus an auditory one versus being in pain versus whatever a sonar one is, which we don't know.

And that's different from what it's like for Siri to feel cold when she tells me, "Burrr, it's 20 degrees outside". Because she doesn't feel anything.

Perception involves the minimisation of prediction error simultaneously across many levels of processing within the brain’s sensory systems, by continuously updating the brain’s predictions. In this view, which is often called ‘predictive coding’ or ‘predictive processing’, perception is a controlled hallucination, in which the brain’s hypotheses are continually reined in by sensory signals arriving from the world and the body. ‘A fantasy that coincides with reality,’ as the psychologist Chris Frith eloquently put it in Making Up the Mind (2007) — https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one

Hoo-boy! That will drive some of direct realists on here battty.

Back to the quining shivering. Anil does mention qualia on the podcast. He doesn't dismiss it. Just says that it's the philosophical term for the contents of consciousness. Then goes on to talk about building bridges and mapping brain processes to those wonderful sensations we all know intimately.

It's like you have blinders on. From the podcast around 7:24.

The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself. — Anil Seth

He's not denying phenomenology. He isn't reifying the hard problem, but he's also not dismissing it. Rather, he's proposing a way forward for investigating consciousness. And it might turn out that the hard problem isn't so impossible after all.

While you have been arguing from an eliminativist view in this thread, dismissing phenomenology as irrelevant or replaceable by non-phenomenological terms. That is not what Anil is doing. He is talking about mapping brain processes to consciousness, and see where that takes us.

From the article:

Armed with this theory of perception, we can return to consciousness. Now, instead of asking which brain regions correlate with conscious (versus unconscious) perception, we can ask: which aspects of predictive perception go along with consciousness? A number of experiments are now indicating that consciousness depends more on perceptual predictions, than on prediction errors. — Anil Seth

You missed the quote where Anil talks about how identifying consciousness with something like integrated information is a form of panpsychism. And it's something Chalmers himself has endorsed, although from a property dualist view. Notice how Anil does not replace consciousness with a predictive model, rather it's a mapping from one to the other as part of the ongoing investigation.

I fully endorse what Dr. Seth is doing. If the hard problem or explanatory gap is every to be resolved, it's along these lines. It's not along the lines of pretending it's just an invention by philosophers.

On a separate note we probably agree on, I do like the talk of perception being an indirect and predictive process. Very interesting stuff.

@Isaac

This last quote from the paper is exactly what the anti-Dennett side has been arguing this entire thread.

But as powerful as these experiments are, they do not really address the ‘real’ problem of consciousness. To say that a posterior cortical ‘hot-spot’ (for instance) is reliably activated during conscious perception does not explain why activity in that region should be associated with consciousness.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one — Anil K Seth

@Isaac I'll add this from the article.

Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. — Anil K Seth

It's readily apparent that Seth is talking about phenomenal consciousness, and he understands the issues, such as when you make it identical to something like "integrated information".

And then there's this that further drives the point home:

When we are conscious, we are conscious of something. What in the brain determines the contents of consciousness? The standard approach to this question has been to look for so-called ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCCs). In the 1990s, Francis Crick and Christof Koch defined an NCC as ‘the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept’. This definition has served very well over the past quarter century because it leads directly to experiments. We can compare conscious perception with unconscious perception and look for the difference in brain activity, using (for example) EEG and functional MRI. — Anil K Seth

Neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't make sense unless Seth (along with Crick and Koch) didn't take phenomenal consciousness seriously as something in need of explanation.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one

I'll start by quoting from from an article Anil wrote. It covers much the same ground.

In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions). A good starting point is to distinguish between conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Conscious level has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware. Conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe. And among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious self, and is probably the aspect of consciousness that we cling to most tightly. — Anil K Seth

And:

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.) — Anil K Seth

And this, since it mentions dreaming:

What are the fundamental brain mechanisms that underlie our ability to be conscious at all? Importantly, conscious level is not the same as wakefulness. When you dream, you have conscious experiences even though you’re asleep. And in some pathological cases, such as the vegetative state (sometimes called ‘wakeful unawareness’), you can be altogether without consciousness, but still go through cycles of sleep and waking. — Anil K Seth

I've bolded the salient points.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one

I'll go grab some quotes from the podcast in my next reply.

(See this review.) — Wayfarer

As has already been mentioned, Sean is a Humean about causation. So there are just regularities. Those might be in logical relation to one another, like a mathematical system. That's the only way I can think to make sense of causeless patterns. Otherwise, why would we expect the universe to remain uniform? Why would the patterns have obtained all this time?

You mean supporting both String Theory and MWI is a contradiction? I realize they are different kinds of multiple worlds, with MWI just being based on taking the Schrödinger equation equation at face value, no ten dimensional vibrating strings of energy needed.

Sabine Hossenfelder would not approve:



The title is a bit provocative. She has strong opinions. I think metaphysics is a better term than "religion".