I don't think so. The idea of sensation being filtered through Bayesian models is expounded in great detail in the various papers on the subject. Not everyone agrees that it's a good or even accurate way of modelling cognition, — Isaac

Why would sensations be cognitive? Not everything the brain does is cognitive. A red sensation doesn't have cognitive content until it's put into language.

You know Anil has categorically said there's no hard problem of consciousness, right? — Isaac

Yeah, but he doesn't dismiss the problem as just a philosophical misuse of language. Rather, it's a topic for neuroscience to resolve. I'm open to that if it actually explains how colors and pains arise from brain processes.

How do images "literally" exist inside brains? — Harry Hindu

I don't know. The exist in our minds, though, and arguably nowhere else.

Yep, images and sounds don't literally exist inside computers. They're encoded as information for output devices that create sound and light waves for our eyes and ears.

@Isaac@fdrake
I did start a thread a year or so ago where neuroscientists Anil Seth discussed in a podcast his research into consciousness and marking progress on the hard problem.

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

And:



Starting at 6:57:

How can the structure and dynamics of the brain, in connection with the body and environment, account for the subjective phenomenological properties of consciousness. — anil seth

So not just a few misguided philosophers.

After Davidson, if we are able to recognise that the lion is indeed speaking, then by that very fact we must be able to recognise some of what it is saying. Otherwise we would have no reason to think it was not humming to itself, or the equivalent. — Banno

We do have this problem with dolphins. They are clearly communicating, but are they using language? Might we figure it out and be able to say something to them?

Lions just roar and growl, so for one to speak it would actually have to be using human language. But some animals like certain birds and cetaceans have make sophisticated enough sounds to one another that it may be a form of language, or on the border. I saw a video about a year ago where one researcher was convinced dolphins have names (special sound an individual dolphin will recognize itself by).

We should talk about multiple realizability. That's the stuff that hammers home that some aspects of consciousness have to be emergent. More later.. — frank

That's what makes me wonder about functionalism.

'Experience' is no less slippery a term unless pinned down. Equivocation is the weapon of choice for most woo-merchants. — Isaac

But one could say the same thing for using words like model for sensation.

I discussed this previously here. Cartesian dualism has no practical application in everyday life or in scientific inquiry. Concepts like qualia, p-zombies and the hard problem are purely philosophical inventions that derive from Cartesian dualism. — Andrew M

That's not entirely true, since ancient skepticism and idealism proposed similar issues based on the problem of perception.

or at lest spooky emergentism. I recently listened to a podcast where a physicist explained why she thought information strongly emerged. But it was fundamental to understanding life:

An alternative one could take is that the model puts one in direct access with the hidden state. Not sure how tenable that is, but if you wanted to ground scientific discovery in direct perception, that's a way to do it.

The hidden state of some part of the external world. — Isaac

Alright, so does cognitive science have a proposal for how this model is generated?

I have a hard time believing that sensations being models is the majority view. What is red a model of? And what do neuroscientists have to say?

Then I think you've either had little experience of the scientific community in my field or you've misunderstood my position. It's quite the most common view among my colleagues and those whose work I generally follow. — Isaac

That color and pain are models?

So, where does that (physicalism plus abstracts) then take us? — jorndoe

To the stars?

I don't know what that means any more than Tegmark's mathematical universe. But then who knows what the hell fundamental reality is. I'm partial to quantum fields.

This is all just more information. — Harry Hindu

It's shivering all the way down.

Stuff that doesn't shiver qualia.

More seriously, the fundamental stuff of physics like fields, energy, matter, forces, spacetime and all the stuff that's logically entailed by that.

If Banno at the start of the Big Bang could simulate the rest of the history of the universe, apparently colors, pains and dreams would be part of the outcome. As would these non-terminating philosophical discussions.

Is information physical?

For one thing, scientists don't mostly run the world. Politicians, lawyers, generals and the rich do. For another, technology is a double-edge sword. Humans choose how they use it.

As near as I can tell dreams are just like real life; I'm immersed in a world, only it's often a much more bizarre world. I certainly don't experience them, just as I don't with movies, as being "in the mind". It's more like I'm in the movie. — Janus

Okay yeah, but it's not an experience of a world outside the body, so ...

One could say the brain is generating a very immersive (but weird) VR-like experience when dreaming.

Why do say that? — Janus

Dreams don't seem like a movie is going on in the mind, except with the additional feeling of your body?

Not if you can sell the (promise of a) taste for a profit!

which is just the notion of conscious awareness of things — Janus

Which is sometimes just conscious awareness of mental activity. I don't know why perception thoroughly dominates the discussion. It's a bit harder to dismiss the Cartesian Theater when dreams come up.

Perception can be a bit misleading because the discussion becomes so focused on what the properties of the things are and our relation to them. You can't do that with other conscious experiences.

Is there a mantis shrimp being consulted? — creativesoul

Are they tasty?

If I only had a brain. — frank

I have a brain in my mind, but I've never tasted seen my own.

I'm just spinning in the void shooting out woo tangents like lighting bolts — frank

And I'm just shivering qualia in a p-zombie apocalypse. I think on The Walking Dead they briefly showed the zombie consciousness of an important character when they turned. Turns out, there is something it's like to want brains.

Tell me Mr. Deckard, did you ever take that test yourself?" — frank

Good one! Also, Westworld.

You know, of course, that it is all just physics. Where you go wrong is thinking that this makes it pointless and meaningless. All along, it was up to you to give it meaning, to find a purpose. — Banno

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

I don't know, of course, that physics is all there is.

On Star Trek The Next Generation, they show Data's dreams from a first person perspective one episode when a secret dream chip is activated.

On the terminator movies, they usually show a brief first person perspective of the killer robot from which looks like human vision with various information overlays.

Permutation City by Greg Egan is a classic mind-uploading science fiction novel where the main character uploads a digital copy of his brain in the 2050s when there's enough computing power. His copies always commit suicide, so he disables that ability for the last one in order to run various tests to see whether it will effect the copy's conscious experience. The copy goes on to develop his dust theory of consciousness.

I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid too, from the age of about 8 into my teens, as my old man had an extensive collection. I don't recall encountering the idea of qualia. Which author(s) do you have in mind? — Janus

Arthur C Clarke in his 3001 book has Hal and Dave tell the humans that the monolith around Jupiter isn't conscious. It's just a really sophisticated machine. They're able to use this information to logic bomb it to death.

Did you read the essay? — frank

Hey now! This thread is about not reading Dennett. You're risking a tangent on Quining Qualia.

I've been willing since I first jumped into this thread and admit that qualia is problematic (certainly as Dennett discusses it). But I haven't seen a good explanation for what consciousness is if it isn't something along the lines of qualia.

Or to put it another way, even if we dispense with the notion of qualia, consciousness still poses a problem for physicalism, because those colors and pains are simply absent from any biological, chemical or physical explanation of the mechanisms behind conscious experience (as best we understand them).

Somehow color and pain pop into existence from the structure and function of the biological systems. I guess one could bite the bullet and endorse spooky emergentism, which would be a form of non-reductive physicalism.

But I'm not sure how strong emergentism is different from property dualism. And I also don't know why you couldn't have a physical universe absent that spookiness. To paraphrase Chalmers: "God has to go to extra work to add in law for consciousness when the right structure and function are in place." And by God, Chalmers just means the additional supervenience that's not logically necessitated from the physical.

We could probably do it if somebody would paste in half of War and Peace. — frank

Have we come to any sort of consensus as to what color is? Or pain?

If it's not qualia, is it ... a model? A language game? A private beetle we can't talk about?

Weak sauce. Banno-inspired perception-related debates used to go 100+ pages. And it often included talk of apples.

p-zombies would make for lousy hedonists.

I'm not clear on what you're getting at here at all. — Isaac

It sounded like you were denying color sensations. But perhaps you prefer to call colors models of wavelength or reflectivity.

Learning what pain is consists in no more than being able to use the word suitably. — Banno

But, but using the word suitably is only possible because we feel various pains. just like the various color words exist because we see colors.

In the same sense that they "exist", yes. In the sense of patterns in observable phenomena, then yes, obviously: patterns in observable phenomena are themselves observable. In the sense of human theories about what exactly those patterns are, also yes: we can observe that humans do really have those theories. — Pfhorrest

Let me rephrase. Is causation observable? Are those observed patterns the result of necessary relations?

Are physical laws observable?