As to whether there is a difference between scientific phenomena and mental phenomena, since, as you say, there is an explanatory gap, the distinction is questionable. If there will eventually be an adequate explanation I think it is likely to be a physical explanation, although others do not think consciousness can be reduced to the physical. — Fooloso4

For example, I think there is a Huge difference between the 670nm Electromagnetic Scientific Phenomenon and the Redness Mind Phenomenon that we experience. These two Phenomena are related somehow because they can occur at the same time. But yet these two Phenomena are Categorically different things. The Electromagnetic thing is explained by Science but the Redness thing has no Scientific explanation.

It is actually not simply an electromagnetic phenomena in your brain. There is, however, a physical brain state that corresponds to the 670nm phenomena in the external world.. It is a far more complex physical state, but that brain state is a physical phenomenon. One that can, at least theoretically, be detected and measured. There must be some change in brain state when we see something red that differs from the brain state of seeing something blue.

The source of our disagreement starts here:

Conscious Sensory Experience seems to be in a Category of Phenomena that is not part of any known Category of Scientific Phenomena. — SteveKlinko
I took this to be a distinction between scientific phenomena and some other kind of phenomena, mental phenomena, that is outside the bounds of science.

Looking back I see you said:

It is not Super Natural but it is Super Scientific, and I fully expect that Science will get it's thinking together and figure this out someday. — SteveKlinko
I do not know what you mean by "Super Scientific", but we are in agreement that it is something that science can figure it out. We are still at the beginning stages of such an understanding. — Fooloso4

There are separate groups of Neurons that fire for Red and separate groups of Neurons that fire for Blue. Measuring the firing of these Neurons will indicate that there is Red and or Blue in the field of view. But this has been known for many decades. Measuring that these Neurons fire does not Explain anything about how the Mind experiences Redness or Blueness. These are the Neural Correlates of Red and Blue Conscious Experience. There is an Explanatory Gap when it comes to Explaining how the Mind experiences Redness or Blueness.

I actually am trying to make a distinction between Scientific Phenomena and Mental Phenomena. I was doing an analogy between Super Natural, which I thought meant outside the bounds of what we think is Natural, and Super Scientific which I thought would mean outside the bounds of what we think is Scientific. I fully expect that Science will figure out a good Explanation for Conscious Experience someday and then Conscious Phenomena will not be Super Scientific anymore.

There is no Electromagnetic Phenomenon of any wavelength present ... — SteveKlinko
Except the electromagnetic phenomena detectable in the brain. — Fooloso4

It seems like you actually think there is 670nm Electromagnetic Waves banging around in your Brain when you have a Dream about something Red. Any Electromagnetic Phenomena in your Brain has nothing to do with the 670nm Phenomena in the external World.

That Redness is an internal Conscious Mind Phenomenon and is not even Correlated with any external 670nm Electromagnetic Phenomenon. — SteveKlinko
I think that is a questionable assumption. How is it that we can agree that a particular color is or is not red? How are we able to tune a string to 440 Hz? — Fooloso4

The Colors that we See in our Mind are Correlated to the different Wavelengths of Light in the external World. So 670nm external Light will produce a Red Experience in the Mind. Nobody knows how that Red Experience gets generated from the original 670nm external Light. It's like any Data Acquisition system. The kinds of Computer hardware and Cameras that exist can turn the external 670nm Light into something the Computer can work with, which is usually a hex number something like 0x00ff0000. Analogously the Human Brain hardware turns the 670nm external Light into something the Conscious Mind can work with, which is the Conscious experience of Redness that we have.

So the Computer does not work with the external 670nm Electromagnetic stuff but rather works with a number that is correlated with the stuff. The number is a Surrogate for the Electromagnetic stuff. Likewise the Human Brain does not work with the external 670nm Electromagnetic stuff but rather works with a Conscious Redness thing that is Correlated with the stuff. The Conscious Redness thing is a Surrogate for the Electromagnetic stuff. The Conscious Redness thing is a Phenomenon that exists in the Mind.

We know exactly how the Camera/Computer converts external 670nm Electromagnetic stuff to the number 0x00ff0000. There is however an Explanatory Gap with how the Brain converts the external 670nm Electromagnetic stuff into the Redness in the Mind. How this happens in the Brain is the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

be solved?

As of now an outside observer using fMRI can only see that certain areas of the brain light up, but it is impossible to tell what is going on at the cellular level. Let's suppose that you had access to all this data, could you then predict exactly what they are thinking?

My guess is that the answer is no, and that having this information is not sufficient to solve the mind-body problem. After all, you would still never be able to know the exact moment when an electrical signal turned into a thought, or how that happened. What implications does this then have, does it mean the mind-body problem can never be solved? — curiousnewbie

I fully expect that this problem will be solved someday. But there are people in Science and on these Forums, the Physicalists (or Materialists if you like), that say that your question has already been answered and is irrelevant. They say the Explanatory Gap is already Explained and there is no Hard Problem of Consciousness. Science will be slow answering your question if the Physicalists keep discouraging research into this. Your first effort has to be to make these people understand that there even is a Problem here.

Conscious Sensory Experience seems to be in a Category of Phenomena that is not part of any known Category of Scientific Phenomena. — SteveKlinko
Cognitive science studies sensory experience. There is some ambiguity in your terminology. There can be no sensory experience that is not a conscious experience. A category of phenomena would be a category of things known via experience. — Fooloso4

I'm not sure what the ambiguity is. When I say Conscious Sensory Experience I am talking about things like the Redness of Red, or the Toneness of Standard A. For the Redness of Red I am trying to make the distinction between the external Electromagnetic 670nm Phenomenon versus the internal Redness Phenomenon in the Mind. The Electromagnetic 670nm Phenomenon is definitely in a Category of known Scientific Phenomena. The Redness of Red is a Conscious Phenomenon that exists only in the Mind and is not a Property of the Electromagnetic 670nm Phenomenon. The Redness Phenomenon is only correlated with 670nm Electromagnetic Phenomenon. The Redness Phenomenon is a separate Surrogate Phenomenon of the Mind. There is no known Scientific Category for it. You can See Red objects when Dreaming at night. There is no Electromagnetic Phenomenon of any wavelength present but yet you can See the Redness of an object. That Redness is an internal Conscious Mind Phenomenon and is not even Correlated with any external 670nm Electromagnetic Phenomenon. The Redness is a thing in itself that must be Explained.

On further reflection I would say that my Criteria is as General as it gets. What could be better than peer reviewed World acceptance? — SteveKlinko
I don't recall you mentioning that, but I could have just overlooked it. So you're saying that in your view, what matters is that some consensus of peers in the relevant field count something as an explanation?

So, for example, eclipses were explained in, say, 200 CE, and the explanation was that they were an omen from the gods, or a warning from the gods, etc.? — Terrapin Station

Of course you are just trying to be Sarcastic. But I think the Scientific knowledge we have today makes my criteria completely workable. We are not working with the same knowledge base today as that which existed 2000 years ago.

What I am suggesting is that it is not an either/or issue. The choice is not between physicalism and consciousness. Physicalism is the rejection of supernatural explanations, but this leaves open questions of the effect of culture on consciousness; whether, so to speak, one can understand consciousness by looking at the hardware or if the software plays an essential part. — Fooloso4

Conscious Sensory Experience seems to be in a Category of Phenomena that is not part of any known Category of Scientific Phenomena. It is not Super Natural but it is Super Scientific, and I fully expect that Science will get it's thinking together and figure this out someday.

Because Conscious Experience is unexplainable by Science the Physicalists can only say they don't exist. — SteveKlinko
This is not my understanding of it. Not all physicalists deny conscious experience, they simply go by the assumption that there is a physical explanation of consciousness even though we have not yet and may never figure it out. — Fooloso4

Your experience with the Physicalists might be right but my experience with them has been that they believe Consciousness is just an Illusion and is not even worth studying any further. They say the Hard Problem is solved and there is no Explanatory Gap and that is that. They will not listen to any other arguments. Ok so because of what your experience is I will have to say almost all Physicalists instead of all Physicalists.

↪SteveKlinko are you aware of what Qualia is. I think it is very much what you are saying. The classic thought experiment goes something like this. A person is kept in a black and white room for their entire life, they live in a world without color. But they are taught everything we know about color, they are experts on wave lengths and frequency about how our optics work, how the brain processes it, they know all that can be known about color.

Then they are let out of the room and are amazed by a sunset. The experience of color is different than the knowledge of color. And they are both real. — Rank Amateur

Yes. I am very aware of what Qualia are. Also the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Explanatory Gap.

I partly think science has been infested with financial considerations. It is perhaps easier to apply for research funding, if you have a mainstream research application, which leads to more materialistic research and mindset.......this cycle just promotes materialistic thinking in the scientific community...it's hard I would think for scientists to even break out of this mould in even materialistic research if the reseatch goes at all against the mainstream views......shame really. — wax

Very true.

I have been doing battle with the Materialist/Physicalists for a couple of years now. My arguments are not about Religious Experiences but rather about Conscious Experiences. I maintain that the Conscious Experiences we have, such as the experience of perceiving the Color Red, are not explained by Science yet. The Physicalists just like to dismiss Conscious Experience as just an Illusion and not even worth thinking about. I say that Conscious Experiences are central to what we are. We don't know anything about the external World except through Conscious Experience. Because Conscious Experience is unexplainable by Science the Physicalists can only say they don't exist. They think that talking about Conscious Experience is the same thing as talking about Religious Experience. I tell them to think Deeper about their own Conscious Existence. But that just leads to more accusations that I am promoting Religion.

I think my criteria is a supremely good one for the specific problem at hand. — SteveKlinko
If you have different "what counts as an explanation" criteria for different contexts, you'd need to justify that. Part of justifying it would involve being explicit about the differing criteria, so you'd still need to present "what counts as an explanation" criteria in general and not just for one context. — Terrapin Station

On further reflection I would say that my Criteria is as General as it gets. What could be better than peer reviewed World acceptance?

That would be my criteria for a good Explanation. — SteveKlinko
What would your criteria have to do with whether, say, clorophyll or dark matter or "the rule of thirds" in visual art or photons or anything else is(/are) explained or not?

Your criteria for explanations need to be a set of GENERAL criteria that serves as a plausible demarcation tool for ALL explanations. — Terrapin Station

I think my criteria is a supremely good one for the specific problem at hand.

Are you talking about the Conservation of Energy law? Then that is a law that has been proven to be true in all cases of Scientific experiemnts and observations that have ever been done. That isn't to say that an exception will not be found someday. In anycase the Stone is never the same Stone it was just an instant ago. It is always changing, heating up under the Sun or cooling down at night. Just these simple Phenomena slightly change the Stone every day. So what actually is constant? — SteveKlinko
The fact that the law of conservation of energy is empirically verified makes it (the conservation of mass-energy) a phenomenon to be explained. If, at come later time, we find that the law, as we now articulate it, is only an approximation, then the true law still needs to be explained.

Persistence is not immutability. It just means that the stone continues in being as an observable object. To say that an object is "the same" object as it was a moment ago is to say it is has the same essential character and is dynamically continuous with the object a moment ago, not that it is identical. It is an equivocation to confuse these two meanings of "the same." — Dfpolis

Ok good.

Why does the Energy in the Universe keep on existing? But a Deeper question is: What is this Energy in the first place? — SteveKlinko
The first question is that which I pursue in the argument and answer by saying that we must ultimately come to a self-conserving meta-law which answers the dictionary definition of God.

The second question is answered by the rather complex operational definition of energy. It is that measured by the specified operations. — Dfpolis

Ok.

Exactly how do you define a Meta-Law? — SteveKlinko
A meta-law is a law applying to a law. As I know no law requiring the existence of energy, I also know of no corresponding meta-law. — Dfpolis

Ok.

I don't see why it all necessarily has to lead to some sort of God. — SteveKlinko
The dictionary defines "God" as "the supreme being, creator and ruler of the universe." Surely what ultimately holds the universe in being is supreme. What is responsible for the laws yielding the cosmos is its creator, and the source of its laws is properly called its ruler. So, what the reflection discovers meets the dictionary definition of God. — Dfpolis

I still don't get to a God concept just because we don't know everything yet.

Also if God is directing Evolution then it seems absurd that we had 200 million years of Dinosaurs. What was he thinking? — SteveKlinko
That dinosaurs are worthy of existence. — Dfpolis

Now you are just apologizing for what is obviously an absurd thing that God did with the Dinosaurs. Looks like Dinosaurs would have gone on forever if it were not for the random impact of an asteroid that destroyed them. Or you could say that maybe God got tired of his Dinosaur toys and threw that asteroid himself. It all gets kind of cartoonish.

I think it's explained as well as anything is explained. The resistance to that stems from inconsistent, incomplete and/or unanalyzed views of just what it is that explanations are (and are not), just what explanations do/don't do, just how they do it, etc.

It's not a discussion I'd get into in any depth until my fellow discussants are ready to set forth their explanation criteria in a plausible manner (so that the criteria work for many different things re what that person intuitively considers explained versus unexplained). — Terrapin Station

Since Consciousness is such a completely unexplained Phenomenon, I would say that all attempts at an Explanation are on the table. When an Explanation is presented that solves the Hard Problem, it will be obvious and will resonate around the World as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time. That would be my criteria for a good Explanation.

Thank You for the link. I have been busy and just started reading your paper. You come to an important conclusion early in the paper that I m not quite sure I understand. The paragraph I am having trouble with is:

It is valid to ask why a stone continues in being. Scientists are used to such questions, answering that natural laws explain it. If the question is valid, it is valid to pursue it to a conclusion. Iterate and ask, “Why do conservation laws continue to operate?” As the constancy of energy re-quires a law of conservation of energy, so the law’s constancy requires a conserving meta-law. Iterating yields a meta-meta-law. An infinite regress of meta-meta-meta-laws leads nowhere. The only way to satisfy the scientific requirement for an explanation is with a self-conserving source of law, God. Unless some reality holds itself in existence, the principle that all phenomena have explanations fails. We must either accept God’s existence and on-going operation, or abandon science.

Are you talking about the Conservation of Energy law? Then that is a law that has been proven to be true in all cases of Scientific experiemnts and observations that have ever been done. That isn't to say that an exception will not be found someday. In anycase the Stone is never the same Stone it was just an instant ago. It is always changing, heating up under the Sun or cooling down at night. Just these simple Phenomena slightly change the Stone every day. So what actually is constant? Is it the Electrons, Protons, Neutrons, and etc. that makes it up? These elementary particles are actually made from Energy. So a simpler question should be asked: Why does the Energy in the Universe keep on existing? But a Deeper question is: What is this Energy in the first place?

Exactly how do you define a Meta-Law? How would you apply this Meta-Law to the Existence of Energy? I don't see why it all necessarily has to lead to some sort of God.

Also if God is directing Evolution then it seems absurd that we had 200 million years of Dinosaurs. What was he thinking?

You didn't understand my comment at all. I'm not saying remotely like "we need to list all of the explanations" and I'm not even specifically saying something specifically about explanations of consciousness.

What I'm talking about is that if we're going to say that x doesn't count as an explanation, for any arbitrary x, for any arbitrary subject matter, then we'd better damn well have practically workable criteria for just what counts as an explanation or not and why; criteria that would serve for a broad range of explanations.

Because the alternative is that anyone can reject any proposed explanation for something for any vague, half-assed reason(s) at all--often folks don't bother with any reason whatsoever--and that's just lame. — Terrapin Station

Ok, but I don't understand why the Explanatory Gap is a Red Herring (from your previous post). If there is no Explanatory Gap then I assume you believe that Consciousness is Explained. I can't remember where you stand on this. But I guess a Red Herring is a diversion. A diversion from what?

Do you have a link to your Paper or is your Paper the original post for this thread?

I think you are saying that there is only an Explanatory Gap if the Intentional Reality is found to be in the Neurons. — SteveKlinko
"Explanatory gap" talk is a red herring as long as we continue to not analyze just what is to count as an explanation and why, with a clear set of demarcation criteria for explanations, and where we make sure that we pay attention to the qualitative differences--in general, for all explanations--between what explanations are and the phenomena that they're explaining — Terrapin Station

Since we cannot even begin to understand how to approach the study of Consciousness there is no way we can make a list of all the possible Explanations. There is no clear set of demarcation criteria for Explanations of Consciousness. Everything and anything is possible at this point. In fact it is a Red Herring to demand such a list of possible Explanations. A First Clue is what we need at this point.

I'm missing your point here because I said that Science will need to have the Explanation for the How and Why, and not merely the fact that it is. — SteveKlinko
OK. I misunderstood what you were saying. To me there is data, and the data might show that there is intentionality in the neurons, and there is theory, which would explain the data in terms of how and why. But, you agree that there is no experimental test for finding intentionality in neurons, so, there can be no data to explain. That leaves us with the question: What kind of evidentiary support can there be for a theory that supposedly explains something that cannot be observed? If this theory predicts that some set of physical circumstances will produce intentionality in neurons, and we cannot observe intentionality in neurons, doesn't that make the theory unfalsifiable, and so unscientific? In short, I have difficulty in seeing how such a theory can be part of science. — Dfpolis

That's how bad our understanding of Consciousness is. We can't even conceive that there could be a Scientific explanation for it. But I think there probably is a Scientific explanation. We just need some smart Mind to figure it out someday in the future.

I disagree that we know anything about what Intentionality is. We know we have it, but what really is it? This is similar to how we Experience the Redness of Red. We certainly know that we have the Experience but we have no idea what it is. — SteveKlinko
If you mean that we cannot reduce these things to a physical basis, that is the very point I am making. But that is not the same as not knowing what a thing is. If we can define intentionality well enough for other people to recognize it when they encounter it, we know what it is.

I think you need to ask yourself what you mean by knowing "what a thing is?" What things are is fully defined by what they can do. If we know what things can do -- how they scatter light, interact with other objects, and so on -- we know all there is to know about what they are. We pretty much know what various kinds of intentions do. So, in what way do we not know what they are? — Dfpolis

We know what they are from our subjective Conscious experience of them. But since we don't know what Consciousness is, in the first place, being Conscious of them is not an explanation.

If you have an intention to do something then that intention must ultimately be turned into a Volitional command to the Brain that will lead to the firing of Neurons that will activate the muscles of the Physical Body to do something. I believe you called that a Committed Intention. — SteveKlinko
Agreed. And that means that committed intentions must modify the laws that control how our neurophysiology works. How else could they do what they do? — Dfpolis

When you say the Laws of Nature are Intentional, it sounds like you are talking about some kind of Intelligent Design. I'm not sure how this is even relevant to the discussion. — SteveKlinko
I am not an advocate of Intelligent Design. I think it gravely misunderstands the laws of nature. ID assumes that God is not intelligent enough to create a cosmos that effects His ends without recurrent diddling. That is insulting to God.

The arguments I give in my paper for the laws of nature being intentional are based solely on our empirical knowledge, and do not assume the existence of an intending God. The relevance here of the laws being intentional is that they are in the same theater of operations as human commitments. Since they are in the same theater of operation, our commitments can affect the general laws, perturbing them to effect our ends. Material operations, on the other hand, are not in the same theater of operation and so cannot affect the laws of nature. — Dfpolis

I guess you are making a distinction now between Laws of Nature that apply to Intentional Phenomenon and Laws of Nature that apply to Material Phenomenon. So you should not say the Laws of Nature are Intentional but only a subset of the Laws of Nature that apply to Intentionality are Intentional.

When you hang your argument for eliminating the Hard Problem on an abstract Intentions concept being Material you are setting up a straw man. — SteveKlinko
This seems confused. First, I an not saying intentions are material. Second, the Hard Problem is about the production of consciousness (of intellect) and not, in the first instance about volition (will).

We have no intentions without consciousness, which is awareness of present intelligibility. It makes what was merely intelligible actually known. The brain can process data in amazing ways, but processing data does not raise data from being merely intelligible to being actually known. To make what is intelligible actually known requires a power that is not merely potential, but operational. So, nothing that is merely intelligible, that is only potentially an intention, can produce an intention. Thus, data encoded in the brain cannot make itself actually known -- it cannot produce consciousness.

What is already operational in the intentional theater is awareness -- what Aristotle called the agent intellect. It is when we turn our awareness to present intelligibility that the neurally encoded contents become known. So, while the brain can produce the contents of awareness, it cannot produce awareness of those contents. — Dfpolis

I don't think the Brain is the Consciousness aspect. But rather I think the Brain connects to a Consciousness aspect.

Even if your Intention argument is true, this Redness Experience Explanatory Gap must be solved. This is what the Hard Problem is really all about. — SteveKlinko
If that were so, then every instance of consciousness, even the most abstract, would involve some quale. It does not. So, quale are not an essential aspect of consciousness. On the other hand, there is no instance of consciousness without awareness and some intelligible object. So, the essential features of consciousness are awareness/subjectivity and the the contents of awareness/objectivity.

Of course there are qualia, but we do know what they are. All qualia are the contingent forms of sensory awareness. We know, for example, that redness is the form of our awareness of certain spectral distributions of light. There is nothing else to know about redness. If you think there is, what would it be? — Dfpolis

I think every instance of Consciousness actually does involve some sort of Quale. Things that are sub Conscious of course do not involve any Qualia. Even the sense of Awareness itself has a certain feel to it. The experience of Understanding itself has a feel to it. There are all kinds of Qualia besides sensory Qualia.

I think you are saying that there is only an Explanatory Gap if the Intentional Reality is found to be in the Neurons — SteveKlinko
I am not sure what, operationally, it would mean to find intentional reality "in the neurons." If intentions are to be effective, if I am actually able to go to the store because I intend to go to store, then clearly my intentions need to modify the behavior of neurons and are in them in the sense of being operative in them. Yet, for the hard problem to make sense requires more than this, for it assumes that the operation of our neurophysiology is the cause of intentionality. What kind of observation could possibly confirm this? — Dfpolis

I don't think there is any experimental test for this.

But if it is found to be in the Neurons then that means that Science has an Explanation for How and Why it is in the Neurons — SteveKlinko
Knowing what is, is not the same as knowing how or why it is. We know that electrons have a charge of -1 in natural units. We have no idea of how and why this is so. — Dfpolis

I'm missing your point here because I said that Science will need to have the Explanation for the How and Why, and not merely the fact that it is.

If Intentional Reality is not found in the Neurons then there would exist a Huge Explanatory Gap as to what it could be. — SteveKlinko
Not at all. We already know what intentionality is. We can define it, describe it, and give uncounted examples of it. What we do not know is what we cannot know, i.e. how something that cannot be its cause is its cause. That is no more a gap than not knowing how to trisect an arbitrary angle with a compass and straightedge is a gap in our knowledge of Euclidean geometry. There is no gap if there is no reality to understand. — Dfpolis

I disagree that we know anything about what Intentionality is. We know we have it, but what really is it? This is similar to how we Experience the Redness of Red. We certainly know that we have the Experience but we have no idea what it is.

. How does this non-Material Intention ultimately interact with the Neurons, as it must, to produce Intentional or Volitional effects? — SteveKlinko
I think the problem here is how you are conceiving the issue. You seem to be thinking of intentional reality as a a quasi-material reality that "interacts" with material reality. It is not a different thing, it is a way of thinking about one thing -- about humans and how humans act. It makes no sense to ask how one kind of human activity "interacts" with being human, for it is simply part of being human. — Dfpolis

If you have an intention to do something then that intention must ultimately be turned into a Volitional command to the Brain that will lead to the firing of Neurons that will activate the muscles of the Physical Body to do something. I believe you called that a Committed Intention.

I have argued elsewhere on this forum and in my paper (https://www.academia.edu/27797943/Mind_or_Randomness_in_Evolution), that the laws of nature are intentional. The laws of nature are not a thing separate from the material states they act to transform. Rather, both are aspects of nature that we are able to distinguish mentally and so discuss in abstraction from each other. That we discuss them independently does not mean that they exist, or can exist, separately.

Would it make any sense to ask how the laws of nature (which are intentional), "interact" with material states? No, that would be a category error, for the laws of nature are simply how material states act and it makes no sense to ask how a state acts "interacts" with the state acting. In the same way it makes no sense to ask how an effective intention, how my commitment to go to the store, interacts with my going to the store -- it is simply a mentally distinguishable aspect of my going to the store. — Dfpolis

When you say the Laws of Nature are Intentional, it sounds like you are talking about some kind of Intelligent Design. I'm not sure how this is even relevant to the discussion.

I know this does not sound very satisfactory. So, think of it this way. If I have not decided to go to the store, my neurophysiology obeys certain laws of nature. Once I commit to going, it can no longer be obeying laws that will not get me to the store, so it must be obeying slightly different laws -- laws that are modified by my intentions. So, my committed intentions must modify the laws controlling my neurophysiology. That is how they act to get me to the store.

Am I correct in saying that Volition is the same as Intention in your analysis? — SteveKlinko
Volition produces what I am calling "committed intentions." There are many other kinds of intentions like knowing, hoping, believing, etc. — Dfpolis

I had been thinking that you actually were using the word Intentions to mean Committed Intentions or in my way of thinking: Volition. I'm not sure what to do with an abstract concept like Intentions. When you hang your argument for eliminating the Hard Problem on an abstract Intentions concept being Material you are setting up a straw man.

This is why I like to frame the Hard Problem in terms of a sensory perception like the Experience of the Redness of Red. The Redness experience cannot be found in the Material Brain. We know that there are Neural Correlates of Consciousness for the Redness experience but we don't know what the Redness experience itself actually could be. It cannot be found in the Neurons in the Brain at this point in the Scientific understanding of the Brain. There is a Huge Explanatory Gap here as to what is that Redness experience. Even if your Intention argument is true, this Redness Experience Explanatory Gap must be solved. This is what the Hard Problem is really all about.

I think you are saying that there is only an Explanatory Gap if the Intentional Reality is found to be in the Neurons. But if it is found to be in the Neurons then that means that Science has an Explanation for How and Why it is in the Neurons. There would be no Explanatory Gap here and the Hard Problem would be solved. If Intentional Reality is not found in the Neurons then there would exist a Huge Explanatory Gap as to what it could be. How does this non-Material Intention ultimately interact with the Neurons, as it must, to produce Intentional or Volitional effects? It seems to me the Explanatory Gap is in the opposite situation from what you have stated. Am I correct in saying that Volition is the same as Intention in your analysis?

It is quite common to believe that intentional realities, as found in conscious thought, are fundamentally material -- able to be explained in terms of neurophysiological data processing. This belief has presented metaphysical naturalists with what David Chalmers has called "the Hard Problem." It seems to me that the Hard Problem is a chimera induced by a provably irrational belief. — Dfpolis

So I'm expecting that you are going to show how the Hard Problem goes away. Ill read on.

By way of background, I take consciousness to be awareness of present, typically neurophysiologically encoded, intelligibility. I see qualia as of minor interest, being merely the contingent forms of awareness. — Dfpolis

I think you are missing an important aspect of Consciousness by dismissing the experience of Qualia as you do. What is that Redness that you experience when you look at a Red object or when you Dream about a Red Object?

I am not a dualist. I hold that human beings are fully natural unities, but that we can, via abstraction, separate various notes of intelligibility found in unified substances. Such separation is mental, not based on ontological separation. As a result, we can maintain a two-subsystem theory of mind without resort to ontological dualism. — Dfpolis

Sounds like you are saying that there are two separate subsystems of the Material Mind (the Neurons). One is the Computational Machine sub system that is not Conscious and the other sub system is the Conscious aspect where Intentional Reality exists. Another way of saying this is that it is all in the Neurons. But this is still perpetuating the Belief that you criticized above. But then you say:

Here are the reasons I see intentional reality as irreducible to material reality. — Dfpolis

This sounds like you are saying that you are going to show that Intentional Reality cannot be found in the Neurons. So then where is it? What is it? Sound like Ontological Dualism to me.

1. Neurophysiological data processing cannot be the explanatory invariant of our awareness of contents. If A => B, then every case of A entails a case of B. So, if there is any case of neurophysiological data processing which does not result in awareness of the processed data (consciousness) then neurophysiological data processing alone cannot explain awareness. Clearly, we are not aware of all the data we process. — Dfpolis

You are just assuming that Neural Activity must imply Conscious Activity in all cases. This does not have to be true even if the Conscious Activity really is all in the Neurons. We don't know enough about Conscious Activity to make sweeping conclusions like this about anything.

2. All knowledge is a subject-object relation. There is always a knowing subject and a known object. At the beginning of natural science, we abstract the object from the subject -- we choose to attend to physical objects to the exclusion of the mental acts by which the subject knows those objects. In natural science care what Ptolemy, Brahe, Galileo, and Hubble saw, not the act by which the intelligibility of what they saw became actually known. Thus, natural science is, by design, bereft of data and concepts relating to the knowing subject and her acts of awareness. Lacking these data and concepts, it has no way of connecting what it does know of the physical world, including neurophysiology, to the act of awareness. Thus it is logically impossible for natural science, as limited by its Fundamental Abstraction, to explain the act of awareness. Forgetting this is a prime example of Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (thinking what exists only in abstraction is the concrete reality in its fullness). — Dfpolis

Yes but this seems to imply that the Conscious Activity of Intention can not be found in the Neurons by Science yet. This implies that Conscious Activity must be some other kind of thing that is not in the Neurons. Sounds like Ontological Dualism to me.

3. The material and intentional aspects of reality are logically orthogonal. That is to say, that, though they co-occur and interact, they do not share essential, defining notes. Matter is essentially extended and changeable. It is what it is because of intrinsic characteristics. As extended, matter has parts outside of parts, and so is measurable. As changeable, the same matter can take on different forms. As defined by intrinsic characteristics, we need not look beyond a sample to understand its nature. — Dfpolis

I like the Orthogonal Mathematics metaphor. In mathematics when Vectors are Orthogonal you cannot project one onto the other. You cannot project the Intentional Vector onto the Material Vector.

Intentions do not have these characteristics. They are unextended, having no parts outside of parts. Instead they are indivisible unities. Further, there is no objective means of measuring them. They are not changeable. If you change your intent, you no longer have the same intention, but a different intention. As Franz Brentano noted, an essential characteristic of intentionality is its aboutness, which is to to say that they involve some target that they are about. We do not just know, will or hope, we know, will and hope something. Thus, to fully understand/specify an intention we have to go beyond its intrinsic nature, and say what it is about. (To specify a desire, we have to say what is desired.) This is clearly different from what is needed to specify a sample of matter. — Dfpolis

I'll continue to think about this one.

4. Intentional realities are information based. What we know, will, desire, etc. is specified by actual, not potential, information. By definition, information is the reduction of (logical) possibility. If a message is transmitted, but not yet fully received, then it is not physical possibility that is reduced in the course of its reception, but logical possibility. As each bit is received, the logical possibility that it could be other than it is, is reduced.

The explanatory invariant of information is not physical. The same information can be encoded in a panoply of physical forms that have only increased in number with the advance of technology. Thus, information is not physically invariant. So, we have to look beyond physicality to understand information, and so the intentional realities that are essentially dependent on information — Dfpolis

This is all well and good if Intention actually is Information. Maybe. I'll continue to think about this too.

I did not see any solution to the Hard Problem in all this. If Intentional Realities are not reducible to the Material Neurons then what are Intentional Realities? Where are Intentional Realities? How can this be Explained? There is a big Explanatory Gap here. This Explanatory Gap is the Chalmers Hard Problem.

I was at the bookstore and saw Daniel Dennett's 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. Having a few minutes, I turned to the chapter and read his account of colors.

Dennett states that prior to evolution, it's a mistake to think of the world as being colored in any way that we experience color. Rather, color evolved as a coevolutionary coding scheme between plants and animals. Flowers guide insects to nectar using a color scheme, just as fruits guide mammals to spreading their seeds. Of course the actual evolutionary account is going to be a lot more complex, but those two examples suffice.

As such, color is the result of animals who evolved the means to detect the visual coding scheme of other organism, depending on the species needs. Dennett says that nature doesn't produce epistemic engines, rather it produces creatures who perceive the world according to their "narcissistic" needs. This goes for the other sensor modalities as well.

Therefore, the scientific account of color is going to be a complex explanation of the coding scheme in question, such as the trichromatic colors humans see that we call visible light.

This raises several questions/issues for me.

1. Does it dissolve the hard problem of consciousness by providing a scientific explanation for colors, sounds, smells, etc?

2. Does this entail that direct perception is false, being that secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) are not properties of things themselves, but rather coding schemes that relate to the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves (using the two examples above)?

3. We know that color experience is produced after the visual cortex is stimulated. This can the result of perception, memory, imagination, dream, magnetic cranial stimulation, etc. If a person's visual cortex is damaged enough, they lose all ability to have color experiences, including being able to remember colors. It's hard to avoid concluding that color experiences are generated by the brain. But that sounds like the makings of a cartesian theater, which Dennett has spent his career tearing down. — Marchesk

The Hard Problem would be solved if there really was a Scientific explanation for Color. Science has known for a hundred years that when we experience Color that certain Neurons Fire. But Science has no Explanation for the Experience that we have when those Neurons Fire. That is the Hard Problem. Saying things like Secondary Qualities and Coding Schemes explain nothing. The Hard Problem lives on.

In mathematics there is a shape called a tesseract which is an interpretation of a shadow of a 4D cube. Try as anyone must it's impossible for humans to comprehend it. Here's my question, are 3D beings even capable of comprehending the forth dimension no matter how intelligent. Even if we make a jump in intelligence to lets say a slug to a human and then the same jump from a human, could that being still not comprehend the forth dimension? — Naiveman

You will never truly comprehend the Tesseract until you can comprehend some more simple concepts. First you must comprehend that a three dimensional cube is a Flat object in 4D. It is called a 3D Hyper Plane in 4D. The sides of a Tesseract consists of these 3D Hyper Planes. A Tesseract is a simple empty box in 4D. That animated self eating Monstrosity that they always show you for a Tesseract shows only how the sides might be connected at the expense of any kind of proper visualization for the Tesseract itself. There is not even any inside to this animation it is all just sides morphing in and out of the scene. The Sides are depicted as 3D things that have thickness. There is no attempt to indicate the Flatness of the sides. This Animation provides almost no insight as to what the Tesseract really is. Let me repeat a Tesseract is a simple empty box. The Sides are 3D but are flat in 4D. A particle randomly flying around inside and bumping off the walls will always hit a wall at a point where there is only 1 point of thickness (the definition of Flatness) between the point of impact and the Space outside of the Tesseract..So the first question is to understand the 3D Hyper Plane. Also in 4D, Rotations are about Planes not Lines. But lets understand the Hyper Plane first.

Personally, I consider the fourth dimension to be that of force. — BrianWForce is defined as the product of mass and acceleration, which is the second derivative of space with respect to time, so it is not an additional dimension. I often startle young structural engineers right out of school when I tell them that force does not actually exist--it is merely a mathematical construct that enables us to analyze and solve problems.

Frankly, I am surprised that no one has already pointed out that time is widely considered to be the fourth dimension, since space-time is a continuum. So the question is really whether it is possible to imagine a fifth dimension. — aletheist

Time is incorrectly considered to be the 4th dimension. Space-Time is considered to be a particular kind of 4 dimensional Manifold. Time was never considered to be a Spatial Dimension. In fact the equations of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics show time with the index 0 and the other dimensions with indexes 1, 2 and 3. So in Relativity and QM Time is the Zeroth dimension. If we were to add another Space dimension it would be the 4th dimension not the 5th.

I see, that's an interesting way of putting it. That you only need to mental capacity to view 4D space in that instance. Do you therefore think that consciousness is in a way transcendable? — Naiveman

The Consciousness that is connected to a 4D Brain would have more capability than a Consciousness connected to a 3D Brain. But I don't think that the 4D connected Consciousness would transcend the 3D connected Consciousness. The 4D Consciousness just has better Hardware to work with. You could probably say that the 4D Brain would transcend the 3D Brain.

Why Humans Will Never Understand Four Dimensional Space

I have always more or less been on a quest to understand the Universe. I decided to start with understanding the more fundamental aspects of the Universe and then build on that understanding to understand more complicated things. But the question came up as to what was the most fundamental thing in the Universe. Elementary Particle Physics seemed to be a good place to start. What could be more fundamental than Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons? Well you quickly find out that Elementary Particles are just made out of Energy. So Energy seemed to be the thing to start with. Eventually I learned that Energy can arise out of Space itself. So what does this mean about our concept of Space? It would seem that Energy might be made out of Space. So then the regression back to find the most fundamental thing ended up with trying to understanding Space, which of course is Nothing. How do you study Nothing?

Eventually I realized that Space was not really Nothing it was Something. Since Space is Something it could exist or not exist. The common notion that Space is an ever existent background Thing that extends out infinitely in three directions could be wrong. There could be different kinds of Spaces besides our 3D Space. There could be a 4D Space. There could be no Space. The possibility of no Space is almost impossible to grasp by the 3D human brain.

I thought that if I could show that 4D Space is a workable reality for a Universe , then I would be able to convince myself that Space is a Thing just as Energy and Matter are Things. The concept of Nothing then becomes a concept of Absolute Nothing where there is no Matter, Energy, or Space.

To understand 4D Space I thought I should try to experience what it would be like to be a 4D Conscious being living in and moving around in a 4D World. See Exploring the 4th Dimension Using Animations. I generated many Animations to help me do this. I think the Animations were helpful but I still feel that I am unable to exactly experience a 4D World in the same way an actual 4D being would. The key thing that we must do is understand how a 4D being can see a 3D Hyperplane as a Flat object. Anything else you think you know is irrelevant until you understand that.

But even though I was not able to experience 4D in the way I had hoped I believe that the Animations have shown me that a 4D World is possible and therefore that our 3D Space is only one type of Space. There can be No Space if there can be 3D Space or 4D Space.

The one thing I learned from the Animations is that the reason I don't understand 4D Space is because I am too embedded in this 3D Universe. I can think about 4D Space in theory and use all the different techniques for visualizing it but my 3D brain will never let me fully understand it. I do not think anyone can. We would need a 4D Brain to do this.

To be able to see in our 3D World we have a Visual Cortex that is roughly a flat (but folded) 2D patch of a little more than 1 billion Neurons. If it were a square patch it would be about 32000 Neurons on each side. A 2D being would only need a line of these Neurons or 32000 of them. The whole 2D Brain Neuron count would be scaled down by a factor of 32000. A 2D Brain would be 32000 times less intelligent than a 3D Brain. A 4D Visual Cortex by analogy would have to be a cube of Neurons with 32000 Neurons on all sides. It would be a 3D Hyper Plane so the 4D being would view it as flat. A 4D being's Visual Cortex would have 32000 times more Neurons than a 3D being's Visual Cortex. The 4D Brain Neuron count would be scaled up by a factor of 32000 and a 4D being will probably be 32000 times more intelligent than we are.

So the conclusion we have to come to is that we, and I mean all of us 3D beings, can never know what it would be like to actually be a 4D being. We are just not smart enough. You might think you understand 4D using one of the techniques but you never really get there. You need to be able to see our 3D Space as being Flat. I think this is an important realization for Philosophy and the study of the limits of our ability to understand things.

You are wrong about Space. Our Space is 3D. There is no presupposing it is 4D. Think about the actual Space you live in. You can go Up/Down, Left/Right, Backward/Forward and that's it. In 4D Space you actually have another pair of directions you can move in. 4D is a whole different thing than 3D. — SteveKlinko
You're not attempting to understand what I say. To you it is obvious that our space is 3D, that there is no interpretation of the mind going on that makes it appear 3D, that it just is 3D. It used to be obvious that the Earth is flat. Often things appear obvious because of unchallenged deeply held beliefs, of how we intuitively generalize from limited experiences. Yes sure it appears to you that you can go up/down, left/right, backward/forward, that's obvious to you, just like it's obvious that the Earth is flat. And yet from another point of view the Earth doesn't appear flat. You know how some optical illusions make your mind see the exact same thing in two very different ways? It's not the thing that changes, it's how your mind interprets differently the thing that makes it look different. In the same way I'm saying that by interpreting what you see differently you could come to see things differently. And see that it is your mind that interprets space as 3D.

Again, try to assume for a moment that our space is 2D. Under this interpretation, it is not you who moves across a static scenery, it is the scenery that moves while you are under the impression to be the one moving. This interpretation is not intuitive, it takes some thought and focus to get used to, but it is not inconsistent. You cannot demonstrate empirically that the space is 3D and not 2D. Because it is the mind that imposes dimensions on what it experiences. — leo

I really don't understand what you are talking about. Show me how I can actually move in the extra pair of directions that 4D would have. There are only 3 pairs of directions. Radio waves travel out and attenuate in a way that is consistent with 3D Space. If the Space was 4D Radio waves would have a different attenuation characteristic. It's not a Mind determined thing. It is a Physical reality of 3D Space. It is a Self Evident Reality of the Universe we live in.

I specifically said that the Cosmologists make Speculations. Nobody is taking what they say as some kind of Gospel. But you have to start with some kind of Premise for any argument. it was a spectacular breakthrough and discovery when Science discovered that Matter is made out of Energy. So it means a lot to say that Matter is made out of Energy. — SteveKlinko
I tend to agree that what we call matter and what we call light are closely related, that fundamentally they may be one and the same, just gotta be careful in saying that "matter is made out of energy" because that can be misinterpreted in many ways, seeing that the concept of energy is used in so many inconsistent ways. If you say matter is made out of electromagnetic energy then fundamentally gravitational attraction would be electromagnetic attraction, which surely is possible but we haven't come up with a precise model for that yet. But I agree that light is closely connected to what we call matter.

We are talking about Space dimensions here. There are in fact 3 dimensions of Space in our Universe and you can designate any point in this Space using 3 coordinates. Having only 2 coordinates will not let you designate all the points. Having an extra coordinate would be redundant. You only need 3. But in an actual 4D Space you would need 4 coordinates. With 4D Space you actually have another direction that you can move in. There is a whole lot more Space in 4D Space than there is in 3D Space. 3D Space is an entirely different thing than 4D Space. — SteveKlinko
What I don't agree with here, is that we choose to construct the universe as having 3 dimensions of space, we are the ones who choose to interpret our experiences in that way. We presuppose that the universe has 3 dimensions of space and then fit what we experience into these 3 dimensions, but we could just as well presuppose that it has 2 dimensions and fit our experiences into these 2 dimensions. What that would change is that, when you 'think' that you are moving forward or backward, you would instead see the 2D universe change in front of you. What you interpret in a 3D space as you turning your head in an unchanging universe would be interpreted in a 2D space as you being still in a changing universe.

Then maybe we could come up with interesting insights by presupposing 4 dimensions of space and fitting our experiences into that. But what I'm saying is that we are the ones who through thought impose the number of dimensions of space over our experiences, rather than these dimensions preexisting. And that it would be more fruitful to fit our experiences into various numbers of dimensions and see what comes out of it, rather than assuming from the start that the universe has 3 spatial dimensions, which is a viewpoint that we force and not something testable empirically. Sure we intuitively fit many of our experiences into 3 dimensions of the mind, but maybe the interesting thing to do here would be to try fitting our experiences into 4 dimensions, rather than assuming there are 3 dimensions and thus finding ourselves unable to visualize a 4th. — leo

You are wrong about Space. Our Space is 3D. There is no presupposing it is 4D. Think about the actual Space you live in. You can go Up/Down, Left/Right, Backward/Forward and that's it. In 4D Space you actually have another pair of directions you can move in. 4D is a whole different thing than 3D.

I don´t understand how spacetime is considered as space and time inseparable..., but then we can talk about what happened "before the Big Bang (Space) came to be?: or to put Time as a dimension in a series of spatial dimensions, like when you put "orange juice" in a series of types of oranges?

These absurd considerations can be exposed from a mere philosophical standpoint, because they are just nonsense physicists have to say because they do not really know what time and space are. They are supposed, as scientists, to play with words like that: because it´s very helpful when you need to explore. But often we forget these statements are just language games, and we accept that time is the fourth (spatial?) dimension, and things like that which confuse us all when we take them too seriously.

For instance, when philosophers propose an eternal universe as a "solution" to creatio ex nihilo, they are falling into this reification. From a logical point of view, there is no real ontological difference between a world created out of nothing and a world that always existed, even admitting the reification of our general idea of time. Because a universe "that always existed", is also ex novo, out of nothing. Considering time, real or constructed, is only a distraction which allows us to distance ourselves an imaginary step from the fact that Reality (when considered as a whole) is there for no good reason, and necessarily exists out of Nothing in a philosophical sense; both in potential and actuality. — DiegoT

Real Physicists and Mathematicians don't try to say that Time is a Spatial dimension. This has been done by People trying to sell books. In the real world of Science Space-Time is given the more generalized designation of a Manifold. Most Scientists will say that they really think that the theory of Relativity proves that Time does not even really exist as a Phenomenon itself. The implication of this is that we can never go back in Time because there is nothing to go back in.

Physicists like to treat energy as an entity that has the ability to cause things, but energy doesn't cause anything, it is simply a description of motion and potential to cause motion. We don't need to talk about the fuzzy concept of energy to describe the universe, we could simply talk about particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles — leo
I don't really understand what you're saying here. No physics student, much less a physicist, treats energy as a tangible thing. You yourself point out the standard definition of it, the capacity to perform work.
"particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles " just means energy (kinetic or potential) in physics.



(even though as we talked about in your thread about physicalism such particles cannot explain the emergence of conscious experience so they cannot be all there is).

I probably don't want to jump down this rabbit hole here, but I'm just going to say this sounds really disingenuous. I've never heard a physicist talk about consciousness as being explained by fundamental particles. Maybe some extreme anti-reductionist idiots in philosophy might say that, but one might as well suggest analyzing political systems with fundamental physics. One will never even begin to answer or discuss the most basic aspects of politics, so I'd be surprised if you could name any known physicist (with an actual publication record) speaking so cavalierly about that.

I don't mean to say you're dishonest or something, but this sounds like a category of opponent who doesn't exist, or barely so if it does. Maybe that "mad dog naturalist" philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment (Alex Rosenberg?) might but his epithet kinda sums up the view on him. — MindForged

The Energy that we are talking about is Electromagnetic Energy, not Kinetic and not Potential. Electromagnetic Energy is a real Phenomenon in the Physical Universe. It has Wavelength and Intensity as Properties. This Electromagnetic Energy can convert into Matter. So Matter is certainly Made out of this type of Energy. In fact since Matter is made out of this Energy we can say that there really only is Energy in the Universe.

When I say Energy I am referring to Electromagnetic Energy, which is not just a Mathematical Tool but is an actual thing. Energy is what Matter is made out of. At the dawn of the Universe there was only Energy and Matter formed at a later time out of the Energy. — SteveKlinko
What happened at the dawn of the universe is based on a bunch of untestable assumptions. Electromagnetic energy is a tool in the sense that we don't see it, we create the concept to describe what we do see. Observations lead us to imagine that there are small things that travel at the speed of light which can have an observable impact on what we see, it doesn't explain anything to call these things 'energy', energy is just a concept. Matter is a concept too. It doesn't mean much to say that matter is made of energy, all it says is that what used to be described by the concept of matter can be described by the concept of energy. Don't take the words of physicists as gospel, many of them are unfortunately poor philosophers and they use many words in an inconsistent way. — leo

I specifically said that the Cosmologists make Speculations. Nobody is taking what they say as some kind of Gospel. But you have to start with some kind of Premise for any argument. it was a spectacular breakthrough and discovery when Science discovered that Matter is made out of Energy. So it means a lot to say that Matter is made out of Energy.

I agree that there must be something there, but when you see how Science views this Phenomenon, they usually have no other explanation than that it came out of Empty Space. — SteveKlinko
They call it empty space because they used to believe it was empty, but observations have come to show that it's not, it seemed empty because we didn't see anything in it but it is now clear it isn't empty, it is unfortunate that physicists keep calling it empty space and create misconceptions in the minds of people who want to understand the universe. — leo

I agree, there must be something there.

The Space we live in is 3D. You can go up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. It is a particular kind of Space. — SteveKlinko
I don't agree with that, I think up/down left/right forward/backward is just how we are used to interpret what we experience, but you could also describe what you experience without a notion of forward/backward, you would see the universe in a very different way, you would come up with different explanations for phenomena, but you could still do it in a consistent way. We choose to interpret what we experience by giving 3 coordinates to things, but we could give more or less coordinates and come up with another consistent way to view the universe. 3D is just what we find the most intuitive way to view it, but we are the ones who decide how many dimensions we use to describe what we experience. — leo

We are talking about Space dimensions here. There are in fact 3 dimensions of Space in our Universe and you can designate any point in this Space using 3 coordinates. Having only 2 coordinates will not let you designate all the points. Having an extra coordinate would be redundant. You only need 3. But in an actual 4D Space you would need 4 coordinates. With 4D Space you actually have another direction that you can move in. There is a whole lot more Space in 4D Space than there is in 3D Space. 3D Space is an entirely different thing than 4D Space.

But the really amazing conclusion is that if you can have 3D Space or 4D Space then it would seem that Space itself is a thing that can have different basic properties. This leads to the conclusion that there could be no Space! Most Cosmologists would say there was no Space before the Big Bang. The Space and the Energy were created by the Big Bang. — SteveKlinko
We create the concept of space. We can pick whatever as a 4th dimension, if you take what is in your memory as a 4th dimension then there you construct a 4D space. If you assume that what you don't see is in another dimension then there you construct a 4D space, you can say "at such or such 3D location there is some invisible thing that changes and which I can describe with a 4th coordinate". — leo

We don't create the concept of Space. We observe that there are only 3 coordinates needed to go anywhere in our 3D Space. You don't just construct a 4D Space from our 3D Space. The discussion is about what would a 4D Space look like if the Big Bang had produced 4D instead of 3D.

Cosmologists have no idea what happened before their Big Bang. The space they talk about is the 4D spacetime of the theory of general relativity which they make use of, in that theory in some simulations with a finite universe you get at some point in the past a spacetime infinitely small and infinitely dense, their simulation doesn't go further than that so they say maybe the spacetime was created at that point, but really this isn't based on observations this is just fantasy. Don't blindly listen to what they say because what they say is based on a bunch of beliefs they don't state and are often not even aware of, when you look critically at what they say and try to find out what their claims are based on you come to realize that a lot of it is untestable and based on untestable assumptions which they never challenge, so I feel there are much more productive avenues than following their footsteps. — leo

The Cosmologists largely don't have Beliefs about these things because they fully admit they are Speculating. But you have to start somewhere. They make a best Guess about what was there before the Big Bang and then run their simulations. If the simulation seems to produce a Universe like ours then they have the right to think that their Guess could be correct. But no one is sure about anything yet.

There's a much easier answer: "Humans will never understand =>4D space because there is no such thing. It's just something we can construct theoretically based on the way we've developed the language of mathematics. It's basically a "language game" we can play. — Terrapin Station

It's not just a language game. Cosmologists have speculated that based on the Physics before the Big Bang that Space could have been 4D or other dimensions. We have 3D so that's what we are Evolved to live in. Do you understand that before the Big Bang there was no Space? The Universe as well as Space came out of the Big Bang. Space is a Thing. The Big Bang did not explode into some ever present and forever existent Concept that we think of as Space in the Universe. The Big Bang created the Space that we live in. There was a time when there was no 3D Space. Space can be 3D or 4D or etc., and these are all very different Things. So then with this background the question arises as to what would it be like to be a 4D being in a 4D Universe.

The usual representation of the Tesseract is a self eating monstrosity, folding in on itself as it rotates. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract . There is no empty space inside the box with the model and the sides are shown as 3D objects that have thickness. I hate to say it but the Tesseract is a simple empty box in 4D. It has 8 sides each of which is Flat. I repeat, the sides are Flat to the 4Der. That example they always show does not show the Flatness of the sides. That model is an aberration that tries to show the connectivity of the sides at the expense of any kind of real representation of the Tesseract. The real failing of the 3D Mind is that it cannot visualize a 3D object as being Flat. When you can visualize a 3D hyper plane as Flat then you will understand how a 4Der sees a Tesseract. A 4Der would think the Tesseract is the simplest thing. The fact that our 3D Minds have to go through such conniptions just to even conceptualize the thing shows how retarded the 3D Mind actually is.

My mathematical understanding of reality is very poor. But I have read that spatial dimensions (the way we experience them anyway, that is, the way we make sense of our interaction with the underlying informational process) are such that the second dimension spreads orthogonally in relation to the first, and the third is projected perpendicularly, intersecting at right angles with the first and the second dimensions. This makes me think that a fourth spatial dimension has to interact (or be experienced as) a movement towards the centre or separating from the centre, in our 3D mindset. This would be noticed in our 3D world as objects that come from nowhere and go to nowhere, changing size and intensity of interaction with our plane along the way. The fact that we don´t get to see these anomalies very often, might be just the consequence of being too small to notice such events; we would only detect them considering huge spans of spacetime, like the ones studied in Cosmology.

I was hoping that you guys will tell me if this intuition is false or makes some sense, as I don´t have the mathematical tools to examine it. In my mind it feels right, but mixing coffee and beer also feels right in my mind. — DiegoT

To extend into a 4th dimension you should use the same logic that gets you from the 2nd dimension to the 3rd dimension. You will have to find a direction that is perpendicular to the three axes that you have drawn for 3D. It boggles the Mind to do this. We can only theoretically and mathematically do this. The 3D Brain cannot Visualize this. We would need a 4D Brain.

This leads to the conclusion that there could be no Space! Most Cosmologists would say there was no Space before the Big Bang. The Space and the Energy were created by the Big Bang. — SteveKlinko
This is exactly why we need to consider the 0th dimension, a dimension with no space. When we realize that there could be a time without space we need to allow for this in our representations of the relationship between time and space. The logical procedure is to model time as the 0th dimension rather than as the 4th dimension, such that 3d spatial existence follows from time, rather than modeling time as the fourth dimension which follows from 3d spatial existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. They should have let Time be the 0th dimension.

↪SteveKlinko We have right and left, back and forward, up and down; so I think the four spatial dimension might be outwards and inwards, an eccentric and concentric motion. That way the rule of orthogonal angle with the others spatial dimensions is preserved.
Moreover, I think the big bang and expansion of the universe is a fourth dimensional movement that we perceive "magically" as coming out of nowhere, just like flatlanders would perceive a sphere passing their bidimensional plane. I ilustrate my point with this picture, that contributes no helpful information but it´s really cool: — DiegoT

Yes cool picture. There will be another pair of directions, but I'm not sure what requirement you are putting on these directions by saying eccentric and concentric. I think everything we know about the Big Bang and Universe says it is 3D not 4D.

I have been thinking about multi dimensionality because of what I have been reading and viewing on YouTube recently, regarding unexplained phenomena.

I found it useful to think of multi dimensionality in terms of the process of how we get there: for example to move in space we need to change at least one of our coordinates and we are at a different place. The way our senses work, we get a different input into our senses, distance, for example will make things look smaller and other things look bigger. Others will sense us differently.

Now imagine a multi dimensional universe where we could change one of the coordinates of the fourth dimension. If we move far enough into the fourth dimension, we may not be able to be sensed by someone with the same 3D coordinates as us. So we disappear.

If we our able to travel within the fourth dimension? — FreeEmotion

First of all the Universe is 3D. If the Universe was 4D you would not just unexpectedly slip out of our Slice and into another Slice on special occasions. You would know the Universe is 4D and you would be able to move Up/Down, Left/Right, Forward/Backward, and some 4th dimensional direction pair. The 4th dimension would not just appear when you want to explain Conspiracy Theory type Phenomenon.

I've tried to read a little on 4D mechanics and I think one of the key aspects of a higher dimension is its permeability of the lower dimensions. For example, a 2D being would not be able to see the whole of a 2D model e.g. a circle, unless they went around it. And even then, they would only see the portion in front and which would still obstruct the rest. The same applies to our 3D sight when observing stuff. A common example is the horizon at the edge of any vista. Or the fact that we only see the part of solids directly reflecting light at us. It is often proposed that 4D sight would enable us to view the whole of a 3D object, permeating through its structure to perceive every angle from just one point of view without shifting. Anyway, that's just a guess. — BrianW

I agree. We would need a 4D Brain and Retina. The Retina would be Flat like ours but would have 3 dimensions of Flatness. The problem with understanding 4D is that we cannot wrap out Minds around that requirement that 3D objects will be Flat in 4D. Actually a true 3D object could not exist in 4D because it would have Zero extension into one of the dimensions, The 3D Retina is Flat in 4D but it would not have zero thickness. It is still a 4D object. Just like our 2D Retina is Flat in 3D but does not have Zero thickness. It is still a 3D object.