But that isn’t that a problem for physicalism, which says that conscious acts are reducible to objective referents? — Wayfarer

No, because those mental processes are physical. Hence my experience of red lunar sky jellyfish must be describable as physical processes of the brain, not physical red jellyfish floating above the moon.

We're in accord here. Though I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it, so to speak, do you see how all this meshes with the notion of panpsychism?. — javra

My view is that it is a category error, that it is a sophisticated example of more generic phenomena, the category error being that if A is some kind of B, then B must be some kind of A.

With that, now we're getting into metaphysical underpinnings — javra

Well, not really. That there's stuff and then what stuff can do sums up physics.

No, of course not. But it would need to give reasons for why tangible X, Y, and Z results in what it feels like to be conscious--rather than taking the latter occurrence for granted. — javra

That's a third-person/first-person crossover. Any explanation of what consciousness is is going to be third person.

I don't know what motivates you to not just ignore the screams of brown people but actively try to stop them from being helped. — Paul Edwards

You are very histrionic, indeed disturbed individual.

You mean you're not 10 years old now??? Dang, I got that one wrong. — Hippyhead

No, I reached that age where something isn't automatically true because a bunch of right-wing politicians told me. We keenly await your arrival.

I’m sometimes accused of ducking questions, obviously I’m not alone. — Wayfarer

Well, it was analogous, so I thought that would nail it. More explicitly, the contents of consciousness correlate immediately to mental processes, not to physical, objective referents.

A brain is tangible (to a consciousness); a consciousness is not tangible (to any consciousness).
Therein lies a, or maybe the, pivotal ontological difference—even when eschewing the issue of whether a consciousness can hold non-epiphenomenal, hence top-down, effects upon its own substratum of brain. — javra

I don't think this is explicit, but yeah it's basically the claim... there must be something of consciousness that is elementary and non-physical, otherwise we're just stuff physical doing physical things and that hurts our feelings.

Tangentially, I’ll add that this thread's persistent reference to brains is overlooking the fact that even amebas hold an awareness of other: such as in an ameba’s capacity to discern what is relative to itself a predator from what is a prey. — javra

Well, you could see this thread for an example of taking the idea further: even electrons have awareness of each other. As an intermediary point: even trees are aware of one another. The point befits the fact that human consciousness is a sophisticated kind of mammalian consciousness, which is a sophisticated kind of animal consciousness, which is a sophisticated kind of biological reactivity, which is a sophisticated set of chemical reactions, which are sophisticated sets of electromagnetic particle interactions.

But I think by awareness, we mean sentient awareness.

Nonetheless, the physical brain and all it does will forever be tangible percepts which we perceive as other relative to us as the consciously aware observers. — javra

If I'm reading you right, you're talking about the third-person/first-person barrier. That is true. If you want to know what consciousness is, that is a third-person question. If you want to know what it feels like, that is a first-person question. The former can explain the later, i.e. can say: "this set of processes is identically that" but understanding an experience won't be the same as having it, anymore than me understanding why you're crying at Bambi will be the same as me crying at Bambi, or understanding why the apple fell from the tree will be the same as an apple falling from the tree.

But that's not a justification for saying that it isn't then a complete explanation. A complete explanation for why the apple falls from the tree is just that; it doesn't also have to be an apple falling from a tree. Likewise an explanation for consciousness doesn't need to feel like consciousness.

If, simplistically put, a living brain is identical to a consciousness, they then should both be either tangible or, else, intangible. But they hold different ontological properties in this respect; they are not identical. — javra

There's a difference between substance and function. There is a difference, for instance, in an electron and the movement of an electron. There is a difference between a computer and an executing program. You can't just look at the object, you have to look at what it does if you want to explain e.g. electric current, a machine learning algorithm, or consciousness.

So how could the idea itself be identified with anything physical, when the physical representation is arbitary? You could invent a whole arbitrary system of symbols, but if it followed the rules, it would be valid even if noboby else understood it. And those rules are real, but I can't see how they're physical in nature. — Wayfarer

I had a dream about sky jellyfish on the moon once. They're not real either. I hope...

Are you saying we should let religious bigots decide whether they can enslave a population or not? — Paul Edwards

No, I'm saying that you cannot justify your evil with the evil of others.

And does freedom for brown people have no value to you? Brown people shouldn't be fight and die in any fight for freedom? — Paul Edwards

Do you always call them brown people? Is that especially relevant?

Have you ever met even ONE person who supported the 2003 Iraq war so that America could control oil? — Paul Edwards

One of the two people who pushed the Bush administration into the war at every opportunity was quite clear about why he did it.

Not only didn't you care about the welfare of the Iraqi people, you actively tried to stop the cops when they tried to end the holocaust. — Paul Edwards

This is the most insane conversation I've ever been in. For all you know I was 10 years old during GWII (I wasn't, but...)

When Saddam was committing his crimes, it was LEGAL for him to do so. The police were on the side of the criminal. — Paul Edwards

The police you keep referring to (the US military) were the criminals in this case. Is that better?

When the US commits crimes, they are TRIED and JAILED, because it is ILLEGAL. — Paul Edwards

Yet to see anyone responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq to be tried and jailed.

They may be described mathematically as waves, but they are portrayed graphically as balls — Gnomon

In my experience, they're usually portrayed graphically as directed lines. It is understood this is not a literal pictorial representation, merely a convenient shorthand for counting probabilities.

Take calculating some iterative algorithm that has no p-type solution. The step you happen to be on isn't the 'result' of the process, it's just the transient stage you're currently at. If we did want a result it might more properly be something like 'you're going to doing this forever', or 'you'll never get a number below 100', or some such limit. That's the way I'm seeing perceptual processing, from day one the perception is not a result, its a prediction to be input into the algorithm generating the next perception... — Isaac

I was perhaps unclear. By the result of a process, I mean a single execution of some brain function, for instance V1. One of the things V1 is responsible for, as I understand it, is edge detection. An 'edge' is something we are conscious of, but it's not something distinct in raw optical data, i.e. the inputs to V1. It is an output or result of V1. Yes, that output might be modulated by new data or future feedback; nonetheless 'this edge' is an output of a particular process of V1. This would be analogous to the result of a single iteration of your algorithm, not some potentially unattainable final answer.

True but Dennett is a philosopher to be fair, and not a strict neuroscientist. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for other philosophers to engage him in these kind of (philosophical) questions. And I recognize this might be a legitimate neuroscience question, it is a legitimate philosophical question. — schopenhauer1

It is a question in philosophy; I wouldn't go as far as to say it was legitimate. Dennett's philosophy is science-based; he is not obliged to consider other metaphysics, e.g. to explain the soul as a separate, immortal quantity.

It's when a philosopher handwaves it and then narrowly focuses on the correlates when clearly the question is not about the mechanisms of how the correlates integrate, but how it is that this correlation exists in the first place, that's when there is the continual ignoring of question or talking past each other. — schopenhauer1

In three sentences you've gone from being open to the neurological phenomena being identically consciousness, to being merely the cause of consciousness, to being merely a correlate of consciousness again. All I can say is to repeat: if you are aware that, in Dennett's view, they are not merely correlates but the thing itself, it doesn't make any sense to expect him to answer a question on the separate question of the thing itself that is not meaningful in that view, or to pretend he hasn't addressed the question because he doesn't treat it as a separable problem.

They still call it the Wave Function "of a particle". So, it seems that most physicists still treat holistic quantum level wave functions as-if they are tiny balls of stuff. — Gnomon

A particle is any quantised phenomenon. A phonon -- a quantised vibration -- is a pseudo-particle, for instance, because it behaves like a particle even though it is a collective behaviour. By "particle", physicists do not mean a tiny ball, just a quantised excitation of a field. All particles are described as waves.

Hard problemers wouldn't even discount that the neurological correlate is the thing itself. Rather, it would be why this metaphysical case exists that the neurological underpinnings is experiential. — schopenhauer1

That's not a definition of the hard problem I have heard of before. The formulation I've always come across is the one that might admit correlates of consciousness in neurology, but never consciousness itself.

Yep it "causes" experience. Not debated. How is it metaphysically the same as experience is the question. — schopenhauer1

Well, "causes" experience is not as specific as "is identically experience", which you were open to two sentences ago, so you need to be clearer about what limits you're placing on scientific explanatory power.

Neurology is a physical discipline. It is not its job to satisfy metaphysicists any more than it's its job to satisfy creationists or dualists. If you're in principle satisfied that the science can isolate what consciousness is, not just correlates (including causal) of consciousness, but want a deeper understanding of why a thing that is something is that thing, which is not a question specific to consciousness at all, you ought to look to other metaphysicists, surely? Is there a specific aspect to consciousness that makes this special?

I'm still not sure I'm prepared to accept that picking a point in an ongoing feedback process and labelling it the 'result' doesn't set us off on the wrong path as far as perception is concerned. — Isaac

If it's a process, surely it has a result. For instance, what would you call the single firing neurons in response to Halle Berry's face? If it is something we are conscious of, and it is not an input to that process, it is a result of that process, no? I'm not saying that's the entirety of the purported qualia, which must remain the net experience of Halle Berry's face; nevertheless there are processes occurring which feed into that experience, not instantaneously, sure, with feedback, sure. But it's doing something which adds to our experience.

True, but we have jettisoned phlogiston, humours, elan vital, and ether, (haven't we?) so is it not still a case of deciding what category qualia fall into? — Isaac

Yes, because the referents didn't exist at all. The referent of 'qualia' is 'properties of consciousness' and, as Dennett says, these exist.

Not recognizing the legitimacy of the other side. — schopenhauer1

Well, I'm not suggesting you must recognise the legitimacy of Dennett's view; I'm pointing out that it makes no sense to observe on the one hand that Dennett believes that no distinct hard problem exists and on the other to expect him to give an answer to the distinct hard problem. I'm not trying to convert you, although I guess Dennett is.

Again, you have to at least recognize that "hard problmers" are recognizing this too. — schopenhauer1

I disagree. Being a 'hard problemer' is not a discipline for acquiring knowledge and answering questions; rather, it is a statement of intent; no matter what neuroscience or any other physical science explains, we will always claim there is a bit left over unaccounted for, hence the god-of-the-gaps analogy. So I'd say no, having that particular belief system renders science an irrelevancy, much as believing the Earth is 6,000 years old irrespective of what geology tells us renders science an irrelevancy.

Dennett's view might be summed up like this: if and when we know all there is to know about the brain, one could point to these processes and structures over here and say this is identically having experience. e.g. the neuron firing in recognition of Halle Berry's face is part of the experience of seeing Halle Berry's face.

The sort of viewpoint I gather you're espousing is that, no, these will always be interpreted as merely correlates of the thing, but never the thing itself, god forbid. So while all of the content of an experience might be accounted for neurological correlates, and the start of an experience might be preceded by neurological correlates, these correlates cannot constitute the having an experience itself, they can only be little helpers.

As Susan Blackmore put it when discussing the futility of searching for neural correlates of consciousness:

The trouble is it depends on a dualist—and ultimately unworkable—theory of consciousness. The underlying intuition is that consciousness is an added extra—something additional to and different from the physical processes on which it depends. Searching for the NCCs relies on this difference. On one side of the correlation you measure neural processes using EEG, fMRI or other kinds of brain scan; on the other you measure subjective experiences or 'consciousness itself'. — Blackmore

In other words, hard problemers have it back to front. Dennett agrees with the above: there's no separable hard problem to answer. NCCs aren't correlates but the thing itself, not individually but as a messy whole. The likes of Strawson misrepresent this as a claim that 'consciousness does not exist', but in fact it's an affirmative claim that consciousness is real, not an added sprinkle of magic on top of real stuff.

However, the easier questions aren't even approaching the answer, so how can it "close off" the hard problem when it never ventured the realm of answering it? — schopenhauer1

But that again is merely your insistence that the hard problem is separable and distinct. You're not demonstrating that Dennett isn't answering the question; you're disputing the grounds on which he answers it, just as he disputes the grounds on which you ask it.

Now YOU have to be charitable enough to realize that hard questioners AREN'T denying the science of the findings of cognitive neuroscience. — schopenhauer1

Now, yes. But the answers that cognitive neuroscience yields were once thought to be inseparable aspects of that hard problem. Now they're not, hence: hard problem of the gaps.

It's ignoring it and then pointing to some other line of thought. — schopenhauer1

It's not a distinct question, so it's not some unrelated line of thought either. It's what people who are actually interested in the phenomenon are doing while people who are interested in their own belief systems wet themselves.

I strongly suspect that relating to our own perceptions in a manner that doesn't produce these conceptual traps upon reflection is a laborious, ongoing fight. A "relearning how to see". — fdrake

Yes, I think so too. And relearning how not to see, or hear in particular. Nonetheless, regarding:

perceptual features are "submitted to" a phenomenal content receptor vs phenomenal content ascription is interweaved with the process of perceptual feature formation — fdrake

we can still separate data in a third person way into what we are conscious of in a first person way -- phenomenal content -- and what we are not. As I said before, this does not imply a particular structure; it merely observes that we are conscious of things like 'the car on the left' but not conscious of things like 'transformed orientation of car on what is now the left'.

I'd suggest that the "phenomenal content" of a given perceptual feature is the perceptual feature itself — fdrake

Yes, maybe. The qualia then exists by virtue of us being conscious of it as opposed to not conscious of it rather than packaged and sent into consciousness pret a manger, which isn't really what I was getting at. The important point is that 'the blue car' is not in raw sensory input; it is something the brain adds because it has learned to do so, and that process of recognition is not part of that higher-order set of conscious processes (which may just be because the brain has also learned not to bother amplifying that sort of thing). Or, in other words, whatever triggers those processes are not perceptual features.

Non-reductive physicalism is pretty standard in philosophy of mind. Is that what you're describing here? — frank

That's how I'm describing Dennett's position, which is also mine. I'm not arguing against irreducibility here myself, rather pointing out that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to observe that Dennett believes that no separable hard problem exists and still ask what his answer to it is. He believes, rightly imo, that the hard problem of consciousness is nothing more than a bunch of easier problems.

That's two different conversations. I would like to know Dennett's straight-ahead answer to it. — schopenhauer1

His straight ahead answer is that it's not a distinct question, i.e. that consciousness arises from simpler processes described by answers to easier questions. The hard/easy distinction relies on there remaining a hard problem after the easy problems are solved. His answer is that this isn't the case: understand the easy problems, none of which yield what we mean by the consciousness of the hard problem individually, and you will have the answer to the hard problem.

This seems akin to building a house. Someone comes along and says, 'Hey, nice foundations but when are you going to build a house?', then later, 'Hey, nice walls, but when are you going to build a house?' Then up goes the roof and voila a house.

At the moment, we don't fully understand how the brain works... our understanding has no roof, maybe some missing walls so to speak, and that's used by mystics as an excuse to separate out the hard problem and insist it's not being answered. Dennett's answer is that we are already in the process of answering it by building up knowledge about how the brain works.

For instance, seeing a car as a car rather than some generic smudge of colour in a background of smudges of colour is an important aspect of the disputed qualia of 'this car'. As Isaac described, we already know much about how the brain recognises objects, so the hard aspect of this is pushed back to purely the subjective appraisal of the quale and not the derivation of any of its properties: a hard problem of the gaps. Likewise other shapes, colour, orientation, distance, name, and everything else that makes up the contents of our subjective experiences. What we're left with is a question of how a particular part of the brain does one particular thing, out of all the almost countless other things the brain is doing to construct our subjective experience that are becoming clear.

But you know that is a stance he (you) are taking on this, not necessarily the case, right? I mean it isn't a forgone conclusion that there is not a hard problem. — schopenhauer1

That's true of any stance, including the stance that the hard problem is distinct.

But my main point further, is certainly Dennett isn't even coming close to answering it by criticizing certain theories on the physical mechanisms and their subjective equivalent "illusionary" aspects, as they are reported by individuals. — schopenhauer1

If there's no question to answer, it would be odd to answer it.

Had you had your way, Saddam and his sons would still be attaching jumper cables to the genitals of anyone who got in their way. — Hippyhead

Like Abu Ghraib? No, Americans just did that for kicks.

Okay, well Dennett's view is that we don't need to understand the hard problem, i.e. it's not a separate problem that will remain once all the easy problems are solved, but rather a conceptual problem arising from ignorance.

But women should take responsibility for their acts. — Gregory

I woke up this morning and apparently it's the dark ages again. What happened?

How about actually letting women be responsible for their acts, rather than dictating to them what to do with their bodies.

But what is Dennett's response to the hard problem, if not to retreat to easier ones? — schopenhauer1

What is your point here? That anyone who researches anything to do with mind must answer one question and nothing else? That's not how research works. You cannot dismiss the work of, say, all physicists who do not have a Theory of Everything.

Strawson for example, seems to be asking for answers to the hard problem. Dennett keeps reaching for easier ones in response. — schopenhauer1

Strawson is responding to Dennett, not vice versa.

If the devil is in the details of the formation process of perceptual features, the way we read off features from already formed perceptions effectively has a sampling bias in that regard. — fdrake

Indeed, I was just reading a paper about how the process can cause information loss and, you're right, we can hardly discuss perceptual features not present due to the processes that lost them. And to this extent qualia may not be useful scientific concepts, as Dennett said. That said, there is, as both yourself and Isaac have pointed out, feedback between what we consciously perceive and the unconscious processes that form those perceptions, so any complete description of perception must surely account for what is perceived.

Another fascinating (to me) aside, but I must stop getting sidetracked. Have a look at this paper, if you fancy, it's really interesting. — Isaac

Reminds me of one of our prior conversations:

‘Theory theorists’ in cognitive development point to an analogy between learning in children and learning in science. Causal Bayesian networks provide a computational account of a kind of inductive inference that should be familiar from everyday scientific thinking: testing hypotheses about the causal structure underlying a set of variables by observing patterns of correlation and partial correlation among these variables, and by examining the consequences of interventions (or experiments) on these variables.

It seems then that our disagreement (small such as it is) is only over whether dismissal of Qualia in their entirety puts this idea at risk (throws the baby out with the bathwater, as you put it). My feeling is that the idea here is so generalised and applicable to a field much wider than qualia, that dismissing all talk of qualia maintains the conscious awareness of the results of unconscious processing completely intact. — Isaac

It was more that there is a reason why we have a concept of qualia, and that reason holds even if theories about what qualia are do not, and it seems to me that all of the problems lie with older, less scientific theory and not with the existence or not of properties and objects of consciousness, the things underlying the belief that qualia exist. There's a sense here with how Dennett is being interpreted, not just by Strawson but by yourself and fdrake, that since theories about qualia need improving, the term must be jettisoned. I can't think of any other field where this would be the case. Gravity was modelled as a force field for centuries. When Einstein discovered it was actually geometric feature of spacetime, he didn't jettison the term 'gravity', and that's a pretty fundamental distinction, much more so, I feel, than the difference between ineffable, intrinsic, private, immediate qualia and merely private and immediate qualia.

Renaming gravity because we previously identified it as a force field when it's not would have been extremely confusing and lo there is extreme confusion about whether consciousness is real or not. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater means we get people like Strawson leading people to believe that Dennett has claimed that consciousness is an illusion, because the contents of consciousness are an illusion, when nothing of the sort is claimed.

If I say Pete is 5 ft 11, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and his eyes are in fact grey, does Pete not exist? The existence of the referent is not dependent on the accuracy of my description. When you say 'qualia' do not exist, obviously that is going to be interpreted as 'the referents of qualia do not exist', which is precisely what we have seen, when in fact Dennett is saying that the theoretical description of qualia is wrong (and, furthermore, that qualia themselves, while real enough, are not scientifically useful).

There are plenty of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientist working under the former assumption without ever mentioning qualia or anything like them, so I think it can work. (there are, of course also plenty who do - much to their shame!). — Isaac

And presumably they're talking about the same thing, just using different terminology.

why didn't you play off one fascist against another to get the end result, — Paul Edwards

Because, as I've explained, I'm not a psychopath. You might get off on hundreds of thousands of innocent people dying to enable America to control Iraqi oil, but I cannot.

And you seem to be policing America, despite America being a sovereign nation — Paul Edwards

Are you seriously equating criticising a country for war crimes with invading a country illegally, bombing seven shades of shit out of it, bombing hospitals, weddings, funerals and schools, and torturing prisoners? There are very few intelligent right-wingers, I suppose.

It is Saddam who was the fascist. — Paul Edwards

There can be multiple fascists and, indeed, multiple fascists at any one time. The fact that you recognise America as the police of the sovereign nation of Iraq is an implicit acknowledgement of its kind of fascism.

No, all anyone is asking you to do is be a citizen who supports the police (or a posse) who is in the process of arresting a criminal. You don't personally need to go to Iraq, there are sufficient volunteers willing to do that already. All anyone is asking you to do is say "thanks America", like I did here. — Paul Edwards

I politely decline on grounds of nauseating distaste for fascism.

Instead of sitting back and expecting Bush to articulate a perfect reason for liberating Iraq, why weren't you actively stating the case for liberating Iraq yourself? Then, when Bush came along, you could have said "well that's nuts, but it fits into my objective anyway, so go right ahead". — Paul Edwards

Because I'm not a psychopath.

The war crime in my opinion is to stand in the way of the police as they try to bring the criminal Saddam to justice. And as I said, you should have been part of the police yourself. — Paul Edwards

Right, my options are: become an Iraqi citizen, train as a police officer, and single-handedly arrest the dictator of my new country, or support war crimes against said country. Utterly ridiculous.

The Iraq was most definitely NOT a war crime. If you believe there is a law that protects Saddam's "right" to rape and mutilate, you have a duty to ignore that "law" and then do your best to CHANGE that "law". — Paul Edwards

You have a very peculiar idea of what constitutes a war crime. Usually you have to consider the actions of the culprit, not just the target. Lying to your people in order to justify killing tens of thousands of innocent people in turn to break a country we were at peace with's resolve (the states aim of S&A) on the grounds that, in Paul Wolfowitz's words, "it is swimming in a sea of oil" is not improved by the country's dictator being a criminal. Few people mourn Saddam; we can all agree the world is better off without him. But moral people do not use one person's evil to justify their own. Right-wing propagandists do.

I'm not pro-US-war crimes. Nor is the American government or the American people. If an American commits a war crime, or any crime for that matter, they are charged and jailed (and I support that). — Paul Edwards

And yet why do I get the impression that your answer to the statement that the Iraq war was most definitely a war crime will be that no one was charged...?

Physics can never show "WHY" Reality behaves as it does until we understand its inherent flaws. — Chris1952Engineer

Well, physics has uncovered lots of WHYs, recently including why matter has mass. But why questions always yield more why questions. It is almost inevitable that any answer to a why question will demand some physical underpinning, but it doesn't follow that physics depends on answering them. Physics is about what things are made of and how they behave.

And that description is best suited to Saddam. Which you happily ignore, and even go so far as standing in the way of those who would put an end to his criminality. — Paul Edwards

It's equally simple to divide the world into pro-our-war-crimes or pro-his-war-crimes. Again, propaganda, not philosophy.

No, it's not whataboutery. It's the fact that Saddam was a criminal who ordered the rape and mutilation of innocent Iraqis, and by any sane philosophical position should have been brought to justice. The appropriate tool to bring him to justice was a war of liberation, which is exactly what Bush did and what you should have supported.

You should not have supported the alternative of allowing a criminal to continue committing crimes, and trying to stop the police from arresting him.

It's a very simple concept. — Paul Edwards

Oh, the attractiveness of being judge, jury and executioner of others, as long as the same doesn't apply to them, is very simple, I agree.

Again, though, this isn't philosophy. It's just right-wing propaganda.

So it's a case of "Don't listen to philosophers, it's all nonsense. Now, listen to my philosophical claims..." — Mijin

That sounds like the history of philosophy.

Even so, most quantum physicists continue to "interpret" photons as-if they are petite balls of solid stuff. — Gnomon

They absolutely do not.

To some even suggesting that Quantum physics is proof that nothing exists or is real (it doesn't but any interpretation of it can say what you want it to say). Considering how weird it is, and how not even the people who do it fully understand what is going on do you think there is a place for philosophy in this or should we just leave well enough alone. — Darkneos

Yeah this is my bugbear too. It's used as a propaganda tool by the untrained for the untrained to forward whatever unscientific world view the former feel obliged to peddle.

I was in Tanzania for a few months and was housed with this other guy from England. I asked him what he did and he said he was a personal trainer, but that he was much more than that. I asked him how so and he replied he used quantum theory. He explained to me that everything in the universe is either positive or negative (fine), and that when you bring positive and negative together it created energy (I guess he was thinking of matter-antimatter annihilation?), that energy equated to love, and that's quantum theory. He asked me what I did and I told him I was doing a PhD in quantum theory and left it at that. That guy hated my guts for the whole of his stay after that, which I rather enjoyed.

Nothing excites a charlatan more than the idea of something being unknowable.

Anyway, I do think there's a vital place for philosophy in all science. The ramifications of QM are perfectly reasonable philosophical problems, since they lie outside of empiricism and therefore outside of science's purview... for now, at least. I think the important thing is to not confuse interpretation with empirically-verified theory. For instance, non-determinists and incompatibilists seem to like QM a lot because of the lack of distinction between quantum theory and non-deterministic interpretations thereof.

The reason why we feel like we're living some story is because we're constantly scenario-planning and to do that we have to integrate our current environment into the 'the story so far...' section of the film. — Isaac

I agree with this as a phenomenon, but that seems a rather anthropocentric idea of consciousness. When speaking of objects and properties of awareness, I would expect a lower order to have something in common with other animals. My chihuahua can see what's before her, recognise other dogs, and let the poor bastards have it like the walking fiery female Latino cliche she is. Frogs are pretty adept at recognising flies and firing their insane tongues flyward. We're presumably not accusing all animals of compulsive narrative-building, although I agree that does describe humans well.

The point is that there's no reason to think that 'identifying the object' is an event in any singular manner. — Isaac

I don't think that matters. If I've suggested that recognition must be a singular event, it was merely an artefact of speaking approximately about things I'm hazy about.

Another fascinating (to me) aside, but I must stop getting sidetracked. Have a look at this paper, if you fancy, it's really interesting. — Isaac

Thanks, reading now (when not typing this).

I could almost get behind that but would have to add that consciousness may not be the kind of thing that has the kind of properties we're talking about. Consciousness seems to be a set of processes, story building... — Isaac

I assume consciousness is, at root, a set of processes. But there are also unconscious processes, and they seem to feed into each other such that those unconscious processes provide data to the consciousness set.

Kenosha Kid. It looks like fdrake has already said what I just answered to you - I should really read the whole thread before replying. — Isaac

I find the feedback aspect perfectly reasonable, and I would expect consciousness to be some higher-order set of processes. I don't think either really speak to the impossibility of outputs of unconscious processing being made available for conscious awareness. I don't really have a strong idea of the case against this...

My feeling is that there is some crossed wires about what we're talking about. For instance, I did not intend to suggest any particular structure for conscious or unconscious processes, nor that consciousness is some intended terminus for unconscious processes, but these appear to have come across as vital to my point for both yourself and fdrake, so mea culpa.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to turn this around. We could dismiss qualia on the basis that:

a) there is no conscious/unconscious distinction at all: that everything that might constitute a conscious object or property is either already found in the raw input to our senses (to which the brain does nothing at all) or, if the brain does some things, it always does so in a way that we could be conscious of;

b) there may be a conscious/unconscious distinction, but there's no actual content to consciousness; it is one thing or no thing.

(a) would rid us of the idea that we become conscious of the results of unconscious processing of sense data, i.e. the immediacy of qualia, but begs the question why I am conscious of some of these processes but not others, e.g. irrespective of how I learned to invert my view of the world, why I am not conscious of doing it now.

(b) would get rid of properties of consciousness, which would beg the question of how I can be conscious of 'car' or 'Halle Berry's face' or distance or colour or anything else at all.

As far as I can see atm there are unconscious processes, whatever their structure, that act on sensory input, and we have consciousness of the results of those actions, whatever the structure of consciousness. The unintended implications that e.g. there is some teleological submission process, or some terminus at consciousness, or some implied specific structure to consciousness, aren't really what my argument is about. It is simply that we are conscious of results of unconscious processing.

While it doesn't matter how many people Saddam killed? — Paul Edwards

Is this your philosophy: whataboutery? It has more than a whiff of propaganda and less of a feel of an actual philosophical position. Defend your own arguments; don't just point and yell LOOK OVER THERE when challenged.

And it is the Iraqi people's politics that were being forced on the Iraqi leadership, not US politics. — Paul Edwards

Yeah, I remember all those consultations with the Iraqi people. No, wait, that didn't happen.

I rather liked Trumps idea of a wall, We could all contribute and extend it around the whole place. — FrancisRay

Maybe a dome..?

I am sure there are examples where removing dictators worked for the good but I cannot think of one. — tim wood

Hitler, which I guess makes Hitler a hero... since he removed Hitler. (With apologies to Jimmy Carr.)