Perhaps we should gather a huge UN force and send it into the US to install social cohesion into the US. — ssu

:rofl:

No, my policy for Iraq (and other countries) at this stage in world history is to install democracy — Paul Edwards

Our politics. And to do so by killing as many people as it takes.

My ideology is freedom as I define it — Paul Edwards

Which is killing people until they accept your politics. Fascism, essentially.

When

make the Iraqi people believe — Paul Edwards

is your idea of

a cunning plan for world liberation — Paul Edwards

then your interest is clearly not in freedom, but in forcing unbelievers to convert to your ideology, and killing however many people is required to impress them that this is efficacious. It's literally the oldest story in the book: convert or die. Just because you want something and don't care how many people die in order for you to get it, it doesn't make it just.

What you're typically aware of depends on what you need that identification for - Are you about to say the word that goes with the object, are you choosing the right object from others, are about to interact with it...Whichever following action requires you to identify it as a 'car' will determine how the fact of that identification reaches your awareness, if it does at all. — Isaac

Thanks again, Isaac. What action best describes scrolling down this page and coming across the picture of the two cars and identifying them as cars? I suppose, in a page of mostly text, an image is surprising and, when we become conscious of something surprising, the instinct is to identify it?

A classic example is sensory priming where you are exposed to a distorted sound/picture/smell, you're then exposed to the undistorted version (which you interpret the meaning of at least partly consciously), then when you next are exposed to the distorted version it seems much clearer. — Isaac

Yes, I mentioned something similar to fdrake as an argument against the idea that raw sensory data is just dumped wholesale and unadulterated into our perceptions, in that instance the way the brain stabilises the image we see despite the fact that the eyes are moving. I can imagine that, as infants, we might have suffered a period of time in which the brain had to learn how to do this.

So there's a sense, then, in which our conscious perceptions are being assessed by our unconscious brains in order to fire/learn correction processes. Is it your assessment that this is done for the purpose of improving our awareness, or is that just a nice side effect?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. — Isaac

Anything that the brain does to raw sensory input before we are aware of the corresponding perception or correction thereto, e.g. sensory priming. For instance, I don't open my eyes in the morning and see the world upside down for a second. My brain already knows which way up to present the world.

Maybe these could be the new 'qualia', but I think, given the sullied history of the term, we'd better reach for something else. — Isaac

Yes, I think Dennett and fdrake would agree with you. My response to this idea was:

But we still, as Dennett says, have properties of consciousness, which is what is actually being identified as qualia even if the properties of qualia have been erroneously ascribed, i.e. the prior guesswork at the properties of those qualia is bad. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think it's a bad word for 'properties of consciousness', rather I think that prior theoretical models for what its properties are are wrong. There's nothing wrong with improving our models; we don't need to come up with a new word for our subject every time we present an improved theory about it.

And that brings us back to where we started. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater leads to confusion and opportunism. Strawson reads, deliberately or not, the attack on the precise definition of qualia as tantamount to saying that consciousness is an illusion and has no actual properties.

Not that this thread or Dennett's article is about judicious use of labels. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether we call them qualia or something else, so long as it's clear that 'qualia do not exist' means 'ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate properties of consciousness do not exist' and not 'properties of consciousness do not exist'.

It's like characterising perception as a packaging process for sensory data, and then some other distinct process passes the package as a whole to the "conscious apprehension". — fdrake

I'm struggling to see how that is suggested by the above diagram.

The packaging/formatting occurs within the process of perception as a continually evolving model of data input streams and compensatory/exploratory activities — fdrake

Which is present in the image but entirely absent in the second flow discussed here, which shows raw sensory data presented to our consciousnesses, as if how we see things is how they are read by our senses. This, at least, we know is wrong.

"conscious apprehension" is some feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment — fdrake

Conscious apprehension, as meant by me at least, is nothing more than the subset of information about my environment (including my body) that I am presently conscious of, as opposed to that which I am not conscious of. Since we are at least conscious of them, I think it helps to bear in mind that, whatever else is going on, and whatever definitions of consciousness we prefer, this presentation is happening. The alternative is, as per that shorter flow, that our bodies just dump raw sensory data straight into our consciousnesses unadulterated, which we know for a fact it does not do. I never see, for instance, the upside-down image on my retina, or the rapid changes in view that my brain nicely stabilises for me, or the light correction to make the ambient light appear whiter.

So if your envisioned "feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment" can account for that, groovy.

Try this phrasing: how something is apprehended ("what is it like to me" if conscious) is part of the perceptual process, rather than resulting in a distinct terminal point of a data stream that apprehends a completed experiential object of some kind (that bears "experiential properties"/qualia as they are usually used). — fdrake

But this was Isaac's point and was already accounted for. The fact that what I am conscious of changes, is corrected, augmented, etc. was included in the rough, simplistic diagram I put up and described in the succeeding text. The fact that consciousness is not a terminal is illustrated by the fact that the brain sometimes withholds processed sensory data from conscious appraisal.

Compare that to "extrinsic relational properties" in Dennett's essay. "absolute terms" I'm reading as criticising the same idea that "red" inheres in the experiential object as a quale, rather than red being a property of my relationship with a seen object. I see x as red vs my experiential object has a red quale. — fdrake

But I'm not arguing that some disembodied red is a quale. If it's not an object of my perception, it does not qualify. The redness of a car is not a disembodied redness.

"what is it like to me" - red, "what is it like", "what is my sensory object like? I guess it's like what I've sensed...". — fdrake

Yes. Why not? I'm not trying to shoehorn objects of perception into some previous mysterious philosophy of qualia. I'm just saying that we have them and they serve a purpose. That purpose is not necessarily to do philosophy with or chat about them ;)

The reason why we have a philosophical idea of qualia is because "conscious experience has properties" and "each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do" and "whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time". Then some tradition of philosophy happens and those causes of that philosophy end up "so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia".

Dennett's quarry is of traditional philosophical, religious, and other cultural descriptions of properties of consciousness which, through ignorance, end up being nothing like the truth. Since qualia is a philosophical term, it is associated with those cultural defecations. So if there are no "ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate" qualia, fine. But we still, as Dennett says, have properties of consciousness, which is what is actually being identified as qualia even if the properties of qualia have been erroneously ascribed, i.e. the prior guesswork at the properties of those qualia is bad.

Object->Perception -> Perceptual object -> conscious apprehension, with that last arrow being "making available"

Then we're in a situation where we have perceptual objects with private properties "presented to" the conscious apprehension. It's the same way of breaking up the stages as qualia:

Object -> Perception -> Qualia -> conscious apprehension

The only difference is qualia emphasises the properties of that intermediary perceptual object - between perception and conscious apprehension - in the first there is a perceptual object which has properties, in the second the properties have been split up before immersion into the chain. — fdrake

I'm going to rephrase, because perception as I understand it is a kind of conscious awareness, i.e. perception is not the projection of light onto the retina, the electrical signal along the optic nerve, the cascade of neural activity that follows, but the availability to conscious apprehension, as in I perceive a car: a subjective experience of a car object.

I also disagree that the object can be included here, as it has no direct involvement whatsoever: it is merely the source of whatever mediates the raw data input into my senses.

Raw sensory data -> Pre-processed data -> Formatted object -> conscious apprehension

As Isaac has said, it's not this linear. It might look something more like this:



wherein the central boxes represent the mess of neural process between raw input and conscious apprehension, straight lines represent some pathways through this process, and curved lines represent feedback from conscious processes back to neural unconscious processes. The qualia are the objects of subjective experience, so are not necessarily pre-existing objects provided to conscious apprehension but are the objects for conscious apprehension. I likened it to the API of consciousness.

I've not shown all the pathways here, just a gist, but you can see for instance that 'outline of object' misses the top right box (which here stands for the ventral stream) and is presented to consciousness with outline detection but no what-is-it tag (no 'car' neuron has fired). The mind appraises this, triggering further neural processes including the ventral stream which updates consciousness with a 'car' object. You can imagine similar things for 'yellow car' and 'sound of gunshot', etc.

The crossed out object is 'sound of car engine' which is identified but is not presented for conscious appraisal because the brain knows it's not interesting and suppresses it. It might not identify it as 'sound of car engine' per se, but matches it will enough to 'we need to ignore this shit at night' at least :) @Isaac, am I getting any closer?

If instead it goes:

Perception -> conscious apprehension

Then we're not committed to perceptual objects with private properties. — fdrake

And I think this is what is safe to rule out, although I expect rationalists will not like it. (Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.)

There's a big difference between calling an experience private and saying that only one person has been so effected! — fdrake

It's not incidental that only one person has been effected. It's not like it just happens to have happened to one person: it can only happen to one person.

there is a big difference between saying that a person has a sense datum/experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy) and saying that the same person has had a unique (idiosyncratic) experience. — fdrake

Not in this context, no. The fact that that raw data is input to one person's senses, is processed by that same person's brain which is trained by that same person's past experiences, and is made available to that same person's conscious apprehension, makes it both private and idiosyncratic.

you've removed the idea perceptions obtain properties in the manner we introspectively ascribe them — fdrake

Pending... This is my question to Isaac. But my view is: no! The bulk of what the brain does is unconscious, that is we are not conscious that the brain is doing it. This will most of the time include things like recognising a car as a car. Is this introspective? Probably not as you mean it, which is a conscious effort. But mindless pattern-matching does not always work; this is why we need an algorithmic part of the brain to figure things out when pattern-recognition fails. (I'm being simplistic for economy.) This is identically the conscious mind, which might be provided with 'unidentified shape in periphery' (an output of outline detection) and can iteratively focus on details that dumb pattern recognition cannot. These details are fed back to the dumb pattern recognisers until we see 'car', or else not: I am not eliminating introspection entirely; it might be that some things we recognise purely in a conscious, algorithmic way. (Would seem odd to me, though.)

you've removed the privacy — fdrake

This needs explaining. I don't see how any processes acting on my raw sensory input to produce my conscious perceptions can be anything other than private. I think you've got this the wrong way round: privacy is a prerequisite of ineffability, not the other way round.

you've removed the certainty — fdrake

Yes.

what actually remains of ascribing "subjectivity" to a perception — fdrake

That the sensory data is an input to me, not you, that the processing is done by me, not you, and that the perception is mine, not yours, any one of which would guarantee subjectivity. Even if I could fully understand my experiences and describe them perfectly, they're still mine.

(sorry if my writing's not clear - in my defense I'm recently writing on a phone on the train and so I don't do as much overarching editing as I should — Isaac

Dude, I'm the last person you need to apologise to. I'm the worst for this :)

Much of what's going on, even consciously, is going on before the car tag. You later (perhaps even seconds later) re-tell the story as happening in a better order (saw a thing->worked out it was a car->thought 'I could drive that'). Expermenting on this is really difficult because of the time lag in fMRI and the non-specificity of EEG and the like, so take this with the very large pinch of salt attached to small sample sizes (neurosurgery patients). — Isaac

That's interesting. If I may summarise, then, the conscious perception of my field may include something caused by a car without the car 'tag' (recognition of car object with or without dorsal data), then moments later updated with that tag. So I consciously see the light caused by the car before I see the car.

But to clarify, it's not a conscious decision to identify a car, right? Whenever the car recognition output is presented for conscious consideration, it's not doing so because I'm studying a patch of light and trying to figure out what it is. This is all going on in the background.

Question: Am I right in saying that, as you describe it, data from our conscious perception is fed back into these myriad cascades and may affect (or indeed effect) some of these unconscious processes (e.g. I focus on a block of colour, causing it to be recognised as 'car')? Do these processes rely on this, or can we recognise objects just based on pre-processed data? This is again going back to the idea of sensory data categorised as unimportant, such as the sound of a car engine on a busy Manhattan block.

To me qualists want to say that there is something it's like to experience red, there's the 'redness' experience, or the 'car' experience. To do this, they invoke the 'way it feels' in response to sensing 'red', or 'a car'. What I'm trying to show is that we cannot, even in principle, distinguish the 'way it feels' in response to red, or cars, from 'the way it feels' just right now in general. The cascade of neural responses is continuous, there's no break in higher level backward suppression at the point of seeing red, so the conscious 'feelings' are unattached. We attach them later in retrospect. — Isaac

Ah yes, okay. No, you're right, I think I just wasn't clear on what I was getting at. I agree that no meaningful qualia can be defined that is detached from the moment at which it is apprehended. That's the intrinsic value Dennett dismisses, and I agree with him (and you). What I meant about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater is that there still remain objects of subjective experience, such that I can see a car without consciously determining it to be a car (even if 1 ms ago I didn't see a car), and that this object is private (internal processing from my raw sensory input to instantaneous apprehension by me) and immediate (I see car as car object is presented to me, which may be some while after I see light from car), but not intrinsic or ineffable, and that these objects and the processes that yield them (e.g. neuron that recognises car) underlie our pre-theoretical conceptions of what theorists call qualia.

So while Dennett is right to dismiss ineffable-intrinsic-private-immediate qualia, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained from considering less mystified, more scienticially-grounded ideas of objects of subjective experience, i.e. how we actually appraise such objects as car, taste of coffee, sound of gunshot, etc.

Not sure this should really be up there, but a copy of the entirety of Cramer's book The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is on my alma mater's website: https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mijp1/transaction/TI_toc.html — Kenosha Kid

From the above:

However, the careful reader will perceive that there is a more subtle time asymmetry implicit in the TI description of the quantum event which is implicit in TI2. There the probability of a quantum event with emission from (R1,T1) to an absorber at (R2,T2) is assumed to be:

P12 = |Psi1(R2,T2)|2 [12]

rather than:

P12 = |Psi2(R1,T1)|2 [13]

i.e., in the TI the emitter is given a privileged role because it is the echo received by the emitter which precipitates the transaction rather than that received by the absorber. Thus the past determines the future (in a statistical way) rather than the future determining the past. — Cramer

The above basically says that the probability of transmission of a photon or electron or whatever is given by the value of the retarded wavefunction spreading out from the emitter at the absorption event, not the value of the advanced wavefunction spreading out from the absorber at the emission event.

This is where the OP and the TI diverge, since the former states that knowledge of the future state of the screen would definitely disallow certain transmissions for which P is nonzero, i.e. the Born rule only tells us about the emission, while the electron knows about the absorption already, being stimulated by that absorption to the equal extent that the absorption is stimulated by the emission.

Hence transactional QM itself remains probabilistic, even as it dispenses with collapse.

Cramer claims to have mapped the above arrow of time to the cosmological arrow in the paper here:

Another paper by Cramer (Foundations of Physics, 1973) specifically treating the arrow of time: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/TI/The_Arrow_of_EM_Time.pdf — Kenosha Kid

However the more I read it the less compelling I find it. He actually talks about advanced waves going forward in time, which is contrary to what an advanced wave is.

A good way to conceive of why the OP says this isn't true is to consider single-electron transistors in quantum electronics.



In the first image, taken at time T1, the rightmost electron at site E cannot tunnel into site D because an electron already exists there. (In this case, we're not talking about Pauli exclusion, simply electrostatic repulsion, but feel free to mentally add Pauli exclusion into the picture, which is a much more powerful effect.) Likewise the electron at site D cannot tunnel into site E. But it can tunnel into site C.

It is only once the electron at D tunnels into site C that the electron at E can tunnel into site D (second snapshot at time T2). And so on and so forth. This is analogous to the microstate exploration of the back screen in the double-slit experiment. Let's imagine, for illustrative purposes, that we've built a back screen made entirely of single electron transistors (with fixed gates for now).

Clearly then the true probability of transmission from cathode to any given site A-E is not identical to the absolute square of the wavefunction (denoted by the blue rays coming from the cathode), but also on whether each site has an electron in it or not. If an electron was measured on the screen at T4, we would expect to find the electron in sites B or D most of the time unless the wavefunction at these sites was small. But at T3, we would expect to find the electron at sites A or E.

None of this is captured in P12 (where 2 = (A, B, C, D or E at some time T?)) which is a statement only about the wavefunction coming from the cathode, and yet is physically essential to the probability of finding the electron at a given site at a given time. (NB: if the incoming electron is of sufficiently high energy, and has opposite spin to the occupying electron, it can still get into an occupied site, however it is much less likely to do so.)

We can also see that, over time, all of the sites will be available or not, leading to a statistically useful time-averaged probability per site of the screen receiving an electron from the cathode: that is, we expect statistically that the probability given by the incoming electron to dominate over the noisy data about which sites are and are not available at given times, so we should recover the usual interference patterns.

It's also worth pointing out that a screen in which we can measure the position of an incident particle to some high accuracy is more like an array of single electron transistors than like the ideal metal of naïve Copenhagen interpretation.

Thanks, sorry for the cross-posting. Let's stay here :)

Although it is important to note the cases you alluded to where we're conscious of our processing ("is that a car over there?") because in these cases we're still having an experience - so what is it an experience of? We haven't identified the object yet. Are we experiencing the quale of {some vague grey shape in the distance that we can't quite make out}? Possibly, but 1) that rather detaches quale form the object of experience, and 2) deciding what the thing is is definitely part of the experience, so what happens when we realise it's a car? — Isaac

Yes, I agree. In this case, we still have pre-processed data in our consciousness -- the shape, distance, maybe some colour -- but no metadata tag 'car'. There would not be a car quale, just some generic 'object' quale, i.e. there still exists an object of subjective experience as tagged by its outline.

Proof of this is quite surprising (summary here). — Isaac

Thanks, that was interesting.

The cascade of effects triggered by your interaction with that picture (and the environment you're in at the time, and any other neural processes which were half-way complete when they were interrupted by seeing that picture) will have, by now, had consequences, other than the triggering of your 'car' neuron many of which you could be consciously aware of. — Isaac

Sure, that's fine. Here the 'car' quale means nothing more than that the image is presented for conscious appraisal with the 'car' tag, i.e. the 'car' neuron having fired with some degree of certainty.

your post hoc story is "I saw the car then all these other responses followed". That, provably, is not what really happened. — Isaac

I'm not sure what responses you mean. What I said was that the car appears to me already identified as a car (except when it's not), i.e. I do not see the above image then work out consciously what the two foregrounded objects are.

All of this goings on were associated with what I finally decided was a car — Isaac

Again, not sure what all these goings on means. I'm really just talking about the identification of an object in my visual field as a car, which is what is required to have an object in my subjective experience that is a car.

In fact all the evidence seems to point to there being nothing but a series of responses to the final object, of which it's colour is only one aspect. — Isaac

Its colour, though, is not present in the raw sensory data. For instance, if the ambient light of something is dominated by yellow, it will appear dominated by white, i.e. the brain shifts the colour. Ergo there is a stage in between raw sensory input and final image that colourises to some extent.

again, we could call these stories qualia, but since they are in a constant state of flux, it seems incredibly difficult to get any useful function from doing so - "Which qualia ar you referring to? The one just now...or now...or now..." — Isaac

Yes, I agree, this is Dennett's rejection of the intrinsic nature of qualia. I'm with you, and Dennett, on this, and I agree that this is what philosophers usually think of as qualia, incorrectly.

Thanks haha! I don't know why I did that.

(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness Thus are qualia introduced onto the philosophical stage....Theorists of the contrary persuasion have patiently and ingeniously knocked down all the arguments, and said most of the right things, but they have made a tactical error, I am claiming, of saying in one way or another: "We theorists can handle those qualia you talk about just fine; we will show that you are just slightly in error about the nature of qualia." What they ought to have said is: "What qualia?"

This says merely that Dennett is denying the existence of ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate qualia, or any slight variation thereof, which does not contradict my argument. The qualia that I think underlie our pretheoretical ideas are not much like those we're familiar with, since they are outputs of processes we are largely unfamiliar with.

... the source concept, the "pretheoretical" notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that even if we undertook to salvage some "lowest common denominator" from the theoreticians' proposals, any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse--not to say Pickwickian--to cling to the term. Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all. Endnote 2

Here Dennett is talking about existing theoretical ideas of what qualia are, and how any common element between them would be so meagre as to be useless. The reason for this is that, while:

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us

it doesn't imply that familiarity teaches people anything, i.e. that the pre-theoretical ideas of qualia are any better than the theoretical, which is true, but again does not contradict my point.

The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.

Here Dennett is talking about the intrinsic nature of qualia, that we can isolate the taste of cauliflower at one moment and at another and be talking about the same thing. He's right, there's nothing to isolate in this regard. If you removed everything about one particular moment, you'd have nothing left to compare, hence I said:

This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours. — Kenosha Kid

But I can see curves in the diagram?! — TheMadFool

The left one? It's a diagram of space and time, not just space. That's what spacetime curvature looks like.

In this 1983 paper, the author of the transactional interpretation of QM directly addresses the boundary conditions of the big bang and black holes and their implications for that interpretation: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/TI/The_Arrow_of_EM_Time.pdf

Another paper by Cramer (Foundations of Physics, 1973) specifically treating the arrow of time: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/TI/The_Arrow_of_EM_Time.pdf

Not sure this should really be up there, but a copy of the entirety of Cramer's book The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is on my alma mater's website: https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mijp1/transaction/TI_toc.html

[Off-topic post, moved to different thread.] — Kenosha Kid

I kind of panicked as my post wasn't at all driven by Quining Qualia itself. I should have just brought it back to the text.

Dennett's issue is not with the concept of qualia generally but with a particular definition of qualia, and I think his beef is not with the private or immediate aspects, but with ineffability and particularly the intrinsic aspect.

@Isaac above describes two example streams of unconscious processing of sensory data, one which pattern-recognises (the ventral) and one which contextualises (the dorsal). These might run in parallel, with the what-is-it part not aware or bothered by where-it-is, and the where-is-it part not aware or bothered by what-it-is.


(click to enlarge)

When I see the third image above, I see two cars, one to the left, one to the right, the left one closer, the right one further away, the left one yellow, the right one orange. All of this is immediately presented to me, by which I mean that, though I may determine these things over time as I focus on them, I do not have to consciously derive them by looking at them.

I think we can exclude the possibility that Dennett is unaware that raw sensory data (represented inaccurately as ones and zeros here) gets processed by the brain before it presents it to the consciousness (middle collection of images). And we can exclude the possibility that no such processing ever occurs. (As Isaac pointed out, the brain is good at identifying what is not worth presenting to our consciousnesses, like car engine sounds when you live in a flat in Manhattan.)

So Dennett is presumably okay with the fact that, consciously, I am immediately presented with a yellow car, for instance, not an indistinct image that I consciously have to decode, and that the transition from raw data to final perception is an internal -- i.e. private -- one.

His intuition pumps mostly revolve around connecting qualia over time or space. Is the yellow the same yellow I saw last night? Is the yellow the same yellow you see? Is it meaningful to even extract the yellow to compare? This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours.

He also dislikes the ineffability of qualia, that we cannot know our qualia better. But the above is a layperson's cartoon of how we can learn to know our qualia better in terms of whatever physical processes are occurring in between raw sensory data and perceived image. We can conceive of a Dennett's demon: an accounting for the history-dependent state of the subject plus a full knowledge of the input sensory data, plus a full understanding of the presumed deterministic process that the former enacts on the latter to produce an immediate world as presented to the consciousness.

We have to hear the filtered harmonic to hear it in the unfiltered 'note' (really a chord), but, once the brain is trained, it will present not a sole E to the ear but the higher E and other harmonics as well. Dennett's demon could account for this, could distinguish between an less well trained brain that presents the sound as best it can as a single note and one that has been trained to pick out the individual notes and present them all for conscious appraisal. The qualia then are different, and depend on what the brain does with the same raw sensory input. But we still hear the note(s), however they ended up.

Moved from another thread as off-topic; more relevant here. @Isaac, no obligation to respond if you're not interested in this thread.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks Isaac. If this ends up being pointless, I apologise except I don't as it's always good to hear an expert expunge. As a heads up, my understanding of qualia is that they pertain to conscious experience only: they are objects of consciousness, not, say, intermediary data in some pattern-recognition process of the ventral stream. This is just for clarity when talking of response, which may be completely unconscious.

At some point, several models in, the ventral stream reaches a region which models objects and it will feed forward to areas associated with the object 'car'. Meanwhile, the dorsal stream has been merrily progressing away on the question of how to interact with this hidden state, without the blindest idea what it is. — Isaac

And these both still precede my conscious experience, right? For instance, I never open my eyes and see this:



and not see two cars(ventral), nor do I not see that one is further away than the other (dorsal). Sometimes we're presented with something and we can't make it out, but most of the time we know what we're perceiving as we perceive it, rather than consciously seeing a vision and having to work out what it's of.

The fact that I perceive a car and can discern a different car, without necessarily being conscious of any of the details of either (making them tokens, not a type), suggests to me that we do have objects of our subjective conscious experiences, that these objects are presented to our consciousness as objects, and that this is the sort of thing we should mean when we speak of qualia.

Point 1 the recognition that it's a car is part of your conscious experience of the hidden state. — Isaac

I'm not sure whether you're saying that the recognition of the car is part of the experience I am conscious of, which is also what I'm saying, or whether we consciously recognise the car, which flies in the face of my experience, and also seems to contradict the idea that the brain is adept at filtering out irrelevant sensory data that we are, consequently, unaware of (e.g. the sound of a car engine at night after living a month in Manhatten, versus the sound of a gunshot).

There can be no quale of a car because modelling it as 'car' is part of the response, quite some way in, in fact. — Isaac

Yes, but that is pre-conscious response, and the result of that modelling is an input to conscious experience, the purported objects of which are the qualia. So it's absolutely fine for my experience to contain a car quale (is it qual or quale?) that has been introduced by pre-conscious processing by the ventral stream. (I hope I'm not talking total shit here.)

The dorsal signal doesn't even know it's a car before it's deciding what to do with it — Isaac

It's not obvious to me why it should. Why do I need to know how far away the left-hand car is in order to recognise it as a car? I don't think a car quale has to have a property-by-property map to the actual car.

Point 2 the models which determine the suppression of forward acting neural signals are themselves informed and updated by signals from other areas of the brain. So no more than a few steps in and whatever hidden states we might like to think started the whole 'car' cascade of signals have been utterly swamped with signals unrelated to that event trying to push them toward the most expected model. — Isaac

Which ends up being 'car', which is something I am then conscious of without having to figure out what's in the image consciously.

Either way, the private, accessible to introspection, but inaccessible to third party, qualia of 'red' is an absolute non-starter neurologically. — Isaac

But presumably there is an analogue to the above. The left car is blue. I am conscious of it being blue. I am not conscious of figuring out that it's blue: it's blueness is presented to my consciousness. There is nothing of this in the thing itself, which is a bunch of atoms emitting photons, some of which strike my retina. So in between there is some process, at the end of which this particular blueness is presented to me coincident with this particular car-ness. Whether or not this is a consistent thing doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.

We always 'experience' events post hoc, never in real time. The experience is a constructed story told later (sometimes much later). — Isaac

I like the storytelling analogy. By this I assume you mean that the timescales involved in consciously working stuff out is much slower than the timescales of photons-hitting-retina to conscious-of-image. It can't be too much later. I have present experience for a reason: present problems require present solutions.

[Off-topic post, moved to different thread.]

Gravity can bend space, right? Does that mean with the right amount of gravity we can make space curve into a circle? The near-circular orbits of planets suggests this is the case. — TheMadFool

No, gravity bends spacetime only. This appears to cause space to flux inward (i.e. contract) toward the massive body causing the curvature. It doesn't act like space is curved, rather like space is contracting.

So the best strategy is to borrow lots of money at an imaginary interest rate, wait until it becomes positive (a 180° rotation), and then withdraw it. — Andrew M

:rofl: Sound financial advice!

So I went back to Cramer's papers from 1980s onward in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the transactional interpretation. I think I managed to unconfuse myself a bit regarding the "orthodox" TI, but I am still not sure about your take on it.

The core of the theory is an emission-absorption process, such as when two atoms exchange energy or (as in your presentation) an electron is emitted and later absorbed by a solid. (I think scattering is handled similarly, but I haven't looked into it yet. There is also an issue of weakly-absorbed particles, such as neutrinos, which may not have a future boundary; I know that Cramer has looked into this, but I haven't.) — SophistiCat

I was just rereading part of the paper on type II emission and absorption events, which are interesting. If we take the emitter to be atom 1, the absorber to be atom 2, and the emission to be a photon, from the lab frame it appears as a photon (its own antiparticle) from the origin is absorbed by atom 1 (the emitter) and then, seemingly unrelatedly, atom 2 emits a photon of the same energy, which continues forever.

If the distance between the two atoms is L, the time between perceived absorption and emission (actually emission and absorption) will be L/c. So if type II is possible, it ought to be detectable experimentally in principle, though in practice it would be hard if the phenomenon is limited to CMB radiation (assuming that's all that could constitute a photon from the origin).

What's more interesting is the idea that causal relationships between events can be apparently unmediated in principle.

When we take in sensory inputs it sets off a large set of reactions in the brain, like a cascade. Most of those reactions are immediate feedback loops with the sensory apparatus themselves, the majority of which take place without any conscious awareness. Those that do have conscious awareness are always in review, post hoc constructions to model what just happened and prepare a response aimed at minimising the errors in that model. — Isaac

You're best placed to cast this in more exact terms, so stop me at any point, but some of that stuff the brain is doing includes:
- interpreting optical data as images;
- correcting the colour of images for ambient temperatures and adjacent colours;
- outline recognition;
- pattern recognition (oh, it's Isaac!)
and similar for other kinds of sense data (smells, sounds, etc.).

When I have a perception of my car, that is optical data that is imaged and preprocessed such that objects within that image are already discerned (with error), colours and distances discerned (likewise), kinds of object discerned (that is a car) and precise objects identified if possible (that is my car) by pattern recognition, and so on, all prerequisites for consciousness of my car.

This seems like a qual to me: an object of my subjective perception of the world that has properties somewhat like metadata. Since this is all internal, nothing is particularly added; this simply describes the API of consciousness and the formatting that the brain must perform to satisfy it. But neither is it non-real, in the same way that base 64 encoding a PDF isn't non-real.

The argument against them having properties appears to lie with our inability to say that this consciousness of my car is the same as my previous conscious perceptions of it, but this seems besides the point to me. If my brain has identified it as my car then it is a conscious experience of my car. The fact that it's night so appears differently, or is from a new angle, or is further away, i.e. the precise details of the image that makes it identical or not to others, is irrelevant. It is my car because my brain has given it that property, i.e. has assigned it that meaning or metadata.

So, time can be circular then? — TheMadFool

My thinking was more that one can recover linear time from the cyclic times of many bodies.

Not if there is only one available site - in this case the electron wavefunction becomes irrelevant. — SophistiCat

Ah, it becomes emitted or not emitted in a time-dependent way (i.e. the longer the experiment, the higher the probability of transmission).

So that is how it appears to an observer. What actually happens once a handshake has occurred, and thus a single destination has been determined? — Andrew M

Just to clarify, the transactional interpretation doesn't itself eliminate probabilism, it just eliminates collapse. If the electron could end up in multiple possible final states, the state is still chosen probabilistically, but the electron "knows" in advance which it has shaken hands with.

The elimination of final states is an additional physical consideration that takes seriously the time-reversibility of the equations. In order for a particular site to receive the electron, it must be in a state capable of emitting an advanced wave.

In the double-slit experiment, does the electron follow a definite, albeit unknown, trajectory through one and only one of the slits, similar to pilot wave theory? Or does an electron essentially just disappear from the source and appear at the destination a short time later (a kind of non-local electron/hole exchange)? Or does it travel all possible paths to the destination as a wave? — Andrew M

The last one. The retarded wavefunction is as per the Copenhagen interpretation but without collapse.

Minkowski is flat spacetime. In general relativity, it is spacetime that is curved, not just space, so, yes, time is curved as well.

And we certainly wouldn't expect a WHL big bang to just quickly spew out galaxies the way this black hole is apparently gobbling them up. — Kenosha Kid

Or maybe we should: https://phys.org/news/2020-10-galaxies-infant-universe-surprisingly-mature.html

Neither do multiverses or the many-worlds interpretation — Wayfarer

Allow me to correct my wording: cyclic universes are contrary to empirical evidence, requiring contortions like CCC to make them work.

Those damn Copenhagenists should stay in Copenhagen, where they belong, and forget about the universe. — Ciceronianus the White

:rofl:

Imagine a universe with nothing in it, that doesn't ever change. Time would have no meaning in such a universe. That universe could be instantaneous, or else could be eternally static.

Now imagine a universe with one oscillator in it, e.g. a single photon with a frequency f. Within one period, we can discern different states of the universe from the amplitude of the oscillator and its time-derivative (whether the amplitude is increasing or decreasing). But there's no means of distinguishing between periods: the universe could last one period or an infinite number of periods or any finite number.

Now imagine a universe with two oscillators. The frequency f' of the second oscillator is 1234/1235 times the first. After one period of the first oscillator, the state of the second has changed by at 1/1234th of a period. The universe is different after one period, after two, after three. Same goes if we consider the period of the second oscillator. Only after 1234 periods does the universe repeat. This is the new period of the universe.

Now imagine a universe with two oscillators, one with a frequency of pi times the other...

there are a number of alternative relativistically invariant wave equations, at least one of which is first order in time — SophistiCat

But also first order in space, I think? So the four solutions (advanced spin up, advanced spin down, retarded spin up, retarded spin down) reduce to two (advanced and retarded).

Are there really any absolutely forbidden points of interaction? Instead of being absorbed, can't the electron scatter instead? — SophistiCat

Sure, but scattering also obeys the Pauli exclusion principle, so there must be two holes: one for the scattering electron to go to, and one for the scattered electron to go to (see the Feynman diagram in the OP). And those scattered electrons can scatter again, each requiring two holes, and so on and so forth. So it's a proliferation of backwards hole emission and transmission events.

So let's consider a limiting case where exactly one spot on the screen is available for interaction at any one time - an advance electron hole, as it were. This is what you hypothesize might indeed be the case, right? — SophistiCat

Possibly but not necessarily, hence the not many worlds interpretation :) The electron wavefunction at the screen yields the possible trajectories of the electron independent of the state of the universe and its future history. The possible trajectories can only be eliminated, not added to, by incorporating more and more of the instantaneous state of the screen and more and more of the future of the system.

Does it reduce to one? Not necessarily. Thing is, we can't know, since knowing for sure means solving the time-dependent many-body Dirac equation or some good approximation thereto, not just for the lifetime of the experiment but for the lifetime of the particle.

If the availability of electron holes imposes an absolute constraint on where an interaction can occur, then instead of the interference pattern we should see just that - a uniform distribution. — SophistiCat

No, because the probability distribution of the incident electron will still multiply the probability distribution of acceptor sites.

Well, if I understand correctly, the Everett interpretation is characterized more by what it doesn't do - arbitrarily impose a collapse - than by what it does, so in a way it's hard to be more economical than that — SophistiCat

Fair point, it basically just runs with the mathematics, to its credit. Which is why I think MWI is an improvement over Copenhagen.

although it does ditch those advanced solutions. Hm... could you combine the two? — SophistiCat

Isn't that the not many worlds interpretation?

Jesus, how can you not vote for Trump, he said he won the Nobel peace prize like TWICE!!

The begging of the question is not that the definition contains the assumption that there must be at least one such, it is in the assumption that it the properties of the mutually exclusive and exhaustive set thus presented is an 'eternal fact'. — Isaac

I've never heard of this as begging the question. Pretty much every theorem ever proven would be an example, since the definitions of all terms must be such that they yield the conclusion of the theorem exactly.

So we end up saying that there must be eternal absolute facts because we have the words 'eternal', 'absolute' and 'fact', and this is just what they mean. I'm not necessarily saying there's anything wrong with that, by the way, just that it's question begging. We cannot state it without already assuming it in the language we use to state it, we haven't discovered anything new, just the assumptions we work with. — Isaac

Not at all. Ordinary usage of the words is assumed without apparent ambiguity. An eternal fact is not defined as "a statement that is true irrespective of when it is evaluated of which there must be at least one". Similarly for absolute facts. That would be begging the question.

You performed the reductio on the conclusion, not the premises. Your premises are definitions which, by experience are neither absolute nor eternal. — Isaac

The two facts in question are not premises or definitions.

Are those two facts absolute and eternal? — Isaac

Yes, reductio ad absurdum. The only out is that the language we're employing is meaningless such that an eternal fact need not hold eternally and an absolute fact need not hold absolutely.

They are effectively acting in a random way. — EnPassant

Randomness has its own distributions. If something is random, we can infer it, and ask why it is random and not regular as other things often are. QM predicts distributions, such as the banded pattern in the double slit experiment. Why this and not two Gaussians or a random distribution or something else? That is a question about why and how the mathematical wavefunction represents physical reality.

Personally, if something diffracts and interferes, I call it a wave. That in itself doesn't make the particular wavefunction we calculate ontic, but it narrows the ontological gap. That said, none of this is meant to force a particular wavefunction ontology anyway. Whether you think that the wavefunction is merely epistemic, or if you think it's truly ontic, I think the arguments in these two threads may stand a little rewording but not much refactoring.

So can there be an absolute eternal fact? — Benj96

What sort of answer are you after? Something absolutely factual?

Statement E = There are no absolute eternal facts

E is either true or false

If E is false then there are absolute eternal facts

If E is true then it is the absolute eternal fact

Either way, there are absolute eternal facts — TheMadFool

:100:

You've begged the question. It being the case that E is either true or false assumes that there are absolute eternal facts (ie E must be either true or false). Without that assumption you cannot have the premise that E must be either true or false, E might be true sometimes but false others. — Isaac

There cannot be sometimes absolute eternal facts. If it is sometimes absolute but not always, it is not eternally absolutely. If it is in some cases eternal, in others not, it is not absolutely eternal. If both hold and no other, it is an absolute eternal fact that there are no absolute eternal facts. Reductio ad absurdum there must be absolute eternal facts.

The idea that it is a real thing gives rise to all kinds of nonsense involving reality splitting into multiple universes etc. It seems to me to be a convenient mathematical device, nothing more. — EnPassant

It cannot end there, I'm afraid. A mathematical device with an astounding ability to predict experimental outcomes, even at a statistical level, demands explanation.

It’s more that everything in nature goes through cycles of creation and destruction....why should the Universe be different? (Oh, and I don’t know if Indian cosmology is ‘my own’ ... actually Carl Sagan did a TV episode on that idea way back...) — Wayfarer

I didn't mean to suggest it was yours, rather by "our own" I'm referring to the human race as a whole. Cyclic universes have no real empirical basis; in fact, Penrose's CCC strikes me as an attempt to salvage the big bang/big crunch cycle that he entertained decades ago in the face of the recent-ish empirical evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

I also had in mind Darwinist models of the universe's large-scale structure as described particularly by Hawking. It seems to me that already-attractive narratives flourish where experimental evidence is meagre. Empiricism is usually much more surprising than these narratives would permit.