Now Kant's idea of the Beautiful is judged by the criteria of the form not the object, for example, the art form, say, literature. — Antony Nickles

It sounds a bit like true scotsman. You or I might consider something beautiful, but it's not true beauty, according to the conceptions of Kant. Well, I have no reason to suppose these conceptions are the correct framing; it's just a proposition that I either accept or reject. It can't be used as an argument to convince anyone of anything.

Of course, my point in beginning my remarks only concerned these concepts in contrast to the disinterested, impersonal, intelligible rationality that the judgement of the Beautiful has. — Antony Nickles

I'm still not sure I entirely follow, as you still have not provided a concrete example.
When people talk about a beautiful face, and we can point to features of our neurology that make humans basically hard-wired to like certain aspects of a face, like symmetry, is your view that that is not *true* beauty? That true beauty has to be based on rationality?

And bear in mind that for the question of the OP, I do not need to show that all aesthetics can be shown to be objective. Merely that any can.

I'm not quite sure it's unfair (or even rude) to say you're going to have to try harder. — Antony Nickles

I would say so.

My post gave multiple examples illustrating exactly what I was talking about.

Asking for one example of what you mean by "sensations of the Pleasant, or the value of the Good" is not unreasonable.

What we can say about art through science refers either to the sensations of the Pleasant, or the value of the Good (popularity). What I am discussing is not a standard to judge the object, it is the way in which a type of art has as its means. This is not a standard or "cultural creation" (as opposed to some "thing" created outside of culture?). And the more "specific" the claim gets, usually the better its argument--the more evidence it incorporates, the deeper the insight, etc. — Antony Nickles

I don't understand any of that.
Can you give an example of the distinction(s)?

Speaking from a more neuroscientific point of view, there are of course aesthetic qualities to things for the vast majority of people. And not just "fire hurts", but studies have shown that young infants can be afraid (or at least pay extra attention to) images of snakes or spiders.

And while it's fashionable to try to define standards of human beauty as arbitrary cultural creations, a lot of factors are cross cultural, for example good luck finding a culture that prizes acne over smooth skin.

There are similar fundamental instincts that drive us to like clear water, green grass and even some architectural features. The more specific we get, the more subjective it gets though. And of course most of us value novelty. So even if, let's say, the letter "X" presses our innate hard-wired desires better than any other letter of the alphabet, if we were surrounded by "X", then "S" might become the most desired letter, or whatever.

Factory farming is not not inherently cruel and abusive; cruelty and abuse could take place just as easily on a little farm as a very big one. Cruelty and abuse occur in human workplaces and shelters, too. — Bitter Crank

Actually I was about to say the exact opposite.
Factory farming is inherently cruel and we don't need examples of specific workers intentionally abusing animals.

We're talking about places where animals may never see the light of day; never get to even turn around in the case of chickens and often pigs. Fattened up (extra cruelly in the case of foie gras), with bodies that have been bred to produce e.g. many times more eggs, and much larger eggs than they ever did in nature; they wouldn't survive long if we didn't kill them, who knows what it must feel like.
Oh and calves taken from their mother immediately so we can take the milk.
I've probably missed a bunch of things.

I don't want to anthropomorphize animals too much. But it does appear that these animals possess sufficient instinct and awareness to find all of this very unpleasant. Animals in zoos display anxiety and frustration in conditions far superior.

Sadly, it seems I am something of a hypocrite currently. I buy free range where the option exists but I still eat out at restaurants that likely use factory farmed meat. It's just something I have put to the back of my mind. Also I know "free range" can be defined somewhat generously in some cases to mean near-as-dammit factory farming.

Agree completely.
It's a bit of a bugbear for me. For example, Matt Dillahunty, who I respect as much as any popular speaker on religion and philosophy, will say things like "There's no evidence that nothing can exist" and "Demonstrate me a nothing". These sentences at first glance seem meaningful because they are at least grammatically correct (well...the second is slightly wonky as "nothing" is generally a non-countable noun), but they're actually garbage.
If I were to translate the second sentence into Mandarin, I'd have to say something like "Don't demonstrate anything". Because Mandarin doesn't not have this contraction of "no" and "thing", so the apparent paradox is not there.

This was only an example, but it seems to me that this is the case every time that the word "nothing" is used in english (or in the italian word "nulla"). The quantifier is always on a finite dominion of things. Because how could you formulate a sentence with "Nothing" using a quantifier without boundaties which makes any sense? Nothing comes to my mind (hehe). — L'Unico

Right. As I said though, sometimes that quantifier is ambiguous.
For example, if I say "There's nothing to be afraid of", I am saying the set of things to be afraid of is empty. But this set is very open-ended in terms of what kind of things belong to it; in a particular context we might be implicitly referring to physical objects like spiders or fire say, but also abstract concepts like "heights". Or not implicitly referring to anything.

So, I agree with your point: "nothing" in English does not point to one singular concept. It's a special noun that means different things in different sentences. And it almost never refers to some discrete entity unto itself. This is the fundamental misconception of the OP and similar threads.

We don't know that all physical things must have a cause
We don't know that all transcendental things do not require a cause
We don't know whether infinity can be realized in reality (in this case that cosmic events are eternal. And note a distinction between universe and cosmos, the latter including multiverse(s))

So the argument only works if you just assert a position on several things that we don't actually know.

As I've said previously, the noun "nothing" in English is special, in that it means different things in different sentences, but almost never refers to some discrete thing unto itself. "There's nothing to eat" does not mean there is actually one foodstuff, that we're calling "nothing". It's simply "logical_NOT(something is available to eat)".
This is always worth bearing in mind when discussing the "nothing" topic.

More specifically on quantum explanations, the issue I have is this:
An understanding should mean that we can make useful predictions and inferences. A good understanding on the ultimate ontological question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is no exception.

If we understood how a universe can have a beginning, we should be able to answer questions like "Why does another universe not spring into existence right now in my kitchen?". There are infinite "nothings" in the spaces between matter in my kitchen, after all. The common response to this might be that that is not what is meant here by "nothing"; what is meant here is the absolute nothingness where no universe exists yet.
But, in that case, how can we apply quantum physics spontaneous matter generation, because that is a process which happens within an existing spacetime. We have no reason to suppose it can / did happen when there was nothing and it created spacetime...that's a wholly different thing, not part of the model at all.

disclaimer: I'm not religious, I don't think "god" works as a solution to this intractable problem either.

The discussion about human tetrachromacy is irrelevant to the issue of seeing the world as it is.
Whether or not women with two different cones for perceiving reds can see more shades, the simple fact is that the EM spectrum is much wider than the human eyes' gamut, and indeed many animals can see out of our range.
It would be possible to set up a game like in the OP where a trained animal picks a square based on its color despite all the squares appearing black* to a human.

Or echolocation or whatever...it's pretty clear we don't sense everything that's capable of being sensed, let alone every phenomenon "out there".

* What's "black" anyway? Since we see black where there is a comparative dearth of cone cell activation, is black "out there"?

Im a member of a couple in-person philosophy groups, and they're fun from a social point of view, but the discussion tends to stay in first gear.
Whatever the topic, some people are not familiar with the terms and history, so we always end up just giving the pop Philo summary and not much chance to get into a real debate.
I guess some people would consider that better -- the debates here can sometimes seem impenetrable -- but I feel I learn much more from textual discussion online.

If the only reason to use past experience (memories/knowledge) for making decisions as to what to do, is because that experience shows me it worked most of the time — znajd

Well another reason is a pragmatic one: we know of no alternative.
Deductive logic seems necessary to even be able to reason in the abstract and inductive logic, including the assumption that the future will be like the past / our memories are reliable, seems necessary to do any reasoning in practice.

Without starting with these principles, what reason is there to do, or not do, any action?

In reality, our planet contains many chaotic systems, therefore, in a sense, a small domino can topple a larger one but it's not an amplification or increase in energy. It's not one butterfly's wings flapping becoming the energy of a tornado. It's a difference in initial conditions ultimately delivering a different result set.

In the domino metaphor, it's as if there are many intersecting paths of dominos, some with small dominos, some big, and the exact course of the smaller dominos can ultimately influence which of the larger paths topples.

Perhaps this is too much of a stretch for the dominos metaphor?

Perhaps it's better to imagine, say, a pool table with various sizes of balls. If you run a computer simulation of such a setup, you would find that with precisely the same shots played, the effect of having a single extra ball, even one a couple millimetres in size, will ultimately lead to a different configuration of the big balls.

Because there's no way to turn a 0 into a 1, the only way to start with 0 and end up with 1 is if that 0 was not actually 0 but a 1 in disguise. — Roger

There's no known way to start with 1 either, so the whole "nothing is still something" point, doesn't close the explanatory gap at all.

You said that you are able to determine that something has subjective experiences by its behavior - by exclaiming, "Ouch!", yet now you are saying that the word or exclamation is completely irrelevant. If they exclaimed, "Yippee!", would you say that they are having a subjective experience of pain? — Harry Hindu

I think perhaps you're trolling now, as this post contains numerous errors:

1. I never said that exclaiming "ouch" would be evidence that anything was in pain. In fact it was the opposite. "Ouch" was mentioned in the context of an example of a program that I would not believe had displayed evidence of subjective experience.

2. "determine that something has subjective experiences by its behavior" -- behavior was your wording, not mine. I said that if there was an AI capable of expressing itself in natural language, and it claimed to be in pain, I would have grounds for believing it to be true.

3a. I said that the word itself was irrelevant, because you were making some point about us learning to say "ouch". It's unclear if this new post is even trying to defend that point.
3b. I said that the word itself was irrelevant, so now you're asking me What if the word is "Yippee"? :roll:

That's part of the problem - dualism. You're left with the impossible task of explaining how physical processes cause subjective processes. — Harry Hindu

I am not a dualist, I am a neuroscientist. I want to understand pain because there are people both with painful injuries and diseases, or indeed simply neurological issues that cause intense pain on their own (e.g. cluster headaches). Handwaving their subjective experiences as not existing, or merely "information" is completely unhelpful.

I will never understand why some people are happier to do a handwave than actually work on solving the problem.

No one has ever observed dark matter. Dark matter is just an idea to account for the observed behavior of real matter, just like how subjective experiences is an idea to account for the observed behavior of human beings. — Harry Hindu

How should science proceed in your view? Is it all-or-nothing where the only way we can talk about a phenomenon is at the point where we have completely solved every aspect of it, otherwise the very words are verboden?

"Dark matter" definitely refers to a real phenomenon, likely to be a form of matter because we can see things like gravitational lensing from it. No, it's not understood yet, but that's why we want to talk about it and talk about what to investigate next to tease out more data.

You were programmed (learned to) to say, "Ouch" from copying the actions of those around you. — Harry Hindu

The specific word or exclamation here is obviously completely irrelevant. We don't need to be taught to experience pain.

I'm done going back and forth with you. — Harry Hindu

You won't be missed. I would have preferred if you responded to the original point I put to you though.

So what you seem to be defining pain as is a unpleasant subjective experience, and then go on to say that you don't know what a subjective experience is. If pain is a subjective experience and you don't know what a subjective experience is, then you don't know what pain is. — Harry Hindu

I said no such thing -- you were asking me about the mechanism by which physical neurology causes subjective experience. That's what we don't know.

It's like I am saying we don't know exactly what dark matter is, and you're repeatedly saying "If you don't know what dark matter is, how can you use the word?". The word still has meaning in referring to a specific phenomenon, even if we have no concrete scientific model yet.

What do you mean, "not explicitly part of its programming"? — Harry Hindu

Well the program PRINT "Ouch!" has an exclamation of pain as part of its programming, so does not fulfill the requirements.
Beyond that, in very complex programs, sure it may be much harder to say. I didn't claim we would be able to make such a judgement immediately.

Where did I say that? — Harry Hindu

Here:

You assume that other humans have [subjective experience] because they claim it, and don't assume it if a pzombie or computer claims it. — Harry Hindu

Note that this single quote from you has two issues: firstly chastizing me for assuming that p-zombies don't have subjective experience, when this is true by definition. But also secondly, saying I would not believe a computer that claimed to have subjective experience, when the post you are quoting actually says the precise opposite.

If you can't tell me what pain is then how do you expect to tell me how it works? Can you use a word when you don't know it's meaning? — Harry Hindu

:roll: This is beyond infantile at this point.
I defined pain. I've answered all your questions about pain. I've told you I can elaborate on the mechanisms of pain as much as you like, because it's a topic I've studied at postgrad level.
The only one of your questions I couldn't answer, was how physical mechanisms within the brain give rise to subjective experience because no-one can.

So drop this nonsense about me not knowing what pain is, unless you also mention that you're defining "knowing pain" in such a way that no living human knows what pain is.

You haven't provided a consistent method of determining what type of system is conscious and which type of system isnt. — Harry Hindu

That's still not responding to the point. We're probably at around 8-9 posts at this point with your only response to my original objection being "no", with zero elaboration, and these various dodges.

What were those conditions? — Harry Hindu

Here is what I said on that matter:

With regards to computers, yes, if an AI were able to freely converse in natural language, and it repeatedly made the claim that it felt pain, despite such sentiments not being explicitly part of its programming, and it having nothing immediate to gain by lying...then sure, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't know that it felt pain, but I'd start to lean towards it being true. — Mijin

Your response to that post, was to then say I would not believe an AI could be conscious even if it claimed it was i.e. the exact opposite of what I said.

If a pzombie is defined as having no subjective experiences and you can't define subjective experiences, then You haven't properly defined P zombies much less subjective experiences. How can you use words when you don't know what they mean? — Harry Hindu

You were saying I was wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experiences. This showed that it is you that do not understand what a word (p-zombie) means.

With regard to you point, in this context, there is absolutely no need to try to break down the mechanism of subjective experience. It's like if we were to have a term "Dalaxy" meaning a galaxy that contains no dark matter. That's would still be a meaningful term even if we don't know exactly what dark matter is yet.

You keep contradicting yourself. You go back and forth between knowing what pain is and not knowing what pain is. You call it a subjective experience and then claim to not know what a subjective experience is. You aren't being very helpful. — Harry Hindu

Not at all; those are different concepts. What pain is, how pain sensation works, what we mean by subjective experience and how much we (don't) know about how exactly subjective experience works.
And I note that you still haven't said why your argument is not a shift of the burden of proof. i.e. The whole reason you and I are in this exchange in the first place.

Then all I have to do is program a computer to produce some text on your screen, "I have subjective states" and you would assume that the computer has conscious states? — Harry Hindu

Again, try reading my posts.
I said that under certain conditions I could gain belief that a computer was experiencing pain, and I mentioned what those conditions were. Does the program PRINT "Ouch!" fulfill those conditions?
If you read what I wrote, you would know the answer to this.

You're suggesting that I am wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experience? Their definition is that they do not have subjective experience — Mijin

Yet, you claim that no one knows what subjective experiences are. — Harry Hindu

This response is a complete non sequitur.

Haha, then why are you using a word that you don't know what it means. You literally don't know what you are talking about.
[...]
Then why do you use terms that you don't what they mean? That is ludicrous. — Harry Hindu

All this started from me suggesting that your argument was a subtle shift of the burden of proof.
Call me naive, but I honestly expected a simple response like "oh, you're right, let me rephrase that" or "I don't believe it is, because..."

But instead of that we get this bizarre freakout of you claiming I don't know what "pain" means.
Well I just gave a definition of pain, in the very post you are replying to.
But, since pain sensation was a core part of my postgraduate degree I can actually talk a lot about it. At the end of that, would you respond to the point?

What does it even mean for "an unpleasant subjective experience that follows activation of specific regions of the parietal lobe, usually (not always) preceded by stimulation of nociceptors of the nervous system"? How do subjective states follow from physical states? — Harry Hindu

Nobody knows. There is no scientific model (meaning: having explanatory and predictive power) for that part. If this is a "gotcha" consider yourself, and every other human, "got".

You assume that other humans have it because they claim it, and don't assume it if a pzombie or computer claims it. You assume IT exist in humans without even knowing what IT is. You're losing me. — Harry Hindu

Possibly I am losing you because you don't read my posts? I just said I could believe that a computer could experience subjective states if it were to claim it i.e. the exact opposite of the thing you're accusing me of saying.

But on p-zombies, think through what you're saying. You're suggesting that I am wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experience? Their definition is that they do not have subjective experience.

You're missing the point. — TheMadFool

And you are still failing to reply to a single thing I write.
I would be quite interested to know how your "screenshot" notion of the brain would make sense of people failing to see the gorilla both in the moment and when thinking through their memories.
But I guess we'll never know because you don't respond to points.

My brother and I were looking for a place to eat when I saw this [pointing to a photograph] on the door of a restaurant. — TheMadFool

Sure there are a lot of words you can use colloquially that would need to be defined more concretely if they are being used as the basis of philosophical (and neurological) statements like "The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera".

Had the camera not been faithful to what the eyes see, neither would Jane have pointed to the photograph and nor would John have recalled being there — TheMadFool

Not necessarily, no. You can actually make numerous changes to a photograph that a human would be unlikely to notice. Indeed, if it's a digital camera, that's built into its design; it will ignore details that humans cannot notice.
And if it's a photo of the basketball game, Jane may well exclaim "What the hell is a gorilla doing there?!"

But, if we're purely talking about the camera sensor vs the sensitivity of the eye's rods and cones...yeah there's obviously some crossover there, by design. e.g. perhaps the sensor is better at detecting green than blue or red because so are our eyes.
Not the same by any means, but deliberately similar in some ways.

The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera. — TheMadFool

No I would disagree about a single image existing "in" our eye or that it is identical to the image in a camera. I have studied neuroscience (and indeed, computer graphics) and that's just not how it works.

Look, let's try to pull all this back. As I recall, your ultimate point is not that our brain's image is identical to the image in a camera; that was merely the premise for a bigger argument.
Premises should be uncontentious. How about you think of something else to be the premise for that argument?

Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of solving any problem in any given time, and we're making faster progress now than ever.

I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet.

No. The burden is upon you to explain what pain is. — Harry Hindu

Haha, what?
I didn't claim to know what pain is, why would I have a burden of proof on me?

What I know about pain is that it is an unpleasant subjective experience, following activation of specific regions of the parietal lobe, usually (not always) preceded by stimulation of nociceptors of the nervous system.
That's all I know about it. If you'd like me to break down what a subjective experience actually is, well I can't, and nor would any neuroscientist claim to be able to at this time. That's the hard problem that we'd like to solve.

You can only claim that others feel pain because of their behavior. If a computer behaved like they were in pain, would you say that they feel pain? You seem to be asserting that pain is a behavior. — Harry Hindu

I don't know where to begin with this. No, saying that X is evidence for Y is vastly different from saying X = Y.
If I say I think a murder happened because there are blood stains on the floor, that doesn't mean I am asserting that blood stains *are* murder.

I said that I assume (don't know) that other humans experience pain, because they freely claim that they do. P-zombies could of course claim to be in pain, but this would require the universe to be trying to fool me for some reason -- the simpler explanation for sentient beings claiming to have subjective experiences is that they actually do.

That's evidence and an argument for the existence of pain in other humans, not a claim that that is what pain *is*.

With regards to computers, yes, if an AI were able to freely converse in natural language, and it repeatedly made the claim that it felt pain, despite such sentiments not being explicitly part of its programming, and it having nothing immediate to gain by lying...then sure, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't know that it felt pain, but I'd start to lean towards it being true.

First, look at your phone's or computer's screen. Then, if you're on a phone, take a screenshot or if you're on a computer, use the PrtScrn button. Is there any difference between what you saw and the screenshot and the image you get with the PrtScrn button? No! I rest my case. — TheMadFool

Oh brilliant, just throwing out another argument and ignoring the points being put to you, yet again.

The first answer to your rhetorical question is of course, yes, there is a difference because of the differences between my eyes and the camera's sensor, and my brain and the internals of the computer or camera.
Take the famous example of a gorilla walking across a basketball court that volunteers don't notice because they were given a task of counting the number of times the basketball was passed.
Did the volunteers see the gorilla?

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

But I think perhaps what your question means, is that if you were to ask me whether the screengrab matches what I saw, would I answer that they are the same?
If so, that's a question about memory. While it's true that I would say the screengrab is the same as my recollection, there are numerous ways we could nefariously change the screengrab and I would still identify it as the same. Even an image I'd seen a thousand times.
If you do figure out how this relates to "images" in the brain (including with things like the gorilla example), and can show your working, I would really love to see that. And you'd probably get the Nobel for Phys or Med.

C = image in camera, E = image in the eye — TheMadFool

C is misleading at best. There is no image per se, only data which may be meaningful for a human running a program that can parse a particular file format.

E doesn't point unambiguously to any single thing. As I've explained about three times already and you continue to ignore.

1. IF consciousness is real THEN (C is not consciousness AND E is consciousness) — TheMadFool

The notion of labelling representations or data as themselves "consciousness" seems absolutely absurd and of course I don't agree with the logical inference. So you argument falls immediately IMO.

Please do not simply post your assertions yet again, without actually trying to address what I am telling you about neurocognition.

What makes the hardware in your head special in that it feels, but computer hardware can't? What does it mean to feel?

If there is no perceivable difference between "simulated" intelligence and "real" intelligence, then any difference you perceive would be a difference of your own making stemming from your human biases. — Harry Hindu

That's a shift of the burden of proof.

I feel pain.
I assume other humans also feel pain for various practical reasons, but also because if other humans were p-zombies they would have no reason to say that they experience pain.

Any claim beyond that, needs supporting arguments and data. In the case of animals, there are lots of good arguments for why at least some animals feel pain, but of course that's a big topic in itself.

But if someone wished to claim that computers, or non-living systems experience pain, the burden is on that person to provide an argument and data for this claim.

Please read my reply to Wayfarer — TheMadFool

Your response is just to again assert your claim:

The physical processes/chemical reactions on an image sensor/film and the purported neural processes of vision, both, eventually become images that, if the same object is being photographed or looked at, are indistinguishable from each other. — TheMadFool

This claim is false, and I'm trying to explain to you, repeatedly, why.

Consider for example that the eye only has a narrow range of high-resolution vision within the fovea. However, there is a two-way communication between eye and brain that allows us both to interpret the low-resolution peripheral data in a specific way, while at the same time directing the post-processing in the eye in the best way to get a meaningful categorization of objects, edges etc.

There is likely no single merged image, but if there were, it wouldn't look like a camera image. It would be some kind of metadata image.

Awareness is the cornerstone of consciousness. If it weren't then there would be no difference between you and a stone - again the same difficulty of seeing a difference (consciousness) that, as per your own claim, isn't there rears its ugly head. — TheMadFool

I'm aware of the importance of awareness. I myself called it foundational.
The point is, if you had a good explanation of awareness (and I don't think you have), you would still have all the work of explaining the hard problem of consciousness still to do. And there would still be no justification for the thread claim of consciousness being an "illusion".

This doesn't make sense. I have asserted that it's highly improbable that science will produce an EXPLANATION of how non-conscious matter produces consciousness. — RogueAI

No, you went further than that:

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. Mercifully, the era of materialism is fast approaching an end. — RogueAI

(emphasis added)

Regarding your point, I disagree.
I have no expected timeline for when any particular problem will have a scientific explanation.
Neurology is very new and rapidly advancing; we probably know more from the last 30 years than all of the rest of human history put together. It's a strange time to give up.

Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion — bongo fury

Have we been talking past each other all this time?
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do.

Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions. — bongo fury

I don't consider this "unnecessary"; I consider this the most fascinating and difficult issue within consciousness.

If one were to say "Let's put the hard problems of consciousness to one side, as they seem intractable, and focus instead on the more digestible parts" then sure, I'm game. My background is neurology and I'm familiar with the need to be pragmatic, and choose modest progress over none.
I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. Sadly, handwaving has zero predictive or inferential power. If everyone subscribed to this way of thinking, we'll never make real progress in understanding consciousness.

Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. — Wayfarer

Exactly.
In the case of digital cameras, data is stored in some file format that would likely be meaningless without knowing the format. There's no direct 1:1 correspondence between this data and the real world (especially if it's using lossy compression) because that's not its purpose; the purpose is to store data that when unpacked or whatever will allow us to display images at the required fidelity for the (human) users.

You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. — TheMadFool

Again, what image in your eye? As I mentioned upthread, there is lots of reason to doubt that a single image mapped to the world exists anywhere except on the retina*.
A hell of a lot of processing of image components happens within the neurons of the eye, long before it gets to the brain, and those pieces appear to be separately processed on different sections of the visual cortex. Meanwhile, a huge number of neurons feed back to the eye, because what we see is also in large part a function of what our prediction and categorization engines are expecting to see based on the past data.

* And even in the case of the surface of the retina, the cells do not fire synchronously, so even there there is no image corresponding to a single time slice of reality.

6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor — TheMadFool

I always know that someone is about to handwave consciousness, because they focus on awareness.
Awareness is the low-hanging fruit. A good description of awareness, that makes testable predictions, would indeed be incredibly useful, but it would be a foundational step in understanding consciousness.

Instead the tendency with people like Dennett is to throw out some explanation for awareness that they find plausible, and imply that solves the much harder problems of consciousness because reasons.

@Metaphysician Undercover I'm confident at this point that there is nothing I could say, nothing any physicist could say to you, that could ever shake your conviction that our understanding of gravity is flawed.
Pointing out one misconception that you had about gravity or dark energy should have been enough to make you consider whether you need to study this topic further before you accuse others of being wrong. But we've gone through several at this point.

So I think I'll make this one the last, you can have the last word.

Right, our understanding of gravity is very clearly flawed, because all we have is a multitude of different ways of representing the effects of gravity on things, chiefly the movement of things. — Metaphysician Undercover

We were speaking about the mathematical convenience of finding the center of an object's gravity. That's not a different model, that's mathematics.
I could represent a person eating a sandwich to different levels of mathematical complexity. It doesn't mean we don't understand sandwich consumption.

until we separate out the effects of gravity from the effects of spatial expansion, at small scales, we cannot even say that the effects of spatial expansion are not observable at small scales. — Metaphysician Undercover

This isn't how science works.
The theory of gravity explains everything from cannonball motion to planetary orbits. This is brilliant because we can use that understanding to do many useful things on Earth, as well as launch interplanetary missions.

It is not invalidated by models that have yet to prove themselves. We don't know for sure yet whether dark energy exists. And if it exists, maybe it doesn't need any update to the model of gravity at all, since a uniform expansion of space would result in the kind of expansion that we're seeing alongside gravity.

Regardless, we don't throw away what we know for things we're just speculating about.

When gravity is modeled there is no cosmic expansion. When comic expansion is modeled there is no gravity. There is no model of the very real situation in which these two coexist and are active together. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's no specific scientific model of sandcastles and rainstorms either, but we can still run a simulation of what happens when the two combine.

I think you're confused here over two different meanings of the word "model".

We can of course do the calculations for applying the theory of gravity and various scientific models of dark energy expansion at the same time. Comparing such calculations to reality is the basis on which we lean towards certain models over others.

If spatial expansion is real, and occurs everywhere, then there must be a distribution of points everywhere, each being a center, with space expanding from each of those points. Since the points must be distributed everywhere, they would interfere with each other, as the expanding space from one point would bump into the expanding space from another point. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. Uniform expansion doesn't involve overlapping points.

Consider ordinary Hubble expansion.
I assume that you would not contest that we see galaxies as redshifted, and the further galaxies are away from us, the more redshifted they are?

If a galaxy 1 megaparsec away from us is travelling at speed N away from us, a galaxy 2 megaparsecs away is travelling at speed 2N and so on. From our perspective, we look like the center of the universe's expansion. But, when we do the maths, we find that it looks like that from the perspective of any galaxy.

You could image these velocities are being due to the fact that space cannot overlap itself.

For galaxies that are close to one another (like the Milky Way and Andromeda) the gravitational force between them is strong enough to pull them together even though new space is being created between them. There is no prohibition on moving through space, even newly minted space.

Actually it took about 3.8 billion years, which is about a third of the age of the universe, for intelligent life to appear here. — magritte

I don't think you need the word "actually" there. I did not suggest otherwise.

But even then, a super-aggressive extraterrestrial culture could have sent out self-replicating probes all over the galaxy just to say hello.

Agreed, and indeed, it doesn't even need a whole culture to be like that, just a small group or even an individual. For a species not much more advanced than us, the energy, materials and AI required to launch a self-replicating probe project may be completely trivial.

According to Fermi, we don't see them because that never happened.

No; Fermi doesn't assert anything. The point of the paradox is to point out what we don't know, and let us try to figure out through discussion and investigation why we don't see evidence of ETs.

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. — RogueAI

You have this backwards. You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness. Science OTOH does not need to assert the inverse; though it is a working premise at the moment, given that we can see a correspondence between activation or damage to specific locations in the brain having a predictable effect on consciousness.

How does consciously observing scribbles on a page provide knowledge of unconscious processes? — Harry Hindu

This is a straw man / shift of the goalposts. The point being debated was whether we are consciously aware of unconscious processes. And we are of course; I am aware that my vision performs a lot of processes that are not under my control. This is a very different thing than having an awareness of those specific processes.
It's like the difference between knowing someone took a cookie from the jar and knowing exactly who and what happened.

The temptation to believe in unicorn-illusions that are no less fanciful than unicorns. — bongo fury

You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, just a pointless digression into the Chinese room.
Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful?

Sure but what's the relevance here? We're talking about whether an entity can itself be under the illusion of having sensations (a nonsensical notion in my view). I don't see the relevance of your point to that discussion.

These different kinds of awareness (of the external and the internal) come together to produce what is, at the end of the day, an image of the world and yourself in it.

How different is this image from that captured by your phone's camera of the world and itself through a mirror? — TheMadFool

I'll stop you there. We don't know.
We don't know to what extent images are formed in the brain; we know that sensory data from the eyes is broken down in several ways in the eye and the brain and there is a lot of ongoing research into whether, and to what extent, these elements are brought together.

The sensation of sight certainly *feels* like just seeing one discrete image, but there are reasons to doubt this.
For one thing, if the brain internally makes an image, what views that image? And does it also need to make an internal image, and so on?

For another, there are various optical illusions that cast doubt on this simple idea. The first that comes to mind are the "impossible colors", where it is possible to see a blue that's darker than black or an orange that's lighter than white. Good luck rendering those images.

The discussion here is about er conscious humans that are supposed to have illusions about their own consciousness. In the case of the Chinese Room (some) conscious humans are under the misconception that a computer is conscious. — Daemon

Agreed.
The Chinese room is about whether we can infer intentionality, let alone subjective states, in another entity based on its behaviour.
This is a very different thing from the idea that some entity can itself be under the illusion of having subjective states.

As I alluded, there's no distinction between being in pain and the illusion of pain if both hurt.

I think the op is right but actually think this is already implicit in how we currently divide politics.
"Conservatism" could be seen as a kind phrasing of regressivism or indeed pessimism.

So, is Human Consciousness a form of Matter? If so, what is the missing link? Whence the Illusion?
Or, is Human Awareness perhaps a form of immaterial, but knowable, Information? — Gnomon

What's the distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness?

Physical pain is unpleasant, and explaining how matter can have unpleasant sensations is the hard part. The "illusion" of being in pain seems to also be unpleasant. So what exactly is calling it an illusion bringing to the table?

I don't think consciousness is immaterial, but I don't think dennett is right either. Explanatory power is the measure of any hypothesis.