Radical Lastthursdayism says, that's constantly true, all the time - your existence is being renewed every moment and your memories are effectively implanted. — flannel jesus

Indeed. In fact, even talking of "your existence" being "renewed" could be misleading here, as what we're actually positing is that every instance of consciousness is essentially a new entity that just happens to inherit the memories of that body. And then its existence ends in an instant.

It's not a pleasant conception, but as I say, it's immune to the strong counter arguments to the two more obvious positions on the transporter problem. In fact, I've never heard any argument against it (but I've generally not heard this position discussed very much at all -- most people in this debate implicitly assume continuous existence).

I didn't content they did. Not sure where this is coming from. — AmadeusD

Because I am trying to get your meaning. You're alluding to bodily continuity, so I am asking follow up questions of why bodily continuity is critical.

This doesn't have much relevance to my position, or the claim, to be clear. For sake of discussion, there will be no specific amount. You can lose both legs and still be alive, and you. It's a silly question, in context. That's not the belittle it. It just has no reasonable avenue to a response. — AmadeusD

Hard disagree.
Look, in daily life we all implicitly subscribe to some form of bodily continuity. I have Mijin's memories and I assume that I am one and the same entity as Mijin. If I were to suffer an accident and have brain damage, then that is a damaged Mijin.
The problems for bodily continuity come with hypotheticals like the transporter problem and the follow up questions that I have summarized in this thread. It's much easier of course to insist that we keep our focus only on how personal identity works in daily and handwave questions like the imperfect transporter. But if we have a good model of personal identity we shouldn't need to dodge; we should be able to apply our model.

It removes the potential for my first-person to disappear, but someone to still be me. Which seems ridiculous and intuitively hogwash. — AmadeusD

This is why the terminology is important here. Another entity could be qualitatively identical to me, but if he is not numerically identical to me, then he's arguably Mijin but not me. If you stick a pin in him, I don't feel a thing. And when I'm lights out, I have no reason to believe I will suddenly have his conscious experiences.

Mijin If spatial-temporal continuity is required to maintain identity, then your case adds nothing, the subject is killed no matter what. — hypericin

Can we know that? What if the transporter functions by firing your actual atoms across space? If assembling your own atoms back into the configuration that they were in isn't you, then what is missing?

If it is not required, then your case reduces to, "How much damage can someone sustain before becoming a new person?"

From the third person perspective yes that's what it boils down to. The question is what about the first-person perspective of the person that entered the transporter. Is he gone entirely?

It seems more realistic to infer episodes of relative coherence among otherwise fleeting and unconnected moments of consciousness? — bongo fury

This seems to be alluding to different levels of consciousness. Sure, there are different levels of alertness largely corresponding to brainwave states. This seems a different topic though to personal identity.

They deserve identifying with (or as) one person because they arose in that particular (spatiotemporally continuous) brain and body. — bongo fury

This is just asserting the position of bodily continuity. I'll ask again: what makes the particular atoms that you are made of special, and how many of your own atoms need to be incorporated into an entity for you to survive in any form?

It seems crucial to the viability and identity of an organism, at least? Pre-sci-fi, of course. — bongo fury

But that's my question. When I ask why spatio-temporal continuity matters, I mean why is it critical to whether consciousness persists or not? If we believe that there is some persistence of consciousness from moment to moment then it is a valid question of what is required for this persistence. If the key thing is that it's the same atoms, why is that necessary?

Really? I suppose there are edge cases, like that of conjoined twins? But generally we, like the ship of Theseus, maintain our personal identity by losing and replacing a few planks at a time. — bongo fury

Yes that is the case today but I am not talking about only what is biologically or technologically possible today. If that were a requirement for topics here, then 99% of threads on philosophy forums can be shut down right now.
I am talking about hypothetically copying entire brains, swapping out atoms etc to test a given position or model of personal identity.

I think this is the correct answer to the branch-line case. Any "one" who is me, yet occupied different atoms and extracts difference resources from the environment to maintain homeostatis, and occupies a different "moment' in space, cannot be me. — AmadeusD

But why? What is it that your specific atoms contain that hold your "essence"?
And how many such atoms need to be moved across for you to still be alive? Will 95% do it? 99%?

I think this is a really stupid 'paradox' personally. A ship is "that ship" because of what people call it. There isn't, that I can see, a physical boundary to the identity of a utility/object. — AmadeusD

Agreed, I hate the ship of Thesus. It's only a marginally interesting paradox in its own right, and though it is invoked for good faith reasons, I think it actually derails this topic. Because, as I said upthread, the problem of personal identity chiefly concerns the first-person perspective -- what it is, and under what circumstances it is preserved. The ship of thesus gets us immediately thinking of the third person perspective, and making a completely arbitrary judgement that doesn't actually matter.
Whether my first-person perspective still exists or not matters a hell of a lot to me! It's not like ship of thesus.

Independent medical exam? — bongo fury

In my experience

Spatiotemporal continuity (with me). — bongo fury

Why does that matter? And how, precisely, do we define it? Because of course it is vulnerable to the same sort of "imperfect copy" problem that I talked about in the OP. Whether I am alive or not is binary (NB: alive but damaged is still alive), but whether I as an organism have spatiotemporal continuity with an entity at a past state of the universe is something less clear. Does it matter whether it's the same atoms? What proportion of atoms must be in the same state?

Oh ok.
Yes this is just an IME thing, so no worries if you disagree. But often when there are debates on the transporter problem, and you have the people forming into two groups of either "transported" or "killed" (and, as I say, no-one but me seems to occupy the third group of "no continuity even before the transporter"), the rhetoric is often like this:

"What connects the person at source to the person at the destination, instead of them being separate entities? What was actually transported? Is it a soul?"
Vs
"What does the person at the destination lack in order to be you? Is it the soul? If it makes a difference whether we literally move the individual atoms, does that mean you're suggesting that the atoms held the soul?"

But so (by hypothesis) will any number of duplicates be convinced of their continuity with Kirk. So what? I'm convinced I'm Napoleon. — bongo fury

That was the point. I was explaining that duplicates being convinced they are the original, and third-parties believing the duplicate is the original, doesn't solve the philosophical problem of what happened to the original; whether they were in some sense "transported" or simply killed.

Okay, tell me what you think is wrong with this answer just to make sure that we are on the same page: we might be able to introduce some sort of criteria for determining if someone could be considered to have survived based on the survival of brain function as a result of a certain X. If they pass a cognitive test at a certain X after being transported, then we can say that at that particular X, the person that was transported survived. Thus, it is no longer arbitrary (at least in terms of small differences in X not corresponding to meaningful differences in brain functioning) given we can determine how much someone must be the same after being transported to be considered to have survived. — ToothyMaw

I still don't think you're following me, sorry. I am talking 100% about the first-person perspective of the person going into the transporter. You are talking about what is observable or measurable to third-parties.

In the original, vanilla transporter problem, where the transporter makes perfect copies, it's a given that the person at the destination is identical in every way to the person went in, such that Kirk's colleagues see no discontinuity in their interaction with him, and Kirk is convinced he's just been transported.
This premise is not a solution to the philosophical problem though, because that problem concerns the first person perspective of the Kirk entering at the source. From his own point of view, did he survive?

I am inferring from your answers that probably your position is that, no, the source person is dead, and our focus is just on whether we should consider the facsimile close enough to treat it as Kirk. Right?

I am sorry but I hate this problem. Why would anyone assume the Star Trek transporter could ever possibly work? If one assumed it could possibly work, one could assume any number of solutions to any number of assumed problems. — Fire Ologist

Well it's just a thought experiment. We also can't make Laplace's demon.

A difference though is that personal identity is an issue that will eventually be relevant to human technology. Because, even if transporters are impossible, brain augmentations, splicing etc seem pretty feasible within just the next few centuries. And, if strong AI is true, then transporter-like processes will be absolutely trivial as long as we have sufficient storage to make duplicates.

I actually think there's an argument for consciousness NEVER being continuous, period. Like even just you, now, not being transported. There's an argument that the you that is experiencing the middle of this sentence now is a different you than the one experiencing the end of the sentence now. That continuity of experience is equally illusory in a way, all the time. — flannel jesus

Absolutely. Every time I have discussed, or seen discussions of, the transporter problem, it seems both sides assume that continuity of consciousness is real, and the question is just whether it's preserved through this process. But yes, it occurs to me that there's a third option; that there's never continuity of consciousness.

It seems an unpleasant option -- the me that is typing the last word of this sentence is a different entity to the one that typed the first -- but we have to admit, it's the one that fits the known facts right now. It's immune to all of the arguments against the other positions.

It's not that it's a boring answer @ToothyMaw, and I thank you for it, but I still don't think you're quite getting my point.

Today, yes, if someone has brain damage we can talk about the degree to which that person's personality and other attributes have been preserved. It's the same person, it's just arbitrary how much we consider that person to have the same qualities as before.

However, in the transporter scenario, there's a binary that we've introduced: either you've survived the process -- whether or not you have brain damage -- or you simply died on the source plate, lights out. Remember I am talking about your own perspective. So if Picard uses the transporter, I am talking about the perspective of the Picard that entered at the source, not whether the rest of the bridge crew considers it to be the same Picard.

And there seems no basis for the universe to choose where to set such a line, nor for us to ever know where it is. It's not a refutation of the transporter working per se, it's just showing that there are a number of absurd entailments.

In terms of the OP, I think this is one of the few answerable questions regarding sleep and dreaming.

Our brains have different brainwave states, these correspond with levels of alertness. Dreaming takes place in theta or delta brainwave states, which are the lowest alertness. You can experience theta state while awake, and it's a drowsy "brain fog" feeling, although it is also associated with creativity.

So you're not quite as alert in a dream, although people do still sometimes realize that they are dreaming and enjoy lucid dreams. Personally, I don't only have lucid dreams but also in-between states, like finding everything happening quite odd, but never quite working out that I am dreaming.

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?

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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.