Well, of course. One will start arguing about both of them being illusory intuition pumpin' machines; the other starts arguing that the quality to it all is going down the drain. And then presto, the magic is lost and there's no more making whoopee between the two. — javra

Or it's laughed off, and immediately forgotten about.

"What it's like" to drink tea is determined by virtue of each and every instance of tea drinking. That is a plurality of tea drinking instances. If each and every instance of tea drinking is different in it's perceptual and/or qualitative value, then there is no such thing as what it's like to drink tea, because the use of "it's" indicates a single entity.

We're talking about a plurality.

Right, because sexual partners have prior to recent philosophy readings never asked each other, "what was it like for you?" — javra

Such intimate conversations will always go awry when "qualia" rears it's ugly head.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?
— creativesoul

The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language.
— Marchesk

No, I won't. We must use language.

So, let me see if I have this right...

Color, sound, and taste are - according to you - properties of private experience that exist in their entirety prior to language use.

Are you ok with that? — creativesoul

↪creativesoul Yes. — Marchesk

Can a language-less creature offer us a self report? No. Of course not. Can they have some sort of basic, rudimentary, and/or fundamental form of thought and/or belief? If so, then basic, rudimentary, and/or fundamental experience cannot consist of language, or any product and/or bi-product thereof.

Agree?

I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained.
— creativesoul

Give it a try. — Olivier5

You did a fine job.

Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances.

Because an optical illusion cannot be reasoned away, it will crop up again and again, independently of the circumstances.

Because you can recognise the timbre of a musical instrument, the scent of a rose, the color of a dress in spite of them being always a little bit different than the last time.

Because you can recognise the taste of some food that you haven't had for decades, e.g. Proust's madeleines.

Because dogs can follows trails, and find corpses even under water.

Because the same applies to words: their meaning varies from one sentence to the next, and yet we still use them and we still recognise their meaning somewhat. — Olivier5

I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained.

The p-zombie aspect is a reductio. Seems some miss that point. If a p-zombie counts, then there's a problem with the criterion.

Yeah, I'm working on an ordinary language rendering of the (consciousness)process. Seems to me that the models, such as those being discussed(particularly earlier) by Kenosha, Isaac, and fdrake, are the most promising methods/attempts to situate "qualia" beyond the ability of metacognition in their order of appearance, where metacognition requires common language use.

The judgment/assessment step is most certainly in dire need of unpacking, for there are several levels of complexity to conscious experience, all of which correspond to the cognitive capability of the candidate(which is limited to and facilitated by the physiological/biological 'machinery').

I do not actually entirely agree with Dennett here. I do agree that qualia/quale are misconceptions of the basic fundamental elements of conscious experience. However, I'm trying to keep my engagement about Dennett's paper, or at least on some aspect of his points, as much as possible.

There's a small part of me which would like to think that libs and dems will now be forced to see the vacuity of their 'Russian interference' bullshit and just recognize that no, tens of millions actively want and desire Trump in power... — StreetlightX

As if Trump's popularity cannot have anything to do with and/or be helped by foreign interference and/or disinformation campaigns?

I've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?
— creativesoul

The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language. — Marchesk

No, I won't. We must use language.

So, let me see if I have this right...

Color, sound, and taste are - according to you - properties of private experience that exist in their entirety prior to language use.

Are you ok with that?

You want me to remove all the properties of language and then report my experiences to you? — Marchesk

No.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?

Experience is a synthesis, not an aggregate. Experiences cannot be disassembled, they may only be analyzed. — Mww

I agree with this. The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to.

I asked you to strip the experience down of all that is public, external, and effable. Your report will come via language. That's not a problem. I'm asking you exactly which properties of that experience can stand on their own after you've removed the public, external, and effable?

One wonders what Dennett means by unspoken thoughts. — Marchesk

My characterization. Not Dennett's.

"It appears that I see color, feel pain, etc." is a self report. You're reporting to me about yourself, via common language use. Self reports are existentially dependent upon common language use. Common language use is public, external, and effable.

That's a self report.

Take that experience and strip it down by removing all public, external, and effable properties thereof...

What's left?

Take privacy, how can some conscious experiences not be private to the individual? We don't and can't know always what someone else is thinking or feeling, therefor some of their experience is private. — Marchesk

I do not think that Dennett is denying that some thoughts are private, in the sense of being unspoken.

Go and read his text, and try and summarize what it says. I predict you won't be able to. — Olivier5

Dennett argues fairly convincingly(by my lights anyway) against the ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct apprehensibility of the properties of conscious experience, and in doing so effectively grounds his rejection of qualia. It's worth noting that he does all this by offering physicalist explanations of actual counterexamples(intuition pumps) that are germane to historical notions of qualia/quale. In doing so, he shows that the properties of personal experience that make personal experience what it is, are not special in the sort of way that proponents of qualia claim.

Dennett's aim(I'm guessing) was to use a physicalist framework to effectively explain all that quale and qualia are claimed to be the only explanations for, and in doing so show that there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private, or directly apprehensible about the properties of conscious experience.

Dennett may be right in quining the traditional property combination of qualia — Marchesk

Keep that in mind...

The take-home is that half of eligible voters wanted to put their trust in a liar. — Banno

There are a large number of folk for whom basic honesty is unimportant. — Banno

Yes, and yes.

We're talking about working class mostly rural American citizens, most of whom are products of public education in America over the last seventy years, most of whom identify as Christian. Special pleading is not a problem by their standards... it's a part thereof.

Far more nuanced than that Banno. Troublesome to say the least. The people believe Trump.

What a fucking shitshow.

Eerie silence...

:mask:

I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice.

...you do seem to be espousing illusionism in this paragraph. Which would be that we're being deluded by some trick of cognition into thinking sensations of color, sound, paint, etc. are something they're not, which is some form of the private, ineffable subjectivity.
— Marchesk — creativesoul

I've no idea how you've arrived at that from what I wrote.

On my view, an illusion is always of something else that is not an illusion. I wouldn't call Qualia an illusion, unless it is an illusion of what counts as an acceptable accounting practice.

To quite the contrary, I would call it a failed philosophical attempt at taking proper account of what conscious experience consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon. A failed attempt at setting out the pre-theoretical, basic, and/or fundamental elements of conscious experience.

...you do seem to be espousing illusionism in this paragraph. Which would be that we're being deluded by some trick of cognition into thinking sensations of color, sound, paint, etc. are something they're not, which is some form of the private, ineffable subjectivity. — Marchesk

What are these things you called "sensations of color, sound, paint, etc."

What are red, green, blue visual experiences?

I somewhat agree with this, if we grant Dennett's arguments for quniing qualia. However, you do seem to be espousing illusionism in this paragraph. Which would be that we're being deluded by some trick of cognition into thinking sensations of color, sound, paint, etc. are something they're not, which is some form of the private, ineffable subjectivity. — Marchesk

What are sensations of color?

This thread is a fine example of the way discussions and/or differences in viewpoints about a subject matter ought be performed. Kudos to the active participants here, particularly , , and . It was conversations such as these that initially piqued my interest in philosophy.

Last week, I studied Dennett's paper in the other thread which gave rise to this one, and found it compelling enough to reject the concept of Qualia, based upon it's having been rendered useless as a means to add anything other than unnecessary complications that actually inhibit our understanding of consciousness or conscious experiences. I suspect that's similar to 's take as well.

I agree with Dennett's characterization of what those who argue for qualia/quale are doing, when he says the following...

One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. 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. — Dennett

I think that the above quote is the most important point of the paper, although my reasoning for that may be too far off topic. The quote above has been discussed at length in terms of how the brain works, and in terms of how human perception models work, and although I've found those conversations very helpful, interesting, and relevant to the paper itself, I've also found that there's still much missing in terms of what consciousness consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon, despite the fact that I wholeheartedly agree that there are no such things as the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe.

What's missing is the explanation of how those individuals are stimulated or non-perceptually affected, and how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe that adequately describes thought and belief itself(consciousness). "Consciousness" as described by proponents of "qualia" is based upon a gross misunderstanding of what consciousness consists of, and how it emerges(here I'm quite fond of the discussion regarding whether or not perceptual features/properties/quale can be divorced from the actual individual's history and retain their unity as an entity).

I'd like to see that part of this topic gotten into in quite a bit more detail, but perhaps an aim to adequately explain how consciousness emerges, and what it consists of, is too far off the topic, because Dennett was not concerned about that in this particular paper.

Are all ideas/notions/conceptions of conscious experience basic and fundamental? — creativesoul

Given the many different ways one can define "experience", no. — Mr Bee

Good.

I'm saying that if there is anything basic and fundamental about conscious experience it would be what it consisted of long before we began talking about it; the basic elemental constituency of language less conscious experience.

The question is whether the things our ideas are referring to can't be irreducible if they pre-exist humanity — Mr Bee

I'm not even sure that I understand what you're asking me here...

I'm not fond of the notion of reducibility. If we're talking about amending our accounting practices in a manner that results in adequately explaining something or another, then the simplest version is the best on my view, so long as there is no loss of explanatory power.

However, when we're talking about what things consist of, it's another matter altogether...

All things that exist in their entirety prior to our awareness of them are irreducible in terms of their basic elemental constituency, even those that consist of a combination of more basic elemental constituents and/or emerge as a result thereof. Conscious experiences are exactly such things, on my view. There are basic elemental constituents thereof, all of which are necessary in order for any and all conscious experiences to happen and/or take place. The trick, it seems to me(pardon the pun), is figuring out the minimum that each particular conscious experience requires, for they are not all equal.

For example, while some conscious experience requires language use, not all does. So, given that much... we can confidently say that any and all conscious experience, say, of learning how to use the term "tree", consists - in part at least - of common language use. Language is an elemental constituent of such experience. That experience cannot be further reduced in our imaginings by removing the language use, for what's left is insufficient, clearly. It would be a different experience altogether. Such an experience consists of - in part at least - but, is completely existentially dependent upon, common language use. However, it does not follow that common language use is required for all conscious experience.

Make sense thus far?

I'd like to think that most everyone here would agree that conscious experience existed in it's entirety prior to our ever having coined the terms. An idea of something that already existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness of it is not rightly called "basic" or "fundamental".
— creativesoul

Why is that?... — Mr Bee

Are all ideas/notions/conceptions of conscious experience basic and fundamental?

...the very idea of conscious experience itself is, like I said elsewhere, basic and fundamental. — Mr Bee

I'd like to think that most everyone here would agree that conscious experience existed in it's entirety prior to our ever having coined the terms. An idea of something that already existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness of it is not rightly called "basic" or "fundamental". There is more than one idea of conscious experience, and some of them are mutually exclusive and/or negations of one another; they are incommensurate with one another. They cannot all be basic and fundamental. So we find ourselves at a point where we need to be able to perform a comparative analysis between the different notions/ideas of consciousness/conscious experience.

If conscious experience exists in it's entirety prior to our becoming aware of it, then our ideas of it can be wrong about it. That is particularly the case regarding our ideas about what such things consist of. Some people claim that conscious experience consists entirely, or in large part at least, of subjective, personal, and qualitative properties: Qualia are the ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible properties of experience; the way things seem to us.

As Dennett says in the beginning of "Quining Qualia"...

As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia...

Dennett argues fairly convincingly against the claims of the ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct apprehensibility of the properties of conscious experience and in doing so effectively grounds his rejecting the conception of qualia. It's worth noting that he does all this by offering physicalist explanations of actual counterexamples that are germane to historical notions of qualia/quale. In doing so, he shows that the properties of personal experience that make personal experience what it is, are not special in the sort of way that proponents of qualia claim.

That's the impression I'm left with after studying that paper for the last day.

Dennett's aim(I'm guessing) was to use a physicalist framework to effectively explain all that quale and qualia are claimed to be the only explanations for, and in doing so show that there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private, or directly apprehensible about the properties of conscious experience.

Thanks for that link.

:smile:

I'm definitely inclined to a methodological naturalist approach. I've grown quite fond of framing things in terms of their elemental constituency. In addition I also argue for emergence. I'm no physicalist, however. I'm certainly no dualist either.

...formally speaking: to reduce X to Y isn’t to say that X doesn’t exist. It’s simply to say that X is “really just” Y, that X is “nothing more than” Y, that X is “nothing over and above” Y. And since Y is assumed to exist, X is also held to exist. For although X is nothing more than Y, it’s also nothing less than Y. When you reduce chemical processes to physical processes, you don’t deny that chemical processes exist.

All true.

While I would readily agree that consciousness does not reduce to dispositions to behaviour, the Pizza Theory analogy below does not work as an argument against all other reductionist approaches to consciousness/minds.

Consciousness consists entirely of thought and belief. It is nothing less, and nothing more.

...to say that experience is just pizza is to deny that consciousness exists, for we know that conscious experience exists, we know what it is like, and we know that it isn’t just pizza. So, too, for the claim that consciousness is just behavior.

Saying that consciousness is thought and belief does not deny the existence of consciousness, any more than saying that water is H20 denies the existence of water. There are issues here with the language use of Strawson.

When someone states "we know what consciousness is like" they are most certainly presupposing a.)there is such a thing(one and only one thing that counts) as consciousness, that b.)there is something else that consciousness is like. Neither is true.

Consciousness is self-contained in the individual creature capable of forming, having, and/or holding thought and belief about the world and/or itself. Individual experience is as plentiful as the sheer quantity of individuals capable of experiencing. So, I've no issue with saying that each and every individual experience consists of meaningful events particular to that individual. We experience being ourselves, but simple, basic, and raw experience alone is utterly inadequate for knowledge about how consciousness emerges onto the world stage, what it consists of, and/or how it evolves along an evolutionary timeline.

We know that we see, smell, hear, feel(touch), and taste all sorts of things, and we sit and talk about it using all sorts of different linguistic frameworks. But what on earth could anyone be asking about if they were to query "What's it like to see?" It's not like anything else at all. The same holds good of queries about what it's like to smell, hear, feel(touch), taste, etc. Because physiological sensory perception is one necessary elemental constituent of consciousness, the same holds good of what consciousness is like.

No one knows what consciousness "is like", for consciousness is not like anything.

Thanks for that link.

:smile:

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. — Howard Pattee

Which presupposes that the material or physical 'world' is not a necessary elemental part of all meaning. That's a false presupposition.

That doesn't help.

The notion of "what it's like to use sense organs" is fraught. There is no description adequate enough to exhaust all actual answers to a question formulated about that notion when and if posed to different individual humans. There are a whole slew of different things that most all humans have in common, but what it's like to be human, and/or what it's like to use one's own sensory organs are not a part of what most all humans have in common. Ask a thousand different people what it's like to use their senses and you'll soon enough see precisely what I mean here.

Again, the notion of a philosophical zombie is a consequence of not having gotten human thought and belief right to begin with.

Humans 'use' physiological sensory perception(sense organs) to detect, perceive, distinguish, and draw correlations between different things. All correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. That's how consciousness emerges within capable creatures... via correlations drawn between different things:Via thought and belief formation. We do this(draw correlations;form thought and belief) prior to, during, and long after language use begins in earnest:From before birth until death. The correlations drawn by the individual ARE individual experience. There is no "what it's like to really experience using sensory perception" aside from a saying borne of language use displaying an emaciated understanding of human thought and belief(human minds) hard at work.

A philosophical zombie has sense organs and can use them in all the ways a real human can, they just don't “really experience” using them. — Pfhorrest

All the ways that humans use sense organs includes "really experiencing" using them. If philosophical zombies do not use sense organs to really experience using them, then they cannot use sense organs in all the ways a real human can.

At least Santa is coherent.