We seem to have a vastly different notion of what constitutes an ontological distinction. It seems you might find a stop sign ontologically distinct from a speed limit sign since they have different properties. — noAxioms

I’m not using “ontological” here to mean merely “a set of observable traits.” I’m using it in its proper philosophical sense — a distinction in the mode of being. A rock and an amoeba both exist, but not in the same way. The amoeba has a self-organising, self-maintaining unity: it acts to preserve itself and reproduce. This isn’t a mere property added to matter, but a different kind of organization — what Aristotle called entelechy and what modern systems theorists call autopoiesis.

That distinction is categorical, not merely quantitative. Life introduces an interiority — however minimal — that inanimate matter does not possess. It’s what allows later forms of experience, cognition, and consciousness to emerge. So the “list of attributes” such as homeostasis or metabolism are not arbitrary descriptors, but outward manifestations of this deeper ontological difference.

But this distinction also bears directly on the problem of consciousness. Nagel points out that modern science arose by deliberately excluding the mental from its field of study. The “objective” world of physics was constituted by abstracting away everything that belongs to the first-person point of view — experience, meaning, purpose — in order to describe the measurable, quantifiable aspects of bodies. That method proved extraordinarily powerful, but it also defined its own limits: whatever is subjective was set aside from the outset. As noted above, this is not a matter of opinion.

This means that the gap between third-person descriptions and first-person experience isn’t an accidental omission awaiting further physical theory; it’s a structural feature of how the physical sciences were established. To describe something in purely physical terms is by definition to omit 'what it feels like' to be that thing. So the problem isn’t just about explaining how consciousness emerges from matter — according to Thomas Nagel, it is about how a worldview that excluded subjectivity as a condition of its success could ever re-incorporate it without transforming its own foundations.

That’s why I say the distinction between living and non-living things is not merely biological but ontological. Life is already the point at which matter becomes interior to itself — where the world starts to appear from a perspective within it. From that perspective, consciousness isn’t an inexplicable late-arriving anomaly in an otherwise material universe; it’s the manifestation of an inherent distinction between appearance and being that the physical sciences, by their very design, have bracketed out. But that is a transcendental argument, and therefore philosophical rather than scientific.

If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished — J

I've been going through a pretty dense paper by Evan Thompson, 'Could All Life be Sentient?', which is useful in respect of these questions about the distinctions between various levels or kinds of organic life and degrees of consciousness. Useful, but not conclusive, leaving the question open, in the end, but helpful in at least defining and understanding the issues. I've also generated a synopsis which will be helpful in approaching the essay.

Gdocs Synopsis (AI Generated)
Could All Life be Sentient? Evan Thompson

I've also generated a synopsis which will be helpful in approaching the essay. — Wayfarer

Thanks, I'll read it.

I thank you all for your input, and for your patience when I take at times days to find time to respond.

Yes. And I'm in no position to claim that any view on consciousness is necessarily right or wrong. We're dealing with educated guesses, at best. — J

Most choose to frame their guesses as assertions. That's what I push back on. I'm hessitant to label my opinions as 'beliefs', since the word connotes a conclusion born more of faith than of hard evidence (there's always evidence on both sides, but it being hard makes it border more on 'proof').

There will always be those that wave away any explanation as correlation, not causation. — noAxioms
Hmm. I suppose so, but that wouldn't mean we hadn't learned the explanation.

But we have explanations of things as simple as consciousness. What's complicated is say how something like human pain manifests itself to the process that detects it. A self-driving car could not do what it does if it wasn't conscious any more than an unconscious person could navigate through a forest without hitting the trees. But once that was shown, the goalposts got moved, and it is still considered a problem. Likewise, God designing all the creatures got nicely explained by evolution theory, so instead of conceding the lack of need for the god, they just moved the goal posts and suggest typically that we need an explanation for the otherwise appearance of the universe from nothing. They had to move that goalpost a lot further away than it used to be.

You might say that the car has a different kind of consciousness than you do. Sure, different, but not fundamentally so. A car can do nothing about low oil except perhaps refuse to go on, so it has no need of something the equivalent of pain qualia. That might develop as cars are more in charge of their own problems, and in charge of their own implementation.

Absolutely. If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished.

You also need to answer the question I asked above, a kind of litmus test for those with your stance:

[Concerning] a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience [pain say] and have intent? — noAxioms

If yes, is it also yes for bacteria?
The almost unilateral response to this question by non-physicalists is evasion. What does that suggest about their confidence in their view?

You are the one who suggested that solution, because you want cars to be seen as having the mental abilities we have. I'm fine with cars being seen as not having them. — Patterner

They don't have even close to the mental abilities we have, which is why I'm comparing the cars to an Urbilaterian. .But what little they have is enough, and (the point I'm making) there is no evidence that our abilities of an Urbilaterian are ontologically distinct from those of the car.
You point out why there's no alternative word: Those who need it don't want it. Proof by language. Walking requires either two or four legs, therefore spiders can't walk. My stance is that they do, it's just a different gait, not a fundamental 'walk' sauce that we have that the spider doesn't.

Galileo's point, which was foundational in modern science, was that the measurable attributes of bodies - mass, velocity, extension and so on - are primary, while how bodies appear to observers - their colour, scent, and so on - are secondary (and by implication derivative). — Wayfarer

Those supposed secondary qualities can also be measured as much as the first list. It just takes something a bit more complicated than a tape measure.

Still, I know what you mean by the division. The human subjective experience of yellow is a different thing altogether than yellow in itself, especially since it's not yellow in itself that we're sensing. A squirrel can sense it. We cannot, so we don't know the experience of yellow, only 'absence of blue'.

The division is not totally ignored by science. It's just that for most fields, the subjective experience serves no purpose to the field.

... Canadian neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), who operated on many conscious patients during his very long career.
...
While electrical stimulation of the cortex could evoke experiences, sensations, or involuntary actions, it could never make the patient will to act or decide to recall something.

Interesting, but kind of expected. Stimulation can evoke simple reflex actions (a twitch in the leg, whatever), but could not do something like make him walk, even involuntarily. A memory or sensation might be evoked by stimulation of a single area, but something complex like a decision is not a matter of a single point of stimulation. Similarly with the sensation, one can evoke a memory or smell, but not evoke a whole new fictional story or even a full experience of something in the past.

I see a distinction between simple and complex, and not so much between sensations/reflexes and agency. The very fact that smells can be evoked with such stimulation suggests that qualia is a brain thing.

Noninvasive stimulation has been used to improve decision speed and commitment, and with OCD, mood regulation and such. But hey, drugs do much of the same thing, and the fact that drugs are effective (as are diseases) is strong evidence against the brain being a mere antenna for agency.
Direct stimulation (as we've been discussing) has been used to influence decisions and habits (smoking?), but does not wholesale override the will. It's far less effective than is occasionally portrayed in fiction.

A fully simulated brain might behave exactly like a conscious person, but whether there’s 'anything it’s like' to be that simulation is the very point at issue.

I talked about this early in the topic, maybe the OP. Suppose it was you that was simulated, after a scan taken without your awareness. Would the simulated you realize something had changed, that he was not the real one? If not, would you (the real you) write that off as a p-zombie? How could the simulated person do anything without the same subjective experience?

In short, you’re arguing from within the third-person framework while intending to account for what only appears from within the first-person perspective. The result isn’t an explanation but a translation — a substitution of the language of mechanism for the reality of experience. That’s the “illusion of reduction” you yourself noticed when you said commentators “appropriate first-person words to refer to third-person phenomena.”

When you treat the first-person point of view as something that emerges from a “third-person-understandable substrate,” you are collapsing the distinction Chalmers and Nagel are pointing out.

Perhaps I am, perhaps because they're inventing a distinction where there needn't be one.



I think you messed up the quoting in your immediate prior post. You should edit, since many of your words are attributed to me.

But the ontological distinction between beings of any kind, and nonorganic objects, is that the former are distinguished by an active metabolism which seeks to preserve itself and to reproduce ~ Wayfarer
— Wayfarer

I’m not using “ontological” here to mean merely “a set of observable traits.” I’m using it in its proper philosophical sense — a distinction in the mode of being.

I don't find your list of traits to be in any way a difference in mode of being. Water evaporates. Rocks don't. That's a difference, but not a difference in mode of being any more than the difference between the rock and the amoeba. Perhaps I misunderstand 'mode', but I see 'being' simply as 'existing', which is probably not how you're using the term. To me, all these things share the same mode: they are members of this universe, different arrangements of the exact same fundamentals. My opinion on that might be wrong, but it hasn't been shown to be wrong.

This isn’t a mere property added to matter

Our opinions on this obviously differ.

Life introduces an interiority

I notice a predictable response to the Urbilaterian question: evasion. That question has direct bearing on this assertion.

That method proved extraordinarily powerful, but it also defined its own limits: whatever is subjective was set aside from the outset. As noted above, this is not a matter of opinion.

I acknowledge this.

To describe something in purely physical terms is by definition to omit 'what it feels like' to be that thing.

To describe something in any terms at all still omits that. I said as much in the OP.

... Evan Thompson

Vitalism?

Perhaps I misunderstand 'mode', but I see 'being' simply as 'existing', which is probably not how you're using the term. To me, all these things share the same mode: they are members of this universe, different arrangements of the exact same fundamentals. — noAxioms

Which is, in a word, physicalism - there is only one substance, and it is physical. From within that set of assumptions, Chalmer's and Nagel's types of arguments will always remain unintelligible.