The stick is not bent in the water the Muller-Lyer lines are not unequal length but they appear that way to someone. — Andrew4Handel

They appear that way to everyone, and everyone also knows that the stick isn't bent and that the Muller-Lyer lines are not of unequal length. So how can illusions demonstrate that consciousness is subjective?

Then there is the privacy or memory and pain. I have a lot of information only immediately accessible to me that I can choose to share via language and pain is not something we can share, it is our own and only our pain reactions are publicly observable. — Andrew4Handel

Privacy is only a relative matter. We're not far off being able to read thoughts by observing the brain (in fact I vaguely recall that it was recently done by a research team at a very crude level, as part of research into brain/computer interfacing); though it may not be possible practically (the processes involved may be too mathematically chaotic), that line of progress could in principle lead to being able to record and play back others' thoughts and experiences. But even without that, the experience of being able to "read" someone emotionally just by subtle but overt signs (e.g. flushing, slight twitches) is quite common. There's a continuum - the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system - between the stuff chungling around in the darkness of the skull-case and the observable activity of the body.

Musical tastes differ as people have different reactions to and experiences of the same piece of music. — Andrew4Handel

Musical tastes cluster, and there is quite a lot of statistically-observable agreement on what's good and bad musically, both synchronically and diachronically. Taste has an element of subjectivity, certainly, but it is not completely subjective across the board. But anyway, that's really a different sense of "subjectivity" from the one we're concerned with here, I think.

How can you mispercieve the external world if you are are just having a brute direct experience of it. — Andrew4Handel

Because while experience is direct, perception involves categorization (partly automatic, worked out below the level of consciousness, partly conscious and deliberate), which can go wrong.

IOW "appearing bent even though not bent" is the direct experience, that's just how sticks in water directly turn up in experience. Consistently and for everybody.

None of any of this kind of thing means that we should believe that what we truly are is a mysterious somewhat looking out at the world from behind the eyes, trapped inside the body, that is the true bearer of consciousness. It's all perfectly consistent with the bearer of consciousness being simply the publicly-observable human animal.

There's a slight onomatopoeic irony here though: the illusion of the "inner self" may itself be an illusion of the standard kind (i.e. an illusion the publicly-observable human animal standardly has)! :)

everyone also knows that the stick isn't bent — gurugeorge

The point is that the bent stick is not in the external "objective world" Just because people can agree on some subjective states does not make them less subjective.

I agree that it could be that everyone's visual system and or the nature of light causes the same experience. But It is due to language that we can talk about our mental states not due to them being publicly observable.

I think people take for granted how much information they receive from language. Guessing what someone is experiencing by brain scans is not the same as having direct access to their being.

I have a brother who has had aggressive MS for twenty years, he is paralysed, communicates by blinking, has had pneumonia at least 6 times and so on and I have no idea what it is like to be him. I don't speculate either because when you are caring for someone in that situation you have to ask them what they want and not impose your preconceptions on them.

I can publicly observe aspects of his illness but you could not really believe that is at equivalent to having the illness for twenty years.

The bent stick is a fairly trivial example of a basic illusion that illustrates a lack of direct access to the external world. It is easy for everyone to give a basic report on this illusion. It doesn't mean they have identical experiences of the phenomenology of the experience... but that the stick simply looks bent.

But having the same basic illusion does not amount to having public access to what it is like for someone quite different over a 20 year period.

Musical tastes cluster, and there is quite a lot of statistically-observable agreement on what's good and bad musically, both synchronically and diachronically. Taste has an element of subjectivity, certainly, but it is not completely subjective across the board. But anyway, that's really a different sense of "subjectivity" from the one we're concerned with here, I think. — gurugeorge

I know that there is music other people like that I absolutely dislike and no amount of majority preference could convince me it was good or make me like it. Obviously majority held intuitions do not equal facts.

The only way we can have these differing experiences is due to subjectivity. The music is being experienced differently.

I am not saying different subjective experiences cannot be accounted for by differing brain patterns but that there is an experiencer being subject to experiences that he/she is reporting.

I don't see how something cannot be an experience. If we describe something it is because either we or somebone else experienced or perceived or imagined it.Things like colour, sound and pain have purely experiential qualities that aren't described in objective statements about brain processes.

And it is unclear how pain could exist without consciousness.

The point is that the bent stick is not in the external "objective world" — Andrew4Handel

Who ever thought it was? "Bent" is just the way a stick in water appears. And we all know it, it's not in the least mysterious or "subjective."

Same for other visual illusions, they're just cute anomalies - the only importance they have is that they show that there might have been occasions (especially in our tiger-avoiding past) when glitches like that mattered, and there might be occasions like that now. But any contemporary illusion that we're subject to would still have to be capable of being demonstrated via perception itself.

You can't extrapolate from illusions to the idea that all perception is subjective, because if you accept that there are such things as illusions, then you must accept that some perceptions are objective (specifically, the ones that tell you the previous perception was an illusion).

Just because people can agree on some subjective states does not make them less subjective. — Andrew4Handel

But the fact that they are illusions doesn't mean they aren't objective states.

The distinction between appearance and reality is not a distinction between subjective and objective, both appearance and reality are phases of a process of perception, part of the continuum of objective experience. Subjectivity is just a practical matter of lack of access, not the result of an in-principle barrier.

I am not saying different subjective experiences cannot be accounted for by differing brain patterns but that there is an experiencer being subject to experiences that he/she is reporting. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, and the experiencer is the reporting human animal, not a mysterious ghost trapped inside, and animating, an inert fleshy hulk, or associated with it in some mysterious way.

Really, all the vaunted distinction means, is that I am physically not you, and you are physically not me - the perturbations my being undergoes when looking at a tree are not the same as the perturbations your being undergoes when looking at a tree. Big whoop. That doesn't stop us from both perceiving the same tree.

The distinction between appearance and reality is not a distinction between subjective and objective, — gurugeorge

I think you are failing to grasp the definition of objective and subjective in the sense used with knowledge. This definition from Wikipedia is helpful.

"Objectivity is a central philosophical concept, objective means being independent of the perceptions[thus objectivity means the property of being independent from the perceptions, which has been variously defined by sources. "

I don't think anything can be proven to be independent of the perception and the senses, because we are only aware of things through perception and the senses. Notice that science talks about a lot of concepts pr entities unavailable to immediate perception that are supposed to underlie our perception. Science does not usually validate immediate perception

The point about illusions is they cannot be in the external world and in that sense are subject based and internal. Another examples is if I mistake bush for a cow in the darkness. The seeming like a cow must be happening in my mind.

I am not making a commitment to what the mind is or the experiencer but just that they do exist and are subjective. However there is a dualism to experience in that we can be aware that we are aware. That might be called a meta cognition. "I think therefore I am" I become aware of myself whilst perceiving.Here I am looking to find out how we become that experiencing thing. Even if it is just the brain it is an empirical phenomenal reality that we are a subject or experience.

Consciousness is probably nothing special. It is made of the same substance as everything else — Harry Hindu

Nothing in reality is trivial. The phenomena we discover is all special and not banal and with weird properties. But I don't see consciousness being explained using the same framework we use from the natural sciences.

I think subjectivity is one the most defining, special aspects of mind. It is easy to imagine that we all experience a tree in a similar way but we have immediate access to our private mental states and bodily sensations in a way unlike the public access to trees and their cells and biochemistry etc.

I think expanding physics or exploring the role of the observer in physics and observer relativity is probably more useful than trying to exorcise consciousness or subjectivity from science.

Like Descartes I believe we can be more certain of our conscious existence then anything. So that when I have been deeply unconscious everything ceases to exist for me and becomes somewhat irrelevant. So consciousness is not like a weak irrelevant epiphenomenon and something to tap onto to the end of an exhaustive physicalist framework imo.

objective means being independent of the perceptions — Andrew4Handel

It's not that I don't understand that idea, it's that I think it's incoherent, and that I understand objectivity to be simply scientific objectivity (sticking to the facts, freedom from biases, value-free). IOW, I think objectivity in that "independent of perception" sense was a way of trying to encapsulate a metaphysical distinction that was at one time thought to be the cause of the necessity for the practice of objectivity - but it isn't.

I don't think anything can be proven to be independent of the perception and the senses, because we are only aware of things through perception and the senses. — Andrew4Handel

And we can be objective or not about that - whereas if you're talking about something that can't be proven to be "independent of perception and the senses" then what are you talking about?

The objective is "independent of perception" in an unproblematic way - its existence is independent of the act (any given act) of perception. But that doesn't mean it can't be perceived, or is metaphysically independent of perception as a process.

Another examples is if I mistake bush for a cow in the darkness. The seeming like a cow must be happening in my mind. — Andrew4Handel

No, that's just how the bush looks under those conditions. The phenomenon that's objectively happening is that there's a causal chain from the bush to your brain, that includes both the bush and your brain, that results in the bush "looking like a cow" under those conditions. That doesn't need to happen "in" something, or "in" some kind of mysterious subjective realm.

To put it another way, the bush presents as a cow under those conditions. Your unique physiology and brain state at that moment (your "subjectivity" in that sense) certainly have something to do with it, but so does the bush itself, the ambient light, etc. The total phenomenon under consideration is not something that's just occurring in your brain, or in a subjective "mind," it's a total phenomenon that's spread out in space and time, part of which is external to your body. (What I'm touting is a kind of Externalism, btw.)

No, that's just how the bush looks under those conditions — gurugeorge

It can only "look" like something if you have a mind.

Different animals have different visual capacities and things look very different under a microscope or at the atomic level. There is no independent way of something being in the world.

It seems to me that you are claiming that any perspective on anything is dependent on external input but that seems trivial if true. It might be but it might not be. But what different perspectives require is a mind. A coin can appear different from different angles but these are not part of the nature of the coin.

An unconscious object has no perspective.

I don't see how belief in an external world rules out belief in an internal world. A dream is a clear example of something internal or mental. I have vivid dreams which are photographic sometimes with sounds. If the dreams are based on the external world then they must be based on stored memories of it not immediate access.

To have rich veridical-truthful access to an external world like we seem to have would require immense sensory apparatus and conscious access to the product of this sensory scheme. That is to say the more accurate we believe our experiences to be the more sophisticated our means of capturing details of the external world must be.

I think Descartes thought God gave us honest perceptions because God is not a liar. Now evolutionary theorists claim that we must have accurate perceptions because they favour our survival so would have been selected for.
However I think as I said earlier that only an explanation of consciousness can resolve the issue of the validity of our perceptions.

Nothing in reality is trivial. The phenomena we discover is all special and not banal and with weird properties. But I don't see consciousness being explained using the same framework we use from the natural sciences. — Andrew4Handel

I was being objective in saying that consciousness isn't any more important than any other natural process. Of course a conscious being would think that their consciousness is special, but that in itself is subjective and isn't conductive to scientific research. The sciences attempt to establish a view from everywhere (objective) that can apply the same explanation to all conscious beings and explain why they all are conscious and why it is useful to have it.

I think subjectivity is one the most defining, special aspects of mind. It is easy to imagine that we all experience a tree in a similar way but we have immediate access to our private mental states and bodily sensations in a way unlike the public access to trees and their cells and biochemistry etc. — Andrew4Handel

Do we really have different access to a tree than we do with each others minds? Your mental states and bodily sensations are indirectly accessed by observing your behaviors. When we look at a tree, we only see the outer layer and it's behavior. What we are able to see is only what light can reflect off of, which is why we can't see atoms. Light doesn't reflect off of conscious experiences. Conscious experiences are a partially produced from the information we receive via light entering our eyes.

Subjectivity isn't special. You thinking it is isn't productive to getting at what it is. You are making a value judgement, not an explanation that would be useful to everyone who has subjective experiences. Subjectivity is simply a unique array of sensory information. We each have our own unique array of sensory information and memories that are used to interpret it. It really isn't that difficult to explain when you step out of your subjective value judgements and look at things more objectively. Your view is reflective of how humans have looked at consciousness since we've started trying to explain it. It is time for a paradigm shift.

I think expanding physics or exploring the role of the observer in physics and observer relativity is probably more useful than trying to exorcise consciousness or subjectivity from science. — Andrew4Handel

You mean like QM?

Like Descartes I believe we can be more certain of our conscious existence then anything. So that when I have been deeply unconscious everything ceases to exist for me and becomes somewhat irrelevant. So consciousness is not like a weak irrelevant epiphenomenon and something to tap onto to the end of an exhaustive physicalist framework imo. — Andrew4Handel

I never said it was irrelevant. I said it wasn't special. There is a difference. Consciousness needs to be explained. It just needs to be explained objectively - without making any value judgements (which are only useful for yourself). It needs an explanation that gets at what consciousness is and how it related to the world, why it is useful to have it, and how each person has their own version (subjectivity).

A coin can appear different from different angles but these are not part of the nature of the coin. — Andrew4Handel

This is our fundamental disagreement. They are very much part of the nature of the coin, in the sense that they are ways the coin exists under those conditions. IOW, the interposition of our body and brain at just that point in space and time affords the object an opportunity to exist in a way that it otherwise couldn't have.

It's all about existence, there's nothing at our end that "has" a "representation," objects are not causes of a doubled-up "inner" world; there's just solid, standing existence of a particular type, that couldn't exist without both us (the physical us) and the object, in just those positions.

It's the same with dreams, images, etc. - they're just jumbled, time-delayed perceptions. Or from a physical point of view, one might say they're re-circulating reverberations or echos of the perturbations in one's substance that the real objects produced; the re-stimulated our-half of a split boiled egg, with the fractal break having the precise "negative" contours of the of the other half of the egg.

I very much like your phrase "an unconscious object has no perspective," but to me that's a neat encapsulation of a false view :) The "unconscious object" has all sorts of perspectives with all the things it's interacting with other than us, when we're not interacting with it; and the sum total of those, plus those forms of existence it has when it is interacting with us, is the sum total of its existence.

It's animation of a location. What's called consciousness is an obstruction. The process of masking over an undifferentiated continuum is the formation of consciousness in the particular. A light comes about a center of gravity. This is the consciousness of an area. The field is constant, the contents change. The claim for an immaterial mind can only come from an immaterial person or someone mistaking a reflection as its' source.

This whole "awareness" thing. It is an elusive concept. It appears, from double split experiments involving firing atoms rather than light, that "awareness" still merely produces effects we expect.

This, therefore, does not give any validity to there being any such thing as us being aware.

It appears we really don't have awareness. It appears to be impossible to be objective about experience.

We aren't actually aware. Just some stuff arises. What is the stuff? I don't know.

I think some aspects of consciousness are undeniable in a similar way to pain.

If someone is in pain it seems that being theoretically skeptical about it does not make sense.
You can be skeptical about perceptions because your eyes might be deceiving you but all it takes to class something as pain is to be an unpleasant sensation. Even if the a pain is psychosomatic.

It seems sinister, if someone is claiming to be in severe pain, to then demand rigorous objective evidence as if you are immune to empathising with other people.
I think being skeptical about other mental states can be equally distasteful, undermining or unhelpful.

Unfortunately people with chronic pain and no bodily injury do face skepticism and mental health issues cause skepticism because of peoples skepticism about hidden mental states.
If someone has a big wound most people will assume, or accept, that they are in pain or if someone is writhing around as if in agony.
So why do people think people can accurately report some mental states and not others and what grounds have they for differentiating?

I can reject a theorists model of consciousness or self just by comparing it with my own experience. I think people should do phenomenology and reflect as honestly and (non theoretically) as possible on their mental states and not try and base theories around other ideologies.

It is ironic that some thinkers who seek to diminish qualities of human conscious at the same time seek to elevate the qualities of other organism mental states (kind of like a misanthropic-anthropomorphism)

This is our fundamental disagreement. They are very much part of the nature of the coin — gurugeorge

It seems to me that somethings appearance is a property of the visual system and not the object.

For example people perceive colours differently and it seems to be implausible to claim the object is both colours at once. It is easier to say that the object is individually represent as such. Also when something big seems small because it is far away raises similar issues.

I just can't imagine anything you could say about an unperceived object. (I don't see that physics supports naive realism)
At the very least we need an observer who is separate from an object to discuss it and I am trying to explore that location of the person having these perceptions of some kind of reality.

(..)because if you accept that there are such things as illusions, then you must accept that some perceptions are objective — gurugeorge

I am not sure this follows.

For example if your father tells you on his death bed that you are adopted. You have discovered he is not your father but you don't know who your real father is.

I think an illusion just shows the possibility of experience being deceptive. Because it casts doubt on the validity of a former experience.

That is why I think only a full account of consciousness can stop skepticism. I think if know full how we are able to be conscious of a stick in water bent or otherwise then we will know how valid our perception is.

It seems to me that somethings appearance is a property of the visual system and not the object. — Andrew4Handel

Why can't it be a bit of both? That an object looks yellow to the jaundiced eye is as much a property of the object as of the jaundiced person. Again: bent-looking is just how sticks show up in water, in the same way that straight-looking is how sticks show up outside water. The "seeming as" is just as dependent on the object and on surrounding conditions as it is on the observer. Presenting-as-small while in the distance is a property of the object in interaction with the observer.

I think an illusion just shows the possibility of experience being deceptive. Because it casts doubt on the validity of a former experience. — Andrew4Handel

But it doesn't cast doubt on the validity of the experience that reveals that the former experience was an illusion, does it? If you accept that the former experience was an illusion, then you've implicitly accepted the validity of the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.

If you accept that there's such a thing as illusion at all, then you must accept that there's some valid perception somewhere, namely, at the very least, the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.

But then it makes no sense whatsoever to wonder whether all experience "could be illusory." You've already denied that possibility by accepting that you've had an illusion.

All the possibility of illusion shows is that any given experience could be illusory, not that the whole series of experiences could be illusory. To put that another way, all it shows is that testing for illusion is possible with any given experience. But how do we test for illusion?
We test for illusion on the basis of testing experiences we accept as validly revealing illusion.

At the very least we need an observer who is separate from an object to discuss it and I am trying to explore that location of the person having these perceptions of some kind of reality. — Andrew4Handel

The observer is the human animal who's observing and physically distinct from the observed object, as I said. What the observer is not, is a mysterious inner entity having experience as something metaphysically distinct from reality.

As Thomas Nagel says "Objectivity is a view from nowhere" — Andrew4Handel

I think this is wrong. Objectivity is a view from everywhere, not nowhere. Obviously I can't have a view from everywhere, so others are needed for that, and objectivity is thus really intersubjectivity. Solipsism is nonsensical.

I had my first solipsistic ideas when I was thinking about gods in my mid twenties. I was brought up in a strict religious household with a hell and damnation god. I left at 17. So later I was reflecting on things like existence and also the supposed nature of God.

I somehow got to thinking that if no conscious beings existed (observers) it would weaken God.
Because in that scenario God could do all manner of miracles, making planets appear and so on but no one would there to acknowledge it. I also imagined God being lonely.

So I thought a god would want to create conscious beings to have his existence acknowledged and have company, but then once they became conscious they could reject him. That seemed to give the individual a certain power because a god creates them to be validated and then he can't just make them robots because that would make there relationship with him pointless.

So I was thinking about this dynamic, that a supposed omnipotent god could be disempowered by his reliance on someone else's consciousness. That made me realise consciousness was a powerful thing in this role of illuminating things existence and adding value.But also the relationship seemed solipsistic where the observer imposes value on something.

Before I thought about all that I had thought about how even the most famous celebrity in the world was probably unknown to a Mongolian herder (and to all the people who died before they became famous). so it is like you can't transcend a lack of personal awareness.....since then I have felt trapped in my own consciousness more then ever.