I don't quite think this is going to go anywhere. Take care. — AmadeusD

This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney.

“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney. — T Clark

Have you thought about working that up into an article?

This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney. — T Clark

I have sometimes used analogies to try to get this idea across. But I really don't think it's necessary. Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials?

Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials? — Patterner

I don't find this question as helpful as you do, because I think the "stuff" model used here doesn't capture what we're interested in. There are no non-physical things on offer.

Set aside consciousness for a moment.

What about something like your voice? The sound you make when you speak is obviously physical, and produced physically by physical, if biological, machinery. Physical as you like. But that's not your voice. Your voice is the individual pattern of pronunciation and accent and prosody and timbre, and we could ask about those individually as well. We know how you as an organism produce sound—there's no mystery about the mechanisms involved—but there are a lot of different voices you could have ended up with, and nothing about your physical makeup that could predict this one.

A similar example is gait. I've been told I have my father's walk. My brother does not. It's again a clearly physical process, but the pattern of how I walk, or how I stand, my carriage and posture, there are who knows how many possible patterns of behavior I could have ended up with, all using this same body and the same mechanisms.

These are not even processes exactly that we're talking about, but patterns in how those processes occur. Obviously a better analogy for consciousness than a "thing".

So would you call your voice or my gait a physical thing? Not walking and talking, mind you, which we can just stipulate are physical processes, if not things, but voice, gait, carriage, and so on.

First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist, such that consciousness has to be found a home in that picture (a project that is then problematic).

This is already problematic - for if making a particular assumption generates problems that would not have arisen otherwise, then the sensible thing to do is to give up the assumption, not double-down on it! — Clarendon

Clarendon, may I interest you in going back to your original post and provide me the opportunity to dissect it?

When you start your OP with First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist,, this is already problematic and doesn't do justice to the principles of physicalism. Physicalism is a supervenient principle -- the proponents of physicalism never claimed that the physical is what ultimately exists. I stand to be corrected if you could point me to the right direction.

A supervenient thesis doesn't claim that there's ultimate reality represented by only one entity -- that job was done by the pre-socratics. And we're not in that epoch anymore.
What physicalism claims is that there is causation, there is energy, there's science to support the entailment of consciousness. We have progressed so much in science that we can absolutely claim that the external stimulation can change our brain. Consciousness is not one way -- it is a bidirectional interaction between the external stimuli and the mechanisms in the brain.

You can study consciousness by science. But the problem is, you will not see or observe actual consciousness itself, no matter what you dissect and look into. It is not in the form of matter.

You will only observe the telltale signs, functions and behavior of consciousness from the conscious living people and animals. — Corvus

I don't know what else to make of this comment, Corvus, but to simply say if an opinion could be marked "Fail", this is it.

No one here, or in any philosophical writing I've read, is asking to observe the embodiment of consciousness. What would that look like? A square-triangular oblong?
And what does "You will only observe the telltale signs...from the conscious living people and animals" mean? Our whole constitution is conscious! It is certainly not just telltale signs.

I don't know what else to make of this comment, Corvus, but to simply say if an opinion could be marked "Fail", this is it. — L'éléphant

It is up to you how you read and understand others opinions and interpretations on the point. No one can dictate how you feel and understand it. That is the exact point about consciousness too.

And what does "You will only observe the telltale signs...from the conscious living people and animals" mean? Our whole constitution is conscious! It is certainly not just telltale signs. — L'éléphant

Your comment sounds like a pretense just like what the politicians do and say. There is no logical or factual content in it.

I’ve already told him I disagree with him. Now it appears I disagree with you too. — T Clark

Science is based on observation and experiments for their laws and theories. When science is working and claiming their own metaphysical views on the invisible or non-existent objects, often it turns to alchemy and magic with the devious pretense, hence it is sensible we keep our minds open with investigative motives on these topics, and keep the traditional philosophical traditions alert with analytic methods.

In general, that’s true, but I’m not interested in taking it up right now. — T Clark

I have absolutely no idea what is in your mind, apart from a telltale sign of your unwillingness for further discussions on this topic. Happy days. :smirk:

I never claimed otherwise. When one level of organization emerges from another, they aren’t the same thing. Living organisms are not the same thing as the chemicals that make them up. — T Clark

And one more thing. I have no access to your subatomic structure for your consciousness. I doubt if anyone else does. The only way I can access your consciousness is by your mind expressed in the statements you are making. If you were in front of me while making the statements, I would also be able to see your facial expressions too for accessing your consciousness. That's all there is to it.

Nothing to do with the chemicals in your head or subatomic structure of the brain. All I know is that you have the biological living body, and nothing more I know further apart from your statements on the state of your mind. It is the most honest and realistic analysis on the consciousness of humans.

I don't know if we can set consciousness aside in any aspect of voice or gait, but we can't in all of them. The most obvious is timbre. Why do a trumpet, French horn, and trombone have different timbres? As with bananas, avocados, and tomatoes having different colors, one part of the answer is purely physics. The air going through a tube of this diameter and length vibrates differently than the air going through a tube of that diameter and length. Same with our voices. No two people have identical vocal cords or throats, so the purely physical vibrations that our speech produce in the air cannot be the same, even if just holding one vowel.

But part of the answer is consciousness. Qualia don't exist without consciousness. An electronic device that registers and compares the two of us just holding one vowel doesn't hear timbre any more than another device sees the colors of avocados, bananas, and tomatoes.

Sorry, I can't post anymore at the moment. Just beginning what is going to be a fairly horrifying day of work.

Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials? — Patterner

To be clear, arguments about your question were not what I was calling "pseudo-science."

Now to answer. Let me think...well...I guess the answer is "yes." The example I always come back to is biological life. Is life physical? I'd say no in the same sense we'd say consciousness isn't. Chemicals behave in certain ways. Life is just one of the ways chemicals behave. Historically, people have asked the same kinds of questions about life you're asking about consciousness. To them, there must be something else, something added beyond the chemistry.

I think consciousness is more difficult to get a grasp on because it's so personal. It feels different from the other things we interact with. And, of course, that's the problem. Subjective experience is, in our subjective experience, different from those things we call "physical."

Hey!!! You tricked me into talking about the hard problem of consciousness.

No two people have identical vocal cords — Patterner

I thought this might say something like this.

Your plan is to say that your voice is different from mine because there are identifiable physical differences between us that cause you to produce your voice and me to produce mine.

Sure. But the fact remains that if I had been adopted as an infant, and grown up in a different place, among different people, I would very likely have a different voice, because I would have a different history. That history is encoded physically in my body, so that by the time I reach maturity there are recognizable patterns in my behavior, like my voice and my gait. Those patterns are pretty robust, but even they change over time, most obviously due to aging.

You could not look at infant me, however closely, and predict my adult voice, much less identify me as a human infant and predict my adult voice, because they're all the same, or note that I am a physical object and I will later make the sounds characteristic of a physical object.

It's all in there, physically, I assume. But my voice is encoded in me physically much the way my vocabulary is. It's the encoding of my history and the reinforcement of my behavior, and it leaves a physical trace, which you could, maybe, in theory, maybe, find, if we knew a helluva a lot more about the brain.

The behavior of physical objects is not reliably only a matter of the laws of physics and chemistry, but depends on their history, on information and its encoding, and, finally, on chance. Obligatory chess analogy: white played Be4 in this position "because" bishops move diagonally, is nonsense; play is in accordance with the rules, not determined by them, and not explained by them.

Why am I talking about all this? Because I think you see a gulf between the physical and the mental that I don't, and part of that is that you think the physical world is much simpler and easier to understand than I do.

Fair enough if this is where you land. It seems clear, based on this response, that you're not adequately taking into account what Chalmers is saying there. It is a physicalist account which leaves no gaps. If its unsatisfying to you, make the arguments.

Otherwise, I agree.

First, physicalism does claim that everything that exists is ultimately physical, in the sense that all facts supervene on physical facts. Denying that physicalism is committed to this simply misunderstands the position.

Second, appealing to supervenience does no work here. Supervenience states a dependency relation; it does not explain how a wholly new kind of property could come into existence from a base that entirely lacks it. It is irrelevant, then, to the issue at hand.

Third, nothing I have said denies that external stimuli affect the brain, or that there are correlations, mechanisms, and bidirectional interactions. Such observations are beside the point. They do nothing at all to explain how consciousness could arise from combining objects that entirely lack it.

So unless you think that supervenience allows you to get out what was never put in, you have not yet engaged with the argument.

You are clearly assuming that any hard problem of consciousness just is the one Chalmers is talking about. It is not. This is the 'hard problem' fallacy, we might say. Anyone who raises a hard problem of consciousness 'must' be talking about what Chalmers is talking about. No, if you understood Chalmers you'd understand that in my opening post I was explaining why the 'hard' probem he perceives there to be is a pseudo problem.

Chalmers’s hard problem concerns explanation: that functional and causal accounts leave consciousness no work to do. My point is not that one at all. It concerns generation: whether a property of a wholly new kind could come into existence from a base that contains nothing of that kind at all ( to which the answer is a self-evident 'no'). You don't seem to be grasping the difference.

Chalmers does not resolve that problem. He sidesteps it by positing fundamental psychophysical laws. But that is not an answer to the generative question. It simply says that consciousness appears because the laws say so. But such laws are just labels for magic, not solutions. It's not different from explaining how the magician produced a rabbit from the apparently empty hat by simply saying 'there is a hat-rabbit law'.

So this is not a matter of my rejecting Chalmers’s solution. There's no solution to reject. But anyway, as you're clearly locked-in to thinking that any and all hard problems of consciousness are the ones Chalmers was talking about, there is - again - no point in us continuing this (about which we already agreed, I thought).

You are describing exactly what I have already granted: weak emergence.

Voice, gait, accent, vocabulary, chess moves - they're all patterns of behaviour realised in physical processes that already have the relevant kind. No new kind of property appears. Nothing phenomenal is generated.

The fact that history matters, that outcomes are not predictable from initial conditions, or that laws underdetermine behaviour is completely irrelevant. Indeterminacy and complexity do not create new kinds of state; they only select among possible instances of the same kind.

So nothing you have said even begins to touch the argument. You have given a catalogue of weakly emergent patterns and treated that as if it showed how a wholly new kind of property could arise. It does not.