Quaila belongs by definition. I am my experience, not yours or anyone else's. You can never access my quaila no matter how much you feel or think like me. It's MY Being and cannot be anyone else's. That's what it means to exist as being of experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness
In terms of the "hard problem," semiotic theory considers it either incoherent or irrelevant. Since qualia doesn't have an apparent logical structure, there's nothing to say about it with the constraints of logic. — TheWillowOfDarkness
So even phenomenology has an irreducible Kantian issue in thinking it can talk about the thing in itself which would be naked or primal experience. Any attempt at description is already categoric and so immediately into the obvious problems of being a model of the thing. You can't just look and check in a naively realistic way to see what is there. Already you have introduced the further theoretical constructs of this "you" and "the thing" which is being checked. — apokrisis
If matter has subjectivity, then why don't animals have it? — tom
Whitehead was not a panpsychist, but a pan-experientialist; a distinction which Whitehead himself was at pains to emphasize. — John
I would argue that animals do have subjectivity- they have a "what it's like aspect". It may not be self-awareness though. — schopenhauer1
So, you are going to bypass this problem by ignoring it and go on to more answerable problems? Then you are not answering the question at hand. The naked primal experience is at hand. — schopenhauer1
You've lost me in apparent contradiction. You say that we can think illogical thoughts, but this is not really thinking. We can establish mental relations "that don't have relation of logical entailment", but even those thoughts "must have some kind of associative logic". Do you see the contradiction? — Metaphysician Undercover
You and apokrisis alike, seem to be obsessed with this preconceived notion that the freedom within, the local freedom, is necessarily constrained by a larger, global constraint system. But this is clearly not the case, if there are prior constraints on the local freedoms, these must be inherent within, and not of a global character at all. — Metaphysician Undercover
Language is also obviously constrained by actuality, by the nature of what is experienced. It also comes to constrain that experience; it is a reciprocal or symbiotic relation between perception and conception. For me that natural primordial symbiosis consists in the reception of, response to and creation of signs, and I suspect apokrisis would agree. — John
But if I merely present a number of thoughts with nothing at all to connect them, then that would not really be thinking; it would just be presenting or laying out a set of random thoughts. It cannot be a process if it is just a series of disconnected thought events; so I say it cannot be counted as 'thinking'. — John
Now you contradict yourself again, here. You say that what we can think is constrained by language, then in brackets you say that it is not really constrained by language, thought extends beyond the constraints of language. Which do you believe is the case? Is thought constrained by language, or does it extend beyond the confines of language? If thought extends beyond the constraints of language, as you say in brackets, then your original claim, that what we can think is constrained by language, is clearly false.What we can think is obviously both augmented and constrained by language, for a start. (Note: just to anticipate a possible misinterpretation I think you are likely to commit, I am not saying thought is impossible without language; it might be reasonable to claim that, but that would be a stronger claim than my argument relies on, so I don't need to make it here). — John
Language is also obviously constrained by actuality, by the nature of what is experienced. It also comes to constrain that experience; it is a reciprocal or symbiotic relation between perception and conception. — John
My qualia is part of my existence. We can't discuss someone's qualia without talking about a part of the world which is them. It is unique. There no other state of the world is my qualia. — TheWillowOfDarkness
By definition the scientist and robot do not possess equivalent hardware. One produces their quale of blue when given the pill, the other does not. The difference is already within their existence. — TheWillowOfDarkness
You ask what could bring about the difference, but we already know: a human body with the pill produced the scientist's blue quale, while in the case of the robot body, there was no production of quale. — TheWillowOfDarkness
I'm not going to waste any more time replying to false accusations of contradiction. Put your magnifying glasses on and read it again properly this time. :-} — John
↪Metaphysician Undercover Image recognition software doesn't possess qualia either. — tom
Have a browse of the essays of Steve Talbott at the New Atlantis. He's not an advocate of semiotics as such, rather a kind of independent philosopher of biology, more aligned with Owen Barfield (although there is some commonality). Have a look in particular at Logic, DNA and Poetry, which touches on some of the themes suggested by the above quote. (He's a friendly guy, too, I wrote to him a few times and he was very responsive.) — Wayfarer
The problem is that their insistence upon textual mechanisms blinds them even to the most obvious aspects of language — aspects that prove crucial for understanding the organism. If I am speaking to you in a logically or grammatically proper fashion, then you can safely predict that my next sentence will respect the rules of logic and grammar. But this does not even come close to telling you what I will say. Really, it’s not a hard truth to see: neither grammatical nor logical rules determine the speech in which they are found. Rather, they only tell us something about how we speak, not what we say or who we are as speaking beings.
If geneticists would reckon fully with this one central truth, it would transform their discipline. They would no longer imagine they could read the significance of the genetic text merely by laying bare the rules of a molecular syntax. And they would quickly realize other characteristics of the textual language they incessantly appeal to — for example, that meaning flows from the larger context into the specific words, altering the significance of the words. This is something you experience every time you find yourself able, while hearing a sentence, to select between words that sound alike but have different meanings. The context tells you which one makes sense.
Experiences aren't generated separate to the triad monism. They are part of it. The "hard problem" misunderstands consciousness. It thinks it something separate to the world, outside its formal cause (from a semiotic theory perspective), so it just misses the boat completely in its analysis of experiences and the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Experience doesn't have a formal cause separate to the world. That's what emergence means. — TheWillowOfDarkness
From a dualist perceptive (i.e. experience has a formal cause separate to the rest of the world), emergence isn't "unexplained," it's impossible. No account of consciousness works because the dualist considers it be outside and separate to the things that exist ( "body"). — TheWillowOfDarkness
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