Is it consciousness they call an illusion? Or only the so-called phenomenal character, or qualia, or subjective experience... or some such putative feature contentiously associated with consciousness in philosophical discourses?Yes, that's what saying consciousness is an illusion amounts to. — Marchesk
If so, then it seems it's not consciousness per se that they call an illusion, but only some more subtle aspect that many of us insist belongs to consciousness, something like phenomenal character. Is that right, or am I off the mark in assessing their view? — Cabbage Farmer
I'm still not clear whether there is a consensus view in this conversation with respect to what counts as a zombie, and what features of consciousness the zombie is said not to possess. So far I have the impression that many of us are speaking at cross-purposes, with different conceptions of p-zombie in mind. Is there perhaps an authoritative source in the literature we might turn to for a concise characterization we might use as a guide in this discussion?Nor am I. A p-zombie could not act exactly like a conscious human being because it is by definition not conscious. Even if consciousness were an illusion, we act in many of the ways we do, and say many of the things we do, because we think of ourselves as being conscious, and the p-zombie could not have such a self-reflexive self-understanding. — Janus
I'm still not clear whether there is a consensus view in this conversation with respect to what counts as a zombie, and what features of consciousness the zombie is said not to possess. So far I have the impression that many of us are speaking at cross-purposes, with different conceptions of p-zombie in mind. — Cabbage Farmer
Actually, that doesn't follow at all. The only thing that follows from "our experience of the world is not immediate" is itself: our experience of the world is not immediate. — Terrapin Station
reflexive simulated awareness — Cabbage Farmer
(simulated) cognitive equipment — Cabbage Farmer
(simulated) knowledge of itself — Cabbage Farmer
(simulated) introspective bases of noninferential (simulated) knowledge acquisition. — Cabbage Farmer
So there are no "qualia", there is only "virtual glue". Forgive me if I dont see an improvement, or anything different than someone saying, "There is no God, only Allah".There are no qualia, instead there is something akin to the idea of "virtual glue" that performs the functional and informational roles that qualia is supposed to be playing. — Marchesk
For several reasons, researchers have typically either postponed addressing this question [the hard question] or failed to recognize—and assert—that their research on the ‘easy problems’ can be seen as addressing and resolving aspects of the hard question, thereby indirectly dismantling the hard problem piece by piece, without need of any revolution in science.
..the widespread conviction that qualia, thus conceived, must obviously exist if we are to make sense of our introspective access to them, is an illusion, not an optical illusion or auditory illusion, but a theorist's illusion, an artefact of bad theory, not observation. Richard Power nicely captures the source of this illusion. — D Dennett
We know that our perceptions or imaginings of trees, faces, etc. are distinct from the objects themselves. They are internal representations, representations in our minds. — R Power
We understand the concept of representation from external representations, such as pictures, or verbal descriptions. For these representations we can have direct experience of both a representer (e.g. portrait painting) and a representee (e.g. the person painted). Call these the medium and the content. Thus for the Mona Lisa, the medium is a painting that hangs in the Louvre; the content is an Italian woman who modelled for the artist centuries ago. Medium and content may have attributes in common, if the representation is iconic (as they say in Semiotics). Oval partly-brown patches in the painting resemble the oval brown eyes of the Italian lady. But usually medium and content are of different stuff: oil on canvas, in the case of the Mona Lisa, as against human flesh. And in many cases the representation is symbolic, so that medium and content share no features. — R Power
Evidently some of the professionals paid to philosophize and to instruct students in their art seem to think it's a pretty big deal. Me personally, I'm not sure there's any deal here at all. It may yet turn out to have been another of those pseudoproblems on which philosophers squander social resources, misleading and confusing each other along with the laity, leaving their own special mess in the literature for two or three generations until academic fashions shift professional attention to some new fantastic output of the rational imagination.That's correct, but it'd kind of a big deal to deny the phenomenal aspect, yes? — Marchesk
Even in cases of pain, the subjective experience is correlated with and directs us to objective states of affairs inside and outside the sentient animal's body.I understand the argument to be a denial of experiencing pain, pleasure, heat, cold, music, bitter, sweet, joy, anger, indigo, pink.
Of course the objective correlation to those experiences remain for the illusionist. I kick a rock and and act as if I have a pain in my foot and my neural activity agrees with my behavior (I'm not faking it), then, that's all there is to the pain. With the addition of some mechanism that creates an illusion of feeling the pain. — Marchesk
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html
But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.
~Michael S. A. Graziano
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html
I'll say it has no "subjective experience with phenomenal character"; but allow that it does have simulated subjectivity. It has features we ordinarily associate with subjectivity: It seems to have a point of view; it seems to observe and report reliably; it seems to act rationally with respect to a priority of values and purposes; it acquires, organizes, reports on, and otherwise acts on "information" about its environment, including the part of its environment we identify with the thing in question.A p-zombie is missing the experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels. Thus it has no subjectivity. The zombie is identical in every other way. — Marchesk
Arguably the p-zombies, as well as some sorts of advanced AI, would each have a sort of first-person point of view. I mean, we can say they make reliable introspective reports analogous to ours. For instance about states of appetite and emotion, about goals and plans and intentions, pains, sense-perceptions, memories, daydreams....There are some interesting consequences for this argument. An identical p-zombie universe would still have all the same stories we have. But many stories have first person points of view. So how do p-zombies understand reading or watching someone's thoughts or dreams? How do they make sense of a character undergoing intense emotion not apparent to other characters? — Marchesk
Do you mean, what's the difference between the imitation and the genuine article? As I've noted, this seems to me a definitional question, at least in part.Can we posit any cogent distinctions between these "simulations" and reflexive awareness, cognitive equipment, knowledge of self and introspective bases of non-inferential knowledge acquisition? — Janus
I haven't read much Chalmers.What motivates p-zombie Chalmers to make arguments for the hard problem, since the hard problem cannot exist by definition in the p-zombie universe? — Marchesk
I've brought Graziano's theories to the forum before - primarily his attention-schema theory of consciousness. I believe that what he is proposing is that attention is interpreted as the point of subjectivity. The existence of attention is what provides that feeling of being in your head and attending to the contents of the mind. It is really just a brain mechanism of amplifying certain sensory signals over others.Here's an outright denial that credits Dennett and P. Churchland: — Marchesk
P-zombies would use language in a way that would never refer to colors or sounds or feelings. They would use language in a way that refers to the causes of colors and sounds and feelings. They wouldn't use terms like, "red", "loud" or "painful". They would use terms like "680 nanometers" (the wavelength of EM energy that is registered as "red" in the mind), "amplitude", or "injury". In a sense they would use language as if they had a view from no where. They would never say that an apple is red. They could only say that the apple is ripe.There are some interesting consequences for this argument. An identical p-zombie universe would still have all the same stories we have. But many stories have first person points of view. So how do p-zombies understand reading or watching someone's thoughts or dreams? How do they make sense of a character undergoing intense emotion not apparent to other characters? — Marchesk
Arguably the p-zombies, as well as some sorts of advanced AI, would each have a sort of first-person point of view. I mean, we can say they make reliable introspective reports analogous to ours. For instance about states of appetite and emotion, about goals and plans and intentions, pains, sense-perceptions, memories, daydreams....
Their observations and reports about things outside them as mediated by sense-receptors will be as fine-grained and reliable as ours; and their observations and reports about things inside them as mediated by "introspective processes" will be as fine-grained and reliable as ours. I believe this comes by definition in these discourses; this is part of what it means to be a p-zombie, if there could be such a thing. — Cabbage Farmer
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
Electro-magnetic radiation exists out in the world — Harry Hindu
And that electromagnetic radiation is what we're calling color out in the world. — Terrapin Station
And that electromagnetic radiation is what we're calling color out in the world. — Terrapin Station
As if anyone thought that a perception of a tree might be, in fact, identical to the tree. I know that Dennett has made comments in that vein a number of times as if he's saying something insightful. — Terrapin Station
The two idioms you gesture at here, which I might distinguish as ordinary language and scientific language, are both cultural products of human animals, cumulatively informed by experience of the empirical world as it appears to us.P-zombies would use language in a way that would never refer to colors or sounds or feelings. They would use language in a way that refers to the causes of colors and sounds and feelings. They wouldn't use terms like, "red", "loud" or "painful". They would use terms like "680 nanometers" (the wavelength of EM energy that is registered as "red" in the mind), "amplitude", or "injury". In a sense they would use language as if they had a view from no where. They would never say that an apple is red. They could only say that the apple is ripe. — Harry Hindu
I haven't read enough Dennett to answer for him, and I don't believe I'm acquainted with Graziano.The question I have is how does a 680 nanometer wavelength of EM energy convert into the color red? I can imagine wavelengths as black wavy lines and then I can imagine a blotch of the color red as two separate things. Are Graziano and Dennett both saying that there are no wavelengths of EM energy and that red exists out in the world which we access directly? — Harry Hindu
To me it makes more sense to say that our color concepts range over physical objects. The word "red" is a name primarily for wavelengths of a certain frequency-range with fuzzy boundaries; and is a name derivatively for physical objects that emit or reflect light of the specified range "in ordinary circumstances". — Cabbage Farmer
Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses? — Cabbage Farmer
It seems to me I have it the right way, and go a bit further than you allow. I trace the phenomena to the places they seem to appear, even when they appear outside heads.This has it backwards. Our color concepts come from experience prior to any scientific understanding of optics, and then they were mapped onto the science as a correlation with our color experiences. — Marchesk
I would reject the claim that the story I tell about color "explains away the phenomenal"; and I believe that story is in line with a contemporary scientific account of color.This is where the scientific explaining away of the phenomenal goes wrong. It assumes science is apriori and experience comes after. But it's the other way around. Science comes from experience. Its basis is empiricism. — Marchesk
Only a narrow band of it. The rest of it has no color for us. — Marchesk
As if anyone thought that the perception of EM energy (redness) might be identical to the EM energy.
If they arent identical then how can we be referring to the same thing? How does red differ from EM wavelenghts of 680 nm? — Harry Hindu
Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses? — Cabbage Farmer
Yes, but I'm skeptical of p-zombie argument because I don't think it makes sense for them to make the same arguments about consciousness. — Marchesk
I don't recall anyone arguing about it, but on my read it's been tough to ferret what consensus there may be about the definition we're trying here; and occasionally an interlocutor's remark has led me to wonder if we have different conceptions in mind.I haven't read every post and I didn't see people arguing with you about that, but yes. That's what a p-zombie is. — Terrapin Station
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.