To restratre my main point in the OP:

If colors, pains, etc. are an illusion, what makes us think the world we perceive is any better off?

I was thinking about this today and I remembered how TGW would talk about the Cyreneics, and how they went to the opposite extreme regarding perception, and denied that we knew anything about objects or the world. Instead, all we had was what appeared to us in experience.

I think both sides make a mistake in endorsing radical skepticism about our experiences. Different sides of the same coin.

that credits Dennett and P. Churchland — Marchesk

I think P.Churchland has a vastly different view to Dennett in that he sees the direct empirical experience as being more informationally rich than our folk psychology can account for. For example, a description of Pat's son by the fire:

one evening when Mark was three or four, he and Paul were sitting by the fire—they had a fire every night in Winnipeg in the winter—and Paul was teaching him to look at the flames like a physicist. He told him how the different colors in the fire indicated different temperatures, and how the wood turned into flame and what that meant about the conversion of energy. The boy was fascinated; but then it occurred to Paul that if he were to sit in front of a fire with a friend his age they would barely be able to talk to each other. — Churchland

Dennett in contrast believes that most of our minds are built up out of cultural memes.

I'll say it has no "subjective experience with phenomenal character"; but allow that it does have simulated subjectivity. — Cabbage Farmer

OK, but it still seems reasonable to ask if there is a cogent distinction there. I'm not convinced there is. I mean we can stipulate whatever we like, but it doesn't follow that what we are stipulating will necessarily be cogent just because we stipulated it.

The goal is to dissolve the hard problem without just handwaving it away or giving into some form of dualism. But taken illusionism to its logical conclusion has serious ramifications for knowledge. When I perceive an apple, I'm not just aware of the apple's color or its taste, I'm also aware of it's shape and weight. Some qualities of human experience are the basis for science. But if color and taste are illusions, what reason would we have for supposing that shape and weight are not? After-all, we know about apples by experiencing them via our sensations of color, taste, etc.

I don't see how they can get around this. — Marchesk

With Dennett and Frankish, I'm skeptical of the hard problem, p-zombies, qualia, and radical privacy of experience.

A necessary part of dissolving the hard problem is to identify false or misleading pictures of consciousness. One such picture is the Cartesian ghost in the machine.

One illusion, then, is the ghost (along with its attendent qualia and radical privacy).

But a second (and opposite) illusion is that humans are machines.

What is needed is a different picture that doesn't implicitly assume the Cartesian model either in whole or in part. And that requires paying closer attention to the ordinary and specialized language that we use. Our practical experience in everyday life is what grounds our language and knowledge about the world (which, of course, includes language and knowledge about ourselves).

Our practical experience in everyday life is what grounds our language and knowledge about the world (which, of course, includes language and knowledge about ourselves). — Andrew M

So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions?

A necessary part of dissolving the hard problem is to identify false or misleading pictures of consciousness. One such picture is the Cartesian ghost in the machine. — Andrew M

Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, only that we take the primary/secondary quality distinction seriously.

So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions? — Marchesk

Color, sound, etc. are not illusions (i.e., stop signs are red). What is an illusion is the false picture of color, sound, etc., either as radically private or, its opposite, as definable independent of human experience.

Right, but the hard problem doesn't require ghosts in the body, only that we take the primary/secondary quality distinction seriously. — Marchesk

Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. The point is that, similar to optical illusions, such distinctions can affect how we perceive the world in hard-to-notice ways.

Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. T — Andrew M

It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. The room doesn't feel like anything objectively, but it does have molecular motion based on the amount of energy in the system.

Science is only possible because we can make these distinctions.

Maybe I should press this definitional issue:

The p-zombies about which I've heard rumors are not just

i) any AI that passes the Turing test; nor just

ii) any AI automaton that passes the Turing test and outwardly resembles a human and is normally mistaken for a human under a wide range of ordinary circmstances; but rather are

iii) biological creatures physically and behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings (which thus of course pass the Turing test), which creatures -- by definition in these discourses, if yet somehow inexplicably -- lack the thing we here agree to call "subjective experience with phenomenal character".

Isn't it, specifically, the third sort of hypothetical construct we consider in the zombie discourses? — Cabbage Farmer

What would the difference between ii and iii be if the automaton had an outer layer that looked like flesh and therefore looked human and behaves like a human? The only real difference here would be one is electronic while the other is biological. Are you saying that biological matter gives rise to subjectivity while electronics cannot? I think that is part of the problem. I think we should be thinking of this from a perspective of information processing which can be performed by both biological and electronic machines.

The problem with p-zombies is that one is expecting the same effect from different causes. If we should expect the same results from difference causes, then that throws a wrench into all scientific knowledge that we've accumulated over the centuries. For me, a p-zombie is impossible, and it is possible for electronic machines to have a point-of-view because a point-of-view is simply an information superstructure in working memory used to navigate the world. P-zombies must have a point of view in order to behave like humans. If they don't then they can't behave identically to humans and would be illogical to expect one to.

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.

I see no reason to suppose that p-zombies -- which are by definition in these discourses, I take it, physically and behaviorally identical to human beings -- would prefer either one of these idioms any more than we do.

You seem to take for granted that the term "red" is primarily subjective. On what grounds would you support such a claim? Concepts like the concepts of red, loud, and painful all seem to have objective associations and criteria, so far as I can tell. They're less precise than the measurements made by those equipped to measure more precisely; but isn't that precision mainly a matter of the instrument employed, not of the distinction between subject and object? I mean, for instance in the first case, the naked eye, and in the second -- what do we use for that -- a spectrometer (the output of which is available to us via the naked eye or some other sense-receptor)? — Cabbage Farmer

I asked before, "Is it useful to perceive the apple is red?" I asserted that it wasn't. It is useful to perceive that the apple is ripe. Now the question is, is perceiving that the apple is red the same as perceiving it is ripe? Is the only way to perceive the ripeness of an apple is to see redness of the apple? If the answer is yes, then it IS useful to perceive the apple is red. One might say that redness of apples IS the perception of the ripeness of apples.

I wouldn't use the term "subjective" here. I agree that our concepts have an objective property as we can talk about others' minds and their contents as if they are just another part of the world. Subjective is a property of language use where category errors are made in projecting value, or mental, properties onto objects that have no such properties. You might say that I am committing the same category error in attributing mental properties to computer-brained robots, but I am asserting that computer-brained robots have mental properties of working memory and a central executive (attention) that attends to the sensory information in working memory.

There would be a "what it is like" for the computer-brained robot. It would be how the information superstructure is organized in its working memory. The information superstructure would be organized in such a way as to include information about the self relative to the world. That is how the world appears to us via our senses. The world appears located relative to the senses. That is what a point-of-view is, or what some would call, "subjective".

I would argue that much traditional puzzling over "secondary qualities" consists in pseudoproblems and misconceptions, and should be cleared up through a rehabilitation of our concept of perception.

What "converts" red light into an experience of red light and an experience of objects that emit or reflect red light? Cognitive systems like ours with sense receptors like ours. — Cabbage Farmer

I agree, and is why computer-brained robots with sensory devices like cameras, microphones, and tactile pressure points where information comes together into a working memory would have "experiences", or a point-of-view.

agree, and is why computer-brained robots with sensory devices like cameras, microphones, and tactile pressure points where information comes together into a working memory would have "experiences", or a point-of-view. — Harry Hindu

This sounds like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I'm unclear as to where that is a property dualism, strong emergentism or some form of identity theory.

Which is also a false or misleading picture but for different reasons. T
— Andrew M

It's not, because some things we perceive are properties of objects and others are properties of our perception. — Marchesk

The false picture is, for example, that only one's perception of the stop sign is red (or some variant such as sense data or phenomena), and not that the stop sign is red.

But perception (and human experience) is the starting point for explanation whether ordinary or scientific. You don't get behind it or transcend it, you instead explain things in terms of it. Including, in principle, perception itself.

The room doesn't feel like anything objectively — Marchesk

I find that hard to parse. Do you mean we don't perceive the room? But we can feel the hardness of the walls when we touch them, or the coolness of the air. And that can be investigated scientifically.

It's also not clear what the "objectively" qualifier is adding if not just to say that such perceptions are beyond the province of scientific investigation. Which is just a reassertion of the hard problem.

Science is only possible because we can make these distinctions. — Marchesk

I'm only familiar with Locke's primary/secondary qualities distinction which is a philosophical distinction. I'm not aware that science makes any use of it, or why it would be useful.

I'm only familiar with Locke's primary/secondary qualities distinction which is a philosophical distinction. I'm not aware that science makes any use of it, or why it would be useful. — Andrew M

Science is an objective, third person enterprise that abstracts away from individual perception to formulate equations, models and laws. This is fundamentally based on the realization that properties such as extension, shape, mass, composition and number belong to objects, allowing us to systematically investigate the world and form predictable explanations.

The false picture is, for example, that only one's perception of the stop sign is red (or some variant such as sense data or phenomena), and not that the stop sign is red. — Andrew M

It's not a false picture at all because the color red is what we experience given the kind of visual system we have. The scientific explanation is that packets of electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths are reflected off molecular surfaces into our eyes where cones are excited to send electrical signals to the visual cortex, where neuronal activity performs whatever functions result in an experience of seeing a red colored object. The experience is a correlation and not part of the explanation for molecular bonds, optics or neuroscience.

find that hard to parse. Do you mean we don't perceive the room? But we can feel the hardness of the walls when we touch them, or the coolness of the air. And that can be investigated scientifically. — Andrew M

No, I mean that our perception of room temperature is a creature dependent experience. Notice how one person can feel hot, another cold and third just right in the same room. This sort of perceptual relativity was noticed in ancient philosophy, leading to skepticism of external objects. If the honey tastes sweet for me and bitter for you, who is to say that sweetness belongs to the honey? Instead, I am sweetened or I am whitened was the preferred formulation of the Cyrenaics, similar to how we sometimes say I'm cold. If I kick a rock and feel pain, the rock feels nothing. Pain is my experience of kicking a rock.

The physical explanation is not an experience of heat or cold, but rather the combined energy of all the molecules in motion, which we don't experience directly (or we would have known about atoms and chemistry from the start).

It's also not clear what the "objectively" qualifier is adding if not just to say that such perceptions are beyond the province of scientific investigation. Which is just a reassertion of the hard problem. — Andrew M

It's just a realization that naive realism is untenable, and we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. Science is our best attempt to get beyond how the world appears to us to explain how it really is (however incomplete it may be).

it's pretty obvious when we discover that solid objects are mostly empty space and the the visible light we see is only a small part of the EM spectrum. It's clear we don't experience the world as it is, thus the distinction between appearance and reality.

I believe the usual line for an Illusionist to take is to say that, in the sense of "reason" that you have in mind, there is no reason at all to believe anything - even basic empirical claims about our immediate surroundings. They will say that we are mere machines that process light waves and reliably spit out true beliefs.

So as they see it, their view might undermine traditional epistemology, but traditional epistemology is already, again in their view, impossible.

PA

They will say that we are mere machines that process light waves and reliably spit out true beliefs. — PossibleAaran

Or not so reliably, since this is accompanied with an illusion of color resulting in much ink spilled over the hard problem and also, the problem of perception (given other illusions such as optical, hallucinations, and perceptual relativity).

This sounds like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I'm unclear as to where that is a property dualism, strong emergentism or some form of identity theory. — Marchesk

Yes, it is like the integrated information theory of consciousness. I don't see how it could be any type of dualism as dualism in any form is contradictory and has a hard problem itself of explaining how two different types of "properties" or "substances" interact. I have no idea what "strong emergentism" is (nothing comes up in a Google search). As for identity theory, that seems to have more to do with direct realism vs indirect realism. Is the brain you experience a mental model of others' mental information processing? When you look at another person, do you experience them as they truly are - a body with a brain, or is that just a model of what they really are - information? What about when you look in a mirror and see your body, but don't see a mind? What does that mean in relation to what you are? What are you when you look in the mirror - a mind, a body, something else?

I have no idea what "strong emergentism" is — Harry Hindu

Strong emergentism means something truly novel that couldn't have been predicted beforehand with perfect knowledge comes into existence when the right physical configuration occurs.

Some people also call it spooky emergentism. I think it falls under the title of non-reductive materialism. I consider it be a kind of dualism, because its emergence can't be predicted by knowing all the physical facts before hand. It's a new addition to the universe. One can easily imagine physically identical universes lacking strong emergence. It's a tacked on feature, basically. Kind of like God saying, let there be consciousness (or universals or whatever) when matter is arranged a certain way.

I prefer asking what it's like to be a bat, or whether a computer simulated world could have conscious inhabitants. — Marchesk

What is it like to be a bat? I suppose this line from Nagel, as much as any other in our tradition, directs us to the heart of the matter in these discourses, the thing I've been calling subjective experience with phenomenal character.

To answer in good faith the question, what is it like, the introspective phenomenologist must acknowledge the unity of experience, the integration of phenomena, the original synthesis of the manifold... and make room in his account for a whole phenomenology of nature. Empirical science is a most rigorous and complete phenomenology of nature, grounded in the ongoing investigation of appearances.


Could a computer simulation contain genuinely conscious characters? To me this seems an empirical question we're not currently in position to answer at this point in the history of our empirical culture. I tend to like Searle in these regions. Our conceptions of sentience, awareness, consciousness, cognition... seem informed by our own experience as sentient things, and by our recognition of other things that appear in the world along with us and seem likewise sentient. It seems reasonable to say that the only things in the world we have to date encountered that clearly count as sentient things are animals. It seems reasonable to expect investigation to reveal that there are biological bases to consciousness, and to direct empirical investigation accordingly.

Taking that much for granted, I suppose it is a distinct empirical question, whether consciousness may also be produced in other ways, by other biological or nonbiological means.

But it seems an error to suppose that consciousness can be produced merely by winding enough of the right sort of "information processing" into an AI program. To wit, Searle's Chinese room.

There is nothing it is like to be a simulated mind.

I agree. Though I guess they would say that we aren't perfectly reliable - just reliable enough to survive.

I think the position is unintelligible. If I am to accept that the whole of sense experience is an illusion, I no longer have any grasp on the idea of the physical world, nor can I attach any meaning to the suggestion that there are these "reliable machines" that "survive". All of that stuff belongs to the allegedly illusory world of sensory experience.

I know they will reply that it is not that the world of sense experience is an illusion, but the sense experience itself. I cannot see that there is any difference between the two.

PA

Science is an objective, third person enterprise that abstracts away from individual perception to formulate equations, models and laws. This is fundamentally based on the realization that properties such as extension, shape, mass, composition and number belong to objects, allowing us to systematically investigate the world and form predictable explanations. — Marchesk

And that realization or perspective is a human one (i.e., it's based on the kinds of creatures we are), not a God's-eye perspective.

It's not a false picture at all because the color red is what we experience given the kind of visual system we have. — Marchesk

Our experience is observing the stop sign out there in the world. We describe it as being red because of the kind of visual system we have. If we had a different visual system, we would describe it differently.

No, I mean that our perception of room temperature is a creature dependent experience. Notice how one person can feel hot, another cold and third just right in the same room. This sort of perceptual relativity was noticed in ancient philosophy, leading to skepticism of external objects. If the honey tastes sweet for me and bitter for you, who is to say that sweetness belongs to the honey? Instead, I am sweetened or I am whitened was the preferred formulation of the Cyrenaics, similar to how we sometimes say I'm cold. — Marchesk

Right, it can be valid and useful to describe things in those ways. And it doesn't really matter whether you think of the honey as tasting sweet for you, or the honey as being sweet relative to you (consider the analogy with special relativity, where observational reports are reference-frame dependent). The actual experience is in the interaction between the subject and object. Whether or not your experience generalizes for others is an empirical question. If it doesn't, then it can be investigated further - is it due to genetics, or the environment, and so on. There is nowhere a need to posit qualia or sense data.

It's just a realization that naive realism is untenable, and we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. — Marchesk

I'm arguing against both direct and indirect realism as generally conceived. What I'm arguing for is a relational view that, as you say, holds that we experience the world a certain way based on the kinds of bodies we have. What I'm also arguing is that language (whether ordinary or scientific) is grounded in our practical interactive experiences in the world, not in qualia or, on the other hand, in external/intrinsic/absolute properties.

it's pretty obvious when we discover that solid objects are mostly empty space and the the visible light we see is only a small part of the EM spectrum. It's clear we don't experience the world as it is, thus the distinction between appearance and reality. — Marchesk

There's no contradiction between an object being solid and being filled with mostly empty space. It's use doesn't imply that. But it's a good example of a false picture that people might hold. And some things are indeed invisible to the naked eye which we discovered by using, among other things, our eyes. It's no more or less a part of the world for that.

The distinction between how things appear and reality is fairly mundane. Most of the time a straight stick appears straight. But in some scenarios, such as when the stick is partly submerged in water, it appears bent. But we don't perceive "appearances" or qualia. They are ghostly objects that arise from invalid philosophical distinctions.

But we don't perceive "appearances" or qualia. They are ghostly objects that arise from invalid philosophical distinctions. — Andrew M

If we perceive the world as colored in, and science explains it without the coloring in, then the appearance of color needs to be explained. It doesn't matter whether we call colors relational, qualia, secondary qualities, representations, mental paint or whatever. Changing the language use isn't going to help.

One might think that neuroscience or biology would be of help here, but the coloring in isn't found in explanations of neuronal activity or biological systems either. This is why we have questions about whether other animals, infants, people in comas, robots and uploaded simulations are or could be conscious (experience a coloring in in their relation to the environment). We can ask what or whether it's like anything to be a bat or a robot using different terms, and the same issue arises.

To answer in good faith the question, what is it like, the introspective phenomenologist must acknowledge the unity of experience, the integration of phenomena, the original synthesis of the manifold... and make room in his account for a whole phenomenology of nature. Empirical science is a most rigorous and complete phenomenology of nature, grounded in the ongoing investigation of appearances. — Cabbage Farmer

Right. One question you could ask is can you ever really perceive experience? I don't think you do. I don't perceive the experiences I have - I undergo them; I am the subject of experience. When I say 'I'm having an experience' - say, if I try and relate what I'm experiencing to someone by telephone - then I'm trying to convey to them how I feel, what I see, and so on, but what I'm describing are all artifacts or attributes of experience. The actual experience is not an object even to myself.

I think it's just this fact which makes eliminative materialism possible in the first place. Because of the fact that the nature of experience itself can never be 'objectified' it is, on those very grounds, never to be found amongst the objects of empirical analysis. Which is how the eliminativist can claim that it is unreal! It's like saying - science knows what is the real basis of experience, which is neural activity and the like; the first-person sense of experience that comprises your sense of self is generated by that, and dependent on it, therefore, it has no inherent reality. And there's no empirical argument against that stance.

Myself, and many others - Searle included - think it's a preposterous argument, but it still keeps being made. But leaving that aside, considering it in those terms at least helps clarify what is actually at issue.

But it seems an error to suppose that consciousness can be produced merely by winding enough of the right sort of "information processing" into an AI program. To wit, Searle's Chinese room. — Cabbage Farmer

Searle's Chinese Room is a thought experiment that is easily debunked for many reasons, one of which is that Searle never defines "understand" to show the difference between "real" understanding and "simulated" understanding. Is there a phenomenal difference between the two? Is this relying on the untenable, and biased, position that carbon-based constructs are special in that they generate consciousness while silicon-based constructs cannot?

In the thought experiment Searle attempts to show that the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese, but the problem with Searle's thought experiment is that the instructions in the room aren't for understanding Chinese, or more specifically, the instructions aren't for interpreting the arbitrary symbols the same way as people from China would.

The visual and auditory symbols we use for communication are arbitrary. Large groups of human beings have simply agreed upon the rules for interpreting the symbols. We could have agreed upon different rules, just as other groups of human beings have. Many groups use the same symbols (their alphabets are similar) in different strings to mean the same thing, ie. tree, arbol, arbre, etc. So understanding some language is merely knowing the rules for interpreting some symbols to be able to apply that knowledge by using those symbols to communicate with others in coherent conversations.

The man in the room isn't given a set of rules for interpreting the symbols that people in China were given. The man understands something, and it is what to write when he sees certain symbols. That is what those symbols mean to him, and he could eventually become experienced enough to memorize those rules so that he doesn't have to reference them in the room any longer, they are now in his head.

If the man had rules that translated the Chinese symbol to the English equivalent, which Searle says that the man does understand (it's his native language), then he would begin to be able to interpret the symbols the way people from China would.

The native language of computers is machine language - the binary language of 1's and 0's. Programmers can create programs in machine code, but it is very time consuming so we have high level languages like Java and C+, which are more like English. But these programs need to be compiled which converts the high level language into machine code for the computer to execute. The computer understands machine language but needs an interpreter to understand other languages, just you and the man in the room would. The problem with the rules in the room is that they weren't an interpretation of Chinese into English. They were some other set of rules.

So computers can understand things, but is there a phenomenal aspect to their understanding? How do you know that a mass of grey matter has any phenomenal aspect to it?

Right. One question you could ask is can you ever really perceive experience? I don't think you do. I don't perceive the experiences I have - I undergo them; I am the subject of experience. When I say 'I'm having an experience' - say, if I try and relate what I'm experiencing to someone by telephone - then I'm trying to convey to them how I feel, what I see, and so on, but what I'm describing are all artifacts or attributes of experience. The actual experience is not an object even to myself. — Wayfarer

What sort of experience shall we agree to call "perception", Wayfarer?

There's a powerful tendency in our tradition to divide introspective awareness from perceptual awareness, and to characterize perception primarily along the lines of the paradigm of visual exteroception, to the neglect of other perceptual modalities. These are unjustifiable biases.

I suspect the tendency to divide perception from introspection owes a great deal to the rationalist-theological prejudices and ambitions inherited by the early Kantians, and perhaps, more generally, to the problematic appropriation of skeptical philosophy in the early modern West. At least some of Kant's predecessors, however, including Locke and Hume, used the term "perceive" to characterize our relation to what we may call "ideas", "experiences", or "mental operations". See, e.g., Shoemaker, "Self-knowledge and inner sense: Lecture I".

We should aim to address substantive issues here without getting bogged down in futile terminological disputes. Philosophers like Shoemaker acknowledge that "[p]erception and introspection are of course alike in being modes of noninferential knowledge acquisition" ("Self-Knowledge and inner sense: Lecture II"). Most often I follow them in this usage, though now and then I try another idiom, still perhaps rough-hewn, according to which any instance of awareness is perception.

I suppose that last slogan indicates the sort view I track. To me it seems the most reasonable way to line up our terms according to the balance of appearances. The formulation gives broad scope to correlate concepts of phenomenon, observation, empirical world, and Nature; and facilitates or guarantees the integration of first- and third-person points of view in a single person in a single world.


Along these lines, I would argue that experience is among the available objects of awareness for the self-conscious sentient creature. We encounter our own experiences in time and place. Our experiences are among the things in the world that appear to us.

It's easy enough to characterize experiences, because each of them is shot through with objective character. This objective character extends throughout the body of the sentient creature, and remains open to empirical investigation.

To insist that experience has "subjective", as well as "objective", character, is not to suggest there is a rift between subjective and objective "worlds", "realities", "facts", or "entities". Whoever would make that sort of suggestion need support it on some other grounds, or admit it's only one imaginative possibility among indefinitely many other imaginative possibilities we may project beyond the balance of appearances.

Along those lines, the skeptic puts at bay the claim that sense-perception puts us in touch with empirical objects, while introspection puts us in touch with some supernatural, extra-empirical, domain.


On what grounds would we claim that sense-perception puts us in touch with empirical objects, while introspection puts us in touch with nothing, makes nothing present-to-consciousness, leaves us mysteriously witnessing or knowing-that in an empty arena, without any observable connection to things in the world that are observable?

We learn only so much by gazing. We investigate natural phenomena and empirical objects -- including the things we call sentient animals -- by moving around, trying things out, and collecting observations according to the balance of appearances.

We don't know everything there is to know about an empirical object by catching a few glimpses; nor by recording and assessing ten thousand years of glimpses. What can it even mean to say "everything there is to know"?'

We get a small bit of information about objects, and make fallible, if generally reliable, reports and inferences about objects on the basis of observation in every mode of "noninferential knowledge acquisition". We remain ignorant of "the whole truth" of any object we observe.


Or why should I suppose there's some relevant difference between introspection and other modes of observation along these lines, that I've overlooked so far in this account?

I think it's just this fact which makes eliminative materialism possible in the first place. Because of the fact that the nature of experience itself can never be 'objectified' it is, on those very grounds, never to be found amongst the objects of empirical analysis. Which is how the eliminativist can claim that it is unreal! It's like saying - science knows what is the real basis of experience, which is neural activity and the like; the first-person sense of experience that comprises your sense of self is generated by that, and dependent on it, therefore, it has no inherent reality. And there's no empirical argument against that stance.

Myself, and many others - Searle included - think it's a preposterous argument, but it still keeps being made. But leaving that aside, considering it in those terms at least helps clarify what is actually at issue. — Wayfarer

I hope I've made clear that on the sort of view I favor, experience is objectified along with everything else that appears to us, on the same sorts of bases, the various modes of awareness.

Why trouble with preposterous arguments, when you can cut them down in bunches at the preposterous assumption without which they don't follow?

I would argue that experience is among the available objects of awareness for the self-conscious sentient creature. We encounter our own experiences in time and place. Our experiences are among the things in the world that appear to us. — Cabbage Farmer

I'm saying that experiences are not objects of awareness, because that implies a split between awareness, on the one hand, and experience, on the other. I think when we undergo experience, then there's no such division, that we are 'in' or 'undergoing' the experience, which is constitutive of our being at that moment.

You might say, well if experience is not an object of awareness, then what is? To which I would respond, all the many objects of experience that surround us at every moment of waking experience. Our conscious experience comprises mainly subject-object relationships - relationships with other beings, who themselves are subjects of experience, and so not simply objects, as well as relationships with the objects that surround us. I don't find the subject-object nature of mundane existence especially problematical or mysterious.

Why trouble with preposterous arguments? — Cabbage Farmer

The first sentence in the thread is

Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett are too proponents that conscious experience is an illusion produced by some yet to be discovered mechanism in the brain. — Marchesk

So, is representative of 'eliminative materialism', which I remarked seems preposterous to many people. D. B. Hart commented in his review of Dennett's latest book that 'Some of the problems posed by mental phenomena Dennett simply dismisses without adequate reason; others he ignores. Most, however, he attempts to prove are mere “user-illusions” generated by evolutionary history, even though this sometimes involves claims so preposterous as to verge on the deranged.' So that's what I'm aiming at in my remarks above. I'm trying to provide an account for why it is that apparently well-educated and serious academics that describe themselves as 'philosophers', and are so regarded by the public, could entertain an idea that others think is preposterous or deranged. Do you see what I'm getting at? I'm not articulating a general philosophy here, I'm simply making a very specific point about what it is that allows 'eliminativists' to argue as they do.

If colours, pains, etc. are an illusion... — Marchesk

But that's just wrong. A misuse of words.

Hm. Odd, again, that folk can't see this.

Hm. Odd, again, that folk can't see this. — Banno

Yes, it is odd, isn't it, when folk don't think as we do, when what seems self-evident to me apparently does not seem self-evident to others!?

Stick a pin in your arm and see if you still think that pain is an illusion.

I'm saying that experiences are not objects of awareness, because that implies a split between awareness, on the one hand, and experience, on the other. — Wayfarer

I don't know about you, but I am able to be reflexively aware of (at least some of) what I am presently experiencing, including the sense of experiencing of it. What could experience be other than either the sense or the idea of it? I we could not objectify it how would we even come to the idea in the first place? This is not to say that experience is usually or even often objectified, but just that it can be. In a similar way, as Heidgger points out, objects, the world itself, are not usually objectified ( present at hand) but "transparent" (ready to hand).

Stick a pin in our arm — Banno

I have been searching for our arm but I couldn't find it; perhaps it is an illusion? :joke:

Seriously, though I agree with you that pain is no illusion, sensations are as real as anything, in fact are the processes by which we know anything at all that we might call "real".

sensations ...are the processes by which we know anything at all that we might call "real". — Janus

So it is only real if you have a sensation of it?

Nuh. Too simple to think of counterexamples.

It is only via exteroceptive sensation viz. seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting of things, and interoceptive sensation of thoughts, feelings and emotions and so on that we come to know anything such as to call it real, isn't it?