that credits Dennett and P. Churchland — Marchesk
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
I'll say it has no "subjective experience with phenomenal character"; but allow that it does have simulated subjectivity. — Cabbage Farmer
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
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
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
So you agree that it doesn't make sense to say that color, sound, etc. are illusions? — Marchesk
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. T — Andrew M
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.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
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.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 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.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
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
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 room doesn't feel like anything objectively — Marchesk
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. — Andrew M
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
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
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
They will say that we are mere machines that process light waves and reliably spit out true beliefs. — PossibleAaran
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?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
I have no idea what "strong emergentism" is — Harry Hindu
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.I prefer asking what it's like to be a bat, or whether a computer simulated world could have conscious inhabitants. — Marchesk
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
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
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
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
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
But we don't perceive "appearances" or qualia. They are ghostly objects that arise from invalid philosophical distinctions. — Andrew M
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
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?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
What sort of experience shall we agree to call "perception", Wayfarer?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
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.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 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
Why trouble with preposterous arguments? — Cabbage Farmer
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
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
Stick a pin in our arm — Banno
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