The signals which chemosensory neurons send to cotices higher in the hierarchy. Nothing more. Beyond that you start to see the influence of a whole slew of non-chemosensory systems getting involved, feeding back to the chemosensory neurons, suppressing certain signals, re-iterating others. One if the many paths taken ends up (together with input from a hundred other unrelated paths) in the stimulation of the motor neurons responsible for forming the words "this tea tastes bitter". Where in all that is the 'taste' of the tea? — Isaac
To quite the contrary, I would call it a failed philosophical attempt at taking proper account of what conscious experience consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon. A failed attempt at setting out the pre-theoretical, basic, and/or fundamental elements of conscious experience. — creativesoul
We don't. That's the easy solution. — Isaac
I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable
— Isaac
What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again?
— Luke
Those are both massive questions. Short answer neural networks and predictive models. Perhaps if you could explain the relevance I could be.more specific, as it is you've just asked me for a précis of the whole of cognitive psychology. — Isaac
Somehow you have to show how the act of discriminating becomes a conscious sensation. — Marchesk
But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. That sounds pretty close to what we'd expect a conscious organism to be doing, responding to change in a way that enables planning. Is there an alternative that doesn't require a Cartesian theater? — Srap Tasmaner
Somehow that updating of the model has to lead to colors, pains — Marchesk
computer models don't have sensations. They don't see a colored in world, feel the coldness of the wind, smell the fragrance of flowers, feel the heaviness of a long workout in their joints. — Marchesk
I don't know that this is a fact... Our eyes resemble cameras quite a lot. They have an aperture, a lense and a photosensitive surface on which the image is captured.We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know? — Srap Tasmaner
So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip? — Marchesk
You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that? — Luke
I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner
Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour? — Luke
I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. — Srap Tasmaner
The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner
You asked me why people add sugar — Isaac
What perspective did you want the answer from? — Isaac
As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. — Isaac
I'm trying to explain the difference between there being 'a taste of tea' and the process of tasting tea. — Isaac
There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions. — Isaac
It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition. — Isaac
I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice. — creativesoul
We never stand still long enough for any sort of input to become present to us in this revealed sort of way; we're already involved with whatever it is, expecting it, seeking it, avoiding it, using it, regretting it, whatever. We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know? — Srap Tasmaner
I think maybe we don't really either, not in the way typically imagined. I want to say what has to be avoided to start with is an image of experience that is at all static. Empiricists have this model of experience as chopped into a long string of instants -- your visual field is like this, then this, then this, and you have to make these inductive leaps to tie it all together into any kind of coherence. But there's nothing like this really going on, is there? We are, while awake, in constant multifaceted contact with our environment and processing an unending stream of data which we constantly project into the future and take action on. All of these point-like experiences we seem to construct retrospectively, I'm not at all sure anything quite like that is ever actually happening. Feeling the sun and the wind is bound up with all the rest of the process of living, testing, responding, projecting. — Srap Tasmaner
Being a relation still involves a combination of, or an interaction between, a subject and an object(s). Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"? — Luke
What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties. First, since one cannot say to another, no matter how eloquent one is and no matter how cooperative and imaginative one's audience is, exactly what way one is currently seeing, tasting, smelling and so forth, qualia are ineffable--in fact the paradigm cases of ineffable items. According to tradition, at least part of the reason why qualia are ineffable is that they are intrinsic properties--which seems to imply inter alia that they are somehow atomic and unanalyzable. Since they are "simple" or "homogeneous" there is nothing to get hold of when trying to describe such a property to one unacquainted with the particular instance in question.
Moreover, verbal comparisons are not the only cross-checks ruled out. Any objective, physiological or "merely behavioral" test--such as those passed by the imaginary wine-tasting system-- would of necessity miss the target (one can plausibly argue), so all interpersonal comparisons of these ways-of-appearing are (apparently) systematically impossible. In other words, qualia are essentially private properties. And, finally, since they are properties of my experiences (they're not chopped liver, and they're not properties of, say, my cerebral blood flow--or haven't you been paying attention?), qualia are essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer (whatever that means) or qualia are properties of one's experience with which one is intimately or directly acquainted (whatever that means) or "immediate phenomenological qualities" (Block, 1978) (whatever that means). They are, after all, the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states. So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are...
The specialness of these properties is hard to pin down, but can be seen at work in intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. Could Gallo Brothers replace their human wine tasters with a machine? A computer-based "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology. We now know enough about the relevant chemistry to make the transducers that would replace taste buds and olfactory organs (delicate color vision would perhaps be more problematic), and we can imagine using the output of such transducers as the raw material--the "sense data" in effect--for elaborate evaluations, descriptions, classifications. Pour the sample in the funnel and, in a few minutes or hours, the system would type out a chemical assay, along with commentary: "a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina"--or words to such effect. Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise Endnote 3, but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience! Whatever informational, dispositional, functional properties its internal states have, none of them will be special in the way qualia are. If you share that intuition, you believe that there are qualia in the sense I am targeting for demolition.
What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties.
My challenge strikes some theorists as outrageous or misguided because they think they have a much blander and hence less vulnerable notion of qualia to begin with. They think I am setting up and knocking down a strawman, and ask, in effect: "Who said qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible ways things seem to one?" Since my suggested fourfold essence of qualia may strike many readers as tendentious, it may be instructive to consider, briefly, an appparently milder alternative: qualia are simply "the qualitative or phenomenal features of sense experience( s ), in virtue of having which they resemble and differ from each other, qualitatively, in the ways they do." (Shoemaker, 1982, p. 367) Surely I do not mean to deny those features!
I reply: it all depends on what "qualitative or phenomenal" comes to. Shoemaker contrasts qualitative similarity and difference with "intentional" similarity and difference-- similarity and difference of the properties an experience repre sents or is "of". That is clear enough, but what then of "pheno menal"? Among the non-intentional (and hence qualitative?) properties of my visual states are their physiological properties. Might these very properties be the qualia Shoemaker speaks of? It is supposed to be obvious, I take it, that these sorts of features are ruled out, because they are not "accessible to introspection" (Shoemaker, private correspondence). These are features of my visual state, perhaps, but not of my visual experience. They are not phenomenal properties.
The thing with colour etc being relational properties means they don't collapse down to either being subjective or objective. A subjective state of colour is "in" your mind. An objective state of colour is "in" the perceived object. Characterising colour as a relational property makes it neither wholly in the head nor wholly in the object, it's a property of the relationship between the two of them. — fdrake
The problem with this is that we can have color experiences independent of perception.m, such as in dreams or by directly stimulating the visual cortex. — Marchesk
Perhaps due to the highly visual nature of dreaming, people always have wondered if blind people dream, so some of the earliest systematic interview studies on dreams dealt with this topic, showing that people who are born blind or become blind before age 4 or 5 years old do dream even though they do not see images in their dreams,91 a finding that was then supported by laboratory studies.92,93 Nor is there much if any difference in dream content, except that there may be less aggression in their dreams.11,91
You can have coloured features in dreams without the same flavour and intensity of sensorimotor feedbacks we have when conscious, that's not quite the same thing as perceptual feedbacks between agent and environment. — fdrake
It's more likely to be the case that visual imagery in dreams occurs without the usual perceptual stimuli for vision, but that visual imagery in dreams is part of the functionality of the person's sensorimotor and discriminatory systems regardless — fdrake
Probably so, but I don’t see how this makes the sensations extrinsic if it’s the brain circuitry that produces the sensations, not any other part of the perceptual process. — Marchesk
There is no double transduction [5]. The various peripheral and internal transducers—rods and cones, hair cells, olfactory epithelium cells, stretch-detectors in muscles, temperature-change detectors, nociceptors and others—are designed by evolution to take the occurrence of physically detectable properties as input and yield signals—axonal spike trains—as output. There is no central arena or depot where these spike trains become recipes for a second transduction that restores the properties transduced at the periphery, or translates them into some sort of counterpart properties of a privileged medium. Vision is not television, audition does not strike up the little band in the brain, olfactory perception does not waft aromas in any inner chamber. (Nor, one had better add, are there subjective counterpart properties, subjective colours-that-are-not-seen-with-eyes, inaudible-sounds, ghost-aromas that need no molecular vehicles, for us to enjoy and identify in some intimate but unimaginable way.) Colour vision is accomplished by a sophisticated system of information processing conducted entirely in spike trains, where colours are ‘represented’ by physical patterns of differences in spike trains that are not themselves colours. The key difference between the transmission of colour information by a DVD and the transmission of colour information by the various cortical regions is that the former is designed by engineers to be a recipe for recreating (via a transduction to another medium) the very properties that triggered the peripheral transducers that compose the megapixel screens behind the camera lens, while the latter is designed by evolution to deliver useful information about the affordances that matter to the organism in a form that is readily usable or consumable [10] by the specialized circuits that modulate the behaviours of systems external and internal.
(ii) So, there is no place in the system for qualia, if they are conceived of as intrinsic properties instantiated by (as contrasted with represented by) some activities in the nervous system. — Dennett, Facing up to the hard question
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