Reading a lot does not necessarily indicate learning. — Mww

Well, I picked up Kant far too early, in the beginning of my interest in philosophy, along with Spinoza, Witt, and Russell. So, undoubtedly I did not understand it to the degree that I may now, should I ever read him again.

The CI is one of the best philosophical renderings in history, to this day.

Back to the topic though...

:zip:

the capability for "second or third thoughts" in Pratchett's sense:

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft. — fdrake

Tiffany books. Absolute classics.

‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany.
‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man.
‘No,’ said Tiffany patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’
‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’
‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.’

What founds the knowledge of Dennett, if not his subjective observation of the world?

And then, if Dennett's observations are illusory, why read them? — Olivier5

Well of course I'm in perfect agreement with you, yet threads about Dennett are like zombies that refuse to stop moving even though they're fundamentally devoid of anything meaningful!

But how would such a theory ever be confirmed? That theory must be able to tell us the conditions required for consciousness to occur. But how will we test the hypothesis? — khaled

If the theory is a good one, it may give us tools to measure consciousness. Let's imagine for instance that a theory crops up, saying consciousness is mediated by brain waves. The supporters of this theory will try and find signals in brain waves, and if they find some patterns, and start to notice clues, they could program their MRI to tract a certain kind of wave modulation.... leading one day to be able to read someone's thoughts... Science fiction?

And it's really not condescending to wonder if people are different. — frank

It's not condescending to wonder and study the differences between people. The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute literally lack a mental faculty when you've not presented evidence for it. Heck, the p-zombies we're allegedly closer to even existing is a disputed point! Perhaps we are simply poor-in-world ;)

A fair amount of what you just said about me is how I feel about you. I understand that I've been offensive, but I thought I was just being defensive. — frank

The troll cycle: I expect you to spend lots of words explaining your position and disagreements, you read my long form argument posts as dismissive and over-critical and respond briefly and amorphously, my expectation is frustrated and I write another detailed exegesis/rebuttal, your expectation is frustrated and you respond briefly and amorphously... Mismatch of respect standards.

I do think we're better off avoiding each other. — frank

Fair enough!

The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute — fdrake

One which has inspired multiple books and numerous papers? That dispute which we're having the thousandth thread about in the history of this forum? The one that Dennett has probably had more to say about than any other dispute?

One which has inspired multiple books and numerous articles? That dispute which we're having the thousandth thread about in the history of this forum? — Marchesk

Yes. It's a dispute about what human nature is, why should we bifurcate human nature to fit the disputing parties?

Have you heard of "aphantasia"? There are people out there who are really and truly different from other people when it comes to mental experiences. I don't see why different/lack of mental experiences can't be a hypothesis for why disagreements about stuff like qualia get so heated.

Our theories about the world emerge from our pretheoretical observations and reason...
— Olivier5

What would such pre-linguistic reason consist of? — creativesoul

"Pre-theoretical" means something different from "pre-linguistic". It means stuff you do in practice without thinking about it in theory. Like when you watch large packs of birds fly. You are not necessarily theorizing about yourself watching birds fly, or even about how the birds fly. You may simply watch them. You may wonder why they fly so high or turn so suddenly, all as one, but it's not a research program yet, more a wonder, a question. You may start to reason that this is peculiar and beautiful, and start filming the phenomenon with your cellphone. You are still not theorizing much. You are just recording whatever you can of the event, thinking your friends will like this.

You may theorize latter, for instance if I ask you why you looked at those damn birds for so long.

The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute literally lack a mental faculty when you've not presented evidence for it — fdrake

I didnt claim anything. I said I keep coming back to that as a possible explanation for the existance of reductionism. No insult intended. If you want me to get exhaustive about my knowledge of how differently people can experience the world, I guess I could.

It gets my goat when someone attributes a stance to me that I clearly didnt take. To avoid having my zen harshed, I usually just ignore it. Are you like that?

@Banno@creativesoulThis turns on the crux of the debate. Is Dennett and his defenders in this thread denying the experiences of color, coffee taste, etc? Or are they just saying there's nothing to those sensations that leads to a hard problem?

Banno has clarified that he doesn't deny sensation. There is a taste of coffee, and it can vary from bitter for you and nutty to him, but it's not inexpressible or (fundamentally) private.

However, we do have this from Dennett, which I quoted earlier:

The properties of the "thing experienced" are not to be confused with the properties of the event that realizes the experiencing. To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact. (I doubt that this is what the friends of qualia have had in mind when they have insisted that qualia are intrinsic properties.) — Quining Qualia

So what is Dennett saying here? It's a category error to say that the difference between purple and green is the neural equivalent of 0 and 1, because numbers aren't colors, and neither are spiking neurons. So the issue arises when attempting to explain our conscious sensations by reducing them to dispositional, relational or functional talk. Reason being that it seems to dismiss the experience of sensation, by replacing it with talk of something else (the purported underlying mechanism or behavior).

The biological explanation for coffee taste isn't the nutty or bitter taste itself. That's why we say there is a "what it's like", a "seeming", an "appearance of something". To be conscious is not to be conscious of some perceptual process or 1s and 0s in the brains "registers", it's to be aware of how things seem, whether nutty or purple.

We could have visible light detector hooked up to a voice dictation that reads out a color that matches our visual system, but there's no reason to think this system would have a color sensation just because it can discriminate and report accurately. We could easily modify the dictation to invert the colors or map taste words or Trumpisms instead (sorry, election is still "on" my mind).

And we could modify the detector for some EM range we can't see and feed that the color dictation. Would that mean it's now having the same color sensations for light we can't see? The p-zombie argument came about because we can't "see" how any physical system results in conscious sensations, even though we know there are physical correlations in the human case.

The CI is one of the best philosophical renderings in history, to this day. — creativesoul

No doubt. And that has only to do with his moral philosophy. His speculative epistemology has been professionally superseded....or neglected outright......which leaves we armchair types to keep it alive.

Probably because we don’t know any better. Or just maybe...there isn’t any better.

Have you heard of "aphantasia"? There are people out there who are really and truly different from other people when it comes to mental experiences. I don't see why different/lack of mental experiences can't be a hypothesis for why disagreements about stuff like qualia get so heated. — RogueAI

Imagine that only Spinozists have the conatus - a will/power to survive, grow, adapt.

Let's say I'm a Spinozist and you're not, and I start telling you that you have no will to survive, grow or adapt because you deny Spinoza's account of the conatus... That is what is happening here. Some advance the thesis that others experience the world totally differently in a manner that is convenient for one side of a philosophical dispute. You have no will to survive, you are not a Spinozist. I have no phenomenal character to my experience, because I am a qualia eliminativist.

People notice disparities in experience by looking at self reports. If we met in real life over alcohol, you'd have no reason to doubt that I feel stuff. Consider:

The last time I ate a burrito the mouth feel of the bread was extremely soft, the chilli inside was quite sour and moderately spicy. There were tingling sensations in my nose from the heat as I swallowed. I felt my cheeks flush too. The texture of the chilli was very smooth, contrasting the hardness of the cool lettuce wrapped in with it. The lettuce was very slightly wilted, having less crunch than I expected. There were sweet fruity notes from the pineapple diced and run through the chilli, that flavour of pineapple didn't permeate the chilli though, it came when my tongue found it.

And if you can't tell I have flavour and texture qualia from charitably reading my self report of taste, you couldn't tell for anyone else either!

It's a category error to say that the difference between purple and green is the neural equivalent of 0 and 1, because numbers aren't colors, and neither are spiking neurons. — Marchesk

...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start from the premise that they're obviously the case.

...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start from the premise that they're obviously the case. — Isaac

It is a category error. 1s and 0s aren't colors. They're numbers. And neurons aren't colors either. And guess what, neither are photons!

The last time I ate a burrito the mouth feel of the bread was extremely soft, the chilli inside was quite sour and moderately spicy. There were tingling sensations in my nose from the heat as I swallowed. I felt my cheeks flush too. The texture of the chilli was very smooth, contrasting the hardness of the cool lettuce wrapped in with it. The lettuce was very slightly wilted, having less crunch than I expected. There were sweet fruity notes from the pineapple diced and run through the chilli, that flavour of pineapple didn't permeate the chilli though, it came when my tongue found it. — fdrake

All of that is qualia. What Dennett wants you to do is find some space for doubt.

Start by looking at other people. See how there is room to doubt what they say about their experiences of burritos. Once you doubt that I am a reliable witness regarding what sounded like a Peruvian recipe, then you can move on to doubting yourself. See?

I said it was a hypothesis, not a particularly good one!

In these discussions, I really am at a loss to explain how the Dennet's and Churchlands of the world actually the believe the stuff they're saying. I think it has less to do with how they experience the world and more to do with a certain mindset that views consciousness (and everything associated with it) as "woo".

I don't at all see how qualia is so much more ghostly an apparition than any of experience, sensation, representation or mental state.

Not trying to be more-eliminativist-than-thou, but... ok, maybe I am.

But I'm surprised that embracing these other mentalisms is expected to clear the air in a debate with mentalists. As though it'll then be clearer what everyone is talking about.

That doesn't follow. If what it is like to drink tea is different fro each person and on each occasion then it follows that there would be something it is like to drink tea, which changes through time just like everything else does.

I have never like the term 'what is it like', though. 'What is it like to be a bat'? Apart from the fact that it depends on the particular bat and the time, I would say that there is nothing it is like to be a bat. in the sense that being a bat is not like being anything else. Perhaps 'what it is to be a bat' or 'what it is to drink tea' and so on would be less misleading.

Taste doesn't have a quality (quale) it is a quality. I think confusion over that is the source of the reification that quales are sometimes taken to represent.

I have never like the term 'what is it like', though. 'What is it like to be a bat'? Apart from the fact that it depends on the particular bat and the time, I would say that there is nothing it is like to be a bat. in the sense that being a bat is not like anything being anything else. Perhaps 'what it is to be a bat' or 'what it is to drink tea' and so on would be less misleading. — Janus

Good point. "What it is like" implies a comparison. Which can work for bitter and nutty coffee, because we know what bitter and nutty tastes like. But we don't know what a sonar modality would be like. We have nothing to compare it to, unless it's like vision or hearing, although bats also have ears and eyes, as do dolphins. So sonar sensations might be something entirely different that we can't compare to.

So the issue arises when attempting to explain our conscious sensations — Marchesk

To be conscious is not to be conscious of some perceptual process or 1s and 0s in the brains "registers", it's to be aware of how things seem, whether nutty or purple. — Marchesk

I'm not even clear on what you want an account of. Is it that a given cup of coffee seems a particular way to me? Or that I'm aware that the cup of coffee seems a particular way to me? Or is there an awareness of the taste of the coffee which is only by definition how it tastes to me?

One thing about consciousness is that it seems to be related to volition, might even be why we have it at all instead of just reflexes, however complicated. Or it could be this is the cheapest way to build up a repertoire of complex reflexes. (I spend far more time talking and writing than I do trying to remember words I want to use.) At any rate, we don't have volition here: I don't choose to see the world as colored, or to smell what I smell or feel what I feel, and so on. I have no control over what's dumped into my awareness and what's not. (Similarly, it's almost impossible not to understand speech in a language you understand, so robust is the habit.) That strikes me as interesting, but I've no idea what to do with it.

Yes, exactly, one coffee can be like or different from another in varying ways and degrees. But the general "what is it like to be, do, go, taste etc," really does just mean "what is it to be, do, go, taste, etc.". I guess the 'like'' is in there to signal that we are asking about qualities, not quantities, or any other accounts in so-called objective terms.

Intuition pump #16

Chase and Sanborn are sophisticated programs inside an elaborate computer simulation. They perform all the same functions when tasting coffee as humans do, and make the same reports in the simulation. Some say that means they must be conscious agents.

So computer scientists examine the running code and hardware. But nowhere do they find a sensation of coffee, nor any colors or feels. Only self-reports. Some others say they are not conscious, but rather digital p-zombies.

The problem remains hard.

Turing test. That's all he had to say.

It is a category error. 1s and 0s aren't colors. They're numbers. And neurons aren't colors either. And guess what, neither are photons! — Marchesk

Yes, I don't think your position was unclear the first time so a fourth or fifth repetition isn't helping. What I was asking was, if the separateness of these things is an unquestionable belief for you, why you're taking part in a discussion whose premise is to question them. It's like someone declaring they believe in God as a matter of faith and then taking part in a discussion about whether God exists. It's disingenuous. If you've no intention of re-considering your beliefs in these matters just don't partake in discussions about doing so. Why would you?

I have no control over what's dumped into my awareness and what's not. — Srap Tasmaner

Whoops. Was thinking about how I can't choose to see an un-colored world and forgot about attention, which I've also thought should be part of this discussion, since introspection is not our default activity and so much talk about consciousness among philosophers is really talk about introspection.

There are ways that I'm different from most people. I mentioned earlier that I have a cousin who has perfect pitch. That's a very distinct difference and there is a genetic basis for it. — frank

Happens I'm about 3 weeks into an uncontrolled experiment wherein the subject (myself) attempts to acquire absolute pitch. I'm still hopeful of refuting your innatist aspersion, albeit unscientifically.

I aspire also (perhaps) to a Mary's Room type revelation: an additional dimension to my auditory perception. E.g. a 'global' quality attaching to the pitch of a sound, independent of its local relations to other, proximate sound-events (relative pitch). The kind of quality that apparently enables the possessors of absolute pitch to associate different keys with different moods etc.

I would be keen to share the unscientific data with any other interested parties (in a thread), especially if they were minded to share their own? E.g. recollection of their previous attempts, or description of attempts started now, or soon.

Absent that demand, I'll update this (single) post. So WTS if interested...

So you deny basic logic? Numbers and neurons aren’t colors. This is a matter of identity. You expect me to reconsider?

Happens I'm about 3 weeks into an uncontrolled experiment wherein the subject (myself) attempts to acquire absolute pitch. I'm still hopeful of refuting your innatist aspersion, albeit unscientifically.

I aspire also (perhaps) to a Mary's Room type revelation: an additional dimension to my auditory perception. E.g. a 'global' quality attaching to the pitch of a sound, independent of its local relations to other, proximate sound-events (relative pitch). The kind of quality that apparently enables the possessors of absolute pitch to associate different keys with different moods etc.

I would be keen to share the unscientific data with any other interested parties (in a thread), especially if they were minded to share their own? E.g. recollection of their previous attempts, or description of attempts started now, or soon.

Absent that demand, I'll update this (single) post. So WTS if interested... — bongo fury

Cool. Yes, I'm interested. My cousin has a genetic anomaly that's known to be associated with perfect pitch. She's always had it. She started playing piano at 3 years from watching her mother play.

But it's true that jazz musicians demonstrate the ability to perceive key transitions that normal people can't. Supposedly there is a study. I could find if you need it.