The fact that we cannot think of a physical model, is neither grounds to say qualia are non physical, nor that they are some kind of "illusion". — Mijin
An illusion happens when something is mistaken for something else; the illusion of a magic trick, the illusion of movement in an optical illusion; it appears like one thing but is another.
The notion then is that qualia are an illusion in that they appear one way but are not actually like that. — Banno
How do you know? Isn't what you said prior to your present experience of what you said? Can't you only infer what you previously said since it happened prior to your present statement of what you previously said? — Harry Hindu
So ... anyone else, do you have a clear understanding of his distinction between qualia and experiences? — Daemon
to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere. — bongo fury
just sensations — Banno
the brain constructing images. — Mijin
My inner world is soggy meat, and I live in the outer world which I call 'the world'. — unenlightened
That all depends on what you mean by "conscious", "experience" and "knowledge". If the accuracy of our knowledge is not affected by how direct or indirect the knowledge is, then what is the point of using those terms? I'm only questioning the reliability of the experience by taking what you have said and running with it. If you don't mean to say that the accuracy of our knowledge is affected by the indirect nature of it, then what are you actually saying when you say that our knowledge is "indirect"?That's true. Which is one reason why people can be mistaken. But if your argument against the idea that we are not conscious of the causes of our consciousness is going to rely on a general doubt about the veracity of anything we experience, you really do have a contradiction on your hands. After all, I'm only rendering knowledge of the causes of our experience indirect. You're questioning the reliability of experience itself, which is going much further (too far imo) down the road. The reliability of experience has nothing to do with my earlier comment; it is the total absence of experience of certain events that underlies my comment. — Kenosha Kid
If the accuracy of our knowledge is not affected by how direct or indirect the knowledge is, then what is the point of using those terms? — Harry Hindu
"the brain constructing images."
— Mijin
Every time a neuroscientist says "neural representation" without clarifying it as readiness to play a social game of agreeing actual representations, a dualist gets more confused. — bongo fury
I think the context is important here — Mijin
Same with, — bongo fury
Qualia aren't about soul/mind/body anymore, they're about distribution of quantum processes within nature and the body, something introspective thought might shed light on. — Enrique
As in, "no", or "to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere"? — Banno
Goodman — Banno
Not that qualia do not exist, but that what we infer from their existence is an illusion. This also seems consistent with what Dennett says: it's not that qualia -- which are familiar, everyday phenomena -- do not exist, but that they are not what we think about them. — Kenosha Kid
My objection to qualia is that in so far as they are subject to discussion they are just what we see, taste and feel; and so far as they are of philosophical interest, they are not available for discussion. — Banno
Now, it's true that the neurons themselves are dedicated structures in the sense that auditory neurons are sensitive to sound and not light and vice versa for ocular nerves. However, this doesn't solve the problem of how the two perceptions, sound and light, are differentiated because both ultimately end up as action potentials. — TheMadFool
There was a famous experiment a while ago that showed that neurological behaviour associated with motor responses fired before correlated decision-making processes in the prefrontal cortex. — Kenosha Kid
Every time a neuroscientist says "neural representation" without clarifying it as readiness to play a social game of agreeing actual representations, a dualist gets more confused. — bongo fury
That sounds like Libet: there's still a lot of controversy about these experiments, their findings, their interpretation. — Daemon
That sounds like Libet: there's still a lot of controversy about these experiments, their findings, their interpretation. — Daemon
Libet’s experiment is easily debunked. We know that our decisions are often taken after some deliberation, that we commit to a choice after contemplating that choice, which can make our decisions somewhat predictable (with a better performance than just by chance), as in Libet’s experiment, but we also know that we can take decisions in less than a second (eg when driving, or playing blitz chess) so there’s no possible way to reliably predict such decisions. — Olivier5
I'm not really following Bongo. — Daemon
Your argument is circular. You're assuming conscious decision-making in precisely the sorts of behaviours (e.g. split-second decisions when driving) that are suggested to be decided unconsciously. — Kenosha Kid
The accuracy likely is affected, but for one thing it avoids going down wrong paths when looking for or describing something. The way people often talk about human reason and it's role, for instance, seems very wrong to me. There was a famous experiment a while ago that showed that neurological behaviour associated with motor responses fired before correlated decision-making processes in the prefrontal cortex. The subjects remember, from their limited but direct phenomenal experience, deciding to act, then acting, when in fact the action appeared to be unconsciously chosen and only consciously ratified -- or rationalised -- after the act. The narrative based on the first person viewpoint is wrong, and this is exceedingly common it seems.
This reminds me very much of Daniel Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 model of the brain and his tests of it. Problems that appear amenable to pattern-matching (the thing that makes it easier to add 5 or 9 to things than 7 or 8) but that pattern-matching would lead to the wrong answer for follow a similar pattern. Human subjects swear blind they worked out the answer, when in fact they seem to be *receiving* an answer and ratifying it. Badly. That is, System 2 (the so-called rational, algorithmic part of the brain associated with conscious decision-making) receives a putative answer from System 1 (the dumb but hard-working pattern-matching part of the brain that acts without conscious input).
There are all sorts of psychological effects that follow from these sorts of behaviours, some good, some terrible, and those effects can be exploited. It's beneficial to know how your mind operates, what mistakes it makes. For instance, the above suggests to me that the conscious mind is not adept at discerning "We should do this, right?" from "We did this FYI." Besides that, it's just interesting. — Kenosha Kid
Talk of qualia muddies the water. Take something simple, like the pain of stubbing a toe. How does the feeling of pain emerge from non-thinking/feeling stuff? Science has no answer. Science has had no answer for a long long time. I expect science to continue to flounder. — RogueAI
I ask the people who still hold out hope that science will explain consciousness: what do you base that hope on? — RogueAI
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