You know, of course, that it is all just physics. Where you go wrong is thinking that this makes it pointless and meaningless. All along, it was up to you to give it meaning, to find a purpose. — Banno

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

I don't know, of course, that physics is all there is.

”Tell me Mr. Deckard, did you ever take that test yourself?"

It's experience, Janus. It's not complicated. — frank

The understatement of the century.

Tell me Mr. Deckard, did you ever take that test yourself?" — frank

Good one! Also, Westworld.

I'm just spinning in the void shooting out woo tangents like lighting bolts — frank

And I'm just shivering qualia in a p-zombie apocalypse. I think on The Walking Dead they briefly showed the zombie consciousness of an important character when they turned. Turns out, there is something it's like to want brains.

If you say so then it must be so, I guess. So, if it is just the same notion as experience then why do we need it? That's the question no one seems to be able to answer.

Sounds interesting; I used to love that kind of stuff; these days I have too much else on my reading list to be able to give any time to sci-fi.

And I'm just shivering qualia in a p-zombie apocalypse. I think on The Walking Dead they briefly showed the zombie consciousness of an important character when they turned. Turns out, there is something it's like to want brains. — Marchesk

If I only had a brain.

you say so then it must be so, I guess. So, if it is just the same notion as experience then why do we need it? That's the question no one seems to be able to answer. — Janus

Why do we need the concept of experience? Uh, it comes up from time to time.

Neittz also suggested that the natural environment may not have sufficient hues of colours to harness the full potentials of tetrachromatic vision. He said that people with four cones may be helped to develop full tetrachromatic vision if they regularly visit a lab where they are exposed to vision experiences that will help then develop the cognitive skills to identify a richer variety of hues.

Is there a mantis shrimp being consulted?

If I only had a brain. — frank

I have a brain in my mind, but I've never tasted seen my own.

Is there a mantis shrimp being consulted? — creativesoul

Are they tasty?

...the concept of experience... — frank

What's that?

Wonder if ducks and rabbits have such a thing? Seems to me that they do not. And yet, they most certainly have conscious experiences.

I didn't ask why we need the concept of experience; I asked why, if the concept of qualia is just the concept of experience, do we need the concept of qualia.

(Of course, there are different concepts of experience. Whitehead for example, in his pan-experientialism, does not equate experience wholly and solely with conscious awareness; in fact he says that only a tiny fraction of experience is conscious. That is a different notion than the one I would equate with qualia; which is just the notion of conscious awareness of things).

conscious awareness of things). — Janus

yes, that.

which is just the notion of conscious awareness of things — Janus

Which is sometimes just conscious awareness of mental activity. I don't know why perception thoroughly dominates the discussion. It's a bit harder to dismiss the Cartesian Theater when dreams come up.

Perception can be a bit misleading because the discussion becomes so focused on what the properties of the things are and our relation to them. You can't do that with other conscious experiences.

Are they tasty? — Marchesk

This question is nonsensical and possibly communist.

Not if you can sell the (promise of a) taste for a profit!

It's a bit harder to dismiss the Cartesian Theater when dreams come up. — Marchesk

Why do you say that?

Not if you can sell the (promise of a) taste for a profit! — Marchesk

A coke and a smile. :up:

Why do say that? — Janus

Dreams don't seem like a movie is going on in the mind, except with the additional feeling of your body?

Dreams don't seem like a movie is going on in the mind, except with the additional feeling of your body? — Marchesk

As near as I can tell dreams are just like real life; I'm immersed in a world, only it's often a much more bizarre world. I certainly don't experience them, just as I don't with movies, as being "in the mind". It's more like I'm in the movie.

To All:

You can't tell us what qualia are, because they are ineffable.

And you cannot show them to us what they are, because they are private.

Were this any other argument, you would join us in rejecting them. — Banno

If you don't know how (an instance of seeing) the colour red looks to you or how (an instance of having) pain feels to you, then there's little to discuss here and I'm surprised that you can make any sense of Dennett's paper.

...all you have done is engage in the circular argument that the biological machinery cannot tell us about the qualia, and the qualia are what the biological machinery cannot tell us about. — Banno

The constant refrain of the idealist.
"X is not amenable to empirical evidence from the material world of the physical sciences" - before proceeding to expound exactly how an understanding of X should impact our behaviour in the aforementioned material world. — Isaac

Ohhhh I see. All this feigned ignorance of seeing colours, tasting tea and feeling pain is done in the service of maintaining physicalism. Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods.

As near as I can tell dreams are just like real life; I'm immersed in a world, only it's often a much more bizarre world. I certainly don't experience them, just as I don't with movies, as being "in the mind". It's more like I'm in the movie. — Janus

Okay yeah, but it's not an experience of a world outside the body, so ...

One could say the brain is generating a very immersive (but weird) VR-like experience when dreaming.

Ohhhh I see. All this feigned ignorance of seeing colours, tasting tea and feeling pain is done in the service of maintaining physicalism. Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods. — Luke

Yes. The whole purpose is to behave and speak as if they were machines, so as to convince themselves that they are machines. I suppose it makes life easier to handle, when you pretend to be dead inside?

A 3rd grader with a calculator understands integral calculus. And a blind person equipped with a spectrometer that says the associated color of the wavelength it receives knows what color is. — khaled

No-one mentioned understanding the subject. In fact I specifically explained the exact opposite (the difference between understanding a practise and using a word), yet you still want to come back with this disingenuous straw man. If you're not going to argue seriously, there's no point in continuing. We're talking here about whether a person can use a word, understand the meaning of it. So the equivalent with 'maths, or 'calculus' is whether the person uses the word in the right way in the right context, not whether they can carry out the calculations contained within its practises. My claim is that a colour-blind person can use the word 'red' correctly in context (for example if you ask them what colour stop lights usually are). They can use the word correctly in even more contexts if you give them a spectrometer.

how does the patient tell between blunt force pain and stabbing pain? — khaled

Nerve endings can distinguish between those different types of pain, plus the thalamus helps to distinguish based on experiences.

Neither of these uses implies "fake experience". Which is what I say doesn't make sense. — khaled

So if I played you a virtual reality film of going to the rain forest and said I'd 'faked' the experience, you wouldn't know what on earth I was talking about? You might well not like the expressions I use, but that doesn't mean they make no sense. 'Fake' means that it's not part of the real world, something you invent, a model which doesn't have good predictive power. This latter makes 'fake' an important distinction from 'real'.

I am not basing my information of whether or not I have mental experiences on whether or not I reach for the word red. I am having a mental experience, as a matter of fact, and I am reaching for the word red to explain it. — khaled

Yep. Those two things are happening. Nothing in that correlation indicates that there is such an entity as the 'experience of red'. You have experiences, you reach for words like red. Nowhere does that show that your experiences are what cause you to reach for the word 'red'. The important thing here is the place these experiences have in the chain of events. if it goes stimuli>experience>response, then your response 'red' results from the experience, you are experiencing 'redness'. If it goes stimuli>response>experience, then your experience is not of redness, it is of your response to redness, a post hoc fabrication, a 'fake' - in that it appears to be something it's not. This is why investigation of the neurological mechanism matters. It gives us evidence as to which path best explains the process (clue - it's the latter), but thought experiments like Dennet's can also throw doubt on the process we think is happening.

How about "stimuli cause experiences and also responses"? That's more what I think is happening. — khaled

There's just no evidence of this, and absolutely tons of evidence to the contrary. If you want to make up some imaginary realm where non-brain-related 'experiences' happen, then be my guest, but you've ceased taking part in any serious discussion at that point. assuming not, then you have to at least take seriously the evidence from neuroscience which opposes this view.

When did I do that? As in even claim that an understanding of X (qualia that is not my own) is possible. — khaled

X in this case is not 'qualia that is not my own'. It's 'qualia' the topic, the concept itself. You, and others, have listed all sorts of potential problems from avoiding the concept - doctors having trouble with diagnoses, inability to appreciate art, moral problems...

There is a non sequitor there. Why is it the case the if X is not amenable to empirical evidence that that should not impact our behaviour? — khaled

Where would you be getting the 'should' from then? It 'should' because...? It cannot be because of some consequence (that would mean it has a measurable effect on the world and so be amenable to empirical testing). So what is the 'because...' here?

Echoing what Daemon said earlier, your view has consequences in the realm of morality. If we ask what it's like to be a rape victim, the answer would be: tachycardia, hypertension, soft tissue trauma, inflammatory response, etc. — frank

I don't see why. If someone asked me what it's like to be a rape victim, I'd more likely reach for considerably less technical terminology. But if someone asked me to help a rape victim deal with some of those issues, I'd sure as hell what to know what they 'really' were and not base my therapy on some fanciful woo which just 'sounded' right.

This is one of the many reasons this view, which we might call p-zombieism, is going to be a hard sell. A lot of people will just be revolted by it. — frank

Yes. I'm sensing that. It's a good job some people prefer to investigate matters in a more productive way than just avoiding what they find repulsive and pursuing only that which seems nice. We'd have never left the dark ages. You recall the reaction to Darwin's suggestion that we were descended from apes?

Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods. — Luke

Simply claiming your position to be 'obvious' is a lame argument. Do you really expect anyone to take that seriously?

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html


I don't know, of course, that physics is all there is. — Marchesk

Ha! That's a perfect microcosm of what's going on here. I'll quote one bit.

"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

Apparently it's perfectly reasonable to believe that sentience comes from Carbon, or Plasma...or God or conscious electrons, or some third realm of existence we can neither see nor touch...but the one place literally all the scientific evidence in the world points to it coming from is the one place, for some hidden reason, that people claim to find it impossible to believe it comes from.

It's like pointing to the light coming out of the sun and everyone asking "Yes, that's all very well, but where's the light really coming from? I mean, suns can't just produce light, can they."

...and here again you have entirely misrepresented what has been said.

But hey, it's my thread, so keep adding to it.

Simply claiming your position to be 'obvious' is a lame argument. Do you really expect anyone to take that seriously? — Isaac

I never said that my "position" was obvious. I said that qualia are obvious. The definition of obvious is "apparent", "perceptible", "self-evident". Qualia are - according to Dennett - "the way things seem to us". So yeah, qualia are obvious, obviously.

Nerve endings can distinguish between those different types of pain, plus the thalamus helps to distinguish based on experiences. — Isaac

But the patient didn't examine nerve endings. So how come he was able to distinguish?

I'd 'faked' the experience, you wouldn't know what on earth I was talking about? — Isaac

Again, this use doesn't imply "fake experiences" it implies fake sources of experiences. Experiences are the way things seem to you. Those can't be fake. If it seems to you one way then that is the experience you're having. For you to have a fake experience would mean something seems to you one way, but actually doesn't seem to you that way, instead, seems to you another way. That makes as much sense as "married bachelor"

There's just no evidence of this — Isaac

I am having experiences. That's evidence. Which you recognize here:

I am having a mental experience, as a matter of fact, and I am reaching for the word red to explain it.

Yep. Those two things are happening. — Isaac

So I AM having a mental experience now?

Seriously though which is it? Am I or am I not having experiences?

if it goes stimuli>experience>response — Isaac

If it goes stimuli>response>experience — Isaac

Point me to the point where I said either of those things. Otherwise please stop misrepresenting. I'll repeat it again. It goes stimuli>experience+response. What's weird here?

assuming not, then you have to at least take seriously the evidence from neuroscience which opposes this view. — Isaac

Present me the neurological evidence that says that our brain activities cannot coincide with an experience. What theory breaks if I propose that at the same time my brain is processing color, I am having an experience of red?