There is one significant difference between forming images on a light-sensitive Surface, and forming images in a meaning-sensitive Mind. The mental Image, or Illusion, has personal Meaning & Significance & Aboutness & Awareness. Imaging is not awareness; but Imagination is. :smile:The notion of consciousness is, at its heart, claiming there's a difference between mental images and camera-images but we know there's none. Ergo, consciousness - the purported difference in identicals - can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion. . . .
what we call awareness is simply the formation of mental images in our minds, and that's precisely what happens inside a camera. — TheMadFool
The temptation to believe in unicorn-illusions that are no less fanciful than unicorns. — bongo fury
I fear you're missing the point of what consciousness is. Consciousness is all about awareness - a certain entity is conscious if and only if it's aware of its environment and itself and what we call awareness is simply the formation of mental images in our minds, and that's precisely what happens inside a camera. — TheMadFool
Bad argument - cameras are not aware. Consciousness is an attribute of conscious organisms - devices including cameras, computers and telescopes are no more aware or conscious than are bicycles, abacus, or mirrors. None of them are sentient. So a camera image and a mental image are worlds apart - that's without even mentioning the fact that camera images are created by humans in the first place. — Wayfarer
Is there any difference between the image in your eyes and the image on a camera's image sensor? — TheMadFool
Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. — Wayfarer
You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. — TheMadFool
6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor — TheMadFool
Read the rest of the post. The tree ring example doesn't clarify things for you?Please clarify, if possible. If not possible, no worries. — bongo fury
What is the distinction? Both cameras and sentient beings are physical objects. Seems to me that you'd have just as difficult of a problem explaining how images are in brains.Let me ask you a counter question: do you know what an 'ontological distinction' is? Do you know why it might be argued that there is an ontological distinction to be made between devices (which are constructed by humans) and sentient beings? — Wayfarer
The same can be said about eyeballs. Connect eyeballs to a brain, or a camera to a computer, and then you have interpretations of images.Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. An image is not an image to a camera, because no camera is capable of intentional action or interpretation. — Wayfarer
Imagine being burned at the stake as you keep telling yourself the pain is an illusion. — Marchesk
You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, — Mijin
What's the distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness? — Mijin
The same as the distinction between an illusion of consciousness that (like the Chinese Room) doesn't have a proper semantics, and one that does. — bongo fury
Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful? — Mijin
between a self-driving car able through mere syntax to complain of bodily trauma and [on the other hand] an as yet fictional self-driving car able to play the social game of pointing appropriate words at the same trauma. — bongo fury
Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion — bongo fury
Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions. — bongo fury
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do. — Mijin
I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. — Mijin
Have we been talking past each other all this time? — Mijin
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. — Mijin
In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do. — Mijin
Indeed. Even the illusion is itself being conscious of something. — Marchesk
Thereby getting nowhere, but perpetuating the myth of an internal world. — bongo fury
The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself.
https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html — Anil Seith
Or an external one? That sword can cut either way. — Marchesk
I'm glad you find that obvious. But you digress. — bongo fury
It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, — Marchesk
Okay, but if i'm brain shivering color and pain, that still needs to be explained. — Marchesk
I've been watching some videos on YouTube : Journey to the MicroCosmos. And the minuscule single-cell organisms, swimming freely and nosing about, seem to have purposeful behavior. So, they are "animals" by definition. But what goes-on in their brainless blobs -- what it's like to be an amoeba -- is a moot question, until we are able to communicate with them. So, until then, I would attribute only a minuscule amount of Consciousness. :smile:An amoeba also has sensory abilities, does that mean it is conscious because of that? — Rafaella Leon
The problem is those sounds and colors don't exist in external objects. It's rather sound waves and photons. — Marchesk
The sounds and colors we experience are shivered into existence. — Marchesk
Why "rather"? Sound events and illumination events are clearly external and public. — bongo fury
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