What is preventing someone with urbach-wiethe disease (passing over the complications in simply correlating the condition with a lack of ability to feel fear) from saying "being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride" — Isaac

Nothing prevents them from saying it. But they haven't had said experience. Therefore they do not know what they're talking about.

If being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride, then someone correctly identifying it as such has understood what fear is, haven't they? I don't see the contradiction. — Isaac

The contradiction is you saying that fear is a public concept and not an experience and at the same time that fear is an experience.

You can be unable to report on working memory and still have experiences.
— khaled

How could you possibly know that? — Isaac

I don't know but I assume. In the same way I don't know that you're conscious but I assume you are. It's just that this assumption is so basic we say we "know" others are consicous and that some animals are conscious, etc. For instance, if Helen Keller never learned to communicate with people, I would still assume she was conscious.

Perception involves the minimisation of prediction error simultaneously across many levels of processing within the brain’s sensory systems, by continuously updating the brain’s predictions. In this view, which is often called ‘predictive coding’ or ‘predictive processing’, perception is a controlled hallucination, in which the brain’s hypotheses are continually reined in by sensory signals arriving from the world and the body. ‘A fantasy that coincides with reality,’ as the psychologist Chris Frith eloquently put it in Making Up the Mind (2007) — https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one

Hoo-boy! That will drive some of direct realists on here battty.

Back to the quining shivering. Anil does mention qualia on the podcast. He doesn't dismiss it. Just says that it's the philosophical term for the contents of consciousness. Then goes on to talk about building bridges and mapping brain processes to those wonderful sensations we all know intimately.

It’s fear. For that, see Thomas Nagel’s essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Sorry if I’m overburdening you with reading materials. :yikes: ) — Wayfarer

I never cared enough about gods to think or want this or that of them. They are metaphors, the way I see them, sometimes useful and poetic metaphors but nothing more. What I came to value over the years is spirituality, that is to say, to leave the transcendental door open.

So the model is of entities interacting in a relational sense, rather than a model where the world is divided in a physical/mental sense. — Andrew M

There's a misunderstanding somewhere. I do not divide the world in a physical/mental sense, or a physical/non physical sense. Internal, external, that which consists of both. Conscious experience being of the third; part physical, part non physical; part internal, part external, part neither.

Nagel has written a lot on this, including the essay that made him famous, 'What is it like to be a bat?' — Wayfarer

If only writing a paper that makes one famous warrants believing that the paper actually says something coherently. I've just critiqued the very idea of "what it's like" earlier in this thread. I stand by that critique.

Your critique being that every experience is unique? "What it's like" doesn't need to pick out the same exact experience. It just means there's something it's like to have a visual experience versus an auditory one versus being in pain versus whatever a sonar one is, which we don't know.

And that's different from what it's like for Siri to feel cold when she tells me, "Burrr, it's 20 degrees outside". Because she doesn't feel anything.

Nothing prevents them from saying it. But they haven't had said experience. Therefore they do not know what they're talking about. — khaled

I haven't had a rollercoaster ride, but I know what one is. I can use the term correctly. I don't see how you can justify a difference with 'fear'. Why do I need to have experienced 'fear' to know what I'm talking about when I use the term, but I don't need to have experienced a rollercoaster ride to know what I'm talking about when I use the term?

The contradiction is you saying that fear is a public concept and not an experience and at the same time that fear is an experience. — khaled

Experiences themselves (as a models of interocepted states) are public concepts. That's what the Barrett paper was about. Do you read the stuff I cite or not, because it's not worth my while doing so if not?

Fear is further a category of experiences. What belongs in that category is a public convention.

For instance, if Helen Keller never learned to communicate with people, I would still assume she was conscious. — khaled

My bad, we've had this misunderstanding before and I haven't learnt from it. 'Reporting' has a technical meaning in cognitive science, it doesn't necessarily mean spoken or written. Think of it as a writing a journal in your head.

I don't know what to say. We could trade Anil Seth quotes all day. I've read most of his papers (certainly the Sackler lab work, anyway). I've been to three of his lectures and I've worked, briefly, with a couple of people from his lab. You've either misunderstood his position or you've misunderstood mine because a large chunk of my position on this comes from Seth's work. He's certainly not opposed to the position I'm expounding here and he's not a supporter of Chalmers, Nagel et al's position on this.

It's not that I've independently come up with a theory and now I'm saying "look Anil Seth agrees with me", it's mostly his theory that I'm presenting here. Him, Friston, Barrett, Edelman... all of whom frequently collaborate on the same papers and are very close in their view on this.

So you agree with Anil Seth that the goal is to map brain processes to phenomenal consciousness as a way forward to building bridges between the two?

Because it sure as hell seemed like you were arguing along eliminativist lines to me and others in this thread. In fact, in the very post before your reply to me you're doing it again. Replacing the experience of fear with talk of a model and public convention.

Methodologically, yes. I wouldn't have put it that way (I don't literally agree with every word he says, of course), but broadly speaking yes.

In psychology there's very little choice but to start out with self-reports and ask "what's going on to cause this?" We can't just look at brains and expect to 'see' what's going on without any phenomenological data. We get people to say what they're experiencing, we look at their behaviours, we correlate these with brain activity (and other behaviours) and make inferences.

In psychology there's very little choice but to start out with self-reports and ask "what's going on to cause this?" We can't just look at brains and expect to 'see' what's going on without any phenomenological data. — Isaac

I wonder why that is. :chin:

Sigh... This is going nowhere, we're going around in circles. I think I'll just read the threads for now.

I wonder why that is. :chin: — Marchesk

Because brains are just lumps of biological matter with electrical and chemical activity. Just looking at it isn't going to tell us what any of it's doing any more than looking at a microprocessor is going to tell us what software is on it.

The point is that once certain mappings have been established (and a huge quantity have), then we get correlations, strongly predictive models, statistical inferences... Once we reach a certain threshold we can start to look at aberrant phenomenological reports and say "well, either this report's not quite right or we have to throw away all these otherwise excellent models". Since we've absolutely no reason to presume phenomenological reports are always accurate (as in providing the type of data point we're interested in), we don't just take them at face value anymore as we might have done at the outset of the project, hence Seth and Barrett's work on public models of phenomenon like emotions and colour.

it sure as hell seemed like you were arguing along eliminativist lines to me and others in this thread. In fact, in the very post before your reply to me you're doing it again. Replacing the experience of fear with talk of a model and public convention. — Marchesk

One of the possible mappings of brain activities to phenomenological experience is via public models like 'fear'. Why would you rule that out?

Because brains are just lumps of biological matter with electrical and chemical activity. Just looking at it isn't going to tell us what any of it's doing any more than looking at a microprocessor is going to tell us what software is on it. — Isaac

And there you go again. I thought for a moment you were backing off the eliminativism.

Since we've absolutely no reason to presume phenomenological reports are always accurate — Isaac

Nothing is always accurate. Certainly not our perception of the world. What matters is that phenomenological experiences exist and need to be accounted for. We see colors. We feel emotions, pains, taste food. We dream. We visualize. Many of us have inner dialog. We relive memories at times.

One of the possible mappings of brain activities to phenomenological experience is via public models like 'fear'. Why would you rule that out? — Isaac

I don't know wha it means to say fear is a public model. I can't always tell when someone is afraid. Particularly if they wish to hide it, or are one of those people with good poker faces who don't wear their emotions on their sleeves. In fact, I don't know to a large extent what everyone else is thinking or feeling. Only some of it is apparent, to the extent I'm reading them accurately. Which is always a guessing game that can be wrong. And even when they tell me, I don't know if it's the truth. People often omit things or tell white lies.

It's like saying lying is a public model. Which would mean we could accurately detect liars, right? Something that would stand up in court.

What matters is that phenomenological experiences exist and need to be accounted for. We see colors. We feel emotions, pains, taste food. We dream. We visualize. Many of us have inner dialog. We relive memories at times. — Marchesk

No one's denying any of that from a phenomenological perspective. It's just that from a process perspective some of those accounts are not as we think they are. When you feel 'angry' it feels like you're 'finding' yourself to be in some state, but you're not. There's no such state. It doesn't exist. So that can't be right, no matter how much it feels like it is - or else we discard the idea that conscious experience is caused by the brain, in which case why bother looking at it at all.

So people like Barrett try to find out what's going on. How can a set of physiological states with no boundary and no non-overlapping properties give rise to the feeling that we're 'angry'? The answer she proposes (and with substantial empirical support) is that we use public models to infer the causes of our interocepted signals. "I've just had someone punch me, people get 'angry' when they're punched, these mental states I'm receiving data about must be 'anger'"

Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides.

I don't know wha it means to say fear is a public model. I can't always tell when someone is afraid. — Marchesk

It's not about you telling if someone else is afraid. It's about them deciding that they themselves are afraid.

How does that work for animals? Fear and aggression are important for survival, and they're not exactly querying themselves for reports on conscious experiences.

Also in the moment when someone punches me, I'm probably reacting in anger, not stopping to do some reflection. That comes after the reaction.

Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides. — Isaac

So does this mean other animals do not have experiences of colors, tastes, memories, because they lack the language to ask themselves about how other animals typically react?

And I can't make sense of that for color at all. So you're saying seeing a red apple is the result of learning the public model for using the term "red"? And that generates an experience in the reporting?

Does this mean Helen Keller had no conscious experiences until she learned the word water by the feel of it from her tutor writing the word on her hand? That seems exactly backwards.

It's not about you telling if someone else is afraid. It's about them deciding that they themselves are afraid. — Isaac

Thinking about this some more, how would the words "afraid", "red" or "pain" have become part of language if there wasn't fear, color, or uncomfortable sensations to begin with? What exactly is the public model that we learn based on?

We don't have any words for sonar experiences. Could we make one up and get people to have sonar experiences by teaching them the model?

I see what you mean here. If at any given time the only variable that really is 'varying' in the system is the hidden state, then we can appropriately talk about a direct causal relationship. Like triggering a pinball, the various flippers and pegs are going to be determinate of it's path, but they're fixed, so right now it's path is directly caused by the strength of the trigger? — Isaac

@Banno (because "seeing as" and "seeing an aspect")

Yeah! That's a good analogy. Translating it back to make sure we're concordant: the priors=flippers, task parameters =pegs and the strength of the trigger = hidden states.

So, if we want to answer the question "what are people modelling?" I think the only answer can be 'hidden states', if they were any less than that then the whole inference model wouldn't make any sense. No-one 'models' and apple - it's already an apple.

I think what I claimed is a bit stronger, it isn't just that the hidden state variables act as a sufficient cause for perceptual features to form (given task parameters and priors), I was also claiming that the value of the hidden states acts as a sufficient cause for the content of those formed perceptual features. So if I touch something at 100 degrees celcius (hidden state value), it will feel hot (content of perceptual feature).

I think a thesis like that is required for perception to be representational in some regard. Firstly the process of perceptual feature formation has to represent hidden states in some way, and in order for the perceptual features it forms to be fit for purpose representations of the hidden states, whatever means of representation has to link the hidden state values with the perceptual feature content. If generically/ceteris paribus there failed to be a relationship between the hidden states and perceptual features with that character, perception wouldn't be a pragmatic modelling process.

I'd agree here. Do you recall our conversation about how the two pathways of perception interact - the 'what' and the 'how' of active inference? I think there's a necessary link between the two, but not at an individual neurological level, rather at a cultural sociological level. All object recognition is culturally mediated to an extent, but that cultural categorising is limited - it has functional constraints. So whilst I don't see anything ontological in hidden states which draws a line between the rabbit and the bit of sky next to it, an object recognition model which treated that particular combination of states as a single object simply wouldn't work, it would be impossible to keep track of it. In that sense, I agree that properties of the hidden sates have (given our biological and cultural practices) constrained the choices of public model formation. — Isaac

Just to recap, I understand that paragraph was written in the context of delineating the role language plays in perceptual feature formation. I'll try and rephrase what you wrote in that context, see if I'm keeping up.

Let's take showing someone a picture of a duck. Even if they hadn't seen anything like a duck before, they would be able to demarcate the duck from whatever background it was on and would see roughly the same features; they'd see the wing bits, the bill, the long neck etc. That can be thought of splitting up patterns of (visual?) stimuli into chunks regardless of whether the chunks are named, interpreted, felt about etc. The evidence for that comes in two parts: firstly that the parts of the brain that it is known do abstract language stuff activate later than the object recognition parts that chunk the sensory stimuli up in the first place, and secondly that it would be such an inefficient strategy to require the brain have a unique "duck" category in order to recognise the duck as a distinct feature of the picture. IE, it is implausible that seeing a duck as a duck is required to see the object in the picture that others would see as the duck.

Basically, because the dorsal pathways activities in object manipulation etc will eventually constrain the ventral pathways choices in object recognition, but there isn't (as far as we know) a neurological mechanism for them to do so at the time (ie in a single perception event).

I think we have to be quite careful here, whatever process creates perceptual features has the formed perceptual features that we have in them - like ducks, and faces. I know the face example, so I'll talk about that. When someone looks at something and sees a static image or a stable object, that's actually produced by constant eye movement and some inferential averaging over what comes into the eyes. When someone sees an image as a whole, they first need to explore it with their eyes. Eyes fixate on salient components of the image in what's called a fixation point, and move between them with a long eye movement called a saccade. When someone forms a fixation point on a particular part of the image, that part of the image is elicited in more detail and for longer - it has lots of fovea time allocated to it. Even during a fixation event, constant tiny eye movements called microsaccades are made for various purposes. When you put an eye tracker on someone and measure their fixations and saccades over a face it looks something like this:



(Middle plot is a heat map of fixation time over an image, right plot has fixations as the large purple bits and the purple lines are saccades)

But what we see is (roughly) a continuously unchanging image of a face. Different information sources of different quality of different hidden states being aggregated together into a (roughly) unitary, time stable object. Approximate constancy emerging from radical variation.

That indicates that the elicited data is averaged and modelled somehow, and what we see - the picture - emerges from that ludicrously complicated series of hidden state data (and priors + task parameters). But what is the duration of a perceptual event of seeing such a face? If it were quicker than it takes to form a brief fixation on the image, we wouldn't see the whole face. Similarly, people forage the face picture for what is expected to be informative new content based on what fixations they've already made - eg if someone sees one eye, they look for another and maybe pass over the nose. So it seems the time period the model is updating, eliciting and promoting new actions in is sufficiently short that it does so within fixations. But that makes the aggregate perceptual feature of the face no longer neatly correspond to a single "global state"/global update of the model - because from before it is updating at least some parts of it during brief fixations, and the information content of brief fixations are a component part of the aggregate perceptual feature of someone's face.

Notice that within the model update within a fixation, salience is already a generative factor for new eye movements. Someone fixates on an eye and looks toward where another prominent facial feature is expected to be. Salience strongly influences that sense of "prominence", and it's interwoven with the categorisation of the stimulus as a face - the eyes move toward where a "facial feature" would be.

What that establishes is that salience and ongoing categorisation of sensory stimuli are highly influential in promoting actions during the environmental exploration that generates the stable features of our perception.

So it seems that the temporal ordering of dorsal and ventral signals doesn't block the influence of salience and categorisation on promoting exploratory actions; and if they are ordered in that manner within a single update step, that ordering does not necessarily transfer to an ordering on those signal types within a single perceptual event - there can be feedback between them if there are multiple update steps, and feedforwards from previous update steps which indeed have had such cultural influences.

The extent to which language use influences the emerging perceptual landscape will be at least the extent to which language use modifies and shapes the salience and categorisation components that inform the promotion of exploratory behaviours. What goes into that promotion need not be accrued within the perceptual event or a single model update. That dependence on prior and task parameters leaves a lot of room for language use (and other cultural effects) to play a strong role in shaping the emergence of perceptual features.

Here's the difficulty with Khaled's position. He has decided that qualia are ineffable in that there is always something about them that cannot be said. As a result, he is obligated to say things such as the following:

What is preventing someone with urbach-wiethe disease (passing over the complications in simply correlating the condition with a lack of ability to feel fear) from saying "being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride"
— Isaac

Nothing prevents them from saying it. But they haven't had said experience. Therefore they do not know what they're talking about. — khaled

Khaled's picture of what is going on prevents him form seeing the obvious falsehood. We have a person who says things such as "being scared is the experience you have on a horror ride" and "I am unable to feel scared because I have urbach-wiethe disease", but Khaled is obligated by his mistaken picture of mind to say that this person does not know of what they speak.

Now there is something that this person cannot do; they cannot feel fear (ex hypothesi). That's a quite public fact about them.

You called?

I'm not overly enamoured with detailed descriptions of physiology, so i hadn't much been following @Isaac's contributions. Do you fell up to summarising?

[deleted] — Wayfarer

I'm searching for a public model to express my experience of seeing a deleted comment. Disappointment? I'll have to shiver harder.

Do you fell up to summarising? — Banno

It would be an even longer post to write, I think!

Do you fell up to summarising? — Banno

The images that we see are constructed unconsciously in our head based on sensory data, understood as a constant updating of our expectations. Something like that.

Also, the expectations have something to do with public models, which are what we think other people would do in our situation.

So feeling anger or seeing the red of an apple is the result of telling ourselves about the public model, I think. An outside-in or top-down sort of construction of consciousness.

What I'm not sure about is whether @Isaac thinks this means consciousness is a kind of illusion, or merely just identical to the public model self-reporting mechanism (or expectations).

Also, the expectations have something to do with public models, which are what we think other people would do in our situation. — Marchesk

I don’t know about no ‘public model’. Is that a meme? An official theory? A frequent practice? A common sense position? Sounds like a slippery concept to me.

ghgh Respectfully, neither of you would be my choice for interpreting @Isaac.

Mostly I got it from this recent post:

So people like Barrett try to find out what's going on. How can a set of physiological states with no boundary and no non-overlapping properties give rise to the feeling that we're 'angry'? The answer she proposes (and with substantial empirical support) is that we use public models to infer the causes of our interocepted signals. "I've just had someone punch me, people get 'angry' when they're punched, these mental states I'm receiving data about must be 'anger'"

Same can be said of colour, tastes, memories... the more we look, the more useful an explanation this model provides. — Isaac

So we're apparently interpreting some physiological response via a public model and that becomes what we're conscious of, or at least what we say we are.

Maybe you should ask Dennett to summarize then.

The materialist god forbids that people recognize anger by its phenomenal qualities. Aka the satanic qualia.