And is the argument that sets exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices? — creativesoul
Dennett counts beliefs as abstract objects... — frank
Clearly she'd had a conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup. It's private, in the sense that it happened... to her. It's ineffable... to and from her limited point of view. It's immediately or directly apprehensible to her. It's meaningful to her. She has no language. Clearly meaningful conscious experience is prior to language. That which is prior to language cannot be existentially dependent upon it. My cat's conscious experience of coffee drinking is prior to language. Some conscious experience of coffee drinking exists in it's entirety prior to language. That's pretheoretical.
The problem...
There's no red quale as a property of her experience. There's also no reason to deny the same limitations apply to human conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup prior to language acquisition. The cat drinks from a red cup without ever perceiving the red cup as such. That's because there has been no correlations drawn between the cup's color and something else. Some conscious experience involving red cups do not have the property/quale of red, despite the fact that a red cup is an irrevocable necessary elemental constituent thereof. — creativesoul
Cats can even have a conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup without ever experiencing it as such. — creativesoul
Dialog, by definition, is a conversation between two or more people. Inner dialog extends this idea in a metaphorical way. — Andrew M
Such recognition may not threaten anyone's intuition of purely phenomenal "sound" events, even if they begin to notice that shivering at some level always accompanies them. — bongo fury
he says nothing precise
— Olivier5
Coming from someone who advocates for the use of "qualia"...
...that's a tad bit ironic if it's meant to be a critique. — creativesoul
We can apprehend the world through quality and quantity, hence both of these must exist, at least in our mind. They must be supported by perception systems. I noted that the taste of sugar combines a quality (sugar taste) and a quantity (too little, too much sugar in my coffee). So the idea is like this:
Functionally, a successful animal needs to be able to estimate certain things, including the energy available in its food, and incentivise certain behaviors, while minimising certain risks (including food poisoning). Its olfactive and gustatory senses help distinguish between "good" and "bad" food by:
1. Using chemical reactions in the nose and mouth to estimate a series of indicators - eg concentration in disposable sugars, various salts, some "known" ( by evolution) poisonous stuff, etc.
2. Tag each of these indicators with a qualitatively distinct mark or feel, a qualitative signal if you wish, that allows the animal to recognise the indicator. The taste of sugar is different from the taste of salt.
3. Use the intensity of the signal above to code for the quantitative aspect of perception. (too much or too little sugar)
4. Attach pleasure or displeasure to each of these qualitatively identified signals, as a way to shape behavior.
5. Make the system evolutive and adaptative throughout the animal's life, with some capacity to record or reproduce past food consumption events, to inform future ones. — Olivier5
Tastes work. Quantitatively, objectively, they measure important stuff, like the content of sugar and salts in our food. Such a system cannot logically work without some ID system for tastes, some qualitative perceptual signal, recognisable somehow from the perceptual signals of other chemicals. Memorizable somehow. And then this individual perceptual signal for say, sugar, is perceptive enough to code for solution dosage by way of modulating the intensity of the signal.
Now we can ask ourselves how our senses work, a scientific question, or wonder what is the ontology of tastes, a philosophical question. But let's be clear that everyone can taste the difference between sugar and hot pepper. Especially at high dosage.
Therefore qualitative differences in perception exist.
Enter the little qualia, dancing in circles... I mean the modest, phenomenological qualia: mere qualitative coding for generally quantitative signals that make up our robust, biological, life-afirming senses.
Our senses honed by evolution, the source of all our experiences, they need some way of tagging, identifying qualitatively the signal of certain significant chemicals, or wavelengths, or sound signatures. It's literally "color coding". — Olivier5
The right approach is to reject the entire Cartesian framing. The human being (interacting in the world) is the relevant agent here, not minds or brains. We see things because we have eyes (and brains), not because our brain projects things on a virtual screen for us. — Andrew M
Pretty much. The use of those terms reinforce the Cartesian theater such that its difficult to understand that there can even be an alternative. Per Ryle's ghost in the machine metaphor the materialist, in rejecting the ghost, simply endorses the machine (where physical things are external, third-person, objective). But that still accepts the underlying Cartesian framing and so doesn't resolve anything. — Andrew M
So to use the word is to play their game. — Wayfarer
Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book [Breaking the Spell] is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? — Leon Wieseltier
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