And is the argument that sets exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices?

The set of all possible qualia.

Now we're saying that ideas aren't language dependent?

:brow:

Weird.

And is the argument that sets exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices? — creativesoul

I don't know what it would mean to say an abstract object exists at a certain time. Dennett counts beliefs as abstract objects. A belief is true a certain time.

Belief B could be true during the Devonian, but not during the Pleistocene.

The set of all possible qualia. — Marchesk

All in one acid trip.

All in one acid trip. — frank

A simulated brain in a vat dreaming it's a bat while on acid.

Dennett counts beliefs as abstract objects... — frank

I would argue against Dennett.

You guys/gals enjoi!

:point:

A simulated brain in a vat dreaming it's a bat while on acid. — Marchesk

The code for which is running on a simulated android who's trying to get out of the matrix so he can find out what chicken actually tastes like.

I would argue against Dennett. — creativesoul

Well, if you must.

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

This seems to me to say that there are actually ineffable private directly apprehensible meaningful experiences. Just that they are not necessarily formed from "red" and "cup". From the cat's POV all that happened is it just drank something disgusting. This is not to say that it does not see the red cup, only that it didn't "categorize" it in her experience, didn't emphasize or notice it. Am I understanding this correctly?

Cats can even have a conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup without ever experiencing it as such. — creativesoul

Hypothetically, so pre-theoretical.

Does it matter what is the cat is drinking? Is it the same to say, cats can have a conscious experience of drinking without ever experiencing it as such, which reduces to, can cats have a conscious experience of drinking without ever experiencing it as drinking? If so, what the cat can have a conscious experiencing of, in this case, is undefined. Given it is a conscious experience the cat can have, yet the experience is undefined, it follows that whatever permits the cat to be conscious of its experiences, is at the same time insufficient for it, from which it is perfectly permissible to surmise either the cat isn’t experiencing, or, it isn’t conscious enough.

Cat’s been drinking since it was birthed. Of the manifold of things it has imbibed, because it is assumed to be in good health, none of those things have been detrimental to its health. From the fact it is in good health because nothing imbibed has the properties to cause otherwise, that which is henceforth imbibed can be recognized as detrimental, merely from the fact it is nothing like that which has never hurt it. If such be the case, the cat isn’t drawing any conscious correlations at all, for all such recognizant operations are sufficiently attributable to instinctive reaction to pure biological physiology, no part of which can be called necessarily conscious. And of course, cats being language-less creatures is utterly irrelevant, for even in language-imbued humans, instinct is quite sufficient for involuntary reaction.

With respect to higher as opposed to lower intelligences, it is the preemptive capacity to consciously create the correlations to draw, rather than the consequential drawing of them. The latter we do, but only because the former is the condition that makes the doing, possible. Even of there is a valid argument that lesser intelligences have the capacity to create that which is not already extant, in which ever form but for us it is conceptions, it remains hypothetical that such creations, and thereby any employment of them, are inaccessible to any intelligence that didn’t create them, and by which the logical right to talk about them is immediately sacrificed, unless indulging in rampant. anthropomorphism.

Me....enjoi-ing. For a change.

Dialog, by definition, is a conversation between two or more people. Inner dialog extends this idea in a metaphorical way. — Andrew M

But the philosophical challenge is to then get literal again. Lest your poetry be seized on.

Inner dialog (and music) is a good place to be literal about thinking, as it is relatively easy to recognise as being supported, even if not utterly constituted, by neural shivering. In the extreme, we might catch our lips (fingers) moving; but plenty of more central neural/neuro-muscular twitching is also noticeable.

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. After all, perhaps the alleged theatrics are something weird emerging from the bio-physics of the more central shivering.

But it's a good place to start.

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

Most people on the phenomenal side admit to the shivering accompaniment. The question is how/why it's not just shivering.

If we have a shivering ontology, then it's strange that our experiences are more than the shivering. Thus the weird emerging from bio-physics.

That's exactly what I meant about how I think you see it. I hope that was clear.

Anyway, as I say, I think it's a promising area in which to offer you reasonable cause for doubt, all the same.

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

That is so unfair! I've been very precise about what I mean by qualia.

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

An incoherent mash of teleology with evolution, intentionality with causation.

Very precise.

I love you too, Banno.

Well, you seem to be espousing the "Darwinist imperialism" castigated by Nagel in the article you were discussing with @Wayfarer...

And the bloody arthritis is playing up again, making me even grumpier.

I dunno. I sorta hoped you would begin to make sense at some stage.

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

I think there's a pretty strong alliance between that perspective and embodied cognition approaches, though there's a rabbit hole to go down regarding how much of embodiment is the brain's doing. Do you think the role of the brain can be emphasised without falling into the Cartesian trap?

I think it can, so long as the image of the brain producing output mind states as distinct phenomena from their production is discarded. Body patterns as environmental patterns. Refusing to put events involving an agent on a privileged ontological stratum - like as a separate substance (a "res cogitans") or aspect of substance (an "infinite mode" or "attribute").

As an aside, I also think it's a separate kind of question from discussions of superveniance; as "the mind supervenes on physical states" doesn't tell you much about which conception of the mind is supervening on which conception of the physical.

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

This makes a lot of sense to me (maybe). In what way do you believe conceptualising things in terms of mental and physical phenomena can propagate or reinforce a Cartesian perspective?

And the bloody arthritis is playing up again, making me even grumpier. — Banno

Don’t worry about it, pain qualia don’t exist.

pain qualia don’t exist. — Olivier5

But pain exists.

What is pain?
Oh baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more

The introduction of the neologism ‘qualia’ into the discourse about the nature of mind was simply a gigantic red herring which eliminative materialists use to obfuscate the obvious falsehood of their argument. That is why the only time you will ever find use of the word is in discussions involving that clique of American academics - Dennett, Churchlands, Rosenberg, et al. So to use the word is to play their game.

You enjoy sucking on dreams
So I will fall asleep with a zombie other than you
I had a thought you would take me seriously
And keep posting on

Serpents in my mind
I am searching for your qualia
Everything changes
In time

So to use the word is to play their game. — Wayfarer

If you started a thread to debate consciousness (because we need yet another one of those), what word(s) would you use instead? I do agree qualia is a problematic term. That's why I try to talk about sensations instead.

But It seems everyone has their own criteria for what counts as being conscious.

Reason, language, meaning, self-awareness - there’s quite a palette. I’m specialising in the argument from reason, in fact, seriously considering in enrolling in an MA 2022-23 to write a thesis on it.

If you really think through what elminativism is saying, it eliminates reason itself.

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

That’s why I keep harking back to Nagel’s essay. The elimination of reason really means foreclosing the possibility of philosophy itself.

:cool: