What does that feel like? Do you experience an ineffable annoyance?

Yes. E-lusive, not IL-usive. Good catch.

The something else must already exist in it's entirety.
— creativesoul

..... “elemental constituents”, yes?
— Mww

What they can actually be is determined, in part, by virtue of their own existential dependency. — creativesoul

Determination by virtue of existential dependency doesn’t say what the dependency is. If I knew what the something depends on, I might be able to figure out what the something is.

The breakdown intrigues me, honest.

So, when you say: 'minds are physical", what type of explanation are your trying to exclude? — Olivier5

Very simple; I am trying to exclude any meta-physical explanation.

I am pleased that this thread is now longer than that on the US election.

Thanks for asking.

The Trump thread is the real goal.

Topic Length is the real goal. It gives Banno a warm qualia inside. :-)

I am trying to exclude any meta-physical explanation. — Janus

Janus belongs to the Secular Thought Police. That's right, isn't it, Janus?

Surety is not the sort of thing that has a spatiotemporal location, so the question doesn't make sense — creativesoul

Correct, but surety, the quality, has a definite relation to its object. I’m suggesting the quality of non-personal experiences in general, because they can only be second-hand, have none.

The only way out of the dilemma is to assert that cat’s experiences have only empirical content, which is certainly determinable by mere observation, but if such is the case, the “conscious” part of the content....because it is being called “conscious experience” of the cat....would seem to be completely absent. This, in turn, reflects on the quality....the surety.....of the cat’s experience.
————-

Are you asking me to justify my asserting what the content of the cat's conscious experience is? — creativesoul

Apparently, the content is that which exists in its entirety, and so far, that’s the extent of the assertion. Maybe not asking so much the justification for asserting content, but asking instead, what the something’s content actually is. And even if the something’s content is some ubiquitous or pervasive correlation, I still have no more understanding of that, than I had with understanding merely the ambiguous something.

I think it's clear that the qualists won the war because the anti-camp ended up with nothing but distaste for the word.

Distaste.

Distaste. — frank

The qualia Banno mixes into his morning coffee.

Probably needs to add more Bailey's, except I think it's ineffable. :grimace:

Yes. As long as we keep in mind that a human being is not just a body, but how it is organized (just as a university is not just a set of buildings, but how they're organized). That is, we predicate experiences, beliefs, perceptions, actions, etc., of human beings, not bodies (or brains). — Andrew M

This doesn't seem quite right to me; a body is not a separate thing from "how it is organized"; so there would seem to be no problem involved in saying a human being is a (minded, organized) body, in which case "experiences, beliefs, perceptions, actions etc.," can indeed be coherently predicated of (enbrained) bodies. To say that they cannot is to introduce another, differently nuanced layer of separation which begins (again) to look like dualism.

Janus belongs to the Secular Thought Police. That's right, isn't it, Janus? — Wayfarer

No, it's not right at all; I wouldn't mind metaphysical explanations if any of them seemed coherent. It's also an egregious irony, considering you are the one who insists that there must be metaphysical explanations, without being able to give the slightest account of what they might be, and you are the one asserting without any cogent argument that physical explanations are demeaning, tout court, which amounts to a form of puritanism; and puritans are the archetypal holier than thou "thought police".

BTW, I'm not telling anyone what to think, but merely outlining what seems most plausible to me, and my reasons for finding it most plausible. I respect anyone's right to believe whatever they want for whatever reason they want; but if they want to argue for the universal inter-subjective truth of their beliefs, in a public forum, as you do, that is to prescribe, or at least insinuate, that others should think as they do, because alternative forms of belief are "demeaning" of humanity, or whatever, then they need to present good cogent arguments, not the bare assertions and innuendo you usually present instead.

Wait, aren't you advocating for physicalism? How is that not a metaphysical position?

How many times do I have to explain that I agree that physicalism is, as an ontological presumption, obviously not testable any more than any other ontological presumption? I advocate it because the only testable, or even really coherent (in the sense of involving determinable interacting parts and ways of interaction between them) explanations we have for anything are given in terms of causation, and causal mechanisms are always and only modelable in physical terms.

If you don't agree all you have to do is cite an example of a detailed model with "determinable interacting parts and ways of interaction between them" that is not given in terms of physical entities and their interactions.

I like my coffee bitter and sweet.

Hence, my preference is neither ineffable, nor private.

If qualia are ineffable and private, they have nothing to do with my drinking preferences.

What about Hume's critique of causation? What about Kant's categories of thoughts? Or Berkeley's ideas? The empirical world has a consistent structure, whatever that means.

While I agree that a physical reality is the most compelling explanation for the empirical, it's not the only coherent one. And I don't agree that it's necessarily complete. As in, there could be more to the world than what physics, chemistry or biology posits, since those are explanations we come up with, not some God's eye view.

What about Hume's critique of causation? What about Kant's categories of thoughts? Or Berkeley's ideas? The empirical world has a consistent structure, whatever that means.While I agree that a physical reality is the most compelling explanation for the empirical, it's not the only coherent one. And I don't agree that it's necessarily complete. — Marchesk

The idea of the physical is the idea of mind independent structure and interaction. How those structures and interactions appear to us is not taken to be exhaustive of their nature. What does it matter that our understandings of the world are not complete; how could we ever know if they were, or what it would even mean for them to be complete?

In any case the point is that our understandings of things are in terms of physical, material and energetic, structures and their powers and causal interactions. I don't see how Hume, Kant or Berkeley are relevant to this point of fact.

As in, there could be more to the world than what physics, chemistry or biology posits, since those are explanations we come up with, not some God's eye view. — Marchesk

Since we can't achieve a "God's eye view", what relevance could such an imagined thing have to us? Don't we have to test our explanations and choose those which seem most consistent with our observations and experience; those, in other words, which seem most plausible?

So in the context of consciousness, since we already know we're conscious, we can ask whether our physical explanations account for consciousness.

I am trying to exclude any meta-physical explanation — Janus

Guess it could be close to my idea if by metaphysical you meant what I mean by supernatural: exceptions to the causal laws of the universe.

The idea of the physical is the idea of mind independent structure and interaction. — Janus

Defined as such, you cannot say that minds are physical, since they cannot be 'mind-independent'.

I think it's clear that the qualists won the war because the anti-camp ended up with nothing but distaste for the word.

Distaste. — frank

:-)

The breakdown intrigues me, honest. — Mww

Click on my avatar, then on my discussions. There are several OP's and discussions that you would find interesting. The titles are indicative of the subject matter.

Well, in the end it seems to me that intuition pumps will not work on folk with the wrong intuition. It's clear that the arguments in the article are successful in removing from reasonable discourse qualia that are both ineffable and private. The reasonable folk who defend qualia have followed the only course open, which was to shift the definition of one or more of the concepts involved.

That's in keeping with the approach of the SEP article, which lists Dennett's definition as one of several.

The trouble with this is the tendency to slide between definitions, seen most clearly in @khaled.

By definition, when it seems to you that you are angry you are, in fact, angry.
— khaled

Which parts of what counts as being angry is established by social convention? — creativesoul

All of it. — khaled

Then anger is neither private, nor ineffable. Qualia are(by definition). Therefore, anger is not qualia.

:up: Thanks for the cool thread.

@creativesoul has done a fine job in carrying the good fight, apart from that strange stuff about pretheoretical beliefs.

I'm trying to quine conscious experience, thought, and belief...

:wink:

@Olivier5 seemed to have some interesting points but was unable to articulate them, finishing by simply ignoring the arguments while slashing out at straw men of his own construction.

Olivier5 seemed to have some interesting points — Banno

Did I, really?

@Marchesk seemed to me to simply vacillate. Perhaps I wasn't following closely enough. Perhaps not.