Studies of people, born blind, who then suddenly become able to see (such as those who undergo cataract surgery), suggest they have to learn how to interpret what they see,.... — Cavacava
A child has to learn that the toy truck is red, just as Mary has to learn that what she is experiencing is red, — Cavacava
What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so. — jkop
Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims. — Marchesk
The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue. — Marchesk
What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism". — jkop
What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected? — jkop
For example, I've never been on the moon, but I've learned indirectly to know what it's like to be on the moon by reading other people's descriptions, seeing pictures and so on. On the moon I would hardly need to learn how I ought to experience what it's like to be on the moon.
The problem is accounting for how our visual system has color experience, since all the physical facts about vision would be without color. As such, Mary inside or outside of her room cannot explain how it is that we have color experiences, despite knowing all the physical facts. — Marchesk
Why not? Is it not objectively true that you are on the moon and have a vantage point from on the moon, and experience colors and feelings of weightlessness?But isn't this the point of the Mary's room thought experiment: the subjective experience of being on the moon cannot be adequately described objectively. — Cavacava
A physicalist interpretation is just that - an interpretation, or a model, just as your visual experience is a model, not how the world really is beyond your experience of it. So to say, that there are neurons firing is a visual model, or explanation, of the world, or some process that is part of it.I don't think your experience of being on the moon could ever be reduced to physicalistic interpretations such as neurons firing. — Cavacava
Why not? Is it not objectively true that you are on the moon and have a vantage point from on the moon, and experience colors and feelings of weightlessness?
To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them. — Cavacava
It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists. — Luke
Well let me ask you if... ..your experience of a red firetruck is a passive affair, that its givenness is the content of your experience of it... — Cavacava
..the red firetruck is your representation of what is out there, and any statement such as 'it's a red firetruck' is the only content of that experience, that we are in fact responsible for how we take things? — Cavacava
Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe. — Marchesk
The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective — Marchesk
Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. — Marchesk
He refers to Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" metaphor about private language to argue that because qualia are supposed to be inaccessible to anyone but the subject, the specific referent of the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out — SophistiCat
But we can reduce it to an objective description. I simply need to describe what I'm experiencing. If you were there on the moon with me, what would be the point of describing it to you? It would be redundant.It is objectively true that you are on the moon, but I don't think whatever could possibly comprise that experience, or for that matter any experience, can be fully reduced to objective description. I think there is subjective reality and it is part of what it means to experience anything. To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them. — Cavacava
..the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out. — SophistiCat
That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject. — SophistiCat
His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist." — SophistiCat
Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them. — SophistiCat
But they do deny the inner, private part. Experiences can be individual, but not inner or private. — Marchesk
Right, but quining qualia amounts to redefining consciousness as having a functional/behavioral role only. Dennett did say in a recent talk I watched on youtube that we are the equivalent of p-zombies. There is nothing going on in our heads in terms of consciousness. — Marchesk
Sure, and Chalmers discusses several versions of physicalism. Physicalism might be the case, but questions of consciousness and intentionality still remain puzzling. — Marchesk
I don't know if that was intended to be ironic, but seriously, I am not sure what to make of it. I get a feeling that he may be missing the point, or else that the point doesn't amount to much. Dennett is not very clear as to what he is arguing against. That's part of his point: he makes much of the obscurity of the concept of qualia. But if the concept was too confused to analyze, then how could he build a case against it? He should have just stopped at conceding his confusion. — SophistiCat
What is instead denied is a radical privacy - the idea that no-one could experience or understand that feeling in principle, regardless of their physical brain state. — Andrew M
Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.
You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.
...Dennett believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those creatures will behave and to interact with them. — Thomas Nagel
The way in which this conscious life is allegedly illusory is finally explained in terms of a “user illusion”, such as the desktop on a computer operating system. We move files around on our screen desktop, but the way the computer works under the hood bears no relation to these pictorial metaphors. Similarly, Dennett writes, we think we are consistent “selves”, able to perceive the world as it is directly, and acting for rational reasons. But by far the bulk of what is going on in the brain is unconscious, low-level processing by neurons, to which we have no access. Therefore we are stuck at an “illusory” level, incapable of experiencing how our brains work.
The true nature of things is evident only at the bottom, and so we must understand life from the bottom up.
• What we find at the bottom are scraps of molecular machinery.
• Through the power of natural selection — which operates like a mindlessly mechanistic algorithm (Dennett) or a blind, unconscious automatism (Dawkins) — these low-level molecular machines slowly evolve into the kind of apparently purposeful, complex entities we recognize as organisms, including ourselves.
• Whatever we are to make of this appearance of meaning and purpose — including my own intentions as I write this and yours as you read it — we are both urged to shed our prejudices and acknowledge that we with our intentions somehow arise from more basic, underlying processes that are essentially dumb, meaningless, and mindless.
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
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