Even if so, that doesn't mean consciousness is understood functionally, as in we can provide a function which makes a system conscious. If we could, then we would know how to do the same with computer programs and robots. Chalmers criticism is that no amount of structure and function results in an explanation of consciousness. Which is similar to Locke's primary and secondary qualities. Number, shape, extension, composition don't give you the sensations of color, taste, etc. Nagel used that to show the fundamental objective/subjective split in our descriptions. We can't say what bat sonar sensation is no matter how good our science is.

It should be noted though that Chalmers has proposed property dualism on information systems, so he's fine with functionalism as long as there's something additional that connects it to consciousness.

Chalmers criticism is that no amount of structure and function results in an explanation of consciousness. [...] We can't say what bat sonar sensation is no matter how good our science is. — Marchesk

I have sympathy for Chalmers pushing back against the reductionists and simplistic materialists like Dennet, but I tend to be puzzled by his arguments. Maybe one day the state of our science will allow us to read the minds of bats, for instance.

I would then expect us to find out that bats aren't that different from humans, that all animal mental worlds are variations on a common theme, just like all animals use the same genetic code, and tend to share vast amounts of DNA. Your hemoglobin is quite similar to bats'. We're all cousins.

Simple arithmetic would do. That doesn't belong in the phenomenal domain. — Wayfarer

Well, yes and no. Everything belongs there because that is all that is given, but this doesn't mean all that is given is interpretatively clear. Givenness has a transcendental horizon, an "openness", and its interpretative values are not governed by an extraneous idea, a metaphysics like material substance.

When one does arithmetic, and stops to observe what is there, not referring to neuronal activity, evolutionary modeling of adaptive functions, and the rest, one is being a phenomenological "scientist". Kant was the grandfather of phenomenology, they say.

No, I don't find the analogy with logic any more clear. Anything can be the subject of a discourse, including logic. At the same time, as you note, logic structures discourse. But I don't see a vicious circularity here, if that is what you are leading to. You cannot ground or justify logic with more logic - that much is clear. But you are talking about the very possibility of discoursing (logically) about logic, and I don't see a problem with that. — SophistiCat

And there is none. What you talk about is the very reason why we have the discipline called logic. the point I am making is that this field is question begging in the same way physics is question begging when it talks about, say, force. They talk about and use this term freely and make perfect sense, usually, but ask what a force is, and you will get blank stares; well, at first you will get explanatory attempts that contextualize the meaning, by when you get to "where the ideas run out" as Putnam put it, it has to be acknowledged that physics hasn't a clue as to the "true nature" of force. Go to something like Plato's Timaeus and you find some intriguing inroads, but mostly pretty useless.

Anyway, logic is what it is, and if you don't ask pesky foundational questions, then you will not encounter the issue. But regarding the hard problem of consciousness, this IS the hard part. Perhaps not the way Chalmers puts it, but so what. Explaining conscious philosophically takes you all the way down the rabbit hole, right to the language embeddedness of the term, and if you can't ground language, you can't ground logic in a non question begging way. Derrida argues that the whole lot of it is question begging, at the level of foundational discussion. Philosophy "ends" here, at language and its existential counterpart, existence.

Well, then you do deny the premise, and that's that. You cannot make an argument against a contrary position without first taking it on its own terms. If you deny the position outright, or, as you admit, don't even understand it, then there is no argument to be made. — SophistiCat

The contrary position here appears at the most basic level of analysis, and this would be the interpretative foundation provided by a phenomenological pov. All things are in play, but one has to find the context of play. Wittgenstein very seriously (he was pathologically serious) said that ethics, being, aesthetics, logic are mystical., but he refused to elaborate because as he saw, language has no business doing this. He was wrong and right: Wrong because there is a LOT one can say, and right because obviously, one cannot speak what lies outside the totality of language possibilities. He, by inference, believed what I believe, that the world IS metaphysics. My cat and my morning coffee.

A footnote on "phenomena" - in classical philosophy "phenomena" was part of a pair, the other term being "noumena", "Phenomena" referring to "how things appear" or the domain of appearances.

The meaning of "noumena" is complex, especially because it is now generally associated with Kant's usage, which was very much his own. Schopenhauer accused Kant of appopriating the term for his purposes without proper regard to its prior meaning for Greek and Scholastic philosophy (ref, and a criticism which I think is justified). The original meaning of "noumenal" was derived from the root "nous" (intellect) - hence "the noumenal" was an "object of intellect" - something directly grasped by reason, as distinct from by sensory apprehension. It ultimately goes back to the supposed "higher" reality of the intelligible Forms in Platonism.

In traditional philosophy, this manifested as the distinction between "how things truly are", which was discernable by the intellect, and "how they appear". This was the major subject of idealist philosophy (e.g. F. H. Bradley's famous Appearance and Reality). In this context, "appearance" was invariably deprecated as "the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave".

The emphasis on "phenomena" in phenomenology begins with the focus on the lived experience of the subject as distinct from the conceptual abstractions and emphasis on the object which was typical of scientific analysis and positivism. "Phenomenology is...a particular approach which was adopted and subsequently modified by writers, beginning with Husserl, who wanted to reaffirm and describe their ‘being in the world’ as an alternative way to human knowledge, rather than objectification of so-called positivist science. Paul Ricoeur referred to phenomenological research as “the descriptive study of the essential features of experience taken as a whole” and a little later, stated that it “has always been an investigation into the structures of experience which precede connected expression in language. (ref)”

This emphasis on the subject (not on "subjectivity"!) eventually gives rise to Heidegger's 'dasein' and to the school of embodied cognition and enactivism which is still very prominent. You could paraphrase it as "naturalism is the study of what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is a study of you looking out the window."

@Constance - in respect of the 'reflexive paradox' you might have a look at It Is Never Known but it is the Knower (.pdf) by Michel Bitbol. He is also French but his work is much more relevant to 'the hard problem of consciousness' than Jacques Derrida in my opinion. ;-) — Wayfarer

There is nothing in this post that suggests arithmetic is outside phenomenology's purview, that i can find. And Bitboll is not entirely right in his thinking. Michel Henry is much more rigorous:

Phenomenology rests on four principles which it explicitly claims as its foundations. The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!” The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”

Notice how phenomenology is a method of discovery and analysis. It provides a foundational position for doing philosophy: the givenness of the world, vis a vis being.

I would then expect us to find out that bats aren't that different from humans, that all animal mental worlds are variations on a common theme, just like all animals use the same genetic code, and tend to share vast amounts of DNA. Your hemoglobin is quite similar to bats'. We're all cousins. — Olivier5

But that doesn't mean bats or other animals have the exact same set of sensations. We know that can't be true because many birds can see more than three primary colors, and presumably bats have a sonar sensation. Maybe it's a kind of color or sound, but it could be something altogether different as well. And what would it be like as an octopus, where the nervous system is as much distributed in the tentacles, which act semi-independently, as it is in the head?

Maybe one day the state of our science will allow us to read the minds of bats, for instance. — Olivier5

I have heard of experiments using MRIs to correlate specific brain patterns with specific words. The claim is that this may someday allow reading minds. Here's a link to a 60 Minutes program discussing this. I have not watched this since it was originally on the air.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-rewind-mind-reading-2020-09-04/

And what would it be like as an octopus, where the nervous system is as much distributed in the tentacles, which act semi-independently, as it is in the head — Marchesk

Plus they don't have hemoglobin. They have hemocyanin.

How else would it classify them. — Isaac

Computationally.

But that doesn't mean bats or other animals have the exact same set of sensations. We know that can't be true because many birds can see more than three primary colors, and presumably bats have a sonar sensation. Maybe it's a kind of color or sound, but it could be something altogether different as well. And what would it be like as an octopus, where the nervous system is as much distributed in the tentacles, which act semi-independently, as it is in the head? — Marchesk

Agreed. There would be variations. A new sense such as bats' sonar would theoretically imply a whole new set of qualia specific to that sense, of if you prefer, a typology of sensations specific to that sense. I agree that as of now, there's no way for us to even imagine what these theoretical sonar qualia would feel like. But this doesn't prove that we will never be able to do so. We obviously cannot tell in advance what discoveries science will make in the future, otherwise we would make them now... (Popper)

Another huge difference between humans and other animals is in the use of and dependency on symbolic language. We cannot think without language (though a human baby supposedly can).

The case of octopuses is interesting because bats are mammals, and hence very close to us humans in the darwinian tree. Cephalopods (squids, octopuses etc.) are invertebrate and thus very far from us. And their nervous system, as you say, is much more scattered than ours.

Nevertheless, invertebrate nervous systems use the same basic element than ours: neurons that appear similar to mammals' except that the cephalopod ones are larger in size. Octopuses have bigger neurons than we do, for some yet unknown reason.

An interesting consequence is that for a long time, we knew more about octopuses neurons that we did about our own, because it is far easier to stick electrodes into a big cell than into a small one. Studying cephalopod neurons was just easier. Of course the assumption was that we would learn something about neurons in general, including our own, by studying squids'. Just like we study genetics in mice or drosophilia because it's easier than on humans, but the results are supposedly applicable to humans.

So the assumption was, and still is, that at neuronal level at least, what happens in a squid is comparable to what happens in you and me.

Now, my argument here is that, if indeed the neurons of squids and ours function in a similar way, then we should expect their mental world and ours to not be so very different. It might be less of this or more of that; some variations would apply, but all using a common basic material.

Computationally. — hypericin

Computing what? If it's not aware of any data, then how can it process it?

Computing what? If it's not aware of any data, then how can it process it? — Isaac

You are misusing the word "aware". A camera receives light, but it is not aware of it. A camera taking a picture is not an instance of "awareness".

You are misusing the word "aware". — hypericin

Ah, I see. So what exactly is it to be 'aware' of some data? How do we measure awareness?

But you are talking about the very possibility of discoursing (logically) about logic, and I don't see a problem with that. — SophistiCat

And there is none. What you talk about is the very reason why we have the discipline called logic. the point I am making is that this field is question begging in the same way physics is question begging when it talks about, say, force. They talk about and use this term freely and make perfect sense, usually, but ask what a force is, and you will get blank stares; well, at first you will get explanatory attempts that contextualize the meaning, by when you get to "where the ideas run out" as Putnam put it, it has to be acknowledged that physics hasn't a clue as to the "true nature" of force. Go to something like Plato's Timaeus and you find some intriguing inroads, but mostly pretty useless. — Constance

An argument or a justification can beg the question, but logic* as a field does not present an argument or a justification of itself. I already acknowledged that logic cannot be grounded in more logic, but that is in no way controversial, nor does it present a challenge for its study.

* Or rather, rationality, which includes informal logic, as well as other standards of reasoning and decision-making.

(I don't want to derail this conversation further, but if you are interested, Feynman (who rather disparaged philosophy as a discipline) has a good philosophical discussion of the nature of force and its treatment in physics in his Lectures: Characteristics of Force. (I dare say, this is more useful than Timaeus.) He sort of agrees with you.)

Anyway, I still don't see how this addresses the thesis that started this conversation:

If the brain were the generative source of experience, every occasion of witnessing a brain would be itself brain generated. This is the paradox of physicalism. — Constance

What paradox?

I suspect we are all pretty much the same soul, the same thing, the same mental structure, with better or worse abilities here or there. Like two diesel cars are essentially the same thing, even if one can drive faster than the other. — Olivier5

Your suspicion is understandable but wrong, though the subject has not received nearly the attention it deserves. Here is one blog post by a guy with aphantasia.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/2862324277332876/

There was a better post, that I also read from here, that I can't find right now. It is not just can/can't visualize. There are people who have no inner monologue at all, and think by entirely other means. They were astounded to learn people think like this, and found the idea kind of psychotic. I for one cannot "visualize" tastes and smells, others have no problem with this.

I read the post and I think the guy is mistaken in assuming that "nearly all of you have a [mental] canvas." I certainly cannot recall with any ease the face of my departed mom. I can imagine a beach in my head but it is not a stable picture, more of a vague, unstable set of gross approximations of the real deal. The same applies to something as elemental as a red triangle. All I can summon in my mind is a vague, flickering shadow of something, that on a good day I can convince myself looks a bit like a red triangle.

I think the guy is mistaken in assuming that "nearly all of you have a [mental] canvas." — Olivier5

Yes, my experience is the same as yours. I read other posts from people with aphantasia and they make the same mistake. They think we are walking around with HD movies in our heads. some people do, but I guess they are at least as rare as people with aphantasia.

but logic* as a field does not present an argument or a justification of itself. — SophistiCat

This would be true if logic were, magically, its own interpretative base, as if the intuitive apociticity of modus ponens or De Morgan's theorum were what it is AS it is presented to us in language. But language is not, itself, apodictic. Like causality: there is an intuition that is absolute regarding objects moving spontaneously which says, no. But then, the language and its terms is a historical construct. One would have to show how terms themselves are absolutes.

(I don't want to derail this conversation further, but if you are interested, Feynman (who rather disparaged philosophy as a discipline) has a good philosophical discussion of the nature of force and its treatment in physics in his Lectures: Characteristics of Force. (I dare say, this is more useful than Timaeus.) He sort of agrees with you.) — SophistiCat

Perhaps I will look it up. But the argument I am pressing here comes from general thinking inspired by Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and others.

What paradox? — SophistiCat

I first put this out there to show how physicalism as a naive thesis, lacks epistemic essence. That is, there is nothing in it that allows for anyone to know anything at all. I see my cat and I am thereby forced to admit I am reductively seeing brain states only. Only brains states are no longer brains states, for language itself, including expressions like 'brain states' is "something else" which is unnamable, and this is not all wrong, of course, because, physicalist model aside, all analytic avenues lead to this radical indeterminacy (as with Wittgenstein). It is just that here, there can be no "out there" IN the model. Phenomenology takes the "out there" of objects (or the "otherness" of what is outside of myself) and leaves this openness as a feature of our existence. Where Kant thought noumena as an impossible "other" and simply a postulatory necessity, phenomenology can see this as In the presence of the being of the world.

Ideas about physical brains are fine in contexts of the everydayness and sciences where they meaningfully are found. But take this to basic philosophical questions, and there is no way to reconcile knowledge claims about the world with foundational physicalist descriptions. One ends up with the paradox of having an encounter with things out there, like trees and fence posts, and having no way to epistemically reach them: the tree is out, not me; and yet, it isn't, for all out thereness is confined to physicality. Rorty put it like this: One no more has knowledge of an outside world (in the context of basic assumptions discussed here) than a dented car fender has knowledge of the offending guard rail.

Phenomenology remedies this matter, I argue.

Imagine a blue circle next to yellow circle.

Move the two circles closer an closer until they overlap.

What colour is the overlapping region?

...

You've no idea have you? Because you're not really seeing a blue circle and a yellow circle, so their combined colour does not occur. In fact you could make their combined colour anything you like. I'm currently imagining a blue circle and a yellow circle combining to make a deep burgundy, which is impossible.

They think we are walking around with HD movies in our heads. some people do, — hypericin

I doubt it very much. There's no such thing as "mental furniture", ie some stable, solid mental representation of anything. Our minds are always in flux, like a torrent, or a calmer river. But there isn't any furniture in that river. It's all 'constructed', cheaply but aptly so in a way. That is to say, the system cannot do everything. The system is geared to do certain things and not others, specifically it is focused on tasks that have survival values. For instance, recognition of sensations, ie their interpretation, as fast as possible. When you see a tiger, you can classify it as such really fast, faster than you can imagine a tiger, perhaps because spotting a real tiger nearby is an ability that is more useful to survival than imagining one.

To the degree that it might be useful to imagine a tiger (or anything else), this value is exhausted when I just put some place holder somewhere saying "big striped cat - who will kill you if given a chance". I don't really need the mental canvas, with the tiger painted on it. What would I do with that? Nor even a mental movie would serve any purpose, because if you ask me to imagine a tiger, it's probably because you will then tell me a story about it, or some further detail, so I need my imagining to remain open and fluid.

We cannot think without language (though a human baby supposedly can). — Olivier5

Speak for yourself. In everyday thinking concerned with what do do, what I have to do, where to go, how to get there and so on, I think in images, not words. Obviously abstract or complex discursive thought is couched in symbolic language.

So what exactly is it to be 'aware' of some data? How do we measure awareness? — Isaac

Obviously there is no way of objectively measuring awareness, but its intensity can be felt, so we have a sense of its "measure".

What I was commenting on was not the range of phenomenology, but rather this statement:

Consider, if you will, the one abiding thought that dominates my thinking: The world is phenomena. Once this is simply acknowledged, axiomatically so, then things fall into place. — Constance

That's why I introduced the distinction between 'phenomena' and 'noumena', and pointing out that there's a fundamental distinction made in philosophy between the sensory and rational faculties, which I understand still exists in Husserl, although I'm not conversant with the details. But your statement basically seems to state that the world is as it appears, on face value, which I'm sure is not what you mean.

I have heard of experiments using MRIs to correlate specific brain patterns with specific words. — T Clark

You want to be careful, many of those studies have been called into question. See Do you believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch?

That's why I introduced the distinction between 'phenomena' and 'noumena', and pointing out that there's a fundamental distinction made in philosophy between the sensory and rational faculties, which I understand still exists in Husserl, although I'm not conversant with the details. — Wayfarer

Husserl’s distinction is not between phenomenon and noumenon , but between the subjective ( noetic) and objective (noematic) poles of an intentional act. When we see a chair , the object wee see simply as an enduring self-same thing is the noema , and the synthesizing of memory, presentation and anticipation that allows us to produce this idealization we call ‘chair’ ( or any natural empiricalobject) is the noetic contribution to the intentional experience. There is no noumenon behind phenomena, there is nothing but appearances.

Thanks. I understand he doesn't posit the distinction between sensory and rational as such, but it is still implicit in his analysis, no? (And I remain dubious about the statement 'the world is phenomena'.)

Bitboll is not entirely right in his thinking. — Constance

The reason I mentioned Bitbol, and this paper in particular, is because this analysis is specifically relevant to the question of the 'hard problem', and also because it directly addresses this point you raised earlier about the paradox of the brain knowing itself.

have heard of experiments using MRIs to correlate specific brain patterns with specific words. — T Clark

I was thinking of something more radical, like some science-induced telepathy, which would then allow us to feel what it is to be a bat. There's no telling if we will ever reach that point but I can't see why it would be technically or logically impossible.

↪Joshs Thanks. I understand he doesn't posit the distinction between sensory and rational as such, but it is still implicit in his analysis, no? — Wayfarer

The sensory is never treated as having a component absolutely independent of rational processes.



“But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness?”

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

Because you're not really seeing a blue circle and a yellow circle, so their combined colour does not occur. I — Isaac

Who is claiming you "really" seeing in your mind? Brain activity will be similar whether you are seeing or imagining. But this doesn't mean the logic of color combination will be implemented faithfully by the brain.

So what exactly is it to be 'aware' of some data? — Isaac

To have a first-person experience of it.

How do we measure awareness? — Isaac

By report, or by measuring at the neural correlates.

Yes, my experience is the same as yours. I read other posts from people with aphantasia and they make the same mistake. They think we are walking around with HD movies in our heads. some people do, but I guess they are at least as rare as people with aphantasia. — hypericin

What about when you dream? I would put it more in terms of a VR headset kind of experience, particularly for lucid dreaming.

Some people are really good visualizers. Others can compose music in my head. I have a regular stream of inner dialog. I wonder what you make of Temple Grandin's claims that for autists like herself, their imagination is like the Star Trek Holodeck.

Of course in all this I'm reminded of the certain scientific and philosophical skeptics who mistake their lack of visualization or lucid dreaming for those abilities not existing in other people. That's a kind of logical error whose name escapes me.

The sensory is never treated as having a component absolutely independent of rational processes — Joshs

Makes perfect sense. Thanks again.