Ok, so if 'experience' is the word we're using to describe the post hoc storytelling, then neuroscience has a few quite good models for that. There doesn't seem to be a hard problem there. — Isaac

That's great! So what is it about the neuronal models that explain how it is that I feel like I'm having an experience, when I'm not? Why can't all the neuronal stuff happen without me thinking I'm having an experience?

Why can't all the neuronal stuff happen without me thinking I'm having an experience? — bert1

Because some of the neuronal stuff is you thinking you're having an experience. 'Having an experience' is the term we use to describe that particular set of neuronal stuff*.


*more like a family resemblance of neuronal happenings, there's no one-to-one correspondence.

I think the correct term for...

*more like a family resemblance of neuronal happenings, there's no one-to-one correspondence. — Isaac

...is Anomalous Monism. @Banno taught me the term, so will kindly correct me if I'm wrong.

'Experience' is a word we use to describe a set of happenings we learn through our culture belong to that word. Because our culture is embedded in a real world which science studies, there'll be some overlap with the objects of science (neurons in this case), but the overlap isn't necessarily direct because the concept 'experience' is constrained by the world science studies, it's not defined by it.

By the same token, there's no proper one-to-one causal relationship because 'experience' is just a word we have, used in a variety of social contexts. It doesn't necessarily describe any object of science, nor is the fact that there's no direct causal link surprising or 'a problem' (hard or not). We simply wouldn't expect there to be.

They'd need to have eyes, but I don't see any reason they couldn't. — Isaac

None of the computers I know have eyes. Can I conclude that they are definitely not self-aware?

What about people without eyes? Can we classify them as unconscious zombies based on your definition?

Why can't all the neuronal stuff happen without me thinking I'm having an experience? — bert1

Probably because there is some survival or reproductive value in you having an experience. Our consciousness exists for a reason. That reason may be God, or it may be the Devil, but my guess is that it was shaped by natural selection like the rest of us, and that the reason why we have experiences must be that it gave our distant ancestors some Darwinian advantage over animals lacking it.

You're pretty well versed on the topic, what would you say is the best argument against the hard problem?

The gulf between the purported complex complete picture of something people believe they have in their mind('visual thinkers' and all that) with what they can describe when asked a few questions about it. — creativesoul

Yes, we are very good at lying to ourselves.

None of the computers I know have eyes. Can I conclude that they are definitely not self-aware? — Olivier5

You asked about consciousness (my definition of), not self-awareness.

What about people without eyes? — Olivier5

The pupillary reaction score is just left off in blind people, and those with potential eye damage.

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. — Wayfarer

Face value begs the question, what is there on its "face"?

Husserl's "Ideas" is all about, of course, ideas. Eidetic seeing is his first order of business. Do universals exist? I am reminded of Hegel: when I say, the boat is over there! "there" is a universal, and the over-there-ness is literally IN the reference. But is this "seen" empirically? Obviously no; but the object/affairs before you are not merely empirical. What is there Husserl calls "essences". He implicitly invites one to stare at an object, and pay attention to what is there that is in the structure of being there, and claims a kind of "seeing" is possible regarding essences. If you think this is hard to do, you're not alone. But this is the only way to responsibly approach what is before you. One has to look "away' from the physical presence, and toward the inwardness where the understanding is engaged, and this is an important part of this thinking: Essences are "intuitively objective", says Husserl, and they can be "seen" as intuitive presences. Two difference colors cannot occupy the same space and you know this through intuition of what is intimated in "space," "the same," and so forth. Clearly, Husserl is following through on Hegel's "rational realism" as is Heidegger: rationality, concepts, cognition, understanding, and the like, simply cannot be conceived independently of the actualities of the world. To do so makes for an ontology of abstraction. But, just to make a point, concepts are "open", determinative in their being part of the structure of what is there, but open to possibilities. The question then is, what is it that is THERE. Can one really "see" thought? One can only address this by going to the only place one can go, to the presence of thought, and this is a phenomenological move.

And noumena is there, baldly stated. Where else could the term be grounded? It is, and the Buddhist or Hindu would put it, always, already in the "there"; "palpable" metaphysics is the palpable indeterminacy of our existence that is made clear "through" the pragmatic discursivity of thought and phenomenology in its commitment to a being-appearance identity. This is where, I argue, Husserl's (and his progeny's) epoche takes inquiry.

This is the way I ground all philosophical questions. What is God? Reduce the term to its material grounding. What is there, in the world, that makes this term at all meaningful? The indeterminacy of ethics. What is ethics? This goes to a phenomenological analysis of the essence of ethics-in-the-world.

The pupillary reaction score is just left off in blind people, and those with potential eye damage. — Isaac

So you have a special definition of consciousness for blind folks. Good for them I guess...

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
— Constance

That's the opposite of what I said. — SophistiCat

Apologies for that.

What do you think the thesis of physicalism is? I don't think there is a single generally recognized physicalist doctrine. It is more of a family resemblance among philosophical treatments of certain subjects. — SophistiCat

I think of Quine's naturalism, and then this simple notion: where is the epistemic connectivity? The more a theory moves to make this happen, the more one moves into things that compromise the essential idea. I am open to the way this might work, but I can't imagine any defensible physicalist epistemology that hasn't redefined what the physical is. It would have to be a compromise toward phenomenology, and then, such a compromise must lean, with emphasis, toward the phenomenon: after all, all one ever witnesses, and all that is possible to witness, is phenomena.

That's hardly even a caricature of physicalism. No one would say that you are "seeing brain states" when you look at something. — SophistiCat

Then I am gratified you are here to disabuse me. I won't ask for a thesis, just the essential idea you have in mind.

Well, I was hoping to find out more about "this matter" (not so much about phenomenology), but I am making no progress in teasing it out. — SophistiCat

I referred to that quote of Rorty's. The "matter" is getting over the problem of epistemic distance between an agency with knowledge claims and the world that these knowledge claims are about. Phenomenology closes this distance by makes the object an intuitive presence, leaving the matter of the nature of intuition in play, that is, debatable. To go further than this would require a great deal of writing, but it suffices here to say, what I call the bottom line of all philosophical inquiry is what is given in the world. To move beyond this closes in on bad metaphysics.

So you have a special definition of consciousness for blind folks. Good for them I guess... — Olivier5

Same definition - maximum score on the Glasgow coma scale. The scale already takes blindness into account. If you tested pupillary response in a fully blind person you'd be doing it wrong. You'd be doing some other test.

But regardless, you're speaking as if you don't understand the concept of family resemblance. Perhaps a little reading might help. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein/wittgenstein-on-family-resemblance/831CEAF5C3B78D4CA94927F367979B0C

Guess I would require a definition of the concept of "family resemblance"... :-)

If you tested pupillary response in a fully blind person you'd be doing it wrong. — Isaac

Depends on what kind of blindness they have. The GCS is a quick way to communicate clinical signs. It's not a definition of anything. There might be recommendations, like intubate if the GCS is 8 or lower, but that's not a hard rule.

In a Neuro ICU, you'll see cool attempts to rouse people. There's lots of screaming and physical assaults. For instance, I do sternal rubs to see if I can rouse people, but neuro intensivists cause bruising. They dig their thumbs into pinky nail beds and all sorts of other things in order to assess if there's withdrawal to pain.

But after that, they still don't know if the patient is conscious or not because they could be locked in.

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? — Wayfarer

Agreed. I did not intend to imply that it was an established fact.

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. — Olivier5

It is a fairly common science fiction storyline. If such a technology were ever to be developed, I imagine it would start very simply with something like what has been studied with the MRI.

On the other hand, I think the potential for a mind reading device is pretty radical all by itself.

I imagine it would start very simply with something like what has been studied with the MRI. — T Clark

I would tend to disagree. MRI monitors the intensity of the biological effort made in various places of the brain, but it won't tell you what the result of this biological effort is.

It's a bit like trying to reconstruct a symphony by monitoring the bodily heat of individual orchestra members while they play it. The more effort they put into playing, the more heat their body ooses out. So bodily heat is a good indicator of the level of effort, but not a good indicator of the output of the effort: the actual music.

My money is on listening to brain waves. I believe they are the stuff our consciousness is made of.

Keith Frankish's illusionism argument. That the brain is performing the equivalent of a magic show, tricking us into thinking there's something about consciousness that turns it into the hard problem. I can't be sure exactly what his argument amounts to. He seems to be denying the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, since those are what leads to the hard problem. So I guess he's arguing for a functional account with the added twist that are brains trick us into say things like the "redness of red", or there's something it's like to be a bat, which we can't discover with neuroscience. It only seems like we have qualia.

Chalmers has said that if there is a dissolution of the hard problem, the meta-problem of explaining why we think there's a hard problem has to first be addressed. Frankish attempts to do that. I just don't know whether it seems like I'm phenomenally conscious is different than actually being conscious in the hard sense.

I just don't know whether it seems like I'm phenomenally conscious is different than actually being conscious in the hard sense. — Marchesk

Seeming to be conscious is equivalent to being conscious, no? Just as a matter of definition.

I just don't know whether it seems like I'm phenomenally conscious is different than actually being conscious in the hard sense. — Marchesk

So he's saying there is a magic show or illusion, but it's missing something that would make it qualify as phenomenal consciousness.

I think Dennett does something similar, where he says there is experience, but it doesn't meet certain criteria often assigned to experience.

I'll check out Frankish, thanks.

Chalmers has said that if there is a dissolution of the hard problem, the meta-problem of explaining why we think there's a hard problem has to first be addressed. — Marchesk

Yep.

I would tend to disagree. — Olivier5

You may well be right.

Then in what sense are we 'aware' of a yellow disk and a blue disk? We clearly are not experiencing their actual properties. — Isaac

We are aware of an imaginary yellow and blue disks, which is just an awkward way of saying we are imagining them. Why should imaginary and real things share all their properties?

What neural correlates? And how do we know they are the neural correlates? If "by report" then how do we know the camera's circuits aren't 'aware' of the light? — Isaac

We can measure neural activity that correlates with reported states of awareness, and which are absent when the subject is not aware.

We don't definitely know that the camera is not aware, just as we don't know the camera is not inhabited by a malignant spirit. We just have no evidence pointing to either case.

You may well be right. — T Clark

Just to conclude on the orchestra metaphor, if one trained an infrared camera tied to a computer on an symphonic orchestra, and asked the orchestra to play its repertoire of say, 10 pieces of classical music a number of times, soon enough the computer would be able to tell pieces apart based on the bodily temperature patterns of each player. Like in Vivaldi, the cymbals and the brass stay silent so the respective players are at rest, cool, while the violin players go all heated up. The temperature signature of Bethoven pieces are all ups and downs, while Bach is much more regular and stable in its temperature patterns... But at no time would the computer hear the actual music.

Similarly, an MRI experiment monitoring the energy consumption of various places in the brain of a patient can recognize A from B, or blue from red, when the patient's mind focuses on A or B or blue or red, if it has been trained previously to do so on the patient. But the MRI is not accessing the real thoughts themselves, of an A or a B. It just can tell that the energy consumption signature of an A is different from that of a B in that patient.

So if we want to read people's minds one day, we need a way to listen qualitatively to their music -- the thoughts themselves in whatever materiality they take, be it brainwaves or something else. Not just measure quantitatively the level of effort spent in producing thoughts.

All this to say it's high time neuroscience takes thinking as seriously as musicologists take music. No musicologist worth the name would use orchestra heat scans to explore Mozart.

So if we want to read people's minds one day, we need a way to listen qualitatively to their music -- the thoughts themselves in whatever materiality they take, be it brainwaves or something else. Not just measure quantitatively the level of effort spent in producing thoughts. — Olivier5

That makes sense.

No one would say that you are "seeing brain states" when you look at something. — SophistiCat

Then I am gratified you are here to disabuse me. I won't ask for a thesis, just the essential idea you have in mind. — Constance

We started this discussion with the thesis "The brain is the generative source of experience," which was presented as an essential physicalist commitment. I won't dispute that, though I personally think that physicalism is not so much about specific scientific commitments. With that in mind, a physicalist should be committed to the idea that what we call "seeing" is generated (in some sense) by the activity of the brain.

In what sense is seeing "generated" by the brain? I would say that the weakest physicalist commitment would be the supervenience relationship between seeing and brain activity (that is to say, no difference in what we see without a corresponding difference in brain activity). Some would go further than that, asserting a stronger reductive relationship between the folk-psychological concept of "seeing" and its physical realization.

:cool:

I'm not seeing the problem you're seeing here. History is littered with understandings and entities which seemed 'so obvious' to people at the time, but later societies consider them nothing but misunderstandings or superstition. I can't see how "everyone thinks it's obvious" presents any major barrier to neurological theories. — Isaac

This is not just "some theory" this is central to human experience and self-understanding, and it's not a question of that understanding being right or wrong. Humans generally experience themselves as being aware, and they are not at all aware of purported neural correlates, which are thus entirely irrelevant to their experience and self-understanding.

If you are not able to be conscious of your own awareness, then that says something about you, not about others or humans in general.

Yes, because you've already done it again and again based on a real human body. — Olivier5

Practice only enables, and thus explains being able to, acquire the motor skills involved in getting proportions right which of course comes from training. Likeness, recognizability, is something else. Even if I can't visualize a familiar face I know if even small details of a familiar face have been changed.

Anyway, my own experience has shown me that even though I usually cannot hold a stable image in mind, that I do have the ability to do it in some altered states.

And again I would pick you up on assuming that everyone is the same. What you find yourself able to do is not necessarily representative of human capacities in general.

.

If you are not able to be conscious of your own awareness, then that says something about you, not about others or humans in general. — Janus

As Descartes pointed out, who would be doing the "you" part, then? The doubter cannot doubt his own existence.

...even despite Dennett's 50-year effort to cast doubt on it.