.The section you quoted does not support your claim that the author’s goal is to “prove” that we each have an undeniable, given self. The fact that we have phenomenal consciousness is simply a given. — Luke
I’m saying that the assumption that we have “consciousness” is a misconception based on a desire to be certain that we matter. — Antony Nickles
You aren’t really aware of your feelings or sensations? — Luke
Why is there any such thing as what philosophers call ‘phenomenal experience’ or qualia – our subjective, personal sense of interacting with stimuli arriving via our sense organs? Not only in the case of vision, but across all sense modalities: the redness of red; the saltiness of salt; the paininess of pain – what does this extra dimension of experience amount to? What’s it for? — Nicholas Humphries
Isn't it rather a strange question? — Wayfarer
This is the question that the article proposes to address:
Why is there any such thing as what philosophers call ‘phenomenal experience’ or qualia – our subjective, personal sense of interacting with stimuli arriving via our sense organs? Not only in the case of vision, but across all sense modalities: the redness of red; the saltiness of salt; the paininess of pain – what does this extra dimension of experience amount to? What’s it for?
— Nicholas Humphries
Isn't it rather a strange question? — Wayfarer
So in philosophical mode my question in place of Humphrey's would be something like, "what is it about a scientific view that makes phenomenal experience look so puzzling?" — Jamal
But yes, some new phenomena or discovery comes to light that sheds some light into what was already deemed extremely problematic centuries ago, like the hard problem, or machines thinking. — Manuel
The stakes are certainly very high. As Descartes found, if we rely on anything else to build our sense of self, it can be taken away. Only if we “own” what is special about me (keep it inside) can I be ensured that my culture won’t minimize me, that others’ won’t define what is acceptable for me to be, that my actions won’t be judged to include implications I had not thought about, that I won’t just be identified by my suffering. — Antony Nickles
So in philosophical mode my question in place of Humphrey's would be something like, "what is it about a scientific view that makes phenomenal experience look so puzzling?" — Jamal
I think we by now have sufficient evidence to show that mind and matter are not distinct (different) ontological categories, but instead should be considered part of the same phenomena, matter, which we do not understand well at all. — Manuel
The example of blindsight demonstrates one aspect of this; that, although the person functions as a sighted person, without the qualia of sight, it doesn’t feel to them that those sighted functions belong to them. It was instead just some qualia-less physical processing that the person was unaware of, like their liver function.
If the same applied to all qualia, then there would be no sense of personhood. — Luke
Is it a scientific view that makes it look puzzling, or just the commonsense view of matter as being "inanimate", not to mention insentient and insapient? — Janus
What I take to be the main crux of the article is that the combination of different qualia create a sense of personhood; create me, my conscious self.
The example of blindsight demonstrates one aspect of this; that, although the person functions as a sighted person, without the qualia of sight, it doesn’t feel to them that those sighted functions belong to them. It was instead just some qualia-less physical processing that the person was unaware of, like their liver function.
If the same applied to all qualia, then there would be no sense of personhood. — Luke
If we have trouble with a particle, we have some issues in understanding matter as revealed by physics. — Manuel
Still a whole lot to learn about experience by way of science, but, again, compared to physics, I think it's substantially less problematic, by quite a margin, I'd wager. — Manuel
I tend to think the idea of the insentient nature of matter goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Judaism and Christianity, but it's a nuanced issue to be sure, and I'm no expert. — Janus
I’ll let it go after this because I agree my point is not a critique of the crux of the article (rather, I would say, of its premises). We are all aware (or unaware), sense the world (or are numb to it), feel anger and sadness (or repress it), but what I sense and feel is not unable to be possessed by others, for them to “have” them. We are interested, traumatized, exalted—me by one thing, you by something different, remembering different things, perhaps differently, but not always different.
But it is no mistake that the “sense of personhood” is a “sense”. We want the criteria for a self to be continuous, specific, knowable, so we take as evidence the one thing we feel we cannot not know, awareness of sensation—this self-evident pain I am pierced with, undeniably, unavoidably—and add to that our desire for uniqueness (and control) and you have the individual phenomenal self, backwards engineered from, coincidently, the criteria for truth that philosophy has desired from the beginning. — Antony Nickles
Whenever it happened, it’s bound to have been a psychological and social watershed. With this marvellous new phenomenon at the core of your being, you’ll start to matter to yourself in a new and deeper way. You’ll come to believe, as never before, in your own singular significance. What’s more, it will not just be you. For you’ll soon realise that other members of your species possess conscious selves like yours. You’ll be led to respect their individual worth as well.
‘I feel, therefore I am.’ ‘You feel, therefore you are too.’
To cap this, you’ll soon discover that when, by a leap of imagination you put yourself in your fellow creature’s place, you can model, in your self, what they are feeling. In short, phenomenal consciousness will become your ticket to living in what I’ve called ‘the society of selves’.
One small step for the brain, one giant leap for the mind.
I follow Strawson here, everything is physical, and that means everything. It's a terminological choice, but a coherent metaphysical one, which focuses on the nature of the world.
Within the physical (or material) we understand the conscious aspects of it better than anything by far. But there remains a lot of the physical we understand poorly, which is the non-conscious aspects of the physical (or matter).
What's the incoherence in this view, if you could explain it a bit more? — Manuel
I believe this misses the main crux of the article. It is not about “building” a sense of self, but about having one — Luke
No, by physicalism I mean everything in the world is physical stuff - of the nature of the physical - this means that experience is a wholly physical phenomenon. — Manuel
I don't see where you find that in the premises of the article, unless you are talking about the premises created within the history of philosophy that brought about the hard problem. — Luke
The article does not mention anything about a "desire for uniqueness" of the individual phenomenal self. — Luke
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