Some physical processes are information processing apt, while most physical processes aren't information processing apt. If what we refer to as mental processes can only supervene on information processing apt physical processes, then we are some distance from square one. — wonderer1

Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing".

the relationship between chemistry and life is analogous to the relationship between neurology and mind. — T Clark

It is superficially so, but not actually, no.

It is superficially so, but not actually, no. — schopenhauer1

As often is the case, you confuse your refusal to engage in discussion with making a coherent argument.

Interestingly, you draw a distinction between "process/behavioral," vs "mental," but it seems like all your examples could as easily distinguish between "process vs object."

But is consciousness fundamentally an object rather than a process? I might go with the latter. I cannot recall ever thinking without time passing or living the same moment more than once. It seems like first person subjective experience is a process then, not an object that springs forth from other objects or a property that objects possess. It's the difference between a song being a series of notes in time and thinking of a song as being the notes abstracted from time.

IMO, part of the gordian knot of the Hard Problem is that we have developed a 2,000 year habit of thinking in terms of "objects and substances," instead of patterns. Information theory seems like a prime example where we should be taking the process view, and yet the legacy of Platonism in mathematics seems to keep dragging it back.

As often is the case, you confuse your refusal to engage in discussion with making a coherent argument. — T Clark

It's how you define mental versus process. You can't just say mental is a process. That is the point. That is what is to be explained.

1) My thought of red is a subjective, internal, felt, experience.

2) A wavelength of a certain frequency hitting the rods and cones hitting the optic nerve and transmitted to various cortical and subcortical networks is the physical correlated property.

The example of chemistry and biology are examples of 2 to 2. This is 2 to 1. If you don't see there is a distinction there, then you are playing word games or being purposefully ignorant, which I am not interested in.

IMO, part of the gordian knot of the Hard Problem is that we have developed a 2,000 year habit of thinking in terms of "objects and substances," instead of patterns. Information theory seems like a prime example where we should be taking the process view, and yet the legacy of Platonism in mathematics seems to keep dragging it back. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing". — schopenhauer1

I too have deep problems with hand waving appeals to "information" and "complexity," re the Hard Problem. However, the Chinese Room always seemed like simply begging the question when applied to the Hard Problem.

"Imagine you don't understand Chinese," is a premise right in the thought experiment. Well, yes, given "I don't understand Chinese," then I won't understand Chinese, but as an analogy to consciousness the thought experiment fails by essentially recreating the Cartesian Homunculus. It's like asking someone to "find the neuron in the brain that speaks English."

However, I think the Chinese Room is interesting in the sense that it shows that it appears to be metaphysically possible for something to show the behaviors we associate with consciousness without being conscious. That said, if we knew what caused consciousness, the analogy might fail. It's successful because we have to rely on "correlates" of consciousness precisely because we don't have a clear causal hypothesis for what generates consciousness.

IMO, this is a problem for idealists too. Idealism is all well and good, but most idealists want to say that other people are conscious and rocks aren't, even if rocks only exist as objects of consciousness. So, they still have the problem of explaining what empirical criteria can be used to determine what is or isn't conscious. Dualists have this same problem. Is the suis generis cause of consciousness observable?

But the Chinese Room is not really relevant for that set of problems since we could take the Room apart to see how it works very easily, all you'd need is something to knock the door in. The same hasn't been true for us.

But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1

Consider this possibility: Consciousness is just the being of the world for various embodied subjects. We don't live in private dreams. Your toothache is part of my reality. It doesn't matter that I access it differently. I can reason about it with you. It lives as concept in the logical space we share.

Direct realism assumes the human animal has a god-like view of the universe. — schopenhauer1

I disagree. A good description of what I'm talking about is Zahavi's interpretation of Husserl in his intro book. But I'll sketch the basics.

I see the rose and not an image of the rose. I see it from a certain perspective, with my eyes.--because I'm a primate, not a god. I can be mistaken. Maybe it's dark or I'm sleepy. But my being mistaken need not be explained in terms of some ghostly stuff about which I cannot be mistaken. [Indirect realists tend to misunderstand direct realism, loaded as they are with certain assumptions, used to as they are to incorrigible images.]

One of the stronger arguments for [ sophisticated ] direct realism is that indirect realism secretly depends on assuming it in order to insist on the necessity of some mediating layer. If the brain is a mere representation (an 'image on a screen'), it's absurd to use it to claim that all the subject ever has is representation (an 'image on a screen.')

As a squirrel, a fish, a bat, a rat, and a bee all have their own view, and yet, do they have direct access to the world too? If it is different, then certainly there is something that mediates between directly observing the object, and processing it (i.e. indirect realism). Surely something is causing differences upon the objects perceived between species. — schopenhauer1

If you and your mom are on opposite sides of the room, and she is nearsighted as fuck and can't find her glasses and you have an eagle's eyesight but are colorblind, are you looking at the same furniture or not ?

Or let's say there's a clone of you across the room. Are you looking at the same furniture, seeing it from different perspectives?

I do not at all contest that there are all kinds of causal relationships that can be examined between eyes and objects and brains. No one is denying the biological complexity of seeing. But when I talk about the Eiffel tower, I'm talking about the fucking Eiffel tower and not my idea of it. Language is deeply ego-transcending and social. We intend the worldly object. Even my toothache is a worldly object, despite my special access to it. I can use it to explain being rude. Its cessation might be explained by Novocain.

What you ignored in my first post was the absolute centrality of giving and asking for reasons -- the philosophical situation itself. This is prior to any ontological thesis. We reason about and intend worldly objects. I talk about the rose, our worldly rose. It's not completely insane or absurd to invent a private rose for everyone, but it is insane or absurd to get rid of the worldly rose.

We can just as well talk about brains. Presumably you like indirect realism because the brain is conceived as a mediation machine. But then the brain is an illusion. The brain-in-itself (the one that does the work) is now a wild hypothesis.

It's much easier to believe that we see the familiar brain directly, if never completely and perfectly and exhaustively. Objects have depth and complexity. They are seen from different perspectives, understood with more or less sophistication.

We can be wrong about them. But this does not force indirect dualism on us. A daydream, for instance, doesn't need its own level or plane of reality. We can understand consciousness as the being of the world for this or that subject, instead of its own kind of being.

Are you saying there is a hard problem of biology too? — T Clark

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. — Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?

The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. — Thomas Nagel

they (idealists) still have the problem of explaining what empirical criteria can be used to determine what is or isn't conscious. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The divide between organisms and minerals is pretty clear, is it not (leaving aside viruses and prions which seem to straddle it.)

Thought is at least correlated with that physical phenomenon, so it's not like you can completely disconnect it. — schopenhauer1

Kastrup's answer is that the physical process is what the thought looks like from across the dissociative boundary, when viewed from the outside. Just as 'sadness' appears as tears and facial contortions to an observer, but is a subjective reality to those undergoing it. So it's not as if there's physical sadness and mental sadness.

fails by essentially recreating the Cartesian Homunculus. It's like asking someone to "find the neuron in the brain that speaks English." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't that the point? It is supposed to fail in recreating it. That is to say, the homunculus in this case is all appearance only (to us who do have consciousness), and not actually "there".

But the Chinese Room is not really relevant for that set of problems since we could take the Room apart to see how it works very easily, all you'd need is something to knock the door in. The same hasn't been true for us. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the main takeaway in the context of "information processing" is that information processing itself doesn't necessitate consciousness. A monitor's outputs means something or is about something (intentional stance) because there is already an observer in the equation, not because the monitor is outputting.

Consider this possibility: Consciousness is just the being of the world for various embodied subjects. We don't live in private dreams. Your toothache is part of my reality. It doesn't matter that I access it differently. I can reason about it with you. It lives as concept in the logical space we share. — plaque flag

You'd have to flesh that out...Otherwise it's words coherently put together that don't mean much for me.

Maybe it's dark or I'm sleepy. But my being mistaken need not be explained in terms of some ghostly stuff about which I cannot be mistaken. [Indirect realists tend to misunderstand direct realism, loaded as they are with certain assumptions, used to as they are to incorrigible images.] — plaque flag

I come at it from an evolutionary standpoint. Humans perceive the object because our primate ancestors needed to perceive it that way. Rather, unlike DR, we don't see the apple "as it is in reality" beyond our evolutionary apparatus. How can it be otherwise? Why does a bat and a human have different perceptions of the same object? No one is arguing that there is an object, and that it might have its own properties even, but that the epistemological framework is a "window into the reality" of the object? That seems a bit too far, and hence why it is often called "naive realism".

I do not at all contest that there are all kinds of causal relationships that can be examined between eyes and objects and brains. No one is denying the biological complexity of seeing. But when I talk about the Eiffel tower, I'm talking about the fucking Eiffel tower and not my idea of it. Language is deeply ego-transcending and social. We intend the worldly object. Even my toothache is a worldly object, despite my special access to it. I can use it to explain being rude. Its cessation might be explained by Novocain.

What you ignored in my first post was the absolute centrality of giving and asking for reasons -- the philosophical situation itself. This is prior to any ontological thesis. We reason about and intend worldly objects. I talk about the rose, our worldly rose. It's not completely insane or absurd to invent a private rose for everyone, but it is insane or absurd to get rid of the worldly rose.

We can just as well talk about brains. Presumably you like indirect realism because the brain is conceived as a mediation machine. But then the brain is an illusion. The brain-in-itself (the one that does the work) is now a wild hypothesis.

It's much easier to believe that we see the familiar brain directly, if never completely and perfectly and exhaustively. Objects have depth and complexity. They are seen from different perspectives, understood with more or less sophistication.

We can be wrong about them. But this does not force indirect dualism on us. A daydream, for instance, doesn't need its own level or plane of reality. We can understand consciousness as the being of the world for this or that subject, instead of its own kind of being. — plaque flag

Well it's all what we mean by mental representation isn't it? Why does a human see certain colors and other animals do not? Are we seeing reality more clearly or simply represent it differently?

The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. — Thomas Nagel

There's a dualism taken for granted here.

In my opinion, the issue is especially here:

but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.

I think the better path is 'how the world appears.' For this is the rat looking at the cheese and not some internal image of the cheese. The problem with 'subjective experiences' is that it slides toward looking only at the image of the cheese. Then one is tempted to say the image of the cheese is made of a special 'nonphysical' stuff. As if there's no other option.

If the rat is looking at the worldly cheese, why can't we ( fallibly ) describe how the cheese appears to it ? Trivially, my talk about brown is not itself brown. Nor is my talk about a rat itself a rat. Describing what the rat sees is, as description, bound to be conceptual. It's trivially not what the rat saw but my fallible description of it. 'I don't think it saw that cheese, because it just sat in the corner.' It's like me trying to figure out what my mother saw when I forgot to lock the door that one time. Note that I can't put my actual seeing into my description of what my mom looks like in the shower.

So why can't I fallibly describe what the rat saw in the spatio-temporal order ? Must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? Must I mindmeld with the rat ? Be the rat to study the rat ?

Or must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? — plaque flag

It's not a question of being fallible or infallible. The difficulty is that the experiential dimension is not included in any description. Skilled writers can describe an experience or evoke it, but conveying anything of it will rely on the fact that the reader is also a subject of experience. 'Ah, I know how that feels', 'that must have been an amazing experience'. But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. There is an experiential dimension to existence, which is never captured by the descriptive process. That's the hard problem in a nutshell.

You'd have to flesh that out...Otherwise it's words coherently put together that don't mean much for me. — schopenhauer1

The main thing here is to grasp the radical and I think surprising centrality of the usually backgrounded philosophical situation itself. If you want to make a case to me about objects X and Y and their relationship, they have to be available to me in some sense. Your toothache is literally meaningless unless it's related inferentially to other concepts. It's in my world too. It's in the only world that philosophers can talk about. The world. Our world.

But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. — Quixodian

I'm afraid this is trivially true. As John Berger says at the beginning of Ways of Seeing, we see before we can talk. The world surrounds us. A painting is not a poem. A melody is not a painting. Conceptuality is its own dimension. If I describe a painting, I give you concepts and not a painting (not shapes and colors).

I will happily grant you that toothaches exist in a different way than protons. But they too are in the one-layer world, seen from many perspectives, part of the one and only semantic-inferential network along with marriages and voltages.

I'm afraid this is trivially true. — plaque flag

But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that?

Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. — schopenhauer1

Please remember, I was responding to your question:

But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1

Do you see your question as a purely rhetorical question? Or do you want to learn about the answers? To develop some understanding of how far beyond square one (some of) humanity is?

Searle's Chinese Room is an argument against computationalism. We could have a nuanced discussion of the argument's merits and limitations, but let's suppose the argument totally succeeds against computationalism. In that case we have reason to narrow our view of the sort of information processing which could result in mental events to non-computational information processing. However, I only presented information processing as a criteria for ruling out the many physical processes which aren't the sort of physical processes suitable for resulting in mental events. Narrowing things down further is not a problem, depending on how specific we want to get in various ways.

As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing". — schopenhauer1

I solved the problem I wanted to solve - providing a relatively informed answer to your question, as to why some processes don't have mental results. Now I'm going to swagger away from your moved goal posts. :razz:

I think the better path is how the world appears. For this is the rat looking at the cheese and not some internal image of the cheese. The problem with subjective experiences is that it slides toward looking only at the image of the cheese. Then one is tempted to say the image of the cheese is made of a special 'nonphysical' stuff. As if there's no other option. — plaque flag

One reason I hate these debates of direct and indirect realism is this notion of "mental representation" and what that really means. It's very vague and becomes a weird sticking point. We are sensing an actual object that is interacting with the organism, yes. So in the sense that I think we are actually perceiving an object and not some intermediary, call me a direct realist then.. However, do brains process the inputs in a way that was shaped by the environment? Yes, so perhaps that is indirect realist. I really don't like the labels either way and think they are not very useful, or were part of a historical context that perhaps doesn't pertain to every argument about philosophy of mind.

Note that I'm saying that nostalgia and rumors and butter and integers are all equally real.

Integers aren't easy to place in space-time. Rumors are also hard to localize, but not in the same way or for the same reason.

Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. Whatever we can reason about as philosophers is in our world. Isn't the alternative confusion and nonsense ? You may have special access to your nostalgia, but you are in my world and so therefore is your nostalgia. I 'see' it from a different 'perspective.'

Do you see your question as a purely rhetorical question? Or do you want to learn about the answers? To develop some understanding of how far beyond square one (some of) humanity is? — wonderer1

Oh come now, get off the pedestal. I was just pointing out problems with the move to information processing which I know is a popular approach.

However, I only presented information processing as a criteria for ruling out the many physical processes which aren't the sort of physical processes suitable for resulting in mental events. Narrowing things down further is not a problem, depending on how specific we want to get in various ways. — wonderer1

I think his argument stands for any processing really. I don't see the functional difference, because the POV is always out of reach. I see it as a computer monitor. The monitor is outputting, but so what? You need an observer already in the equation for that to have any meaning. There is no there there. There is no point of view, otherwise. There is no view even.

One reason I hate these debates of direct and indirect realism is this notion of "mental representation" and what that really means. It's very vague and becomes a weird sticking point. — schopenhauer1

Well I think it's hard work getting clear on the most basic concepts especially. Hence the foolishness of the ontologist who should be marketing dick pills on Instagram for big bucks. But I insist that we are striving to find the truth and clarify our situation.

Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. — plaque flag

You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience.

To make it clearer, consider Daniel Dennett's response to Chalmers:

In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. — Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science

I refer to Dennett as a canonical materialist, ergo, not a straw man.

We are sensing an actual object that is interacting with the organism, yes. So in the sense that I think we are actually perceiving an object and not some intermediary, call me a direct realist then.. However, do brains process the inputs in a way that was shaped by the environment? Yes, so perhaps that is indirect realist. — schopenhauer1

Yes, that's the issue.

We are discursive subjects. Is the 'ego' trapped in the brain ? Or is the ego a character on the stage of the world ? Making a case ? A philosopher is always already on the normative stage, 'performing' critical rationality, making a case, responsible for the coherence of his claims. No rational argument could begin to deny this stage without performative contradiction. The mechanics of seeing depend on taking the eyes and brain as real. Or do we have the eyes-in-themselves and light-in-itself and brains-in-themselves .... insane ! We'd never dream up such stuff if not for a disavowed direct realism that taught us about causal relationships involved in seeing to begin with.

But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that? — Quixodian

Do you expect the sort of simple answer that someone might post here? Or do you expect the answer would take years of study to get a handle on?

The latter. In some ways it's a very simple problem, in the sense that the solution to it is holistic or a matter of a change of perspective. But the details have been bedevilling us for centuries. Bottom line: is 'mind' something that is ultimately reducible to, or explainable in terms of, lower-level laws such as physics and chemistry, or is it somehow real independently of those?

You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience. — Quixodian

I'm trying to actually resolve some confusion here, on both sides. You seem to ignore what it means to grant toothaches and rumors the same ontological dignity as electrons and peaches.

Husserl has a kind of direct realism in some of his work that's brilliant.
Consider:
1. Subjectivity is the being of the world from/for a certain perspective.
2. The world is only given perspectively.
3. All entities exist interdependently in the same semantic-inferential-causal nexus.

#1 nondual consciousness-world
#2 rejects scientific realism
#3 help from Hegel and Brandom