Solving a problem that isn't there is always going to look abysmal, but equally would ignoring one that is. — AmadeusD

As I wrote in my response to Wayfarer - both sides of the discussion think their position is self-evident and dismiss the other argument.

I think both sides of the discussion think their position is self-evident and dismiss the other argument. — T Clark

Philosophy in a nutshell. :wink:

Yes - i was just pointing out more clearly this extends in both directions. Dismissing is probably the thing to be guarded against though, i guess, rather than twisting oneself in circles over a nonexistent problem. At least that can be fund, and have auxiliary benefits.

Searle, on the other hand, just doesn't do his job in several areas based on vibe. He literally handwaves away serious issues. That, I think, is a worse outcome. Not enquiring, worse than erroneously enquiring.

Philosophy in a nutshell. :wink: — Tom Storm

Yeeeeah boi. LOL. Except maybe Graham Oppy.

i was just pointing out more clearly this extends in both directions. Dismissing is probably the thing to be guarded against though, i guess, rather than twisting oneself in circles over a nonexistent problem. — AmadeusD

I have made what I think are reasonable objections to the hard problem many times here on the forum. I never convince anyone and no one ever convinces me or those who agree with me. At this point I usually say the whole thing is just metaphysics, but I'm not sure that's true in this case.

Another problem with this particular issue - different people use different definitions of "consciousness" without clarification. The hard problem refers specifically to the difficulty of explaining how biological/neurological processes are expressed as experience. It doesn't necessarily apply just to humans or even our near relatives.

different people use different definitions of "consciousness" without clarification. — T Clark

Yes sirr. Huge problem in conversation. But, with enough good faith, I've not found this to be an obstacle as such. At least if you work out that you're talking about two different things, two conversations can be had. Apt here, as one could mean the description you've given (which, I think the problem adheres to, as stated by Chalmers) or the state of being aware of something. The second is useless for this arena, so it's hard to talk at cross-purpsoes once that's established.

It doesn't necessarily apply just to humans or even our near relatives. — T Clark

For sure. Chalmers thoroughly treats this and eventually has to go to that weird proto-panpsychism type of thinking to get a 'by degrees' system that would account for 'consciousness' we see in the world.

For sure. Chalmers thoroughly treats this and eventually has to go to that weird proto-panpsychism type of thinking to get a 'by degrees' system that would account for 'consciousness' we see in the world. — AmadeusD

I think it's a simple question without a current answer - do deer see pictures and hear sounds in their head in a similar manner to how humans do?

On his conceptions, that level of awareness isn't quite required to instantiate consciousness. But this just circles back to the definition problem :lol:

All well and good - but that also embodies a perspective, somewhere outside both the mind and the world. A mental picture, if you like, or image of the self-and-world. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean here.

Hoffman et al — Wayfarer

I don't think I have anything additional to say about Hoffman for this paragraph that isn't in recent previous posts on him.

But is it? — Wayfarer

Yes, but I am talking about studies on the brain, not philosophers: e.g., studies where the brain is stimulated or examining damaged brains and associating it with changes in experience and behavior. Obviously imaging studies too.

But going back to the point I made above, brains and neurons and physics are themselves mental constructs, in some fundamental sense — Wayfarer

Yeah, I don't deny that all our explanations and knowledge are models enacted and embedded within our perspectives, experiences, whatever other relevant contexts to us, etc. But these stories are supposedly about something... They are stories about the world; and through observation, we glean consistent structure to the world, even if through many different means, tools, perspectives. There is an inherent connection between the experiences we have and what is observed as activity in the brain.

I guess though the deeper nature of the connection may not obvious but if our scientific constructs regarding neurons, brains, physics... are just that... constructs, there is no need imo to reify a stark separation between experience and what those constructs are purportedly accessing or about or what we are interacting with when we probe them empirically.

The idea I keep coming back to is that we instinctively accept that mind is 'the product of' matter. — Wayfarer

which proposes that the brain evolved through the aeons to the point where it is able to generate the mind-states that comprise experience. — Wayfarer

I disagree, such statements presuppose a kind of dualism I do not agree with.

But again, I argue that objective facts are invariably surrounded and supported by an irreducibly subjective or inter-subjective framework of ideas, within which they are meaningful — Wayfarer

Yes, this is not something I disagree with; yet, I seem to have a completely different view to you regarding this matter as a whole.

This is also suggested by a paper on a physics experiment known as Wigner's Friend which creates an experimental setup that calls into question that subjects all see different perspectives on the same thing. This experiment shows that two subjects can see different results that are both supposedly 'objectively true'. — Wayfarer

My preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics does not interpret Wigner's Friend scenarios in this way (at least not in the way I believe that you are implying).

How could you possible confirm that: — AmadeusD

Science does not tell us about the intrinsic nature of things, but vicariously through our experiences and other technological extensions of our senses, we can still glean something about the structure of reality and the way it behaves. That is what physics is about. We make inferences from our senses, technology and science that there is an objective world out there when we aren't looking, that was here before we were born and shall be around after we die. You can't definitively confirm anything, let alone in a perspective-independent way but I personally don't see strong reasons to believe otherwise.

All well and good - but that also embodies a perspective, somewhere outside both the mind and the world. A mental picture, if you like, or image of the self-and-world.
— Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean here. — Apustimelogist

I will try and explain again. You said:

I think its more about trying to be as clear as possible. I think its about the idea that there is an objective way the world is and the mind is embedded within that. It is a slave to other parts of the objective world that undergird it, not independent from those things; the evidence relating our minds to neurons and physics is overwhelming. There is no harm trying to clarify that relationship as precisely as possible. — Apustimelogist

All well and good, but I'm referring to the sense in which even this realist view is itself a mental construction. To form that picture, you have to adopt a perspective that is outside of both and that contains an image or concept of both 'the world' and 'the mind'. I think we're in agreement on that.

I suppose I should acknowledge my agenda, so to speak. I'm resistant to the kind of realist view which subordinates the mind to the scientific perspective itself, which seeks to explain philosophical issues through a scientific perspective. And why? Because philosophy has an inextricably qualitative dimension which eludes a strictly objective analysis, but which is nevertheless fundamental to our well-being. The scientific image of man often tends to deprecate or belittle that.

As for this somewhat mysterious issue of 'seeing things as they are' - I believe that that is what is conveyed by the faculty of 'sagacity'. The archetypical sage is able to arrive at a holistic understanding of nature of being, not necessarily in conflict with the scientific image, but also not necessarily disclosed by science itself, although scientists do describe moments of insight which correspond with that.

And speaking of sages, here I'm reminded of several passages from Erwin Schrodinger's 'Nature and the Greeks':

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. ...

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them. ...

The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. … For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy." ...

The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.
In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I and whither go I?

Assembled throng of philosophical worthies: I think I have a simple definition of consciousness (which i might as well put here as start a thread).

>>Consciousness is the capacity for experience<<

What do we think?

Consciousness is the capacity for experience — Wayfarer

I think it deeper than that: consciousness is the unity of all my representations.

Rational consciousness can reflect on that. I’m trying for the bare-bones definition.

>>Consciousness is the capacity for experience<< — Wayfarer

What about 'consciousness is the activity of having an experiece' or 'consciousness is the activity of having experiences'?

I’m thinking of the most basic form, what it is that any being described as conscious has.

Dunno quite where you want to go with this, but I wonder if positing “rational” consciousness implies a variety, but on the other hand, you’re trying for a bare-bones definition, which shouldn’t allow any.

Still, I grant the notion of rational consciousness, insofar as I hold there to be no other kind. Consciousness of empirical conditions, which is exemplified by your definition predicated on experience, is still a rational construct.

We’re paddling in the same philosophical canoe here, whatever our respective particulars be.

Ok, I see. But I would not say that 'consciousness' is a capacity, but an activity.

You can IMO say that 'sentient being' are those beings that can be conscious even if they are not in a given moment (for instance, if one consider someone in a state of general anesthesia...). Of course, the term 'sentient' taken literally would imply that someone unconscious is not sentient, even if alive. But IMO, we can take the liberty to use the phrases 'conscious beings' or 'sentient beings' to indicate all those beings that are conscious or can be conscious.

Thank you both, I’ll chew it over.

I would not say that 'consciousness' is a capacity, but an activity. — boundless

….are conscious or can be conscious. — boundless

To be conscious is to unite conceptions in thought, an activity with a vast plurality of representations; consciousness is that by which conceptions can be so united, all under one singular, irreducible representation.

The first represents the activity “I think”, the second represents the capacity of the “I” that thinks.

Or not…..speculative metaphysics and all that.

To be conscious is to unite conceptions in thought, an activity with a vast plurality of representations; consciousness is that by which conceptions can be so united, all under one singular, irreducible representation. — Mww

I think this is somewhat too specific. IMO, I would more or less equate 'being conscious' as 'having a subjective/private experience', without necessarily being aware of that (this would rather be 'self-consciousness', a specific kind of consciousness).
But maybe even 'having a (subjective/private) experience' is too much. Maybe 'consciousness is experiencing' or even only 'consciosness is a synonym of (subjective/private) experience' is better (and maybe we can drop the qualifier subjective/private...after all, I am not sure it makes sense to speak of an experience which is not private).

Sorry for the 'maybes' but it is notoriously difficult to define what is most immediate to us, after all.

And it is certainly correct that the neural correlates approach flounders to the degree it represents Cartesian representationalism – the story that the brain is somehow generating a "display" of reality.

That way of thinking about the problem of consciousness just bakes in the Hard Problem. It begins with the unbridgeable divide as its premise. A display needs someone looking at it. Experiencing it. Homuncular regress is the only option once you trap yourself into a neuroscience of "mental display". — apokrisis

It's not at all clear who you are arguing with here, either on this forum or elsewhere. It's very generic. Names?

I think my criticism of your criticism is that you assume that consciousness is like a discrete thing that just pops up and then disappears under certain circumstances. — Apustimelogist

That's not my view, but that is exactly the view of emergentists. Emergentism just is the view that consciousness arises in some circumstances and not others. Emergentists also typically endorse the vagueness of the concept of consciousness to allow for gradual emergence, they don't generally think of consciousness as all-or-nothing.

I don't think there's any evidence for this.

I think there is evidence of this on other senses of the word 'consciousness', but not in the sense we mean here. For example, waking up from sleep happens gradually under some circumstances. But we're talking about any phenomenal state at all, not the difference between waking and sleeping.

What differs non-conscious from conscious things is how they behave as dynamical system...

I disagree. How do we derive, conceptually, consciousness from behaviour?

...and it doesn't seem to make sense to say that consciousness is some additional thing that pops up on top of that, under pains of a kind of epiphenomenal redundancy (see sections 4.4, 5.3, 7 of Chalmer's Conscious mind for details, full pdf available on internet).

I agree epiphenomenalism is wrong. I think consciousness is likely causal, possibly even uniquely so. And then the causal closure of the physical is an idea we have to tackle. If panpsychism is the case, we might be able to replace the concept of law with that of will, perhaps, honouring both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical.

Indeed, the commitment to a principled distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, or living and non-living ones, commits to a sort of élan vital, wherein the substance and laws of learning, perception, and action should not be grounded in the same laws of physics as a stone, as though they provide a different, more implacable sort of organization or coherence of states [108]. — the author you mentioned

It's emergentists who are implicitly dualistic, in my view, and create the hard problem by saying that consciousness was a late arrival in the universe. Ironically I think this is what @apokrisis does. Panpsychism is one way of undermining the physical/phenomenal divide. There must still be conceptual distinctions of course, having the capacity to feel is not the same thing as having physical extension in space, but both these properties can be in everything, perhaps, so there is no need to derive one from the other.

I don't think we can have a theory of consciousness in the way you want, not only because there is no fine line between conscious and non-conscious, but we are simply limited to describing what living things do (or what things we deem as being alive do) and nothing more.

I don't especially want a theory of consciousness, I don't think consciousness needs explaining. But when people disagree with me and say consciousness emerged, I'm interested. How exactly? The emergence of consciousness is very much in need of an explanation.

On the question of the difference between consciousness and non-consciousness being sharp or fuzzy, I think it's clearly sharp. I'm with Goff, Antony and Schwitzgebel (and not doubt many others)on that.

….it is notoriously difficult to define what is most immediate to us — boundless

Odd, innit. That with which we are most familiar….our own inner workings, whatever they may be…. is the very thing we know the least about.

With respect to specificity, I rather think, assuming an interest in such matters despite the absence of sufficient empirical facts from the scientific method proper, little remains but to fall back on logical constructions, the certainty, hence the explanatory value, of which is our own responsibility.

I think we're in agreement on that. — Wayfarer

Yes, I see no conflict with the idea that - all our knowledge is perspective-dependent yet we can make statements like "there is an objective way the world is". If you think about it, a statement like that doesn't even really have any content, yet it is still completely intelligible. We understand what it means without having to specify something as totally precise and veridical, not because we don't want to - we cannot; but just because we cannot, doesn't mean we cannot make the word convey something. At the end of the day, all meaning regresses into something ineffable on pains of circularity - For instance, I cannot define for you what it means "to do something", you just have an ineffable, intuitive understanding of that phrase and can identify what accords with "doing something" coherently. Imo, all word-use and all knowledge is enaction within experience, and that enaction is totally primitive from our immediate experiential perspective - just a flow of experiences.

The scientific image of man often tends to deprecate or belittle that. — Wayfarer

I just simply disagree, I guess. Science may not tell us about ethics or aesthetics but that doesn't mean it isn't in conflict with that. Neither does it mean that fields like ethics or other parts of philosophy don't use similar critical faculties to a science. At the same time, I just don't see God or teleology in reality.

I disagree. How do we derive, conceptually, consciousness from behaviour? — bert1

You can't. But from our knowledge of the natural world, what is it that differs sentient creatures from non-sentient things? The activity of complicated dynamical systems. The differences between death, coma, sleep, wakefulness and psychedelia are the activities of a complicated dynamical system. I don't need to know what it is like to be such systems to make this observation.

I think consciousness is likely causal, possibly even uniquely so. And then the causal closure of the physical is an idea we have to tackle. If panpsychism is the case, we might be able to replace the concept of law with that of will, perhaps, honouring both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical. — bert1

I think issues of causal closure only come about when you take models of the physical too literally as more than models - because we are capable of describing reality pluralistically and at different scales. People then get the idea that we need to accomodate causation at different levels when these are just descriptions that model at different scales from different perspectives; there isn't a necessity that it is about some intrinsic causality.

We then don't need to "honour(ing) both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical." because they aren't two inherently, fundamentally different categories. One very generic description of "things" I like is the following (https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=10954599080507512058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5):

To address the nature of things, we start by asking how something can be distinguished from everything else. In pursuing a formulation of self-organisation, we will call on the notion of conditional independence as the basis of this separation. More specifically, we assume that for something to exist it must possess (internal or intrinsic) states that can be separated statistically from (external or extrinsic) states that do not constitute the thing. This separation implies the existence of a Markov blanket; namely, a set of states that render the internal and external states conditionally independent...

In brief, the formulation on offer says that the states of things (i.e., particles) comprise mixtures of blanket states, where the Markov blanket surrounds things at a smaller scale. Effectively, this eludes the question “what is a thing?” by composing things from the Markov blanket of smaller things...

More specifically, we will see that the Langevin formulation of dynamics – at any given spatiotemporal scale – can be decomposed into an ensemble of Markov blankets. These blanket states have a dynamics at a higher scale with exactly the same (Langevin) form as the dynamics of the original scale. When lifting the dynamics from one scale to the next, internal states are effectively eliminated, leaving only slow, macroscopic dynamics of blanket states. These become the states of things at the next level, which have their own Markov blankets and so on. The endpoint of this formalism is a description of everything at progressively higher spatial and temporal scales. The implicit separation of temporal scales is used in subsequent sections to examine the sorts of dynamics, physics or mechanics of progressively larger things.

We just have recursively nested "things" in reality and as you expand the scale, or zoom out, the fast, random, precise details get coarse-grained over by the slower regularities. This seems an intuitive way to me of characterizing say the difference between conscious experiences and microscopic "physical" structures nested within them. The difference is only a difference of scale and how information is lost as you zoom out, as written in the bold above. Seems to me that the structure of our experiences reflects this loss of information from smaller scales.

On the question of the difference between consciousness and non-consciousness being sharp or fuzzy, I think it's clearly sharp. I'm with Goff, Antony and Schwitzgebel (and not doubt many others)on that. — bert1

I disagree. I don't think there is even any fact of the matter you could use to demonstrate the difference between conscious experience and the absence of conscious experience.

Consciousness is the capacity for experience — Wayfarer

This is the way I've been using the word in this discussion and, as I understand it, this is the issue Chalmers is talking about when he says "hard problem."

What do we think? — Wayfarer

After making my previous post I went on to read the following responses. It's pretty clear people here generally define "consciousness" differently. This is what has lead to much of the disagreement here. It's hard to separate those disagreement from more substantive ones.

An important part of philosophy is criticism, especially of poor analogies and misapplied categories. — Wayfarer

I'm not complaining about criticism, but about the weird appeal to authority. You didn't actually say why my analogy was poor.

In the heart example, what is being talked about is a single anatomical context or perspective within which heart and blood co-exist and interact directly.

But various claims in the mereological fallacy link talk about things like "decision", "belief", etc. which cannot be defined directly in terms of brain content. — Apustimelogist

Heart and blood don't just co-exist and interact directly. They both interact with the circulatory system, lungs, metabolic system, etc. Without any of these, the heart wouldn't function, it functions only in the context of a whole organism. Yet, we say without issue, "Hearts pump blood".

Modeling relationships," might be another tricky term here. Does a dry river bed model past flow of rainwater? We probably wouldn't want to say that, but it certainly does contain information about past rainfall. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that "modelling" refers to informational processes, where one system maps or reflects the relevant informational process of another, without actually reproducing the physical system.

A combat drone uses video, IR, radar, etc. inputs to get information about the world. It puts this information into a model. But presumably this isn't "sensory" information because it doesn't involve sensation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are wired to interface with the world via sensations, whereas fundamentally a combat drone isn't: it translates sensory input into logical symbols, performs symbolic transformations on those symbols, and acts according to those transformations. There is a symbolic reduction that happens with drones, that doesn't with us. That same reduction that makes engineering possible might preclude conscious experience.

I think we will only truly understand the sensations we experience when we figure out, at least in principle, how to engineer them in a machine. Of course, we just don't.

science cannot tell us anything about the fundamental "intrinsic nature" of things beyond experience. — Apustimelogist

No, and that's fair but not quite relevant. My point is the clear contradiction in the two quotes i put forward. If the above is your position, then the second of those quotes needs to hold while the first needs to be let go. We cannot know anything about hte intrinsic nature of things = we cannot know there is an objective world out there. I take no position, for the sake of this discussion, just point out the break in the line of thinking there. You can't have both, basically.