I think we mostly are in agreement — Janus

I agree about the agreement. I hope that doesn't happen too often. There's no fun in that! But thankfully you've raised several interesting points.

when it comes to simple empirical observations, the truth of statements is a matter of correspondence — Janus

I know what you mean here. One can imagine that sensorium level representations (empirical ones) are 'sort of' veridical. Vision is almost ubiquitously used as the exemplar of this. It is highly implausible to assume that our extero-sensations and the percepts formed from them do not correspond with our environment, otherwise our ancestors and ourselves wouldn't have survived. But one still cannot check that directly of course. My view is that raw sensation is a priori biological, but thereafter (ie percepts to some extent, concepts, theories) our representations are shaped by a posteriori personal and cultural factors. Going up the cognitive hierarchy doesn't preclude a putative correspondence with extramental states of affairs, but does make that correspondence more fragile, ie defeasible.

Using vision as an exemplar unfortunately makes empiricism (ie thinking the world is as we see it) more seductive. We are less beguiled with other senses. It is easier to accept that, for instance, sweetness is our reaction to something rather than being a quality of the sugar cube per se. Yet surely the same caveat should be applied to vision. A bit of reality we represent by the symbol 'grass' is not itself green. It just corresponds to our light wavelength measurements of 495-570 nm, itself of course another way of representing the same bit of reality. Visuospatial distribution (points, edges, regions) seems easiest to claim as veridical, but only because it is supported by tactile and auditory representations. Our claim that sensations correspond to extramental reality is only ultimately justified by other sensations (including those derived from scientific instruments).

'it is raining' is true iff it is raining — Janus

Standard truth statements like you give ('p' is true iff p) always make me slightly uneasy.
- 'p' is a representation (a linguistic statement) supposedly justified by p (its extramental representatum). But how do you know p? Well of course it's by having a another representation of p. For instance, the sentence 'there is a tree' is justified by simultaneously having a percept of a tree. All you have is parallel representations, one linguistic and the other iconic. Truth statements like those seem to me to pretend to have direct access to extramental reality per se as their justification.
- Mischievously: Is '('p' is true iff p)' only true iff ('p' is true iff p)? Representation is always a 'hall of mirrors'!

I do hope you disagree with me.

Coherent theories can be wrong; most probably are. Or if not wrong then under-determined. For those who like thinking rationally consistency is important. — Janus

I agree with that ... even coherent theories can be wrong, but only empirically based ones. Mathematical and logical theorems are, by definition, coherent and correct because they are a chain of valid deductions. If they are incoherent, they are not theorems. Unlike all empirically based theories, theorems are not defeasible and universally accepted once proven (by those who understand them).

The situation gets of course a lot messier with empirically based theories, but here again coherence is the only game in town. Now however, coherence means logical conformity with those existing theories regarded as true and consistency with relevant data - ultimate exterosensory data. This makes such theories more plausible of course, but as you say, doesn't guarantee truth. A vast ocean of epistemology opens up in trying to define truth, but for current purposes: a true theory is one with high levels of predictive and retrodictive success. This seems to bring in a necessary probabilistic aspect to theorisation.

So far, so robotic. It gets messier still when the various elements of a theory ('theory' defined in the widest possible way as an efficacious model of some bit of reality) become affectually 'weighted' by the theoriser (ie implicitly or explicitly assessed in terms of its costs and benefits to them). Rational cognition has to then achieve some construct which optimises the total affectual 'weight'. Hence the same facts can lead to different theories because of differing personal values. As you state:

I think terms find their meanings, their senses, in relation to contexts, to associative networks of understanding. That's why any term will mean more or less differently to different people. — Janus

Connotations count as much as denotations ... maybe even more in most ordinary situations.

By gaining coherence, we hope to also gain correspondence between our theory and its referent extramental states of affairs, but we can't check that directly. So coherence is our only yardstick for truth: to seriously doubt its reliability is the road to madness and damnation! A little fly in the ointment here is that at bottom, coherence relies on logic and any formal system suffers Gödelian incompleteness. But if anyone judges coherence to be unreliable, just try incoherence!

We aren't capable of fully knowing what it is like to be each other. But that's a limitation that comes with having a physical mind. — wonderer1

I would prefer to say that it is not possible to know what-it-is-like-to-be a different bit of reality because we only know what-it-is-like-to-be the bit of reality which is ourself. However the ability to think about (intramentally represent) this with psychical concepts allows us to putatively attribute similar psychical concepts to other bits of reality: ie we can empathise and have a 'theory of mind'. Furthermore with detailed observations and imagination, talented authors can even write fictional accounts of other minds providing readers with alternative virtual vicarious subjectivities. I agree with the rest of your post.

But that doesnt mean you dont believe in a universe where there is something called love floating about with its onwn separate ontological being to physical things. Its still something that is embedded in the physical very much so. — Apustimelogist

I'm afraid this "separate ontological being" makes no sense to me. If you do believe in such a realm, surely you are back to something like a Cartesian dualism, which then requires some formally inexplicable relation between the two different onticities ... such as 'embedding' in your proposal. Such a belief would violate Physicalism's claims of an exclusively physical monism. This is an indication of why I abstain from ontological declarations: I regard them as ultra vires.

I don't really understand what extra things would be needed to explain conscious agents above things related to the natural sciences, math, computation, information theory etc. — Apustimelogist

Explanation is hypothesising about posited causal relations between observables. Consciousness is not observable. Can you weigh a thought? The extra ideas (things?) you requested are found in psychology, which tries to map between psychical concepts representing subjective experience and physical concepts representing neuroscientific observation (ie NCCs - neural correlates of consciousness). But that doesn't imply the former are physical or even that they are caused by or embedded in the physical. It merely implies that some complex bits of reality need parallel representations (mind/brain) to exhaustively describe them and deal with them practically.

Supposing a neuroscientist is looking at a brain scan which detects intensive neural behaviour in specific areas. S/he might be able, on the basis of previous identification of NCCs, to then say "Aha ...the 'owner' of the brain is probably feeling love", or another specific emotional state. This predictability has strong experimental support. But that doesn't mean that the emotional state is physical, merely that there is a mutual supervenience between two modes of representation, one psychical (non-observational) and the other physical (observational). You might say; "Ah ... but the physical observables are the real thing!" However if you did that, you would be denying your own subjective experience as real because it isn't observable (by any normative meaning of 'observable'), even by you.

For Physicalism to be up to the job of describing all of reality, it seems to me that it must do one of the following:
- Expand it's conceptual repertoire to include psychical concepts (btw this is what most versions of panpsychism try to do) ... but then it no longer falls under any normative definition of 'Physicalism'.
- Hope that mind can eventually be explanatorily reduced to (not just mapped onto) physical concepts ... but you and I don't believe that's possible; a long history of scientific 'failure' casts a severe doubt about the possibility; and I think it is logically incoherent.
If one of these get-outs works for someone, fine. But the cognitive dissonance is not to my taste.

[1]Physicalism claims that physical representations processes occurring in nature can account for everything.
[2]For practical purposes we need to resort to simplistic non-physical psychical representations to account for some things, because we don't have detailed data about what is going on in our brains, nor do we have brains capable of processing such a mountain of data in an expeditious way. — wonderer1

Re your version of [1]: Can processes per se account for anything? I agree with Hume that causation is essentially epistemic. We can have a useful account (ie a symbolic representation) positing that A causes B. But causation is a not necessary concept. In a block universe where time is represented, A and B are part of a single spatio-temporal 'thread'.

Re your version of [2]:
'Practical purposes' do indicate something important about how we interact with extramental reality. I don't think they can be dismissed so easily as irrelevant to our understanding. You say "we need to resort to simplistic non-physical psychical representations", but most psychologists would dispute that pejorative classification as simplistic ... as would I.

we don't have detailed data about what is going on in our brains — wonderer1

Even if we had a complete model based on all possible data from observation, would we know what it is like to be that bit of reality?

“The last dollop in the theory [of Physicalism] – that it subjectively feels like something to be such [neural] circuitry – may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops.”
Steven Pinker, 2018, Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress

physicalists will not have some kind of naive physicalism where they believe the only way to describe the world is with physical concepts — Apustimelogist

Then surely they are not physicalists. They are people like us who think that physical representations are extremely effective with much of life, but not all of it. Physicalism plus is no longer physicalism by any definition I can think of. Once you concede that a purely physical stance is insufficient, how can you be a physicalist? I agree entirely that 'physical' needs a lot more work to define it, but whatever the definition is, it seems to me that there will be aspects of life which physical concepts don't account for. If you can actually provide a sufficient definition of the physical, then you have solved the Hard Problem.

I think the crux here is the implicit assumption that physical = real. I don't judge that there is any warrant for that ontological belief for several reasons:
- History shows the hubris of humans claiming to know what reality 'really' is. All sorts of ontologically dualistic systems positing earthly and transcendent realms were fervently believed contemporaneously to be reality. The success of science, and its worthy claim to monism, lulled us into the arrogance of Empiricism ... yet another claim to be able to circumvent perception and 'know the noumena'.
- Physical representations keep changing. 19th century physicists would have said the world is really made of atoms. Modern physicists would regard that as simplistic and have recourse to the much more epistemic concepts of fields and information. Has fundamental reality changed as we've changed our theories about it? A bit implausible.
- The neo-Kantian paradigm, ubiquitous in current neuroscience, psychology, ethology, etc, which assumes that our relationship to reality is essentially representational, is very well grounded in experiment.

All this is of course not to deny extramental reality per se, but merely to posit that each sufficiently complex organism interacts with it by intramentally constructing a model of it ... their own Weltenschuuang. We as bio-agents are no different. Reality, since we have good grounds for assuming it contains conscious agents, is more complex than solely physical concepts can handle. How many more centuries of Physicalist failure are we going to tolerate before accepting that there is something more complicated going on with reality?

Indeed, all conceptual representations may be flawed ... but some are more flawed than others.

Physical concepts (from folk physics to quantum fields) are obviously hugely propitious. But that mode of representation is insufficient to represent all of life as experienced.

Consciousness needs another mode of representation, ie phenomenal concepts, to describe it: love, hope, fear, disappointment, uncertainty, attending to (a tree), etc. Some philosophies maintain that this is all there is: ie psychism. I agree with you that this is just as flawed as physicalism for parallel reasons: psychical concepts don't apply to tables, stars or atoms.

These two modes of representation can have convenient mappings between them, but to claim either can be reduced to the other is false. A reduction may be a sort of mapping, but not all mappings are reductions. I think we probably agree about all this.

But physicalism claims otherwise, sometimes using unconvincing fudge about 'emerge from' and 'supervenes upon' etc to address its rather large hole: the explanatory gap of consciousness. So, despite your posts, I cannot see how you maintain that this doesn't refute physicalism.

[1] Physicalism claims that physical representations can account for everything.
[2] We need non-physical psychical representations to account for some things.
[3] Ergo physicalism is a false claim.

Alternatively:
[1] Physical representation is based on observation.
[2] Consciousness/phenomenality/subjectivity/'what-it's-like-to-be-ness' cannot be observed.
[3] Ergo physicalism is a false claim.

Where is my error?

I think sensing is always already affective and so I would not say that machines sense anything. Machines may have sensors that detect photons, sound waves, molecules and so on, but that is not what I would call sensing. — Janus

I think it's fair enough to distinguish differences between human, animal and AI sensing, but they do share the common function of detecting the presence of something outside themselves. A sensory biological cell performs exactly the same function as an artificial sensor. It's what happens to the sense data immediately after the instant of interaction which differs.

Apart from the physical differences between biology and technology, affect is almost certainly the distinguishing criterion, because that is about motivation of and evaluation by the sensing individual in terms of their individual needs. It is hard to attribute any motivation and evaluation to simple organisms or current AI. But I suspect it must be necessary once brains developed and intramental modelling of the environment started.

Affect is attendant at all levels of cognition - sensation, perception, conceptualisation and theorisation. With the most abstruse philosophical issues, I might casually believe that I think and write about them to get as near to rational coherence as possible in my theory. But of course that purely rational explanation is not quite right. I actually think and write about philosophical issues because I desire that theoretical coherence. It feels more comfortable than cognitive dissonance ... for a philosopher anyway. (Generally, alas, people seem to have a very high tolerance of cognitive dissonance: cf politics and religion!)

This can be fascinatingly accounted for in informational terms. Coherence/order requires less energy to represent and process than incoherence/disorder. Those who know a bit of physics will recognise the entropy connection here and Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics. Crudely the latter states that the universe tends to increasing disorder, ie greater entropy. Organisms (while alive) need to be highly ordered to survive so use lots of energy to counter the ever threatening entropy. To conserve energy, organisms try to reduce their informational processing needs. Representing orderly situations requires much less information (and therefore energy) than chaotic ones. Affect is the evaluative process here: we feel more comfortable being certain about our situation (ie having sufficient information about it) than being uncertain ((ie not having sufficient information about it). We are much more likely to have sufficient information in orderly (low entropy) situations than in chaotic (high entropy) which threaten our stability. We tend towards our comfort zones in which we feel safer, because it minimises energy usage. This is a very simplified version of Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle, which is much more complicated and comprehensive. (For a gentle introduction cf https://www.aliusresearch.org/bulletin02-fristoninterview.html.)

Incidentally this illustrates how efficacious an informational paradigm is, since it can straddle the psychical and physical.

Is it possible that electric devices (or anything) have subjective experience and awareness of things, but don't care about, desire, or want to avoid anything? — Patterner

How could we ever know?

I would prefer to say "what it is to be conscious" than 'what it is like to be conscious". — Janus

Yes, maybe I was a bit careless there. The trouble here is that we are paddling around at the bottom of the epistemic well. There are no sub-concepts to fall back on, so we end up swapping synonyms. So 'sentient', 'aware', 'conscious', 'what it's like to be' are interchangeable, although some philosophers discern subtle differences. What I meant was 'what-it-is-like-to-be a complex enough bio-agent when normally awake or dreaming'. There's obviously potential circularity there. Define 'awake' or 'dreaming' and you get back to consciousness and what-it-is-like-to-be. But all these indicative symbols point to something we all 'know' without recourse to any symbolic representation of that state of being ... simply by being it.

I'd say rather that phenomenal consciousness is to be sensing, perceiving and reflective linguistically mediated consciousness is to be conceptualizing, theorizing, although I also think there is a prelinguistic mode of conceptualizing and theorizing. — Janus

I couldn't parse your sentence clearly, but you seem to propose 'phenomenal consciousness is to be' rather than 'phenomenal consciousness is what-it's-like-to-be'. However, since seemingly unconscious artificial recognition systems sense (ie detect) and perceive (ie identify a concrete particular), I don't think we can use just 'to be' to characterise consciousness. Personally, I do like the 'like' in what-it-is-like-to-be (what's not to like?) for that very reason. A current-level AI detection system is nothing it is like to be (we assume). But perhaps I should future-proof my earlier attempt at definition, so ... consciousness is 'what-it-is-like-to-be a complex enough system when normally awake or dreaming'. That's the end of my symbolic representational road.

Please don't ask how complex the system has to be!

The word "reducible" sounds problematic — Corvus

Well I think this is more or less what reducing is when we believe that this correlating as cogently justified under some context. — Apustimelogist

I agree with Corvus. I think 'reducing' should be confined to when one is accounting for a thing by referring to that thing's subparts. Eg an atom is reduced to subatomic particles, a sentence reduced to its words, a structure reduced to its components. Correlations on the other hand are correspondences between two different things. Eg smoking correlates with lung cancer. One correlate is not reducible to another: smoking is not reducible to cancer. Smoking is reducible to the sub-behaviours that comprise it: stick fag in mouth, light end, suck. And neither is cancer reducible to smoking because cancer reduces to pathologies in cells, biochemicals, etc. One may subsequently adduce a causal relationship between the two different things (smoking causes cancer), but causation isn't reduction either (even though it might require reductions to clarify it).

Likewise with your example. Your phenomenal image of a tree is not reducible to a some putative neuro-endocrinal arrangement which stores your image of the tree. It is perceptually reducible to sub-images of bits of the tree (ie of branches, leaves, fruit, etc). You could also conceptually reduce it by identifying its component botanical elements and processes; then further reduction into biochemicals; then into biophyical particles/fields/whatever elements you choose to put at the bottom of your epistemic reduction.

A neuroscientist might correlate your reporting of a tree image with a representation (scan) of your neuro-endocrinal arrangement. But there's no reduction here, merely correlation.

If experiences are purely representations or information about trees, then why should these representations carry information (that can be explained by) about brain states — Apustimelogist

I can't see how your phenomenal image of a tree contains any information about its putative storage in your brain. Even a neuroscientist can't do that. What gives them the information about the neural correlate(s) of that perceptual image is their study of neurology, not any image of a tree, phenomenal or physical. Information about your correlated brain state can only be gleaned by observing that brain state in some way. Your phenomenal image is what-it-is-like-to-be the bit of reality that is also described physically as an embodied neurological nexus. Correlations between the two are therefore expected, but not reductions.

And that is why Physicalism's claim to be a complete is flawed. No physical concepts can be applicable to the phenomenal image. You can measure lengths, mass, density, age, etc of your tree, but you can't measure your phenomenal image of it.

what defines a unique ability of homo sapiens is that "we know that we know, and we can communicate that knowledge in words" — Gnomon

Yes, that's a good point. Meta-representation ... an essential iteration for selfhood. And of course what philosophy is actually about: meta-theorisation, ie thinking about thinking. Similarly I define wisdom as the intelligent use of intelligence. So thank you for your wisdom. But doesn't your proposition "we know that we know" show that we also know that we know that we know. And doesn't my latter sentence show ... you can see where this is going.

And isn't the intramentality of homo sapiens just a life-long drag-on dispute? That ever-present problem, while conscious, of what to do next. Plus of course the life-long drag-on intersubjective negotiation the 'doing next' usually involves. We know what we know and we 'know' (sometimes) that others know. Hell may be other people ... but so is heaven? Even with imperfect communication.

Thanks again for dragging on the 'dispute' long enough to correct me re analogical cognition being more widely distributed than among humanity. Keep on dragging on!

animal reasoning is likely very primitive compared to human judgement. But the ancient assumption that rational thought (this relative to that) is "unique" to humans is passé. — Gnomon

Thanks for that. The baboon research is particularly interesting and I will have to abandon my proposition that analogical thinking is uniquely human. I'm pleased to 're-naturalise' analogical thinking by finding it in our close evolutionary relatives. Indeed the experiment may even indicate a more widespread capability of vision generally, although it is only likely to manifest itself in sophisticated animals who indulge ethological experimenters!

I also accept that widespread tool use, as extensions of their body parts for extra motor control, could be a another 'weak' form of analogical thinking. An ape using a stick to pick out ants from a hole might relate stick and finger. I hadn't thought of it that way before. It is also the case that animals use many signs which refer to something else, such as predator warning cries and mating signals. So I concede it makes sense to see all these as proto-analogical thinking that possibly provides a precursor of our own more sophisticated version. Useful.

Having rowed back on analogy as a human USP, what then defines our ability? I would posit the following as specifically human (but now without complete confidence!):

[1] Conceptual analogies, by which I mean the use of one concept as a model for another, is probably unique to humans. This is not just an association of a visual form or sound with something else, but a process requiring much more cognitive ability to establish correspondences. Examples would be a line representing a journey; a tree representing future decision options; a window as the representational basis for accessing information on a computer screen. This is employing the structure of a simple concept as the structural basis for a completely unrelated complex one. I have a theory that all abstract concepts rely on concrete ones as metaphors: the etymology of even our most complex concepts reveal their humble origins. My favourite is 'consider' from the Latin, con sideris, for 'with the stars'.

[2] The other distinguishing behaviour is the creation of symbols. These are not just signs (which merely indicate something else) or tools (which physically extend something else), but actually stand in for or replace something else. A speculative example would be how a stone used as a place-marker (a sign) for a sacred site gets taken away and used perhaps to represent that site. Such natural symbols were subsequently supplemented by constructed ones: symbolic artefacts: eg carving of gods, cave drawings, iconic and alphanumerical marks as symbols. Does any other species represent their thinking extramentally even in simple ways, let alone with language, graphics and mathematics?

A symbolic object (eg Apustimelogist's original example of the photograph) needs extra informational processing compared with a normal object. A symbolic object, natural or artefactual, is still an object and its information qua object can be represented conceptually by an observer as one would normally do with any object (ie the photo is paper with a photosensitive coating). But it also potentially contains (for the appropriate observer) information about something else, ie what it depicts (eg spouse on holiday). Hence a symbolic object needs two types of decoding: its intrinsic information as an object and the referent information it symbolises (by analogy). So I think the following statement could be misleading:

The information in a photograph doesn't contain any direct information about the physical medium it is being represented on, and neither should it if it is caused by information from the outside world. — Apustimelogist

Symbolic artefacts remind us that objects/events need different representations depending on the purposes of the observer. Symbolic artefacts are themselves a metaphor useful for addressing the Hard Problem; ie how can some squidgy jelly produce hopes and dreams? Short answer: it doesn't! When we look at a person's brain you can represent it physically (and somewhat inadequately) as 'squidgy jelly', but that is only one of the necessary representations of that bit of reality. To do justice to that specially complex bit of reality, you need an extra representation involving its psychical functioning. Actually of course there are a plethora of different representations of the brain/mind, all trying to capture different information germane to different observers. Note that the visuo-tactile 'squidgy jelly' representation has no greater claim to fundamental veracity as any other.

So the ontological Hard Problem dissolves from trying (and of course failing) to find an extramental relationship between two different onticities (eg emergence, supervenience, panpsychic coexistence, etc) into finding correlations between different intramental representations of the same bit of reality ... a hard but tractable epistemological problem. Which indicates the most coherent categorisation of the human condition (I believe): we are what-it-is-like-to-be our representations. A bit of reality representing those bits of reality we encounter, including ourself.

Answering Apustimelogist's early question ("Why should a representation of a tree be reducible to brain components which have nothing to do with the tree and are physically separated from it?"): reducibility is not a propitious way to represent the informational process involved with modelling experience. Better to see it as correlating parallel representations: your perceptual image of the tree, your biophysical theory about the tree's functioning and your conceptual model of it stored as a neural configuration ... all referring to the extramental bit of reality you call 'a tree'. That's my representation of representation!

this dichotomy between human deliberation and reflexive animal instincts is not correct — Apustimelogist

I do sympathise with that sentiment and obviously human cognition has evolved from the same conditions as all other species which intramentally represent their world. But humans are just such an exceptional species that, if I were an alien scientist, I would immediately conclude that something special (in Earth terms) has happened here ... despite its humble origins. However I agree than we should never forget our roots as just part of nature ... now that Darwin has helped us climb down from our religious and Enlightenment pedestals.

The question is asked as to what a quantum field really is — Janus

Yes, that's a good point. Although I doubt that question (what a quantum field really is?) makes any sense. I was trying to say that there comes a point in any epistemic hierarchy where you can't reduce or describe any further. Quantum fields (currently) get to that baseline physically and what-it's-like-to-be gets to that phenomenally.

a coherent answer that distinguishes it (what-it's-like-to-be) from merely seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling cannot be given — Janus

Isn't (phenomenal) consciousness what-it's-like-to-be sensing, perceiving, conceptualising, theorising, with attendant affect at each cognitive level? All we can do at the baseline of an epistemic hierarchy is point to an aspect of experienced or putative reality rather than deconstructionally represent it any further. The baseline concepts, referred to by their relevant symbols (the phrases 'quantum field' or 'what-it's-like-to-be') are perforce essentially indicative, not explicative. So your quest for an answer as to what what-it's-like-to-be 'really' is, seems destined to remain unanswered because we've run out of symbolic road.

BTW, I think we do need the extra concept of what-it's-like-to-be because cognition (sensing, perceiving, conceptualising, theorising) can occur without it, as in the case of AI (we assume) or blindsight (experimentally well attested).

I'm not sure modern physicists do spend much time asking what a quantum field 'really' is. Post-Popper, they seem content to regard it as representational: a space with appropriate vectors at each point which forms the most coherent current symbolic hypothesis conforming to observable data. Some may go empiricist and propose that as ontological, but in an age where physics has been exposed to quantum paradoxes and is increasingly cast as informational, I suspect they are few in number ... especially among theorists.

Ultimately don't all our normative theoretical constructs eventually boil down to our own 'raw' experience or reports by others based on their 'raw' experience? Perhaps our epistemic condition is rather like that of an exasperated parent, who after a long sequence of whys from their disputatious child, resorts to 'because I say so'. In the metaphysical case, we must end up with 'because I observe it'. I'm sure you are familiar with the Wittgenstein quote from his Tractatus: “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” Eventually there always comes a point of representational 'silence'.

behavioral evidence suggesting analogical thinking in cats — wonderer1

Thanks for that. I wonder if the cat's would be as grateful! But does their reaction show analogical thinking ... or merely an inherent or learned reaction to a particular form? A domestic cat seems highly unlikely be comparing those objects with a snake, something beyond its experience. It is surely simpler to assume that certain long thin stimuli, be they cucumbers, socks or snakes, provoke a heuristic reaction. Indeed the cats' reaction speeds lend support to the latter explanation.

Analogical thinking requires the construction of correspondences between two different things/events. That's not just a reflex ... it's a much more developed and complex form of cognition. That is using one thing as symbolic of another thing: a line in the sand representing a path; a muddy patch of terrain (field) providing a representational basis for a mathematical space.

It is hard to understand why evolution would grant most animals such an ability. But that raises the question as to how humans got it. That's a big story.

The salient problem is how to determine what the "what it is like" really is. It is not self-evident that it is a real phenomenon as its proponents like to claim, as opposed to being just a linguistic reification. — Janus

Is there any meaning to asking 'what the "what it is like" really is'? Is it not like asking what a quantum field really is? Doesn't there necessarily come a stage of deconstruction where there is nowhere else to go ... epistemic bedrock? Just because we have a word/phrase labelling an aspect of life doesn't necessarily imply reification, although I agree it can often lead to that error. But of course it depends on your definition of 'thing', which is a vast and fascinating epistemological rabbit-hole in itself. A definition of (phenomenal) consciousness as 'what it is like to be a bio-agent', as distinct from a description of its structure and behaviour, seems useful to me.

One example of its usefulness is blindsight, where people's reactions indicate that they have sensed something yet they are not aware of doing so. (Cf https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness for Nicholas Humphrey's concise description and exploration of its implications.) In such a case, there is no what-it's-like-to-be-ness during the intramental-extramental interaction, despite its efficacy. The same could be said of artificial sensory-perceptual systems where similarly 'the light's on but no-one's home'. So it's a useful phrase which perhaps seems less prone to reification that consciousness, phenomenality, sentience, awareness, etc.

I am ontologically agnostic, so I will refrain from making any statement about what what-it's-like-to-be-ness 'really' is. I concur with your remark about its ontological status being undecidable ... because I think anything's(?) ontological status is undecidable.

That's why I, not Nagel, suggested that animals probably share the human ability to create analogies & metaphors — Gnomon

That is a very big claim. It obviously can't be proved, but what aspects of animal behaviour make you think that is plausible? I believe that analogical thinking is uniquely human, because no other species produces symbolic artefacts or behaves in ways indicating such abstraction. Am I wrong here? I'd be interested to know.

Perceptual representations of trees can be reduced to the constructs of biology, chemistry and physics that occurs within a tree because those things are what trees in the outside world are made of. — Apustimelogist

If we accept a Representationalist paradigm (which I believe is the only coherent metaphysical stance) then how is it possible to know "what trees in the outside world are made of"? Surely we only 'know' our constructed biophysical representations of the observed putative bit of reality we have labelled as a tree. These may be conceptual rather than perceptual, but are still representations ... and as I think you point out, representations are different from their representata. Failure to acknowledge that the physical is most coherently categorised as a form of representation is Physicalism's fundamental fallacy. Incidentally a parallel criticism can be made of Psychism.

If we are confined to our representations in such a neo-Kantian way, how is it possible to make any ontological claims about what reality 'really' is? To know/experience is to represent. So we cannot logically claim that reality is physical, psychical, informational, whatever. All we can do is represent it in convenient ways depending on our purposes, and all these modes have their uses.

I am reminded of Bohr's admonition to Einstein about not telling God what to do: we should stop telling reality what it should be. Isn't it anthropocentric and hubristic to claim that reality is as we experience it? I prefer the more modest epistemic claim of us having efficacious models of reality. But am I open to the challenge of hypocrisy by positing such a metaphysical stance as the way the world is? I don't think so, because I am not positing an ontological proposition, only claiming that Representationalism is the most coherent metaphysical representation I have found ... an epistemological proposition. For instance the Hard Problem dissolves: the bits of reality we call bio-agents don't consist of different onticities, they just need (at least) two modes of representation, mind/psychical and brain/physical. Neural correlations of consciousness are to be expected since the two modes have the same referent, but there is no substantive primacy (eg mind emerging from a sub-stratal brain). The dualism is not an ontologically irreconcilable one, but an epistemic one allowing informational correspondence between the two modes. What's not to like?