We know that neural processing must have something critical to do with qualitative experience. — apokrisis

We don't know that. That's a hasty generalisation.

Isn't this all solved by panpsychism?

Your thoughts? Let me hear about arguments to be had over the metaphysical significance. — HuggetZukker

There was a great thread on the old forum involving an attempt to disprove physicalism by attempting to show that there is some information that is non-physical, namely indexical information. The idea is that even if you know every single bit of objective public information about the world (which is an intuitive, if crude and perhaps wrong) characterisation of 'physical' information, and you are situated in this world, you still can't tell which person in the world you are until you open you eyes and make a local observation. Only then will you know which bit of the world you are in. No amount of studying the point-of-view-invariant stuff about the world will give you that bit of information. Therefore this is non-physical information. Therefore physicalism is false. There were lots of objections, mostly about the details of the thought experiment that the peoster concocted to illustrate this. There were better objections. some objected that this was an impoverished concept of physicalism. Some said that even if this does show that indexical information is not analysable in terms of non-indexical information, this proves nothing about consciousness - why can't a non-conscious robot make a local 'observation' and figure out which one of the many different robots it is? Another guy went further and said that all information is actually indexical information. I'm not sure where I stand on all this. I don't think I agree with the robot objection - I think if we want to imagine the robot has a point of view we are tacitly importing our own point of view into the robot. But then I have always had idealist sympathies.

Another thread about indexicals was an attempt to reduce indexical propositions to non-indexical ones. So relative, context-dependent propositions involving indexicals were replaced by ones with 'objective' reference points. So "I am here now" could be rendered "Bert1 is in the train station at 10:15". And then the inevitable objection and responses:
"Yes, but which Bert1, which year and which train station? You still need an indexical to disambiguate."
"No, still no need for an indexical: Bert1 with a mole on his arse, Portaloo train station in 3466".
"OK, but there are two Bert1s with moles on their arses, two Portaloo train stations and I don't know which civilisation's calendar you are using. You still need an indexical."
"No, it is the Bert1 who is speaking, not any other."
"But there are two Bert1s speaking in all the relevant train stations in each calendar time. I still don't know which one you are."
...and so on and so on. The idea is that by duplicating all 'objective' frames of reference you render them ambiguous, thus making indexicals necessary to disabiguate. Of course, for any practical purpose, it is possible (albeit inconvenient) to do without indexicals. But if you take it to its extreme logical conclusion, it seems to me that propositions involving indexicals can still be shown to be non-reducible to non-indexical propositions.

Either way, you are having 2) happening on undecided 1) relations. I could claim a relation too... :)
But I do not. You are still looking for the totality of visual impressions somewhere in the brain... :) And that's unrealistic, to put it mildly... — Damir Ibrisimovic

This is unclear Damir. It's not clear you actually understand the difficulty SteveKlinko is describing. Maybe you do understand it, and you have a good answer, but so far nothing you have said indicates that (not that I have really understood much of what you have said). Can you state in your own words the philosophical problem that SteveKlinko is patiently and repeatedly raising?

Dfpolis

Thanks for mentioning Stace. I had not heard of Stace before. My only brush with analyses of mystical reports is William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

It's an unfortunate feature of pathologically argumentative philosophers (like me) that that we tend only to talk to people with whom we disagree over a point we find interesting. I have to make an extra effort to even acknowledge helpful and interesting posts that I do not find disagreeable in some important way, hence this reply.

I am not averse to some forms of panpsychism. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shows how consciousness higher than protoconsciousness might emerge. IIT is a panpsychist (or maybe panprotopsychist?) theory, and I'm not averse to it. It could well have the answer, but I'm not decided on the matter. — HuggetZukker

I'm a full-on panpsychist as I can't really make sense of the notion of proto-consciousness. Even if there's a smidge of subjective awareness, there's subjective awareness, and that's just full consciousness in the relevant sense it seems to me. I can't make sense of the idea that there is something somewhat similar to, or a more basic form of, subjective awareness, but isn't quite subjective awareness.

IIT is very interesting. I do think it is a panpsychist theory, but I also think it is false for the same reason I think many theories of consciousness are false, namely it is reductive. It says that consciousness just is integrated information. That's just wrong. Integrated information is integrated information. Consciousness is consciousness. The hard problem us untouched. To avoid reductionism, it would have to say something like 'consciouness arises from, or is caused by integrated information', but then we have a mystery again as to how exactly that happens. (Reductions are theoretically good when we can get away with them, because they don't involve mysteries.) I do, however, think that the IIT is a valuable theory. It may well be a decent theory of identity - that is to say, a conscious individual is defined as the system that integrates information, perhaps. Any system that integrates information has a roughly unitary consciouness that persists as long as the system persists and keeps functioning. Searle's tough objection to panpsychism: "What are the units supposed to be?" might find its answer: "The units are systems that integrate information." It's an interesting and plausible possibility it seems to me.

I'll reply to the stuff about indexicals when I can find a bit more time.

Damir,

Are you aware this is a philosophy forum? You seem innocent of the philosophical issues.

This is a floppy OP with no interesting philosophical question. It may as well be "Hey guys, some dumb people believe in spooky stuff! Are you dumb too?"

Based upon scientific research, there is no "detailed graphics" in our brain. So, I suggest that we see what our retinas see... :) — Damir Ibrisimovic

Thanks for your reply. I think we are struggling to communicate.

Anyone else could be HuggetZukker
— bert1

What does this mean? I used to find the notion meaningful, because I (more or less automatically) thought of a being as having some non-physical essence of being. It led me to ask myself, "why am I me instead of someone else," but hidden in this question was the actual meaning of "by what means and criteria or logic did this spectator (I) enter this particular life?" So there was the assumption of a discrete essence of being built in.

My current thinking is that to be is to experience, such that one is identical to one's whole experience. Within this framework, X could not experience exactly what it's like to be Y without actually being Y as a consequence. The brain interprets sensory information, steers the body appropriately, and everything it does, including the very important storage of, and access to memory; a prerequisite for the sense of continuous being.

Then one could still ask "why am I me instead of someone else," but within this framework, and presuming that dead objects also do not have discrete essences of being (another topic), the question drops to the same level of meaning as that of "why is the pencil on my desk not a carrot?" (Or why is A=A?) That is a completely different type of question than "by what means and criteria or logic did this essence (I) enter this particular life?"
5 days ago — HuggetZukker

Sure, I see that the questions we ask (Such as 'Why am I bert1, and not HuggetZukker?) seem to be theory-laden, and perhaps they are.

Consider, though, how "Bert1 is bert1" is a very different proposition from "I am bert1". I am bert1 tells me who I am in a way that bert1 is bert1 does not.

Some analyse this in terms purely of language use and see no metaphysical significance in it. I do see metaphysical significance in it.

Another way of approaching this is to ask "By examining all non-indexical information in the world, can I figure out which one I am?" Again, even if the answer is 'no' there is further argument to be had over the metaphysical significance of that.

I don't have a really good example, sorry. I don't know whether one can currently know anything about this sort of thing. I'm reminded of hypnagogia, which I have by the way experienced myself accompanied by exploding head syndrome and sleep paralysis.

There is an evolutuionary continuum for abilities such as flight, olfactory sense, social behavior, problem solving, etc. Could the same not (perhaps) be the case for consciousness? Maybe some simple animals have, or hypothetical advanced future artificial intelligences, will have, quasi-consciousness. I'm just speculating! — HuggetZukker

My own view is that consciousness could not be an emergent phenemenon, because it does not admit of degrees. All emergent things emerge gradually (to a greater or lesser extent) because of the complexity of the interactions that they emerge from. Consciousness is one of those few concepts that does not seem to admit of degree. Consider your suggested examples, both of them involve experience, and so fall clearly within the definition of 'consciousness'. There is 'something it is like' to be in those states, to use one formulation.

That is why I asked for examples of intermediate stages between conscious experience and no experience at all. What people usually offer is examples of very vague and diffuse experience, and contrast that with sharp wakeful experience. But both these are still examples of experience. What I'm after is some intermediate stage between experience (no matter how vague and diffuse) and no experience at all. It seems to me that the concept of experience does not allow for this, and that makes any theory of conscious emergence fatally problematic.

Damir

I'm interested in how you perceive the problem of consciousness pre-theory. I was struck by the sharp contrast between your statement saying how consciousness and brain activity seem very different, but that there is no need to separate them. We wouldn't say that about other things that seem very different, for example, we wouldn't say "Dogs and bicycles seem very different, but there is no need to separate them." However, we might say "Water and ice seem very different, but there is no need to separate them," but even then the identity between ice and water is only at a deeper level (H2O), superficially they remain very different.

The vast majority of things are different from one another, and we don't even bother starting to come up with a theory of their identity - doing so would just seem like madness. Why is it different with consciousness and brains? Why even do we start to think that they might be the same thing, such that we would even bother making a theory about their identity, or at least close relationship?

I read your replies but I still think your have not addressed my point. You don't have to if you don't want to of course.

EDIT: you have suggested a theory of your own, maybe that is what you mean.

I did read it. You said it seems separate. I know you don't think it is separate, but you have not acknowledged that the person who says things are not as they seem is the one with work to do.

It's true that subjective experience seems like a whole different category, — Damir Ibrisimovic

Here.

When does it stop? — Posty McPostface

The right person can make it stop. The right person can take away all decisions and responsibility. We only start to think when our will is thwarted. Reason is the circumference of the will.

Regarding identification and getting stuck in a particular definition of oneself, I think de-identification is hard to do by itself. The mind tends to identification. However there is an alternative. If you want to get out of an identity, identify with something else that is not consistent with the identity that you want to escape. To do that just pay lots and lots of attention to the new identity. Overwrite your hard drive rather than erase it, at least as a first step. What do you think?

It's true that subjective experience seems like a whole different category, but that is the nature of all subjective experiences... :)

We do not need to artificially separate these two... :) — Damir Ibrisimovic

But you separated them yourself in the previous sentence!

If two things seem very different, the default assumption is that they are different, not that they are the same!

The person who wants to say they are, in fact, the same is the one with work to do.

Evidence suggests that consciousness involves brain activity. — Tyler

I doubt this. Can you give an example of what you mean?

When I presented my thoughts to my friend, he expressed disappointment in me. He said, he had thought I was a smart, rational person, who would reject such superstition. In frustration he argued something to the effect of, "You are you, because who else could be you?!" I couldn't even define my stance in a way that sounded logical, since it was ultimately an illogical stance. — HuggetZukker

I don't like the sound of your friend, sorry. It seems to me quite possible that you could be someone else, and not just because, grammatically, the referent of 'you' is variable. 'Why are you HuggetZukker and not, say, SteveKlinko?' is an interesting question that your friend has not got to grips with. There was a really good thread about indexicals on the old forum. Gone now unfortunately. To answer your friend's question, 'Anyone else could be HuggetZukker.'

EDIT: I think you had it right in your middle stage of thinking prior to the Occam's Razor cut.

I've since grown comfortable with the concept of emergent consciousness. I am only made of my physical self, which is undergoing constant change, meaning I'm basically a new me every day. There's no eternal self, and probably no sharp line to draw between conscious and unconscious. — HuggetZukker

Could you give an example of a creature, or a state of being, or structure or function or whatever, which is neither clearly conscious nor clearly not-conscious?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'social justice has gotten to the point of ridiculousness'. Do you mean that society is ridiculously unjust? Or ridiculously just? Or that people who think that society is unjust have taken a ridiculously extreme view of its injustice, and it is in fact much more just than they perceive? Or something else?

Edit: also, do you mean danker or darker? You might mean danker, which would be interesting.

I can't remember The Sophist (is that the right one?) very well from my A-levels, but I do remember thinking Callicles' arguments in favour of might being right were stronger than Socrates' opposing reasoning.

The quality of something is how it feels.

EDIT: is the OP asking for a definition or a theory?

You posit that we know only ourselves,
— Hanover

I didn't posit this though. — Benkei

I posit my self-knowings at least twice a day into an old t-shirt.

My son, this is not a sin and therefore can not be forgiven. You are being too sensitive. Now, get out of the confessional; there is a long line of people who have real sins to confess and for which severe penance will be required. — Bitter Crank

If only confession were so popular absolution had to be rationed.

As a homosexual, I would much prefer people reference us as "a group of perverted, immoral, disgusting, monsters, a genuine threat to the American Way of Life" (or Turkish, Russian, North Korean, Saudi Arabian, Ugandan... WOL) than have them say that about me personally. While we certainly are a collective threat to American manhood and empire, I am as pure as the driven snow. — Bitter Crank

Indeed, it's far less personally offensive. However I suspect it's a heck of a lot more dangerous. Individual members of a collective threat (such as the Gays) are targeted because they are an example of that collective - and any example will do, it doesn't matter about any of your other virtuous individual qualities. Whereas an attack on you as an individual (rather than a representative example) must take into account all your complexities.

Genocide starts in the waters of hate and psychopathy. — Buxtebuddha

This doesn't seem right to me. Doesn't genocide happen when one group is demonised and blamed for the suffering of another group? In which case the origin is in the suffering and passivity of a population.

Do you really think that posting on the internet fuels some sort of intense madness? I presume most people have their big boy pants on and won't jump off a cliff based on criticism from invisible internet strangers.

One hopes your presumption is correct. I fear it may not be. My particular comment is obviously insignificant. But a heap of a million other similar ones may become significant.

As in when dealing with groups as vague as Republicans or Democrats pretty much every type of person is represented, so there's not a lot you can say accurately with any force. — Baden

Indeed

Identity politics have existed since the Roman Republic. They have since been vital in supplying universal suffrage, civil rights, LGBT rights, worker's rights, woman's rights, etc. Criticizing identity politicstout court, as Peterson often does, is crap, and done from a privileged vantage point of being a white male. — Maw

Sure, you could be right. I'm fairly new to the concept.

It's the private sense (the spotlight sense) that seems like it has to be something that's either on or off. — gurugeorge

Indeed. If the spotlight is on anything at all, it's on.

To be sure, there is a difference between being non-conscious and being conscious. But between things that are conscious, what would make something "more" conscious than another thing?

As far as I can tell the only difference would be in amount of consciousness, that is to say, the size of the set of things that one is aware of. "Transcending to a higher degree of consciousness" can only mean a change in the contents of consciousness. — darthbarracuda

Yes, that's my view I think. The content of consciousness admits of degree, but consciousness itself does not - you are either aware of something not aware at all (and perhaps aware of nothing). Perhaps there are three useful conceptual categories, aware of something, aware of nothing (but still aware), and not aware at all. I regularly revisit this topic to see what people think as it's the main question I'm interested in in philosophy.

If we accept for the sake of argument, that the brain is a computationally universal physical structure, like Babbage's Analytic Engine, or a PC, then anything the brain can do, so can these other objects. The implication of this is that consciousness cannot be a material property, or be associated with any particular physics. — tom

There is an assumption of functionalism here, that consciousness is something a brain (or whatever) does. We're not all functionalists, and functionalism hasn't been shown.

I think nine times of out ten, sides of a debate are not ‘wrong’; it’s much worse: they are ‘not even wrong’; the game itself is broken from the very beginning: the set of possible moves needs to itself be rejigged. — StreetlightX

I think you are wrong. Can you give an example of this? Presumably you mean more than just misunderstandings caused by different implicit assumptions concepts and definitions - that's just the normal stuff of debate that often takes a while to explicate.

I hope you are wrong, because this kind of attitude drives me up the wall. Apo does it. Mars Man did it. (There are others I disagreed with like Death Monkey and Reincarnated who didn't do it.) "I won't engage with what you are trying to say until you adopt my vocabulary, concepts, rules, definitions. Of course, when you these things you will naturally see the light anyway and our disagreement will dissolve."

It makes debate about power rather than ideas and truth. It's who can seize the rule book first. "No! It's my debate, not yours. We do it MY way!"

What a nice question. Defining these things in the abstract is not without difficulty. I'm not sure that we can define 'feeling' in any other ways than by synonym (e.g. experience, knowledge, consciousness-of-something, etc) and invitation to internally reflect on what these words mean, although once grasped I think the concept is one of the easiest ones to understand. 'Activity' is easier to define as it is much more public. I suppose we might say activity is, in the most general terms, any change initiated by a conscious object. Will that do?

I'm interested in the relationship between activity and feeling. As a panpsychist I've come to the view that things do what they do because of how they feel, and they feel what they feel because of what they do. That seems true of me, at least. I eat because I feel hungry. I feel pain because I stuck my foot in a hole.

Being, or identity, is perhaps linked to repeated pattern of behaviour. I'm a human being because the matter of my body persists in behaving in a way that preserves a persistent form and function over time. I'm a footballer because I play football every day. Once I stop doing these things, my being changes.

Granting the religious assumptions of the OP, I think the solution to the paradox is to be found in the immanence of God. Our own horror of death and will to preserve the vehicle of our experience is nothing other than God's will to explore the possibilities of finitude, to struggle and develop in a way that an omnipotent being cannot do.

The UNCRPD is definitely considered an authority and 177 countries have ratified it. So far only Ireland has yet incorporated it into law. It is influential in court judgements in the UK at least. The UK is committed to incorporating into UK law. It was in the Labour manifesto to do it. Tories are avoiding it.

The disconnection of mental capacity from legal capacity should of course not be absolute or reckless. It has been suggested that one sensible way to be UNCRPD compliant is for an extremely incapacitous adult to at least retain the right to sack their decision-maker, even if they have all other decisions made on their behalf. This would only be in the most extreme cases in which supported decision making were not possible.

Your converse point about holding incapacitous people responsible is an interesting one. Again, the actual system adopted should be a sensible one. A court having the power to hold an incapacitous person fully accountable does not mean they have the duty to. And I would expect that in nearly all cases it would not.

The practical solution is found through the Golden Rule: "How can I act in a way that I would want others to act towards me?". The golden rule is directly derived from justice, because it demonstrates an equal treatment between yourself and others. — Samuel Lacrampe

Sure, but why would I follow such a rule? I would only follow it if I valued it. I will only act justly if I value justice. The value of justice must come from a subject mustn't it? If the value of justice is objective, how can it connect to what I do? Why would such objective values matter to me, or indeed to any subject?

I can't think of a philosophical way to disprove this, and creating an experimental conditions whereby we could even tell if mental states change without brain states relevantly changing seems mind-buggeringly hard.

Mind you, as supervenience is compatible with all theories for the mind except perhaps the most extreme of substance dualisms, then this is not a problem that worries me.

(4) If the criteria to evaluate the moral value of an act is justice, and justice is objective, then morality is objective. — Samuel Lacrampe

One human problem is 'What will I do?' Does your conclusion provide a practical solution?

Maybe this is a bit boring of a thought, but I find it interesting that there are no mentions of classifying these theories of normative ethics as descriptive ones (unless I just made an obvious and huge mistake somewhere there?). — BlueBanana

I've had exactly your thought a few times and I haven't seen it expressed anywhere else. Not that I read any philosophy these days.

Isn't it mental capacity that distinguishes the child from the adult and therefore limits the child's right to vote? — Hanover

i don't think so. An incapacitous 35 year old is not a child.

The UNCRPD section 12 distinguishes mental capacity from legal capacity, saying (in other words) that the lack of mental capacity shall not be grounds to remove legal capacity. So far only the Republic of Ireland is fully compliant with section 12 (in Europe anyway, not sure about elsewhere).

Th acquisition of legal capacity is a recognition of adulthood, regardless of how well people understand the world they live in. Being non-disabled is no bar to being an ignorant vote-savaging twat in any case. I'd happily be ruled by a bunch of bipolar people.

'Theism' as it is used in Philosophy of Religion is the view that there is one supreme, perfect being who exists separately from the world, who is the creator and sustainor of the universe, who is conscious to the degree of being all-knowing; who is all-powerful, all and ever present, eternal, unchanging, existing necessarily, dependent of nothing else. In addition, Theism maintains that this being, who is called "God", loves and is concerned about humanity. — Mitchell

Panpsychism can result in more or less this view. Substance, if sentient (as some versions of panpsychism hold) entails a kind of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Substance, in so far as it is not its modes, is unchanging and eternal and dependent on nothing else. The trouble is then separating this view from all the nasty baggage that unfortunately often comes with a religious view. Sprigge said he wanted to take the superstition out of religion and I concur.

EDIT: The big difference, of course, is that substance obviously is not separate from the world. If theism has that in its definition then I'm not a theist.