What’s the actual physics of this? What mechanical process counts as “estimating external states”? — Michael

It's the modelling assumption of the aggregated function of our nervous system, so I suppose the 'physics' would be action potentials, ion channels and the electromagnetic forces of neurotransmitters at synapse vesicles?

I would say that “estimating external states” is itself just the firing of certain neurons. — Michael

Plus neurotransmitters, but yes.

So what all perception reduces to is an external stimulus influencing sense receptors which in turn trigger the firing of certain neurons and then sometimes a bodily response. That is perception at its most fundamental. — Michael

Seems so. When we talk about the biology of it. I don't believe that much of what we speak about correctly reduces to biology. Much of what we say is functional rather than representative, so many things we talk about have no proper reference in empirical science. If you want to bring science into something like perception, however, it's a mistake to do so piecemeal. If we're talking about the science of perception, then this description is, I believe, the most persuasive model and is certainly the leading one right now.

But given the mostly deterministic nature of such physical processes (I say mostly because at the quantum scale it is stochastic) it doesn’t make much sense to describe the firing of certain neurons or its response as being correct or incorrect. One can only say that it’s adaptive or maladaptive. — Michael

I don't agree. The terms we use are obviously all loaded with the meanings from where we've borrowed them (we don't have terminology specifically designed to describe this kind of predictive network). Adaptive and maladaptive are loaded too, they suggest a teleology to evolution which is certainly not present in the nervous system. When we make a choice and it turns out well for us, we call it 'correct', I'm just seconding that term for the actions of the nervous system in predicting appropriate responses. I'm not wedded to the terminology though. Technically, I tend to refer to is as reducing surprise (since 'surprise' here has a technical meaning in the Bayes optimisation equations used to describe the function of these systems), but any term would do.

But with this it really makes no sense to talk about seeing the world “as it is”. There’s just neurons firing in a useful way, and it’s not a given that there’s just one useful way for neurons to fire in any given situation. — Michael

Absolutely. Again, it's a modelling assumption, but an important one and one which is supported by the theoretical framework...

Simply put, for an system to have some self identity requires it oppose entropic forces (Newton's third law). Since opposing entropic forces requires information about the direction and momentum of such a force a system needs to be able to detect those properties in order to sustain itself against entropy. Since we do sustain ourselves against entropy, it follows that we must actually be detecting the direction and momentum of otherwise entropic forces (or, Newton's laws are wrong).

As such it's a good working assumption (based on what we know of physics and systems dynamics) that any system such as ours will need to be at least moderately successful at actually identifying the state of external nodes since it is their actual state against which gradient our internal probability distributions must climb to maintain their highly improbable state of being self-consistent.

you seem to feel it nearly all the time, and in relation to nearly everyone you discuss with. Perhaps I have missed all your respectful conversations with others, and only seen your attacking ones. Perhaps you can point me to some of your more charitable posts. — unenlightened

Odd. I would have thought if one were going to make a public accusation such as you've done, that checking first to see if it's actually true would be the bare minimum amount of prior research.

But maybe I'm just having another one of my antagonist turns.

Not, of course that such is universally how I or anyone behaves all the time. — unenlightened

Exactly. Because we all have criteria for when we think that inappropriate (past experiences, offense, context...). We don't always extend charity because we don't always consider it the right course of action.

You didn't charitably try to interpret my comment. You assumed it was exactly as it seemed to you at first (an attempt to unjustly ridicule a reasonable response).

You could have considered it a well-meaning attempt to robustly challenge an attitude to pedagogic teaching which causes misery to entire generations of innocent children.

You could have sympathised with the urgency and passion with which I opposed the notion that core Republican voters (mostly poor, rural conservatives) need to be taught how to think properly, rather than just given decent jobs, decent prospects and a decent healthcare system.

But you didn't. You felt this was not a time for charity. This, you thought, was a time for robust attack.

We all feel that sometimes.

There are obviously conservatives who support the movement simply because they see it as the most self-interested political means to secure more wealth for themselves. But that's no different to any movement. For those on the left, for whom social capital is worth more than financial capital, they may only support left-wing or progressive political positions because they think doing so maximises that social capital.

If you're asking why some people engage in politics for selfish, rather than ideological, reasons, then your question has nothing to do with conservatism, but just social psychology in general.

If you want to ask about the coherence of conservatism as an ideology, then you need to disregard that which is cynically done in its name just to gain a core of political support. The same is true of the left.

Then what covert response counts as seeing red? — Michael

As I said, it's not one single response. It is one of a number which accurately respond to the state of the external node. Anything which doesn't is either wrong or irrelevant.

I’m suggesting that seeing red just is the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation, comparable to feeling pain just being the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation. — Michael

Great. That's a really good, clear point to have as a point of agreement.

Now. When neurons within the nociceptive system fire and produce responses we call 'pain' those responses have effects on, for example, the endocrine system which prepare the body for a response to the trauma that nociceptive system has estimated exists. If it makes a mistake, then the pain response was an error, it will attempt to correct that error. This model fits with the general evolutionary model of how the features of the brain evolved - response to environmental stimuli to reduce surprise, to better ensure self-sustainment of the information system.

'Pain' is a term we use for the interocepted detection of one of four main types of response to stimuli, it's detected post hoc (things like heart rate, cytokine release, even external visual and auditory stimuli). It's purpose is obvious to avoid the noxious element at the nociceptor dendrite.

To suggest that colour is like this would require;

a) the V4 and V01 regions release endocrine responses which prime other cells to propagate state changes (they don't)
b) there to be a separate system of interoceptive neurons which detect the state of the V4 and V01 regions other than the ventral and dorsal streams of neural network connections which constitute the response to colour (there isn't)
c) there to be some 'preparatory state' response to a ripe berry (as opposed to an unripe one) other than the stimulation of the regions involved in the response to the estimated ripeness of the berry (again, there isn't)
d) there to be some evolutionary advantage to having such a state other than the actual ventral stream response to identifying the ripe berry (feel free to suggest one - evolutionary theory is just storytelling)

Colour detection is not like pain. The output of the V4 and V01 regions goes directly into systems which model the environment and determine a response to it. The response of those regions to their respective stimuli is absolutely no different in character to the response of earlier regions detecting edge, or light intensity. Nor later regions assigning object definitions and associations. They are all trying to estimate the state of some external node. To exactly the same extent that we can say that external node is 'square' we can say it is 'green'. Both are just ways of describing our estimating its state in ways which dictate appropriate responses.

Decades of teaching is a poor qualification for a conversation. And of course it is no support at all for the efficacy of your communication here. — unenlightened

Oh. So what is?

I can see without any overt response recognisable by other people who might be around. — Michael

I didn't limit the description to overt responses.

Then what’s this and this? — Michael

They are both parts of the brain typically responding to external stimuli and outputting responses related to colour. I can absolutely assure you 100% that none of those regions merely sit in some 'state' that equates to an 'experience of red'. Every single region, every neuron, is just firing or not, each passing a signal on or not. No where is there a state of affairs which some other part of the brain can detect as being 'an experience of red'.

that's your response to the massacre? — jorndoe

Yep.

I'm sorry you feel attacked all the time. — unenlightened

I'm not (sorry, that is). It's exactly what I expect given my provocative approach. I was pointing out the hypocrisy in your complaint about antagonistic approaches that was itself antagonistic.

But you really aren't very good at engaging with people constructively, or putting together an argument. — unenlightened

I'm a qualified, experienced professor with decades of teaching behind me, several publications to my name and a good career in both advocacy and consultancy. I don't have any reason to be concerned. There's a social structure here which perpetuates a particular attitude. That's of interest to me to explore. So I do.

You're missing my point, it's not that we must look at this from a functional point of view, that was just an example, it's that we must look at this from some point of view. It's not sufficient to be dissatisfied with answers given from one perspective (functional ones serving as the example here) without saying why or how those accounts are unsatisfactory, what are they missing?

If neuroscience doesn't explain consciousness by reference to functions, why not? What is it that such an account is missing?

I'm not asking that question rhetorically (in support of a functionalist account), I'm asking it literally in support of a coherent account. There needs to be some ground for satisfaction with 'why?' questions. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's nonsensical, in my view, to claim dissatisfaction with an answer without being able explain what that answer is missing. Anything less is just carping.

All I have so far from people dissatisfied with the evolutionary, functional account (for example) is a repeat of the question "...but why?" We can repeat that question ad infinitum on absolutely any subject. We don't, because we have grounds on which we are satisfied.

Without such ground the investigation is anchorless.

My pointing out the fact that the US-lead world order was beneficial to its allies is vacuous hand-weaving as much as your reference to “the entire post WWII history of western violence and the culpability — neomac

No it isn't, because your 'pointing out' was in direct response to an attempt to take those victims' lives into account in determining if such strategies are worth it.

As such, you need to justify the relevance of your 'pointed-out' fact to that argument.

The only relevance I can think of is that the various regime changes were worth the lives lost and could not have been achieved any other way.

Now maybe you had some other relevance in mind. We don't know because you haven't made that argument.

@Baden, on the other hand, was merely pointing our that your hand-waiving was inadequate as an argument (which it is). The two are in no way equivalent.

To be clear -

That the US has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is not in doubt.

That the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is a bad thing is also (hopefully) not in doubt.

So nothing further needs to be demonstrated on that side.

That the removal of these regimes resulted in a net improvement is in doubt. So bringing that claim in without argument is hand-waiving.

I actually did you a favor by not engaging with you. You wouldn't be able to hang, dude, — Ying

Yes, I see that now. Your ability to speak to Microsoft toys is awe inspiring.

And note again here who are to blame now for the Republican voting blocks... Why, it's everyone's favourite scapegoat... The poor.

If only they could think properly....

It's, of course, not the fault of the Democrats, who offer them fuck all (except a healthy dose of sneering condescension).

No, it's the fault of the poor themselves, for being just too stupid to see what a great deal the liberal agenda offers them.

The suggestion is that 1. people are not explicitly taught critical thinking, and 2. They are not able to do it very well. — unenlightened

No the suggestion includes (3) that we should therefore teach them to do it. That does not follow.

So your example of something that is not explicitly taught but that people can nevertheless manage, is entirely beside the point. — unenlightened

No it isn't. It is exactly the point. There are things which, in the right environment, children are quite capable of learning for themselves without pedagogic teaching. The fact that such things exist means that anyone wanting to argue that a skill needs pedagogic teaching has to also argue that the skill in question is not one of these.

It is an attempt at ridicule that relies on the difficulty of critical thinking and the tendency of ridicule to provoke anger that clouds judgement. — unenlightened

Nonsense. It's ridiculing a ridiculous argument. @Ying spouted off an unexamined cultural dogma in an argument about critical thinking. It was a stupid thing to do and I appropriately ridiculed it.

The whole point of the comment (and controversy) around what the Republicans are wanting to do in Texas is to prevent the questioning of culturally embedded dogma. To replace that with a different culturally embedded dogma is the height of ridiculousness.

That this can happen to you is evidence in favour of the explicit teaching of critical thinking. — unenlightened

That you can claim such a thing is evidence of the failure on your part to pick it up.

Note your entire post consists of a personal attack against my general style, and not a shred of evidence, critical analysis, or argument on the subject at hand. Exactly the approach you're criticising.

Well, EU has kept EU members from fighting each other. And btw, NATO members have also done that, thus the member states have followed Article 1 of the organization.

I'm just happy that I'm not living in an expendable buffer state anymore. — ssu

Whether the EU is safe, or whether you're happy are not the question. You claimed soft imperialism was 'better'. If your claim now is only that Europe (and you personally) would have been better off if Russia had followed 'soft' imperialism instead, then frankly I don't care - I don't think there's any merit to benefiting one's own position at the expense of others. If you do, then there's little else to discuss. Our radical differences in morality obviously explain our different assessments in policy.

You support the US and Europe involving itself in this dispute in the way it has because that benefits you, and yours, and it's harming others is not your concern. Makes sense.

So someone who doesn't eat the red berry can't see the red berry (correctly)? — Michael

No.

I don't need to eat something to see it. I'm asking you to explain what it means to see something's colour correctly. That has nothing to do with any subsequent activity. — Michael

Simply declaring it doesn't have anything to do with subsequent activity is begging the question. I'm claiming it does. I'm saying that, since we don't have any locus for a 'representation' of red (and yet 'red is meaningful, as in the ripe berry), our best theory is that it is our response that constitutes 'red' (our reaching for the word, our eating the ripe berry, our categorising according to our culture's rules...), and that absent of any of these responses, there's no 'seeing red' going on at all.

You counter that you think you see red without any response at all, and that because you think it, it must be true.

I counter that we don't have an apparent mechanism, nor locus for such a thing and looking at the way the brain works doesn't seem to allow that (it seems to go straight from modelling aspects (likes shade and edge) to responses (like speech and endocrine system reactions).

... and so we go round in circles.

You appeared to accept this in the case of pain. Putting my hand in the fire causes pain. That pain is not a property of the fire, but an inner, physiological state. — Michael

Yes. Pain, is a property of a body. Our bodies are in a state of pain (or not, if we have incorrectly identified it). It's not a property of a fire under any system.

Red is a property of a berry. Berries are red. Fires aren't in pain so there's no issue there to contend with, you're not comparing like with like.

In each case we're predicting the state of some external node and responding either to refine that prediction or alter the state of that node.

This is the position that indirect realists argue against. — Michael

None of which says that our brains are literally coloured - that the property in the object must be manifest in the brain.

Our modern scientific understanding of the world, along with the arguments from hallucination and illusion, have shown that the naive realist conception of colour (and other) experience as described above is untenable. — Michael

They really haven't, but my attempts to show that have come to naught if you're just back here again.

The brain does not always predict the stet of external nodes correctly. That doesn't mean it does not attempt to do so, nor does it mean we can't ascribe the properties we predict to those external nodes. We are just sometimes wrong.

An admonitory.

Trump’s Idling Plane Got More TV Coverage Than Biden Cutting Healthcare for 15 Million

While Trump’s arraignment is historic news, it has almost no effect on the lives of ordinary Americans. Stories that affect millions of lives deserve far more than a few collective minutes of coverage. Media have long privileged sensational news over important policy shifts, leaving audiences in the dark about the forces that shape their lives. This, like many other instances, demonstrates the importance of alternative and adversarial media organizations and outlets. — https://fair.org/home/trumps-idling-plane-got-more-tv-coverage-than-biden-cutting-healthcare-for-15-million/

Indeed. We can just let this conversation stand as an excellent example of how to apply critical thinking. When presented with an idea which questions the status quo, ignore it, end the conversation and put a laughing emoji in place of actual argument.

So no answer then? So much for the importance of critical thinking. you take the unquestioned trope that important things must be taught through public education and then refuse to even entertain questions of it.

Stuff like that should be a crime since it actually is. We live in the information age. Critical thinking is a survival skill nowadays. — Ying

Critical thinking skills are indeed essential. As is walking.

Did anyone 'teach' you to walk?

Anyone have good responses? — jorndoe

From the article you presumably didn't read...

The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam's regime from foreign sources.[36] Most precursors for chemical weapons production came from Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. Singapore-based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[37] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989 that "for people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad."[36]

The 2002 International Crisis Group (ICG) no. 136 "Arming Saddam: The Yugoslav Connection" concludes it was "tacit approval" by many world governments that led to the Iraqi regime being armed with weapons of mass destruction, despite sanctions, because of the ongoing Iranian conflict. Among the dual-use exports provided to Iraq from American companies such as Alcolac International and Phillips was thiodiglycol, a substance which can also be used to manufacture mustard gas, according to leaked portions of Iraq's "full, final and complete" disclosure of the sources for its weapons programs. The dual-use exports from U.S. companies to Iraq was enabled by a Reagan administration policy that removed Iraq from the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Alcolac was named as a defendant in the Aziz v. Iraq case presently pending in the United States District Court (Case No. 1:09-cv-00869-MJG). Both companies have since undergone reorganization. Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum is now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and discount fossil fuel company. Alcolac International has since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc.[38]

On 23 December 2005, a Dutch court sentenced Frans van Anraat, a businessman who bought chemicals on the world market and sold them to Saddam's regime, to 15 years in prison. The court ruled that the chemical attack on Halabja constituted genocide, but van Anraat was found guilty only of complicity in war crimes.[39] In March 2008, the government of Iraq announced plans to take legal action against the suppliers of chemicals used in the attack.[40]

In 2013, 20 Iraqi Kurds who were victims of the attack requested a judicial investigation into two unnamed French companies, saying that they were among 20 or more companies that helped Saddam Hussein construct a chemical weapons arsenal. The Kurds sought for an investigating judge to open a case.[41]

As soon as he took power in 1958 Gen Kassem began to offend Britain and the US. They suspected his alliance in the streets with the powerful Iraqi Communist Party. He withdrew Iraq from the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. He appointed British-trained leftist bureaucrats to run government ministries. Most important, in 1961 he nationalised part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait.

Britain had lost its primacy in the Middle East with its failure to overthrow Nasser in Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956. The US was taking over its role as the predominant foreign power in the region. The CIA decided to use the Ba'ath party, a nationalist grouping with just 850 members but with strong links to the army. In 1959 a party member named Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, aged 22, had tried to assassinate Gen Kassem in Baghdad, but had been wounded in the leg.

In return for CIA help Mr Aburish says the Ba'ath party leaders also expressed willingness "to undertake a 'cleansing' programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies." Hani Fkaiki, one of the Ba'ath party leaders, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.

Accused by the Syrian Ba'ath party of co-operating with the CIA, the Iraqi plotters admitted their alliance but compared it to "Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution." — https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/revealed-how-the-west-set-saddam-on-the-bloody-road-to-power-1258618.html

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

So, in answer to your question. Yes, there is something we can do in response. It's the 'something' that we've been banging on about for the last 400 pages.

Stop fucking interfering in the rest of the world simply to make profits for the powerful oil, arms, fertiliser and pharmaceutical industries.

I think assigning a specific evolutionary purpose to consciousness is unjustified. — T Clark

Can you expand on that? Is this something specific to consciousness, or do you think it equally unjustified to assign an evolutionary purpose to osmosis, or active sodium ion transportation?

I don’t need to see something or know something about it to talk about it. — Michael

Wittgenstein was talking about sensical language, not merely the possibility of forming words. the words the 'The Jabberwocky' all make a kind of flow and are grammatically correct, but it's nonsense.

It doesn't make sense for us to hold a conversation about my brother when I have no brother. That I can string together the words "your experience of red" doesn't mean those words have any sense. This is what Wittgenstein meant by the "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language".

What does it mean to correctly see that property? — Michael

To eat the red berry and not get sick because it's ripe.

it’s not incorrect that things look different to something with a different physiology, e.g. the colour blind or the human tetrachromat or animals. — Michael

It is. That's why those two conditions are...conditions. We try to help colour-blind people see properly, we don't try to help the rest of the world lose that ability.

In tetrachromat animals, they have a form of life in which errors will accrue from failures to see what they see. We don't.

What does “detect” mean? If it just means “responds to” then it isn’t inconsistent with indirect realism. — Michael

Yes it is, because indirect realism posits this 'representation' of the object (which we have no cause to consider even exists) to which we respond. Direct realism is about eliminating that representation. Both involve responding to the object. Indirect realism seems to want to build this 'representation' out of it first and yet doesn't seem to have cause to.

they don’t just say that a copy of the property is in the experience, but that the exact token instance of the property is in the experience. That’s what they mean by experience being direct. If it were a copy then it would be representative realism, i.e. indirect realism. — Michael

You'll have to quote a direct realist saying such a ludicrous thing for me to believe this isn't just a straw man.

And that's why I've said before that there's an element of equivocation in the direct realist's argument. That we might use the same word to refer to both cause and effect isn't that they are the same thing. Colour experience is one thing, and apples reflecting light is a different thing entirely. — Michael

This seems a completely unreasonable strawman of the direct realist position. It is that we are detecting a property of the external object, not that we actually possess a copy of that same property in our own brain.

Direct realism is simply saying that we observe properties of the external world. That 'red' is a label given to a property in the external world and when we correctly see red, it is that we are detecting that property.

The producer is so different from the product it seems impossible that they are the same kind of thing. But maybe that's my failing. — bert1

An orchestra produces a Beethoven symphony. Do you find that equally impossible? Is an orchestra the same kind of thing as a symphony?

What I would like is an argument, or observation, or evidence, that shows the emergence of consciousness from human bodies is conceptually possible. — bert1

OK...

Consciousness is the label we give to the re-telling of recent mental events with a first-person protagonist. It evolved to give a coherent meta-model to various predictive processing streams so that responses could be coordinated better in the longer term which provides a competitive advantage worth the calorie cost of doing to in large bodies living in complex environments (usually social ones). It doesn't 'feel like' anything, we use the term 'feels like' in conversations such as these as it's something we've learned to say in these circumstances from a particular position (those taking that position use the term, it's like a badge or token of membership of that group). Our linguistic response to consciousness within social hierarchies is not the same as actual consciousness.

How was that? Not "do you agree with that?", I mean in what way do you find that not even conceptually possible?

you've left out the specifics about what "function" means in the abstract, what it means to give a functional account in the abstract, whether functional accounts can be made consistent with what you're criticising and so on. — fdrake

Indeed, but it's not really about my definition of what function means in the abstract so much as the requirement for one from anyone proposing such an account. I can give a definition of function for me. Other may disagree, of course, but it's not the disagreement that's the problem, it's the lack of any substance at all to disagree with.

If one the many 'consciousness mysterians' were to say that the question of "how/why the brain produces consciousness" is unanswered and then go on to give what would count as an answer from their own definition of function - say "I'm expecting to see how consciousness carries out some function and by 'function' I mean..." - then we'd at least have something to discuss. But as it stands, the discussion still seems little more than "Ohhh, isn't it weird, man".

Yet no one has this problem with quantum mechanics - which is fucking weird.

I'd say it's the label given to the contents of the box. That's why we use the word "private" in the phrase "one's own private thought". If it was a label given to the box, which is public, then the phrase would be "one's own public thought".

Or, to use Wittgenstein's example, the phrase "the contents of the box" refers to the contents of the box, not to the box itself. — Michael

The set {all things inside this box} is not the same as the things inside the box. The set could be empty. Just like the set {6,7,8,9} is neither 6, 7, 8, nor 9. The set {all things which are both A and not-A} has no members, one ca refer to the set, but one cannot refer to the members of it, since there are none.

Is there some bizarre condition that a single word can't refer to a private though but multiple words can? — Michael

Yes (though I'd quibble with 'bizarre'). The expression "one's own private thought" is a placeholder into which any private thought can go. It itself is a public placeholder - we're all agreed we have private thoughts, so the notion, it's full content and meaning are public. It is, in Wittgenstein's example, the label given to the box.

A single word would suffice but it would suffice to describe the container, the set, {one's private thoughts}, which itself has a fully transparent public meaning.

The contents of that set are different to the set itself.

Presumably the phrase "your own private thought" refers to my own private thought. — Michael

Indeed. I should have written...

What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to one's own private thought might be.

What is one supposedly doing when one is using a word to refer to a private thought? What does 'refer' mean in this heterodox context you've placed it?

When I talk about the beetle in my box my words are referring to the thing inside my box. — Michael

How?

By what mechanism are they 'referring'?

I might say, for example, that when I say "give the hat to John", my use of 'John' refers to John via drawing your attention to the public label for the person called John. I could give an account of your learning John's name by experiment, I could even give an account of the neural processes connecting your auditory perception to that learned label (though I suspect you'd thank me to not).

What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to your own private thought might be. It certainly can't be drawing your attention to it (it was already there), it can't be connecting a label (the connection is already made), it can't be learning by experiment (as says, by what test could you possibly learn)...

So what are you claiming is going on when you privately use a word to refer to a private sensation?

it refers to and means something to me. — Michael

How can it do either to you? You are you.

You think of an X, then use the word 'x' to privately refer to the X you just thought of? But you're already thinking of it. What is referring doing here?

Before people get too carried away with this "what it's like" nonsense, an admonitory...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat/EC6290746D630C343A661C8C0F4D8B8E

Again (again), ↪Isaac
? Already mentioned the thread; I ain't your secretary, have daytime job, life outside the forums. Since you apparently haven't read, you could always hit up google — jorndoe

Yeah. Vague hand-waiving in the direction of Google doesn't count as an argument. If you don't believe me, then I suggest you Google it.

I don't like default position chess when the grounds of a substantive disagreement isn't established. I think it's a responsibility of everyone with a position not to treat it as correct by default in this context. — fdrake

I agree, but, for my part I don't think it's so much about default positions as coherent ones. I cannot make sense of a complaint that a question has not been answered for which the complainant cannot provide any clue as to what the answer would look like. It seems to me to be an essential ground for knowing the question hasn't been answered. Otherwise, maybe it has, who knows?

The biggest problem I have with these neuroscience vs consciousness debates is the lack of clarity, not the burden of proof. There are two main dimension to this lack of clarity:

1) We're dealing with 'why?' and 'how?' questions, both of which are unfixed in their scope - they're about satisfaction, not some objective, pre-determined criteria, so they need to be accompanied by a measure of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) in order to be coherent complaints.

One could (as the apocryphal child) keep asking "...but why?" after every response. It never ends, yet this feature doesn't hold up, say, investigation into how cells transport ions across the membrane. There it is sufficient to describe the function of various membrane channels with reference to matters like where they get their energy from, the protein structure etc. This is normally considered a sufficient explanation of 'how?'

Likewise in biology, various evolutionary, or functional accounts are usually considered sufficient answers to the question 'why?'. The answer to the question "why do membranes transport ions?" is that these ions are either functional components or waste products, the build up of which would damage the cell. This is considered a sufficient answer. We could expand on it to evolutionary theory as to why the cell appears designed to avoid damage.

Yet when it comes to brain functions, this normal level of satisfaction seem to go out of the window and be replaced by an unreasonable hankering after a level that no one involved can even specify. No longer are functional or evolutionary accounts satisfactory (despite those same accounts being satisfactory for other functions of the same entity). And worse, this dissatisfaction is not replaced by a higher (or different) standard appropriate, perhaps, to philosophy, or 'consciousness studies' - it is replaced by absolutely no standard at all. It is considered perfectly good intellectual practice to simply register one's dissatisfaction with the answer and leave it there.

Quite frankly, I find the whole approach quite disingenuous, and I don't think it overly cynical of me to suspect nothing more than a gut displeasure at having our 'special' natures reduced to biology.

2) The extent to which first person introspection provides evidence is arbitrarily applied - again with inconsistency erring only on the side of mystifying consciousness. There is a persistent sense that if one 'feels like' one has a private experience of red, then there must be such a step in the process of seeing red. Simply 'feeling like it' counts as irrefutable evidence that it exists as an entity to be found.

But merely 'feeling like' one's phantom limb is present doesn't oblige the physician to keep searching for it. Merely being convinced one is hearing voices doesn't make that an accurate description of schizophrenia. In both these cases, when contrary evidence is presented, we adjust our account. Not that introspected models are all useless, they're a good starting point, but normally, they're informed by other evidence.

Not so, it seems with consciousness, where one's 'feeling' that one 'experiences red' trumps absolutely everything else. Never mind that decades of searching for a locus to this 'experience' has yielded nothing. Never mind that the very pathway of neural firing (which in normal circumstances we're quite happy to take as a proxy for mental events) precludes any such thing. In this case (and in this case alone), if neuroscience doesn't find the experience of red, it is neuroscience that is wrong.

No one is saying such things about phantom limbs, spotlight bias, false memories, Capgras syndrome, Kahneman's famous economic misjudgements, Asch's conformity results, the conviction one has prior to realising one has miscalculated are large sum... In none of these cases to we assume it is the external/emprical/mathematical correction that is mistaken because it doesn't match our own feelings. We are instead, intrigued, and often delighted, to learn how things are not quite as they seem (like finding out how a magic trick is done)

This comes back to a question I asked Isaac:

I classify phenomenal consciousness as a mental process. That's the kind of a thing I say it is. The category I say it belongs in. One of the characteristics of a mental processes is that they are behaviors or at least that they manifest themselves to us as behaviors.

If it's not a mental process, what kind of a thing is it? What category does it fit in? — T Clark — T Clark

I'm sorry for missing this one, I did read it through and thought the question was rhetorical.

I agree that phenomenal consciousness is a mental process, I think that, despite the passing similarity in name, it has little to do with consciousness (the state) which is more to to with merely being awake. This we can measure in various cortices being 'online'. Consciousness (the process), seems more like a post hoc storytelling of self-identity, it's a way of bringing together otherwise disparate and often contradictory mental processes into a coherent whole by re-telling what just happened seconds ago with this single character as the protagonist.

I'm something of a (slightly reformed) behaviourist, so I'm also in agreement with you in that it is our behaviours which reveal to us mental processes. Later on in my career, however, I was lucky enough to work with some excellent neuroscientists on issues around visual perception and they changed a lot of the way I think about cognitive processes. Now I consider it to be a bit more OK to talk about a mere cognitive state (sans behaviour) as being a real state of affairs, but I'm still not as comfortable with it as I am with behaviour.

So now your argument is that anything that uses glucose must have a survival advantage? Why do you think that? — frank

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18490395/

This is basic stuff, I'm not wasting any more time on this.

Your argument was as follows: — frank

It wasn't.

The research you offered shows that some kinds of thinking are associated with glucose consumption. I don't doubt that. — frank

Good. So we can conclude that mental activity requires additional glucose.

Now where is your example of additional glucose requiring features of physiology which provide no survival advantage yet persist over available alternatives?

Do you know of research that picks mental activity out from the rest of the CNS's activity an evaluates it for calorie usage? I don't even know how someone would do that. — frank

I'm not quite sure what you're after, but this was a classic

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15041139/

But what we're talking about here is an activity which goes on all our waking day, it's way bigger than a stroop test.

I thought your argument was that there's no clear survival advantage to having experiences. My point was that if that is so, it doesn't rule out experiences. Evolution doesn't dictate that every feature of an organism provides survival advantage. — frank

That is my argument, yes.

If 'experiences' are some kind of mental activity, and evolution has not yet produced features which are energy intensive but also useless, then we can, quite rightly conclude that it is unlikely to do so here.