Exactly. I don’t understand how supposedly cogent and smart philosophers can keep making the same logical error again and again. Dennett must not be very smart. — Olivier5

Yes of course, that's the answer!

...It's a marvel you were ever taught anything. When your physics tutor explained atomic theory to you did you say "well it doesn't seem that way to me, you must not be very smart"?

Do you think that if a person died in a car crash, and they had previously tested positive for Covid-19, their death would be counted as a Covid-19 death? — Metaphysician Undercover

If their recovery was in any way hampered by Covid-19 (even having had it) then it would form part of the chain of events leading to death (the other being the car crash injuries) and so it would form part of the Covid-19 statistics, yes. That's how they're designed and it's a deliberate strategy so that the statistics encompass the full impact of the pandemic - ie that person might not have died if one part of the chain of events was removed.

But just pointing that out that the issue of 'excess deaths' is consequently complicated by by this decision is not in the least bit reminiscent of Trump's nonsense. Partisanship in politics is one thing, but when millions of people are dying or at risk of dying what we need is good data and dispassionate analysis, not mob rule shutting down any discussion not totally on board with the Hollywood version of this disaster movie.

The decision to count all listings of Covid involvement as a Covid death was a perfectly rational one, and a good idea, in my view, but subsequently pointing out that the result of this decision is that the statistics, particularly related to excess deaths caused by policy responses, needs to be treated with caution is not

an attempt at downplay. — jorndoe

it's a necessary part of developing policies which cause the least collateral harm whilst still tackling the pandemic.

The way the world seems is not a theory, is it? To try and put it another way, the biological machinery produces some end-product of consciousness, and that end-product is not theoretical, is it? It's a real end-product. — Luke

Yes, but the mere existence of an end product of some sort is not what's in question. It's properties are. 'Qualia' does not simply mean 'some mental state'.

I have long believed that culture and language influence experience. For instance, there's nothing in the visual information I get from standing in front of a tree that tells me it's a tree. It's all just shapes and colors. The tree is an idea.

So yeah, I see ideas. I think we all do. This doesn't conflict with the idea of qualia, though.

If your view does, how so? — frank

The place it purportedly plays in the process of perception. Mostly hidden state>qualia>introspective perception (of qualia). The colours and shapes are processed sub-consciously (ie not available to introspection), so the first part of the process available to introspection is the model 'tree'. Any further introspection is only going to reveal what colour 'trees' are, not what your V1 neurons actually responded to. So looking at grass, you do not get a 'green' quale. Even if the V1 neurons which usually code for what you call 'blue' actually fired, your introspection of the experience would tell you you experienced 'green' because you're expecting grass to be green and what you 'saw' was grass.

Even if we put it later it's problematic. We could get around the first problem by positing hidden state> model>qualia (of model). Here we run into the problem I outline to Khaled above (the timescale issue).

Also, all the issues of privacy, ineffability, availability which have already been discussed are not thus removed.

No it's the same old why. Just this time it's harder to answer. Because we cannot gather data about something private. — khaled

Consciousness is not private. It's exact components might be pragmatically so, but there's no reason at all why some highly specific limits to the granularity of our data should prevent us from developing some very compelling models. If you ask 'why do objects fall earthward' we don't need the details of Higg's Bosons to give a very compelling and fairly exhaustive model - there's no 'hard problem' just because we don't know the exact pathways of all the fundamental particles involved - (apologies to any physicists who might be reading if that example is complete nonsense - reaching for an example from another field). The point is that just because the exact state you're aware of right now is not pragmatically reportable that's no reason why we can't have a good enough general impression of it to make extremely accurate models of consciousness - incomplete accuracy doesn't lead to a 'hard problem' in any other field.

That's not what I'm saying. I said that things seem to me a way. That is a fact. You keep saying things like "there is no phenomenological layer" or "you do not see red" but those are false. I do, in fact, have an experience. There is, in fact, a phenomenological layer. Me knowing how my brain works does not remove the phenomenological layer. — khaled

We're talking about the cause of your experience here. Claiming to have "an experience of redness" puts 'redness' as the cause of your experience. It's not. Some hidden state of the external world is the cause of your experience - 'red' is a public concept you apply later to define it. And in the case of "an experience of redness" we can trivially show that such an application is very removed (ie, it's not what anyone would reach for without introspection aimed at reaching a specific conclusion like that).

Put a temporal aspect in. Let's say this morning the world seems some way to you. Later in the afternoon you want to tell someone how the world seemed to you that morning, so you consult your memory. But your memory is flawed and filters stuff by prior expectations, so your report this afternoon is not accurate, it's not the way the world seemed to you this morning, it's an inaccurate recollection of it, yes?

Now contract the timescale. Even in the milliseconds between the conscious awareness of some state and the formation of a report of that state (especially a linguistic one), that report has already become inaccurate.

I know when the stimuli is removed, the experience is removed. — khaled

Nope. All manner of experiments can show that when the stimuli is removed you can continue to experience is as you brain still expects it to be there and the new data isn't yet sufficient to overcome the expectation that the stimuli is still there.

I therefore conclude that the brain processing of stimuli is causing the experience. Where is the issue with this line of logic? — khaled

Nothing. Experiences are caused by brains. That doesn't say anything about what experiences are experiences of.

Ok so my experience is largely shaped by my language and culture. First off, no one is disagreeing (at least I'm not). Secondly, how does this undermine the claim that there is a phenomenological layer? It doesn't. — khaled

Again, no-one's denying that we have something we could call experiences. It's the nature of the experiences that's at issue - what they are experiences of, how private they are, the degree to which they're in flux, the extent to which they reduce to function (p-zombies), the extent to which a person knows any more about them than a third-party...etc

Do you think the following are true:

(1) Environmental hidden states underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(2) Bodily hidden states underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(3) Task parameters underdetermine perceptual feature formation.
(4) Priors underdetermine perceptual feature formation.

? — fdrake

Yes, but again with caveats I'm afraid. I presume you're talking about mutually exclusive variables to an extent (again with ceretis paribus). In normal circumstances all four would collectively determine - ie there's no other factor - I want to leave aside the thorny issue of whether there might be some random factor for the moment as I don't think it's relevant (my gut feeling is that there might be at least a psuedo-random one resulting from the chaos effect of such a complex system).

If you make the environmental hidden states a part of the process of perceptual feature formation, you lose the ability to elicit underdetermined behaviours from them based on models; to be surprised by them at all. Since they may become fully causally, not just possibly informationally and partially causally, determined by the process of perceptual feature formation. How things look in public becomes what they are. — fdrake

I think if you put the hidden states into the process of perceptual feature formation, it changes part of their causal relationship with perceptual feature formation. — fdrake

If I've understood you right I completely agree. Of course, I think the case of the engineer's timely intervention is the most interesting part, but I totally accept that we have to have a foundation of the independence of hidden states in order to even make that interesting.

We may have got crossed wires. What I mean by saying that the thing modelled is 'the apple' which is a public model, is not intended as an entanglement of some hidden state with the public model. It's a limit of language (which is what I was trying to get at in my edit). The process of 'seeing' could be seen as essentially that of fitting sensory data to priors (filtering of priors being task dependant). So the meaning of 'I see an apple', might be 'the sensory input best fits the public model of 'apple'', but this is not that same as saying that we see 'model-of-apple', because that would be to make that Cartesian divide of 'seeing' into object>qualia>perception(of qualia). It's just that that's what 'seeing' is, so it's only correct to say we 'see the apple'.

If we wanted to phrase all this in terms of purely Markov Chains in the process of perception, then I don't think we can say any more than that the cause of of our perceptual feature has no name. We do not name hidden states, we only name objects of perception.

Edit - Another way of putting this (the language gets complicated) might be to say that we do name the hidden state (apple), but that these christenings then produce fuzziness on the hidden states we could possibly refer to in any given instance of perception - so the hidden state that is in direct causal relationship with our perceptual system will be only fuzzily identified by any word we apply. I'm not sure which approach is best (if any), I don't think we've really got the linguistic tools we need to develop theories about objects of perception.

I think the perceptual system would not be direct if the process of perceptual feature formation didn't have direct causal contact to some hidden states. Isn't that the Cartesian theatre metaphor? We see "models" or perceive "aspects of aggregated sense data", rather than perception being a modelling relation. In those formulations, the models or the sense data are in direct causal contact with the environment, and all perception is of those things which are in direct causal contact with the environment. Two steps removed at all times (Cartesian Theatre) vs One step removed at some times (direct realism). — fdrake

Yep, I think that actually a good way of putting it. I've described myself as an indirect realist before, but these are not terms I have a in-depth knowledge of, so I'm not attached to them. My question was really just getting at the issue of how we define the boundaries of a 'perceptual system'. Where does the perceptual system end and some other system take over (even if only in theory to show that it never does)? If we just say that the boundaries of the perceptual system are the edge of the Markov Blanket, then your version of direct realism is true, but only by definition (ie if some other process intervened between the hidden state and the perceptual system it would, by definition, either be a hidden state itself or part of the perceptual system). So to get a Cartesian Theatre problem (in order to disprove it empirically rather than definition-ally) we'd have to say that the creation of 'the play' out of some hidden states was not part of the perceptual system - the perceptual system was the bit watching the play. If we say the play-making mechanisms are part of the perceptual system then the system is in direct causal relationship with the hidden states (it's just that the description of the perceptual system is wrong). I don't see anything wrong here at all, I only wanted to clarify which way you were looking at it.

For me at least, a perceptual system is direct when there are no intermediaries between some part of it and hidden states. — fdrake

So would what constitutes a 'perceptual system' have parameters other than the edge of their Markov blanket? I mean such that we're not simply making the above true by definition?

Are you throwing the hidden states into the public agreed model there? — fdrake

Yeah, I think you'd have to. We can't escape this and look at it from a position where I'm outside of my modelling, but I don't see that as a problem (I know some people do). I'm ultimately a pragmatist and it seems to work.

Do you agree with these things?

(1) The model's state is informative of the hidden state, but underdetermined by the hidden state. — fdrake

Yes, definitely, but the extent will depend on the novelty of the environment and the developmental stage of the brain. It's one of the reasons babies are such interesting subjects.

(2) The model's state is directly causally connected with the hidden state but underdetermined by it. Underdetermined because there're priors and task parameters. — fdrake

Yes, but less so. I don't necessarily see any reason why a model might no become disconnected from the causal state which at one time formed it, I don't think there's anything neurologically preventing that.

When a hypothetical philosophical someone says "I see the apple", they're utilising the causal connection between their perceptual system and the apple. Do you believe they're seeing "apple models" or do you believe they're seeing what the apple models are modelling in the manner they are modelled (roughly, the apple)? — fdrake

The apple. There's nothing more that an apple is than the publicly agreed model. It's not that there's no apple, it's that that's what 'seeing an apple' is.

Edit - I should add that it depends on the context. In terms of challenging any objective authority to those public models I might be more tempted to say 'there's no apple'. It's a contextual language game thing about what we're using 'apple and 'model of apple' to do in some particular conversation.

Yes, several. My favourite is Karl Friston's model.

Here's an introduction.

https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Active%20Inference%20A%20Process%20Theory.pdf

And here's one specifically about visual perception.

https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Scene%20Construction,Visual%20Foraging%20and%20Active%20Inference.pdf

...but there are others. Anil Seth's take is slightly different, but along the same lines...

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zvbkp/

...is quite an interesting recent one.

I have a hard time believing that sensations being models is the majority view. What is red a model of? — Marchesk

The hidden state of some part of the external world.

In neuroscience though, nobody thinks people are p-zombies. That's not up for debate. — frank


Again, for emphasis. — frank

You'd struggle to find so much as a handful of neuroscience papers which even mention p-zombies in anything more than a disinterested passing phrase, so I'm not sure how you might have formed this view. If you've got any supporting citations I'd be interested in reading them.

Since you don't seem to know the difference between Hilton and Davis, I'm not convinced you have a field. — frank

Yep, you've called my bluff, I've just been winging it so far using Google.

That color and pain are models? — Marchesk

Yes. That the brain creates models to predict the outcome of the body's interaction with hidden states of the exterior environment. That these models are heavily socially mediated (factors like language and culture).

It is really the standard model in cognitive sciences.

I'd want to know why, but evidently you're not much interested in that question. — Isaac


That would be the hard problem. Which I am interested in. — khaled

Ah, so you're another one for whom 'why?' apparently means something completely different with regards to consciousness than it does in every other field of inquiry.

I want to emphasize that the statement "the world seems like X to me" is not negated by any neurological evidence you can throw at it. The world still seems the way it seems. The statement "qualia does not exist" implies "the world doesn't seem like anything, there is no X", which is absurd. — khaled

Replace 'qualia' with God...unicorns, fairies, fate, Valhalla... What use is just saying that the way things seem to you right now is completely impervious to any evidence to the contrary? Seems like a self-defeatingly dogmatic position to hold.

I don't think I need to present to you evidence that stimuli cause responses. — khaled

Why are you dodging the only bit of your claim which is relevant? The significant bit of your claim is that stimuli directly cause experiences.

Oh that's easy. When I close my eyes I do not have the experience of color. Additionally I know there are certain ways the biological machinery can malfunction to make me colorblind. Therefore the stimuli and biological machinery must be causing that experience. — khaled

None of which demonstrates that it does so directly (ie, that you are experiencing the stimuli and not your culturally-embedded response to the stimuli).

I'd say the experience is a side-product of whatever our brain is doing. As in this:

Photons hit the retina, they fire a chain of neurons in the V1, these (depending on previously cemented pathways) fire a chain of other neurons (with the important backward-acting filters). Some of these neurons represent things like the word 'red', images of other things which caused the same initial V! pattern, emotions attached to either the current image, or remembered ones... All this is held in working memory, which is then re-fired (selectively) by the hippocampus. It's this re-firing which we are aware of when we introspect, not the original chain. — Isaac


Causes the experience as well. Is there a problem now?

I've cited several papers which you've declined to read. — Isaac


All of those papers attack the model stimuli>qualia>response or stimuli>response>qualia. — khaled

That's not what is demonstrated in those studies. They show how prior models (mostly socially mediated) filter stimuli to place modified predictive models in the working memory which then provides data we associate with 'experience' (ie, the tendency to say things like "that tasted bitter").

I think you'll find your view is absent in scientific communities and the world in general. Dennett doesn't even take it as far as you do and he's as close to it as you'd find it in philosophy of mind. — frank

Then I think you've either had little experience of the scientific community in my field or you've misunderstood my position. It's quite the most common view among my colleagues and those whose work I generally follow.

Present me the neurological evidence that says that our brain activities cannot coincide with an experience. What theory breaks if I propose that at the same time my brain is processing color, I am having an experience of red? — khaled

I've cited several papers which you've declined to read.

But the patient didn't examine nerve endings. So how come he was able to distinguish? — khaled

What part of the path between the signals sent by nerve endings and signals sent to the voicebox to produce "it feels like a stabbing pain" is it that you think is broken?

Experiences are the way things seem to you. Those can't be fake. If it seems to you one way then that is the experience you're having. For you to have a fake experience would mean something seems to you one way, but actually doesn't seem to you that way, instead, seems to you another way. — khaled

Yes, but such a notion of experience when applied to "it seems like I have an experience of redness" is utterly useless. What do we then do with that? I'd want to know why, but evidently you're not much interested in that question. I'd want to know how I came to learn to use such expressions, but evidently you're not much interested in that either.

If all you want to do is say "the world seems like X to me" and don't want to ask any questions of that, then I don't know what you're doing here.

There's just no evidence of this — Isaac


I am having experiences. That's evidence. Which you recognize here: — khaled

How is you having an experience evidence of "stimuli cause experiences and also responses"?
All you've shown is that one side of the relationship exists. Your claim was about the cause, not the mere existence.

Seriously though which is it? Am I or am I not having experiences? — khaled

I've never claimed you are not having experiences tout court.

I'll repeat it again. It goes stimuli>experience+response. What's weird here? — khaled

The inclusion of an aparrently direct route from stimuli to experience for which there is absolutely no evidence. Not to mention the things you then want to claim of these experiences...

I never said that my "position" was obvious. I said that qualia are obvious. — Luke

Right. And your position is that qualia exist (are a coherent ontological commitment), so saying their existence is 'obvious' is exactly the same as saying that your position is obvious. It's no different to arguing that 'Elan Vitale' is obvious, or that 'Aether' is obvious.

Qualia are - according to Dennett - "the way things seem to us" — Luke

...before showing how such a notion is incoherent.

It doesn't matter what weird expression you use, they all end up empty. "What it's like...", "the way it seems...", "how it feels"...none of these expressions have any coherent meaning beyond behaviours and interoception of physiological states. There's nothing they describe that the aforementioned don't.

That is my point. How does it get started? — Brett

http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html


I don't know, of course, that physics is all there is. — Marchesk

Ha! That's a perfect microcosm of what's going on here. I'll quote one bit.

"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

Apparently it's perfectly reasonable to believe that sentience comes from Carbon, or Plasma...or God or conscious electrons, or some third realm of existence we can neither see nor touch...but the one place literally all the scientific evidence in the world points to it coming from is the one place, for some hidden reason, that people claim to find it impossible to believe it comes from.

It's like pointing to the light coming out of the sun and everyone asking "Yes, that's all very well, but where's the light really coming from? I mean, suns can't just produce light, can they."

Admitting the obvious might upset the physicalism gods. — Luke

Simply claiming your position to be 'obvious' is a lame argument. Do you really expect anyone to take that seriously?

Echoing what Daemon said earlier, your view has consequences in the realm of morality. If we ask what it's like to be a rape victim, the answer would be: tachycardia, hypertension, soft tissue trauma, inflammatory response, etc. — frank

I don't see why. If someone asked me what it's like to be a rape victim, I'd more likely reach for considerably less technical terminology. But if someone asked me to help a rape victim deal with some of those issues, I'd sure as hell what to know what they 'really' were and not base my therapy on some fanciful woo which just 'sounded' right.

This is one of the many reasons this view, which we might call p-zombieism, is going to be a hard sell. A lot of people will just be revolted by it. — frank

Yes. I'm sensing that. It's a good job some people prefer to investigate matters in a more productive way than just avoiding what they find repulsive and pursuing only that which seems nice. We'd have never left the dark ages. You recall the reaction to Darwin's suggestion that we were descended from apes?

A 3rd grader with a calculator understands integral calculus. And a blind person equipped with a spectrometer that says the associated color of the wavelength it receives knows what color is. — khaled

No-one mentioned understanding the subject. In fact I specifically explained the exact opposite (the difference between understanding a practise and using a word), yet you still want to come back with this disingenuous straw man. If you're not going to argue seriously, there's no point in continuing. We're talking here about whether a person can use a word, understand the meaning of it. So the equivalent with 'maths, or 'calculus' is whether the person uses the word in the right way in the right context, not whether they can carry out the calculations contained within its practises. My claim is that a colour-blind person can use the word 'red' correctly in context (for example if you ask them what colour stop lights usually are). They can use the word correctly in even more contexts if you give them a spectrometer.

how does the patient tell between blunt force pain and stabbing pain? — khaled

Nerve endings can distinguish between those different types of pain, plus the thalamus helps to distinguish based on experiences.

Neither of these uses implies "fake experience". Which is what I say doesn't make sense. — khaled

So if I played you a virtual reality film of going to the rain forest and said I'd 'faked' the experience, you wouldn't know what on earth I was talking about? You might well not like the expressions I use, but that doesn't mean they make no sense. 'Fake' means that it's not part of the real world, something you invent, a model which doesn't have good predictive power. This latter makes 'fake' an important distinction from 'real'.

I am not basing my information of whether or not I have mental experiences on whether or not I reach for the word red. I am having a mental experience, as a matter of fact, and I am reaching for the word red to explain it. — khaled

Yep. Those two things are happening. Nothing in that correlation indicates that there is such an entity as the 'experience of red'. You have experiences, you reach for words like red. Nowhere does that show that your experiences are what cause you to reach for the word 'red'. The important thing here is the place these experiences have in the chain of events. if it goes stimuli>experience>response, then your response 'red' results from the experience, you are experiencing 'redness'. If it goes stimuli>response>experience, then your experience is not of redness, it is of your response to redness, a post hoc fabrication, a 'fake' - in that it appears to be something it's not. This is why investigation of the neurological mechanism matters. It gives us evidence as to which path best explains the process (clue - it's the latter), but thought experiments like Dennet's can also throw doubt on the process we think is happening.

How about "stimuli cause experiences and also responses"? That's more what I think is happening. — khaled

There's just no evidence of this, and absolutely tons of evidence to the contrary. If you want to make up some imaginary realm where non-brain-related 'experiences' happen, then be my guest, but you've ceased taking part in any serious discussion at that point. assuming not, then you have to at least take seriously the evidence from neuroscience which opposes this view.

When did I do that? As in even claim that an understanding of X (qualia that is not my own) is possible. — khaled

X in this case is not 'qualia that is not my own'. It's 'qualia' the topic, the concept itself. You, and others, have listed all sorts of potential problems from avoiding the concept - doctors having trouble with diagnoses, inability to appreciate art, moral problems...

There is a non sequitor there. Why is it the case the if X is not amenable to empirical evidence that that should not impact our behaviour? — khaled

Where would you be getting the 'should' from then? It 'should' because...? It cannot be because of some consequence (that would mean it has a measurable effect on the world and so be amenable to empirical testing). So what is the 'because...' here?

It just appears that you're saying we can be fairly confident that a silent patient is not in pain. — frank

Why would we rely on the spoken word as the sole response? We could measure prostaglandin for example, or activity in the thalamus.

So you would explain the law in terms of the range of words uttered, not in terms of the subject experiencing the same pain. — frank

More or less, yes. I don't see the need for a speculative 'middle man' with no empirical support for it's existence.

Stimuli cause responses. We can examine the mechanisms by which that happens. We just don't need 'Stimuli cause experiences which then cause responses'. It doesn't aid our understanding at all and it contradicts most of what we know about how the process between stimulus and response actually works.

I keep hearing this argument by all the Quiners here. I want to instead ask, what's the problem with introducing that layer anyways, even if we don't need to (not that I'm convinced of that)? What are y'all afraid might happen? What confusion have you been trying to avoid? — khaled

For me it's...

The doctor knows that the private experience we each describe as "like knives" is indicative of a certain condition — khaled

doctors talk about qualia all the time — khaled

How do we explain this [Hilton's Law] without resorting to talk of phenomenal consciousness? — frank

Maybe painkillers and anaesthesia kill more than complaints. Maybe that's why they're not called complaint-killers. — khaled

how might we teach the colorblind person to be able to distinguish all the colors perfectly in each situation? And that includes seeing new things for the first time too? Answer: We can't. — khaled

... and a dozen others.

The constant refrain of the idealist.
"X is not amenable to empirical evidence from the material world of the physical sciences" - before proceeding to expound exactly how an understanding of X should impact our behaviour in the aforementioned material world.

Anyway, I was asking how an anti-qualist puts that into words. A person with chronic pain complains of a bout of the ”same pain" but we know the cause is not necessarily the same. — frank

I thought I'd answered that. There's one-to-one relationship with the neurons in the post central gyrus where the location of pain signals is interpreted. I don't see the fact they're imperfectly wired causes any issue. I could say that the patient showed neural activity in the upper section of the post central gyrus corresponding to the lower back, despite tissue damage in the upper thigh. This activity causes them to reach for terms like 'lower back', and to show defensive reflexes there. I don't seem to need to talk about their 'experiences' even, let alone 'qualia'.

An element of understanding doens't translate to the colloquial use of "Do you understand X". Being able to use the word correctly in one sentence doesn't show understanding as it is commonly used. — khaled

From where are you getting this empirical data about 'common', 'colloquial' use of the expression 'to understand the meaning of a word'?

But then again, a couple comments ago you said that if a colorblind person says "Hand me the red apple" that that does the same job as an ably sighted person saying it. Even though the colorblind person would clearly behave differently from an ably sighted person upon being handed a green apple. — khaled

I wasn't talking about their response to the next event, I was talking about their public use of the word 'red'. In the example of paralysis/anaesthesia, you we're talking specifically about the behavioural response to pain. Two different cases. In mine we have two events - the use of the word to get a job done, and the response to that job having been done incorrectly. In yours we have just one - the response to tissue damage.

How does he know this? — Isaac


From noticing that everyone complaining from a stabbing pain usually has this ailment but if they're complaining about blunt force pain then they usually have this other ailment. — khaled

The question I asked was how does he know that "the private experience we each describe as "like knives" is indicative of a certain condition". I've bolded the relevant section. Knowing that a person using the expression 'like knives' is usually complaining of a certain ailment doesn't in any way give him knowledge about what you're calling 'private experience'. It is just response based. He would know this no less if he didn't consider 'experience' at all. He has no need of it.

Experience is talk on a phenomenological level. Your experience is your experience (another way of saying "the way things seem like to you is the way things seem like to you"). Saying "actual experience" makes no sense as it implies a distinction between "fake experience" and "actual experience". Fake experience would translate to "The way things seem like they seem like to you but don't actually seem like that" which makes no sense. You cannot think you're experiencing something and actually not be experiencing that thing. — khaled

Say I knocked you out and then brought you round in a perfect virtual reality simulation of swimming in the ocean and I later explaining that what you were actually experiencing was a virtual reality set-up. You're saying that my use of the term 'actually experiencing" there would make no sense to you at all, you wouldn't know what I was talking about? Seems unlikely. You may not prefer to use that term, but the idea that it "makes no sense" is ridiculous. Surely we can come to some mutual understanding of what is meant?

You cannot conclude we have 'red' quale from that. You might, other people might not. — Isaac


The fact that I cannot conclude what other people's experiences are like is why qualia are private. — khaled

You cannot conclude that qualia even exist. Other people may not have the experiences you have. You may not even have those experiences in the next five minutes. It might seem to you that the colour 'red' has an experience associated with it, it might not seem that way to others, it might not seem that way to you tomorrow. Others might feel that talk of 'experiences' at all doesn't make sense. You might feel that way tomorrow.

we both call them "red". In other words, that whatever experience we are having, we both tell the same story about it. What is the issue? — khaled

What you can tell is that when presented with an object, both you and I respond in similar ways (reaching for the word 'red', for example). This gives you no information whatsoever about mental 'experiences'. Any further information you draw from this similarity in response is entirely speculative and without a grain of substance.

What do you mean here? The way things seem like to me, is, as a matter of fact, and always will be, the way things seem like to me. I don't see what's non-factual about this. — khaled

Because it is a trivial matter to prove that the way things seem to you (at time t0) will definitely not always be the way things seem to you (at time t1), even on the subject of exactly the same stimuli.

You have yet to give an example where knowing a list of things and their colors, but never actually having seen the color results in the same behavior as people who’ve seen that color. — khaled

Why would it need to result in the same behaviour? I don't think either of us is under the delusion that all people understand terms to the same extent.

I keep giving you examples where colorblind people may know that lakes are blue but will still repeatedly fail a test where they're shown drawings of purple lakes and red skies. I am saying that without having seen something red, you will never be able to use the word as appropriately as people who've seen red things. — khaled

Yep. And what I'm asking you is why you've drawn the arbitrary line at that particular level of understanding.

Your reply was: Give them a spectrometer. But if "understanding" for you means that a kid with a calculator understands math despite not being able to solve any problems without the calculator, then I think the definition is ridiculous. — khaled

We're not talking about understanding a practice (maths) we're talking about understanding a word (red). Understanding a practice means being able to carry out tasks according to it's rules, that's not the same thing at all as understanding how to use a word. The proper equivalent for what we're talking about is whether a kid knows how to use the word 'maths'. You're saying that an inability to detect something is the same as an inability to apply the term for that something once detected. It's clearly two different issues. I can only detect neural activity with an fMRI scanner. Now that I can no longer access such machinery, have I lost my ability to use the term 'neural activity' simply because I can no longer identify it?

It sounded like you were denying color sensations. But perhaps you prefer to call colors models of wavelength or reflectivity. — Marchesk

Yes, that's right. Public models. By which I mean ones which, although in individual minds, are kept similar by repeated use to accomplish similar tasks in a social context.

Our use of language. — Isaac


That's absurd. Does this mean birds don't see colors? — Marchesk

Why would it mean that?

why don't we have the equivalent language for the rest of the EM spectrum or sonar? — Marchesk

Because we have no signals from either of those wavelengths to model.

I'm not clear on what you're getting at here at all.

Why? — Isaac


I could ask the same of you. Why is your standard so low? — khaled

Charity as much as anything else. But also, meaning is related to use, so any (intentionally) successful use has to have an element of understanding meaning, otherwise we end up arbitrarily disassociating meaning from use. This leads to all sorts of ontological issue reifying the 'meaning' of words.

Anesthesia prevents both (you don't move during surgery). And in that case we have behavioral equivalence (the complaints are removed). — khaled

No it doesn't. I bet those patients who were accidentally merely paralysed complained a great deal afterwards. Again, you're applying arbitrary parameters to make the evidence match your model. Why place an arbitrary time restriction on complaints? They are clearly not behaviourally equivalent at all.

So you are seriously suggesting that with enough knowledge the surprise would be eliminated. I think that's a much less reasonable expectation. — khaled

I'm not sure what your opinion of reasonableness has to do with it.

Does it also follow then that we can teach children colors by having them look at enough fMRI scans and reading enough neurology books? — khaled

No. Not unless you're suggesting that all the empirical data about colour in the world is somehow written down in neurology books. That would be some book!

Incorrect. The doctor knows that the private experience we each describe as "like knives" is indicative of a certain condition that is not the same as the descriptor "like blunt force". — khaled

How does he know this?

I already think it will be a waste of time from reading the first bit. — khaled

Well, there's not much point in pursuing a line of argument based on the data if you're not going to take the time to read it - let's leave that line of argument for now.

Let me just dig into this a bit. So if I say "I am experiencing red", you would reply "Actually, you're not experiencing red, you're.....". What is the ......? Could you do that for "I am in pain" too? What exactly would you put in place of those dots? — khaled

"Actually, you're not experiencing red, you're... reaching for the word 'red' as a model to help you explain, predict and act on your actual experience which may or may not have included stimulation from some particular wavelength of light". As I've said, it is virtually inarguable at this stage that your awareness of mental processes is post hoc.

Now you can have the definition of 'experience' in this context to be just whatever story your brain puts together to model the interioception events, but then the investigation must end there.

You cannot conclude we have 'red' quale from that. You might, other people might not. Someone who's never heard of the idea of a qualia certainly won't have a 'red' quale. You're trying to have your cake and eat it here. On the one hand you want to establish a discursive reality to your experiences as they appear to you to be, then on the other you want to use this to make claims about our shared experience (there is such a thing as qualia, we experience redness, we have experiences etc). None of this derives from the mere fact that you've told yourself a story about what's happening in your brain. If you want to divorce the actual mechanisms from your experience of them (the story you tell yourself about them), then that's fine, but all you have left is a story, you can't then treat it as some matter of fact that can be further investigated. For one it will change minute-to-minute.

Give them a spectrometer and tell them that anything with a wavelength of approximately 625-740 nanometres is called 'red'. — Isaac


That's like saying you can teach a kid math by giving him a calculator. I obviously meant for them to be able to distinguish it alone. — khaled

Why? As per the comment with which I opened this post, why are you setting arbitrary limits to what constitutes understanding a term? I've answered for me, but you've not given me your answer.

Pain is interesting. Per Hilton's law (@Isaac is it Hilton's?), any nervous pathway that is used extensively, will become a pain superhighway, so pain from any source in the area will use the same pathway and present the same feeling to the subject.

How do we explain this without resorting to talk of phenomenal consciousness? — frank

I think Hilton's is more about the overlapping of sensorimotor and surrounding tissue nerve ending, the superhighway idea is a consequence of it, but my expertise ends at the neck, so I'm not sure.

Either way, I'm not clear what the issue is with explaining this. Presumably if our nerve endings had a one to one relationship with each patch of tissue you'd have less of an issue, right? So why not apply the same one-to-one relationship with the neurons in the post central gyrus where the location of pain signals is interpreted? I don't see the fact they're imperfectly wired causes any issue.

In behavior yes, but you know they have never seen anything red. I would say then that they don't understand the word. — khaled

Why?

The difference between anesthesia and paralysis — khaled

One prevents either nociception or working memory function (depending on type), the other prevent muscle function. I'm not seeing how this relates at all to the meaning of words like 'red'.

The surprise experienced by people when they first see something regardless of their empirical knowledge about it — khaled

We've just been through this. It is not "regardless" of their emprical knowledge. You've not demonstrated at all that surprise is not eliminated by empirical knowledge. All you've shown is that two states of empirical knowledge both show surprise, ie neither have acquired sufficient knowledge to eliminate surprise altogether. You haven't even shown that the neurologist is not less surprised. It's all nothing more than armchair speculation.

The fact that doctors talk about qualia all the time (does it feel like stabbing or blunt force?)
etc — khaled

Agai, how would this even be a useful question if there were not a public meaning for these terms. If they referred to private experience then the doctor will have learned nothing whatsoever from your answer.

I never said "everything there is to know about red". — khaled

And yet...

regardless of their empirical knowledge about it — khaled

How would you know that the surprise is "regardless" of empirical knowledge unless you're referring to 'everything there is to know'? Anything less than that and you haven't made your case at all, the surprise might be caused by a lack of some empirical fact of which both the neurologist and the layman were previously unaware.

I didn't say ineffable. I said 'not perfectly communicable'. — Isaac


Those are the same thing. — khaled

Not as I intended it they're not. Ineffable implies some metaphysical impossibility. 'Not perfectly communicable' was just meant to imply fallibility in language. Again, you ignored the important bit. We can communicate an experience with no less fidelity than we ourselves recollect it.

So far the only thing Lisa has said is that our emotional categories are man made and do not need to exist in nature. — khaled

Look at the inferential method she demonstrates. The same thing applies to 'red'. I'll dig out a paper specifically on perceptual features if you're having trouble making the cross-over, I just thought the emotions paper was clearer about the role of public concepts.

It makes no sense to me to say somthing doesn't have X if X doesn't mean anything. — khaled

Sorry, it made sense to me when I wrote it. I mean exactly the thing you say it makes no sense to mean.

I say "it feels like X" you say "No it doesn't feel like X". — khaled

I've nowhere said that the way things feel to you to be is not the way things feel to you to be. I'm saying they're not the way things actually are. In other words, I have a better model.

You haven't answered my question on this. What exactly are you investigating if you're going to assume that the way things seem to you to be is the way they actually are?

That's like me saying topology is an area of math. Or citing some of its uses. It doesn't mean I know what topology is don't you agree? — khaled

No. You've just said what topology is. How is "it's an area of maths" not an answer to the question "what is topology?".

I don't see how the fact that it's possible to give more detailed answers means that less detailed ones are now not answers. As you say...

"topology" have they misused the word because their studies are incomplete? — Isaac


No but as I said, their understanding is rudamentary and far from perfect. And I'm sure you'd agree that the only way for them to understand it perfectly is to be able to use it in every scenario. For topology this is easy, they just finish the course. For color not so much. — khaled

"Understand it fully". Now you've snuck in a 'fully' which wasn't there before. So how does the postgraduate student now understand it 'fully' when the post doctorate student clearly understands more? You're placing an arbitrary threshold on 'understanding' just to match your theory. Colour-blind people understand the meaning of the word 'red'. Normally sighted people understand more. Artists (arguably) understand more still. Colour scientists understand even more. Why draw the line at some arbitrary point?

Not really. If I passed him the green apples he wouldn't complain but a person who can see color would. There is a difference there. But fine let's say that the same job gets done. And I know that to you that means they understand the word. However, being able to use the word well in one situation does not show full understanding. Being able to use it well in every situation does don't you agree? — khaled

Not one of us has that level of understanding. To use the word well in 'every' situation.

So for instance if someone drew a red lake and asked the colorblind person "What color is this?" and the colorblind person said "blue" that would be evidence that the colorblind person does not understand the word "color" sufficiently to accomplish the same job as an ably sighted person would doesn't it? — khaled

Yes. Not understanding the word as sufficiently as all other users of it has, thankfully, never been a criteria for understanding the meaning of a word.

So how might we teach the colorblind person to be able to distinguish all the colors perfectly in each situation? And that includes seeing new things for the first time too? — khaled

Give them a spectrometer and tell them that anything with a wavelength of approximately 625-740 nanometres is called 'red'.

You said earlier that taste was a concept: — Luke

Yep.

Now you're saying instead that (a bitter) taste is "associating the concept with it". — Luke

Nope. That's not what the quoted text says.

It may be my poor communication. Let me try again from scratch. We'll do it with object perception because I know the routes better. The neurological process I described earlier...

Photons hit the retina, they fire a chain of neurons in the V1, these (depending on previously cemented pathways) fire a chain of other neurons (with the important backward-acting filters). Some of these neurons represent things like the word 'red', images of other things which caused the same initial V! pattern, emotions attached to either the current image, or remembered ones... All this is held in working memory, which is then re-fired (selectively) by the hippocampus. It's this re-firing which we are aware of when we introspect, not the original chain. The colour red is a public concept. We use it to indicate to other people some category of thing, we learn which word to use by experiment in early childhood (retaining those uses which work), There's nothing more to 'red' than the public use of the word. — Isaac

The public concept is applied as an inference model to explain the interoception of responses. Did you read the paper I linked? It explains the evidence for all this.

All we have at the time of the initial experience (stimulus to response) is the chain of neural firing, various associations. When inferring a cause for these various mental states we reach for public concepts as models. These are usually a very fuzzy fit and always applied post hoc.

'Bitter' is just such a concept. We apply it to a range of mental states caused by drinking or eating (or imagining such).

You can see this with the influence colour words has on perception of colour shades.

If someone has never seen something red before, but just has a list of words he memorized as "red objects" (for example blood) none of which he has seen does that person understand what "red" means? I would say no and I'm guessing you'd say yes. — khaled

Say someone had such a list. They'd be indistinguishable from your someone who'd never seen anything red. So I have a reason for my answer, I don't know why you'd add something where there's no cause to.

Are you seriously suggesting that if the patient was a neurologist he wouldn't be surprised? I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that among those patients at least one knew how their own illness worked from a neurological perpsective and were still surprised. — khaled

A neurologist does not know everything there is to know about red either. Just fractionally more.

Ok so we have this word "Experience" you assign the property "Ineffable" to. — khaled

I didn't say ineffable. I said 'not perfectly communicable'. They're not the same thing. I also said that such imperfect communication need be no less imperfect than one's own recollection. You're missing important parts of my posts in your responses.

I don't see where in your reply to Luke you showed this. — khaled

The paper I cited.

I want to know what, by your standard, would it take to say "Isaac is having the phenomenological experience of 'red'". — khaled

Nothing. The sentence is nonsense. There's no such thing as 'the phenomenonological experience of 'red''.

I don't see how neuroscience can provide any sort of evidence about phenomenology. — khaled

It depends what question you want answered about it. If you're just going to take everything you feel like is the case to actually be the case then there's no further work to do is there? Why are we even talking? The whole point of any investigation is premised entirely on the idea that what feels like it is the case might not actually be the case. If you're going to respond to any such suggestion with "but it doesn't feel like that's the case", then there's no point in investigating. You already know all you want to ever know about the issue.

I don't see how that follows. Ask a colorblind person what "red" is and they'll probably think you're rude because you're pointing out that they don't know. — khaled

Of course they know. "It's the colour of stop signs, blood, teacher's ink..." that's an answer a colour-blind person could give. You want to add something to the meaning of 'red' which there's no cause to add. A colour-blind person could say "pass me the red apples" and the same job would get done as if a normally sighted person said it.

What they don't have is something like specific neurological responses associated with red objects. But that was never part of the public meaning of the word 'red'. Our parents didn't point to fMRI scans to teach us how to use the word, they pointed to red things.

That is not the same thing as knowing what colors are. If I never studied topology, and you asked me what I don't know about math, and I said "Topology", do I know what topology is? — khaled

Yes. If you ask someone studying topology in their first year what they're studying and they say "topology" have they misused the word because their studies are incomplete?

But the question remains: How do you teach someone what pain is without them ever being in pain? — khaled

So the colour-blind can't know that they're colour-blind? Ask a colour-blind person what it is that they don't see, they will answer "colours". Are they using the word incorrectly? If not, then it seems they know what colours are sufficiently to use the word.

I'm sure you're right; taste is only a concept and has nothing to do with eating or drinking. — Luke

No-one said anything about it having "nothing to do with" eating and drinking, only that it is not the result of it.

How can something have a bitter taste if taste is only a concept? — Luke

By associating the concept with it. That's what 'having a bitter taste' means. That the eating or drinking of it produces the responses some subset of which are somewhat similar to the ones we've learned to use the word 'bitter' to describe.

You've suggested that a taste experience is "a unique set of memories, emotions, desires, sematic associations etc" that results from a public concept. I would have thought that a taste experience resulted from eating or drinking instead. — Luke

No. Here's a really good paper on the subject - https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712 . I'm not sure what bearing you're expecting the fact that you 'would have thought' taste experiences result from eating or drinking to have on the matter.

the example of phenolthiourea that Dennett gives shows that not everyone agrees that it is 'bitter'. — Luke

Whether something is 'bitter' and what 'bitter' means are two different things. we might all agree what 'interesting' means, that doesn't mean we all agree on what things are 'interesting'.

How do we "detect" public concepts? I thought we just learned to use them. — Luke

See the article above.

Your position is that we don't really see colours, it only seems like we do because of our language? Then how and/or why did the English-speaking community come up with these concepts? — Luke

To do a job. I'm not following your line of thinking here. If I want to select a particular apple, then using a word to distinguish it seems like a good move, no?

Yes! Perfect.