How is it the thing itself has a subjective what it's like aspect is not explained — schopenhauer1

What would an explanation of this be like? You've talked a lot about how Dennet's philosophy isnt one, so you must have an idea of what is one to compare it to, so what's that?

We open a philosophy journal tomorrow with the headline 'Hard problem solved - we have an explanation of why we seem to have first person experiences'. What might the abstract read? 'We seem to have first person experiences because...'

Okay, so our perceptions get coloured by stuff. I'm just trying to get at whether or not you can smell smoke at all, or whether you've ever smelled smoke. — Luke

Smelling smoke and 'the way smoke smells' are not the same thing. The first can be described entirely as a process without introducing new facts. The latter has introduced this new element without cause 'the way...'.

So there is a way that it tastes? Otherwise, why would you want sugar added? — Luke

No, there's no need for one, I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable. Again, if you want to call my entire mental state at the time 'the taste of tea' be my guest, it just seems to add unnecessary confusion. Maybe I want sugar added because I'm hungry or tired and the story I tell to account for that is 'the tea was bitter' do you want to be describing my state of hunger and tiredness within 'the taste of tea'? It's not really 'of tea' anymore by then is it?

someone asks you "how's the tea?", you respond in neurological terms and/or strategic terms? — Luke

Yes. That's how people work, they say and do things with an aim to have a certain effect by doing so.

What if someone asks whether you can see, hear or smell something particular. "Can you smell smoke?" You either answer in neurological terms or say what they want to hear, which is presumably "no"? — Luke

Why would telling them what they want to hear be my only strategic choice? But yes, if it were, that's exactly what I'd say. More to the point, if I really didn't want to think there was smoke I would demonstrably be less likely to interpret chemosensory signals as indicating that there was.

Our ability to talk of taste is not reliant on the unique existence of a referent for that talk. It's reliant only on the fact that it does the job we need it to do. If saying "this tea tastes bitter" to the waiter gets more sugar put in it, then it's done its job even if there's no referent. Indeed it does the job better that way. If I want a world where waiters add sugar in response the word 'bitter' then I'd better hope it's one in which 'bitter' has a public meaning based on use, not a private one based on subjective internal states.

[I've moved this comment here as it seems to be where the previous thread now is.]

it seemed like you and Banno were questioning that, implying that there is no way of sorting beliefs at all, them all just being held non-rationally and so immune to any rational process of comparison. — Pfhorrest

Yes, that's entirely what we're saying (and @Srap Tasmaner, above, too, I think). Your process isn't 'sorting beliefs'. It's pointing out that you ought to do some choosing between those that are contradictory. That isn't actually doing any sorting at all. Falsification does not provide the rational method of comparison, so I don't see how banno and I arguing against it amounts to us saying that beliefs are "immune to any rational process of comparison".

Lack of proof is just nothing, the starting point — Pfhorrest

Repeating it doesn't just make the counter-arguments go away. Lack of proof is not the starting point. It is neurologically impossible to derive a belief without proof and extremely difficult (read impossible for all but the severely mentally ill) to maintain one contrary to all proof.

Then what informs your response, or your "range of words" you reach for if asked to describe it (to describe what?) — Luke

All number of things. In neurological terms, it's the firing of whatever neurons have pathways leading to speech centres, in psychological terms it would be my beliefs about the effect those words would have compared to the goals I have the time. I can't see referring to the entire state of my mind at the time of sipping tea (regardless of the source of those states) as 'the taste of tea' being useful in any sense.

You are again pretending as if those qualia don't exist, yet that is what you are trying to account for by means other than introspection. — Luke

I'm not trying to account for qualia. I'd be trying to account for behaviour, neuroscientists would be trying to account for neural activity. There's no need to account for qualia because there's no cause to think they exist to require accounting for.

Does tea have some taste for you? — Luke

No. I have a range of responses to drinking tea, a range of words I reach for if asked to describe it, a range of actions I take associated with it (but also associated with all the other aspects of my environment at the time).

The argument that's been fairly exhaustively presented is that our intuitive sense that there's a way tea tastes to me (at time t) is mistaken, as many intuitions turn out to be. It's no good arguing against that position by stating that we all have such an intuition, we knew that, that's where we started, we're now checking to see if it makes sense in the light of Dennet's charges, the insights of neuroscience etc.

Why does the person report that it tastes bitter? — Luke

Could be any one of a large number if reasons. That's the point of rejecting qualia. We wouldn't know, at least not by introspection. Most likely is that they expected it to taste bitter, chemosensory neurons didn't keep any signals in the sensory memory long enough to trigger a revision of that expectation. But it could as easily have been because everyone else in their social group said it tasted bitter, or that their tounge wasn't working, or that they're having a bad day and want to find fault. What it's not (at least we've good reason to think it's not) is because there's some way the tea tastes stored in the brain which we seek out when wanting to make an accurate report of it.

What (else) is chemosensation supposed to account for if not taste? — Luke

The signals which chemosensory neurons send to cotices higher in the hierarchy. Nothing more. Beyond that you start to see the influence of a whole slew of non-chemosensory systems getting involved, feeding back to the chemosensory neurons, suppressing certain signals, re-iterating others. One if the many paths taken ends up (together with input from a hundred other unrelated paths) in the stimulation of the motor neurons responsible for forming the words "this tea tastes bitter". Where in all that is the 'taste' of the tea?

I wasn't referring to (and I thought you weren't referring to) a way tea tastes to you that is stored in your brain, but to a way tea tastes to you when you taste it — Luke

So where is that 'way' if not in the brain of the person doing the tasting? And yet we can make a complete account of chemosensation->talk (or any other response) without either requiring such a fact, nor finding evidence nor mechanism for one. So why would we continue to assume such a thing exists?

it seemed like you and Banno were questioning that, implying that there is no way of sorting beliefs at all, them all just being held non-rationally and so immune to any rational process of comparison. — Pfhorrest

Well now I've no idea where to put this response....

Yes, that's entirely what we're saying. Your process isn't 'sorting beliefs' is it. We've just established that. It's pointing out that you ought to do some choosing with those that are contradictory. That isn't actually doing any sorting at all. Falsification does not provide the rational method of comparison, so I don't see how banno and I arguing against it amounts to us saying that beliefs are "immune to any rational process of comparison".

Lack of proof is just nothing, the starting point — Pfhorrest

Repeating it doesn't just make the counter-arguments go away. Lack of proof is not the starting point. It is neurologically impossible to derive a belief without proof and extremely difficult (read impossible for all but the severely mentally ill) to maintain one contrary to all proof.

What are you trying to account for here? — Luke

There I'm just trying to throw a bone to @Kenosha Kid's idea that we might have a defined step we could meaningfully talk about in the otherwise seamless process of perception-inference. I wasn't sure if I'd understood Kenosha's point properly so thought I'd try to lay some potential bridges. The actual idea that there's a way tea tastes to me which is stored somewhere in my brain (or mind, for any dualists out there), has, I thought, been discarded quite some way back. We laid out a fairly exhastive exposition and were met with nothing but "...but it's obvious there's qualia", so I'd kind of moved on from that argument to just the specific point Kenosha was trying to make.

Then what are you trying to explain? The mistaken belief that we taste tea? Or that people make reports about the taste of tea (even though they don’t)? — Luke

Trying to explain by what? I'm not clear here whether you're asking what inquiry into perception is trying to explain, or what dismissing qualia is trying to explain.

Why not just work backwards from the fact that there is some way the first sip of tea tasted, as described or reported by a subject? — Luke

Because there is no such fact. Dennet's just taken an entire paper showing this, we've just taken 13 pages of discussion showing it. I mean this in the most polite possible way, but you need to counter one or more of the specific points raised which show that there is no such fact, returning to the assertion that there is just puts us right back at the beginning again.

In short, to answer your question, we did start there. Then we worked out that there was no such fact of how the sip of tea tasted, and so we moved on.

Indeed. The fact that people who can't see this are given 'air time' in serious philosophy is shocking. We shouldn't even know the names of those promoting such obvious nonsense beyond identifying them as some whaco in the park. Basic misunderstanding of physics, basic misunderstanding of probability.

The trouble is these threads have a trend, you start a thread seemingly about A and B in which you make the argument B follows from A. People chime in with arguments against A or B, and you reply "no, this thread is just about the fact that B follows from A, not about either B or A" - then you start a thread about how C follows from A and the same thing happens. The problem is that usually you're not far off right. B following from A is perfectly reasonable, and trivially so. What's of interest is A, not it's relation with B. So if we followed your restrictions, you'd just end up with a series of threads where you proposes strict logical relations between terms and the only answers you'd get are "Yes -that's is a reasonable thing to think" restating the principles of rational thought doesn't make for a very interesting thread. Discussing different beliefs which can nonetheless arise from the application of such principles, does.

I think, if you you start a thread in which A is already quite a specific proposition, and its relation to B is trivially shown, we needn't start a new thread to discuss A, we'll end up with a massive number of very short threads that way, and a great difficulty choosing where best one should respond.

You're incorrigible, we're discussing this exact thing in the other thread and instead of answering the questions there, you just re-iterate the same theory in another thread? @StreetlightX, @fdrake could we please just move this to the thread that's already about this so that we can keep all the responses together, It's an interesting topic to participate in, but not split between two almost identical threads.

Can you give an example, real or imagined, but not schematic? — Srap Tasmaner


Say you think that doing a certain dance (A) causes it (if A then B) to rain (B). You do that dance, or at least you try to do it right, but it doesn’t seem to rain, at least not when and where you expected the dance would cause it to.

You must either conclude that it did in fact rain in a way consistent with your rain dance theory even though it does not seem like it did to you, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that dancing does not cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that you did not do the correct dance to cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion. — Pfhorrest

So all three beliefs remain in play. I'm not seeing how you've narrowed the field. You can't have all three together? Is that what you're getting at, that we must choose one and so we've narrowed it from three to one because all three together were contradictory? I'm no Popper expert, but I really don't think this is falsificationism at all.

Regardless of the correct term, it's still very unclear what your target is here. Since an example has proven enlightening, perhaps you could furnish us with another. Who doesn't think like this already? Or are you simply describing normal mental activity?

Can you give an example of some belief which might be held by an actual person where they simultaneously believe that A, and that B, and that A directly entails ~B? as Srap put it

philosophical problems like the subject of this thread just look different if you start from a modern science-aware world-view. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm pretty sure you'll find that even a cursory glance at how beliefs are formed and held in the brain will show you that such a state is nigh on impossible to generate, and for good reason. Nature's already got this one covered. as I said in an earlier post, to assess even as little as ten beliefs in this eliminative fashion would require you to consider 3,628,800 arrangements. Why would you want to even attempt that manually when you have the most complex computing system known to man doing exactly that at 100 hertz?

With sufficient pedantry, what demarcates the steps of the "iterations" of perceptions would also vary too, no? There's no guarantee that update steps correspond 1-1 with "instants" of perception as we'd introspectively, pre-theoretically or even experientially in this case draw the line. The indexical progression of update steps within the updating procedure isn't the same thing as individuation of situated ("subjective") states. — fdrake

Yes, that's true. Libet's a good example. Also various temporal re-arrangements that have to be carried out to accommodate the expected difference in time it takes for signals which we expect to have been caused simultaneously to reach our working memory via their various routes.

Regardless, it does seem important to be able to study the "perceptual moment" and to give an account of how that arises from the steps of the updating procedure. Even if that perceptual moment is still a "finite stretching along in time" — fdrake

Yeah, at issue here in reply to is the extent to which we can usefully identify and segment off a 'result' of all this subconscious processing as some property of consciousness. I think we all agree that any such segmentation will be arbitrary, but is it useful to inquiry and does it need parameters in order to continue to be?

I think one thing that prompts a use of qualia is a desire to be able to work backwards as a explanatory precess, so to be able to take the fact that I can describe how my last sip of tea tasted and explain it. The first step qualists take is to say that because I can describe how my last sip of tea tasted (or carry out any other response) there must be some way my first sip of tea tasted. This is obviously false and we can move on from this simplistic view. So the real issue is whether there's some intermediary step between the subconscious parts of the brain responsible for forming models related to taste, tea, cups, misty mornings, headaches, work stresses...and the resultant formation of words, or actions which we'd like to be able to say 'resulted' from that mix. The best candidate would seem to be something like the sensory memory or the working memory, but Libet's work (and others) seems to throw the latter into question, much of what's stored in the working memory is stored after the event it's supposedly initiating has already been initiated, It's there to explain the action we just took, not determine it. So perhaps the sensory memory? For those that don't already know, this is a theorised, even shorter-term memory than the working memory. It stores (keeps online is a better description, given the tiny timescales we're talking about) some of the neural responses to some fairly high level sensory representations (so a little combination, filtering and suppression has taken place, but not the full works). Maybe whatever is in the sensory memory is in there long enough to count as a 'result', a 'step' in the processes even thought he rest of the process is continuing along behind it, the holding of that data, even for a fraction of a second, could break down a continual process into steps. If so then such holding is based on surprise (as active inference devotees will not be surprised to learn). We break up the continual algorithm into chunks using very short term storage based on the points in the process where we were surprised.

If it's a process, surely it has a result. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, we die.

(Sorry, couldn't resist the flippant answer).

Take calculating some iterative algorithm that has no p-type solution. The step you happen to be on isn't the 'result' of the process, it's just the transient stage you're currently at. If we did want a result it might more properly be something like 'you're going to doing this forever', or 'you'll never get a number below 100', or some such limit. That's the way I'm seeing perceptual processing, from day one the perception is not a result, its a prediction to be input into the algorithm generating the next perception...

But we might actually be getting into the weeds here. I think we're not so far from one another. It's interesting to hear how you see things differently, though.

I think the real motivator, in terms of cultural history, is Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin. It's Freud in particular: the revelation that we have something like "unconscious thoughts" and, more importantly, unconscious motivations, and unconscious commitments is troubling to people careful about how they think. — Srap Tasmaner

That's an interesting way to look at it. There's certainly a common thread, a discomfort, with psychology and neuroscience, that we're intruding where we're not welcome (faced some pretty nasty backlash even within these sanctified walls), I think this sense might be behind some of that. There's a certain tranche of philosophers for whom the potential inability of the brain to act as a measure of the truth of its own conclusions would undermine their whole project.

Should have mentioned Wittgenstein too (and Sellars). How do I know my argument is what I think it is? Am I actually relying on a simplistic picture I have of how this works? Am I taking words that make sense in one context and smuggling them into another context as if they still have that meaning? — Srap Tasmaner

This too, especially the last (I think I should read Sellars). We had a massive thread a while back on "What it's like", as if the fact that I can ask what that lemon cake was like makes asking what being a human is like make any sense.

One of the things that interests me about how people write here is that philosophical methods of defending beliefs differ from those employed in more general senses. Less social perhaps, more precious about the integrity of the 'method' than content. Hinting that such a method may be nothing but post hoc rationalisation and underdetermining anyway seems like a fraught undertaking.

The nascent way we split up phenomena and describe them isn't a neutral process of observation and recording with respect to the topic of the thread. Reading off features from our perceptions involves the same process by which perceptual features are formed (to some degree anyway). — fdrake

Yeah, my concern is still with...

we have consciousness of the results of those actions — Kenosha Kid

@Kenosha Kid, I'm still not sure I'm prepared to accept that picking a point in an ongoing feedback process and labelling it the 'result' doesn't set us off on the wrong path as far as perception is concerned.

Gravity was modelled as a force field for centuries. When Einstein discovered it was actually geometric feature of spacetime, he didn't jettison the term 'gravity', — Kenosha Kid

True, but we have jettisoned phlogiston, humours, elan vital, and ether, (haven't we?) so is it not still a case of deciding what category qualia fall into?

I strongly suspect that relating to our own perceptions in a manner that doesn't produce these conceptual traps upon reflection is a laborious, ongoing fight. A "relearning how to see". — fdrake

This is an important point. In my discussion with @Kenosha Kid we've been talking about the way the brain constructs a narrative post hoc to unite it's streams of input. If what we want, for whatever reason, is to grasp what going on beneath the surface, we can't be using our intuitive feeling about it as a guide, we can establish pretty early on that that isn't going to give us an honest answer to that inquiry.

Do you think intention is emergent? or an illusion? — frank

Wouldn't it be both? Only tangentially related, but if an effect is emergent, then any reification is an illusion. Flash a bight magenta light on a white background, when it's removed a green shape will appear in its place, yet no green light was shone. This effect simply emerges from the combination of magenta light and antagonistic processing in the retina. It's still what we commonly call an 'illusion'.

1. Have a belief A
2. Demonstrate that it is impossible for A to be contradicted through deduction.
3. A can become a prime premise for B, etc. — Philosophim

This still doesn't address Quine.

1. Have a belief A
1a. Also have a belief C
2. Demonstrate that it is impossible for A to be contradicted through deduction.
2a. Also demonstrate that it is impossible for C to be contradicted through deduction.
3. A can become a prime premise for B, yet C can become a premise for ~B.

It's that which Quine shows. Our theories (beliefs that B) in your example, are underdetermined. A large number of otherwise consitent beliefs can be marshalled to support or diminish B. We have no mechanism for choosing which.

I've read the first and second of your essays, but neither address the degree to which deductive beliefs form networks. You take a single example and extrapolate merely assuming that the added complexity of vast numbers will have no effect. Even if it were theoretically possible to thus ground beliefs (I maintain it isn't, but this is a lower hanging fruit), it would be pragmatically impossible due only to the absolutely vast number of beliefs involved, each of which would have to be independently disentangled from the other. With only 10 beliefs you have 3,628,800 arrangements to go through.

The danger is a philosopher thinking this explains something about human intentionality. — Banno

Yeah, depends what you mean by 'explains'. There are different standards for what constitutes a satisfactory explanation in different fields. I'll freely admit I've never been entirely clear on what philosophers want of an 'explanation' such that it satisfies their criteria for one.

On my account, knowledge is a kind of belief, not something separate from it, and what we're discussing in epistemology generally is how to (practically) revise beliefs, in a way that avoids various problems that might otherwise arise in that activity. Epistemology is about identifying what problems might arise in that activity of belief-revision, and seeking out ways around them. Knowledge is just the subset of belief that can make it through such a process. — Pfhorrest

None of that is surprising to me and yet I still don't feel you've answered my charge, so the problem can't be in that distinction alone.

You say "Knowledge is just the subset of belief that can make it through such a process." I'm fine with that, so let's say we agree there. The issue is then the nature of the process, with which there can be two issues

1) whether it does indeed define any subset at all - ie if all beliefs pas this process then it doesn't define a subset, it just defines the set.

2) whether, assuming it does define a subset, that subset is correctly called 'knowledge' given that 'knowledge' is already a term in common use.

I disagree with your proposed method on both counts. On the former because no beliefs are ruled out by your method, it therefore defines all beliefs, not a subset of them, and the latter because we simply don't use 'knowledge' that way, as the term cannot refer to private justification and still retain a public meaning.

That "reason why you can't" is not itself some other belief external to the rest of your preexisting beliefs, it's some inconsistency within your complete network of beliefs. That inconsistency, that ruling-out, does not compel any specific alternative belief, only that you revise something or other in your belief system to avoid that inconsistency. — Pfhorrest

That it is inconsistent is a belief. You can't escape this, it still forms the same structure - my belief that A, and my belief that B, and my belief that A is inconsistent with B - all beliefs, all of equal status, none prior, or beneath, or more fundamental or any of these distinguishing features you'd like to attach. They're not there.

The problem here is not critical rationalism, or justificationism, or fideism as methods of distinguishing knowledge from belief - it is the assumption that there exist methods of distiguishing knowledge from belief at all at the ontological level you want them to exist.

Almost the same as the Chinese room. Let's not. — Banno

Yes, a peril of cognitive psychology, particularly computational approaches. As soon as you leave the influence of the neocortex you lose intention and then the language we use to talk about the processes starts to sound weird (to those who care about that, many of my colleagues used to use intentional language about neurons without a care - I cannot do so without cringing a little). We would be fine if there were a neat cut-off, but there isn't - so I tend to just use it and cringe away. It made my lectures more visually entertaining anyway - "the posterior superior temporal sulcus suppresses (ugh!) signals from the v4 region which is expects (yuech!) to be in conflict with it's predictions (eurgh!) of social status"

I could be pedantic and ask if the brain is calculating Bayesian stats as opposed to doing something that can be described in Bayesian terms... but that might be the same as asking if a neural network trained to add two numbers is actually doing addition... I'm not sure the question can be made coherent. — Banno

Yeah, I see what you mean. Is the calculator calculating? It would be badly misnamed if it weren't. But yes, a tricky distinction.

Ah. Hence your inadequate response to Isaac. — Banno

What is so inadequate? He’s basically stating confirmation holism, as you pointed out, and I’m saying “no duh”. You rule out a complete network of beliefs, and replace it with something else that is not yet ruled out. Beliefs aren’t free-floating atoms, they’re all tied to other beliefs. — Pfhorrest

What you're not grasping (or ignoring, not sure which) is that it being "not yet ruled out" is itself another belief. The point of talking about Quinean Webs of Belief is not just to aggregate beliefs into little sub-net to be treated in exactly the falsificationist manner you propose. It's to undermine the idea that the belief in question and the cause to rule it out (or not) are different in kind. you cannot, therefore, make a distinction between those of the first kind on the basis of a lack (or presence) of those of the other.

You must demonstrate that the first premise in the chain is incontrovertible. I do that in my theory here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9015/a-methodology-of-knowledge
I do not want to distract from the OP's point here however. If you are interested in exploring how I solve this problem, feel free to visit. — Philosophim

I will perhaps have a read if I've time. I can't keep more than a couple of threads in mind at the moment. Perhaps in lieu of my doing so you could answer a few brief questions here?

How do you decide which is the first premise? Is it just the one you first thought of (temporally arranged)? In my example - A belief that A and a belief that evidence exists contrary to A (which we're calling a belief that B) - which is the 'first' premise and why?

When speaking of objects and properties of awareness, I would expect a lower order to have something in common with other animals. My chihuahua can see what's before her, recognise other dogs, and let the poor bastards have it like the walking fiery female Latino cliche she is. Frogs are pretty adept at recognising flies and firing their insane tongues flyward. We're presumably not accusing all animals of compulsive narrative-building, although I agree that does describe humans well. — Kenosha Kid

Your dog probably forms stories to integrate dissonant information too. The frog maybe not so much, but then the frog probably doesn't have much by way of object identification either. The two seem to go together. Have you seen the experiment where the baby birds will beg at any yellow diamond. they don't get the point of piecing together all the parts of the mother bird, just two angles and the colour. there may still, however, be a proto-story developed, just a very limited one, but here's a lot of people think that's what the neocortex does. anything without one can't do it, anything with can.

My feeling is that there is some crossed wires about what we're talking about. For instance, I did not intend to suggest any particular structure for conscious or unconscious processes, nor that consciousness is some intended terminus for unconscious processes, but these appear to have come across as vital to my point for both yourself and fdrake, so mea culpa. — Kenosha Kid

Ah, that sounds likely then, it's not an easy topic to have clarity of expression in, one really needs to start from some agreed basis and proceed from there. One of the most compelling take-aways from Dennet here is the way in which talk of Qualia throws us in at the middle without having any clear idea of how we got there.

As far as I can see atm there are unconscious processes, whatever their structure, that act on sensory input, and we have consciousness of the results of those actions, whatever the structure of consciousness. The unintended implications that e.g. there is some teleological submission process, or some terminus at consciousness, or some implied specific structure to consciousness, aren't really what my argument is about. It is simply that we are conscious of results of unconscious processing. — Kenosha Kid

I see. It seems then that our disagreement (small such as it is) is only over whether dismissal of Qualia in their entirety puts this idea at risk (throws the baby out with the bathwater, as you put it). My feeling is that the idea here is so generalised and applicable to a field much wider than qualia, that dismissing all talk of qualia maintains the conscious awareness of the results of unconscious processing completely intact. There are plenty of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientist working under the former assumption without ever mentioning qualia or anything like them, so I think it can work. (there are, of course also plenty who do - much to their shame!).

Brains doing statistical analysis?

Isn't it rather that what neural networks learn using feedback, Bayesian models use feedback, and hence neural networks can be described in Bayesian terms?

That is, the architecture of the brain is connectionist rather than Bayesian.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but rather asking for clarification. — Banno

In a broad sense, yes, the term Bayesian Inference, Bayesian Brain, Active inference... all pretty much interchangeable and broadly refer to the same model - that the brain is organised into hierarchical areas which suppress signals from areas beneath them on the basis of prior assumptions about the nature of the signal they're expecting, but updating those expectations in accordance with the function of the combined signals - just like Bayes theorem.

In literal terms, there have been a number of experiments done where (for example the dissonance between expected distance and actual distance between ridges in a ridged pattern) have been calculated using Bayes theorem and the function of the results from human subjects also plotted. The two functions ('Bayes by maths' and 'estimates by humans') are almost identical to the millimetre, so in at least a few stripped down, (overly?) simplistic cases the brain is somehow doing Bayesian statistics, yes. It's not as far fetched as it originally might sound, a fairly simple neural network can be designed computationally to carry out Bayesian calculations. Neurons could quite feasibly do it.

It's getting harder and harder for me to care about the ontological part. (I also can't help but see the dual-process story as validating the reliance of Hume and Ramsey on "habit", though it feels a little tendentious.)

Philosophers tend to want to focus on the status of claims (is it a belief? is it knowledge?) and on the status an individual is imagined as assigning to their beliefs. But it might be possible to quit doing that. In the usual case of belief revision -- I thought there were two packs of poptarts but when I look there's only one -- does it matter that my belief was marked as revisable or defeasible? I do revise with minimal hesitation, if any. The "hunh" I grunt is, by introspection, mild curiosity about how there came to be only one or why I thought there were two, but there's very minimal tension associated with the belief revision itself. — Srap Tasmaner

I can see your point here. I was going to add to my explication of socially defined knowledge that individuals generally don't have a distinction between belief and knowledge for their own predictive thoughts. They're not treated differently, they don't appear differently neurologically, they're basically indistinguishable until they set them in a social context.

I wonder if there is really an issue there well described in terms of a belief's status at all, or if it's just more about reasoning processes, specifics of the evidence, etc. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that would be my take too. Although, I think people are more similar on that front than in respect to belief formation than people who worry about 'critical thinking' tend to believe. This is the point I'm trying to drive home here. The target of the OP is non-existent. No-one thinks any other way than the way described. we do not form beliefs contrary to the evidence of our senses, and when beliefs need updating owing to new sensory information, we just do so (in a suitable conservative manner - we can't afford to be just changing our beliefs every few seconds)

The target of the OP, I think is the religious, the flat-earthers, the creationists, the anti-vaxxers, the climate change deniers etc. But most people form beliefs of that more complex sort on the basis of reports from members of trusted groups. I've not conducted any neuroanatomy, I believe all the things I believe about neuroanatomy because I think it's implausible that all the people involved and working with it are doing so deceptively, it has nothing at all to do with my senses (apart from my initial judgement of their trustworthiness). I am, for example, much more suspicious about the effectiveness of medicines, despite them also being investigated and tested by similarly qualified scientists, I basically can see much more of a plausible way in which their results might be skewed and so I've less inclination to trust them. At the end of the day, both are social judgements. The amount of scientific knowledge I personally have verified is tiny, the rest comes down to trust, the more people involved the potential deception, the less likely I deem it to be because I basically trust people not to be deceptive without due cause.

Versed? The generic is midazolam. — frank

Oh! The benzodiazepine. My mind went straight to versed as in 'well-versed' and got stuck there.

Yes, but the effect of benzodiazepines is not on the primary working memory, it affects the formation of new stored memories.

Now if you mixed it with Fentanyl...but then you would indeed be unconscious.

Versed would inhibit memory formation — frank

? - Typo, possibly.

It just seems that you're defining consciousness as "when you're conscious." — frank

Well, at least I'd be right then! Any explanation has an element of tautology, no? 'Tides' are the action of the Moon's gravity on the oceans - "sounds like you're just saying 'tides' are tides"

Isaac, do you believe it's possible you're not really conscious right now, as you're reading this? Do you think you can be talked into the belief "I am not conscious right now"? If no, then I guess what I was saying about Searle makes sense, doesn't it? — RogueAI

I don't see how my ability to judge whether or not I'm conscious has anything to do with either the neurological basis of consciousness you originally raised, nor whether the set 'qualia' under consideration has any proper members as we're here discussing.

This kind of talk is exactly what I meant by my comment you've quoted above. Any and all discussion about the complexity and neurological underpinnings (together with the philosophical implications of such) are assumed to have been properly addressed by nothing more than an outraged cry of incredulity.

Of course you have an explanation of reporting activities. Reporting activities can't possibly mean reporting activities. We're talking about "reporting activities". I'll pass on that rabbit hole. — RogueAI

Can't make any sense of this.

OK, you're conflating mental activity with reports of mental activity. The point is the same: consciousness/mental activity is different than reports of same. — RogueAI

I don't see how. Are you suggesting that logging to working memory is not a 'mental activity'?

That is logically equivalent to: you are not conscious when you are not doing reporting activities. Is that the claim you're making? — RogueAI

Yes. That's right. You have read my explaination of what I mean by 'reporting activities'?

I guess I'll take you both at your word that you're not prepared to discuss it seriously and leave it at that. I wish you would've saved us some time and not engaged. — fdrake

In what field other than the whole consciousness/qualia field is this...

no matter what arguments they give or evidence they show, you're not going to conclude you're unconscious. That would be absurd. Do you agree? Or could you be persuaded into thinking you're a zombie? No, you couldn't! You know you're conscious. How can you not know that? This is why these discussions are frustrating. You know you're not a zombie. You know nothing anyone can say to you will convince you you're a zombie. — RogueAI

...considered an argument?

There's something I find so odd about all this. The counter-arguments to any questioning of what's going on is "but we know X, you can't deny it", and yet it's apparently the 'hard' problem? We both unquestionably know it and simultaneously find it the hardest problem in philosophy. Is God messing with us?

I think he means that a person must be able to report or have access to a report, not that they're only conscious when they are reporting. — frank

Sorry everyone. 'Reporting' means logging to working memory. I should have made that clear.

On second thoughts, though, less sorry because I don't think I've written anything so stupid as to warrant an assumption that I'd mean something like "we're only conscious when we're talking". A little charity (or inquiry) might help, in addition to me being more clear about my terms.

You're conflating being conscious with reports of consciousness. They're not the same thing. Not even remotely. — RogueAI

I said 'reports of mental activity', not 'reports of consciousness'.

Are you ever conscious when you're not doing any reporting activity? — RogueAI

No, it doesn't seem so. Look at the memory studies of dream states, there seems to be an extremely strong connection between reporting activities and consciousness. I can't actually think of a contemporary model of consciousness in cognitive sciences which doesn't include reporting. I expect there is one, it's a very wide field, but the inclusion of reporting activity is certainly a common view. When you're conscious, some process is switched on which allows reporting of mental activity to working memory, activities which are not thus reported are those we're not 'conscious' of.