Your reading comprehension problem here: somehow you read me as implying something about "physical" versus "nonphysical." I didn't imply anything about that, and my comment has nothing to do with that. — Terrapin Station

For Christ's sake, stop answering everything by telling me what you didn't mean, it's not a fucking guessing game. If you didn't mean the thing I interpreted you as saying, why can't you just say what you did mean in response? What on earth is prompting you to give half a response all the time?

The comment I was responding to was simply...

It's just the qualitative properties of your experiences. You must have qualitative properties to your experiences. — Terrapin Station

Where in that does it make clear that 'it's' refers to your personal opinion and not, the standard treatment of the matter in philosophy (which I'm almost certain was what fdrake was asking about). If the latter then my response is entirely appropriate, it is not treated as you claim by most of the philosophers who use the concept.

lol - you're not going to say which paper that was supposed to be? — Terrapin Station

Why would I do that when the citation is barely a page back and the philosophers I've additionally mentioned are hardly obscure? The main paper on the subject is by PMS Hacker, as I have already mentioned twice, if you can't even be bothered to look it up I can't see why I should.

Did you give an example of a paper that you believe is claiming that "'What it's like' does not make sense in terms of conscious experience"? — Terrapin Station

Yes.

Does anyone not understand what these two people are saying? — bert1

Yes, obviously. As I've just cited, whole papers have been written by eminent philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists entirely on the subject of the fact that 'what it's like' does not make sense in terms of conscious experience.

Jack: I wonder what it would be like to be a seagull?
Jill: Fantastic, I would imagine. The feeling of swooping through the air, the effortless traversing of long distances. Pecking people, nicking chips. I'd love it. — bert1

All the answers Jill gives here are measurable brain states. She's answering the question with an attitudinal judgement. "I'd like it" essentially. She's using her past experience to literally image what it would be like (as in most similar to) in her experience and reporting what her feelings were related to those things. If this were the case then we do know what it is like to be a bat.

I dunno, it might not feel like how you imagine at all. We're very different from seagulls. It's like trying to imagine what it's like to be a snail, we're just too different.
Jill: Maybe, but even though I can't imagine what it is like to be a snail, I reckon there is still something it is like to be a snail, even though I'm not sure what. — bert1

Now they are both changing the meaning. It was previously answered as "what in your experience is it most similar to and how did you feel about that?" but now, such an interpretation would not make sense "what (in the seagull's/snail's experience) is it most like to have the seagull's/snail's experience?" it's become nonsense.

Not like rocks though, there's nothing it's like to be a rock. — bert1

Now jack does know again this previously ineffable fact. Where before some barrier prevented him from knowing what it was like to be a snail, that barrier has now confidently been removed simply because rocks don't have nerve endings. But is 'what it's like' simply the having of nerve endings, the signals coming therefrom? Apparently not.

It's just the qualitative properties of your experiences. You must have qualitative properties to your experiences. — Terrapin Station

It's not though. Not in Jackson, not in Chalmers, not in Lewis, Byrne, Janzen. In all of these uses, and the use it is put to here, it constitutes more than just the qualitative properties of your experiences (where qualitative is meant as in subjective judgement, feeling). The feeling one has when experiencing something is entirely measurable and comminicable "it made me feel happy". The argument of Jackson is that the facts there are non-physical. The argument of Chalmers is that they cannot be reduced to physical mental states, even in theory...

Having been so often accused by you of reading comprehension issues, the first thing I did before responding was to look up 'qualitative' in my dictionary, to check that there wasn't some odd way it's sometimes used that you might mean. The first definition was "relating to what something or someone is like". It's like a disease people have, some compulsion maybe to write anything difficult to explain off as 'what it's like'

I was pointing out an equation between 'what it's like' language, and the language of experience. — bert1

OK, then yeah, I think sometimes 'what it's like' language is trying to capture experience. But part of the problem is that it acts as a technical referring term in other cases.

Jon Farrell has written an excellent paper on this. The key point being that in order to avoid the critiques of people like Peter Hacker about the use of 'what it's like' in ordinary language, one has to treat the term as a technical one. Yet, as Farrell goes on to argue, the term is not properly technical either in that it was not introduced, it is never defined, and it is not used consistently.

So I think the linguistic issue is actually central. Something unjustified is being 'snuck in' by alternatating between saying it is a technical term not at all like other uses of the word 'like', but then when pressed for a definition, resorting to "oh, you all know what I'm talking about" as if, again, it were an ordinary use term.

First off, we'd have to distinguish what makes a preference natural. One might argue three ways here: — schopenhauer1

A preference is 'natural' if it is one displayed by the species acting in a typical manner. All your other definitions are some form of 'necessary' which is not the same as 'natural'.

That's not how the turn of phrase is supposed to work, as far as I understand. — bert1

That is exactly how it is supposed to work, which is why I disagree with it so strongly. It is the basis for a whole load of mystical woo around consciousness. The phrase is used in discussions around whether there are non-physical facts. To make this claim it is necessary for there to be some thing it is to experience red, which is itself a fact, but which is not derivable from the physical facts of seeing red.

There is something it is like for John to see red = John experiences red

There is nothing it is like for Roger the Robot to see red = Roger the robot does not experience red — bert1

This is the very issue at stake. How can you demonstrate that this is the case? Of course there is something it is like for the robot to see red. It is like having some sensation register and some action occur in response.

No. To say order is strongly associated with a designer is begging the question. That is the very matter the argument is trying to resolve. Does the order in the universe mean that it is designed?

In order to say empirically, that order is associated with a designer in all or most cases, you must have evidence of a large number of diverse cases of order, all of which have a designer. But we have no such sample. All we have is a very small number of cases (using the same scale/complexity criteria for both sets) of very specific cases of order (all objects made by one species on one planet in a tiny solar system off one end of one of the smaller galaxies). That is not a sufficiently large or diverse sample from which to justifiably reach the conclusion that all ordered things are associated with a designer. Not even close.

To solve this problem by 'fixing' the scales (one watch counts as a single example in one group, but 'the whole universe' becomes the comparitve object in the other) is just blatant bias. Set up an experiment with that level of bias in any serious science and you'd be laughed out of the establishment. It's this sort of crap that gives philosophy such a bad reputation.

1. A watch has order. The watch has a designer
2. The universe (as ONE object) has order
Therefore
3. The universe has a designer — TheMadFool

3 does not follow from 1 unless there is some reason to think that the universe is otherwise in the same category as watches.

Consider...

1. A watch has parts made of metal. A watch has been designed the way it is by a watchmaker.
2. A randomly scattered pile of nails has parts made of metal
Therefore
3. A randomly scattered pile of nails must have been designed that way by a watchmaker.

Doesn't make sense does it?

So the sticking point is still an epistemological one because you're still suggesting that something about the experience can be learnt by having the experience, but this is not true if you accept that the two things are different. That's like saying you can learn something about Marx by reading Smith. The two books are different. You're not going to learn anything about seeing red (the family of experiences) by seeing red yourself. It might be that your experience is similar to others and so teaches you something about the family, or it might be that your experience is dissimilar to other (as for example with synaesthetes), in which case it tells you nothing about the family (as in the very next second a new synaesthete is born who changes the definition), and you'll never know which by your standards of knowledge here.

Furthermore, if you want to use some kind of Wittgensteinian family resemblance idea to say 'seeing red' is an experience you can learn about by having it, then the only way you'd be able to do that was by communicating with others. The very thing you're saying cannot be done.

Yeah, that'd be great, thanks.

There is one issue though: an omnipotent God has the option to bring people into the world without suffering. Humans do not. So, for your argument to work, it has to apply to non-omnipotent beings. And then we're back to the old question of whether or not existence is worse than non-existance. — Echarmion

Yeah. As usual with @Bartricks's types of argument, they're based on one massive flaw, and this is it. The Problem of Evil is a question of why God brought Evil into the world - any amount of evil at all. The problem of deciding to procreate is one of whether there is too much evil in the world to outweigh the good.

God is deciding whether to put any evil at all in the world. Humans are deciding whether the evil there is outweighs the good. Two completely different matters.

Once God has made a world with evil in it, to say he is making the same choice (to populate it with people or not) is to miss the point of the problem of Evil, because (being omnipotent) he has an option available to him which we don't - remove the evil and then populate the world. The problem of evil is asking why he didn't do that.

The experience of seeing red isn’t something separate from the seeing of some red, it’s just the specific experience that is the seeing of some red. — Pfhorrest

No, the point is there is no such thing as the experience of seeing red. There is only an experience which may from time to time, involve seeing red. So...

You can’t tell someone what seeing red is like, in a non-analogical sense of that phrase that just means to describe it to them; they just have to see it themselves. — Pfhorrest

...doesn't make sense. They will never experience for themselves what you just experienced, only things like it. Things which can as easily be described with no less error.

If I have experience X and I want to get another person to understand what it was for me to go through experience X, I have only two imperfect methods. Put them through experience Y which I think is similar enough to experience X to invoke the same feelings, or describe experience X in terms of experiences A, B and C which they've already had and recall. Neither are really any better than the other, they each have their merits in different situations, neither actually communicate what experience X was, for me.

There is. man-made objects, as a group, is compared to the universe itself. — TheMadFool

Yes, but you're not talking about man-made objects. The footprint I just made in the sand is a man-made object, the eddies I just made in the water as I walked through it are man-made objects. Neither were designed intelligently. The vast majority of man-made objects are complex but not designed, we make them every time we interact with anything.

What you're really talking about is the set {objects made with the intention to carry out some function}, but in this case the property you're claiming to deduce from that set is the very defining factor of it. It's like saying all things in the set {things which are red} are red.

So you end up begging the question. You haven't' taken a set with property X and found that every member also has property Y (for you to then say All other things with Property Y might well be considered to have property X. You've taken a set and determined it has Property X simply because you defined the set that way in the first place. This then gives you no information at all about members of another set.

I mean precisely that there is no external, intersubjective “thus” to point at in the sentences Wittgenstein talks about; the things we’d like to point to to say “it’s like this” are internal, subjective states, and the only way to communicate what it’s like to be in that state to someone is to put them into that state, or invite them to enter into it themselves. — Pfhorrest

I don't read what Wittgenstein was saying that way, maybe taking it out of the context of the piece wasn't helpful of me. He's saying that the expression "what it is like" always refers to some this or thus, that it is incoherent otherwise. To say something is 'like' the thing it is doesn't make any sense as a proposition. So I don't think he's pointing out quite what you're arguing, but more along the lines of saying there is nothing 'it is like' to have some experience. It just is the experience, it's an event, it's not like anything, you couldn't communicate it to another person, even if you could somehow make them experience it themselves, because there is no it, the whole concept of 'the experience of seeing red' as opposed to just 'seeing red' is incoherent.

Stop arguing. — Terrapin Station

I don't understand. Do you mean you want me to stop arguing as in...

to speak angrily to someone, telling that person that you disagree with them: ]

...in which case you'd need to point me in the direction of the part of my comment which seemed angry, or...

to give the reasons for your opinion, idea, belief, etc.:

...in which case I'm not sure how else you imagine disagreements being discussed here.

If it is a "pattern we recognize" then it is something within the thing itself (objective). — Metaphysician Undercover

No, because the act of recognition can occur in different people based in different patterns. I might recognise my phone number, to you it's random digits.

if a person happens to judge that there is order in the outcome, then there actually is order in that outcome. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm saying there is no such thing as 'actually' order. Order is entirely a subjective judgement, no 'actually' about it.

The fact that you happened to drop them makes that particular aspect of the thing created (the precise time of the roll or something like that), unintentional, but it does not remove the intent which was behind the act as a whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't agree with your interpretation. I think it defines away the meaning of intent. Why is 'carrying the dice' and intentional act and not just 'going about my day' (which happened to involve carrying dice), or 'living my life'. Where we draw the line between acts is arbitrary.

An accident, or mistake only occurs as part of an intentional act, so "object created entirely by accident, without the intention to make anything at all", is just contradictory nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

As above, I disagree with your use of 'act'.

So the subject wants to justify the claim of "order", by pointing to something real, a real order in the object. The only recourse for the subject is to appeal to an ordered creation (design). — Metaphysician Undercover

The subject wanting to justify some judgement does not in itself mean that they must then be capable of doing so. I want to fly but I can't.

This is another nonsensical point of departure. Look around you, in your house, at all the objects. How many of these objects do you judge to have been created with intention? — Metaphysician Undercover

Almost all of them.

How many of these objects have you observed a "person" or some such thing, creating? — Metaphysician Undercover

Almost all of them (or objects very similar to them).

Did you make the judgement that certain things were created intentionally, by imagining, or referred to in your mind, images or propositions about how the things were actually produced, manufactured by equipment and human beings, or did you make the judgement simply by seeing something about the object? — Metaphysician Undercover

Neither. I've already made that judgement in most cases and I just recall the outcome.

I don't know of anyone who would think about the manufacturing process when making the judgement that an object was intentionally designed. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well you do now.

Isn't the more natural way of making such a judgement to look for evidence of sculpting on the stone itself? — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I'd use its history, it's strong similarity to other objects I know the history of, or reserve judgement.

the person asked might not know the truth, might pretend to know the truth when not knowing, or might not speak the truth (deception). — Metaphysician Undercover

So? We can ask hundreds, we can ask a dozen people, each of whom has themselves asked a dozen people, each of whom... This is a perfectly normal means of learning, how much of what you know can you claim to have actually learnt from first hand direct experience?

The artifact often lasts a lot longer than the person who made it, in this case there is really no reliable person alive to ask. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, so what? In those cases we just don't know. We can't just make up some method of defining 'designed' to suit the availability of evidence.

the latter of which isn't necessarily an analogy. — Terrapin Station

Attitudinal reports are analogous also, just not directly so. I felt happy, only works as an analogy to the times the person you're speaking to experienced happiness, otherwise it communicates nothing. It's saying "I felt a bit like you did those times when you reported being happy".

And yet you fully understand what a p-zombie is. — frank

Not at all. I know in what context it was mentioned, what it was trying to say. I certainly wouldn't say I fully understood what one is. I'm fairly sure the concept is either incoherent (something exactly like us in every way but with only consciousness missing), or trivial (something partly like us but with all the constituent mental processes of consciousness missing, whatever they turn out to be).

Put down the pretense of confusion. — frank

Why do discussions about consciousness always end up this way? With increasingly importunate claims that we really do know what you're talking about. We really don't.

It's a way of saying that there's an experiential quality, or a quale, with respect to something. — Terrapin Station

Yes, but the point is that it doesn't really say anything at all without either analogy or attitudinal report, as every other question beginning "what is it like..." is seeking.

As Wittgenstein said...

One would like to say ‘I see red thus’, ‘I hear the note that you strike thus’, ‘I feel sorrow thus’, or even ‘This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad’, etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises. But this makes sense only where there is a
picture of what is experienced, to which one can point as one makes these statements — Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology

the design argument is an argument from analogy where the universe is taken as ONE object — TheMadFool

Well then it can't be an argument from analogy as there is no other object to which to compare it.

I'm extremely suspicious that what goes on when we think about "what is it like to X" is that we aggregate over X experiences and form commonalities and analogies; and then we retroject the commonalities and analogies into the experience without giving a simultaneous account of how commonalities and analogies are always already embedded in first person experiences in the first place. — fdrake

That's pretty much how I see it too. Interestingly, since we were talking about Ramachandran earlier, he has my personal favourite solution to the Mary's Room problem. He thinks Mary (on seeing a Red apple for the first time) will respond in one of two ways.

1. She will see the apple as grey. Having had no experience of colour, the sections of her brain that deal with colour will have simply atrophied (we can see evidence of this happening in real brains) and so she simply won't have a mechanism to deal with the different light waves hitting the retina. She might slowly develop one in later life, but it's possible she'll just always see grey. Note this is different to blind people who have their sight restored (another fascinating and again unexpected set of results) because the idea behind Mary is that she would have all the requirements of visual processing, so all the wiring would be attached already to shades of grey. Difficult (if not impossible in adulthood) to re-wire them.

2. She would simply say "Oh a red apple". In her colour isolation, the centres of her brain which deal with colour may simply send out their signals anyway in response to other stimuli (again we have examples of this happening in real brains), and so she would feel as if she'd always know what some colour was like. A bit like if you've never seen an exact shade of blue before, you still know what it is, even though the exact experience is completely new.

He errs on 2, but 1 is my personal favourite.

Arguing about panpsychism is really beyond the scope of this thread. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I don't know why people keep bringing up these tangential remarks in a thread about Frank Jackson's Thought experiment! Seriously, I'm only continuing this current derailment because it's your OP. If you want to reign in discussion about qualia because it's off topic, just say, we can discuss elsewhere.

Notwithstanding...

And those are still experiences of color, and if they had not had them, they would not know what it’s like to experience color. — Pfhorrest

This comes back to the issues I first raised about what an answer to the question "what is it like" would consist of with regards to qualia. The colour-blind scientist could not see red, and the claim is that without the experience of seeing red she would never know what 'it is like'. But the data from truly colour-blind synaesthetes is that they could know 'what it is like' to see red without actually seeing red, because 'what it is like' is to have the mental states associated with the activity and they seem to do that, simply because the part of the brain responsible for initiating the experience of 'seeing red' is stimulated in these people, by other senses.

So your assertion that one cannot know what a first person experience 'is like' from a third party account rests entirely of what sort of data 'is like' consists of. The various experiments with synaesthetes, phantom limb patients, split hemisphere patients etc give compelling evidence that Jackson own assertion that qualia are non-physical data is not right. So qualia must be physical data (data which can be altered by injury/problems with the structure of the brain. So if it's physical data we'd need a convincing reason why that physical data cannot be imparted verbally like any other data.

Say you've never had lemon cake before and I'm trying to tell you 'what it's like' to eat lemon cake. I could describe the taste in terms of things you have experienced "like a sponge cake but more tangy", I could describe the various ways it makes me feel "satiated, but moreish", I could describe the memories it generates "sitting at my Grandma's table when I was nine". You'd have a pretty good picture, no? But not a complete one, you'd argue. there's something missing. But what is missing these are the exact same set of things that happen when I actually do taste lemon for the first time - "Oh, it's like a sponge cake but more tangy", "gosh that's filled me up but I still want more", "I think my Grandma used to serve this cake when I went to visit". Nothing more is happening than these thought (I mean a vast quantity more of them, but not of any different type). I could, in theory at least, impart them all to a third party.

Essentially my disagreement is not about the quality fo third party accounts - they're massively flawed, gappy and biased. My issue is with the sublimation of first party experience - which is massively flawed, gappy and biased. Next time you think your first person experience is delivering you something so full of good data that a third party account could not possibly generate it accurately, just remember that you're blind for 2 hours in every day (your occipital cortex switches off signals every time your eyes move), you're completely making up the colours in your peripheral vision (which is actually black and white) and the two blind spots which your eyes have, and then the very second all of this data is recorded into the short-term memory, it is recalled and altered by the cerebral cortex to better fit the what it expects to see. These processes produce different results each time depending on mood and life experiences thus far. There's every possibility the third party description is more accurate than the one your brain is now delivering to you as your own memory of 'what it was like'.

Sure; but it doesn't stop the discussion. Take

God:
Is that which nothing greater can exist — Samuel Lacrampe


Ridding Anselm's notion of inconsistency is a work of ages... — Banno

True, but in the meantime I can at least relax in my favourite armchair (or God, as I call it). The armchair than which no greater armchair can exist.

With this I can agree. However I do not agree that it follows that we ought start with agreement as to our various definitions. Much off philosophy, essecialy Socratic method and linguistic analysis, shows this to be not just unnecessary but counterproductive.

A better approach would be to map out the differences... — Banno

Absolutely. Definitions can't be treated as if they were some technical matter enabling the true meat of a discussion, definitions are what a discussion consists of entirely. To really agree on definitions is to just agree. The reason why we can't agree on a definition of God/Religion/Theology is because they are no mere acts of taxonomy, the meaning of the words is their use and their use is intimately tied to people's lifestyles, identity etc. You can no more easily get someone to give an inch on a definition than you can persuade them to act this way or that, best to simply present alternatives.

When you imagine yourself running, you have memories of running or at least similar motor functions with which to generate that mental image. When you see someone in pain, you can sympathize because you have memories of your own pains. — Pfhorrest

No, you're not taking on board what I'm saying. That is not how the brain works. You might like it to, but the evidence contradicts it. Colour-blind synaesthetes have experiences of colour in response to other senses, colours they've never seen. Lifelong amputees have experiences of the lost limb that (if it happened before 5) they have no recoverable memory of ever having. Parts of the brain are wired to play the part delivering particular experiences. They usually do so in response to stimuli but not always. It is not necessary to have seen red to experience the same brain stimuli associated with seeing red.

The point is to highlight something that you can’t know just from observing other people. — Pfhorrest

No, the point was to refute physicalism by proving there were non-physical facts. To do this, Mary has to theoretically have access to all physical facts. Otherwise all Jackson proved was that if you lock someone away in a room they know less than they would had you not.

Is there a sexness? Do I somehow have access to sexness because I've had sex? "What is it like" is an analogy disguised as an event. — fdrake

Exactly, there's no thing it is to have sex, it's a slightly different experience every time, the experience is, as you say, just an event, a period of coinciding mental activities which you arbitrarily label 'having sex'. To say one can't know what it is like until one experiences it is nonsensical, because one still doesn't know what it is like after experiencing it, one only knows what that exact event was, no other.

Yes, but Mary knows everything about the colour Red. Literally everything there is to know about it, every connection anyone ever made with it, every emotion it ever generated, every memory it triggered. When you imagine yourself running, for example, the parts of your brain involved in running actually start working. When you se someone in pain, the parts of your brain involved with pain start working. There's an additional part which says "this is all made up". That seems to be the bit that's missing in some schizophrenics.

So Mary imagining all those thins is the same as seeing red, she'd just additionally know it wasn't real.

There are a number of speculations about how phenomenal consciousness works. Which one is your favorite? There used to be one about a central drawing board. Is that one still in play? — frank

At the moment I'm keen on the expanding connectivity theory. The work's currently being done at Sussex (one of my old haunts). If you stimulate an unconscious brain with electromagnetic waves, they echo only very locally. If you do the same to a conscious brain, they echo all over the place. The same extention of connectivity has been recorded when waking up from sleep.

I think conscious experience is just the association of multiple parts of the brain with senate inputs. What it's like to see Red (not that I agree with the terminology of the question) is to have multiple areas of the brain interact in response to the stimuli.

definitely makes a difference in how you experience that process for it to be your brain undergoing it instead of someone else’s. — Pfhorrest

How do you know this? Surely it's not a given. In fact experiments with psychotic hallucination seems to at least vaguely point in the direction of the fact that experiencing something through the senses and experiencing it through empathy, or imagination are actually the same.

But then you seemed to back away from that, and you argue that though we lack a robust theory, we need not expect a scientific revolution to cover phenomenal experience. — frank

Robustness of a theory is subjective. It's robust enough for me.

We don't do science by eliminating any path that might turn the world upside down for us. We follow crazy ideas because we're courageous and flexible and amazingly good looking. — frank

No (apart from the good-looking bit, which is true). We don't do science that way. And we don't for a bunch of very good reasons. We start with principles of parsimony and falsifiability. I'm more a Kuhnian than a Popperian, but as general guides when choosing theories to investigate, those are as good as any. Consciousness does not yet need any mystical forces, there's no reason to believe it isn't just something brains do.

That doesn’t have to have any ontological implications, I’m a hardcore physicalist myself; it just means that observing someone else undergoing something is different from undergoing it yourself. That should be a trivial truism, neither denied nor held to be of some deep philosophical importance. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I'm quite happy to agree with that. The Colourblind Scientist experiment though is supposed to demonstrate Mary could not, even in theory, know what seeing Red is like, no matter how much information she had about it. I think that just confuses something we can't conceive with something which isn't the case. You can't really conceive a billion people (this has been demonstrated) it just doesn't seem to be something the human brain can do. Doesn't mean a billion is an impossible number of people.

no amount of studying human sexuality in the third person can tell you what it’s like to have sex. You have to experience it in the first person to know that. Maybe that book learning can help you recreate an accurate first person experience of it, but you still have to then undergo that experience to know what it’s like. That’s all there is to “what it’s like”; nothing deeply ontological about it, but it’s something. — Pfhorrest

You see, this is the bit I just don't get the support for. It's just like the Colourblind Scientist. If she really did learn all there was to know about Red/sex/whatever, then what grounds have we got for denying that she would then know "what it's like" that aren't themselves question begging.

We can't simply say "she wouldn't" and expect that to demonstrate anything inductive.

Do you see a difference between "is related to" and "reduces to"? — frank

Yeah, but only in that being merely related to involves some other component, whereas being reducible to means one thing entirely consists of the other.

In the case of consciousness though, I'm just using the term colloquially. Why would we theorise some additional factor which might go toward constituting consciousness?

We make a presumption in predicting the weather that it's entirely reducible to the motion of particles, we can't demonstrate that it is because it's too complicated, but we don't then invoke some mystic woo, just because we can. So I can't think of any reason not to say that ontologically, consciousness is simply something that brains do.

Do you have some reason for wanting to add some additional constituent (other than brains), that wouldn't also apply to every physical system too complex to describe reductively?

The notion that experience does somehow reduce to functions of consciousness is an interesting speculation, but that's all it is presently. — frank

No, it's a fairly robust theory. Virtually no one reports experience when in an unconscious state. Levels of reported experience even correlate with levels of consciousness. For example dream reports during lite wave cycle sleep (which is quite deep) are always less vivid that dream reports from REM sleep, which is more conscious.

People put into various states of coma with anaesthetics report levels of experience which correlate well with the dose of anaesthetic.

As far as theories go, the idea that experience is related to consciousness is pretty sound.

Are you familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem? — frank

Yes. I don't agree it's remotely hard.

Experience — frank

But that just goes back to the first person accounts neuroscience uses to correlate its mechanically detected data with. How is that not 'experience'? Science is obviously not going to merely describe experience, it's not journalism. But it definitely takes experience into account, otherwise it would have nothing to correlate brain states with would it?

Neuroscientists confirm that their research doesn't go beyond functions of consciousness. — frank

What would be "beyond" the function of consciousness?

Clearly that order arose by design. You specified the desired order, you threw the dice intentionally to create that order, and succeeded in creating that order. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm saying I merely specified the order that would interest me, then threw the dice. Not that I threw the dice with the intention of making 1,2,3,4,5,6. My intention may well have been, for example, to prove how unlikely that was.

Order is a subjective opinion, it's just a pattern we recognise. I could as easily have accidentally dropped the dice, if they landed 1,2,3,4,5,6, I'd say "oh look, that's an order I recognise". Nothing to do with intent. Same thing would happen if they were my phone number, but to you that would just be random.

The problem is that accidents and mistakes are inherent to intentional acts. So if someone is trying to produce one thing, and instead they produce something not quite as intended, this does not mean that the thing produced was not designed. — Metaphysician Undercover

Possibly, but that principle doesn't extend to an object created entirely by accident, without the intention to make anything at all. I certainly can't just be prima face applied any object at all, even if we don't know if there were a designer or not.

The universe displays order, and the property of having been designed, as described above in my proposal, with the concept of "inertia". — Metaphysician Undercover

No. This is the main issue. You're conflating 'ordered' with 'designed', the two do not describe the same thing at all, that is the very crux of the matter, you can't just assume it. What you described was a perfectly adequate working description of 'order', and yes, the universe exhibits such structure. But how can you justify saying it also bears the hallmarks of being 'designed' simply because you've recognised 'order'?

. If something actually existed without order, it could not even appear to us at all. It would be so random, from one moment to the next (and that's an extremely short time), that it could not even appear to our senses which are programmed to perceive order. For example, some people propose that this sort of randomness exists at the quantum level. But this randomness doesn't even appear to our senses at all. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, all this is true of 'order', but my statement was about appearing to have been 'designed' a different property from merely being 'ordered'.

Therefore, I believe that if a "state" appears to us, it is necessarily designed, because we could not perceive a disordered state. — Metaphysician Undercover

Same conflation. 'designed' in the first part, 'ordered' in the second. The two terms are not simply interchangeable.

Even if we did accept this, it would simply be the claim that all ordered things must have been designed, which is the very issue.

But as I explained to Terrapin, this is not actually how we make such a judgement. We actually judge in the opposite way. We find all sorts of things which we believe were designed, and we judge that they were created with intention, by people. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you have any evidence for this? I don't judge things that way for one. And if you demonstrated that some critical mass of people judged things that way, how would that effect what is actually the case, they might all be wrong.

in reality we cannot judge intention through observation, and we really observe to see whether the thing was designed, then conclude that it was made with intention. There is no way to observe intention in action, so we must judge the characteristics of the thing to determine whether there was intention. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can. We just ask.

Chalmers suggested that a way to start would be to add the concept of first person experience to the scientific tool box (in the same way gravity was added, as something we know about but haven't explained yet.) — frank

Have a look back at @fdrake's earlier posts here. Science already does include the concept of first person experience, the whole of cognitive science is based on it.

That there is a "what it's like" aspect to consciousness is plain. — frank

Right, this really bugs me (sorry to pick on you Frank, it could have been anyone). Is it just a failure of my imagination, but I can't think what an answer to this could possibly be.

If I ask "what is that lemon cake like?", I might get one of a number of possible interpretations of 'like'.

1. Similar to - "it's 'like' an ordinary sponge but more lemony"
2. Metaphorical - "it's like jumping into a bath of lemons"
3. Emotional/judgemental - "it's lovely"
4. Sensate - "it's lemon-flavoured"

I can't think which of these could possibly answer questions like "what is it like to be... ". Yet the phrase is pretty much standard in discussions about consciousness.

If you think either science or philosophy could investigate such a question, what could the answer possibly consist of?

I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't an autonomous decision making process that bodies and minds together can do, that corresponds somehow with felt qualities associated with decision making. A "top down" causation of the body's self model on the body. — fdrake

Yeah. Again, off topic, but some interesting work has been done on possibly connecting the parts of the brain responsible for distinguishing self from other to the experience of willing something. It's mostly looking at it from the point of view of understanding some types of psychosis, but it's a promising line of enquiry with regards to both where the sense of willing comes from and what it's evolutionary origin might be. It's possible that all the hugely complex structure of human identity derives from a simple mechanism to distinguish actions precipitated by the frontal cortex from actions precipitated from the amygdala. Too reductionist...?