Sure: hope, disappointment, confusion, frustration, excitement, triumph, despair, pleasure etc.

Hadn't thought about emotional aspects, though.

Cool. Yes, I'm interested. My cousin has a genetic anomaly that's known to be associated with perfect pitch. She's always had it. She started playing piano at 3 years from watching her mother play.

But it's true that jazz musicians demonstrate the ability to perceive key transitions that normal people can't. Supposedly there is a study. I could find if you need it. — frank

Great. Happy to be introduced to research. I would hope to recognise some of it from previous encounters, but nonetheless. No real excuse for launching into the project, such as it is, without a thorough review. On the other hand I hope we and any other participants aren't inhibited from forming and comparing opinions based on a mixture of science and navel-gazing.

I'll start the thread in the lounge, for that reason. Any views, anecdotes, arguments, research or idle speculation welcome. :smile:

I start from the (questionable) assumption that my brain must have quickly destroyed all growth of the global, absolute sensitivity as soon as musical play led it to start to develop the local, relative sensitivity. [...continued p 94 aka the lounge, here]

There are ways that I'm different from most people. I mentioned earlier that I have a cousin who has perfect pitch. That's a very distinct difference and there is a genetic basis for it. — frank

Happens I'm about 3 weeks into an uncontrolled experiment wherein the subject (myself) attempts to acquire absolute pitch. I'm still hopeful of refuting your innatist aspersion, albeit unscientifically.

I aspire also (perhaps) to a Mary's Room type revelation: an additional dimension to my auditory perception. E.g. a 'global' quality attaching to the pitch of a sound, independent of its local relations to other, proximate sound-events (relative pitch). The kind of quality that apparently enables the possessors of absolute pitch to associate different keys with different moods etc.

I would be keen to share the unscientific data with any other interested parties (in a thread), especially if they were minded to share their own? E.g. recollection of their previous attempts, or description of attempts started now, or soon.

Absent that demand, I'll update this (single) post. So WTS if interested...

I don't at all see how qualia is so much more ghostly an apparition than any of experience, sensation, representation or mental state.

Not trying to be more-eliminativist-than-thou, but... ok, maybe I am.

But I'm surprised that embracing these other mentalisms is expected to clear the air in a debate with mentalists. As though it'll then be clearer what everyone is talking about.

You can't tell a blind person what it's like to see color, no matter the words you use. — Marchesk

Am I missing something or is it quite easy? E.g.

Seeing the colour of that surface is like hearing the timbre of that trumpet. Notice how timbre fills a region of the stimulus either uniformly or with a gradient specific to each of one or more directions, e.g. temporal and pitch-height? Colour is like that.

Again, this seems neutral with respect to the question whether we need to posit an internal as well as an external stimulus.

Two diamonds both identifying as an intermediate grey in most contexts will indeed be seen as contrasting greys in the ingenious context. For obvious enough reasons of unconscious inference.

How is this supposed to bear on the controversy whether there is a mental picture?

Is a zombie, with no mental picture, not expected to distinguish the greys, by the same unconscious reasoning?

Who said I didn't? — Olivier5

What, you mean in some very fleeting way, for a small moment, in some small corner of your mind?

Or were you able to maintain the mistake, in some subtle way? Art as illusion?

Yes, I was forgetting how entrenched that theory is.

So, for some such reason, you don't think pictures are generally patterns? Merely, illusions of patterns? Ok.

It's an illusion created by your perspective. — Olivier5

Not unless you mistook it for a horse, which you didn't.

It's a pattern you recognised with particular ease from your perspective, but which you may then impose with ease from almost any other.

It looks like a pattern but it is not one. There's no horse in the clouds. — Olivier5

But there is, of course, a pattern we recognise as a horse-picture.

Were I doing a PhD, — Banno

...then definitely use divers with one e.

Just interested in what you think. :smile:

I'm not at all sure if you are talking about images. :chin:

So it's not a problem, nothing to see here folks, but at the same time it's unsolved and we have basically no predictive power? — Mijin

When firings of the required kind occur in certain cells, the subject can to some extent produce, sort out, criticize, revise descriptions or pictures of a horse. The "image" and the "picture in the mind" have vanished; mythical inventions have been beneficially excised.

[...] we must construe informal talk of rotating images in some way that does not imply that there are images twirling in the head. — Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

Just like most people, I had to have a "penny drop" moment, where I realized that pain, color, smells etc are phenomena that occur in the brain, not in the outside world (or the body, in the case of pain), in a way we don't yet understand. — Mijin

Colors twirling in the brain?

It's easy.

Where do you draw the line [...]? — Beautiful Mind

Not a problem either.

Translation of talk about nothing into talk about something often takes some trouble...
— Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

Indeed. Especially when the writer keeps casually and carelessly using concepts that he also contends are meaningless. This can only lead to confusion. — Olivier5

Carelessness makes trouble, but scrupulous analysis takes it.

How can he possibly dislike something that by his own reckoning doesn't actually exist? — Olivier5

Translation of talk about nothing into talk about something often takes some trouble... — Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

But there just is no fact of the matter whether a word or picture is pointed at one thing or another. No physical bolt of energy flows from pointer to pointee(s). So the whole social game is one of pretence.
— bongo fury

Unless you're a biosemiotician? :chin: — bongo fury

Today, no biologist would dream of supposing that it was quite all right to appeal to some innocent concept of lan vital. — QQ

it's not all matter that is infused with some amount of 'consciousness'; but all life. — Olivier5

The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.
— MMP — fdrake

Sorry (but also rather smug) to see I wasn't being at all original here,

If I'm wrong, and the appropriately confused machine might still be unconscious, I need alerting towards features of my own conscious thoughts that I am leaving out of consideration. However, I don't think the usual claim of unreflective and immediate certainty will be one of those features. Indeed, the confusion hypothesis suggests a reason for that kind of claim: certainty arose in our assessment of the status of the tree itself, but we mistakenly ascribed it to our confused (e.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts. — bongo fury

Fair enough. I'm confusing all manner of abstract Forms with their Material supports. So much for my theory of how belief in abstract mental furniture arises from confusing internal and external materials.

Actual, physical books contain pages. They do not formally contain sentences. At best they can produce and reproduce sentences, which is different. — Olivier5

So, after the careless generalising, a strenuous particularizing.

Ok then, take two:

Thoughts are information, written down and processed by neurons.
— Olivier5

Interesting. Symbols? Sentences? Images? — bongo fury

Please elaborate, for the benefit of those for whom sentences would normally (without notice to the contrary) be classes of printed inscription or sounded utterance, and images would be classes of inscription or illumination?

What exactly is 'pre-philosophical' about images or symbols? — Olivier5

Not meaning it literally:

Symbols? Sentences? Images?
— bongo fury
Of course! Also humor, dreams, ideas and music. You don't have those? — Olivier5

A book literally contains sentences and images. Many societies encourage the view that brains do, too. I would need persuading. I thought you were about to try. But generalising to all of the things that a book can contain only metaphorically only punctures my intuition of the claim.

I can cheer you up. — bongo fury

Also, people spooking you out on a magic mushrooms forum reminds me that the wisdom proffered in my linked post probably derives from some very helpful advice that I was lucky enough to once receive, during a difficult session of precisely that species of very silly (though fascinating) indulgence. Which was, to see myself as a walking talking person, rather than from "inside".

People vary in their ability to hold mental images. — frank

And equally, of course, in their literal theorising of what "holding a mental image" actually amounts to.

Thoughts are information, written down and processed by neurons.
— Olivier5

Interesting. Symbols? Sentences? Images? — bongo fury

Of course! Also humor, dreams, ideas and music. You don't have those? — Olivier5

I was ready to be schooled in information theory, or some such. But you revert to a pre-philosophical declaration of wonder. Which is fine. Don't you want to refine it into theory plausible as literal truth, though?

Thoughts are information, written down and processed by neurons. — Olivier5

Interesting. Symbols? Sentences? Images?

I'm certainly not confusing thoughts with neurological events. — Olivier5

Ok, what are they for you?

And mentalists are people with telepathic capacity, which I don't believe in. — Olivier5

haha, at least that needn't be a substantive issue. I just meant, believing in mental furniture. Whatever you want to call that. Phenomenalism? Psychism?

that we experience qualitative sensations inside our head, such as colours, or the timbre of a musical instrument (the “sound of trumpet”). — Olivier5

That, to me, is mentalism: confusing thoughts (neurological events) with pictures (or other symbols) and with pictured (or otherwise symbolised) objects.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it — Russell, 1918

... leading on, we hope, to reconception of and improvement on the received wisdom. (Leading on to another round, etc.)

I always assumed that an "intuition pump" is to be admired as an artificial aid for getting the process going. Perhaps like agreeing of definitions "for the sake of argument", but more, er... erotic?

Seems to apply in the case of the Chinese Room, at least.

Turns out Dennett only really wants to disable all the pumps. Oh well.

Anyway, I'm often surprised at how amenable he (and if he isn't playing around) is to mentalistic talk.

We keep moving the goal posts, aka the Cartesian Theater fallacy. That's a fallacy I think was coined by Dennett, but ironically I think he himself violates. It's neurons encoding for this or that.. but then encoding itself has to be explained as for why it is mental states. The problem lies in positing a hidden dualism. Mental states exist, yes or no? — schopenhauer1

Quite.

I do think that the "neural representations" favoured by the likes of Dennett and Frankish (thanks for the links) are questionable as being probably ghosts of "the idea idea", and other mentalisms. Hence the prevaricating in 3.3 Who is the audience?. And the possible own goal, if

An appearance of something which isn't there.
— Marchesk

gets supposed as a thing located in the head, to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere. — bongo fury

Can't (yet) find a smoking gun to quote from Quining. But,

Fair enough. Let's talk of colours, smells, feelings, tastes, timbres and tunes then. — Olivier5

Hopefully, @Banno and Dennett mean, merely, external stimulus sets, while you mean, specifically, qualia (or some such) in the head?

for whatever reason. — Srap Tasmaner

E.g., possibly: our thinking in symbols.

That an illusion of consciousness isn't necessarily consciousness.

If it could happen without “magic”, that would mean it was something that could be built up from non-conscious processes, and so would not be whatever the supposed difference is between a philosophical zombie and a real person. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but it doesn't have to be that specious and spurious difference. It only has to be the difference between an ordinary zombie such as a smart phone and a conscious machine such as one of us.

Phenomenal consciousness is defined in opposition to that kind of process. Nothing that the ordinary mechanical properties of matter can build up to, including the full complex and nuanced behavior of a human being, can constitute phenomenal consciousness by itself, as it is defined by the people who came up with the idea. — Pfhorrest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question?wprov=sfla1

No?

Pan-psychists' being wrong about zombies doesn't make them right about pan-psychism.

It happens in any non-religious school as "Religious Studies". Which many such schools (sample of one) now call "Philosophy and Ethics".

Phenomenal consciousness is defined in opposition to that kind of process. Nothing that the ordinary mechanical properties of matter can build up to, including the full complex and nuanced behavior of a human being, can constitute phenomenal consciousness by itself, as it is defined by the people who came up with the idea. — Pfhorrest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question?wprov=sfla1

Obvs.

Not all matter is wet, even in the slightest degree, but liquids usually are.

Not all matter is (phenomenally, of course) conscious, even in the slightest degree, but animals able to play a social game of pointing symbols at things usually are.

some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, — Pfhorrest

No need.

Conclusion: it's not possible for us to gain or obtain knowledge about anything that goes beyond our senses, memory and testimony. — Humelover

Or is it?...

But here it may be proper to remark, that though our conclusions from experience carry us beyond our memory and senses, and assure us of matters of fact which happened in the most distant places and most remote ages, yet [...]

In a word, if we proceed not upon some fact, present to the memory or senses, our reasonings would be merely hypothetical; and however the particular links might be connected with each other, the whole chain of inferences :wink: would have nothing to support it, nor could we ever, by its means, arrive at the knowledge of any real existence. — Hume, Enquiry, section 37

Had not the presence of an object, instantly excited the idea of those objects, commonly conjoined with it, all our knowledge must have been limited to the narrow sphere of our memory and senses; — 44

Hence likewise the benefit of that experience, acquired by long life and a variety of business and company, in order to instruct us in the principles of human nature, and regulate our future conduct, as well as speculation. By means of this guide, we mount up to the knowledge of men’s inclinations and motives, from their actions, expressions, and even gestures; and again descend to the interpretation of their actions from our knowledge of their motives and inclinations. — 65

(My emphasis.)

The bad science part is to assume that it's simple. For instance, there is probably some genetic basis for character traits, but there's no one-to-one relationship between genes and character traits. "The genes of love" or "the genes of selfishness" are gross simplifications of far more complex realities. — Olivier5

To be fair:

The bogey of genetic determinism needs to be laid to rest. The discovery of a so-called ‘gay gene’ is as good an opportunity as we'll get to lay it.

[...]

Genes, in different aspects of their behaviour, are sometimes like blueprints and sometimes like recipes. It is important to keep the two aspects separate. Genes are digital, textual information, and they retain their hard, textual integrity as they change partners down the generations. Chromosomes — long strings of genes — are formally just like long computer tapes. When a portion of genetic tape is read in a cell, the first thing that happens to the information is that it is translated from one code to another: from the DNA code to a related code that dictates the exact shape of a protein molecule. So far, the gene behaves like a blueprint. There really is a one-to-one mapping between bits of gene and bits of protein, and it really is deterministic.

It is in the next step of the process — the development of a whole body and its psychological predispositions — that things start to get more complicated and recipe-like. There is seldom a simple one-to-one mapping between particular genes and ‘bits’ of body. Rather, there is a mapping between genes and rates at which processes happen during embryonic development. The eventual effects on bodies and their behaviour are often multifarious and hard to unravel.

The recipe is a good metaphor but, as an even better one, think of the body as a blanket, suspended from the ceiling by 100,000 rubber bands, all tangled and twisted around one another. The shape of the blanket — the body — is determined by the tensions of all these rubber bands taken together. Some of the rubber bands represent genes, others {105} environmental factors. A change in a particular gene corresponds to a lengthening or shortening of one particular rubber band. But any one rubber band is linked to the blanket only indirectly via countless connections amid the welter of other rubber bands. If you cut one rubber band, or tighten it, there will be a distributed shift in tensions, and the effect on the shape of the blanket will be complex and hard to predict.

[...]

So, if you hate homosexuals or love them, if you want to lock them up or ‘cure’ them, your reasons had better have nothing to do with genes.
— Dawkins: Genes Aren't Us - A Devil's Chaplain, chapter 2.4

or take this to PMs — fdrake

Please not!

Why are you pestering this thread — Srap Tasmaner

Pardon me? You engaged me, not me you?

You called reference a fantasy; — Srap Tasmaner

You seem to have assumed this was an insult? I'm insulted. :wink:

but of course it turns out this is a picturesque way of describing anything abstract — Srap Tasmaner

What is? Clarification, please.