whether or not we should describe perception as "seeing representations" or "seeing the external world stimulus" is an irrelevant issue of semantics. It's like arguing over whether we feel pain or feel the fire. — Michael

So it's a crucial issue of semantics. Should the psychology admit internal representations, as well as external representations and internal brain shivers?

See also: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12417

Yes. The broken leg is the trauma. The brain activity (or the mental phenomena it causes) is the pain. — Michael

Ok. The broken leg is trauma. The brain activity (the recognising the broken leg as an instance of trauma) is the feeling pain.

And yet as I said we can recognise trauma without "feeling pain" (e.g. congenital insensitivity to pain) — Michael

Sure. The associations effected by merely intellectual recognition of the trauma hardly overlap at all with the associations we are inclined to call "feeling pain", which are informed directly by stimulation of nerves in the site of the trauma.

and we can feel pain without recognising trauma (e.g. headaches). — Michael

Sure. We can recognise wrongly.

Hmm so you were distinguishing neural alarm from bodily trauma?

We don’t just associate pain with trauma; we feel pain in response to trauma. They are two separate things. — Michael

I'm suggesting the pain is the recognition of the trauma as an instance of a kind of thing, e.g. of trauma. It is the association. Sure it's separate from the trauma. It might be caused by the trauma. But not from or by the pain. It is the pain.

I don’t need a language to be in pain. Pre-linguistic humans had headaches. — Michael

They suffered the trauma. My car suffers trauma. And pain, but only metaphorically. They, though, probably also had enough symbolic ability to associate it with trauma in general. Which is how we suffer pain literally. Perhaps. Plausibly.

Sure. I'm not totally averse to saying that mental phenomena just is brain activity. What I'm averse to is the claim that being in pain has something to do with me saying "I am in pain" — Michael

But then, applying that to the snooker balls, you're averse to saying that seeing the ball as red has something to do with associating it with red surfaces generally? For example by reaching for the word "red". I thought you might be. Slightly surprised that you reply with "sure".

If you're not totally averse to that, though, how about that being in pain is associating the bodily trauma in question with bodily trauma in general? For example by reaching for the word "pain".

would that be tantamount to accepting that gravity is mystical? — frank

There's mystical and there's mystical. There's an invisible pull between two bodies proportional to their masses, and there's a picture show in the head.

As for SDR, I'm not at all sure I'm on side with any brand of realism, inasmuch as they mostly seem to discuss the possibility of some kind of inner ghost making contact with the outer world.

You don't have to think of experience as a collection of ghosts, though. You can just note that you do see red, and leave it unexplained exactly how. — frank

That seems tantamount to accepting the ghost as ghost? Which could turn out to be appropriate, of course. I'm just pointing out an alternative.

You put a red ball and a blue ball in front of me. I can see that one is red and one is blue. I don't need to do or say anything that you can interpret as me "seeing red" or "seeing blue". — Michael

But perhaps you need to have brain activity that succeeds in associating the red ball with red surfaces generally, and the blue ball with blue surfaces generally?

Having red or blue mental images in the brain, to meet that purpose, is kind of having a ghost in the machine.

Having the brain reach for suitable words or pictures, isn't. And, even better, it suggests a likely origin of our tendency to imagine that we accommodate the ghostly entities.

read this. — Michael

pdf, anyone?

Again, you seem to fail to understand the use-mention distinction.

But this isn't the main point. — Michael

Perhaps yes it is, and no we don't fail. We, the people disputing the reality of private experience, understand that seeing colours is using (hence reaching for) words and pictures in order to mention (refer to, and thereby identify, classify, compare and order) visual stimuli.

This symbolic skill does tend to thrive on casual confusion of symbol and object, such as the kind usefully diagnosed as use-mention, but also (by the way, just saying...) the kind that confuses either symbol or object with brain shiver.

Without language, your target image might illicit responses that deserved classifying as a nascent form of recognition or comparison or classification of colours. Perhaps an animal would be reminded (as it were) of a face, in response to the whole set of local contrasts. But to imagine that all of the concentric rings would be identified as instances of separate classes of stimuli... That implies language, proper.

Searle argues that even though the person in the room can produce responses that appear to be intelligent to someone who does not understand Chinese, — Bot to Banno

Searle's requirement, to the contrary, that the room should convince even Chinese speakers, always seemed somewhat audacious. Until now?

While the person in the Chinese Room follows a static set of rules to manipulate symbols, GPT-4's neural network is capable of generalization, learning, and adaptation based on the data it has been trained on. This makes GPT-4 more sophisticated and flexible than the static rule-based system in the Chinese Room. — Bot to Pierre-Normand

Did Searle concede that the rules followed were static? If so, was 'static' meant in a sense contradicted by the present (listed) capabilities? I had the impression it would have allowed for enough development and sophistication as to lead exactly to those capabilities, which would be necessary to convince a semantically competent audience. For 'static' read 'statistical'?

Then GPT-4 is nothing not envisaged in Searle's account.

When I see a photo of a tree, I indirectly perceive the tree, but directly perceive the photo, for example. — NOS4A2

Does the camera, producing the photo, directly perceive the tree?

Also.

Is it different for words? When you see the name "Fido", do you indirectly perceive the dog?

Or is it more relevant to ask: when you read a description of Fido, do you indirectly perceive the dog?

I'm not sure. I recall @Terrapin Station arguing for that kind of direct realism, and likening the alleged directness of his alleged mental representations awareness to the fidelity commonly attributed to photos over and above hand-drawn painting. If I read him right.

I'm curious whether the OP's point is the same (boo) or different (hooray).

... Having now checked: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/297414

@Terrapin Station denies his awareness-picture-in-the-head is a representation-picture-in-the-head. I never quite saw the difference. Shame we can't ask him.

Representations, what more can be/should be said about them? — Agent Smith

That they aren't in the head.

ChatGPT applies a statistical algorithm, — Banno

Exactly like a non-Chinese speaker using a manual of character combination to hold a conversation with Chinese speakers outside the room, without understanding it at all?

:100:

Depends on whether

But, but, unicorns don't exist! — Agent Smith

can be prevented from arising, at least within discourse referring to the story. You might say that a feature of fantasy as a specific genre is that such a protest can be suppressed indefinitely. The discourse (the variety of things it's helpful to say about the story) can be shielded from normal influences and standards of conduct. Selectively, that is. Shielded from normal standards of evaluating existence claims, but thereby enabled to apply normal standards of inference about certain events in the story.

But fiction generally, and even fantasy to some extent, seems to have things to say about things outside of it. Consequently, interpretations of sentences, such as your formal paraphrase of a sentence, are likely to be judged with some degree of reference to real-world criteria.

Then your question, how the fictional sentence should be interpreted, is fair, and I think there are two kinds of answer: half-measure and full-measure.

Half-measure is some way of relativising the statement to the story. To talk about the fiction-related discourse from outside. E.g. qualify statements by way of disclaimers like "in the story" or "fictionally speaking".

Full-measure is to seek to reconcile the truth of the fictional statement with that of factual statements. The popular way to do so is to treat the statement as on a par with conditional or hypothetical statements: so that they might paraphrase along the lines of, e.g. "suppose for the sake of argument that there exists an x such that..."; or "consider the set of possible worlds in which there exists an x such that...".

Less well known is Goodman's approach, in which the story is acknowledged literally false, but allowed to be metaphorically true in a manner that has the novel advantage of being about the real world.

Obviously, I meant that I'm familiar with his ouvre.

They're talking about experience. — frank

So am I.

Remember that pan-psychism is on the table as a possible explanation. — frank

So experience has to mean a ghostly extra layer, in the first place? Seems presumptuous.

I've never heard of the glowing picture theory. — frank

Really? Dennett's Cartesian picture show?

How would you paraphrase

the felt quality of redness,
— Nagel/Chalmers

?
— bongo fury

I wouldn't. — frank

I imagine they would be disappointed. Negotiating paraphrases is an obvious tool of constructive debate.

if you aren't willing to read an essay or book by Chalmers, — frank

Oh, you.

Do you think that's what Chalmers and Nagel are suggesting? That a picture glows in the head? — frank

Pretty much. Do I slander them?

mental images that are conjured up internally; — Nagel/Chalmers

Like those, but delivered from outside.

How would you paraphrase

the felt quality of redness, — Nagel/Chalmers

?

for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, — Nagel/Chalmers

We prepare to point appropriate symbols at the stimulus: pictures of just the right shade, words selecting the right pictures. And we prepare to point other symbols at the biological activity that we infer effects the process of preparation. We find it useful, and generally harmless, to equivocate (in talk and in thought) between word, picture, stimulus, associated stimuli, and neural process. Unsurprisingly we often have to unpick an apparently reliable (because habitual) account alleging that a picture glows, somewhere inside our head.

the experience of dark and light, — Nagel/Chalmers

The need to prepare to select pictures having the right luminosity when illuminated, so as to associate the stimulus with an appropriate range of stimuli, and of words and of objects.

the quality of depth in a visual field. — Nagel/Chalmers

Pictures satisfying learnt pictorial conventions of perspective.

Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, — Nagel/Chalmers

Not another experience in the sense of another wonderful ghostly correlate of neural activity, but another (wonderful) physical process of readying to select among sounds to associate with the presented sound, thereby contributing to an ongoing classification and ordering of the world of sound events. A process soaked in the same multiple confusion of use with mention: reference to stimulus with reference to symbol; symbol with neural readying for use of symbol; stimulus with neural readying for use of symbol.

the smell of mothballs. — Nagel/Chalmers

Where the associations may be especially deep and cross-modally disruptive.

Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; — Nagel/Chalmers

There is physiological trauma and convulsions, and there is interpretation of these through language and other symbol systems. And with the interpretation, endemic intellectual confusion, and habitual implication of an internal observer.

mental images that are conjured up internally; — Nagel/Chalmers

In a manner of speaking, which benefits from translation into literal analysis, in terms of preparation to manipulate and interpret diagrams and visual talk.

the felt quality of emotion — Nagel/Chalmers

The physiological turbulence, and then the interpreting it through language and other symbol systems, especially (and usefully and often truly) with respect to social and physical threats and opportunities.

and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. — Nagel/Chalmers

The tendency to confuse the continuity of actual scenery with the continuity of an internal picture show.

what unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. — Nagel/Chalmers

There is a topography of more and less appropriate linguistic (and otherwise symbolic) interpretations and reactions to the situation in which the organism finds itself.

All of them are states of experience. — Nagel/Chalmers

But not of a ghost in the machine.

On the surface level, if we have a "self" in the materialist worldview, we inevitably run into the "Ship of Theseus" problem. — tom111

Yes, and I don't see any deeper issue.

So why is it, when I look back at photos of myself from 5 years ago, I feel like the same person? — tom111

Well, why is it that when you look back at photos of your ship from 5 years ago, you feel like it's the same ship?

This is likely due to the fact that you have inherited memories from this person, — tom111

And likewise you have memories of the earlier ship.

What we are (in the materialist view) are simply piles of carbon, — tom111

Or living flesh, why not? Does a materialist have to be exclusively a physical chemist?

using past memories and ideas to compile a constant "self" that simply doesn't exist; — tom111

Agreed, if self is soul. But why can't it be the animal?

a human being is empty of essence. — tom111

Agreed.

Upon thorough examination, the idea of a "self" is as arbitrary as the idea of a "chair", or any other object. — tom111

Wobbly, sure, with no solid foundation. But not entirely arbitrary, surely? You have the vehicle's service history?

In a purely material world, concepts like these simply don't exist work — tom111

Again, of course they do, at a coarser level of description.

In a nutshell: because correlation doesn’t explain consciousness. — Art48

But confusion might.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/433444

2. Set A has a smaller cardinality than set B IFF set A can be put in a 1-to-1 correspondence with a proper subset of set B. — Agent Smith

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality?wprov=sfla1

Yes, your parsing seemed right.

No, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism?wprov=sfla1 has a list

If A then not B
If C then B
[If] C then not A — KantDane21

A, B, C ---> P, M, S

Yes. Why is that? — Shawn

Touche! :lol:

But, Santa's ontology exists in the fictional realm. Why do people conflate the two? — Shawn

Why do people conflate existing in a realm with existing in a realm-diagram or a realm-description?

Yes. So what (if not a Cartesian film show) is intermediate between what (if not a homunculous) and the world?

apprehension of the world is mediated. — 180 Proof

By a Cartesian film show?

as [a] much more subdued version of the Cartesian theatre that is more plausible to current thinking. — Moliere

More plausible how? More subdued how? Different how?

Maybe to sum up the thoughts in an unclear question: Is the brain a virtual reality machine? — Moliere

A Cartesian theatre, then?

In other words, language. Stories. Words. That's all. — busycuttingcrap

Yes. Apart from real beardy old men, and the real north pole. And real charity workers, as @unenlightened rightly points out.

As you say "people can and do use the same words or expressions for different purposes in different contexts". — RussellA

If I may help you to grasp the point here... People can and do use the same kinds of words (e.g. names) for the purpose of referring to people or objects in some contexts and for the purpose of non-referring word-use in others.

'Real' does not always mean actually real; 'existent' does not always mean actually existent. That's just the way things are. — Herg

Does 'actual' always mean 'actually actual'? Perhaps Santa is the first but not the second?

However, it's still a fiction. — Sam26

So, false?

If you're referring to what's veridical, then they have no referent. — Sam26

Can we talk veridically about fiction?