I think language also contains thoughts which may be visual and conceptual in nature. So that words don't just mean something explicit but work in close association with experiences and abstract concepts.

Skepticism seems trivial when you acknowledge the complex interrelationships I have just described. So I would say the idea that statements have to be either true or false is somewhat trivial.

Some skeptics appear to think they know are mind better than us and and know what we mean better than ourselves.

I define consciousness as awareness. It's a perspective and something that entails the self.

I am the subject of experiences from a unique perspective this is the self the experiencing subject.
Awareness is like access to experiences and awareness of existing in some form.

In a way consciousness is elusive when you try and pin it down to some material substrate or common sense notion or just focus closely on it.
But I think only conscious things can have a perspective or a self.

I think science is the attempt to explain our experiences. I don't see how we can access anything other than experiences. So in one sense consciousness may be fundamental is the substrate of our knowledge of some kind of reality.

But it has a complex relationship with the process of modelling and enquiry.

I think some skepticism is just incredulity which is more of an attitude or emotion than reason.

To justify a skeptical statement it seems one has to offer a grounds for disbelieving something such as a logical fallacy or inconsistency or a defence of implausibility.

I think language allows us to talk about things that may not exist but are based on things that already exist. It seems impossible to talk about things that have no basis in preexisting structures.

I think the idea that some things are eternal is nerve wracking. Infinities are intimidating. Infinite space. Infinite time. Infinite divisibility.

It seems that reality is either infinite or came to exist with dispositions at some arbitrary point.

Maybe some explanations we seek in whatever domain are to reduce anxiety.

I don't find anything problematic with reincarnation and the idea that the mind interacts with bodies/matter but can inhabit different bodies or domains at different times.

I completely agree. This was Einsteins principle. If you cannot explain it to other people you don't understand it yourself.

This kind of issue is usually infected by people's biases.

People always seem to be trying to preserve their own worldview which for some people is rampant materialism. It is best to interact with people who accept that mental phenomena exist and want to describe them accurately and not subsume them under a prior worldview.

I long got tired of atheists trying to impose their worldview under the misnomer of skepticism.

I feel that emergent properties must already be dispositions of reality.

For example water is never going to spontaneously turn into chocolate because it does not have that disposition or possibility.

So I think things can only emerge if a prior disposition is exists. Which does suggest reality is complex from the begining.

Otherwise emergent properties would seem like magic emerging from something formless and causally inept.

No.

I think personal experience is a rich source of knowledge. But it can be subject to other peoples skepticism.

There is an issue it seems however concerning how we describe our experiences without language.

It seems we need language to catalogue our experiences. It depends on what kind of knowledge we want and what we want to do with it.

As ↪Wayfarer noted, the "paradigm" you are struggling with may be the Reductive perspective of Classical physical science (since Newton), which focuses on collections of parts, rather than whole systems. Since the isolated parts are not viewed in the context of an integrated interrelated System, the Cause of their functional integrity is a mystery : the Hard Problem. — Gnomon

My issue is that I know I have vivid mental states like dreams which I have every night that have phenomenal content. Including dreams about dead people and places I lived as a child and fictional scenarios.

But my eyes are closed and I am receiving no input from the external world. The number one candidate at the moment for where the dream is occurring is entirely in the brain.

People are looking for neural correlates of dreams:

"Using high-density electroencephalography, we contrasted the presence and absence of dreaming in NREM and REM sleep. In both NREM and REM sleep, reports of dream experience were associated with local decreases in low-frequency activity in posterior cortical region"

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4545

I personally am not wedded to any particular position but I do see an explanatory gap between any current paradigm and phenomenal mental states.

One issue is that everything is a mental state. We only have access to mental states that we are trying to analyse
and they are more real than the concept of physical world independent of our models of it.

Physics uses models and isn't committed to having a veridically mapped representation of the world. (as far as I am aware)

I am aware of different arguments in cognitive science and the Philosophy of mind. And there is a huge number of papers from various perspectives. Among these are searches for the neural correlates of consciousness and the concept of mental representation.

"For many years I have argued that the “grandmother cell” hypothesis should be taken seriously (Bowers, 2002, 2009). On this view, single neurons code for familiar categories, such as well-known persons (Jennifer Aniston), objects, and words. The alternative view is that each neuron is involved in representing many different categories, and that a pattern of activation over many neurons codes for a specific category; so-called distributed coding. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to have a constructive debate on this issue because critics typically reject straw-man versions of the grandmother cell hypothesis. The most recent high-profile example of this was published a few months ago by Chang and Tsao (2017) in a paper entitled: “The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain”. A key claim of the authors is that their findings rule out the hypothesis that single neurons code for single faces. As they write in the “In Brief” section of their article:"

https://jeffbowers.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/blog/grandmother-cells/

People are arguing that brain regions and even single neurons can be correlated with phenomenal content of mental states.

I think the dominant paradigm is to correlate any mental states reports and concepts with brain states.

There are lots of objections to all perspectives including the computational theory of mind, embodied cognition et al which I can cite papers for.

I want to know where my phenomenal experiences are occurring and where the content is coming from. It may hinge on an explanation for consciousness which may be impossible. But as no one seems to be defending conscious states are brain states here I suppose there is no one to argue with.

I think that skepticism about other peoples mental states is on weak ground because we only have private access to our own.

So I think some skepticism amounts to calling other people liars or attempting to revise how they can describe their own mental states, like somebody claiming I didn't describe my dream or memory correctly.

So I think psychology and neuroscience are probably working with an interpretation of peoples descriptions of their mental states a lot of the time. And so brain correlates are not between concrete well defined mental states and brain states.

The theorist decides what I mean and how to formalise it and attach it to a biophysical counterpart.

My point is that just by successfully using any language you have disproven fundamental skepticism and proven a form of certainty.

Any skepticism following from this initial certainty of meaning conveyance has to have robust grounds and not just be word games.

Any worldview has to explain the fundamental fact that words convey meaning even solipsism, multiverses or brain in vat.

I think that any language you don't speak fails to convey meaning. For example urdu conveys no meaning to me.
But to communicate here we have to have at least minimal understanding of word reference.

After that with complex or controversial discussions we can dispute whether meaning is successfully conveyed.

People might claim that a lot of philosophy does not convey meaning.

Disputes seem to centre around the coherence or validity of a claim. At this juncture we might be stuck with a resort to purely subjective appraisal of meaning.

Then I think lack of understanding could be described more as ideological or an incompatibility of subjective landscapes.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not up for interpretation". Do you mean something like "has a clear and definite meaning"?. — Ludwig V

I am referring to lanaguage like directions, describing things, or information like "the house is on fire" that only succeed if the language is unambiguous.

Either the house is on fire or it isn't. The statement is either true or false and can be true where as something like the definition of the word "Politics" could be up for dispute.

But I just find it interesting that we can rely on language to some extent as opposed to having to start from a basis of complete doubt and skepticism.

I think that the computer analogy works dependent on how much you think consciousness is involved in a process.

Some people go to the extreme of no free will and consciousness as an epiphenomena so that all processing for behaviour is unconscious. This would sit best with a computational non phenomenal model.

So I suppose we have to work out when consciousness is necessary for something. I think quite a lot more things require consciousness than cognitive psychologists believe.

So it can range from "no cognitive process needs consciousness" to "they all do".

I do believe the brain would has the capacity to perform computations.

What I mean is that we can test what someone claims with empirical evidence to test the truth value of a sentence. Lies do not undermine the system because they can be detected.

And then what I mean is that language maps onto facts about the world somehow. When someone tells the truth and gives us information they prove that language transmits facts somehow.

To me it is not important is how language works but just that there are clear instances where facts are received through lanaguage. Making language a reliable vehicle and foundation for knowledge.

I think the problem with skepticism is that it undermines even itself. How can you be skeptical if your means of communicating your skepticism is also something to be skeptical about?

If you admit you might be a brain in vat you are committing yourself to an unresolvable uncertainty that has no use as far as I can see.

In this sense I think quite a lot of philosophy might be based on false doubt. We might be able to clarify more things we can't doubt if we except language transmits facts and not that all language is up for interpretation.

Why do I want to specify a location for my memory? — mcdoodle

It could be quite. There are rare cases of Photographic memory which is apparently fairly unpleasant because you do what to forget some things.

But on the other hand it would be good if we could store and access information more easily making learning easier. Now there is also the potential to have traumatic memories erased.

"Memory erasure has been shown to be possible in some experimental conditions; some of the techniques currently being investigated are: drug-induced amnesia, selective memory suppression, destruction of neurons, interruption of memory, reconsolidation,[1] and the disruption of specific molecular mechanisms"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_erasure

Then the self is not the experiences — lorenzo sleakes

That does seem to follow. I don't not consider things I think or perceive to be me.

It seems you must have to differentiate between yourself and input into your senses.

It is hard to give analogy but may be it is like when you watch a film but don't consider yourself a character in the film.

Strangely none of the biophysical matter of the brain features in our consciousness. We were unaware that we had neurons and neurotransmitters until scientists discovered them.

the detailed causal explanation that explains why a memory suddenly gets activated, — universeness

I don't think the problem is the storage of the memory but the phenomenal access to mental content. A machine could place something in a box and retrieve it later with no awareness.

One theory of consciousness does invoke the idea that certain activity in the brain is firing together in such a strong unison that that somehow leads to that brain activity reaching consciousness, but it is not clear how or what "reaches consciousness" means.
I think consciousness requires a self and we have point of view in front of which we experience things. It almost invokes a homunculus in the middle of the brain watching a screen with images on it or some central location where we can have a unified coherent perception or thought.

I feel that people forget that mental states are conscious. So they are all tied to whatever causes consciousness. I don't think the term mental should be applied to subconscious brain processing. (But that is a whole nother topic)

I could store a hundred toys in a cupboard and retrieve them randomly at a later date when I wanted to use one or more. Is a computer doing anything more than this?

I don't think anything in computation invokes mental states. The information we garner from the screen is for our conscious consumption but the computer isn't aware of it. The computer doesn't benefit from any of the info stored on it.

It doesn't seem quite right to assign any specific location to thoughts, memories and desires, although it might be reasonable to say that they are associated with the persons who 'have' them or are aware of them. — Janus

My issue is that we clearly have (or at least I do) vivid mental states including beliefs like "Paris is the capital of France" and images of an external world, dreams, hallucinations and so on.

I think they have to exist somewhere. If we are physicalist of some sort and think things have to supervene on a physical reality or emerge from it. But mental stuff does seem to really challenge physicalism. We probably do need a radical new paradigm or end up with the Mysterian stance of Colin McGinn.

But I think theorists should really focus on this phenomenological explanatory gap.

Another issue about brain states is how they can have truth values. How can brain activity which may be automatic and unreflective preserve truth value or evaluate it? It seems that 2+2= 4 should be true in any gover world and not depend on the right brain state.

The pain is in your foot -- but neurons communicate with each other to send to your brain the message that your foot hurts — L'éléphant

There are phantoms pains. People experience pain in a missing limb. This what suggest pain is all in the brain.

There is Congenital insensitivity pain where a person doesn't experience tissue damage as pain (something that can also happen under anesthetics.)

I actually think or belief in the physicality of the world is based on a spectrum of pain. (from mild to strong) and Haptic sensations in general (touch).

I have actually has someone say something to me like "if you don't believe in the physical world then let me bash you over the head with this baseball bat and see how you feel"

But all that would prove is that I have pain sensations. So what information is being transmitted by neurons exactly? Is it accurate? Just rambling here on the surrounding topic.

This is what I think has to happen with consciousness and self.

There are billions of humans but becoming conscious makes you become aware of being only one of them. But why and how?

Imagine a billion people are unconscious then become conscious why should you become aware of being *person 1* as opposed to *person 2* or person *a billion*? I cannot see a lawful reason.

What becoming conscious does is situate you as a unique person in a unique location at a unique time.

To me reincarnation would be less mysterious because you could have one spirit travelling through bodies and time rather than a randomly appearing conscious location. And I think to make a robot conscious you would have to create a subjective centre of experiences and perceiver.

The best I can explain it is as if a chinese woman in Hong Kong woke in the morning to be Black man in Nigeria. That would seem mysterious (body hopping) but it is actually no less mysterious to become conscious of being a random person in the first place.

If you can understand this post then you have passed the Turing Test.

To say brain X leads to consciousness X I think you would have to be able to distinguish two separate entities and give an explicit causal link with no explanatory gap.
But currently the brain is correlated with private self reports.

It could be the conscious entity was on another planet using this body as an avatar/vehicle to give responses. I don't think verbal reports logically situate us in our body. Just like reading a post here or listening to someone on the phone doesn't situate them anywhere.

I think the self perspective is invoked when it comes to things like taste and sound.

We can both eat the same cake and one thinks it tastes nice the other think it tastes horrible. We can both listen to a piece of music and one person thinks it sounds horrible while the other likes it.

There is no objective fact of the matter about the desirability of a phenomena (cake or sound). It is how we interact with it.

It isn't clear how many properties rely on subjective perception like this but there is no objective way to experience reality. (The view from nowhere, Thomas Nagel)

I think things like colour, tastes, sounds, opinions and beliefs require a self (perspective) to exist and we can't see them in the brain or body. The subjective is the private self realm and it is a perspective.

It is not clear where the self perspective is though or consciousness. We don't see, self, consciousness, sounds, dreams and tastes etc in the brain. We just have a concept of correlating them with brain states but only the individual can access them and then we use language to transmit ideas about our conscious states.

It doesn't make sense to attribute mental states like my memory of my grandmother or my belief that 2 + 2 = 4 to the whole of my body or a function.

But that does sound like a rehash of behaviourism.

I have distinct mental contents which is not similar or identical to any part of my body or behaviour.

This is usually discussed under the concept of mental representations in cognitive science.

I am conscious of my body. But I can lose substantial parts of my body and remain fully conscious.

You can lose one hemisphere of your brain and remain conscious.

The notion of a neural correlate is to find one part of the brain essential for consciousness or self.

But at the same time no aspect of the physical body exhibits the properties of mental states. (Although the whole body seems to be subject of a mental state).

I just think it is the wrong paradigm. I don't think we are going to find anything unique about bodies to explain our consciousness and self identity.

Years ago when I first started thinking about this only thing I found reflecting my thoughts was "Why am I me" by Scott Bidstrup who seems to have died now. He was an engineer among other things.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020402181037/http://www.bidstrup.com/why.htm

"In a strictly material sense, it may be true that the matter that makes up me could have made up a tree, or a lizard or a rock or anything else. But what we're talking about here is consciousness; in particular, the consciousness which is unique to me, and not shared by anyone else. The matter that makes up my body has little relevance to the fact of my consciousness. It doesn't do one bit about explaining why I am me in terms of my consciousness. It just explains the fact of the carrier of my consciousness, my physical body. The body should not be confused with the consciousness. It's like confusing a program running on a computer with the computer itself."


"The personal distinction, which I experience as a personal consciousness, is quite independent of the matter that makes up my physical body, as when, for example, if a chunk of me is removed in surgery, I do not continue to experience what is happening to the removed chunk; it simply becomes a part of the world I experience and is no longer "me."

If that chunk includes living cells that are cloned into another complete, living, breathing, human being, that human being still isn't me, even though it had its beginnings in my body. "

He then goes on to like Julian Barbour's theory relating to multiverses saying roughly that each moment of our self is a trajectory through another multiverse. I am not convinced by that idea but it does make the point about the uniqueness of the personal perspective.

180 proof claimed memories were not phenomena.

Well as I mentioned my memories are vivid and have a lot of detail (that might be referred to as qualia).

I am describing the phenomenal properties of mental states here not their function.

The function or potential uses of a mental state doesn't explain its emergence.

For example I am using the computer and internet now. But it's usefulness to me is not a history of its development. An evolutionary explanation of something in my opinion has to be an explicit causal explanation explaining emergent properties. Not a story of the benefit of a trait. I think the two things are conflated.

Eliminative materialism and behaviourism do contain explicit attempts to ignore or deny the phenomenal aspects of mental states. If they were just physical functions we wouldn't call them mental states.

"Memories" are functions, not "phenomena". — 180 Proof

What function do the memories of my brother serve. Or what function does my earliest memory of having a cold and being in a pram sucking a cough sweet on a wet day serve?

The structure of selfhood is there, but nothing is filled in. Maybe you were born with this blueprint? — frank

It seems every individual distinct thing like each snowflake has a unique identity but most of them do not appear to have a self or a conscious perspective.

I think that no amount of difference or complexity in brain structure seems to explain or lead to a personal perspective, a conscious portal, the consciousness through which we receive information and are now communicating.

So in a facile way we can identify differences that we could call a person's identity but these don't differentiate between our listing of traits and someone's felt experience.

What would make some differences constitute a self as opposed to other differences that are just inanimate physical differences?

Consider if you woke up in an emergency room with no memory of who you are. — frank

I think memory loss is relevant to this issue.

On the one hand we all seem to lose most of our memories. So that we live for thousands of days but could not probably recall the most of what happened.

But we seem to keep a core skeleton of memories that gives us our identity.
Some theorists think everything we experience is stored in the brain but not retrieved. An example here might be the thousands of words in our vocabulary that we can retrieve from without having at the forefront of our mind.

I would not say identity is self though. To me self is the individual subjective perspective. I have not had drastic memory loss that causes me to forget people I am close to or any other profound memory problems and I would have to speak to someone in that situation to work out what is constituting their identity.

We could call certain things self identity like memories and preferences. But I feel that self is literally who we are. Us as a distinct entity and having a consciousness attached to this body. So even in cases of profound memory loss other people can identify the unique individual.

I think as I may have said earlier we require individual conscious perspectives even to have the notion of individual things because they may just be concepts in a person's head as we divide up the world into perceived individual things.

It is a complex, difficult topic though where we could end up each referring to different phenomena and concepts.

We know that we have memories.

My oldest brother died a couple of years ago and I could tell you a lot about him from my memories without referring to photos or a written account etc. I could try and describe smells, sensations. I know where he used to live. I lived with him for a few years. Colours, DVDs he owned. His catheters. Pressure sores. Thousands of things potentially.

I mention this because he has passed on which emphasises the ability of memories to capture things that are long gone or not in current spacial temporality (and may be described as representations the common term for mind brain correlated).

It does seem that the brain is the only candidate for these memories to reside in. Yet nothing in the brain is like my memories of my brother.

Memories are vivid and multidimensional. I can remember things such as my brothers beliefs, his religious beliefs, political beliefs etc. Yet all we have in the brain is neurons, dendrites, axons, support cells, blood, synapses, chemical or electrical transmitters etc and none of these things share the characteristics of mental states.

The only possible options that spring to mind for me right now is another realm of mental objects or a new perspective on the physical world that supports mental and physical entities.

Who am I?
I'm part of this group, and I'm this individual. — frank

I think there is something profound happening behind the self.

It positions us in a unique body/brain and space and time. I am a 46 year old mixed race gay, autistic male from Bristol UK who grew up in a religious cult etc. (I could write an autobiography to illustrate the diversity of my experiences and life events.)

Nobody else is me or has been me. I have this unique subjective standpoint and I can only have this unique subjective standpoint. I can't be anyone else or experience anyone else's mental states.

But How do I come to be me and aware of being this person over the billions of other human living or dead?

It is a mystery but I think this is the only correct approach to exploring the self perspective not describing as a sense of self or a brain state or a concept.

I reside in my self space with this identity which is my only access and filter to a reality and I am fighting for my values. I am not just a number or another chunk of matter. I am sentient. I am not another tree in the forest. I can think about consciousness and infinity.

It is why I value other people because I believe they probably are in a similar position.

I think we can only fight for things, for reality by asserting the truth of our identity not by trying to fit in with some kind of groupthink accepted paradigm.

Strictly speaking, I wouldn't include intentions inasmuch as they are hidden. Context and gesture and everything manifest would count though, in my opinion.

It's not a big deal, but I like to focus on meaning as between people. — plaque flag

There is no reason not to include people's intentions and private mental states in a speech act.

When I am talking about myself I am talking about my experiences not just attempting to clarify whether we are using publically arbitrated meanings.

I think making mental states to be something that can be arbitrated about by the group is setting up for failure or exclusion of the phenomena.

I don't mean to sound to sound dramatic but I will never let anyone tell me what my self is or dictate how I assess my mental states.

I think we should investigate mental states in a public forum but not with a goal to diminish the phenomena by seeking public approval on what is acceptable as phenomena.

I am saying this general now to this thread topic and my thread on the privacy of subjective states. I don't believe mental states can be publically arbitrated meaningfully. It would seem to lead to denying one's own reality and being subservient to the mob.

It's true that you can often provide elaboration. But you can't use slurs or cry fire or decide that words mean whatever you want them to mean. You can twist things a little bit if you are careful and charismatic. — plaque flag

I think what someone means to say is contextual and will derive meaning from their intentions as well.

There are thousands of words which means in combination a vast amount of possible sentences can be created. So it seems very easy to create a unique but meaningful sentence.

And because we can combine words in numerous ways I cannot see why we cannot create new ideas and mental images.

I feel like you have to be the arbiter of what you mean because how else can you decide what to say and know what you mean and want to convey?

You intend to convey some kind of meaning but who is to blame when meaning fails to be transmitted?

If I understand what I mean that could be enough. To create shared mean we then seek to influence others in an almost physical act of persuasion even coercion.

I am going to try and get my view of the self across and may try various means to so determined to transmit my meaning and so on.

In my view, we as a community do this. We always inherit cultural software from previous generations (down to the meanings of the words we use), and then we modify this heritage (adapting to life today ) and finally pass it on. — plaque flag

So how does someone have the final say on what we mean by "self" or "free will"

I personally think the extension of a word can be related to somebody's' personal web of experience and words can combine to make new meanings for the individual.

I don't know whether you or anyone else is saying that words are deterministic and meanings inflexible.

I think telling people that the self is a fiction could be harmful and this could apply to telling people they don't have free will and a range of related issues. Leading to hopelessness or nihilism or reducing horizons.

I think people should be exposed to the issues raised in philosophy of mind so they can decide what they find compelling. Some people, as happened with the Matrix film's influence, may draw radical conclusions or be influenced by preexisting mental health problems to questionable actions.

But I feel that studying the Philosophy of mind may have had a positive impact on my mental health but I can't say for sure. It certainly expanded my concept base.

I don't know how many individual actions are taken with a consideration of the impact of everyone doing the same or population size.

I thought the golden rule was to act how you wanted everyone to act.

In which case if one person wants a car, washing machine, computer etc they can't expect everyone else to go without these things. In this sense the public have spoken and are pursuing their own goals.

In one sense governments need to find out what the public want and tell the public the costs of pursuing this whilst trying to remain elected.

It is almost like a dance between government and public.

The reason I defend the notion of god and now call myself an agnostic is because I don't associate the word "god" with a particular religion but with the human based concepts of intelligence, creation and meaning and so on.
So this is my method of deriving meaning or concepts from other things. I think conceptualising is probably essential for us. We learn about consistency between types.

My idea of the self is not entirely conceptual though but is extracted from my experience as the subject of conscious experiences but it is stronger than that. It is me that is in pain. Strong sensations are happening to me that reinforce my perception of a self. It is closely tied to consciousness which is all about experience for me. I consider both an essential mystery that needs explaining.

I don't think you can replace self-referential talk.

So I don't think it is a game,

I went to the shop
I had a nightmare
I hallucinated
I am 46
I got a mortgage

Are we supposed to say "My brain is 46" "My brain had a dream" "My body got it's first mortgage."