If you can't tell me in basic terms what externalism is, we're done. — frank

About mental content? Roughly the idea that the content of mental states of an agent is differentiated by that agent's (history of) agent-environment relationships. As I read Dennett, he's an externalist with regard to mental content, and broadly some kind of representational functionalist with respect to that content.

Quining? — frank

"Denying resolutely the existence of something which seems important" (paraphrase) seems to me much different from, say, saying that convention T suffices as a theory of meaning for sentences. What is being deflated into what and why?

This is where we disagree. You need to know what externalism is to understand Dennett. — frank

Can you tell me what I need to understand about externalism to understand the argument in the article?

Yes — Marchesk

Woop woop.

(1) Appearances are secondary qualities. In other words, appearances are relationships between perceived objects and the perception of that object.
(2) Every appearance inheres in a subject.
(3) The appearance has, as a property, a way it seems to the subject it inheres in. — fdrake

Do you further identify the "seeming" as a quale? Is that the qualish bit?

When you say the appearance seems some way to us, what do you mean?

Here is what it seems to me you mean:
(1) Appearances are secondary qualities. In other words, appearances are relationships between perceived objects and the perception of that object.
(2) Every appearance inheres in a subject.
(3) The appearance has, as a property, a way it seems to the subject it inheres in.

Does that sound about right?

Deflation of qualia would benefit philosophy and science. — frank

What do you mean by deflation? Considering the article never uses the word, it needs explaining.

With exercises meant to demonstrate that a person's reports about qualia are vague, confused, and unreliable. — frank

:up:

It would better be seen as fleshing out why qualia should be handled in an externalistic way. — frank

Okay, what do you mean by externalism here? Again, seeing as the article never uses the word, it needs explaining.

Isn't that kind of obvious? — frank

Not to me. How do they do it?

Okay. Take me through this. If what's important is the appearance, how is the appearance distinguished from the relational properties of sensation causes and sensations?

So you're characterising qualia as relational properties of sensation causes and sensations? As Lockean secondary qualities?

If the entire experience is qualia, how does that idea work with qualia being secondary properties of perception?

Qualia are the secondary qualities of perception. — Marchesk

Can you please break down an experience you've had and show me/us which bits are qualia and which aren't? Or how qualia apply to it? Describe your keyboard or something!

(1) What is Dennett's argument in Quining Qualia?
(2) How do you think he argues for that position?
(3) In what sense is Quining Qualia an argument for externalism of mental content? How do the different intuition pumps try to demonstrate the necessity of environmental relationships for mental content to be configured as it is?

If you've got enough time to tell me I know nothing about anything, you've got enough time to enlighten me.

(1) What do you think Dennett's position is in Quining Qualia?
(2) How do you think he argues for that position?
(3) How does that relate to the maxim "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (Searle) assertion you've been using your photos to intuition pump for (as I've read them anyway).

@frank

Same questions for you, with changed (3):

(3) How does Dennett's position lead to an equivocation between "3rd person data" and "1st person data"? Why does Dennett believe they are the same thing?

It should be pretty obvious how to productively engage in a reading group thread. A combination of text exegesis, contextualising that argument in their broader work - refutation and critique after demonstrating understanding. Refutation and critique in response to demonstrations of understanding.

You don't have to just agree with the humourless nuts p-zombie man, it would be preferable if you engaged with his arguments.

Oh it's a clusterfuck unfortunately. Most of the discussion derailed into Dennett's broader points. And it's not really a discussion of them either, it's more "he's wrong! have you considered this extra textual thing?" (link to previous thing or explanation of misinterpretation) "he's wrong! have you considered this extra textual thing?"

What is externalism in this context?

Conscious experience and 3rd person data about conscious experience. — frank

And why do you think he is equivocating between those things? Do you think Dennett thinks conscious experience is 3rd person data? Or that 3rd person data is conscious experience? Or that there's no difference between the two for him?

I did read the Wiki article, and I looked at the paper abstract it cited. Between what and what do you think Dennett is equivocating?

Which just sounds like he wants to say we're conscious, but not really. Kind of like an anti-realist about dinosaur fossils. He's also expressed the ideas that consciousness might be a trick of language, a trick of the reporting mechanism, or just introspection giving us the wrong idea. But whatever it is, consciousness isn't what we think it is. Which sounds like eliminativist talk. — Marchesk

That "not really", presumably the additional part is phenomenal consciousness. If nothing less than phenomenal consciousness will do for that objection, it's begging the question. As that's actually the assertion of a disputed point.

Which sounds like eliminativist talk

Eliminativist with regards to what? Dennett's clearly an eliminativist towards qualia, I think he's an eliminativist towards phenomenal consciousness as usually construed, but I don't think he's an eliminativist towards minds. I think the claim is that the mind is a narrative built with representational approximations which are equivalent to neural-bodily functions in some way. As an overall statement of Dennett's position, I've found two quotes from "Illusionism As the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness":

Dennett: Today we — most of us —are comfortable with systems of unconscious representations that influence, specify content, orient, direct memory retrieval, etc. That is as good as gospel in cognitive science. These are representations in us that contribute to our cognitive talents without being for us. (In this regard they are no different from the representations of blood sugar level or vitamin deficiency that modulate our digestive systems without engaging cerebral cortex at all.) But at some point, as Frankish puts it, we must describe:

Frankish: the sensory states that are the basis for the illusion. On most accounts, I will assume, these will be representational states, probably modality specific analogue representations encoding features of the stimulus, such as position in an abstract quality space, egocentric location, and intensity. (p. 19)

Dennett: Filling in these details will require answering a host of questions that Frankish raises:

Frankish: Is introspection sensitive only to the content of sensory states, or are we also aware of properties of their neural vehicles? Do the reactions and associations evoked by our sensory states also contribute to the illusion of phenomenality?… Are sensory states continually monitored or merely available to monitoring? Is the introspectability of sensory states a matter of internal access and influence rather than internal monitoring? (p. 19, my italics)

Dennett: I submit that, when we take on the task of answering the Hard Question, specifying the uses to which the so-called representations are put, and explaining how these are implemented neurally, some of the clear alternatives imagined or presupposed by these questions will subtly merge into continua of sorts; it will prove not to be the case that content (however defined) is sharply distinguishable from other properties, in particular from the properties that modulate the ‘reactions and associations evoked’.

Dennett's denial of phenomenal consciousness looks ultimately to stem from trying to undermine the distinction between phenomenal properties (whatever it is) and functional, behavioural, intentional and reactive properties of the body. But then there's the question of why he thinks it's an illusion:

The red stripe you seem to see is not the cause or source of your convictions but the intentional object of your convictions. In normal perception and belief, the intentional objects of our beliefs are none other than the distal causes of them. I believe I am holding a blue coffee mug, and am caused to believe in the existence of that mug by the mug itself. The whole point of perception and belief fixation is to accomplish this tight coalescence of causes and intentional objects. But sometimes things go awry. Suppose a gang of hoaxers manage to convince you, by a series of close encounters, that there is a space alien named Zom who visits you briefly, speaks to you on the phone, etc. The causes of your various Zom experiences can be as varied as can be, so that nothing at all in the world deserves to be identified as Zom, the intentional object of your beliefs. What are intentional objects ‘made of’? They’re not made of anything. When their causes don’t coalesce with them, they are fictions of a sort, or illusions.

The position seems to be: perception is a representational relationship embodied by the workings of... our body and brain. The representational relationship ties intentional objects with distal causes when it's working well - indeed, tying intentional objects to their distal causes is a success criterion for normal instances of perception. But what are the "intentional objects" themselves made of? Nothing at all, says Dennett. Just like we don't think imaginary objects are substantial.

So it looks like - denying that phenomenal consciousness exists turns on undermining a distinction between what is phenomenal and what isn't (without collapsing it to one side). Then in answer to the question of what is the nature of experience - it's kinda like being an unreliable narrator of your own autobiography, no "you" outside the text, so in that sense it's an illusion.

Dennett thinks people endorse things like hardness or redness because they're doing the best they can to interpret neurological functioning, not because those things are properties of experience. He speculates that the illusion of phenomenal consciousness may arise from verbal streams. In short, he equivocates. He does the same thing with free will. — frank

What two types do you think Dennett is equivocating between? And can you provide a link to some of his work that demonstrates the equivocation?

He sounds like it! — khaled

Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. — Dennett

It's a clear misreading.

Where might I ask? — khaled

I tried to open up that line of discussion on page 3, that post concerns trying to locate what a quale is and the ambiguities in it. This response to @Kenosha Kid deals with the distinction between qualia as perceptual entities vs perception as a relation. There's more, but if you want to look for it in thread, it's discussed between @Luke, @Isaac, @Kenosha Kid and I.

What notion exactly is Dennett trying to attack here? — khaled

A bunch of things, as I read him:

(1) The idea that qualia are experienced. Disentangling "I tasted the tea", taste there is a relation, from "I had a tea taste quale", tea taste there is a property (and there's a question of what bears the property!). I went through that previously in the thread.

(2) He's trying to highlight that standard moves philosophers make when introspectively analysing experience have serious problems. Going from "The coffee I had today tasted bitter" to "Coffee taste experiential properties are time dependent" will be done by invoking (1) and not noticing.

(2a) There's the issue of if qualia are properties, what are they properties of? And how do those entities which the properties are predicated of behave? That's related to the "experiential entity" discussion @Isaac, @Kenosha Kid, @Luke and I had.

(3) He's throwing some skepticism on the idea that the first order properties of experience (like tea having "a taste") are individuated like we introspect/label them to be by highlighting that those first order properties are contextually variable.

(4) He's trying to show that common second order properties of qualia are untenable (the list of four things I've brought up).

(5) All the above are done in the context of distinguishing qualia from functional, behavioural and intentional properties - Dennett is arguing against making such a distinction (ie, the argument in paper is for the claim that experiential properties are functional, behavioural, intentional).

"Seeing" is qualia. Though I suspect we're not talking about the same thing. — khaled

I think Dennett would actually approve of "Seeing is qualia", since that emphasises that experience is relational. The caveat is whether the relation is moved "into the head", which a discussion I'm having with @Luke and what I imagine @Banno 's been gesturing toward. There's also the (2a) question of whether an experiential entity is mediating the perceptual relationship.

The underlying dispute there is the subject-object distinction - I believe Dennett's views undermine it without trying to collapse it to one side (idealism vs global eliminativism towards minds), and he's expressed approval of the claim that his works undermine it in an interview.

People attack Dennett like he's an eliminativist towards minds, he's not.

2- Tea tastes like nothing and you are all philosophical zombies which think they're not philosophical zombies. — khaled

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.

The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. — Dennett

If you want to talk about whether the properties of experience are appropriate to distinguish from functional properties/"extrinsic relational properties", please do so. Or otherwise engage with the paper or its ideas.

When Dennett claims to be a p-zombie, he's not saying that he's incapable of experience. He's saying that the distinction between p-zombies and humans makes no sense. Notably, Quining Qualia doesn't talk about p-zombies.

See my discussion with Luke here, this is related to covered ground.

I don't see qualia, I see pretty pictures.

It's pretty easy to argue through shitpost isn't it?

And yet, everyone seems to want to come live here. — Hippyhead

I don't. — Michael

Same. The US is fucking terrifying.

@Luke The denial of double transduction looks to me to be the same issue discussed here, whether it's appropriate to conceive of perception itself with or without perceptual intermediaries. If it goes object -> intermediary -> consciousness, that's a double transduction of raw data into formatted data (transduction 1) and formatted data into perceptual features we are conscious of (transduction 2). If it goes object -> consciousness, there's a single transduction - the single arrow becomes the whole perceptual relationship.

Probably so, but I don’t see how this makes the sensations extrinsic if it’s the brain circuitry that produces the sensations, not any other part of the perceptual process. — Marchesk

It seems to indicate that a person will not have visual imagery in their dreams if they have not had sufficiently recent visual perceptions . Whether a property is Intrinsic/extrinsic, in the article, I think is ultimately a question of access to it, access to what type of access (epistemic, causal relation, questions of "transduction") and properties of those access types (infalliblity, privacy etc).

Regarding the transduction thing, here:

 There is no double transduction [5]. The various peripheral and internal transducers—rods and cones, hair cells, olfactory epithelium cells, stretch-detectors in muscles, temperature-change detectors, nociceptors and others—are designed by evolution to take the occurrence of physically detectable properties as input and yield signals—axonal spike trains—as output. There is no central arena or depot where these spike trains become recipes for a second transduction that restores the properties transduced at the periphery, or translates them into some sort of counterpart properties of a privileged medium. Vision is not television, audition does not strike up the little band in the brain, olfactory perception does not waft aromas in any inner chamber. (Nor, one had better add, are there subjective counterpart properties, subjective colours-that-are-not-seen-with-eyes, inaudible-sounds, ghost-aromas that need no molecular vehicles, for us to enjoy and identify in some intimate but unimaginable way.) Colour vision is accomplished by a sophisticated system of information processing conducted entirely in spike trains, where colours are ‘represented’ by physical patterns of differences in spike trains that are not themselves colours. The key difference between the transmission of colour information by a DVD and the transmission of colour information by the various cortical regions is that the former is designed by engineers to be a recipe for recreating (via a transduction to another medium) the very properties that triggered the peripheral transducers that compose the megapixel screens behind the camera lens, while the latter is designed by evolution to deliver useful information about the affordances that matter to the organism in a form that is readily usable or consumable [10] by the specialized circuits that modulate the behaviours of systems external and internal.

(ii) So, there is no place in the system for qualia, if they are conceived of as intrinsic properties instantiated by (as contrasted with represented by) some activities in the nervous system. — Dennett, Facing up to the hard question

The problem with this is that we can have color experiences independent of perception.m, such as in dreams or by directly stimulating the visual cortex. — Marchesk

You can have coloured features in dreams without the same flavour and intensity of sensorimotor feedbacks we have when conscious, that's not quite the same thing as perceptual feedbacks between agent and environment. Nor does the fact that we dream establish that the coloured features in dreams are not functional, intentional or dispositional properties of those states. Can your dreams have a visual component if your brain patterns are far removed from representing colour patterns, eg if you've been born blind or become blind at an early age? Probably not:

Perhaps due to the highly visual nature of dreaming, people always have wondered if blind people dream, so some of the earliest systematic interview studies on dreams dealt with this topic, showing that people who are born blind or become blind before age 4 or 5 years old do dream even though they do not see images in their dreams,91 a finding that was then supported by laboratory studies.92,93 Nor is there much if any difference in dream content, except that there may be less aggression in their dreams.11,91

That blindness sufficiently early in a person's development can screen off visual imagery from being present in dreams suggests that even though blind subjects may have had visual experiences, visual imagery in dreams - that is, the presence of "colour qualia" in dreams - depends upon the functional characteristics of a person's sensorimotor systems and how that information is currently processed. "Functional", "how" - we're still in the scope of extrinsic relational properties. It's more likely to be the case that visual imagery in dreams occurs without the usual perceptual stimuli for vision, but that visual imagery in dreams is part of the functionality of the person's sensorimotor and discriminatory systems regardless.

Being a relation still involves a combination of, or an interaction between, a subject and an object(s). Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"? — Luke

The thing with colour etc being characterised as extrinsic relational properties means they don't collapse down to either being subjective or objective. A subjective state of colour is "in" your mind. An objective state of colour is "in" the perceived object. Characterising colour as a relational property makes it neither wholly in the head nor wholly in the object, it's a property of the relationship between the two of them.

If you're thinking of "the subjective state of colour" as "a perceptual relationship between a subject and an object" which "only the perceiving subject has access to", which "isn't an objective property of the perceived object" and which "is a property of the subjective state", that's not characterising colour as extrinsic and relational, that's characterising colour as private ("only the perceiving subject has access to") and non-relational ("is a property of the subjective state"). It's as if upon characterising perception as a relationship between a subject and an object, the properties of the relationship have been moved inside the subject. Rather than having those properties of perceptual events being of the relationship between the agent ("subject") and their environment ("object") and occurring in same scope as environmental and bodily events.

Dennett and the interviewer here talk a bit about the relationship of Dennett's criticism of qualia and undermining the subject-object distinction. Undermining it, not collapsing it to one side.

@Isaac@Kenosha Kid@Marchesk

So back to the paper, there's some skepticism regarding first order properties of qualia in intuition pump #1 - targeted at their conditions of individuation. But he's also going to throw shade on the second order properties of qualia. Those second order properties are:

What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties. First, since one cannot say to another, no matter how eloquent one is and no matter how cooperative and imaginative one's audience is, exactly what way one is currently seeing, tasting, smelling and so forth, qualia are ineffable--in fact the paradigm cases of ineffable items. According to tradition, at least part of the reason why qualia are ineffable is that they are intrinsic properties--which seems to imply inter alia that they are somehow atomic and unanalyzable. Since they are "simple" or "homogeneous" there is nothing to get hold of when trying to describe such a property to one unacquainted with the particular instance in question.

Moreover, verbal comparisons are not the only cross-checks ruled out. Any objective, physiological or "merely behavioral" test--such as those passed by the imaginary wine-tasting system-- would of necessity miss the target (one can plausibly argue), so all interpersonal comparisons of these ways-of-appearing are (apparently) systematically impossible. In other words, qualia are essentially private properties. And, finally, since they are properties of my experiences (they're not chopped liver, and they're not properties of, say, my cerebral blood flow--or haven't you been paying attention?), qualia are essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer (whatever that means) or qualia are properties of one's experience with which one is intimately or directly acquainted (whatever that means) or "immediate phenomenological qualities" (Block, 1978) (whatever that means). They are, after all, the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states. So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are...

(1) ineffable - one cannot transmit a quale over the information channels of language, and being in the same functional, behavioural or intentional state as another in the same circumstance does not count as bearing the same quale.
(2) intrinsic - eliciting (an instance of) the quale requires having an experience which bears it, one only "has access" to the quale when one is having (or has had) an experience generative of it,
(3) private - interpersonal comparison of first order experience properties is systematically impossible (Dennett's cauliflower taste != other person's cauliflower taste)
(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness - the first order properties (the taste of cauliflower) are what is presented to consciousness.

Dennett puts those second order properties in the context of a distinction with intentional, dispositional and functional properties:

The specialness of these properties is hard to pin down, but can be seen at work in intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. Could Gallo Brothers replace their human wine tasters with a machine? A computer-based "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology. We now know enough about the relevant chemistry to make the transducers that would replace taste buds and olfactory organs (delicate color vision would perhaps be more problematic), and we can imagine using the output of such transducers as the raw material--the "sense data" in effect--for elaborate evaluations, descriptions, classifications. Pour the sample in the funnel and, in a few minutes or hours, the system would type out a chemical assay, along with commentary: "a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina"--or words to such effect. Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise Endnote 3, but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience! Whatever informational, dispositional, functional properties its internal states have, none of them will be special in the way qualia are. If you share that intuition, you believe that there are qualia in the sense I am targeting for demolition.

I bolded the sense data bit, it's construing sense data as the output of senses to discriminatory systems - distinct from construing sense data as perceptual features presented to consciousness, as perceptual features are formed in an interaction between how the environment+body is sensorially sampled and discriminatory systems.

What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties.

The claim seems to be: qualia (as Dennett is attacking) are a distinct type of property from intentional, dispositional and functional properties of internal states. Those four second order properties are treated as the distinguishing features of qualia from intentional, dispositional and functional properties.

Let's try not to get trapped in the Motte and Bailey situation Dennett describes:

My challenge strikes some theorists as outrageous or misguided because they think they have a much blander and hence less vulnerable notion of qualia to begin with. They think I am setting up and knocking down a strawman, and ask, in effect: "Who said qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible ways things seem to one?" Since my suggested fourfold essence of qualia may strike many readers as tendentious, it may be instructive to consider, briefly, an appparently milder alternative: qualia are simply "the qualitative or phenomenal features of sense experience( s ), in virtue of having which they resemble and differ from each other, qualitatively, in the ways they do." (Shoemaker, 1982, p. 367) Surely I do not mean to deny those features!

I reply: it all depends on what "qualitative or phenomenal" comes to. Shoemaker contrasts qualitative similarity and difference with "intentional" similarity and difference-- similarity and difference of the properties an experience repre sents or is "of". That is clear enough, but what then of "pheno menal"? Among the non-intentional (and hence qualitative?) properties of my visual states are their physiological properties. Might these very properties be the qualia Shoemaker speaks of? It is supposed to be obvious, I take it, that these sorts of features are ruled out, because they are not "accessible to introspection" (Shoemaker, private correspondence). These are features of my visual state, perhaps, but not of my visual experience. They are not phenomenal properties.

in the thread any more. In terms of the paper, we're trying to look at whether it's appropriate to distinguish qualia from functional, intentional and dispositional properties. No one wants to deny that people can taste coffee.

Fascism - to a decent approximation paligenetic ultranationalism, an ideology of restoration/rebirth (palingenetic) of a superior mythologised nation/culture to which an adherent belongs (ultranationalism). Four commonly cited contributory causes:

(1) Natural tendencies (eg. "tribalism", "group size limitations on empathy"), the same across all societies and all times - therefore predictively, descriptively and explanatorily useless. Discount them.

(2) Personality profiling (eg. "authoritarian personality"), at best tells you demographic traits that predispose people to holding fascist beliefs. That political belief is contextualised in socio-economic conditions renders personality alone a poor explanation for holding these beliefs, like a building being flammable does not explain why it has been firebombed. At best, may inform in this sense:

“But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

Profiling those who "will find out when the time comes" - that still requires analysis of...

(3) Social+historical effects (eg. systemic racism): the ordering of demographic categories in culturally relevant power hierarchies (systemic discrimination and its history) and their prejudicial supporting ideologies (eg. white supremacy, anti-semitism) tends to mirror the ordering of demographic categories in fascist beliefs held in those circumstances.

"Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!" + "the colonised are inferior" + "we civilised them" =>
"We want Britain to go back to the glory days of Empire" + "let's get all the (racial slurs) out of here".

These effects are good at explaining the content of facist belief but not why any individual or group believes them, acts upon them. Cannot answer "Why now?".

(4) Crisis effects (eg. crises of political legitimacy, economic crises) - deterioration of the existing social order creates seizable power vacuums for opportunists, a combination of populist rhetoric (restore things to pre-crisis (mythologised) stability, "swift and decisive action") and "cutting out the rot" that lead to the crisis. This is an answer to "Why now?".

For neutral observers, it justifiably seems like it will never come - until it's already there.

A fifth aspect is required to explain why individual fascist actors (far right terrorists) do what they do and why they do it; processes of isolation and radicalisation. But they are a minority of people. (Edit: in this context, I should've mentioned that overwhelmingly such actors are men from somewhat troubled social conditions).

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

With sufficient pedantry, what demarcates the steps of the "iterations" of perceptions would also vary too, no? There's no guarantee that update steps correspond 1-1 with "instants" of perception as we'd introspectively, pre-theoretically or even experientially in this case draw the line. The indexical progression of update steps within the updating procedure isn't the same thing as individuation of situated ("subjective") states. It seems there must be indexical progression without reportable changes precisely because selectively apportioning working memory is a component of perceptual updates! The progression of situated states looks to have a slower clock than the indexical progression within algorithm (Libet's delay) and between its components (reflex triggering before conscious awareness that it was triggered).

Regardless, it does seem important to be able to study the "perceptual moment" and to give an account of how that arises from the steps of the updating procedure. Even if that perceptual moment is still a "finite stretching along in time" (as Heidegger puts it) so even "instantaneously" has temporal dependence (priors + expectations).

Indeed, I was just reading a paper about how the process can cause information loss and, you're right, we can hardly discuss perceptual features not present due to the processes that lost them. And to this extent qualia may not be useful scientific concepts, as Dennett said. That said, there is, as both yourself and Isaac have pointed out, feedback between what we consciously perceive and the unconscious processes that form those perceptions, so any complete description of perception must surely account for what is perceived. — Kenosha Kid

Aye. I imagine that the kind of accounts philosophically split along two lines:

(1) How are perceptual features formed?
(2) What is the phenomenal content of a given perceptual feature?

The first admits of functional explanations (it's a "how" question regarding a process), the second evokes an apportioning of phenomenal content to perceptual features, and we might be in a similar situation to the debate we just had (perceptual features are "submitted to" a phenomenal content receptor vs phenomenal content ascription is interweaved with the process of perceptual feature formation).

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

Edit: I'd suggest that the "phenomenal content" of a given perceptual feature is the perceptual feature itself - or perhaps "the most attentionally prioritised aspects of the nascent perceptual feature components", or when introspecting "the attentionally prioritised aspects of the remembered/introspectively targeted perceptual feature", there's a lot of information loss involved - but Hard Problem enthusiasts wouldn't like that.

>Deplatforming is against freedom of speech.
>Trying to stop political rallies isn't.

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

I see. It seems then that our disagreement (small such as it is) is only over whether dismissal of Qualia in their entirety puts this idea at risk (throws the baby out with the bathwater, as you put it). My feeling is that the idea here is so generalised and applicable to a field much wider than qualia, that dismissing all talk of qualia maintains the conscious awareness of the results of unconscious processing completely intact. — Isaac

It is tricky. The nascent way we split up phenomena and describe them isn't a neutral process of observation and recording with respect to the topic of the thread. Reading off features from our perceptions involves the same process by which perceptual features are formed (to some degree anyway). If the devil is in the details of the formation process of perceptual features, the way we read off features from already formed perceptions effectively has a sampling bias in that regard. We're sampling from an already formed space of features introspectively rather than looking at the process of perceptual feature formation which is constructing the elements of that sample that we later sample from with another (related) process.

:lol: I probably shouldnt either. — frank

There's no argument or evidence that is going to get me to think, 'Hmmm...maybe I don't have qualia after all..." — RogueAI

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

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

That claim is self-evident. — RogueAI

Lame — RogueAI

You responded to a series of reasoned posts with an insult, an appeal to self evidence (self evident to you) and a bare assertion. Make an argument engaging with posts or the source material.

Also consider this bit from the essay:

Even if we are as loathe as Lewis is to abandon the distinction, shouldn't we be suspicious of the following curious fact? If challenged to explain the idea of an intrinsic property to a neophyte, many people would hit on the following sort of example: consider Tom's ball; it has many properties, such as its being made of rubber from India, its belonging to Tom, its having spent the last week in the closet, and its redness. All but the last of these are clearly relational or extrinsic properties of the ball. Its redness, however, is an intrinsic property. Except this isn't so. Ever since Boyle and Locke we have known better. Redness--public redness--is a quintessentially relational property, as many thought experiments about "secondary qualities" show. (One of the first was Berkeley's (1713) pail of lukewarm water, and one of the best is Bennett's (1965) phenol- thio-urea.) The seductive step, on learning that public redness (like public bitterness, etc.) is a relational property after all, is to cling to intrinsicality ("something has to be intrinsic!") and move it into the subject's head. It is often thought, in fact, that if we take a Lockean, relational position on objective bitterness, redness, etc., we must complete our account of the relations in question by appeal to non-relational, intrinsic properties. If what it is to be objectively bitter is to produce a certain effect in the members of the class of normal observers, we must be able to specify that effect, and distinguish it from the effect produced by objective sourness and so forth.

Adding "subjective" to something has an uncanny way of moving it into someone's head.

Edit: as an analogy, "isn't it true that society has abolished all gender inequalities?" said an audience member in a lecture about gender inequality, "how like a man to say!" replied the lecturer. The rhetorical device used there took the audience member's perspective and put it "inside" of one of the constitutive elements of what was being spoken about.... "isn't it true that when we eat stuff it has a taste?" has the "how like a subjective state!" posited in the statement.

If this characterisation is incorrect, does it imply that we can't perceive orange juice to be sweet, or cauliflower to be creamy, at a particular time? If no "final product" of perception gets presented to consciousness (at a time, or at all conscious times), then how can we make any judgments about what we perceive? — Luke

I don't think so? The problem with the "subjective state" isn't the "state" it's the "subjective". Similarly with "private state", it's not the "state" which is the problem it's the "private". Denying that perception has properties associated with it (a kind of "there are no minds" thesis) I believe is quite different from saying that when someone tastes something sweet it is predicated of a relation between some perceptual stimulus and the perceiving agent, rather than of a subjective state inherent in the agent produced by a perceptual relation.

Another way of saying it: sweetness as an aspect of a taste relation vs sweetness as an aspect of a taste object. The "instances" of perception as well as their properties become seen as extrinsic (articulated over an environmental+bodily context) and relational (between the agent and that context) rather than intrinsic (embedded within a a subjective experiential unit "in its consciousness") and unary (as a component part of such a unit).

Since we are at least conscious of them, I think it helps to bear in mind that, whatever else is going on, and whatever definitions of consciousness we prefer, this presentation is happening. The alternative is, as per that shorter flow, that our bodies just dump raw sensory data straight into our consciousnesses unadulterated, — Kenosha Kid

Yes. Why not? I'm not trying to shoehorn objects of perception into some previous mysterious philosophy of qualia. I'm just saying that we have them and they serve a purpose. That purpose is not necessarily to do philosophy with or chat about them ;) — Kenosha Kid

Also @jamalrob because perceptual intermediaries.

Why not? It's a question of what the "object of perception" refers to.

Earlier in my discussion with @Luke I quoted SEP's characterisation of sense data. They have three parts to their definition:

(1) Sense data are the kind of thing we are directly aware of in perception,
(2) Sense data are dependent on the mind, and
(3) Sense data have the properties that perceptually appear to us.

They let you write things like: "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties that perceptually appear to us", or "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties we are consciously aware of".

A sense datum is then a kind of completed form of perception, an instance of what is perceived, which is then presented to consciousness. The chain for it goes:

object/environment -> sense datum -> consciousness

Or in accordance with what you wrote:

Raw sensory data -> Pre-processed data -> Formatted object -> conscious apprehension

object/environment->raw sensory data->pre-processed data->formatted object ->conscious apprehension.

Now the "formatted object" in the latter chain satisfies the three components of the definition:
(1) Formatted objects are the kind of thing we are directly aware of in perception. The directness comes from being the antecedent element to conscious apprehension in that chain.
(2) Formatted objects are dependent on the mind. You seem to agree with this
(3) Formatted objects have properties that perceptually appear to us.

(1) Let's focus on the directness of the relationship between the formatted object and conscious apprehension. If we have characterised perception as this chain - there should be a component part of perception that corresponds to a formatted object being submitted to some other faculty in which case we become consciously aware of it. The submission relation should be unidirectional, it's an ordering of events in the process.

The point I'm making against this relationship between perceptual objects and conscious apprehension conceived as a receiver of perceptually formatted objects is that apprehension actually partakes in the formation process of the perceptual features that we are conscious of. There's no submission of a formatted object to a next step, the "submission to conscious apprehension" occurs as part of the formatting stage. AFAIK the formatting stage is the stage at which perceptual features are formed (by some modelling process) and attentionally prioritised (@Isaac) relative to the task one is doing.

The role that task relative attentional priority plays in determining what perceptual features form is well illustrated by the video I linked. If you do the task in the experiment, your perceptual processes will attune so hard to detecting task relevant features (ball passing events) you will only be conscious of large environmental variations that are task relevant. Whatever process is "apportioning conscious awareness" is running dependently on perceptual feature formation and vice versa. That makes the "arrows" go both ways! Conscious apprehension is interweaved in perceptual feature formation and attentional prioritisation (which also interweave in each other). So it's less a submission, and more of a feedback. And notice there's no distinct "conscious apprehension" faculty for perceptual features to submit to once formed.

So the argument goes:
(A) Assume conscious apprehension is a distinct, terminal stage of the process of perception.
(B) So if conscious apprehension had formatted perceptual objects submitted to it, it would be in a a unidirectional relationship with the perceptual process, but whatever "submission process" there is requires it to be a bidirectional relationship with perception.
(C) So from (B), we discharge (A) as it implied a falsehood. We have that conscious apprehension is not a terminal stage of perception, it is interweaved with perception.

Specifically, no formatted objects are "submitted to" a distinct faculty, in other words the "node" of conscious apprehension is actually a process interweaving "object formatting" (perceptual feature formation) and "attentional prioritisation". There's no such node, and if there were such a node the relationship could not be unidirectional.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. I'm going to take a stab at it assuming you mean to ask if conscious awareness is a necessary feature of bacwkard acting signals. No, but it is usually involved at the higher model levels which, of course, will have an influence over all the models below them. Dream study is probably the best case study for this (again huge pinch of salt required here, very difficult to study), but it seems likely, because of the way memory storage works, that basic object recognition, including limited function, must be able to take place without conscious awareness because they do so during deep sleep dreaming, but appropriate response, form detail and complex function do require some conscious awareness because they only seem to enter stage during REM sleep where you're semi-conscious. — Isaac

So with respect to Isaac's comments there, conscious awareness does seem to "come online" in the higher stages in the formation of our perceptual features. Conscious awareness seems to be associated with upper stages of the our perceptual modelling hierarchy, in which we have isolated the task relevant parameters of our body and environment and are acting upon them. But it's still in a feedback relationship with the lower level models - promoting certain actions, certain adjustments, the formation of certain perceptual features, the exploration of our environment to form new task relevant features etc. It doesn't look like there's a distinct "submission" operation to consciousness, it's more that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with a concentration of bodily effort and attention relative to a task.

Another way of making the point: that conscious awareness "coming online as it is" isn't in a temporal order with perceptual feature formation (this, then that), it's part of the hierarchical order within perceptual feature formation (this is an upper part of that). If the time part is weird ; the apportioning of conscious awareness is a procedural component (systemic part) of perceptual feature formation - rather than a distinct procedure which the results of perceptual feature formation output to.

So how does that relate to the denial of qualia? Well, if we've undermined the existence of a thing which sense data are submitted to, and shown that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with perceptual feature formation, the thing that we'd applied properties to no longer exists as it is theorised. Part (3) of the definition of sense-data:

(3) Sense data have the properties that perceptually appear to us.

If we start thinking of our own experiences in this way, we're going to be talking about private properties that only we have epistemic access to, that inhere within a subjective state that comes from the submission of a perceptual object to it. It's like disbelieving in the existence of a hallucinatory giant chicken then still running away from it.

But if it's false, the sense data no longer have the properties that perceptually appear to us since they don't exist (since they are not in a direct relationship of procedural antecedence with conscious apprehension). If you want to "recover" the normal use of words to describe our experiences, you have to be extremely careful that in talking about "the properties that perceptually appear to us" you don't conjure an object submitted to consciousness which has those properties. In other words, the use of part (3) of the definition (eg, "my subjective felt qualities") easily leads to conceptions that commit the error in (1). If we're talking about "subjective felt qualities that are only in my consciousness", I mean they're... private in some way suspiciously similar to the qualia one criticised (only their receiving subject has epistemic access...) and so on. Thinking of felt qualities under the aspect of (3) commits one to a rabbit hole of qualia like entities.

If instead "the properties that perceptually appear to us" are not conceived as part of a "subjective state presented to my consciousness", they're conceived as part of my agent-environment relation specific to me at the time... They're then "extrinsic relational properties" of the sort given the okay by the paper. So, talk and write how you like, just make sure that how you talk and write doesn't conjure ghosts. And it's really only in this context that the ghosts matter.

Double post because of the notification bug, and I think this is an important clarifying point in my dispute with @Kenosha Kid.

(Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.) — Kenosha Kid

Yes! I'm coming at this from the "left wing" angle that how you've characterised qualia is still subject to the article's critiques. It's extremely hard to stop thinking in terms of perceptual intermediaries with private properties.

I quoted these from Merleau-Ponty earlier in the thread, who is critical of qualia for broadly similar reasons:

The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception.

The "terminal point" (the last phase in your diagram) being a "pure impression" given to "perception", the "pure impression" allegedly has experiential properties, but is "inconceivable as an instant of perception". Perception being of sense data with qualia is the same idea as consciousness being of perceptual objects with experienced properties.

Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms

Compare that to "extrinsic relational properties" in Dennett's essay. "absolute terms" I'm reading as criticising the same idea that "red" inheres in the experiential object as a quale, rather than red being a property of my relationship with a seen object. I see x as red vs my experiential object has a red quale.

he 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.

The "final stage" in which a completed perceptual object is transmitted "to" the conscious apprehension (or is not transmitted to it) is a transposition of what is perceived into a perceptual object - what is seen to seen properties of formatted objects that we have seen - rather than an instance of our relationship with our environment. "what is it like to me" - red, "what is it like", "what is my sensory object like? I guess it's like what I've sensed...".

The qualia are the objects of subjective experience, so are not necessarily pre-existing objects provided to conscious apprehension but are the objects of providing data for conscious apprehension. — Kenosha Kid

That's what the article is criticising though, if they're not pre-existing objects, they solely permeate the "conscious apprehension" as objects with properties. It's like characterising perception as a packaging process for sensory data, and then some other distinct process passes the package as a whole to the "conscious apprehension". Then in reflecting upon our memories of perceptual events, we conjure the properties with some introspective process as if they were there in the perceptual process all along.

And I think this is what is safe to rule out, although I expect rationalists will not like it. (Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.) — Kenosha Kid

It's safe to rule out on the basis that not all datastreams our perception explores+captures out of the environment and our body result in a conscious apprehension, but not safe to rule out that apprehension itself is a component part of perception. The packaging/formatting occurs within the process of perception as a continually evolving model of data input streams and compensatory/exploratory activities, it's "never done" to be output to a "conscious apprehension", "conscious apprehension" is some feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment (and our history).

This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours. — Kenosha Kid

The only reason I chose to label that "perception->conscious apprehension" was because I believed you were talking about input data to conscious apprehension. It's a swerve in context to dismiss the second account on the basis of consciousness consisting of a sample of those data streams' features (there being "unconsciously" processed data aspects) but not the first! Try this phrasing: how something is apprehended ("what is it like to me" if conscious) is part of the perceptual process, rather than resulting in a distinct terminal point of a data stream that apprehends a completed experiential object of some kind (that bears "experiential properties"/qualia as they are usually used).

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