I think you're missing the point. — jamalrob

What is the point then?

Why do you reject the relational account, under which colour is a proprty of perceived things, as perceived in a certain way in a certain environment? — jamalrob

Because that property is generated in the brain. Also, consider that perceptual relativity means that an objects relational properties can vary.

Thus, colour is entirely relational. According to taste one could see this as a deficiency in the language--because of the way we use "colour", we can't say whether colour belongs to us or the things we're looking at--or else one could see it as demonstrating the essential relational nature of perception. — jamalrob

The Cyreneacs liked to say they were sweetened or reddened instead of the apple being sweet or red, which acknowledges that color and taste are properties of the perceiver, which John Locke also pointed out. Dennett starts by mentioning Locke's primary and secondary qualities.

I don't see why. Evan Thompson's description is consistent with an account of perception that has been described as "direct". But then, different people mean different things by "direct perception". — jamalrob

Because color and taste are in the brain, not out there in the world.

But then, different people mean different things by "direct perception". — jamalrob

Indeed, we've had this discussion before. But I take it to be a dispute over whether something mental or the object itself is the content of perception. Since objects aren't actually colored or sweet, I have some problems with the second option.

I don't think saying that the brain produces the experience of colour entails that there is an interior spectator. I imagine Dennett might say, not that the brain produces colours for us to look at internally, but that the relevant events in the brain just are those colour experiences. That's not how I would put it myself, but I don't think the Cartesian theatre is entailed either way. — jamalrob

Perhaps not, but it does still leave all of Chalmers' arguments for the hard problem in play. How do we account for brain events having color experiences?

But the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves are properties of those coloured things. — jamalrob

Yes, but our experience isn't of the chemical makeup, but rather of color. And if that color occurs in the brain, then it's hard to see how we could be directly perceiving a red apple.

Look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq6V4OD_DSs
It's undeniable a phenomenal Jesus appears and that's what is being discussed here. When I type this post I am reacting to the image of Jesus and not say- it's dimensions, hue, tone, (bit pieces). — JupiterJess

Are objects of veridical perception phenomenal? It seems that way if color, sound, etc. are phenomenal.

I suppose an evolutionary account would say those kinds of illusions are a byproduct of how our visual system works. Sometimes it can be fooled. As for how we turn colors into shapes and what not, that would probably involve different brain regions dedicated to the task.

But why it's sometimes phenomenal and sometimes not? I don't know. Dennett liked to say there were computing "agents" in the brain, and once one got focus, the contents of that "agent" would be phenomenal, to paraphrase his argument. But why getting focus would led to a phenomenal experience still seems unexplained.

It's impressive and retarded at the same time. — BrianW

Yep. Makes me wonder if there will be 21st century version of the Amish that draws the line at AI, anti-aging and spending all your time in VR.

I'm not saying humans shouldn't keep going with technology, only that as I get older, disruption starts to feel more unsettling than exciting for me.

I didn't want to go down the meaning rabbit hole in this thread. I'm aware of that sort of criticism. What I'm wondering is if Dennett's approach can dissolve the hard problem by showing how color, sound, etc is explained.

Indeed, but in all honesty, I find myself agreeing with Douglas Adams:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

I mean, I can only take so much talk about how VR is going to disrupt education, unlike all the other technology before it, everything is going to run on the blockchain, we need to set up a colony on Mars stat, fund the hyperloop, humans will soon reverse the aging process, etc, before I just want a time machine so I can go back to the good old days.

Maybe with an iPhone and a laptop with all the news downloaded from the past 20 years in tow.

EDIT: I forgot about the monthly report on the latest machine learning accomplishment and how the robots are coming for us any day now.

And the solution is to live as the Amish, purposefully isolating, remaining ignorant, and living peacefully within the walls of protection built by the corrupted. So many ironies. — Hanover

"We solemnly believe that although humans have been around for a million years, you feel strongly that they had just the right amount of technology between 1835 and 1850. Not too little, not too much."

The question is do these sorts of behaviors not occur in other economic systems?

Homicidal sun
won't you come
And wash away the humans.

Turn it around. If you're being tortured, you're not going to worry about whether it's really happening. Pain has this nice property of driving skeptical thoughts away. So why not let pleasure do the same thing for you?

I've spent many years of my life believing that matter (and energy) is the primary a — Noah Te Stroete

Well, matter is a form of energy and energy might be fluctuations in the vacuum, so maybe it's the vacuum that's primary.

Recently I've been wondering if consciousness is the primary substance that the material world gloms onto or adheres to. — Noah Te Stroete

The problem with this is that human consciousness is dependent on bodies.

What are your thoughts on this and what are the implications for free will? — Noah Te Stroete

I don't know that it would change anything.

So what we'd need to look at is why you take the explanations of photosynthesis to be sufficient to "make sense of photosynthesis" to you, — Terrapin Station

Because photosynthesis can be understood in terms of chemistry, physics and biology, but experience cannot be understood in terms of brain activity.

Of course the explanation of photosynthesis isn't photosynthesis, but the explanation makes sense of what photosynthesis is. This is not the case for neuroscience when it comes to subjectivity.

Or to put it another way, we can write down the process for photosynthesis or simulate it. We don't know what that would mean for consciousness.

Sure. So neural activity isn't going to itself explain consciousness (if we read that literally). A person would have to explain consciousness. — Terrapin Station

But an explanation of how neural activity results in a red experience would show how some neural activity is conscious, and it would dissolve the hard problem, because you could reductively explain consciousness in terms of neuroscience.

The problem with that is the terms of neuroscience are conceptually different from the terms of experience. That makes it a category mistake to say an explanation of neural activity is the same as talking about having a red experience.

What "makes sense of some phenomenon" is going to be different for different people, no? — Terrapin Station

Make sense of it scientifically or philosophically.

Explanations are sets of words, right? — Terrapin Station

Sets of words that make sense of some phenomenon, showing how such phenomena works and came to be. That sort of thing.

And explanations of how to play a C major seventh chord are not a C major seventh chord, and so on. — Terrapin Station

But if we want to explain consciousness, it's not sufficient to point to neural activity, unless the neural activity actually explains consciousness. But nobody has shown this to be the case.

Neurons firing and having a red experience aren't conceptually the same thing. It's a category mistake to say they are.

Are you saying that the explanations of neural etc. activity don't seem like consciousness to you, and you wouldn't count something as an explanation that doesn't seem like consciousness? — Terrapin Station

The explanations of neural activity are not consciousness FULL STOP.

How could they be?

So, what happens to concepts like "subjectivity", "pains", and "intentionality"? Do we just throw them away or are they indicative that logical behaviourism is not all-encompassing in describing the affective aspect of the mind? — Posty McPostface

Do you experience pains and mean things? If so, then why would you throw them away because of some philosophical argument?

If the beetle in the box entails logical behaviorism, then it's flat out wrong.

f a behavioural solipsist were to come along and tell us s/he known intent inferred from behaviour, how could we prove s/he wrong? — Posty McPostface

The amount of invalid inferences this behaviorist would make. Think about all the times we try to tell whether someone is lying, or fail to tell. Take a jury trying to decide if a defendant acts guilty during a trial. Or how often in true crime people's opinions will split over whether someone sounded suspicious on a 911 call.

But consciousness happens when a physical brain behaves a certain way, right? So replicate that kind of behaviour using the same kind of material and it should also cause consciousness to happen. — Michael

That might work. I'm more arguing against the simulation idea.

nd if it can occur naturally by DNA-driven cell development then why can't it occur artificially by intelligent design? — Michael

I don't know whether it can, but the conceptual argument against computing consciousness is that computation is objective and abstract, whereas consciousness is subjective and concrete.

By studying the human brain and replicating its behaviour. — Michael

Assuming behavior can result in consciousness. There's good reasons for thinking that's not the case.

What do you mean by "fundamental"? — Michael

Something that's not explicable in terms of something else, which in context means an empirical explanation.

Only in our scenario that biological computer isn't told to turn on a blue light but to activate the parts of its "brain" that are responsible for bringing about a blue colour experience. — Michael

But how will we know how to put together a biological computer that can bring about a blue color experience? I assume that won't be a binary pattern.

Unless you want to argue for something like a God-given soul or substance dualism, — Michael

There are other options, which you know about.

what reason is there to think that the human brain and its emergent consciousness is some special, magical thing that cannot be manufactured and controlled? — Michael

Not magical, but maybe fundamental.

We might not have the knowledge or technology to do it now, but it doesn't follow from that that it's in principle impossible. — Michael

Right, but there are somewhat convincing conceptual arguments against it. I don't know what the nature of consciousness is, but nobody else has been able to explain it either. And until that can be done, we don't know what computing it would entail, other than stimulating an existing brain.

A computer simulation is just taking some input and applying the rules of a mathematical model, producing some output. The article I linked to explains that biological computers can do this. It's what makes them biological computers and not just ordinary proteins.

And we know that at least one biological organ is capable of giving rise to consciousness.

So put the two together and we have a biological computer, running simulations, where the output is a certain kind of conscious experience. — Michael

Wait a second, what does a conscious output look like where you take some input, apply the rules of a mathematical model, and produce output?

I'm not aware of any mathematical model that can do that, or what it could even possible look like. Are you?

I'm thinking you input some matrices of data, there's some machine learning models, and then the output is .... a blue experience???

That doesn't compute, because it's not a computation.

Here's something related Elon said last year. To paraphrase:

Humans are already cyborgs and superintelligent because of smartphones. Anyone with one of these is more powerful than the president of the United states 30 years ago. — paraphrased Elon

Then he goes on to talk about the limiting factor for superhuman intelligence is output bandwidth, so we need brain to computer interfaces to bypass our slow modes of communication.

A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate ‐ independence . The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon ‐ based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon ‐ based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well. — Bostrom

Yeah, this is far from widely accepted in philosophy of mind. People with a strong computer science background tend to endorse it a lot more than people who are more philosophical in general. I'm not sure where the neuroscientists fall on this on average, but I would guess they're a bit more reserved about making such assumptions.

I believe Musk is creating the conditions with his Boring company and SpaceX, to be able to travel to any part of the world in an hour's time. That's pretty radical if you ask me. — Posty McPostface

Sure, along with cold fusion, flying cars, and Martian colonies. We've heard this sort of stuff for decades now. You should see some of the futuristic predictions from the 1950s.

The argument for the simulation I think is quite strong. Because if you assume any improvements at all over time — any improvement, one percent, .1 percent. Just extend the time frame, make it a thousand years, a million years — the universe is 13.8 billion years old. — Posty McPostface

But this argument doesn't work for everything. Say we apply it to the speed of transportation. There was a dramatic increase from horse to train, automobile and airplane. But after a certain point, which would be the 60s or 70s with highways, concord jets and trips to the moon, we didn't really increase our speed of transportation, despite continued improvements in technology related to transportation. We leveled out on how fast we move people and things around.

A similar thing might happen to computing before we reach the amount we would need to actually run an ancestor simulation. What sort of computing resources is it going to take to simulate Earth's history? It will be a tremendous amount, if you want it to be anything like the real world.

The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one — Michael

One potential problem is that we don't know whether a simulation can include consciousness. The fact that we're

A. Conscious
B. Don't have any clue what it would entail to simulate consciousness

Argues against the likelihood that we're living in a simulation.

nd realists are idealists in the sense that they understand reality to be mediated by the self (from sense organs to personality as a whole). — macrosoft

Some realists do deny this, at least when it comes to perception. Direct realism denies that there is an idea or sense impression in the mind mediating the thing itself. As such, you're aware of seeing the tree, not a mental image of the tree.

Because we’re not the center of the universe, and mind is dependent on matter.

The stupid unfunny joke is the level of suffering and capriciousness of life, not the mere possibility that God created us yesterday for the LULZ.

Why is existence dependent on being known?

Of course only if it was, but if it was, then probabilities would go out of the window because they would be an illusion along with the world as (we think) we know it. — TWI

Well, there is that. Same with being in a simulation.

We don't like it when people dump something on our door step and then leave. Get back here and defend your pile of crap! — Bitter Crank

Maybe the flaming dog poop on your door popped into existence? Must you always blame the neighbors?

I don't know. I'm a wavering realist. Sometimes idealist arguments get in my head.

Because if the world was created yesterday, or today or even just now then our senses are deceiving us. All sorts of reasons. — TWI

Yes, but only if it actually was.

1. We don't know whether that's possible.

2. If it is possible, then it's probably highly unlikely (statistical fluctuation results in the orderly world around us or the appearance of one).

3. We don't have any reason for thinking it did happen (our senses and memories tell us the world has been around for a while).

Therefore, it's reasonable to suppose the world has been around longer than yesterday.

Well, there are idealists on this forum.

Yes, but if we wish to test those ideas we still only have our senses. — TWI

Yes, but our senses tell us the world has been around for a while. So what reason do we have to suspect the skeptical scenario? What reason do we have to believe it's even possible? Because we can think it?