The lack of explanation for why brains are conscious but hearts aren't is a problem. — RogueAI

Not only that, but only some brain activity is correlated with consciousness. So if there's something special neurons are doing, it's not all of them. That's a problem for mind-brain identify. What makes some neural activity conscious? It needs to be something more than an identity, or you end up an unexplained ontology where only certain, very specific things are conscious, for no reason at all.

Color experience is what your brain is doing when you see color — khaled

So the brain is creating an experience that is not part of any scientific description of the world, including the neuroscientific one of the brain activity while seeing color.

I do not see how this helps physicalism. It sounds like brain activity is creating something additional to the physical, which would be color experience in this case.

he problem from my perspective, is that by calling this "physicalism", it excludes visual experience. But why isn't visual experience physical? Eyes are physical, brains are physical, mental phenomena is physical. These things are made of physical stuff. — Manuel

That all depends on whether you think colors are physical. If colors are out there in the world on the surface of objects or light sources, then you can mount a defense. But it's tricky to defend color primitivism, because the scientific facts do not straight forwardly match on to color. For one thing, you will likely have to allow for an object or lighted source to have multiple colors at the same time. For another, how do the colors "get into" the brain? Do they ride on photons and then hop onto electrons all the way into the visual cortex? Or does the brain recreate them in response to the stimulus? Which isn't color itself, but a result of wavelength and frequency interacting with cells in the eyes.

At any rate, Mary hasn't seen red until she leaves the room. How do we categorize "seeing red"? Mary knew all the scientific facts, but presumably this never resulted in seeing red. I should mention that another issue for colors being out there in the world is that they are an additional supervenient fact to the scientific facts. Wavelength and frequency properties are not colors, unless you think the entire EM spectrum is colored, from gamma-rays to radio waves. If not, what makes visible light special?

I wouldn't say she learns anything new, so much as has a new experience. No implications for physicalism. — khaled

How would you fit color experience into physicalism?

One or the other. Not both. — Banno

Or we could say that morality is not a domain that applies to nature. It's a category error to apply morality to the universe.

...but not equitable. Seems to me this argument is based on word-play. — Banno

Sure, as long as we admit morality is based on words we make up (in the language game of society).

Your acceptance of a claim of what justice is thus appears contingent on your knowledge of it. And one answer I take as a wish that there was a fact about it, and the other would be some sense that we made it up or agreed to it, as if there were no necessary fact about it. I would say there is no "fact" about a moral truth that will satisfy the criteria to obviate your place in the state of its truth, but that, nevertheless, it is not insupportable, only not without our part, our bringing them to life, carrying them forward in our culture, adapting them to new contexts, allowing them to constitute us and compromise us. — Antony Nickles

My issue is that if morality is entirely human-made, then there's no objective truth to it, except for sociological facts about this person's morals and that cultures morality. Which means that anyone's morality, including our modern enlightened since of fairness, is arbitrary. Nothing real makes it true. It's historical contingency that we end up valuing what we do. Or perhaps there's an evolutionary explanation for a tendency of the species to construct fair societies, despite our numerous failures over the past few thousand years.

Nothing else in nature cares whether we treat each other fairly. Whether we succeed or not, the universe is totally indifferent.

Social constructs are not real? That's not quite right. Injustice is very real. Again, thinking in terms of justice not being an "objective feature of the world" obscures its import. Objective or not, it is a feature of the world! Always remove "objective" and "subjective" from an utterance in order to check what work they are doing. — Banno

Sure, but granting that something is a social construct makes it rather arbitrary. Different societies create different constructs. The Romans thought slavery was justifiable. We don't. Who adjudicates between the two?

Or to put it another way, who decides that equity is the fundamental moral value and not courage, holiness or an eye for an eye? Different societies value different things. We see this difference between the East and West over individual rights versus the collective good. Which is more important? Depends on who you ask.

If I make a statement that social construct A is moral, what grounds that? Is it just because the particular society I happen to live in values construct A? But if I grew up in a difference society I might find myself valuing construct B.

Yes, it appears that social existence is key to the question of morality, gives it some semblance of truth and objectivity but note this is telelogical in character - morality (justice) is needed to run society in the best way possible, its truth is secondary or irrelevant. — TheMadFool

Yeah, you can see this if you challenge the morality of humans continuing to survive. They you can't use the argument that justice is good for society, since the existence of society is now under question, morally speaking. Which some environmentalists and anti-natalists do on grounds of hedonism or concern for other living species. What possible fact about the world would settle that dispute?

It's just for humans to survive. Is that statement truth-apt?

The jury is still out. I can neither confirm nor deny. — TheMadFool

I can confirm that it's colorful in my visual field, and my dreams, and to a lesser extent, my imagination.

I agree that it's rather mysterious, and all attempts to make it go away have been less than convincing.

I think Banno means if we have a concept of justice, then we can make a truth-apt statement about slavery regarding it's lack of justice, based on whether slavery meets the criteria for something being just.

That doesn't say anything about whether justice is some objective feature of the world. My concern would begin with whether justice was real or just a social construct. I suspect the latter, but tend to live life as if the former were true.

We don't think ant slavery is unjust because ants are not creatures which take justice into consideration. But then we might say the same for the universe, which counts for justice being an idea we made up and try to apply to human interaction. But there's probably an evolutionary reason for that. Thing is that evolution does not meet the criteria for justice, but it does provide some grounding for the origination of the idea.

Humans need to cooperate, and treating each other fairly is a good way to do that. And when people don't, we get angry and wish to punish the unjust, because that usually motivates people to act fairly, which is in our survival interest. Or something along those lines.

However, subjectively speaking, Mary does learn something new. Never having seen red and then seeing red gives Mary the sensation of redness; Mary gets to know what red looks like when seen. — TheMadFool

This would seem to suggest that there is more than objective facts about color. Which is why we can't say what a bat experiences when using sonar, but we can describe the physics of sonar just fine, and carry out investigations of bat physiology.

I wonder how the Mary thought experiment would have gone down if brown had been used in instead of red, since brown is a related color and only seen in the presence of lighter colors, so you you can't just associate with 600nm of wavelength.

I also wonder if the thought experiment is modified so that right before leaving the room, Mary's brain is stimulated to induce a hallucination of seeing something red. Does that change things at all? Or what if Mary is exposed to an optical illusion so that she sees a color that isn't there?



At any rate, we do end up with the uncomfortable conclusion for physicalists that there is some experience of color not captured in the physical description of color perception.

Good luck with all that.

It often turns out that we are wrong in our claims to know, but how would that work with having a pain, or any sensation we're having? — Sam26

So we can't say, "I know that I see a red coffee cup", or "I know that I had a dream last night of my teeth falling out while addressing an audience in my underwear as a tsunami approached"?

That seems to undermine empiricism. Of course we know things based on having experiences. Sensations make up those experiences.

Our only chance of survival is to also close all factories, convert all energy to solar and use hydrogen storage, stop all science experiments except CERN and build a fence around the Amazon? Also stuff about forcing people to have two kids or less, letting test animals go and dismantling all nukes. Who is doing all this? The UN? China, Russia and the US?

That's not going to happen and it would be disastrous if someone had the power to make it happen, which nobody does.

How the hell is anything like that going to be enforced, and why should we think it would be beneficial?

So what else might you have been able to do with 5.6 trillion dollars...? — Banno

Invest heavily in nuclear and geothermal along with storage for wind and solar. Might have made that 1.5ºC target by mid century a little more realistic. Hell, with that kind of money, we might even have commercial fusion reactors by now. And that kind of energy would definitely make a dent in climate change. Might as well throw room temperature superconducting in as well. 5.6 trillion is s shit ton of investment money.

So perception isn't veridical, rather its a hallucination controlled by the world based on the brain estimating what's out there, which is updated from the stream of sensory information?

I don't believe the object is out there in the 'real world' in the first place. I believe we construct the objects of our perception, so for me, the means by which the data we use for this construction arrives is of fairly minor importance. — Isaac

Wouldn't it be important for figuring out the truth of your model of perception? If you're a BIV, then you're not perceiving anything. It's all a generated hallucination based on whatever the programmer wants you to believe you perceive. You don't have any sensory organs, so it can't be a perception.

If you're Kantian, then your model of perception is entirely empirical. Who knows what the act of perceiving in-itself actually is.

Just so, and how I "appreciate" the selbst and its translation. — tim wood

Just to be clear, Kant understands us to be organisms with sensory organs and nervous systems which interact with the environment, and evolved from common ancestors, as entirely empirical. The reality of the world beyond the empirical appearance is something we can't know. Thus Meillassoux critique that correlationism means the fossils of our ancestors only tell us what's empirically the case, not what actually happened, since we can't know whether we evolved or there was a big bang. We can only know what appears to us as structured by our reason.

Being a biological organism, there being a time before humans and a cosmos billions of light years beyond humans are all structured knowledge of the space and time categories of thought.

A more realistic concern might be Boltzman brains, since current physics allows for the likelihood of such beings coming into existence as a statistical fluctuation in the distant future. And if we steal from Bostrom's simulation argument, then we could calculate that Boltzman brains will far outnumber biological ones which evolved like ours, allowing for enough time. So therefore, we're more likelihood to be having a Boltzman experience in which it only appears that the universe is still in a relatively low entropy state and only 13.7 billion years old.

In which case we, or more likely just I, are calculating a probability based on a false appearance.

if the vat world is reality, what do we call the would outside of it? — hypericin

The noumena. The same issue rises for the simulation argument. If reality as we experience it is a simulation, then what sort of world is the simulation running in? Bostrom assumes the likelihood of an ancestor simulation by future civilizations with the technology to run such simulations, but his calculations are based on the reality he experiences now. Same with the argument for envatted brains. It's based on the reality we experience, not some envatted scenario.

But the "as it is in itself," one hopes, would stand as warning to take care as to what exactly the thing is, and exactly what might or might not constitute knowledge of it. — tim wood

It doesn't seem on a Kantian view that one can have such knowledge. All knowledge is given as things appear to us, according to the categories of thought which structure appearances. Anything else is beyond knowledge.

more common locution in Kant is ding an sicht selbst, translated as thing in itself as it is in itself, an addition that imo makes a difference! — tim wood

What does "as it is in itself" add to the thing-in-itself? The idea is the world independent of human cognition and perception. Whatever it is that gives rise to our existence and sensory impressions.

The world absent appearance, or the supersensible. Does, "as it is in itself", emphasize or add additional qualifications to that?

Meaning the experience is an event taking place in the perceiver, while the tomato is an object with potentially some property related to the perceiver seeing red. My opinion is that unless that property is the red we see, color realism, at least as the colors apppear to us, is false. Color primitivism is the only color realist theory which attempts to preserve that, as far as I can tell.

I just don't see how color primitivism can work. At any rate, the authors of this article are defending color representation via productance. So not exactly the same thing.

What's this got to do with natalism? It's very rare that a person has an entirely 'bad' life, and it's certainly not in any way necessary for the well-being of 'the masses'. I don't see how you're connecting the two at all. New people need to be born to sustain the well-being of the masses, they don't need to have a 'bad life'. In fact it's overall worse for the masses if they do as we're broadly speaking an empathetic species. — Isaac

I do sometimes wonder whether it has been worth it — at least the last several thousand years of wars, slavery, famine and various forms of oppression and discrimination. If I were given the choice of starting another human race on a separate planet, but also knew that the next 500 years would play out similar to the last 500 on Earth, I would pass.

Maybe the next 500 years will go better, but it's far from certain. At any rate, we're here now so we try to make the best of it.

I just realized that if time is a category of thought, then Kant can avoid Hume's inductive problem for empirical matters.

So I would not be a brain in a vat. I would be something and I would not be able to say what that thing is because all I seem to perceive now is some kind of psychological trickery and I have no experience of reality. — Cuthbert

The envattedness is a thing-in-itself.

She's a cat-in-a-vat, but not on your mat.

I had to. It rhymed.

Not the really important stuff. — Banno

Like your disdain for metaphysics?

So the sun will keep coming up tomorrow and the day after and so on because or minds must structure experience that way? Let us hope that the thing in itself complies with this.

The ironic thing is that Putnam was using the BIV thought experiment to try and refute global skepticism by arguing that a BIV could not truthfully say they were envatted.

The question is, "Tell me about something which cannot be put into words." — Banno

Follow up question, "Can everything real be put into words"?

I may have been a bit distracted in addition to having the wrong address. The pay just isn't that good. If you have complaints about the world you are experiencing going forward, I can give you the number for customer service.

t's not such a big step to go from being wary of conmen and false friends to entertain the possibility of Deus deceptor (Descartes). — TheMadFool

In fact, I snuck in and wired up Ciceronianus's brain last night while they were asleep. The only problem is I wasn't sure of the address, so it might have been someone else.

So before life forms evolved, what sort of experiences existed? Was color still a kind of proto-experience of lighted events?

Wouldn't that be a form of panpsychism? Process panpsychism or whatever it's called?

Transcendental realism entails empirical idealism because it doesn't give any good explanation as to how we possess any knowledge at all. As I understand it, this basically means the our representations could be arbitrary and have absolutely no ground. Kant introduces a priori forms and concepts and by doing so gives grounding to knowledge, not of the thing-in-itself but of a shared, intersubjective world of experience. — darthbarracuda

So one can see this as a response to Humean skepticism. Hume said that causality is not given to us in perception, but rather is a habit of mind. Kant's response would be that causality is one of the necessary grounds of knowledge. We can't say whether the things in themselves are causal, but the things in experience are structured that way. Thus causality, like space and time, is an empirical necessity.

So why is matter incapable to give birth to consciousness, but another substance (whatever that would be) is? — Eugen

The argument is that materialism has no subjective sensations as part of its explanation for the world. Colors, sounds, tastes, etc are not part of the conceptual framework. It's all math, function, structure, fields, etc. Prothero has mentioned Whitehead's commentary (criticism) on this in another thread I recently started.

I agree it is, but that means the real world is more than physics. In the case of color realism, it means that colors are not physical, even if the thing they represent in the world is.

A further comment on this is what you mean is we are not "consciously aware" of the underlying chain of causal efficacy. The body (the organism) is aware and we intuitively know contrary to Hume and other skeptics that we are perceiving things in the external world. — prothero

Yes, but take vision for example. The ancient view of vision was we are looking out at the world through our eyes. And that's how it seems to be when we're not taking the science of vision into account. But we know that vision goes the other way. Light comes into the eyes and starts the perceptual process.